Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Imperfect Lives, Perfect Moments

1. How Happy is the Blameless Vestal’s Lot?

Eternal Sunshine was one of the first movies that showed me what film could do, and what power it had to inspire feeling and passion.

Even more specifically than that, however, are three things I can point to that drew me to film, and one thing that inspired me to delve into Eternal Sunshine when I did.

The first of these influences, specifically with respect to forcing myself to take the plunge and start this blog, was Film Critic Hulk (@FilmCritHULK). If you’re unfamiliar, Film Critic Hulk is, as the name suggests, a twitter account that offers incredibly insightful and emotion criticism and analysis of film, TV, and the like, in the style of the Hulk (writing in all caps, referring to themselves in the third person, etc.). This style of criticism – insight mixed with an intense vulnerability – informed my approach to film writing.

The second was my best friend growing up. He always seemed drawn to film and screenwriting. I remember hearing about the latest numbers from Box Office Mojo, or the movies that were about to come out, or running into town to catch a showing of The Tree of Life (a movie I didn’t care much for at the time, but in retrospect have gained an enormous appreciation for). The more I’ve gotten into film and film analysis, the more I regretted that I didn’t carry that same passion back then.

The third had everything to do with February 2^nd, 2014. I remember three things about that day. I woke up in Greenwich Village, at my then-girlfriend’s place. Secondly, I heard the news of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death by overdose, not two blocks over. Third, I received a message from my family that I should head home. As I stepped off the train and walked into the car, I got the second bit of news: my grandfather, who had been in the hospital for several weeks at that point, had passed.

In the week that followed, I sought ways to distract myself, to figure out how to grieve. This was the first death I experienced. I didn’t really know what to do about it.

It was during this time – a time when my mother, aunt, and other family members were downstairs trying to figure out arrangements and the like for my grandfather – that I happened to open an obituary of Hoffman’s. I had always known him as a masterful actor, but I had never seen too much of his work, aside from what I happened upon. It was in this obituary that I discovered Synecdoche, New York, the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, a longtime screenwriter.

Synecdoche forced me to face the questions I wanted to avoid. I remember staring at my computer screen as the credits rolled on that movie with tears streaming down my eyes, spending a good half hour or more letting grief, fear, anxiety, wonder, love, anger, and so on and so on fill me up to the top and spill over. It both shredded my heart into pieces and built it back up. It was the movie that got me into movies. In some ways, it is what I started this blog for. And I will get to it some day, when I’m ready.

The point of all of this exposition, however, is to inform the depth of feeling that drives me to write. And, more relevantly, why Charlie Kaufman’s work, both as a director and screenwriter, has such resonance with me.

Which brings me to the movie I’ll be discussing here for the rest of the piece: Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

2. It’s Going to Be Gone Soon…

The world of Eternal Sunshine came back to my mind due to a friendship and relationship that, like that of Joel and Clem, was filled with many, many moments of love, kindness, and intimacy. It was a relationship with a best friend, and it was one that shaped so much of my young adulthood. The growth from it was wholly positive, on the part of both of us. And yes, pieces of that progress were formed through trying to evolve as people, trying to make sense of the shortcomings of the other and either work with or through them, or try to improve ourselves. In the worst moments, we flung around thoughts like wishing we could erase each other. We tried to make up goodbyes that never happened. Hell, I see so much of myself in the character of Joel - trying to find the words to describe what I mean, to get across what I'm trying to say - but without the excuse of a memory wipe. It is this connection that acted as the catalyst for this review, and from which nearly every thread originates.

I’m sure many of you already have seen or are otherwise familiar with the premise of Eternal Sunshine. If not, or if it’s been a while, a quick refresher: in the movie universe, there exists an agency capable of selectively erasing your memories, be that of a lost lover, lost child, lost pet, and so on. We join one Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) as he meets one Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) at Montauk in the middle of winter. They hit it off, and it seems that they begin a relationship.

