Zachary FenellEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
February 4th 2009 18:32
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004
Me and hard-core overly-wrought emotional cheese ball films totally do not get along. I start feeling my pancreas keeling over and my arteries hardening... it's just not a good scene. That's what I thought Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was. BOY HOWDY, but I was wrong.
Eternal Sunshine tells the story of Joel (Jim Carey) and Clem (played by Kate Winslet with the BEST HAIR EVER), a couple who suffer from severe lack of communication and honesty. They love each other but are so devoted to their ego-games of snarkiness and hurting the other as a test for whether they'll stay together that they end up in, frankly, an emotionally abusive cycle. They finally say "Screw it" and break up, but Clem takes it a step further and has her memories concerning Joel erased.
What?!?
Now, once I figured out that it was basically a science fiction movie, I started really getting how this movie gained the popularity that it had. Again, science fiction is the setting, and then the story takes place in it. Science fiction just lets us explore the outer fringe of "what if" without pesky realistic limitations.
Plot points aside, Eternal Sunshine brings up a lot of very good points about the nature of emotion versus memory. The entire idea of erasing memories to recover from an emotional tragedy is illustrated as being a really bad idea. We don't love a person because we have X number of experiences of Y quality with them. We love a person from a totally different place, and the tragedy that ensues when the memories are gone but the emotion still remains is poignant.
For someone who has never suffered monumental loss, the message might be a little lost. There are times when we lose someone we love so deeply that we feel incapable of moving on past the grief, but time marches on and maybe we will forget what they looked like or we won't be able to remember the details of every experience we had - but the sense of loss remains. The hurt and pain remains. We are forced then to deal with the emotion itself instead of focusing on the events, and only then can we really make the choices that will lead to real recovery.
The nature of memories is such that they are not perfectly linear, and that element is also brought up in this film. The sequence of events is not a perfect step backwards in time, and that can be a little confusing unless you are perfectly aware of how memories work. I think a lot of people got lost at this point, but I strongly encourage another attempt at watching it again with this new awareness in tact.
There are parts that are uncomfortable to watch, but all of the characters (including Kirsten Dunst's role as Mary) are going through a kind of emotional hell, and to see anything but the gritty truth of it would be a gross disservice to themselves and the story.
I give it four stars. It's not the most accessible movie out there, but it definitely deserves to be watched at least twice.
4 Stars
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I love this: "We don't love a person because we have X number of experiences of Y quality with them. We love a person from a totally different place, and the tragedy that ensues when the memories are gone but the emotion still remains is poignant."
... so true, and it encapsulates the essence of the film beautifully. And yes, I too loved Kate's hair
If only there were more Hollywood films made like this one... moving and fun, thought-provoking and whimsical, all at once. Movies like these are, sadly, pretty scarce and often hugely underrated.