‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’: A Love Story as Beautiful as It Was Painful

I watched the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and wrote a movie review.

 

The process of recalling memories from the past is like a bomb exploding. Whether it’s a beautiful memory or a memory you want to erase, it’s sharp and explosive, like igniting a stored powder keg. The memories to be stored are always partially loaded deep in the warehouse called the brain. Then, when the traces of the past are ignited by a fuse, the memory explodes, filling the brain with chain after chain of memories. Because these explosive memories can never be erased and cannot be controlled once they are triggered, everyone is lost in the crossroads of what they want to erase and what they want to keep. The movie depicts the traces of memories that can never be erased, but are made all the more difficult to forget when we try to erase them. The movie’s imaginative depiction of the reality of forcibly erasing memories is brutal. Once a memory is erased by a machine, it can never be revived. Nevertheless, the movie does offer a shred of hope. It is that if ‘love’ shone brightly for a moment, even when all memories are erased, ‘a vague trace of memory will remain’. The memory of such a beautiful love makes the protagonist take a train to Montauk out of nowhere, and that is the beginning of the movie, the beginning of the protagonist’s repeated love. The movie starts with a stain of memory and ends with a message about the nature of love.

 

 

From personal experience, there is no such thing as love that is always exciting. There is no such thing as a relationship without regrets. We all have heartbreaking memories of love, and we all live with the fears that come with it. But is love really a battle of attrition, a downward spiral that only leads to separation? The film’s director, Michelle Gondry, and screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, answer this question through their movie. “How foolish!” they say to those who shy away from love because they fear its imperfections. The memories of love, they say, “may be painful, but you can’t help but embrace them.” This movie doesn’t try to tell you that love is destined to come back. It just silently talks about the importance of the love you and your lover share in this moment and the beauty of the memories.

 

 

Joel and Clementine, who are at the center of the love story, realize that their memories of each other have disappeared from each other’s minds and struggle to stop it. They met and loved each other in the past, but eventually went wrong and broke up, leading to the erasure of their memories. What they were afraid of were the feelings of love that would eventually change, and the way they would look and act. Instead of facing their fears, they choose to erase the memories of the love they shared. The movie painfully and beautifully depicts the fading of love memories through the power of technology.
In particular, the regression of the main character in the movie and the way the memories are deformed and torn apart are similar to the process of reliving memories in our dreams. And Lacuna’s machine, which is supposed to erase memories, starts with memory clues and quickly erases them as it searches for memory links. This is similar to the process of uncovering deep traumas in psychotherapy through hypnotherapy, starting with small clues. Memories exist in fragments, and they don’t exist in isolation, but are interconnected like a network. And the process of erasing memories doesn’t leave a single fragment behind.
These cinematic tropes help us to explore the question of “what caused love to change” through the protagonist’s helplessness in the face of memory erasure. However, what is important here is not the causal relationship of who erased whom and who realized it first. What the director wants to say is that “even the love that hurts so much that you want to erase the memory is important in life,” and it is completed by the indirect participation of the audience who tries to remember it together. In that sense, “Eternal Sunshine” is a personal movie that can be connected to the audience’s own experience to complete the message of the movie. This is the reason why ‘Eternal Sunshine’, which could have easily ended up as a story about two lovers’ memories of love, is able to convey a deeper resonance to the audience after the movie ends.

 

 

In the movie Controller, the main character gets a controller that allows him to control everything, even erase his memories by pressing the reset button. But “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which insists that “every memory is precious,” encourages the audience to resist this temptation. In the final scene, when all the memories have been erased, Clementine asks, “Don’t you think we’ll get bored of each other after a while, and find each other boring?” and Joel laughs and says, “Okay!” His (Jim Carrey) facial expressions, honed by his many comedic roles, are so emotionally expressive that they answer all the questions the movie is trying to answer. Clementine’s response to him is also “Okay!”

 

 

In this world, where everything is full of uncertainty, there is no absolute logic or law about the nature of love. However, the movie seems to be trying to say that before the essence of love, what matters in love is the affirmation and faith in the lover, and that fact is a “memory” that should be embraced, even if it is as small as a speck of dust that briefly appeared in the sunshine.