Cut to Joel sobbing in his car, their relationship seemingly over. Nothing felt quite right about the initial scene – with the strange man knocking on Joel’s window (Elijah Wood) outside of Clem’s apartment, to the sudden temporal shift. Needless to say, Joel learns his recent ex-girlfriend, Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) has used the aforementioned memory-erasing service to get him out of her life altogether. He seeks this out for himself, and the vast majority of the rest of the movie takes place in Joel’s mind, as he attempts to hold on to as many memories as he can, realizing his mistake.

I would like to start by saying that Eternal Sunshine shows off some of the most phenomenal acting on the part of its leads. It communicates a strong intimacy between Joel and Clem. It reveals what keeps them coming back. It shows off a tenderness founded in a shared history. And, hell, it shows off how this tenderness is both damaged by, and informed by, the pain that Joel and Clem cause each other.

Both Joel and Clem are flawed individuals. Joel is overly passive, and avoids any inkling of human interaction that might lead to something deeper. He’s quiet, he lacks the words to describe what’s going through his head, despite his ability to craft beautiful works of art, and commit his memory to one of the many sketches in his journal, or to pick just the right piece of jewelry for the woman he loves.

Clem, for her part, describes a story of when she was a child yelling at her doll to “be pretty!” because she never felt that way herself, and thought that maybe through changing the doll she could change herself. She is highly social, but at the same time, holds her cards very close to her chest. She is just as lost a soul as Joel, but merely expresses it in a different way. She copes in a number of ways – random social interactions, late nights out, alcoholism – but doesn’t quite find the perfect piece.

To me, the orbit of Joel and Clem is nothing unusual. No matter who you are, no matter how brilliant, how exciting, how social, how quiet, how normal, how average – we seek something to make us feel okay with this world. We all know what’s waiting for us at the end of the journey, some of us more keenly than others. We want something to make us feel safe, to feel okay with our fate, to make us feel like anything means anything! And you know what? It’s really damn hard!

Some of us seek that out in our work. Some in our friends. Some in hedonism. Some in travel, or writing, or sex, or food, or at the bottom of a bottle, or through art that we’re compelled to create. Yet many of us seek this out in the form of another person, one we feel “meshes” with us in the right way, that “understands” us like no-one else does. A person to wrap ourselves up with at night. A person who we can fall back on no matter what. No matter how weak or small we’re feeling.

Of course breaking up is really fucking hard to do. Especially when you’ve given so much of yourself to another. When you’ve opened up in ways you’re not used to. When you’ve revealed that core that you keep so well-hidden and well-protected. When you think back to those moments where everything seemed right. For Joel, that was talking with Clem under the sheets about her childhood fears, or laying on the Charles with her in the middle of the night. For me, it’s watching Airplane! in a blanket fort, or laying on a couch in a basement listening to a podcast and trying to push out the existential thoughts that plague me. These are the things that stick with you. But each iteration allows for growth. It may take forever to happen, but these moments, these experiences, the good and the bad, they are all necessary. They are what moves us forward, what allow us to get better at this whole living thing!

And honestly? There’s always a lot of awful crap mixed in. That goes not only for relationships, but for every aspect of life. But we keep living life because of those perfect moments. Those moments we can return to in our darkest points. Joel is able to escape to a memory of his childhood, standing in the rain and looking up at the sky. For all the hateful and awful moments that he and Clem went through, we see just as many – if not more – moments of love, of intimacy, of tenderness. Is part of this Joel remembering predominantly the good parts? Maybe. But these always exist. There’s almost always good.

But hey. Human beings are complex. As much as we seek out these connections, as much as we seek out love, and care, and admiration, and respect… there’s a ton that churns within us. There’s regret. Fear. Sadness. Embarrassment. Shame.

For Joel, this is being forced by a group of bullies to kill an injured dove, something he’s saved from by the Clem he brought to his childhood memories to hide from the memory-erasers.

But at the end of the day, it doesn’t work. And even Joel’s memories of home decay. His mother peeks her head out through the window, just before the house ages decades in the matter of seconds for us, the viewers.

