The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Review

The inimitable Mike Wang has been running Sci-Fi Theatre, a series of sci-fi movie community screenings in San Francisco’s Roxie Theatre. This time, they gave us a postcard and an envelope and encouraged us to write to someone we share a core memory with, and offered a mailbox to mail your letter to wherever in the world you wish. I highly recommend you join the next one if this sort of thing piques your interest - here’s the Partiful from the movie night.

Today’s subject is The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I have been on Tumblr for long enough to know the gist of the story, but it still hit hard! There are probably miles and miles to unravel here, but in the spirit of done is better than perfect, I’m slamming out my raw thoughts.

The unreliable narrator is a favourite trope of mine - I count Lolita and The Remains of the Day amongst my favourite books. I’m certainly constantly wondering what “I” really means.And what an unreliable narrator we have! Studies have shown that when we remember, it activates similar parts of our brain that fires when we imagine. We never really remember anything. We are constantly reconstructing our experiences, just as Joel recreates his memories - the scenes blur between invention and recall and we never truly know what actually happened. In one scene, Joel’s neighbour says “The only Valentine’s Day cards I get are from my mother. How pathetic is that?”. But when Joel revisits the same conversation a beat later, the dialogue has shifted ever so slightly to “I only get Valentine’s Day cards from my mom. How sad is that?”.

In the movie, Mary quotes Nietzsche: “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.” It reminded me of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence: if we had to live life again infinitely, would we make the same choices? Milan Kundera responds to this call with another favourite of mine, The Eternal Lightness of Being (I keep referencing this). Kundera argues that we don’t have any counterfactual to our decisions - there is no Statsig for life - and as such, how can we really judge anything we do? We only live once, we don’t recur forever, and so our lives are unbearably light. The procedure Joel and Clementine undergo attempts to create that very lightness by erasing the consequences of their prior actions - their erstwhile romance.

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Joel chooses to see that the terrible beauty is worth the terrible pain. He decides to shine the spotlight (aside: the use of light in this movie is masterful!) on Clementine, warping his lived reality to drag her into the deepest recesses of his mind in his struggle to keep her. I think it’s poetic that he pulls her into his greatest shame, his earliest memories, his deepest pain. I think that’s what love is: letting someone into the monstrous caverns of your being and knowing that the other person still loves you in your entirety.

Clementine tells Joel that she isn’t the life-completing manic pixie dream girl people like to make her out to be, and it’s true: it is his willingness to let the soft animal of his person be exposed in full nakedness that saves him. Throughout the film, Joel repeatedly says that his life isn’t interesting and is reluctant to talk about himself. But in his quest to hold on to Clementine, he has to. He has to show her the unfurling of his strange, awkward, aching being. It is in the confrontation of his hidden Selves that he is able to re-insert Clementine into the tapestry of his life.

In one of the memories, the two mock-suffocate each other. A charade of the intensity of their relationship, but maybe also an analogy for a form of self-death, a willingness to let go of the masks you wield as armor. There’s certainly an unhealthy interpretation of losing yourself to the other person, but I prefer to read that Joel had to find himself before he could be ready to be with Clementine. It is what lets Joel say: “okay”, when Clementine tells him all the reasons not to stay with her - a soft rebellion, in contrast to their first meeting when she said, “so, go” and he promptly did.

I want you plain. I want you bragging. I want you
naked as a tongue without a word. I want you
laughing. I want you joy. I want you wonder & wonderful.
The hips on every guitar. Copper tambourines
scoring your laughter. Don’t ever learn how to stop
laughing. Laugh when you shouldn’t. I like that
laughing best. I want you miracle. I want you possible
& foolish.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Paradise

How love demands the totality of your surrender. How the possibility of its great, all-consuming suffering is the necessary excavation for it to sprout root. Love is non-rational, maybe in the way consciousness is non-computational (as we understand it today). And if love is a form of negative entropy, for it to exist, entropy must accelerate elsewhere. Maybe that’s why it is so transformative, and so painful.

Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.
Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior

The movie’s name references the poem Eloisa to Alebard by Alexander Pope. After their illicit love affair is uncovered, Alebard is castrated and Eloisa sent to a monastery grieving their separation, and wishing that she could alleviate the pain by forgetting their relationship.

In Five Times in One Night, a collection of five short darkly comedic plays, there is one about this couple. I don’t have the script with me, but I remember at the end, Eloisa (spelt Heloise in the play) writes to Alebard something along the lines of:

Heloise: …I’m not sure it was worth it in the end. Despondently, Heloise.
Heloise: Hey, I thought about it some more, and no, it was totally worth it.

The movie closes with a repeated scene of Joel and Clementine running on the snowy beach. The movie began en media res, and ends the same, ominously suggesting that the hurt could eternally recur. But Joel’s “okay” is a decision that makes it worth it. As Camus wrote: one must imagine Sisyphus happy.