First,
Charlie Kaufman is a creative genius. If IQ was based on ingenuity, Kaufman would be off the radar. He consistently comes up with these completely unique screenplays as if he were simply just letting off gas or buying cereal.
The
movie's premise is about love. The two main characters follow the basic boy-girl romance; the rollercoaster of dating. We are invited to see their very first introductions, and through their hundreds of good memories and bad. It's with the last bad memory that the girl, played by Kate Winslet, whimsically decides that she's had enough of him and all the love/hate bullshit and takes on a procedure that removes him from her memory. When he next sees her she doesn't know who he is and apparently that makes it easier for her to move on. The man, played by Jim Carrey, decides that he should do the procedure also because she's completely moved on and he's an emotional wreck. The tension comes when as he's erasing his memory of her, going through from the bad to the good, he suddenly panics because he realizes that he doesn't want to lose his memories; he loves her too much.
I won't spoil the movie by saying much more, but the movie implies that the bond people share goes deeper than purely the memories they have of each other. My teacher explained to the class an interesting area of physics called field physics. He started explaining the Hawthorne (or observer) effect. The act of being watched changes the way people behave. That's obvious. What isn't obvious is how peoples' behaviours change when they are being watched even if they aren't aware of being watched. It's an unexplained phenomenon. He said that the closest explanation comes from field physics. It gets down to the nitty gritty arena of molecules and atoms. It purports that the presence of other atoms in the field of atoms make changes to its composition. That means if a camera was placed in a room secretly, it would still have an effect on the field of atoms immediately surrounding it, which would then have an effect on the next field of atoms and so on like a ripple effect until it reached the subject who would behave differently.
Now how this connects with the movie: I think that's how love works, or maybe what we call
chemistry. That butterflies feeling or "connection" you feel with someone is simply your atoms getting out of whack because their atoms have a particular affect on you. No one can study atoms because we need light to observe, and light disrupts atoms, but I would put my money that not atoms are the same and that certain atoms have an affinity or idiosyncrasies towards others. You can wipe out memories, never have met a person before, heard bad shit about them, but if they have matching atoms, you can't help but love them. And I think the closest thing to an instrument that measures this sort of thing is that gut level feeling you have about people. Now all I have to do is go out and find that girl who really disrupts my molecular make-up and makes my guts feel funny, sounds easy enough.