There’s never enough time. The memories are never enough. Just like that, they vanish. As soon as Clem lifts the pillow off of Joel’s head when they’re playfully pretending to smother each other – Clem’s gone. Joel spends the entire movie not enjoying his memories of Clem, but trying to escape the erasure, trying to escape the inevitable. Clem’s “just a fucked up girl looking for her peace of mind.” In some way, that’s the position we’re all in – all dealing with our own shit, all looking for our own way out. All looking to feel okay in a universe that doesn’t care whether we have the best of times or the worst of times.

Eternal Sunshine is a movie about heartbreak, and about love, and all of these things. It’s a beautifully edited and written and directed movie. There are so many pieces I could discuss for hours upon hours upon days upon weeks. There’s the bindings of all of the books vanishing in the background as Joel talks to Clem in his memory of their meeting at the bookstore. There’s the faces vanishing off of the background characters. But Jesus, it’s so much more. It’s about loss. It’s about trauma. It’s about the ways in which we, as human beings, build ourselves up, destroy ourselves, and try to figure our way through this chaotic, confusing world. Having the timeline mixed up as it is reveals to us, in pieces, how much Clem and Joel affected each other. The ways in which they changed each other’s personalities, how Joel became more passive, more removed, more pessimistic after all that happened in his relationship, and how Clem became more insecure, more confused, more self-loathing. How the loss of their memories – both the intimate, peaceful, amazing ones, and the awful, dreadful, disgusting ones – sapped both of them of any form of closure, or mutual love, or care.

This movie makes me feel, and to be totally honest… I think I’m still struggling to put every bit of that into words, despite being almost 2000 words into this piece, and having seen this film time after time after time. Perhaps that’s just my fate with Kaufman pieces. Eternal Sunshine is intimate. It is harsh. It is forward, and direct, and impactful. It shows love, with its scars and its marks but also with its perfect moments hanging in time. And it captures those few moments of regret that stick with us so strongly after the fact. Watching this movie years after my first viewing – and several relationships later – one scene has stuck in my mind above all others. It’s near the end, where Joel is remembering a moment at Montauk Beach when he first met Clem. Clem had decided to break into someone’s house, and wanted Joel to share this experience with her. In reality, Joel had left, being too timid to take advantage of the situation. But in light of Joel’s memories collapsing around him, and the conversation that just happened in the movie:

“It’s going to be gone soon.”

“I know.”

“What do we do?”

“Enjoy it.”

Joel’s memory of Clem says, “what if you stayed this time?”

What if you made up the ability to have a goodbye?

I didn’t have the chance to have the goodbye I wanted with my grandfather. I missed many goodbyes that I should have had. They may have existed, but they were never satisfying. How do you end a friendship that lasted thirteen years? How do you truly end a relationship in a satisfying way? How do you grapple with deep emotional wounds that are tied together with emotional highs? How do you say goodbye to the man you spent almost twenty years of your life with, listening to his life stories and trying to make sure that he knew he was loved by his grandson? How do you fix the fact that you weren’t at his bedside when he died?

Clem asks Joel to “come back and make up a goodbye, at least… let’s pretend we had one.”

I wish I had that opportunity a number of times. I wish I was able to fix certain goodbyes, or have them in the first place. These are the regrets that haunt me to this day.

But we can’t.

Time is fluid in the same sense that a waterfall is. It tumbles in one direction, forcefully and with no regard for the things caught up in it. It owes us “blameless vestals” nothing.

And sometimes, that’s for the best. The ending of Eternal Sunshine shows Joel and Clem running on Montauk Beach as the camera skips, over and over again. I think I take a pessimistic view to this ending, taken together with the music that’s playing over it, “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime,” performed by Beck. I’ve felt that the ending showed Joel and Clem stuck in a mutually destructive loop, drawn back in by their love for each other, by those beautiful, intimate, intense moments they shared, the ones we saw throughout the film, the ones that were erased. That they continued to get together, have a wonderful time, and then erase each other all over again.

