Ms. Dominico’s Year 12 VCE English Class

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)
starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Michel Gondry

Here is an insightful film review from:

http://filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/eternalsunshine.htm

“…But it’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that completes Kaufman’s emergence into an emotional world with what is essentially an ode to one of my favourite ideas and phrases: the madness of love in a temporary world.

…. The film is told as a montage of Joel’s reflections of love at the moment of their erasure, and it’s every bit as melancholy and romantic as the conceit would imply.

… the picture is a cascade of thoughts that rejects traditional narratives while holding fast to recognizable strictures of storytelling. Joel is the hero, attempting to rescue his damsel from the dungeon of his mind and bad decisions.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind revolves around two quotes.

The first is from Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” in which the poet takes on the voice of a young woman at war (as all of Pope’s protagonists seem to be on some level) between feelings of love and religiosity:

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.y

The second is from Nietsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Part VII: “Blessed are the forgetful: for they shall have done with their stupidities too.”Both passages are quoted by Dunst’s Mary in the film, and both speak to an idea of bliss as well as a blueprint for morality and identity–the question raised the extent to which experience and memory feed not only our personality but also, as Kaufman appears to suggest, our emotions. It’s love as predestination (predestined for doom or ecstasy, it makes no difference), and a moment in which Joel’s remembered self asks his dream lover what to do when their illusory time is so limited (”enjoy it” is the answer) cuts deep to either the despair of love lost or the anticipation of its inevitability. When I met my wife, I felt like I’d known her forever–my memories of before we met are all tinged with confusion as to where she was or the certainty that she was there somehow. And in our darkest moments, the truth that I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat despite the pain of those moments is an emotional verity examined by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

With the poetry of a train station its departure point, the picture is fascinating and powerfully affecting–I’m haunted by its ability to formulate [on the screen] the impossible complexity of the will to love.” -Walter Chaw

© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.
-Used for Educational purposes only. See the full article: http://filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/eternalsunshine.htm
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More insight excerpted from a film review at: http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=1508

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(Reviewed April 9, 2004)

“Here, just for the record, are the lines from Alexander Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard from which a new movie takes its title:

How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sun-shine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resigned.

Generally speaking, it has not been deemed worthy of comment by those who have written about the movie that the phrase Pope applied to the untroubled conscience of a nun — the Vestal virgin, though a pagan Roman phenomenon, was often used a prototype for the various orders of Roman Catholic sisters like Eloisa’s — is applied in the movie to a ghastly new therapeutic technique for washing out of the brain all memories of a sexual “relationship” gone bad, so that the subject, or patient, can make a completely fresh start with someone new.

Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the screenplay of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with the director, Michel Gondry, must have known that the word “spotless” as used by “Pope Alexander,” as the dippy Mary (Kirsten Dunst) puts it, meant “without moral stain.” It had to be, then, with a certain sense of irony that they chose to make the phrase mean something quite unimaginable to Pope: namely an antiseptic consciousness unspotted with memories and so capable of living entirely in the present.

… scientists who mess with your mind invariably claim to have your best interests at heart and are invariably up to no good. But there is a moral dimension to the new film, hinted at in the quotation from Pope, that goes well beyond the ponderous pieties of A.I. and Minority Report. We’ve known since Frankenstein — the book, not the movie — that it is a very bad idea to play God with human life. If you remember that Mary Shelley’s subtitle was “The Modern Prometheus” the lesson goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks. What is less clear is the point at which therapy becomes presumption upon the divine purpose.

In other words, maybe eradicating bad memories, assuming it were possible, would be more like burning out cancerous cells than it would be like creating artificial consciousness or manipulating minds to produce guaranteed moral outcomes. Surely if Joel and Clementine, the two lovers of the film played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, have freely chosen to have their memories of each other erased they are only exercising a form of control over their own lives that we would all exercise if we could? Kaufman and Gondry’s answer to this question is that it may be so, but that you can’t limit the process of memory-removal to the bad and painful memories. Dr Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) requires a complete removal of the good memories along with the bad, so that it is as if the couple has never met. A whole chunk of their lives has been simply obliterated.

