Anubha Yadav writes a beautiful article in ‘The Indian Express’. Twenty years ago, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ gave us a visceral visual language for the erasure of our romantic past.
Clementine undergoes a procedure to erase memories of her ex. She chooses to do so as a n act of clinically moving on, with none of the messiness typical of romantic love. He finds it out & decides to do the same, as an act of revenge. She broke the cardinal pact, the organic journey of a breakup- living with the memories, waiting for time to dull the pain. It became a cult classic about the violence of forgetting.
Vikramaditya Motwane’s CTRL is based on today’s world. Nella & Joe are an ;influencer’ couple. After her public break up, her pain of being betrayed is subsumed by her fear of losing followers. The hope of new life is in Joe’s total digital erasure from her social media.
Clementine had Dr Howard’s procedure, Nella has an AI assistant. In CTRL, forgetting starts by removing the digital trail, regaining followers & creating new digital memories. In short, a spotless digital life leads to a spotless mind.
In ESSM, the process of erasure triggered the memory of the actual event & revealed more about Joel & Clementine’s relationship, in CTRL, the captured moment’s memory is just an isolated rupture, a digital ghost which reveals little about their relationship to the audience.
Like the emojis we use so frequently, the real ‘me ‘is never revealed!
Formerly, it used to be sad songs, drowning in booze like ‘Devdas’, burnt journals, broken mugs or torn photographs. Today it means password locked digital folders of past loves never to be visited again. In ESSM, forgetting was still sensory. In CTRL, it’s visualisation is linear & intellectual. Maybe it is no more ‘forgetting’.
Esther Perel , psychotherapist warns us against another AI on the rise-Artificial Intimacy. It is robbing generations of the capacity to build & experience real connections. In CTRL, when Joe asks Nella, ‘Did you really come there to surprise me ? Or did you just do it for the likes ??’
CTRL reflects the complexity of our lives , between Joe’s interrogation of what he feels for Nella & Nella’s assumption that the erasure of the photographs & videos will mean the erasure of Joe from her life.
A broken cup or a saucer we tend to just throw it away. The Japanese hold it in great esteem. They fill the cracks with gold. It shows how long it has been & how well it has coped up.
So was the white hair & wrinkles of wisdom, one could heed by their advice. Today, remaining wrinkle less is the norm.
Gen X is a different breed altogether. We need to accept it.
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