Meet me in Montauk
Montauk is basically the tip of the peninsula, it’s an eastern end of the South Shore of Long Island. Beyond that point, you see only miles of Atlantic ocean. There’s a gorgeous lighthouse and lots of flat rocks to walk around on or stay a while and enjoy the sun.
If you watched the ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind’, you may realize that Montauk is the third main character in the movie. Clementine and Joel meet on a Long Island Rail Road train from Montauk, New York to Rockville Centre. They both had felt the need to travel to Montauk that day. And that’s because they had spent so much time there together. That was before they decided to erase their memories about each other.
Much of the film subsequently takes place in Joel’s mind during this memory erasure procedure. As his memories are erased, he tries to evade the erasing effects of the procedure by hiding Clementine in remote parts of his unconscious. Joel finds himself revisiting them in reverse. Upon seeing happier times of love with Clementine from earlier in their relationship, he struggles to preserve at least some memory of her and his love for her. Despite his efforts to either hide the memories or wake up and stop the process, the memories are slowly erased.
He comes to the last remaining memory of Clementine, the day he first had met her at a beach house in Montauk. As this memory disintegrates around them, she tells him, “Meet me in Montauk.”
Here you can find all filming locations on the map.
You can get there by car (~4 hours of driving) or by LIRR train (it takes around the same time but costs a lot).
At the time we were there, the lighthouse was closed but probably it’s worth visiting as it was the first to be built within the state of New York, and was the first public works project of the new United States. It is the fourth oldest active lighthouse in the United States. On March 2, 2012 United States Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar officially designated the lighthouse as a National Historic Landmark; it is the 14th site on Long Island and the 11th lighthouse in the country to be so recognized. Nowadays, it’s a privately run museum (the entry costs $10).
