Ooh, been a while since I dusted off this series, eh? Let’s not waste time with apologies or explanations. Let’s just get to it, shall we?
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind might be my favorite film to come from the charmingly cracked mind of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Released in 2004, it tells the story of two people who, after a particularly painful breakup that followed on the heels of a possibly even less appealing relationship, decide to wipe each other from their respective memories. Most people who remember this movie’s release in theaters probably remember seeing a single-sheet poster of Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, lying side by side on a sheet of ice that is starting to crack, while they stare obliviously at each other.
It was a quirky image, true, but what always ruined this design for me was how this far more interesting and mysterious element of the poster was reduced to make way for a large, floating close-up of the top part of Jim Carrey’s face. You want to sell me on a movie? Don’t emphasize that it has Carrey in it. Also, if you have seen this movie, you know that Winslet not only plays just as significant a role as Carrey does in making this script work, but her performance was considered brilliant enough that she was nominated for an Academy Award. In hindsight, I’m sure it seemed a bit misguided that the marketing strategy was to focus primarily on Carrey.
But I do indeed digress this time, especially since this isn’t the poster that I’ve picked!
The poster that I’ve chosen looks like it might have actually been designed for the British market rather than the American one. It’s laid out in that loverly “quad” style that I previously discussed in my Shaun of the Dead poster pick. True, sometimes American movie posters are tweaked to a similar horizontal format for placement on buses or subway cars, but those are typically longer than this design. Maybe this was used for bus shelters. I don’t know, denizens. I can’t have all the answers.
Anyway, I know what most of you are probably thinking right now: But, Loba, you hate movie posters that use giant photos of the actors’ heads as the primary design element! You even said so! Right here!
This is all very true. However, in this instance, it works so well that I couldn’t help but fall in love with the concept. But let’s start at the beginning, shall we?
This design kicks it off with the movie’s release date (an important bit of information) and the tagline, “This Spring, Clear Your Mind.” The tag is written in a sans serif (as is the release date and the list of actors that follows the tag), colored in a bright, sunny yellow. There are two things that appeal to me regarding the font layout of the top part of this design. First, I love the pyramid layout of the text. Whether this way or inverted, a pyramid layout is always a clean, simple yet still visually pleasing way to present text. Second, I always enjoy the mixed use of smaller sentence case and larger upper case, as in the way the actors names are written. It’s a creative way to present bland text without going all PhotoShop crazy on our asses.
Yes, I did just write that. I’m feeling dangerous today, denizens.
Next comes the primary design element: a triptych of head shots for the first three actors from the preceding list: Carrey, Winslet, and Kirsten Dunst. These three facial elements were also repackaged as solo one-sheets, which I think makes a bit more sense (it seems a bit redundant to see them side-by-side-by-side here, showing the repetition of the “torn pages” element of the design on each). However, I loved each design enough that I decided I wanted to use the version that combined them into one poster. The head shots have been defaced, each one having had the strip where their eyes should be ripped away, to reveal that the photos were just the top layer of several, with each following layer ripped away as well.
Speaking of layers, this design element works beautifully on several (mmm, see what I did there?). We’ve ripped away the eyes. The eyes, which are the windows to the soul. One of the primary ways we take in the world around us. One of the primary ways we are visually (haha) recognized and can recognize others. But the removal goes even deeper than this. We’ve ripped away all that lies beneath the eyes, all that has been imprinted below the surface. Just enough left behind to give confusing, fractured hints at what might have been.
However, there are enough clues to leave us with the impression that what was beneath was some kind of informational brochure. We see the word “Lacuna,” which has that strange, meaningless-on-it-own, simple-word-complex-meaning, portmanteau-y feeling of a company name (kind of like Verizon or Microsoft). We see another strip of torn paper that discusses “a revolutionary process,” but all that’s left of the page above this statement is the word, “BROKEN.”
Shredded images, missing information, confusing clues, and something broken in the capital sense of the word. Sort of gives a delicious nuance to the original tagline about clearing our minds, doesn’t it?
At the very bottom of the stack of torn pages, we get three different statements/questions from our three characters: “I’m fine without you”; “Would you erase me?”; and “Do I know you?” Strange sentiments on their own, made even more unsettling when peaking out from behind sightless faces that still smile in progressively more open, more welcoming ways, even in their defaced states. I think the most disturbing pairing of quote and expression is on Dunst’s poster. Even with just the visual element of her mouth in tact, you can tell that she’s smiling/laughing in a way that intimates joyful familiarity with whomever she is interacting. “Do I know you?” simply doesn’t match the image in any way and leaves one feeling at the very least a sense of disorientation at the juxtaposition.
Finally, we get the movie title, broken onto two lines (it was a bit of a long name, wasn’t it?). The natural break right before the prepositional phrase ended up being what most people used to refer to this movie anyway. Therefore, the treatment of placing “Eternal Sunshine” in a larger, sentence-case yellow sans serif font while reducing “of the spotless mind” to all lower-case, smaller, white font was a nice touch. Then we get the movie Web site, with the familiar beginning and end components in a dark red, and the movie title (this time in its entirety) highlighted in yellow. And, once again, the text is formatted in a pyramid structure, this time inverted, giving a lovely balance to the text that sandwiches our primary design elements.
So see, denizens? Sometimes head shots work. But only when used in a creative way. And when it’s not just Jim Carrey.
