Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of those movies that stays in your head – which is fitting for a film that comes out vehemently against the virtues of forgetting.
The 2004 film directed by Michel Gondry and written by Charlie Kaufman, stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as two lovers who decide to end their rocky relationship by erasing each other from their minds – only to realize how much they actually don’t want to lose those shared memories.
It’s a quirky and charming concept, but one that doesn’t necessarily sound like a film you’d expect people to still talk about, reference, meme, and allude to its tropes nearly twenty years later. So what exactly makes this film as memorable to viewers as Clem and Joel are to each other, compared to plenty of other stories that faded from consciousness? And what makes any story analyzable – sparking viewers to think, talk, debate?
Well, we have an answer to this question. Introducing our new series – this is the Total Take, where we break down the most analyzable films and TV shows of all time through visual storytelling, writing, symbolism, world, and impact. By understanding these key categories we can pinpoint what makes the most thought-provoking films and shows truly stick.
But first, what is “analyzable”? When we talk about a story that’s highly analyzable, it’s not just about being “good” or “bad.” It’s about deeper meanings that can yield multiple readings; layers that make the story apply to different contexts; and incredibly memorable themes, imagery, scenes or performances. They make you think, question, or even argue, perhaps long after the credits rolled. So let’s jump into our Total Take on Eternal Sunshine!
Visual Storytelling
Our first category is visual storytelling: the cinematography, editing, the form or style. How do the visuals tell, and elevate, the story?
Eternal Sunshine’s opening shot connects us to its main character: Joel opens his eyes (after the shot fades in, as if the camera, too, is slowly opening its eye). Like the cliche that the eye is the window to the soul, the human eye is cinematic shorthand for the inner world – and with this shot, we’re told that this is really a movie about the inside of Joel’s mind. In fact it’s not just about that – the inside of Joel’s mind is where the film is set. One of the key aspects of Eternal Sunshine’s visual storytelling is that it allows us to experience memories as physical spaces. Joel and Clem are walking around his mind like it’s got actual rooms we can traverse. Whether that’s the bookstore where Clem works, or Joel’s childhood memories of hiding under the kitchen table, now in his adult form.
Time and emotions, which are so fluid in actual life, here become something more solid and inhabitable, thus giving them more tangible weight and importance. It’s in contrast to how things like emotions and memories are belittled or even vilified by much of our culture – and by the movie’s villain, Dr. Howard Mierziak, who promises to destroy the powerful emotional cores of memories. Due to Eternal Sunshine’s technique of making us unsure where we are in someone’s mind or in time, all feelings and reminiscences – past or future – get treated as equally important. While Howard diminishes the need for one’s feelings and memories, by comparing them to lost dreams, here we’re being subtly told that what he’s offering is harmful – because dreams and emotional cores are a key to who we are, not something we should try to damage our brains to get rid of.
Eternal Sunshine’s Director of Photography Ellen Kuras spoke about how Gondry was often asking something impossible or contradictory of her – he was adamant about the film being as naturalistic as possible, shooting in real locations and with available lighting, but also wanted to make sure that nothing ever felt conventional or too seamless. For the transitions between the memory world and real world, Gondry tasked Kuras with finding ways to incorporate old time-y tricks from the early days of cinema that made it clear that the effects were practical and not happening through the use of visual effects. She told The American Cinematographer, “[t]hat was the enigma of the film to me: we would have these unconventional, trompe l’oeil transitions that were not transparent film language, but the lighting sources had to be naturalistic at the same time.” The goal was to make these transitions between reality and Joel’s memories as disconcerting and chaotic for us as it is for Joel, allowing us to feel the tension and confusion and heartbreak in a more visceral way. It also helps the film to capture the truth of what our memories and romances sometimes feel like, at once emotionally authentic but also magical and enigmatic.
Symbolism
The next category up is symbolism. Does the film have a rich and original system of symbols, and can it work as a parable on multiple layers?
Eternal Sunshine creates a highly memorable symbol out of Clementine’s hair – whose colors map onto the seasons of the couple’s romance.
The faded, burnt-out orangey-red of the “fall” is their late-stage relationship blowout fights. The bright red “summer” is the passionate, fully happy memory, and the green of the spring when they met and it was all promise.
