Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

The Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman 119conception of time. Kaufman “maps” space and its representations as a powerfulbut potentially simplifying destructive force that may interfere withthe “natural” chronology and complex interplay of time and memory. Suchtensions and contradictions pop up frequently in “frustrated time” films.The popular imagination perhaps wants to have its cake and to eat it, too.We want to control and therefore vanquish the ravages of time (throughlaptop computers, the internet, computerized maps, etc.), but not at theexpense of our humanity.Attenuating this anxiety slightly is the representation of Clementineand Joel in Joel’s memory. They exist not in a simplified representationof his memory but a phenomenal, complex, and dynamic spatiotemporalgeography. Instead of a computer map to plot his memories in the “real”world, Joel uses a loose-leaf journal – though one in which all the pagesare curiously blank. When Joel, inside his mind, decides he does not wantto forget Clementine and tries instead to outrun the destruction of hismemories of her, spatiotemporal metaphors still abound:Clementine(formulating)I mean, here. This is a memory of me.The way you wanted to fuck on the couchafter you looked down at my crotch.Yeah.Joel(embarrassed)ClementineWell then they’re coming here. So whatif you take me somewhere else, somewherewhere I don’t belong?(proud)And we hid there till morning? (p. 67)After this suggestion from Clementine (or, Joel’s memory of Clementine),the real fun of the film begins. Joel takes Clementine where (really when)she doesn’t belong, in attempts to avoid the memory-erasing computer. Thisresults in their “traveling” to his infancy and adolescence.However, soon the Lacuna team finds them in these parts of Joel’smemory, and starts the destruction anew. The projector always claws