In the pantheon of breakup movies, there is one that indelibly holds my heart as the most poignant and authentic film ever to be made: “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which was directed by Michel Gondry.
“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a slow narrative of two ex-lovers: the soft-spoken, shy Joel Barish, played by Jim Carrey, and the loud and expressive Clementine, played by Kate Winslet. The narrative centers around Joel as he undergoes a procedure to remove any memory he has of his former lover. He decides to do so after hearing that Clementine has undergone the same surgery and has taken up a new lover, Patrick (played by Elijah Wood). The film follows the journey Joel takes through his own mind as he revisits the fading landscape of his time with Clementine and his decision on whether or not that painful experience is still worth keeping.
The most effective creative choice for this film was placing its setting in the abstract realm of Joel’s mind. The film is non-linear and subjective in portraying this doomed romance. Joel’s “memories” are mixtures of past experiences and imagined conversations. He reflects on his mistakes and moments of suffering, but also the time he’d like to savor.
In a distinct scene, Joel recollects the moment he first asked Clementine out on a date. She gives him a speech declaring her own self worth, saying, “I’m not a concept, Joel.” Joel, recognizing her speech and smiling with faint nostalgia, replies, “You had the whole human race pegged.” The movie portrays the fallibility of memory using this device — in Joel’s mind, we don’t see the moments as they happened in Joel’s history, but rather the idealized, re-lived versions of his memory that align with his grief in the present moment.
It’s bittersweet, then, as the book titles behind them start to fade into jumbles of white, that her plea for him to remember her is a seemingly impossible task.
Clementine herself is not an exact characterization of who she is in reality — she is an individual with very limited screen time. The “Clementine” we get instead is an amalgamate of the distinct biases and perspectives of Joel. As he converses with Clementine on why she decided to clear his memory in the first place, she replies, “You know me, I’m impulsive.” And while this may be true, it may also not be. It’s a rationale Joel has given himself to process the grief.
The movie rejects the concrete narrative of a breakup. There is no one to fault: no villains and no heroes. No one is neglected and none are abused. It offers something else — a story of how people grow together and apart. It is about how the importance of those relationships lingers and defines us, even as they fade into the ephemeral realm of what was.
The most bizarre sequence of this film includes the scenes where Joel retreats into the comfort of his own childhood to prevent the underqualified technicians from locating his place in his own mind — which stops Clementine from fading completely. At two distinct stages in his toddler years, we see Joel hiding away from parental figures and peers, protected by a young Clementine that never lived through that moment.
“I wish I knew you when I was a kid,” Joel declares to Clementine after being led away to safety.
Here, the film portrays adolescence from when we are simultaneously too young to understand love but needy enough to understand how we want to be loved. At his core, Joel needs protection from a hostile world. In past moments where we see Joel, seemingly content in Clementine’s embrace, we understand this desire to be loved.
However, the difference in their attachment styles helps us understand why they don’t work out in the end.
For instance, as the film cuts to the couple walking through a densely packed Chinatown, Clementine remarks on how great she’d be as a parent, while Joel casually disagrees. She takes great offense to him disagreeing with her virtuous character. The two show competing philosophies on what it means for the other to be loved. Joel wants to be protected, but Clementine instead wants to be known, heard and understood.
This conflict of needs ultimately breaks their relationship down over time, culminating in the moment when Joel silently eats dinner with Clementine, wondering how they became one of “those couples.”
One of the most memorable lines of the movie is: “Talking constantly is not the same as communicating.” Perhaps they aren’t the same, but it wouldn’t have hurt if they tried to communicate.
Essential to the film’s core romance are the side characters, the employees of the Lacuna clinic responsible for the procedure: the young secretary Mary, played by Kirsten Dunst, her boyfriend and technician Stan, played by Mark Ruffalo, as well as head doctor Howard, played by Tom Wilkinson. These bumbling characters, inexperienced and naive, are knowledgeable about the powerful services they offer, yet seem unfazed, even indifferent to the moral implications of their work.
Mary and Stan find themselves distracted by one another as Joel undergoes the grueling procedure. They play pop music while making out, act out the motions of a young romance and are untouched by the troubles that Joel finds himself re-living moment by moment.
Or so it seems. When Stan briefly exits to fetch his car, Mary offers lines about the miracle of forgetting to Howard. She then confesses her inappropriate yet raw feelings for her supervisor. They share a kiss, and that is when Mary, Howard’s wife, discovers them, forcing Howard to confess that the two once had an affair — an affair that led Mary to choose to have the procedure. In this moment, Mary’s glib philosophization proves true — perhaps it is better to forget.
“Blessed are the forgetful, for they even get the better of their blunders,” Mary says, citing Nietzsche.
However, this inappropriate romance proves to be a core motif in “Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind” — that forgetting isn’t quite forgetting. We can remove the moments we have had with someone, strip them of all their names and identities, yet, something of those times still remains with us. Mary had forgotten all details of the illicit affair, but this didn’t stop her intuition from trying to start another affair with Howard. The meaning she sees in Howard and her desire to be intellectually validated is still ever-present despite her lack of memory.
Perhaps the procedure is but a reset — without the burden of memory, those who have hurt us become whole once again. In some ways, the love we feel remains and comes back to us in unexpected ways. It evokes a sense of the Nietzschean philosophy that Mary quotes: “Would we choose to do this part of life again, knowing that its path has already been laid out before us?”
It seems appropriate then that Joel and Clementine find each other again in the real world, both boarding a train from Montauk — perhaps feeling but not knowing that they compelled each other to meet there in the spaces of their own minds. After spending a night together, the two receive the Lacuna tapes that they had recorded and mailed prior to their procedure, each containing rants and raves about the antagonistic version of one another that they had broken up with.
And yet they make an attempt to ignore what once was and run off into the fading image of the Hamptons, disappearing into white as if it were one of Joel’s memories.
The ending is bold enough to leave the future of Joel and Clementine’s relationship up to interpretation. Do they get back together? Do they stay for more than a moment? Are they fated to be? Or are they doomed to fail once again? Maybe it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they did share — and shared once more — a brief moment of intimacy, intense if fleeting, gone as soon as it returned.
As viewers, we are compelled to ask if these moments are less meaningful just because they don’t last. I surely hope not, especially since Joel and Clementine certainly embrace their memories for what it is.
In an alternate draft of the film, Mary reflects on her decision to leak the tapes:
“But these things happened! All these little sadnesses. The big ones. What if no one remembers? What does that do to the world?”
“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is an optimistic appraisal of how we are able to connect as people. Much like Joel’s memories, no relationship of ours — romantic or personal — is destined to stay the same forever, and as much as they bring us great joy, they’re also bound to hurt immensely. The characters of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” spend the entirety of the film trying to avoid the pain associated with relationships by destroying any semblances or traces of their former partner: Joel forgets Clementine and Mary forgets Howard.
However, everybody is forced to reckon with the pain that comes with having a relationship with their other half. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” argues that we can’t spend our lives only focusing on our own peace of mind because it rejects the immensity of experiences that come in between. Moreover, the pain that surrounds loss and growth is what proves that our relationships were once meaningful — and perhaps always will be in some form or the other.
“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” stands tall as a work that reflects but doesn’t relish in its heartbreak. It shows the immense complexity of how we are shaped by the people that we come into passing with. It’s not just a story about a couple, but rather a story of Joel himself. As Joel meditates on his regrets and fears, we learn the ways in which our past experiences inform how we love, grow and remember.
Final Score: 9/10
