The Spotless Mind of Michel Gondry: Celebrating ‘Eternal Sunshine’ at Twenty
Turning 20, the movie that heralded a cautionary tale of forgetting heartbreak still has a place in everyone’s memory
Before making whimsical movies about longing and love, Michel Gondry made a name for himself by directing music videos for well-known musicians. From Radiohead to Björk, their songs inhabit Gondry’s trademark dreamlike environments even before the debut of his first feature film. From these experimental videos, Gondry built a reputation for style and a surrealistic theme for all his subsequent works. This arguably culminates in 2004’s cult classic Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind.
The movie follows Joel (Jim Carrey) as he attempts to get his memory of his girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), erased after the discovery that she has apparently done the same to him. Throughout the movie, we witness him inside his head reliving his time with Clementine as each moment is excised one by one, and he slowly regrets his decision of selective amnesia. It explores love and loss in atypical ways, by directly digging into the character’s memory — the loss — and finding that original love buried beneath all the arguments and disillusionment. It tells of how people try to fill the lack in their lives with other people, and then when they leave, they are left with a bigger lack than they began with, one they try to erase through forgetting. All of this is framed through the eccentric style of Gondry, complete with Charlie Kaufman’s award-winning original screenplay, tinged with his enthusiasm for metafiction and self-reflection. All of which was predated by Gondry’s music videos from the late 90s.
Knives Out by Radiohead
In 2001, Michel Gondry directed a Radiohead music video titled Knives Out. In it, lead singer Thom Yorke lies down beside a woman in a hospital-like room and watches their memory of meeting on a train on the TV. This is not dissimilar to Joel and Clementine’s meeting in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here, the TV plays a recording of their relationship, from the driving passion of beginnings to taking “knives out” and symbolically attempting to tear each other apart. This montage of a relationship’s shelf life ends with Thom proposing to the woman with a giant diamond ring until someone rewinds the tape, and they see a recording of themselves out the window of the train. The couple inside the train inside the TV watches a duplicate of themselves that are just a few seconds behind. The now happy couple sees their past selves fighting, rewound to their first meeting. This makes them smile, the TV couple at the end echoing the rewound couple at the beginning, smiling after genuine self-reflection and finding the original love at the moment of creation.
This retelling sidelines the other odd happenings in the video, such as having a skeleton with a heart-shaped head housing a picture of the woman inside of it. The skeleton plays a guitar in front of Thom who is now a small mic-shaped mouse. This absurd changing of elements all shot in one take conveys the fluidity of real dreams, and how objects are devoid of constancy in the realm of sleep, further developed in Gondry’s later movie aptly titled The Science of Sleep. Eternal Sunshine coincidentally also has a painting of Clementine’s head on a skeleton’s body, a person stripped bare into a simple idea, an abstraction that often precedes love. This recurring theme of subconscious symbols and things redoubling and repeating, ironically, repeats throughout Gondry’s career change from music videos to movies.
Bachelorette by Björk
Rewinding further back, Gondry directed Bachelorette by Björk in 1997, where the concept of his repeated replicates, called mise en abyme, first matured. Mise en abyme is usually defined as an image housing a smaller copy inside itself, like two mirrors placed opposite each other, creating an illusion of infinity. The song is brought to life by Gondry through having a play within a play within a music video. Here, singer Björk finds a book that narrates the events of the music video and sells the book with her face on it to a publisher. The book then gets adapted into a stage play, where in it Björk finds a book that narrates the events of the music video and sells the book with her face on it to a publisher. The adaptation keeps recurring inside itself, shrinking almost infinitely, a smaller and smaller stage play. The difference is that here, the first instance of the characters doesn’t like their miniature representations, and the original relationship with the publisher crumbles, as the music video ends with the book’s words fading out.
A metafiction makes the audience aware that they are watching something artificial, akin to knowing you’re in a dream whilst still dreaming it. Perhaps this extra layer of self-awareness doesn’t agree with some people, observers don’t like being observed, especially since looking at yourself from the third person may be an unflattering angle. In Eternal Sunshine, as Clementine tells Joel to remember her in his head, the books surrounding him fade as well, like her words and eventually her. While the former music video is about love and loss, this one feels like a critique of art itself, its reproduction, the loss of its meaning, and how it does or does not reflect reality. After all, a dream lasting long enough becomes a nightmare, and something eternal, whether in sunshine or shadow, never sounds as perfect as it first seems.
Keeping that in mind, remembering is a form of reproduction as well; every memory is an attempted reconstruction of past events. And through this act of self-reflection, people may find a newfound appreciation for the past and their merit. As Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind reminds us even 20 years later, there is truth to be found in memory, and blissful ignorance only causes inevitable repetition. The pattern of Michel Gondry’s style has always been there, back in his music video days, getting even more refined in his feature films. Through his penchant for filming dream logic, and interrogating the elements of the subconscious, they reflect the audience’s own memories and represent them in fractal photocopy. People remember through film, playing a reel inside our heads of our imagined past, a semi-accurate autobiography reviewing a retrospective of ourselves.
As Joel relives a montage of his time with Clementine for perhaps the last time, retroactively forging a farewell, the real event is forgotten in favor of a kinder one, a spotless sunshine. Too late to change his mind, he tries his damnedest to hold on to the one truth left in his head, and everything happens all over again. The memory of his relationship, the reason for its end, swept by the sandy breeze, leaving room for rekindling. Like Jim Carrey running in looping corridors, Michel Gondry’s early works in music to later works in cinema are like a labyrinth that the audience gets lost in, trudging in their own memories, and the ones they make-believe.
