Jim Carrey, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Tricky Business of Suffering For Your Art

I don’t remember where, but I distinctly remember reading that Michel Gondry told Jim Carrey that he was definitely going to be making Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and he wanted him in the lead but he wouldn't be able to shoot the film for another year and a half and he wanted to make sure that Carrey would stay depressed during that time for the sake of his movie.

Gondry wanted Carrey to star in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but apparently he did not trust his acting enough to think that Carrey could play a deeply depressed man if he himself were not deeply depressed. 

My immediate response to Gondry’s words and actions were horror and revulsion. As someone who has struggled with depression my entire life I would not wish it on my worst enemy. 

Making an actor promise that they won’t be happy or content or satisfied with their lives for at least eighteen months for the sake of a movie seemed vaguely sociopathic. 

The more I thought about it, the more complicated my feelings became. It would be one thing if Carrey was asked to be miserable for the sake of Mr. Popper’s Penguins or Sonic the Hedgehog 2. 

This wasn't like Jared Leto gaining seventy pounds to play Mark David Chapman in a movie nobody saw or cared about. 

Gondry wasn’t asking Carrey to suffer for schlock. He wasn’t asking him to suffer for entertainment, even. No, Michel Gondry was asking Carrey to suffer for his art. 

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was no mere movie. It was universally heralded as a masterpiece. It topped a lot of polls for best film of the decade. Since Gondry dreamed up the story he shared the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with Charlie Kaufman. 

Carrey got the best reviews of his career. He was deeper, darker and sadder than he had ever been before and would ever be again. 

There is a furious conviction to Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that seems attributable, on some level, to Carrey going method and being every bit as miserable as his character for the sake of the film. 

This was, of course, not the first time that Carrey went to insane extremes for the sake of a role. As chronicled in Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, the Ace Ventura star basically terrorized the cast and crew of The Man in the Moon by trying to essentially become Andy Kaufman rather than just play him. 

Is Gondry’s big ask forgivable in light of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s greatness? Does the suffering of one man matter if it is in service of a movie that will be treasured and talked about a century from now? 

I don’t know the answers to those questions but I do know that we as a culture have gotten much better about not forcing vulnerable performers to suffer for our enjoyment. 

In previous decades, for example, I suspect that the revelation that the infamous anal rape scene in The Last Tango in Paris was not in the script and that a mortified Maria Schneider learned of the scene shortly before it was filmed would be treated as a matter of great artists going to questionable extremes in pursuit of a greater creative truth. 

Today we can thankfully see the incident for what it is: an unforgivable, criminal act of abuse on the part of director Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando. 

Schneider was a vulnerable, inexperienced actress at the time. She was NINETEEN years old. NINETEEN. How was she going to stand up to enormously powerful men old enough to be her father?

I often think about Judy Garland early in her career, when she was pumped full of speed so that she could work impossibly long hours as a teenager on The Wizard of Oz. 

What you are seeing in The Wizard of Oz is a great performance by a consummate professional but you’re also witnessing the result of adults who should know better doing things they know are wrong and destructive for the sake of a performance and movie. 

The never ending revelations of #MeToo have created an exciting new paradigm where the feelings and dignity of actors actually matter. 

Thankfully great art can be born of kindness and understanding and not just casual and not so casual sadism. 

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