Why isn't Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ever labeled as science fiction? After all, the basic plot surrounds the philosophical repercussions of a memory-erasing machine, and the action of this machine comprises the bulk of the film. Yet I've never heard anyone, in any glib mention of the movie, tag it with this category. Far from it -- Eternal Sunshine is usually referred to as either a romantic comedy or just "the best movie I've ever seen, holy crap, you have to see it" This discrepancy betrays a major shift in society's expectations of what constitutes 'science fiction.' Had Asimov penned this story fifty years ago, it would have taken place in some politically charged future-city, where the protagonist pleads with the machine handlers to retain his memory of playing Hover Frisbee with his Robot Dog in the Hyper Park. We would call this story science fiction because it assumes fantastic values and norms that don't resonate with our daily experience.

Eternal Sunshine is no less 'futuristic', and yet it occurs just tomorrow in the non-descript cultural morass of the modern urbanized world: New Jersey. The sights and smells and socio-political infrastructure are all familiar. The only leap of faith required of the viewer is the specific function of the memory-erasing machine, but is this technology really so much more preposterous than a CAT Scan or a sheep clone or a Spigot? In an age where cell phones are more advanced than Star Trek's communicators (they couldn't take videos, could they?), nothing is too far of a stretch. So much for science fiction.

In the movie Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) undergoes an elective memory-erasure operation to rid himself the tortured remembrances of a painful relationship. For the duration of the film we are privy to this process, witnessing Joel's travels across his memories as they are relived and promptly erased. As the first pure excercise in Hyper Realism, Eternal Sunshine fully rejects the extra-terrestrial frontiers of its predecessor genre.

Science fiction employed the endless cosmos as a convenient foil for exploring spirituality -- I do not wish to belabor the point, but doubters need only look to the ultimate sci-fi, 2001: A Space Odyssey for proof of this premise. Under the mantle of extra-terrestrial pursuit these narratives were free to explore themes deeply rooted to the human experience, themes that society was not prepared to confront directly. This trend is rapidly changing now (and not for insignificant reasons), and Eternal Sunshine devotes its time instead to the literal exploration of its hero's subconscious mind, and all the memories, fears and lustful drives that occupy that territory. No, this isn't science fiction, it's something entirely new.

It would be one thing if Eternal Sunshine only offered a simple thematic reversal from science fiction - wearing psychology on the outside as plot rather than its traditional place 'inside' as subtext. However, though both formulas result in an artistic portrayal of the human psyche, they betray different results, and different possibilties. There is a crucial distinction between the rules of the universe and the rules of the mind: specifically, the spans between destinations. To travel between planets means crossing millions of lightyears of inky space, but to travel between memories requires only the will to do so. Unlike the intergalactic enterprises of science fiction, inter-psychological exploration has no need or use for the conventional notion of Space, or, for that matter, of Time.

Joel skips back and forth in his memory between different stages of his relationship, paying no heed to the chronological order of events, only the inner dictate of how they are associated in his mind. To think of a person in Eternal Sunshine is to be with them, to remember an idea is to relive it. For intrepid explorers of the memoryscape, teleportation and time travel are not fantasy inventions, they are par for the course. As a textbook example of Hyper Realism, Eternal Sunshine's box office success represents a cultural awakening to certain facts of the universe: that real time is not the inevitable metronome that we experience; it is nothing more than a representation of progress. Discard your minutes and years; the only useful unit of time is the imperceptible changes between one state and another. Likewise, the spirit of Hyper Realism does not muddle Space with needless inches and miles, when real space measures only the proximal affection between people and ideas.

I hear your grumbling; some of you at the mere volume of abstraction I have produced, as you are not quite ready for Hyper Realism (though your children will be born with these assumptions already implanted). Others accuse me of misrepresenting myself, as though I've presented time travel as nothing more than a philosophical deception.

But take solace, for I know well that you are not about to take up lodgings inside your own mind. No, from the safety of your home, from the grim reality of New Jersey, time travel will soon become a physical reality. The mainstream acceptance of Hyper Realism anticipates our speedy approach to the end of burdensome dimensions. Technology will soon reduce space and time to purely functional concepts, representative more of our own inner lives than the worldly bustle of our bodies. As Eternal Sunshine's Joel Barish closes the distances between the planets by traversing his own memories instead, so too are cell phones and Spigots condensing the spans between countries into a single conceptual point. We stand at the stunning precipice of post Space and post Time, where science fiction will hold no ground and time travel will be commonplace. We are hurtling uncontrollably towards the post future, and I will be The Historian.