Forget Me Not: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Trouble with Wanting to Forget.
“Oblivion — what a blessing…for the mind to dwell a world away from pain.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (430 B.C.)
If you had the opportunity to erase someone from your mind, would you do it? This is the main ethical and philosophical question that the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michael Gondry, 2004) tries to get people to think about — and to eventually solve. Dealing with oblivion, love, and a postmodern technology, Eternal Sunshine brilliantly portrays the emptiness a person would have if the painful memories were to be voluntarily erased. Even when the movie confuses at times with the script written by Charlie Kaufman, as it is common with his writing it is never a straight answer and there is always a journey consistent of scattered pieces; there are clear arguments on the negativity of oblivion along with how a human’s identity is built within memories, and the empty shell an individual would be without parts of their past.
The story of the movie follows three characters: Joel (Jim Carrey), Clementine (Kate Winslet) and Mary (Kirsten Dunst), who decide to have a procedure where they selectively erase memories. The first two characters being in a treacherous relationship: after a fight she erases him from her mind, and when he finds out he decides to do the same. Around one hour of the movie takes place in the mind of Joel, where his memories are being erased, with some complications along the way. The side story follows Mary who has her memory erased after having an affair with the owner of the company (Lacuna Inc.), Dr, Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson). She only finds out about this affair after — yet again — she falls in love with Howard, proving that while Dr. Mierzwiak claims the procedure feels merely like a “bad hangover”, the narrative of the movie shows there’s more to it.
The title itself Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes almost as ironic, since the “eternal sunshine”, meaning eternal light, is referring to happiness. And the “spotless mind” means clearness of any unwanted memories. Joining these together we can figure out it intends to say that a memory without any wrongness equals happiness. Along the movie we see all the characters fooled by this idea. But as Christopher Grau says in his essay “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind And The Morality Of Memory,” this is a very simplistic position, where “the morally right act is the one that will result in the most happiness and the least suffering” (120), and so we keep asking ourselves, how right is the act of voluntarily erasing, since history is doomed to repeat itself if we don’t learn from our mistakes. And we see how these characters fall into the same “mistakes” because they didn’t know they had gone through the same thing before. If we add this painful experience to the previous one we can see how the pain overpasses the happiness, and we start to see that simplicity is not on the table.
An important argument defending selective memory erasure would point out at how some memories — mainly the traumatic ones — are worth forgetting. Why would people who experience traumatic situations (such as the death of a loved one, depression, war) would like to remember the pain (Diski 13)? At the beginning of the movie, Mary — the assistant in love with Dr. Mierzwiak — thinks great things not only about the man, but his work, too, of course, before finding out about her memory procedure. She even says:
To let people begin again. It’s beautiful, you look at a baby and it’s so pure, and so free, and so clean, and adults are like this mess of sadness and phobias, and Howard just makes it all go away. (Kaufman 57)
This changes after she know the truth — and she even steals the files from the patients — , but while in the movie we have only an affair, in the script we also have an abortion, and a discussion between Mary and Howard where she tells him a quote completely different from what she was used to think:
Patrick Henry said, “For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.” I found that quote last night….
I don’t like what you do to people….
The memories are mine now. (Kaufman 112)
In a dramatic turn of events Mary falls into the realization that a person is built from pain and happiness. When we grow up innocence, freedom, and all those values she grants babies, are lost. But when losing some values, a lot of living happens, and a lot of things are acquired.
Identity crisis is other of the great problems in the process of forgetting. Our lives are formed by a past, a present and a future, but when it comes to memory there is “a present of the future, a present of the present and a present of the past” (Sperb). This way is easier to understand Clementine’s behavior after erasing Joel from her mind — feeling lost and old and not making sense of anything is due to the identity crisis she has after losing around two years of her life. The many moments throughout the movie where Clementine feels confused are proof of the damage the procedure caused. And how the procedure was not only a method of self-harming, but also a method to harm others. This identity crisis both characters suffer may be more important than the love story. Because the worst part of it all wasn’t losing the relationship they had, but losing themselves in the process.
Having a spotless mind would be like having a skin clear of scars and marks. It’s an inhumane view. Scars, memories, suffering, and experiences are part of the living. No matter how painful it may seem, our minds are the witnesses of the battles we’ve fought and the roads we’ve walked. So even when memory is treacherous and unreliable, we still — undeniably trust it. At the end of the day we are our happiness but also our pain.
Closing with the next quote by Alexander Pope — said in the movie by Mary — feels right. Even though it’s praising the forgetting, it is also accepting the consequences of it.
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting by the world forgot
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d. (Kaufman 84)
Annotated Bibliography
Kaufman, Charlie. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script”. Newmarket
Press. 2004. Printed Script.
Whipple, Jennifer, and Catherine Tucker. “Using Cinema And Literature To Explore
Existentialism.” Journal Of Creativity In Mental Health 7.1 (2012): 95–106. Academic Search Complete. Web.
Disky, Jenny. “The Me Who Knew It”. London Review of Books. 34.3 (2012): 12–13. Web.
< www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/jenny-diski/the-me-who-knew-it >
Grau, Christopher. “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind And The Morality Of Memory.”
Journal Of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 64.1 (2006): 119–133. Academic Search Complete. Web.
Sperb, Jason. “Internal Sunshine: Illuminating Being-Memory in Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind”. Kiritikos. Jan, 2005.Web. 18 Nov. 2016.
< www.intertheory.org/sunshine#_ednref7 >
Levi, Neil. “Changing one’s mind: the ethics of memory erasure in Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind.” Scienzaefilosofia. Vol. 5 (2011): 29–49. Academic Search Complete. Web.
