Science Fiction and Science Fact Applied to Cinema

Lucius Shepard puts Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the "sub-genre of movies either directly based upon or inspired by concepts exploited in the work of Philip K. Dick," as if Dick were the only touchstone for science-fiction with epistemlogical issues. In fairness, though, he does cite John Varley as another possible reference point--but not, as the Old Hag has mentioned, George Saunders, who read his short story "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz" on a 1996 episode of This American Life. There's also the 1939 MGM flop Remember?, which starred Greer Garson and Robert Taylor and dealt in amnesia-inducing potions rather than high-tech memory wiping.

The thing is, though, Shepard's review is painfully overwritten, bordering on turgid. Over at Slate, as a reader kindly informed me, Steven Johnson does a much more lively job of praising the film for having "almost no dialogue that sounds like actual neuroscience" while being rather up-to-date on current theories about how our brains actually do store our memories. Johnson does here what he does so well in his most recent book, Mind Wide Open; he gets potentially difficult concepts across in perfectly conversational tones, never donning the rhetorical garb of an expert even in his most explanatory passages.