Narrative and Mediatized Memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Carolyn Jess-Cooke, University of Sunderland, UK
A recent surge of films depicting memory have indicated the increasing prominence of memory narratives in the public sphere. [1] Although memory has occupied film as a major thematic interest since modernity, the cinematic treatment of memory and amnesia has altered significantly throughout the course of the last few years, particularly in terms of memory’s operation in media spaces. The focus of this essay is therefore on “mediatized” memory, or the notion of a collective, mediated memory narrative through which the past can be re-experienced, and by which processes of memorialization can be socially organized as visual events. Mediatized memories are filmed, televised, or digitally-rendered reproductions of the past which create a collective mnemic reality that reproduces the past to the extent that the “real” event is displaced from public memory. Consequently, a mediatized memory re-constructs a past that is “deprived of its substance” (Žižek, 2002: 11). As Slavoj Žižek puts it,
[t]he authentic twentieth-century passion for penetrating the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitute our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate “effect”, sought after from digitalized special effects, through reality TV and amateur photography, up to snuff movies (Žižek, 2002: 12).