The Desire to Forget Someone and the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Explained
Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind, you will make you feel the need to delete a few relationships from your memory and not just romantic relationships, but any relationship that gave you pain and suffering and made you miserable for a really long time.
Among all the crazy narrative choices, innovative visuals and unconventional story elements, the bare bones of this film was just about a weird romantic relationship between two wildly opposite people, Clementine (Kate Winslet) and Joel (Jim Carry).
Clementine has a very vivid and extroverted personality, she craves to know about everything she finds interesting to explore while Joel is very introverted and extremely shy. He doesn’t really care about being noticed and just wants to drift by in life.
I’ve turned this blog into a short video narrative if that’s your flavor here.
Clementine falls in love with Joel because Joel has locked away a mysterious depth into his mind that Clementine wants to know about and Joel falls in love with Clementine because someone has shown a deep interest in knowing him.
But here’s the twist, whenever Clementine expresses her desire to further know about the depths of Joel’s mind, Joel tries to avoid the topic by answering ‘My life is just not interesting’.
This becomes the driving motivator for the increasing conflict in their relationship and they begin to slowly resent each other.
This got me interested in finding out any clues as to if Joel’s life really is uninteresting or is he simply holding back a dark secret? There was a scene where Joel tries to hide the memory of Clementine someplace in his mind where it could remain safe and the memory-erasing machine won’t be able to delete it. It was in this moment where Joel realizes how he just can’t think of any moment in his life without the presence of Clementine.
Turns out that Joel’s life really was dull and the only thing making it eventful was the existence of Clementine. Joel was scared if Clementine finds out about this, she would have no reason to stay with Joel anymore and much to Joel’s unwillingness to open up, Clementine leaves anyways.
Clementine now hates Joel so much, she just wants to delete him out of her memory which she does through this innovative process and when Joel finds out about the deletion, he wants to do the same thing to Clementine!
But as the process begins to take effect, Clementine begins to disappear from Joel’s memory, he realizes how despite of all the hatred, he actually needs Clementine in his head because of the unmatched out of body experiences they experienced only with the other one.
This is where I realized the point the filmmakers were trying to make. All the relationships that matter to you will bring you pain at some point in your life, but there’s a bigger reason these relationships became important to you in the first place, they give you meaning and purpose in life. When you think about getting rid of them thanks to some mishandle communication, you will realize how you actually need them and you can’t live without them. They’re the only reason for making your life interesting and meaningful to whatever extent possible.
To understand this theory, just observe the jumbled up narrative of this film, you can’t really seem to make out what happens before and what happens later chronologically.
The point of this jumbled narrative is how it doesn’t matter what happens before and after! You will always have fights and resentment towards your loved ones at one point or the other, but in the end what matters is the happiness and the joyful memories you make from these relationships and no matter what, you’re supposed to hold on to these memories because they make you who you are.
No matter how much you try to run from who you are, at some point, you will have to change and become the best version of you that you can be and eventually learn to love yourself so you can let someone else in your life to love you and for you to love them back.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind is a story written to give you a new perspective of how you look at relationships in your own life. No matter how bad your relationships get, you will always decide to forget about everything and give it another shot! No matter if you have fulfilling relationships or miserable relationships, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a film you have to revisit time and time again.
Until then, let me know in the comments how you liked the film and follow me here on Medium to stay tuned for some storytelling goodness every now and then.
In the hopes of connecting with film lovers all over the world, this is Mr. Zeecon, in the making of a great story.