When her hair is the shade “blue ruin”, it’s the winter of their discontent: they’ve broken up and erased each other, and they’re experiencing isolation (both from each other and from themselves, as both are unable to understand why they feel the way they do). But even in their blue “winter” where most of the movie unfolds, there’s a new beginning. And just like the seasons of the hair, the movie is positing there’s a crucial cyclical aspect to relationships: they need to be renewed and reinvented – like a plant or a person, a relationship is an organic thing which is always changing and evolving. This is the meaning of the movie’s final shot – or rather, final three shots, which repeat the image of Clem and Joel playing on the beach in the snow. We don’t know when these take place – are they early in the relationship, before or after the erasing and reunion, in the future? The point is it doesn’t matter, because committing to love is committing to repeat and relive these experiences, and strive to make them fresh after we inevitably get bogged down by all the annoying sameness and rehashed conflicts. Certain lines speak to this knowingly, like in the opening sequence when Joel is staring right at his ex, Clementine, thinking: “If only I could meet someone new.” And there’s another layer of meaning to this: because Joel has just had his memory erased, perhaps, now, he can see her “anew”.
What’s especially interesting about Eternal Sunshine’s use of symbolism is that by creating its own unique symbolic system, it’s echoing what happens in any meaningful relationship, romantic or otherwise: people create their own shared language and shorthands based on shared experiences, in-jokes and knowing each other. The film is commenting on why these private symbols are so precious, whereas the broadly shared Valentine’s Day-esque capital-R Romance symbols that are fed to us aren’t.
Patrick tries to steal a shortcut to intimacy – taking the jewelry Joel picked for Clem to make her feel he knows her and adopting Joel’s nickname for her. This makes him a villain, but it’s actually not so far off how a lot of people try to engineer a quick path to romance. Many people who buy into the chocolates and roses of Valentine’s Day think this copying of love-symbols is what romance is supposed to be. But it’s significant that Patrick’s recreation of Clem’s and Joel’s great romantic moment on the ice doesn’t work – because even though Clementine doesn’t remember, this replication instinctively makes her feel something is off.
The space of Joel’s consciousness is haunted by all these third party voices that he feels assaulted by. We also see him reliving the neighbor’s comments about his relationship as an intrusive nightmare. So this is a movie for romantic people who may, like Joel, be highly introverted or socially anxious, or who may just relate to this problem of really wanting love but also feeling burdened by all the pressure our culture places on that and how it intrudes on what should be a private space.
Writing
Our next category is the writing. Does the script have originality, inventiveness, and insight? Does the storytelling avoid meaningless cliches, and shed light on human nature? What are the piece’s takeaways, themes, or purpose?
One really interesting aspect of how Eternal Sunshine is put together, is that the story structure turns us, the viewers, into detectives. The reason this is especially clever is because it echoes what we all do after a bad breakup – search for clues to understand what went wrong, when, and why – how we got from the really happy beautiful memories to this.
In the opening sequence, we watch Joel and Clementine meet on the beach in Montauk, as if for the first time, but at the end of this opening sequence Lacuna Inc technician Patrick asks Joe, which is a clue that this is actually the future (after both of their memories are erased). After the Patrick run-in we abruptly cut to Joel crying – and on first viewing we might think we’ve cut forward to their breakup. But actually we’ve flashed back, and much of the story from there (within his mind) does progress backward. We’re constantly figuring out not only where we are in the relationship timeline, but whether we’re in real time or the mental space of a memory.
Just as the movie activates us to echo that post-breakup quest of piecing together what went wrong, it also captures that common attempt to surgically remove the relationship from our lives and act like it never happened – like when we see Joel physically gathering up all the “stuff” that’s evidence of their life together into trash bags. When Clementine acts like she doesn’t know who Joel is, it’s authentic – but it also might feel familiar to anyone who’s seen an ex suddenly act like a stranger, and felt betrayed by that harsh withdrawal of intimacy. The film makes all these common breakup experiences concrete and literal.
When it comes to Clem, Eternal Sunshine ushered in the whole mainstream “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” conversation – but Clem’s highly conscious that this is how you’re going to see her. She fiercely defends her agency and her right to not be the answer to someone else’s story. Interestingly, Clem gives this speech twice in the film – so clearly she has it well-memorized because she’s used to men expecting her interesting personality to “save” them. Also interestingly, Joel admits that he completely ignored this warning the first time before seeming to ignore it again the second time.