If I erased the memories that brought me pain, the ones that tore me up inside and spat me out, I’d be a shell of the man I am today. And sure, that’s clichéd, it’s what one would expect to hear from a movie like this. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

3. Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime…

Eternal Sunshine is not a love story. To take it as hey! These people are something that I should emulate! How romantic! is honestly really fucking dangerous. The message you should get from this movie is not I want to find the Clem to my Joel or vice versa.

But this movie is honest. These are real people. These are real struggles. Just with a very easy solution.

On my most recent viewing, though? There was one piece that I finally noticed. Once all of the memory-erasure was revealed to all of the customers, we actually see forward motion on the part of Joel and Clem – and, for that matter, everyone else. Joel gets his tape, starts listening to it, and just as Clem goes to leave his apartment, he breaks out of his passivity for the first time, just as Clem opens up to the audience allows herself to feel vulnerable and uncertain.

The feeling I’ve long struggled to put my finger on – my ruthlessly analytical and critical mind – is the one that Gondry and Kaufman capture in a shot. It’s Clem and Joel looking at each other across the hallway, discussing the fact that honestly, everything’s probably going to go to hell all over again – that Joel will find things he hates about Clem again, and that Clem will feel trapped, and that things are going to be awful!

And the only answer?

“Okay!” A breathless, teary okay in the face of the inevitable.

Maybe it’s less important that things work out. It’s so very, very easy to get caught up in the worst of others, be those friends or lovers or significant others or any manner of things. What matters is that we actually take that chance, and that we hold those perfect moments as long as we can. It’s not that we ignore the bad – we have to understand those moments as well, accept them, use them to fuel our self-improvement and our development. But when we pour so much of ourselves into something or someone, we can’t really erase ourselves from that, and trying to do so is almost always going to lead to us being worse off.

I’ve been both blessed and cursed with the ability to form extremely deep connections with many people. And yet so many of those connections are lost to time now. I can’t imagine that all of us don’t grapple with that. But man, do I wish I could have those moments back. Those quiet moments. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours put it perfectly:

“We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...”

Those are the hours that Joel wants to keep. Those are the hours that I remember, the hours I want back but can never get again. Memories of waking up to english muffins and eggs at my grandparents’ house. Memories of pillow forts. Memories of love.

The scene of Joel and Clem laying together in bed, with Clem opening up and Joel trying to comfort her, makes me well up every time I see it. It is love distilled into one small scene of a movie. It’s a perfect moment, and that’s exactly what Gondry and Kaufman were aiming for. We can’t see all the moments that make up a relationship – or a life, for that matter – but that’s what makes it all the more realistic. We see the little pieces. The games Joel and Clem played with each other. The places they remembered together – Montauk, the library, the Charles. This is what defines love, not a play-by-play re-enactment.

If I had to condense Eternal Sunshine to a blurb, my first response would be, um, no, I can’t get everything I want to say about this movie out in thousands of words, let alone one sentence. But my second response would be that it is about how despite futility, despite the fact that 99 times out of 100 things are not going to work out well and are going to cause us heartbreak, hurt, trauma, damage, disease, pain, etc. etc. etc., ignoring or forgetting these things will only destroy us more. If we can’t learn from these moments, these experiences, and learn to accept, forgive, and move forward, we’re doomed to keep running down that beach endlessly.

There’s a million ways to mess our lives up. There are the endings we never had with the people we love – or loved – the most. There are the endings we did have with them, and the multitude of time we wish we still had. Endings always come sooner than we would like, and are never quite what we hoped. But at the end of the day, we have to live with that. We have to push forward. We have to remember the love, remember the moments, remember those few hours, receive and lose love, and try and find a reason to keep pushing on.

Our memories stick with us, fading and growing with time, with experiences, but constantly there, an imperfect history of what it is to be us, and what it was like to be us at some point. They can be a burden, they can be a treasure, and they can be anywhere in between. But they define us.

5/5