Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

directed by Michel Gondry

Katie Darby Mullins

I was 17 years old when my best friend Eryn and I started watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind over and over at the dollar theater on Tuesday nights, when it was half-price to get in. Sometimes I even went without her, but the aggressively neon carpet and giant Dr. Peppers seemed to beg for a witness, like I wanted someone to watch me watching this movie, which moves forwards and backwards in time simultaneously, to make the experience more real. That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? Erasing memories because they are so real they’re painful, and then realizing it’s better to have them, even if they burn a little, and trying to reclaim the little pieces that are left?

Recently, my 17-year-old and I had a movie night and I chose to rewatch the movie, hoping it would hold up. It did, magnificently. I know it was unlike anything Grace had ever seen, but she bought in completely—just like I had at her age. I was shocked at how much I remembered—I’ve had a stroke since then. I’m also not one for romances, partially because I live one. Rarely do we go to fiction to relive our own lives, and as someone who has been happily coupled for thirteen years, I wasn’t sure if the heartbreak would be as poignant. It was, but better than that, so was the very genuine love story at the core.

I wasn’t kidding when I said it’s both backwards and forwards, but that’s a tricky feat to pull off. Some scenes are repeated over and over, with more horrific blurred faces and less dialogue every time, but there is more straightforward storytelling than I remembered.

The backwards timeline shows Joel’s (Jim Carrey) memory as any moment with his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) is erased; the forward motion in the film is shown in the people who have been tasked with erasing Clementine from Joel’s memories. They are living in the present tense as he’s living backwards and watching his life fade. The story lines intersect because Mary, played by Kirsten Dunst, realizes the procedure has been performed on her: when her boss’s wife finds them together, Mary apologizes and says she’s just a stupid girl, which leads to maybe the most heartbreaking, veins-full-of-ice-water moment of the film for me: a tired wife saying to the mistress, “You can have him. You did.”

Mary, who can’t process what has been taken from her and her complicity in robbing other people of their memories, then sends everyone who had the procedure done their tape and, through that, gives them their lives back. Joel and Clementine—who have just met for the first time again—are tasked with deciding whether or not they should, despite their previous failure, try to love each other.

For me, the fulcrum of the film is in the idea that someone can replicate your actions and words exactly, but if they aren’t you, it doesn’t have the same effect—for example, when Patrick (Elijah Wood) steals Joel’s memories to win over his ex-girlfriend Clementine (who has also had her memory erased), it hits at the uncanny valley—she doesn’t fall in love with him, she finds it terrifying, even though she’s not sure why. That idea is echoed in the ending, when Joel and Clementine realize that they were in love once and it ended horribly. When Clementine rejects the idea of trying again because pain and hurt are almost certain—they already happened, remember—Joel, instead, says “OK.” Just OK. Like OK, loving you is worth whatever pain is to come. Loving you is worth whatever anxiety comes out of this. I’m willing to stand on this ledge and try to love you because I can see a future in which that’s the most valuable thing in my life. OK.

But mostly, when I see this film, it reminds me that real love exists. In a time of increasing separation and isolation, in a time of swiping and not wanting to double-text, that this kind of bold magnetism toward love is not only hopeful, it’s essential. I’m exhausted by living in a world where people are afraid to be vulnerable because every moment of pure emotion or love is deemed suspect, something to dissect and pick apart over brunch with friends who are equally guarded. Everyone I know wants true love, but I watch people treat it like Battleship instead of like checkers—instead of everyone moving forward one step at a time, we just stumble around blindly until something blows us up. I don’t want to live like that. I’d rather love grandly and get hurt than to waste time with shallow relationships.

That’s what I wanted my 17-year-old to see, at least. I realized as we were watching the movie that I have literally had my memory wiped via a brain stem stroke, and it felt a little on the nose. It was hard to try and guess what parts would come next, all while knowing that though I had the script memorized for a long time, I wouldn’t remember even the broadest beats now. It was as though I was flying backward through fuzzy faces and scenes, dialogue growing ever sparser, and me, trapped, trying to hide in a memory of fifty-cent Tuesday. Was it Hollywood Movies? Is that a real place? Was it off Buckingham or Beltline? Did Eryn drive? I’m sure Eryn drove.

We were watching the movie in real time, though, and for those two hours, I watched Grace’s face as she followed the action on the screen, concerned, curious, and sometimes a little frustrated at how it was clear that there was a point and a conclusion, but she didn't know what it was yet. Most movies we’ve watched are so straightforward that unless there’s a twist at the end, there isn’t a lot of active confusion during the viewing process, and I knew Eternal Sunshine would subvert her expectations. But she allowed herself to be carried along with the experience, and it communicated the same thing to her—pain is inevitable, might as well have something worth all that pain to remember.

So: OK. OK, I love this movie, and OK, I want to live in a world where more of us live our lives with active tense verbs and not passive tense phrasing. OK, I want to love in a way that doesn’t worry whether I am the partner who loves more, instead, in a way that only concerns myself with whether or not I am loving my partner well. OK. OK, I want to remember every part of it and hide it in the recesses of my mind forever. I know what it is to forget—it’s hard to have a stroke at 31 and try to claw your way back to resembling a self people tell you about—but OK. Let’s do it all again. 

Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. In addition to being nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times, she's been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Harpur Palate, Prime Number, and the entertainment magazines Paste and The Aquarian. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC, and her first book, Neuro, Typical: Chemical Reactions & Trauma Bonds came out from Summer Camp Press in late 2020. Her second, Me & Phil, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.