But as the process reaches further back, to moments of tenderness and joy, Joel rediscovers his love for Clementine and realizes he does not want to lose these memories after all.
#ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF A SPOTLESS MIND FULL#
The erasing process (and with it, the movie) works backward in time, beginning with the most recent memories, full of fights and ill-will. That night, unconscious in his bed as Lacuna technicians work (and play) around him, Joel relives each memory of Clementine even as it is wiped from his brain. Discovering Clementine's betrayal, Joel decided to have the procedure performed on himself as well. Eager to "get on with her life," Clementine had all memory of Joel erased from her mind by a low-rent medical outfit called Lacuna. The two of them have, in fact, just recently broken up after two years of living together. This is not the new romance that Joel and Clementine perceive it to be. The two begin talking on the train ride home to New York, and over the next two nights love begins to bloom.īut as with Kaufman's earlier scripts ( Human Nature, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), things soon turn complicated. There, on a desolate beach, he encounters manic extrovert Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet). The film, released on video this week, begins simply enough: One cold, gray Valentine's morning, moody introvert Joel Barrish (Jim Carrey) decides on impulse to skip work and take a train out to Montauk, Long Island. With Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, writer Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry have created a film whose entire purpose is to blur and fade, a self-erasing tribute to the fragility of memory and of love. Murnau in Shadow of the Vampire, explained, "We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory, but our memory will neither blur nor fade." It's hardly surprising, then, that cinema has often been described as a kind of synthetic memory.
#ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF A SPOTLESS MIND MOVIE#
Our specific memories, by contrast, are primarily visual and auditory, not unlike a movie playing in the mind's eye. Yes, a scent may on occasion provoke an emphatic, unmediated recollection, but it is typically an imprecise one-a general period in one's life rather than a particular moment.
It's often said that smell is the sense most closely tied to memory.
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