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Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Charlie Kaufman’s Memory, Julia Louis-Dreyfus goes A24, Harmony Korine’s infrared nightmare, and a murmuring ocean.
Let’s go!
THE ETERNAL MEMORY OF CHARLIE KAUFMAN
With Charlie Kaufman, memory is a tricky thing.
In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), the erasing of memory brings bliss and torment as Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet slowly unravel the enigma of their identity.
For Kaufman, the memory erasure device that Carrey and Winslet use to forget each other after a bad breakup is a metaphor for technology destroying our selfhood–a deep concern Kaufman has about AI.
He's outspoken on this:
“It's the end of creativity for human beings. It's what it's going to lead to, and it's handing it over to a non-sentient, non-feeling, non-rebellious entity.”
Kaufman continued:
“If we stop creating ourselves, if we stop doing that and we're giving up something… that's primal, that's essential as part of that's been part of human experience and necessary to human experience as long as there have been humans. And I think it needs to be protected.”
Kaufman’s newest screenplay, The Memory Police, based on an award-winning novel, tackles the topic with an Orwellian tilt.
Here’s the official synopsis:
On an unnamed island, things have begun to disappear. However, a rare few are able to remember all that no longer exists, but the Memory Police are determined to make sure that what has been erased remains forgotten forever.
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.
For Kaufman, the need to have experiences, to have memory is the soul of artistic identity.