The number of active screenwriters whose work is so distinct that it matters relatively little – oh, that may be an overstatement, so how about “relatively less” –  who actually directs their work is quite few. I can think of only three: David Mamet, Aaron Sorkin, and Charlie Kaufman. Mamet & Sorkin, as one might expect in a medium in which so much of what the writer contributes is dialog, are masters of the music of speaking, tho very different from one another in what they hear. Kaufman, tho, is another bird altogether.

 

Kaufman is a weaver of narrative improbabilities. Perhaps the best or at least most widely known example of this comes in Being John Malkovich. It’s not the idea of setting a narrative on the 7½ floor of an office building – that half floor being exactly that, a circumstance that has almost all of the major characters hunched over for the entire film. And it’s not the idea of people crawling through a hole in the wall and ending up inside of John Malkovich’s head for a period of 15 minutes or thereabouts. No, it’s the idea that when their time is up that they fall from the sky onto the New Jersey Turnpike that is the signature feature of Kaufman’s imagination That & a long subplot on the nature of puppeteering.

 

In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a screenplay that adapts an autobiography, Kaufman focuses on Gong Show host Chuck Barris’ claim that at the same time that he was lowering Hollywood’s standards for entertainment, he moonlighted as a CIA hit man. Then there was Adaptation, ostensibly a screenplay about another nonfiction book, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief into which Kaufman inserts his own fictitious twin brother, Donald, making the film about their attempts to make a film.

 

All of which to say that I’m going to tell you almost nothing important about Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, which I saw last Saturday night in a large, sold-out theater in King of Prussia, beyond the crux of the matter: this is a film worth seeing. One detail I will share is that during many important points in the story, the two principle actors, Jim Carrey & Kate Winslet, are having intense conversations. During one, outdoors on a city street, the signage behind them gradually disappears as they talk. Since they’re walking, you almost don’t notice it. Later, they’re in a Barnes & Noble, and as they talk, the titles start disappearing from the spines of the books. Another detail: the only way to tell time in this mad shuffle of flashbacks & flash forwards (many of which may only be occurring “in the head” of the main character, a phrase understood quite literally in this film) is by the color of Kate Winslet’s hair: blue or tangerine. Kaufmanesque is the word people will eventually apply to such details, so why not use it here?

 

I’m intrigued at the idea that possibly nothing quite exists like this faculty in poetry – the closest example I can think of is the Oulipo-triggered imagination of Christian Bök. It’s that same faculty that something like Eunoia shares with the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, although even to suggest that is to invoke immediately all the ways in which those projects are radically dissimilar as well. Oh there’s a bit of it in Nabokov, in Cortázar & David Markson as well. It’s the work-as-narrative-machine, although in the case of Eunoia I’d subtract the word narrative & underscore machine.

 

I’ve argued before, and will no doubt again, that historically the importance of cinema, especially narrative cinema, is how it has relieved the novel of certain social obligations rather in the way that the novel once relieved poetry. Another way of saying this, of course, is that the film is a tributary of a river whose main branch remains poetry. A premise of normative narrative is that its deployment of devices function in the service of the reality effect, a self-canceling invisibleness (not, profoundly not, invisibility). In a realist film, it should be hidden from the viewer. In a something formulaic, like Star Wars, the plot structure visibly lumbers along, creaking as its rusty joints swing the beast through its motions. That’s not unlike new formalism’s sense of form, which tends to be pattern defined as a lowest common denominator. None of the new formalists comes close to Bök’s facility for form itself, but I often think it’s because they’ve blinded themselves to what they’re attempting.

 

Each year, maybe ten miles to the west of me, there is an event that I think of as the George Romero Poetry Conference. Actually, I’m sure that’s a slander on George Romero, for which I apologize. The event, the largest poetry shindig out here each year in Chester County, is at some level a serious attempt to further the new formalism, as its “by invitation only” critical sessions (one this year on “Defining the Canon of New Formalism”) demonstrate. More telling is the fawning tone of the title of the panel on The Achievement of Dana Gioia, who is also giving the “keynote reading.” Note please all the little elements of hierarchy in this event – that’s the new form. Or the faculty roster, which spans the spectrum of poetry all the way from A to B (and in which context “experimental” poet Kim Addonizio does seem like the official Wild Woman, especially teaching experiments in the sonnet & sestina). I don’t if it’s the span of topics, all the way from rhyme to meter to the sonnet, or the idea of Glyn Maxwell teaching a session on “the line” that appeals to me most.

 

I actually did participate in this affair one year, when Annie Finch coaxed myself, Jena Osman & Rachel Blau DuPlessis in for a panel to discuss new forms. And there was even some decent interchange with the audience, many of whom appeared not even to have heard of the New American Poetry, let alone more recent developments.

 

But in general this conference has heartily resisted the impacts of the outside world over the past half century, maybe even the last century & a half, & is perhaps the best example that the dangers of inbreeding apply in poetry as well. What would the equivalent be in cinema, then? No subgenre that I can think of, not even the lowest level teenage slasher or post-Porky’s T&A flick, has in fact resisted evolution from decade to decade. For someone like Kaufman, that’s probably one of the larger single problems he has to face – if he’s using devices to unveil the device, as he has done in film after film, it’s much easier if you have a static target. But even the Alien vs. the Predator films are constantly evolving. Only in the amber-like fluid of the West Chester Conference does time truly stand still. Sort of like the “after” result of the memory- (also mind- and personality-) erasing program at the heart of Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind.