/ Film Class #44 / Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind / Michel Gondry

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d..

The lyrics of English poet Alexander Pope, which at one point Mary pronounces, played by Kirsten Dunst, also served as the title of the film itself. The song "Eloise to Abelard" speaks of tragic love, its end and oblivion as the only solution. The theme of Pope's epistle is also the story of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind directed by Michel Gondry, whose creative mind stands behind the popular alternative bands Radiohead and The White Stripes. In 2004, Charlie Kaufman won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and in addition to the aforementioned Dunst, the lead roles are interpreted by Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, who are joined by Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo and Tom Wilkinson.



SYNOPSIS

''Emotionally withdrawn Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) is headed to work in New York City one morning when he feels an inexplicable draw to call off from his job and get on a train to Montauk, Long Island. On the train, he strikes up a conversation with Clementine (Kate Winslet), a dysfunctional free spirit whose hair changes colors with her mood. Despite radically different personalities, they are attracted to each other and agree to a date. What they do not realize, and what friends soon reveal, is that Joel and Clementine are in fact former lovers, but both had their memories of one another erased following a nasty break-up.

Weeks prior, Joel and Clementine end their two-year relationship on a bad note, and Clementine hires a local firm—Lacuna, Inc.—to erase all her memories of Joel. Upon discovering this, Joel is devastated. He wants the same procedure as Clementine, and meets with Lacuna’s top technician, Dr. Howard, who reassures Joel that the erasure is painless (or “on par with a night of heavy drinking”). As the procedure transpires, Joel begins reliving his memories with Clementine, starting with the most recent (the bad break-up) but he soon sees pleasant earlier times. He regrets his decision to hire Lacuna and wishes to call the procedure off, but cannot (as he is, in fact, asleep), and his moments with Clementine are slowly erased. To buy some time, he hides Clementine in his subconscious and childhood memories, where he hopes Lacuna technicians will not look. While the pair journey through Joel’s mind, they also journey through the ups and downs of their relationship.''(1)



The core of the film is what happens in Joel's head during the procedure and most of the action is placed in his mental space. At the same time, we look at the realistic part in which the assistants of Dr. Mierzwiak, Stan, Patrick and Mary, are in Joel's room erasing his memory through the computer and that dreamlike, fairy-tale, surreal part. Joel first survives more recent memories that were violent, full of fights and disagreements. The protagonists eat in silence, they become slaves of routine brought by every long relationship, unwilling to fully devote themselves and define their future. Everything is full of bitterness and frustration. They came to a point when everything they loved about the other becomes irritating. "I'm erasing you and I'm happy," Joel shouts at one point, but it seems more like a desperate cry than a clear decision and hope for a better tomorrow. As the deletion process progresses, Joel returns to the happy moments and he realizes he doesn't want to lose that memory. The Clementine of his subconscious is Clementine whom he loved, not the girl he called pathetic and irresponsible and who insulted him during their last encounter. Then begins the struggle of a sleeping Joel attached to a wiping device that wants to hide Clementine into the deepest corner of his brain and greet the dawn with at least one memory.

Although full of flaws and contradictions, Joel and Clementine don't allow us to doubt their love and what keeps them together in spite of everything. Joel fails passion and spontaneity, and the extrovert Clementine has all of this, but is also anxious, convinced that she misses a lot in his life. She's impulsive and changes her moods almost as often as she changes the color of her hair, and just that color can help viewers to pick up chronologically broken and confusing parts of the plot. When they meet for the first time, Clementine's hair is green, as if it symbolizes some awakening, a new life, and a new beginning. At the beginning of their emotional connection, her hair is hot red, like passion and love. The red slowly turns into orange, as if love is inspired by the color of hair, and all the enthusiasm became pale. At the end of the film, her hair is blue - blue for sorrow after the breakup.



Joel is withdrawn, both in life and in the relationship. Constant talking for him doesn't mean communicating. He does not understand that avoiding conflicts also means avoiding problems. Clementine is open and realizes that people need to share things, because this is the only way to get intimacy and trust. Maybe this new Joel finally figured out and decided to hide her at the corner of his childhood, where she had never been, and for a moment stop her from being completely erased. Surely not by accident, she later asks to keep only Clementine's memory of the time when she was most vulnerable and talked under the cover of her childhood, uncertainty and loneliness. Joel wants to preserve the memory of a girl who thought she was ugly and for a moment when he could be with her and tell her how beautiful she was.

Clementine is one of the female characters who managed to deny the Manic Pixie Dream Girl coin by Nathan Rebin. ''Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a fucked-up girl who's lookin' for my own peace of mind.'' She breaks down this wrong idea of herself, and does not want to be the product of other fantasies and performances or to be someone's ideal because, like everyone else, she is not perfect. Clementine wants to stay real.

While Clementine fights for his attitudes and principles while trying to remain a human being in the domain of reality, Joel's mind becomes the center of dreams and visual poetry. The bookstore is intertwined with the apartment, the bedroom is on the beach next to the ocean in the middle of winter and everything looks like a fairy tale. The imagination takes on a completely new form and this is probably the closest and best attempt of cinema to show human dreams. It subconsciously begins to collapse as the erasing intervention is over, and the main characters no longer have anywhere to escape.

Note: This was my translation from Serbian to English from PULSE article '' Večni sjaj besprekornog uma'' by M.Ristic



What's up with the ending?

The subconscious domains end up on the beach, the same one where it all started and the one where the main protagonist goes again after the erase, one February morning, just on Valentine's Day.

''Joel and Clem. Together forever. One way or another, we have a feeling this is going to be true. At the movie's close, our protagonists, despite knowing that they have already tried and failed to have a successful relationship, decide to get back together and give it another go. The big question of whether or not things will work out is never answered.More pessimistic people may be inclined to think that our couple will be trapped forever in a cycle of love and hate; falling for each other before things get sour and then erasing each other from their memories, over and over again.And while that could happen, optimists could see the fact that Joel and Clem are aware of the fact that they've already had the Lacuna procedure as evidence that this will not be cyclical. If things don't work out this time around, would they really decide once more to have a procedure that essentially only managed to cause more pain in the end?'' (2)
(1) The “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” Synopsis, Writers Digest, by Chuck Sambuchino | December 9, 2009
(2) Shmoop,  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind