When they challenge the erasing process by hiding in childhood remembrances and other “off the map” memories, the escape route is always suggested by Clementine. She represents his will to hold on and he does so through what he knows of her spontaneous personality. She leans in and whispers, “Meet me in Montauk.” You see, the Clementine guiding his escape is merely a projection in Joel’s mind. The weak link in Lacuna’s process is that it successfully erases memories but can’t erase feelings.Īnother heartbreaking scene that explores the system’s imperfection is when Joel and Clementine finally bid farewell inside his head. She arrives to that discovery through her love to him. Take for example, the simultaneous subplot involving Mary (Kirsten Dunst) discovering that she had her love affair with Dr. They are in some sense untouchable because they shape who we are. You may forget a past memory but you can’t forget the impulses, instincts and emotions that arose from that past incident. The film ultimately arrives to the conclusion that no, having a spotless mind does not bring eternal sunshine.
Would erasing an incident from our micro-history do us any good? Would a woman erasing the memory of a rape make her happier or would removing the incident do more damage to her life than the actual incident itself? Hence, she wouldn’t have learned anything from it or become the stronger person she is today. One of the philosophical questions this film asks is whether we are merely the sum of our memories or if there’s more to us than a summation of past experiences. If you haven’t seen this modern masterpiece, I strongly suggest you stop reading at this point, as I will explore some of the film’s more thought provoking themes. It’s one of the most original and fresh ideas ever shot on film. They race from one memory to the next desperately escaping the inevitable erasing process. The film then takes a Hitchcockian turn and becomes a man-on-the run film, only this time the protagonists are running from an untouchable entity. But as he re-experiences the passionate days of their earlier relationship, he falls in love with her all over again. Out of sheer desperation he resorts to the only logical solution at the time, removing her from his memory as well. Furious and confused, he contacts the inventor of this advanced process, Dr. Their relationship escalates into a supposedly dead-end when he learns that she had him erased from her memory. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is the rarest of all films, a therapeutically liberating work of art.Ĭharlie Kauffman’s marvelous screenplay revolves around Joel (Jim Carrey), a soloist stuck in the repetitive formula of everyday life till he meets the spontaneously carefree Clementine (Kate Winslet). It is a film that demands the presence of thoughts we put aside when surrounded by people, things we only think about when we’re alone, buried in everlasting thoughts. It reaches for something personal like troubling memories buried deep in our psyche. It is one of those rare films, I’d rather watch alone than with an audience. This almost never happens to me, and I think I understand why it enchanted me the first and last times. Surprisingly, it had that same initial effect on me. Now, six years later I’ve given it another shot. The second time I saw it, I had a few friends over and it wasn’t as impressive. That night, I needed more time to grasp the film’s brilliant originality and fascinating implications. I used to experience that during the last minutes of an exam I couldn’t finish on time. I couldn’t sleep all night due to perpetual thoughts rushing through my head. The first time I watched Michael Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” it felt like a life changer.