Eternal Sunshine for the Postmodern Cynic: L-O-V-E in 2000-2010 Cinema (2012)

Undergraduates: Rocco Giamatteo, none none none

Faculty Advisor: Jordynn Jack
Department: Communication Studies

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This paper argues that three American films of the last decade – Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Beginners – diagnose and address an ailment suffered by contemporary postmodernists. Though American films, they represent a brand of postmodernism not specific to the postmodern movement in the U.S. but rather of a more fundamental type theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The aforementioned “ailment” stemming from this postmodern worldview is simple: The continual, unanswerable questioning of whether one’s “love” for others is in fact “real.” To both address ontological confusions with these ideas and to link these confusions to a U.S. public at large, the films engage with audiences in three different ways, each to different extents in each of the three films: (1) Present a relationship with characters decidedly uncertain about their lives from a self-purportedly objective point of view, (2) Dramatize the characters’ uncertainties with respect to their “objectively” portrayed relationships, and (3) Advertise an adoption of naiveté by engaging viewers in affect associated with “love." The paper posits cinema as memory, memory as affect, and affect as categorically separate from knowledge which modern U.S. filmgoers fruitlessly speak. It concludes the three-part paradigm which these films follow influences and is influenced by Deleuze and Guattari's proposed "reality" and its topographic placement for "love."