A Movie I Might Not Watch Again: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Witness as I unexpectedly spill my heart
I despise Valentine’s Day. Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not a Grinch or Scrooge when it comes to matters related to romance. On the contrary, I am far from that. What I despise about Valentine’s Day is the commercialization of love. We shouldn’t put our attention, resources, and energy on just one day of the year to prove our love. We should demonstrate our love for those close to us every day. As much as love is a noun, it’s also a verb, and the verb form is the version that resonates with me. It’s deliberate, active, and something that is fostered and nurtured. It requires effort and attention.
I will, however, use the occasion as an excuse to talk about a movie that I don’t plan to watch again, not because I dislike it. On the contrary, this movie gripped my heart so tightly, I don’t think I have the fortitude to experience it again. In fact, I have several movies on my mind that I don’t think I can watch again. This sentiment of not watching a film again due to its effect was articulated for me so well in Roger Ebert’s review of the 2011 film Shame, directed by Steve McQueen, written by Steven McQueen and Abi Morgan. Ebert wrote, “This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don’t believe I would be able to see it twice.”
I might indeed have a series here where I explore films I don’t think I can watch twice. Right now, the film I want to discuss can fit with the occasion of Valentine’s Day because it is a romance movie: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), directed by Michel Gondry, screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, story by Charlie Kaufman & Michel Gondry & Pierre Bismuth.
Something specific I will try for this discussion is that I will rely solely on my memory. I usually research the films I write about in order to remind myself of details, but I won’t this time. I just briefly consulted the cast list to make sure I spelled the names of the director, writers, and actors correctly. This will be an interesting writing experience, and a fitting one, since the film is about memory.
This is a film many have seen, and therefore, I hope my recollection of it is amusing and not frustrating.
Early in the film, Jim Carrey (I am sorry, but I will refer to the characters by the actors portraying them, not to blur the boundaries between performance and reality, but because I don’t remember the characters’ names.) runs into Kate Winslet, with whom he had a long romantic relationship with but is now broken up with. To his confusion, Winslet doesn’t seem to recognize him at all. She isn’t just pretending she doesn’t know him; she really thinks he’s a stranger.
Carrey soon learns that Winslet went through a scientific procedure that erased all her memories of him. This service is provided by a group run by Tom Wilkinson, with Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst as employees.
If I remember correctly, either the film explicitly states or implies that the reason for Winslet’s decision to undergo the procedure was because the breakup with Carrey was too painful. She decided she would be able to move on more easily if she forgot all about him.
This is when things get rough for me. The plot element of a procedure that can erase someone’s memories is such a brilliant, heartbreaking concept. It’s so achingly relatable. How many of us still think about moments from our past that arouse pain, shame, regret? When those old feelings bubble up again because of the potency of our memories, how many of us wish we could scrub our minds clean?
The people close to me have seen that I have a strong memory in regards to in-person events.
This is a strength and a weakness. I’m grateful for all the things I can remember. But, there’s a lot I wish I could forget. This desire especially springs up in me when an unpleasant memory pops into my head, unwarranted, unannounced, like lightning from a clear sky.
In the film, Carrey decides to undergo the procedure in order to erase all his memories of Winslet. This would allow him to move on too, he determines. Much of the film is Carrey undergoing the memory erasure procedure while Dunst, Ruffalo, and Wilkinson monitor him. I believe additional characters are there, too, but I don’t remember who they are. I honestly wish my memory didn’t fail me here. I want to give credit to everyone involved in this excellent movie. In order to maintain the initial conceit of this essay, though, I will carry on.
As Carrey is unconscious during the procedure, the film dramatizes the process by illustrating Carrey navigating his memories. He slides between different locations and points in time. Sometimes, different settings and events blur together in absurd ways, giving these sequences a surreal or dreamlike quality. I remember one moment in which Carrey is in his childhood home, but in the place of his mother is Winslet.
This whole sequence illustrates a possibility of theater and film that I adore: the capability to dramatize psychological processes. Novels and stories of course also use creative ways to render mental movements such as memories and imaginations. Yet, because a greater gap exists between the audience and characters’ interiority in film and theater, artists need to find creative methods to illustrate thought in captivating ways. This whole sequence in Eternal Sunshine of Carrey stumbling through memories is moving and fascinating.
