Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Director: Michel Gondry

After all these years, I can still remember seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the very first time, and how much I was deeply moved and blown away at the same time. A long time has passed, and many things have changed since, but my fondness for this movie remains undiminished. It is one of my all time favorites and absolutely deserves a note.

There are many things I love about this movie, but the first has to be its wonderful plot and an equally wonderful screenplay. Although the story is set in the present time, the plot builds upon something that is somewhat surreal, namely the ability to erase particular components of a person’s memory. However, the creators of this story didn’t do this for the sake of convenient storytelling; they didn’t allow the possibility of erasing memories in the story to facilitate twists in the plot that otherwise will not make sense. Rather, the possibility of erasing memories serves as a hypothetical prerequisite, with which those ingenious writers can illuminate to us the nature of relationships, how it happens and how it might run its course. 

As the male protagonist Joel goes through the procedure of erasing his memories of his former girlfriend, Clementine, what we see is actually the process of how we get over somebody that once meant something to us, starting with the most recent memories that more often than not are associated with all sorts of negative emotions. But the process of moving on (or in this movie’s wonderful metaphor, the procedure of having memories erased) eventually brings us to an earlier time, when things were at their most pristine stage, unpolluted by understandings and the changes those understandings might bring. What is left to Joel, and probably to many of us, is a mixture of nostalgia, regret, sadness and thankfulness. It is at this very moment in the story, almost at the end of the procedure, when Joel realizes that he doesn’t want the memories of Clementine erased. He then goes on an inner adventure, trying to preserve those memorable moments with Clementine by running away with Clementine to places in his memories where she doesn’t belong. This is perhaps my favorite part of the movie. And what a beautiful metaphor. 

However, what the creators of this story use to set up the metaphor is meant to tell us something more profound. If the ability to erase the memories of someone did exist in real life, so that everyone can have a truly clean break or fresh start, will the same two people, who have their memories of each other completely erased, fall in love should they meet again? There is obviously no correct answer to this question. However, this movie apparently wants to highlight the determinism of how people fall in love. Although it might be overly romantic to say that this determinism is all there is to it, what attracts us to somebody in the first place is often times a glimpse of his or her personality that we happen to see. As much as we can try to make sense out of such attraction, it is just equally inexplicable as to why we are drawn to that particular quality. And what we think we know at that moment is often proven quite inadequate. In the movie, erasing memories takes away the understandings that ultimately leads Joel and Clementine’s relationship to its disintegration and resets everything. That’s why when they happen to meet again, likely because of some residues in the core of their own memories, they still fall for each other. What will happen will happen, for better or worse. 

The finale of this movie is quite open-ended. Joel and Clementine decide to try again. Maybe they are doomed to repeat the same relationship that will eventually fail, or maybe they’ll learn something from the past (which they receive as tape recordings from the memory-erasing clinic) and make things different this time. I personally see the ending in a more optimistic light, but who really knows?