Rush 9: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Apricot

The two clips being compared here are conversely related. In Spotless Mind, the narrating voice is speaking on screen, but in the past, the "wrong" time logically. In Apricot, the voice is happening in the "right" time that it should be coming from, but it is not shown being spoken on screen as it should. In Apricot, we see a fracture between substance and subject that should not logically be there; in Spotless we see a union of two different subjects, (two different categories of Joel, past and present), pushed together into one substance. Zupancic talks about this difference on page 28:

"In comic consciousness, the substance is not alienated from the self or the subject (as it is in the "unhappy consciousness"), it is alienated from itself and this is the only way it comes to self-consciousness and to life in the strict meaning of the word. Comedy is not the story of the alienation of the subject, it is the story of the alienation of the substance, which has become the subject."

Apricot's diegetic anomaly illustrates in a literal way the substance being alienated from the subject, what Zupancic dubs "unhappy consciousness." However, the clip from Spotless Mind has a substance (the on-screen presence of Joel) being alienated from itself by behaving in a way that contradicts its placement in time and space. The universal/abstract concepts of memory and time-linearity become concrete, manipulatable, fluid.

While this dynamic is emphasized specifically by Joel narrating physically in the logically "wrong" time, it is really the general comedic essence of the film, present throughout in the concept of erasing a human's memory. The absolute nature of the past is flipped to become a medium through which humanity with all of its habits, fears, personality quirks, addictions, etc. becomes a universal constant, which of course creates hilarity and unexpected collisions. In Apricot, the past and the present exchange rapidly and mingle, but the past is still the past and the present is still the present. The characters are struggling to unite the chasm between the two in their own human experience of them. The two films both deal with time and memory on the one hand and human experience and flaws on the other, but only in Eternal Sunshine are they flipped in the way Zupancic describes comedy.

Cinematically, the directors of the two films guide the audience to understand what pattern they are working in. In Apricot, the presence of non-diegetic ambient music throughout, overlapping between past and present tense cuts, creates a dreamlike unity of tone. Along with the parallelism in several of the cuts, it prevents the "disembodied" voice from seeming funny to watchers by creating an even, smoothed out experience. Thus the disembodiment of the voice blends with the music as just another layer that the audience has a category for. However, in Spotless there is no such atmosphere, making the sudden appearance of the formerly intra-diegetic voice-over seem startling and absurd in a beautifully subversive way.