Also, during this sequence, Winslet emerges as a compelling character. Of course, the version of Winslet whom Carrey meets and talks with in his mind is a construction of her based on his memories. She isn’t the infinitely complex and boundless flesh-and-blood person he fell in love with. However, she isn’t a wish-fulfillment fantasy either. She pushes back against some of the things he says and urges him to acknowledge his contributions to the failure of the relationship.
Again, though Winslet as presented in Carrey’s mind is a construct by him, she represents the ways in which the real-life Winslet character in the movie changed him. This reminds me of an idea I once heard, that the people who mean sometime to us leave impressions on us so that we are changed even once they are gone. Carrey is changed because of Winslet, even if at this moment in the film, the change is greater self-reflection.
This is a bittersweet truth, in my view. It reminds me that, while nothing lasts forever in this world, the bonds we make with people are never for nothing. I do think in many ways, we are shaped significantly by the people close to us.
The movie, though, moves from bittersweet enters the genuinely tragic here. This is the second gut-punch for me. Carrey realizes that he has made a terrible mistake. He doesn’t want to lose his memories of Winslet. Despite the pain some of the memories arouse, they are all he has left of the person he once loved. In vain, he continues to stumble through his memories as they get erased, trying to savor last impressions until his time is up.
What a heartbreaking moment. It’s all just so viscerally human: the regret over a decision resulting from pain, the desperate wish to undo what cannot be undone, the acceptance that pain is preferable to nothingness.
Of course, Carrey fails. When the procedure is over, he wakes up with zero memories of Winslet.
The film isn’t over, though. There is a side plot with Dunst and Wilkinson, with Dunst developing romantic feelings for Wilkinson and realizing, to her heartbreak, that this has happened before. Her feelings for Wilkinson led to emotionally difficult experiences for her, so she too had the procedure performed.
This is the knockout punch for me. I feel Dunst’s sorrow over her realization that she, too, tried to erase her unbearable pain. That’s the wind-up, though. The hit comes when Dunst, like Carrey, decides she prefers pain over nothingness, over a permanent blank.
The group records sessions with its clients in which the clients explain why they are choosing the procedure. Thus, many of them describe the relationships and painful break ups that they’re trying to forget.
Dunst take these tapes and mails them to the clients. It is her way of giving them something back, even if she cannot restore their memories.
I think this film hits me so hard partially due to its exploration of memory and regret, but also for its wisdom that pain is an unavoidable part of life, of love. I’m not saying that pain is a sign of love; please don’t misunderstand me. I oppose all needless suffering.
The truth is, though, is that love makes us vulnerable, and therefore allows us to get hurt. Even in the best case scenario, if the person you love never makes a single mistake and never causes you any negative feelings, you will still be shattered, or they will be, when one of you dies.
From what I’ve been told, my grandparents had a marriage like the ideal I’ve described here. My grandma cannot think of a single sad moment involving her husband. She has survived him by over twenty years. She still loves him.
Pain and joy are inextricable from love, as they are inextricable from life. We love because despite the pain, it allows us to move behind the prisons of ourselves and consider people who are not us, who are as infinitely complex and unable to be put into a box as we are. We let people into our world, and they let us into theirs. It’s nothing short of miraculous.
The film ends on an optimistic note. Carrey and Winslet end up running into each other, and though they don’t remember each other, they create a spark between them. One reading of this is that they, along with Dunst, are doomed to experience the same heartbreak over again. Another way to read this is that, they are drawn together because something has survived the procedure. In other words, love prevails.
Carrey and Winslet both happen to be in the same location when they receive the tapes that Dunst sent. They listen to them together realize the truth that they were once together.
If my memory hasn’t failed me utterly, I think the film’s ending is ambiguous. The characters’ futures are up in the air.
I choose to believe that, if they try to build a relationship again, they will find less difficulty now that the tapes have told them what went wrong last time.
When we open our inner worlds up to others, we have to make sure that they are hospitable for others, if we want them to stay. This is where the effort, selflessness, attention, and deliberate commitments of love come in.
Damn it, I don’t think I can keep going right now, my heart is overflowing. I might have to leave it here.
It’s so incredible that a memory of a film can cause all this.
I agree with Ameer