"Uh ... We have a history"

On Friday night I finally saw Big Fish for the first time. Last night, I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as well. I recommend both movies highly, even though or perhaps because they address the same topic and come to opposite conclusions.

It may take the bloom off of this review to say that both films are of professional interest to me. Both movies concern the philosophy of history. They address the importance of memory, the roles it plays in the development of character, and the tension between storytelling as a positive and as a normative force. Although the films apply their conclusions to personal life, the same ideas are relevant to the history of civilizations.

In Big Fish, a young reporter tries to discern the truth about his dying father. This son has heard nothing but tall tales from his father all of his life, and he is tired of lies. His investigation suggests that the metaphors in these fairy tales may be a more accurate reflection of the truth than the facts themselves are.

In Eternal Sunshine, a pair of dissatisfied lovers have their memories of each other erased. As the man undergoes the long procedure, however, he experiences all of his memories of the woman again, and decides that he wants to keep these reflections. Unconscious, he fights desperately to remember his love. A subplot reveals the very simple problem with the rationale for the erasure. The film ends with a breathtakingly obvious lesson about love -- one that I did not think Hollywood capable of delivering.

Lest I lose myself in a discussion of historiography, I should say here that the movies are magnificent together as love stories as well. In this regard, it would be difficult to speak too highly of the movies as a pair. As one might expect, Big Fish is the better prescription for the behavior of lovers while Eternal Sunshine may be the better description of the struggles they could face. Certainly the characters and even the storytelling perspective of Eternal Sunshine are flawed. The lesson of Eternal Sunshine, however, could easily lead one to embrace the ethic expressed in Big Fish. Specifically, Big Fish advocates heroic monogamy. It has one of the most touching cinematic depictions of the love between a husband and wife that I have ever seen.

Regarding historiography, however, the films differ fundamentally. While not entirely irreconcilable (indeed not, since both are correct), their messages are the two horns of an historian's dilemma. Should history be brutally realistic or should it advance our mythology? Is revisionism inherently destructive, or must we be as honest as possible about the human failings of our heroes? Will we repeat the failures of history if we do not take note of them, or will we get lost in the mire of everyday life if not given a myth to take part in? Big Fish takes the side of myth, Eternal Sunshine the side of description. Yet even Eternal Sunshine hails the romantic ideal of unconditional love, and even Big Fish cannot refrain from attaching its metaphors to real people and events.

The technical quality of both movies is superb. One can almost smell the pixie dust in Big Fish, which throws around bucketloads of eye candy to go with all the mind candy. Taking a much different approach, the camera work in Eternal Sunshine seamlessly blends science fiction, flashbacks within a flashback, scenes of daily urban life, and dream sequences into a whole that can be characterized as gritty realism, of all things.

I have one major complaint about both of these films. As one might expect, they both wrap things up too nicely at the end. Big Fish makes the tall tales turn out to be a bit too accurate; I suppose, though, that I can take this as a wink and a grin at the audience. Eternal Sunshine tells us more than it has to; it should have ended ten minutes earlier and let us figure out the rest. The last few minutes tell us whether the ending will be happy or sad, but the point has already been made.

My readers should go elsewhere for a list of reasons why children should see neither film. I am not going to do the MPAA's dirty work. I will merely say that I found satisfactory justification for the questionable elements.

Before closing, I should mention a third recent film that addresses the issue of memory. Secondhand Lions, which is more appropriate for children but not as artistically satisfying for adults, also takes up the question of memory. In this film, however, the moral is merely that we should believe in people rather than in propositions about them. History provides insight into personality, but personality is greater than history. This is less specific than Big Fish, in which history is the personality's way of making sense of a bleak world, and Eternal Sunshine, in which accurate history is the personality's way of governing its own bleak tendencies. One might say that Secondhand Lions shows history as a concern of the id, Big Fish of the ego, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind of the superego. I recommend watching all three.

If nothing else, watch Big Fish for the hilarious North Korean USO scene. That alone is worth the cost of the movie.