…Listening to these tapes, both weakly insist that they cannot possibly imagine thinking such things about the terribly attractive person they now once again want to believe in. “I really like you. I hate that I said mean things about you.” In this instant, therefore, they are given a double perspective on their lives. At one and the same time they can see each other as they did when love was new and when love had become swamped with anger, petty annoyances and the hurtful recriminations these things give rise to. The result is a revelation. We all know the difference between the hopeful beginning and the embittered end of a relationship. It is, in a word, trust. While we believe in the promise of happiness with another person, we overlook his faults, her shortcomings. Little things remain little things and doubts only arise for their benefits to be lavishly given. Later, when hope has been disappointed, it takes trust with it.
Doubts become certainties and every fault, every rough spot and irritation grows from insignificance to such a size as to cut us off from any further hopes of happiness.

All the science of this film’s science fiction is really there just to allow Joel and Clementine this moment of insight which, had we sufficient moral imagination, we all might share without any help from Dr. Mierzwiak and his black arts. In that instant the lovers see their lives sub specie aeternitatis — all at once, as we must suppose God sees them, rather than day by day, year by year, as we are forced to live them — and the juxtaposition of hope and love with bitterness and distrust makes it easy for them to choose the former over the later.

Here, in short, is a sort of playing God that is not just OK but is morality’s highest achievement. Nor does it require some scientist’s magic potion. All that side of the picture is played for laughs because its real concerns lie elsewhere. The title’s “spotless mind” thus has a double meaning: the hygienic mental cleansing the characters think they are going to get and the moral epiphany they actually do get — which, mutatis mutandis, would be recognizable to Alexander Pope. Or Pope Alexander, for that matter.”
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A Third Film review http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/eter-m26.shtml

WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews
The science of remembering
By David Walsh
26 March 2004

“…She goes on to celebrate the “Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!” Whether Pope meant the line to be ironic or not, the poem clearly comes down on the side of earthly, physical love and remembering, as opposed to the “vestals” who have never lived at all and have nothing to forget.

Eternal Sunshine also comes down on the side of love and remembering, despite the pain and suffering involved.

The film’s structure is complicated, perhaps unnecessarily so. It winds back upon itself. Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) is a stifled middle-class New Yorker who skips work one winter day and encounters a free-spirited young woman with blue hair, Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), on the Long Island Railroad.

In fact, we learn, the two once had a relationship, but their memories of it have been erased thanks to the efforts of Lacuna, Inc. The company pinpoints and eliminates memories of unhappy relationships. Clementine had the procedure done first, followed by Joel.
Lacuna, despite its remarkable service, is a rather unimpressive outfit, headed by Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson). He has a small staff, including receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst) and two bumbling technicians, Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood). The latter pair—armed only with a laptop and silly-looking headgear—more or less botch Joel’s brainwashing, opening up the possibility of his resistance.

(Incidentally, why the Polish names Kruczynski and Mierzwiak? A tribute to Polish science fiction of a cerebral, non-technological kind? And we note on the nameplate on her desk that Mary’s last name is “Svevo”—an homage to Italo Svevo, the Italian novelist who pioneered the modern internal-psychological novel? Clementine presumably refers to the girl in the folk song who is “lost and gone forever.” Barish suggests “banish,” “perish,” perhaps “nebbish.” Some of this is too clever by half.)

Part way through the procedure (which takes place in the client’s apartment), perhaps made possible by technical glitches, the unconscious Joel suddenly discovers that he doesn’t want to lose his memory of Clementine. He’s like the individual who realizes he’s dreaming and attempts to wake himself up. Much of the film takes place inside his head. Joel tries to hide Clementine somewhere inaccessible in his brain, even as people and objects around him are disappearing, victims of the memory erasing.

In a remarkable scene, Joel remembers Clementine breaking into a beach house when he was with her. As they quarrel about the wisdom of staying there, the memory comes under attack; the building breaks up and collapses around the lovers. Or, the pair are in a bookstore and the signs designating the shop’s different sections (“Fiction,” “History” and so forth) go blank one by one, then the book covers disappear and the books themselves end up nothing but empty pages. The image itself becomes less and less distinct.

While Joel is engaged in this interior battle to salvage some memory of Clementine, who threatens to be torn entirely from him, Stan and Mary are cavorting, stoned, over his inert body. Patrick has been pursuing his own relationship with Clementine. He’s taken items belonging to Joel and associated with Clementine; he tells the young woman things that Joel once said to her. Somehow it feels inauthentic to her. It turns out as well that Mary and her boss have their own secrets.

Then there’s that winter day on the train again.

