I wonder what Charlie Kaufman has against cars. They never seem to fare well in his movies. Its a good thing cars don’t have activists like PETA (replace animals with automobiles) or he’d be in some kind of trouble.
The movie is constructed around a conceit, that of people wanting to erase large amounts of their memory. Very few people in traditional reality want to do this (and certainly not for the shallow reasons the movie provides), and Kaufman seems to have found all of them to populate his movie.
Nietzsche gets raped… again. His ass just can’t hold the jism anymore… evaporation is truly a blessed thing. The smell though, that’s the problem.
Nietzsche’s “art of forgetting” is about knowing when to hold them and when to fold them. Its definitely NOT about erasing memory. Its the difference between moving a book behind other books, out of sight, and burning the book. Nietzsche also tried to have no regrets and largely succeeded (or created tools to allow success anyway), something the characters in this movie obviously didn’t have access to.
Joel is an Artist. That is to say, he has a restricted reality. Not many things fit that reality, so his life is rather sparse. Somehow he thinks he’s crazy, or the movie thinks he’s crazy, or something. Its unclear to me why all of these people want to erase memories. Or maybe everything is a metaphor for something and I just don’t “get it”. I guess the characters think the only memories they should have are happy ones. How sad and how rare (and how un-Nietzschelike). Fortunately.
Who’s next in the black book? I’m hoping Plato gets the anal blast. Perhaps the actors will ignore their current state and its subsequent progression toward the forms, and quote some Plato on the way. The Humans Will Adore. Ladies opening their legs, Guys slapping on the back, and Plato needing a maid.
You know, I think Crypt is on to something. That above sentence, aside from being the worst metaphor I’ve ever read for anything in the history of ever, simply cannot be the creation of a sane mind.
Of course he picks on a car, beating a horse would have been far too obvious, no?
As he was leaving his lodgings in Turin on 3 January 1889, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche caught sight of a cabby beating his horse. Forgetting his former invectives against pity, he ran across the street and, weeping, threw his arms around the animal’s neck in an act eerily reminiscent of a scene from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He then lost consciousness and had to be carried back to his room. When he awoke, he was no longer himself. He composed a series of letters to the crowned heads of Europe, announcing his arrival as Dionysus. “Sing me a new song,” he wrote to his friend Peter Gast. “The world is transfigured and all the heavens rejoice. The Crucified.”
It wasn’t Nietzsche so I guess it must have been Sartre. However, I suspect he actually believed that he was being followed by misplaced accents aigus.
There was a kid in college who needed to write a play for one of his degree requirements (long story). He finally typed up something called No Exit about these three people in a room. Y’know, hell is other people and all.
He thought it was obscure enough that the professor wouldn’t notice that he copied the whole thing out of a book he found in the library.
I just watched this movie, and I’m completely in love with it. Huge Jim Carrey fan right here, and I gotta say: this may be #1 for him (in my book). Yes, better than Ace Ventura, The Truman Show, and The Mask. But that’s just me.
Koontz: that Neechee line was like 30 seconds in the whole movie, even with Kirsten Dunce saying it twice. It was just a quote that had to do with memories that a ditzy early-20s office assistant “thought was appropriate”.
Why did you not bring up the Alexander Pope quote? They spent more time on it (due to the segue about her calling him “Pope Alexander”) and it is the quote from which the movie got its title.
