Another head case

On Page 38 of Charlie Kaufman's script for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" -- which is to say, about a third of the way through the new film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" -- the following line of dialogue appears:

JOEL

I'm in my head already, aren't I?

There are few employed screenwriters who could get away with that line, even fewer who could get a laugh with that line, and fewer still who could, at the same time, make it a terrifying, genuine, wiltingly beautiful line.

As a question, asked in life, as something you might turn around and say to your spouse, "I'm in my head already, aren't I?" is absurd. Samuel Beckett would have blushed at it. As a line from a movie, if we didn't know Kaufman was responsible, we might guess it came from some gloomy sci-fi picture involving plugs in the backs of people's necks. (Noted: There is some cheap mind-erasing equipment in "Eternal Sunshine.")

"I'm in my head already, aren't I?" a line that Jim Carrey, playing Joel, delivers in his pajamas, is emphatically a Kaufmanesque line. That adjective may not be in Webster's yet, but it is, you can be sure, common currency in the story department of most Hollywood studios.

Charlie Kaufman is, of course, Charlie Kaufman, the Very Successful Hollywood Screenwriter. He is the painfully private, 46-year-old, undeniably important author of five produced films who eschews everyone's attention, whether it's "Entertainment Tonight" or the New Yorker or his own agent, and thus perpetuates the myth of his talent, which is prodigious enough not to require it. Kaufman is the slight, modest Long Island native who has descended on Hollywood like some benevolent deity's answer to Joe Eszterhas.

And "I'm in my head already, aren't I?" is the kind of line Kaufman likes his characters to say. That's the kind of question, sometimes it can seem the only question, Kaufman likes to ask.

"There's no objective reality as far as I'm concerned," Kaufman said from his home in Pasadena, where he lives with his wife and a young daughter. "There's only what takes place in your brain. My brain. We have our perceptions, and that's all we have."

The story of "Eternal Sunshine," which comes out Friday, is this: Joel Barish is a New York City man of unspecified vocation who has stumbled upon one very nasty rabbit hole: His girlfriend, Clementine, played by Kate Winslet, has employed a company called Lacuna Inc. to have him erased from her memory. Now Joel, though he doesn't quite believe such a thing could ever happen, has gone to Lacuna to undergo the same procedure. As it begins, he peeks in on his own scene, at once petrified and entranced by what he sees. "I'm in my head already, aren't I?"