Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This is a story written by Charlie Kaufman that tells about two people who were in love but then broke apart and had each other erased from their memories. The story follows Joel (Jim Carrey), for the most part, during his erasure of Clementine (Kate Winslet) from his mind. As the procedure is being done, Joel becomes aware that he still loves Clementine and he tries to halt the process.

This story addresses the issues of suffering, love, and redemption. The movie basically asked the question of if painful memories of relationships are better to be forgotten or not. The inventor of the memory erasing procedure believes that he is saving people from being unhappy and giving them a chance to live a new life free from the thing that was dragging them down. The story tries to show that it isn’t right to just erase all the problems that come up in life. Part of life is dealing with the difficult things. The empire wants us to believe that we should always be comfortable and never have to be discomfort. That way the empire can sell us more products. This film cries out for us to realize that even when bad things happen there are a lot of great things that come along with it. This movie encourages the audience to settle differences and have hope that people can get along.

Looking at the other characters in the movie that were working on the erasing of Joel’s memory of Clementine, the audience can see another depressing state of human nature. During the procedure the characters get drunk, smoke pot and have sex. I think that the movie is trying to show the sad shape that their lives are in because of their hopelessness. Two of the characters, Mary and Dr. Mierzwiak, get into an awkward situation that Dr. Mierzwiak’s wife catches them in. Mary learns that she has had her memory erased to forget about her love affair with Mierzwiak. Mary decided that the procedure was unethical and tried to redeem herself and everyone who was affected by the procedure by sending them information about the procedure and telling them what they did.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s title comes from a quote that suggests that forgetting painful situations is a good thing. The movie goes against this belief of the empire by showing that everything in life helps people grow and that there is sometimes a lot of good with the bad.