I Like to Watch | Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
"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."
It is rare to sit down to watch a beloved film that has sat upon the shelf out of sheer, numbing dread to view it again.
I love Charlie Kaufman’s bizarre, wonderful meditation on heartbreak. Years ago, at a WBEZ Science event, one of the panelists chose the film as her example of sci-fi technology that actually has a basis in reality. Turns out that the actual removing of traumatic memories is possible and, at the time, in practice for those suffering debilitating PTSD. As Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) explains "It's exactly like brain damage."
I love the film but I've been anxious to re-watch it. It was a favorite of mine when it came out in 2004 and ten years later, it became a template of sorts to explain the nutty engagement that occurred in three dates. While I never really identified completely with Joel (Jim Carrey)—quiet, sad, living within himself rather than out loud—I did understand him on one level. In the first few minutes of the film, as he impulsively hops on a train to Montauk without knowing exactly why and stops at a diner, he notices Clementine (Kate Winslet). She's reading a tattered book by herself and pours some whiskey into her coffee. She notices him looking and gives him a "This is our secret" look. His voiceover continues "Why do I fall in love with every woman I see who shows me the least bit of attention?" That is something the character and I have in common. I understand that.
I was not too much like Joel but she was exactly like Clementine. The drinking. The adolescent need for rebelling against the simplest of rules (like not breaking into stranger's homes). The constant hair changes. The clothing. The slight manic depressive mental game play. The undiagnosed but almost patently visible borderline personality disorder. The ongoing challenges to her partner with the unspoken caveat that if he didn't play along he was somehow deficient. The faux mysteriousness. The hyper-sexuality. All of it. In 2014, Clementine was a model for my own Manic Pixie Dream Girl and Kaufman created a fable that spoke of the inevitability of that true love connection.
Joel's story is standard heartbreak fare but tinged with that Charlie Kaufman weirdness. He is depressed and angry that his relationship with Clementine has ended. Despondent, he goes to his friends' home and finds out that she has hired a company to erase all memory of him. Hurt and furious, he goes to Howard and decides that he wants the procedure as well. That if she is going to erase him, she should be erased, too. Without any memory of her existence (including trash bags filled with any object Joel can associate with her) the heartache he feels deep in his bones will be eliminated.
Most of the film takes place in his mind as each moment, both the good and the bad, is targeted and deleted. At some point, Joel becomes conscious of what's happening and decides that he doesn't want to forget Clementine but it's too late. He takes her image to memories she isn't a part of but the procedure finds them and continues to smudge out her presence in his life. At the end of the cycle, Clementine tells him to "Meet me in Montauk." He does, they discover the confessional cassette tapes that define why each erased the other, but decide in the end to try it again.
The subplots include Mary (Kirsten Dunst), the receptionist in love with the doctor struggling only to find out that the two had an affair and he erased her memory of it. Despite the erasure, she still clings to some sense of inevitability. The second story intertwined is that of Patrick (Elijah Wood) who has determined to steal Joel's memories in order to make Clementine his love. Lots of creepy going on in this movie, gang.
In 2004 and then again 2014, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind told me the story of true love defying even the science of eradicating the trauma of a broken relationship. It underscored the power of finding The One and fighting hard to keep that love alive. It was Joel's realization that the good in his time with Clementine outweighed the bad and that love will find a way. It was, in its way, fuel to my own fantasy love story, the improbable marriage in Vegas against all obvious signs that this would go sideways at some point. I was the Minotaur, she the Mermaid. True love and the stars all aligned. Even if it went wrong, we would find each other.
On April 25th of last year, I divorced my Clementine.
In the Matter of the Joint Petition for Divorce of: Dana Marie Jerman and Donald Ray Hall
There are so many dates tied up with that broken relationship that navigating a calendar is like walking through an abandoned minefield from the Korean war. The 12th of every month was our Month-a-Versary. The 3rd of May was our Meet-a-Versary. Easter was when she revealed she was boning a bass player in Vegas for the last three years of our marriage as well as... well, you can read the book if you want all of the gory details.
So, on the Sunday before the anniversary of our divorce, I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I didn't want to but I felt it was time. I started crying the second it started. I wept through the first half hour. Then something changed. Same movie. Same story. Different me. I stopped leaking tears and began seeing the story as if it was brand new but wholly familiar.
I watched Joel go through the first part of the process which detailed how bad things had gotten between he and Clementine. The last of it first the way we all see things disastrous. Then the familiarity struck hard. A scene when she comes home, drunk, at 3am.
"Face it, Joely. You're freaked out because I was out late without you. And in your little wormy brain, you're trying to figure out 'Did she fuck someone tonight?'"
"No, see Clem, I assume you fucked someone tonight. Isn't that how you get people to like you?"
Oof. She was my Clementine and the film showed me exactly who she was ten years before I met her.
Toward the end, as they discover the cassette tapes recorded after the fallout, she says "He's boring. Is that... enough to erase someone? I've been thinking lately how I was before and how I am now and it's like he changed me. I feel like I'm always pissy now. I don't like myself when I'm with him, I don't like myself anymore. I can't stand to even look at him. That pathetic wimpy, apologetic smile, that sort of wounded puppy shit he does, you know? The bloom is certainly off the rose at this point."
My Clementine wrote a week or so following the divorce, "I've fired myself from a production spanning almost eight years. From a part I became quite familiar with, performed multiple auditions for, and went on to play really, extremely, incredibly well. I never intended such isolation for myself. I'm hungry to return to a free and liberated populace. Now, I must bow. Hereby taking up a stunning new vow without this constructed production. Rightly disabused of its rigid way. Getting back to the role I was born for, no longer the one recruited into."
My Clementine certainly had a better facility with the language but the sentiment is the same.
The ending of the film is the same as it ever was but the meaning in 2023 has morphed for me, in my space, in my future. Instead of a fairy tale that espouses the powers of love against all odds, it now tells a nightmare where one cannot escape the inevitable heartbreak no matter how much you resist. It is the doom of the fated rather than the resilience of true love, the misery of the addicted rather than the tenacity of star-crossed lovers. A cautionary tale or more like an actual fairy tale designed to scare the living shit out of children.
As the film ends, Joel and Clementine seem fully aware that they are destined to break each other's hearts. Knowing this, they decide to keep trying and embrace the inescapable fate of future heartache with a shrug and a simple "Okay." As the marriage ended I suspect she thought I would shrug and say "Okay." In fact, when I didn't accept that fate, she seemed surprised.
At the end of the screenplay but not in the film we discover that Mary is still working for Howard (who is very, very old) and that Clementine has had Joel erased from her memory at least fifteen times over the decades.
I still love the movie but it is a different story. I have changed and in that change the bloom is certainly off the rose. Because I'm still a bit like Joel—I still fall in love with every woman I see who shows me the least bit of attention—I think I will make the viewing of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind an annual ritual. Every 25th of April. To remind me. To keep those self-destructive tendencies in check. You can never truly erase a broken heart but you can stitch it up and look at the scars from time to time.
"Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders."
