"Takeaways From" is a new series where I talk about certain aspects of movies/TV shows. The series isn't a review in any shape or form and may include spoilers.
Depression, self-concern and its possessions, exaggeration in closing the conscience in front of everyone, silence, wandering, lack of use of expressive organs, attachment to empty places where a person can be alone in complete calm in and out of his head, intense attention to details and the implications of their change, extreme analysis of everything and his thoughts and feelings to melancholy. But the chance that creates everything is the one that puts fear in his mind because it is without a cause, and yet it furnishes him, and it happened by chance that he came across it.
They are unhappy strangers in a chaotic world full of possibilities that divide and unite people. He is very depressed, and this depression makes him sincere in everything he wants. He perishes everything in him, especially the meaning of feeling because there are many meanings that have been destroyed in him.
He searches for everything that is real with disgust of the delusions and falsehood, that is why he is in severe pain, and because he is depressed, the presence of simple emotional things, such as his presence, invades everything within him, because first, he does not have many relational feelings, and because secondly, he does not feel existence without being filled with this presence and ramified by it to a frightening degree, so the pain is multiplied hundreds of times.
It has a broad resonance inside him because he believes that the percentage of honesty is in the feelings, and these broken feelings he feels for many people so that he may spend a love story in his head and it also ends in his head at some point.
Usually, depressed people are attracted to eccentrics like Clementine because they see in the eccentric a lack of indifference to the epithet assigned to him and to his transparent truth.
Because pain is memory, it is nostalgia for events that occurred between them, it is nostalgia for feeling the same feelings and the same horizon, Clementine lost her memory during the relationship and he also lost it afterwards, but after knowing that she lost it, he sacrifices all he has of ecstasy while remembering her despite the intense pain and his knowledge that she no longer remembers anything.
Here, he refers to the point of the last return of a person to his physics that affects his meanings. He was in more pain because she did not want to remember these events, feelings and thoughts that were between them for two full years, and with the imagination of the director, he jumps on physics and makes their memory loss normal.
The matter here is: is the depressed fit for love while he is in the midst of his depression? Does he feel relational feelings towards another? Yes, he will feel everything that is sincere, whatever these feelings are, against his melancholy and total apathy.
The depressed person is always an imaginary, mysterious person, who does not reveal much because he has given up language as an expressive daily narrative, but he will approach writing and acts of expression.
In the film, there is a miserable hope, and it is their meeting again after losing their memory by voluntary coercion, from the unknown creator of coincidences. They will love each other no matter how much they meet each other in any circumstances.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind shows us a dark truth about powerless we could be to feelings. It shows us that having a second chance and an attempt to correct our paths isn't something to obsess over because perhaps a correction of the path of behaviour is likely to prove pointless, temporary at best, because that correction process would start without changing the essential thing that is required for it to be corrected, ourselves.
The miserable hope we see at the end is miserable for a reason because we have already seen how it ended, and we already saw how people in denial of it end up in Stan's pursuit of Mary Svevo, it's a meaningless pursuit as he has already seen the person for whom she has affection. We also see it in Dr Howard's denial of his infidelity and the possibility of it happening again. Also, in Patrick's attempt to delay the inevitable with Clementine.
The end result is the same, it's a vicious circle. The reason behind that is the fact that we know how Joel's relationship with Clementine would end eventually, just like Clementine and Patrick, Stan and Mary, and Mary and Dr Howard. The only difference is the details, and those hardly matter.
Perhaps the ending where Mary steals the Lacuna records and mails them to the patients is symbolic of the writer letting us know of this vicious circle, a desperate attempt to let people know of this endless chase. But, deep down, even the writer knows that this circle won't break as evidenced by Joel and Clementine deciding to give their relationship a second chance having heard everything they said about each other.
The physical, authentic, and real memory of pain, not as we're told of it, even by ourselves, might be the only thing preventing us from running in circles.