To his credit, Gondry does not resort to special effects trickery to establish the film’s premises. He captures the sense of the dreamlike, the manner in which memory, inevitably faulty or inadequate, fills in spaces with borrowed or invented elements, all with relatively primitive technique: lighting, focus, montage. Genuine cleverness and ingenuity have gone into the film. A serious playfulness is at work.

Moreover, the film is making a case, perhaps not the most earthshaking or compelling case, but nonetheless…

Americans all too often favor the quick-fix. (One reviewer comments that the memory erasure procedure invented by the filmmakers is tempting!) A pill, a potion, a 30-day program—only 10 minutes a day—for every problem. Everything unpleasant can be removed from your life for only $19.95! Instant amnesia! Order today!

Then there’s that most disgusting phrase of all: “Move on.” Considering the past (and presumably learning anything from it), as Henry Ford suggested, is more or less bunk. Americans are always being urged to “Move on,” from a rotten job, an unhappy relationship, or even perhaps a disastrous war. “Put it behind you!” And “move on” to what? Often, more disasters.

So Eternal Sunshine argues for experience and memory, and the inevitable pain (and wisdom) that goes with them. And against the tendency to drop experience as though it burned one’s fingers. To take the film at face value, it also has something to say against the dreadfully pragmatic notion that a single critical relationship could be excised from the memory without the entire psyche collapsing like a house of cards. The events, pleasant and unpleasant, of one’s life form an interconnected whole.

When Joel asks Dr. Mierzwiak whether the memory expunging carries any risk of brain damage, the latter mildly replies, “Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage.” And of course it is. The characters to whom the procedure has “successfully” been done walk around in a bit of a daze; who they are and what they’ve become do not entirely make sense to them. How could they? There are gaps (Lacuna = an empty space or missing part). In any case, since the experience is not present in the mind to be learned from, they inevitably make the same mistakes. They’re like the proverbial broken records.

Moreover, whether the Lacuna procedure is voluntary or not, there’s something Orwellian about it, and Joel’s futile effort to “escape” with Clementine has an anti-authoritarian quality.

The film suggests that love has considerable power, even against the implacable techno-scrubbing of the brain. Theoretically rid of one another, Joel and Clementine nonetheless find themselves drawn together. Something survives the removal of love’s traces by a wretched computer program. There is another couplet in Eloisa to Abelard that perhaps has a bearing on the Gondry-Kaufman film: “Of all affliction taught a lover yet,/’Tis sure the hardest science to forget.”

There is both more and less to Eternal Sunshine than meets the eye. Like its subject, memory, it both looms toward and recedes from the spectator. Unwarranted claims are being made for the work. Its weakness lies in the direction of character; and the problem of character is bound up with the concrete appraisal of modern social life.

The screenwriter and director have paid a good deal of attention to certain aspects of their work, but not to others. In fact, the characters portrayed by Winslet and Carrey are rather clichéd, limited, even banal. Clementine is “quirky,” moody, easy to take offense. She changes her hair color often, she’s impulsive, she drinks too much. We’ve seen her kind before in films, at least once or twice. Joel is her opposite: introspective, repressed, frightened of spontaneity. We’ve seen this before, too. The pair are rather abstract, generic types.

Winslet brings a great deal of humanity to her role; she makes us care about her Clementine, frankly, more than the character as Kaufman has written it deserves. The thought of losing her becomes painful to us, too. Carrey’s performance is not as consistently acute or concentrated; occasionally he is the stereotypical nebbish, but he too has his moments of depth. But the performers, in the end, are limited by the material.

The filmmakers have created an intriguing set of circumstances, but they forget, as do most of their counterparts at present, that love relationships do not take place in a void. Every love affair has certain universal psychological and physiological features, but it also bears the imprint of its particular historical “here and now.”

The film’s “purchase” on contemporary American life and its specific dilemmas is relatively weak. The formal aspects of the characters’ relations—their coming together, their breaking apart, the eradication of memory and the rebellion that ensues—are sharply delineated. The content of their life together, however, remains largely as blank and unenlightening as the volumes in that vanishing bookshop. What threatens them is quite vivid, but the human figures themselves are specters, devoid of specificity, as is the social world beyond them. This prevents the work from having the deepest impact.

If the writer and director had developed their legitimate concerns about love and memory as part of broader, more insightful artistic examination of reality, the results might have been extraordinary. As it is, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a considerable minor effort”.

See the full article: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/eter-m26.shtml

[2 December 1999]