Looking at Eternal Sunshine can help us understand more about why people so want the Manic Pixie Dream Girl to save them – because it’s more generally about how we’re looking for someone exciting and larger than life to rescue us from our real lives, and ourselves. It’s similar to how Mary escapes into viewing her boss, Howard, as this great man
Like Joel, many of us want romance to be this amazing thing that sweeps us off our feet and overwhelms us with constant excitement. But the truth is that intimacy is the opposite of that: the more we know things, the more they can become boring and insufferable. As this movie exposes, a sad irony about relationships is that the things we most love and are attracted to in a partner, become the very things we criticize and even detest about them.
Joel (like Patrick, and other men) are drawn to Clem’s impulsivity, but when we see the couple in their low points, precisely all those exciting, dramatic parts about her that were so seductive have become incredibly off-putting to him. It’s only through this process of losing her that he remembers how much he loved these attributes.
All of this leads to the insight of Eternal Sunshine into human relationships and romance. A big goal of this movie is to make us see the beauty and value of intimacy – but as it really is, not as Hallmark-style clichés that brainwash us to misunderstand “romance”. The magic of Joel and Clem’s love is all down to their intimacy: truly knowing another person, with all the boring, ugly messiness that entails.
In addition to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, this movie contains a critique of the Fake “Nice Guy” – a trope we’ve talked about a lot before. Patrick acts like a nice, sensitive guy to Clem’s face, but of course he’s stealing Joel’s memories to pretend he magically gets her and fake-support her. The relationship is based on dishonesty and exploitation – much like Howard’s creepy, imbalanced power dynamic with Mary.
But while Patrick acts as a hateable foil to Joel, to make the protagonist look better, the movie is also critiquing Joel and his niceness. Clem is constantly talking about how “nice” Joel is – it’s something that she loves about him, but also a quality she finds infuriating and even threatening. As Clem keeps repeating that Joel is nice, the script leads us to question what she really means or what nice even is. Sometimes it seems to signal that he’s shy or scared of things – because, numerous times, he backs away from her out of fear.
Hiding behind “nice” can be a cop out. Meanwhile, over time, Joel is decidedly not that nice to her. We hear him say a lot of things to her that are viciously cruel and the narrative inside his head is harsh.
Yet ultimately, Joel does put in the work that Patrick doesn’t to get to know Clem, and he does (in his best moments) fully accept her. Perhaps this is what the only valuable or real version of “nice” is, in this movie’s view – to be able to fully know someone and accept them as they are. The joyful release of the couple’s final moment that we see is them pre-accepting each other, to start this cycle again. And while of course the nasty parts of their cycle will most certainly repeat, it’s their commitment to accepting that natural course that is true love.
The love between Clem and Joel, ultimately boils down to something really simple: life is worse without the other person in it. As Clem disappears from each of Joel’s memories, all these beautiful moments suddenly become empty, dead. And even after all this has been erased and he’s heard his past self on tape freely complaining about her, he still has a deep impulse to stop her from going.
World
The next category we look at is world. How does the film use tone, atmosphere, performances, music or sound design to build a particular world that’s memorable, evocative or takes us somewhere that makes us feel something?
We’ve already seen a lot that’s striking about how the world of Eternal Sunshine physicalizes Joel’s mind, and how the atmosphere is a contradictory mix of realistic and whimsical. For subject matter that can sometimes seem a little dark or depressing, the tone is infectiously playful. At times it feels to be affectionately poking fun at overthinking, melancholy types like Joel; and this playfulness is embodied in Clementine’s character herself – she’s a human streak of color and zest for living.
Clementine was a role that went against the type Kate Winslet had previously been associated with – most of her most notable prior roles were period pieces. With Eternal Sunshine, Kate proved that she could bring gravitas and, importantly, relatability to a messy, modern character. Despite all the MPDG talk, Clementine doesn’t fall neatly into any trope but instead all of her exuberance and spontaneity, depth and flaws all come together to create a wonderfully specific portrait of a woman on her own journey of the self. Kate’s charm combined with her deep understanding of Clementine’s interiority allowed her to create this character that was at once endearing and difficult. Kate also wasn’t afraid to make her mark on the character. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Gondry noted that Kate was the only actress that auditioned for the part that gave him any critical feedback, and that was when he knew she was the one.
