- [Jeff] You are not a real person,
you're a man in a box.
You're a block of wood and you like it that way.
- [Narrator] In Michel Gondry's Kidding,
Jim Carrey plays Jeff Pickles,
a Mr Rogers-esque children's show host
who is slowly losing his mind
after the death of one of his sons.
After Pickles runs someone over with his car,
he ominously transforms into one of his own puppets.
This is a jarring turn,
even for a famously fantastical director like Gondry,
but if we examine the much-loved altruist history,
the sudden emergence of a creepy puppet
as a vessel for Jeff's uncontrollable rage
makes perfect sense.
(light piano music)
Kidding may be Gondry's first narrative that literally
centers on human's turn to felt-stitched objects,
but Gondry's characters have always been puppets
with hidden strings hovering just out of the frame.
Gondry is known for his charming and absurd makeshift sets
that prioritize aesthetics and whimsy over realism.
In these unique worlds, the characters, like marionettes,
are often used by others as props
or manipulated by forces outside of their control.
(light whimsical music)
Consider Gondry's 2013 romantic comedy
Mood Indigo for example,
in which Gondry directly conveys a total inability
for his characters to control their own actions
by framing the entire film inside the pages of a story
typed out in shifts by factory workers.
Even when the main character gets his hands
on one of the typewriters determining his fate,
the divided labor regimen of this anonymous factory
gives him only flickers of agency.
In Gondry's 2006 film The Science of Sleep,
protagonist Stephane spends as much time
trying to control his dreams as he does his waking life.
Dreams and reality are often confused in the film,
emphasizing Stephane's inability to control his emotions
or even his physical movements in either realm.
- [Man] Stop playing with me.
(footsteps) (thud)
- [Narrator] And in Be Kind Rewind,
the protagonists become surrogates
for narratives that already exist,
spending most of the film re-recording or suiting
versions of famous films after all the tapes
in their video store are destroyed.
How are the tapes destroyed?
Jack Black's character is inhabited by an electrical force
that triggers involuntary movements within him
and also has the ability to destroy VHS tapes.
- Why is it doing that when you do that?
What is wrong with you?
- [Narrator] Gondry's most famous film
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
uses a similar framing device.
The film imagines what would happen
if a service existed that allowed couples,
in this case Joel and Clementine,
to erase all memories of a painful relationship.
Gondry locates almost the entire story
inside Joel's disappearing memories,
creating a world where the protagonists are pawns,
pulled through time and space by employees at Lacuna, Inc
who manipulate his brain to wipe his memories,
but even the would-be puppet masters in this situation
are condemned to repeat their own mistakes.
After convincing his receptionist Mary
to undergo a memory wipe of her own
so that she will forget their affair,
Lacuna boss Howard again slips and returns her advances,
setting off a sequence of Rube Goldberg-like reactions
that sends both his wife and Mary
into the type of uncontrollable spasmodic anger
that erupts in Kidding.
(dramatic music)
In the end, Joel and Clementine,
unaware that they've known each other
longer than a single day,
discover the tapes they recorded for Lacuna, Inc,
back when they chose to erase their memories of each other.
They realize they're doomed to repeat the same mistakes,
every time Joel and Clementine are on screen together,
they enact the same respective qualities and habits
that draw them together and eventually tear them apart.
Joel's fate feels especially unavoidable
after Gondry's fluid, inventive editing
maps Joel's desires and fears as an adult
directly onto what he felt as a child,
creating the sense that, try as he might,
Joel's essential nature
will always determine his every action.
Because of their lack of agency,
Gondry's protagonists rarely experience
any climactic moments of growth or self-assertion,
instead people constantly struggle
to control the course of their lives to no avail.
Yet, there's a strange, colorful optimism to Gondry's style,
despite this tragically determined destiny
for his characters.
In this way, Gondry's films dwell in a space
more familiar to every day life.
Rather than wrapping them up neatly,
he adores the unending trials and failures
that make up our attempts to control our lives.
(soft music)