Watched most of Eternal Sunshine... again with V last night. It has her first showing and I knew she had hated Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich. And she was soon tut-tutting at some of the dialogue - such as Clementine's manufactured monologue about her ugly doll.
She found the part before the 'opening' credits "dull" and the part afterwards "scary". This third-first person journey in reverse across the map of Joel's memory reminded her of a girl in her school who claimed to be terrified of going to sleep because the moment she left normal consciousness she would sense herself leaving her physical body to go for a bit of a subjective stroll. During these astral adventures she would listen to conversations which she could later report back on and would be gripped by panic as her errant spirit was sucked back into her sleeping carcass moments before it woke up.
Stories like that acquire over time a hardened coating of myth which the darts of scepticism can't really penetrate. This was one of the key insights that Gabriel Garcia Márquez had as a boy when listening to his grandmother's astonishing anecdotes.
Time for one last observation about temporal conundra. After my posting earlier in the week, both V and my colleague Chris have reminded me that any story that admits the possibility of backwards time travel invokes the full set of paradoxes. Everything the Doctor does 'changes' time. The only difference with saving Rose's father was that they had a clear idea of the alternative before acting.
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