Jim Carrey went even more against type for Joel. Mega-famous for his high energy, comedic roles, Carrey had to tone his stand-out funny side way down and instead focus on the qualities that made Joel an indie everyman. In fact, Gondry even added restrictions for Carrey. Gondry told The Daily Beast, “Sometimes, I had to talk to Kate Winslet in a different room to tell her, ‘Go as big as you want! This is a comedy!’ And to Jim, I’d say, ‘This is a drama, not a comedy.’” Boiling the role down to the key human elements that makes Joel feel normal allows him to more readily become the vehicle through which we as the audience experience the story. Both characters feel realistic to us, but the story doesn’t care about making us always like them or see ourselves in them the way romantic heroes and heroines so often have to win us over to cheer on their love. We might not all particularly root for Clem and Joel as individuals over any others – but as a couple, there’s a deeper truth to their struggle that feels universally relatable and profound.
Another haunting aspect about the movie’s world is the music of Jon Brion, which feels very of its era yet captures the emotional sensibility of the movie’s balancing act between charm and suffering. The score is nostalgic, occasionally whimsical, and rides from poppy highs to melancholic lows, working to keep us in touch with the heart of every moment even as we watch this world shift and change again and again.
Impact
And our final category to discuss is impact. Has the piece sparked debate, thought, and conversation with longevity? Has it impacted other works and the cultural conversation – and does its influence weirdly hold up over time?
Eternal Sunshine arguably has shaped the tone and feel of many of the most thoughtful romantic movies that followed – and also tried to do something creative or different with their structure and takeaways.
A lot of the impact here has to do with what we’ve just seen in the writing – the dissection of the MPDG and Nice Guy tropes before people were talking about this, the understanding of intimacy. But we’d also argue a reason the script still feels impactful and influential is because it arrives at conclusions that are surprising, counterintuitive, and sometimes contrarian.
A really interesting theme in this movie is this debate between innocence or forgetting versus jaded knowledge and the pain of experience. This is where the title of the movie comes from – it’s a reference to lines from an Alexander Pope poem that Mary recites: “How happy is the blameless vessel’s lot / The world forgetting by the world forgot / Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”. Mary at first believes that Howard helping people forget is kind and generous – she speaks of the superiority of babies. But Clementine and Joel express a different view – of how disempowered they both felt as kids. Mary herself feels similar to a baby because (she and we eventually learn) her married boss Howard has erased the memory of the affair she’s already had with him. And how is this naive baby-like state serving her? Not very well, it turns out. She’s back to harboring a schoolgirl crush on the guy who exploited her, she doesn’t even know she’s been mistreated, and she’s living a thoughtless existence – helping him carry out this procedure on countless others and causing damage because she’s not fully understanding what this work really is.
When her memory is restored to her in the end, she’s suddenly both more mature and a lot more sad – the camera lingers on a shot of her face looking distinctly worried and pained. But because of this, she’s able to make a choice that’s difficult and brave – returning everyone’s tapes and files, to give them the agency to choose with all information available to them.
Ultimately, the film is coming out very much against forgetting, or trying to delete a complicated history in favor of something shiny and new. While our culture may constantly be chasing youth and perfection and the lack of wrinkles, wiping the slate clean isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Eternal Sunshine is a movie that could get dated in its sensibility – from the music, to the 2000s indie hairstyles and hipster types, to the tortured emotionality of Joel.
So all in all, what makes it ultimately able retain analytical value and spark conversation? To put it all together, it’s the timelessness of its relationship insights, the philosophical depth of its questions about innocence versus knowledge, its rich and unique symbolic world, the dealing with tropes that are surprisingly persistent & still relevant, the memorable, endearing and resonant characters & performances, and the innovative structure & form of the storytelling, which serve to express the theme of the cyclical nature of relationships (and the takeaway that, despite all this pain, love and remembering are worth it).
SOURCES
Palvus, John. “Forget Me Not: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Shot by Ellen Kuras, ASC, Explores a Man’s Fight to Retain His Romantic Memories.” American Cinematographer, theasc.com/magazine/april04/cover/.
Stern, Marlow. “Michel Gondry On ‘Mood Indigo,’ Kanye West, and the 10th Anniversary of ‘Eternal Sunshine.’” The Daily Beast, The Daily Beast Company, 14 Apr. 2017, www.thedailybeast.com/michel-gondry-on-mood-indigo-kanye-west-and-the-10th-anniversary-of-eternal-sunshine.