Jeremy’s Tophunder №75: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

9 min readJun 6, 2020

For a movie that came out more than 15 years ago and barely grossed $70 million at the box office, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind still carries a surprising amount of resonance.

One of my favorite parts of this project over the last few months has been going to YouTube and watching analytic video essays of these movies as I watch them. Obviously, I don’t do this for every movie — I didn’t need a critical analysis of Spaceballs or Mighty Ducks — but any time I think there’s more to the movie than meets the eye, I’ll browse a handful of different interpretations and see if I find anything particularly interesting and worth mentioning. A lot of the times, the videos end up confirming what I was already thinking, which feels nice.

I bring this up to say, I did this with Eternal Sunshine, and I was shocked to see how much content there is discussing and analyzing the movie that’s come out quite recently. Two in particular, combining to be almost 30 minutes long, both were published in the last two months. Clearly, people are still talking about this movie.

Most of the videos I stumbled across provide a deep-dive into the nature of memory, and how the movie’s exploration of a person’s memory provided for an interesting narrative structure. While those topics are incredibly interesting to me, I think what is actually the most compelling component of the movie can be summarized with a question:

Is it possible to fall in love with somebody a second time?

To me, that’s the question from the movie that lingers the longest. All of the contemplation on memory are just misdirection. It’s fascinating misdirection, but it’s not the point of the movie. The point of the movie always comes down to the relationship between Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslett), why they fell in love in the first place, why the fell out of love, and then how they may or may not fall in love again after erasing each other from their memories.

The narrative structure of the movie is tough to decipher after just one viewing, but thanks to dozens of viewings over the course of the last 15 years, I think I finally have it locked down. (For those interested, here’s a PDF that arranges the movies events in chronological order, and is reasonably easy to understand.) The key element that I didn’t realize the first time around, is that for the portions of the movie that take place “inside” Joel’s memory, the memories are happening in reverse chronological order. We start with the memories at the end of the relationship — the memories that led to Clementine erasing Joel from her memory, which prompted Joel to have the same procedure himself. But as we continue to dive deeper into Joel’s memory, we start to see the times when Joel and Clementine were really in love, when they were happy and having fun. As Joel starts to re-experience those memories, he realizes that he doesn’t want to lose them. He wants to preserve a memory of Clementine, and his love for her, and his brain starts to fight back against the memory erasing procedure.

As the memories trace further and further back, it becomes more and more heart-wrenching as the memories collapse in the process of being erased. You see Joel’s love for Clementine (and Clementine’s love for Joel) in a way that you hadn’t seen before. And as Joel starts to drag Clementine into other memories, trying to preserve any semblance of her in his mind, only to see her yanked away from him over and over again, it really starts to take a toll on you.

But here’s the problem — the part the movie shows you, but doesn’t tell you — the Clementine that exists in these parts of Joel’s memory isn’t the “real” Clementine. It’s an idealized version of her that only exists in Joel’s mind. Everybody has probably experienced something like this. Think of an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend — depending on who did the breaking up (and why), I’d say it’s very likely that you either have an idealized memory of that person in your head, or an unjustly negative memory of that person in your head. I’ve been on both ends of that spectrum, and neither one feels all that great. The phenomenon is only magnified the closer you are in time to the end of the relationship. It’s only with a significant amount of distance that you’re able to form a coherent and honest memory of someone, and even that is short-lived as your memories of that person start to fade over time.

This is one of the more heartbreaking pieces of subtext of the movie — Joel is fighting as hard as he can to maintain a piece of Clementine in his mind, but that piece that he’s holding onto isn’t actually her. He’s fighting a losing battle, and even if he wins, I’m not sure he’s actually better for it.

So, the two of them erase each other from their memories, only to meet again thanks to a sudden, seemingly unexplained desire to spend the day in Montauk. They seem to be at the beginning of a new and promising relationship, only for the bombshell to be dropped on them that they previously dated for several years before erasing each other. As they listen to the tapes in which they describe all of the things they don’t like about the other person, it seems inconceivable that this second, new relationship could ever last. But they go ahead with it anyway. It’s bittersweet and hopeful all at the same time. You have to think that this second relationship will end much in the way of the first, but you want them to do it anyway.

So is it possible to fall in love with somebody a second time? This movie seems to think it’s possible. Obviously there’s no real way to replicate the conditions exhibited here, we can only examine the world we have. Plenty of people fall in love, break up, but end up getting back together. But in most of those cases, I would have to assume that there was never a true “falling out” of love. From my view of the world, it seems like when people fall out of love, it stays that way. That’s why I kind of lean more on the hopeful side than the cynical side when it comes to Joel and Clementine’s second relationship. Maybe the only way for two people to fall in love a second time is if they can’t remember the first one.

There are plenty of things I love about this movie beyond the story, but the one that comes to mind first is how the filmmakers were able to visually represent Joel’s memories. Some of them blended together, some of them collapsed, some of them featured forced perspective, allowing an adult Jim Carrey to appear the size of a child. I scoured YouTube trying to find a video that included as many as my favorite sequences as possible, but came up woefully short. The best I could manage was this clip that features a few good ones with some out-of-place voiceover from other parts of the movie:

What strikes me every time I watch Eternal Sunshine is not just the anguish that is very apparent on Joel’s face as he loses the memories of the person he loves. It’s that this must happen to everyone who has this procedure done. As the memories trace back and become more and more positive, more and more meaningful, more and more emotionally resonant, it must be impossible for anyone to fully let go of someone they loved once.

I’ve had breakups in my life that were relatively easy, and ones that truly knocked me on my ass for weeks, or even months. There have been times in my life that I’ve felt that I would want to delete someone from my memory, if I was able to. As I re-watched Eternal Sunshine, I came to realize that my memories of those people, the good and the bad, are the only parts of those relationships that I have left. I still cherish the good memories, and I’m still learning from the bad ones. Why would I want to lose that? Why would anyone? If life is the sum total of your experiences (and I’m of the opinion that it is), to erase memories would be to erase parts of your life. Yes, I’m sure there are certain memories that people would rather forget. But to erase an entire person from your memory is nothing more than doing a great disservice to the experience of being alive.

Leaving movies aside for one second, one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite TV shows comes from HBO’s Six Feet Under. David (played by Michael C. Hall, before he was Dexter) is talking with the ghost of his father (played by Richard Jenkins, before he was John C. Reilly’s dad in Step Brothers) following a traumatic experience he had a few episodes prior. David is incredibly shaken by the experience, and his father (who becomes somewhat of an omniscient oracle in death) offers his perspective:

Nathaniel’s line, “You can do anything, you lucky bastard! You’re alive! What’s a little pain compared to that?” always hits me like a ton of bricks. Life is the greatest gift that the universe can bestow, and pain is fleeting. There’s no amount of pain that can outweigh the gift of being able to experience all the good in the world. That’s what I think of when I watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Painful memories can sear into your brain and fundamentally alter how you see and experience the world. But they are there for a reason. Holding onto that pain isn’t worth shit — life is about absolving yourself of that pain, and learning from it. It’s an opportunity for you to reflect on all of the good things, the good times.

I have painful memories. I don’t think I have any more or less than most people, but I have them, and sometimes, they still hurt like hell. But I appreciate them. I want them to stick around. I like being able to think back to bad moments in my life and realize that they don’t hurt quite so bad anymore. It’s those painful memories that remind me what it’s like to be alive — you can’t have the good without the bad. I can’t say that I look forward to creating more new painful memories, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be thankful for the ones that I have. I like them, kind of. I think I’ll keep them.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring