A Guide to Appreciating Life

Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

By: Meg Davy

For our romance genre, we landed on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Now, personally, I had no indication as to what was going to happen in this movie, and I only knew that it is one of Jim Carrey’s more respected roles in a more serious manner and that it was sad. Just a warning for those who haven’t seen this film, there are spoilers ahead. I can say the one thing I didn’t expect was the sci-fi aspect to the film where people can completely erase the memories of another from their mind. Introducing this type of plot to a romance movie of all things definitely sounds like it has so much room to go wrong, but director Michel Gondry expertly puts a unique twist on the typical romance drama through a distortion in the movie’s storytelling and timeline, especially through its cinematography.

It’s really interesting to see how different scenes fall apart as Joel goes through the process of getting his memories of Clementine erased. For example, with the final scene featuring the final memory of Clementine from Joel’s perspective where the beach house is slowly falling apart and filling with sand as it disappears. Other scenes with other characters like the doctor and his group who help him erase people’s memories have almost disturbing themes to them as they become faceless or distorted, they’re voices are muffled, and not to mention the absolutely terrifying upside down eyed face of Elijah Wood (I mean of all actors, they choose the guy with the biggest, brightest, wildest eyes to flip upside down on his face). They are really strong representations of both the figurative and literal destruction of what it means to completely erase someone from your memory. Just as Joel originally thought, many people may think it seems like a great idea to be able to erase someone from your memories, but as the process went on, Joel realized it would be better to live with painful memories than never have lived them before. I think this goes along with the understanding that if you want to erase the painful memories, you have to erase the good ones too. It returns to the simple concept that you can't have something that is good without having something bad as a precedent to compare it to.

Ultimately, this movie was not what I was thinking at all, but I enjoyed it a lot nonetheless. It beautifully captures what it means to be in a relationship and connected with someone. In my opinion, I think this movie is a good watch for when you’re feeling down or think life is bad because it makes you realize how precious life is, even the bad parts.