Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

There's very little sunshine. The action takes place in winter- and mostly at night. But then Pope, in the original poem, is talking about a person (a vestal virgin) entirely cut off from human relationships- and that's an unattainable, inhuman ideal. The sunshine, if we could ever move into it, would be too terrible to bear. The up-side of the movie is that we need one another. The downside is that memory- which constitutes our identity- is a terribly fragile thing. The film is shot and edited in a way that reinforces this last idea; the camera wavers, the angle changes, the frame darkens, people are always moving out of shot. You try to grasp at an image and it eludes you. At one stage this restlessness up on the screen had me feeling physically sick.

The casting is perverse, but it works: Carey is passive, Winslett is manic and cute little, noble little Frodo plays a bug-eyed sleaze!

Sex on Screen

Channel 4 is running a documentary series about sex on British TV. During the 80s you could have as much sex in your programme as you liked, just so long as you made it plain you were against it and talked about condoms all the time.

The one remaining taboo (actually there are several, but this was the only one they identified) is the erect penis. One slipped by in a documentary about Derek Jarman once; a clip from Sebastiane was playing blurrily behind a talking head and no-one noticed the stonker. But when Channel 4 replayed this seminal moment for us they had to obscure the offending item behind a dab of digital vaseline.

I'm opposed to sexual censorship. We make sex disturbing by hiding it out of sight. Censorship not openness is what fucks with our heads. For me the chief argument against sex on TV or in the movies is that it's quite boring to watch. There's no drama in it.

The most erotic moment in the movies? The sequence in Persona where Bibi Anderson tells Liv Ullman about her encounter with the two boys on the beach.