Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at 20 and Our Obsession with Making Ourselves Sadder
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Alfred Lord Tennyson once wrote “tis better to have loved and lost than not loved at all”; the excerpt from In memoriam A.H.H has since been besmirched by Tumblr templates and domestic “live laugh love” plaques, but its potency nonetheless endures. If you know anyone who's experienced a breakup, it’s possible that they watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) to ease the pain.
But the breakup movie may be considered a dying art - happy-go-lucky Netflix rom coms are all the rage, while the more romantically jaded amongst us have to find solace in repeat viewings of Normal People. As Eternal Sunshine celebrates its twentieth year, I find myself questioning why this psychological romance has persevered across generations and, by extension, how our absorption of sad content has perhaps become habitual.
TikTok has paved the way for a new era of sentimentalism: web weaving, fan cams and sound bites have allowed us to be more vulnerable than ever - but the notion of indulging in our sadness is by no means newfound. The phrase “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” derives from Alexander Pope’s 1717 verse Eloisa to Aberland, which accounts the clandestine love affair between Heloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Aberland in twelfth century France. The quotation is synonymous with the age-old theory that in ignorance there is bliss; the “spotless mind” in question doesn’t concern itself with the hardship of the past and dissociates itself from unwanted memories. I’m sure at some point we have all experienced a form of heartbreak so debilitating we wish to forget it - enter Michael Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to remind us all why confronting our melancholy is far more sustainable than suppressing it.
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Upon hard times we are often consoled by our loved ones and encouraged to partake in various endeavours in an attempt to “take our mind off things”. Hollywood’s renowned sad boi screenwriter Charlie Kaufman took the sentiment one step further and mused a reality in which one is capable of physically removing their ex from their mind. Kaufman is often concerned with matters of the heart, but never has his work been more universally accessible and indicative of the human condition as Eternal Sunshine. Joel (Jim Carrey) accidentally discovers that his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has undergone a medical procedure to have the memory of their relationship removed from her mind. In an attempt to find the same form of closure, Joel also opts to have Clementine permanently removed from his.
“Upon hard times we are often consoled by our loved ones and encouraged to partake in various endeavours in an attempt to ‘take our mind off things’. Hollywood’s renowned sad boi screenwriter Charlie Kaufman took the sentiment one step further and mused a reality in which one is capable of physically removing their ex from their mind.”
It all starts with a meet-cute, traditional to the romantic genre. Joel impulsively bunks off work and catches a train to Montauk where he initially meets the mystifying Clementine (or so we think). It’s later revealed that this opening scene actually takes place post-erasure. Though customarily scenes like this serve as the inciting incident into a story, in Eternal Sunshine, chance encounters make up the main narrative structure of the film. The fittingly coined term “meet-cute” is by its very nature a cloying and definitive concept; in her essay Searching For More Than a Meet-Cute, Nayantara Dutta criticises the plot device as a “disarmingly cinematic way that fate brings two people together”. It’s no secret that Hollywood has conditioned us into believing that true love is an absolute result of these whimsical exchanges, but Kaufman’s kaleidoscopic view of these meet-cutes serves as a rejection of romanticised genre formulas.
Joel whizzes through fragments of his past like a cerebral pinball machine; in one of his many attempts to reconcile with Clementine, he revisits a memory of her at work and laments “if we could just give it another go-round”, meanwhile the shelves of books surrounding him fade into oblivion. Exceeding the disillusionment of Joel’s fleeting memory of Clementine is the visceral, nihilistic dread of relieving ourselves of intrinsic pain. This personification of our tendency to dissociate from trauma is arguably what makes Eternal Sunshine a universally cathartic experience.
If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from two thousand years of Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and the opening scene of Up (2009) is that our desire to wallow in our despair is just as palpable as our efforts to restrain it. As much as we’re led to believe in the guiding spirit of “feel-good” films, a study conducted by the Royal Society found there’s joy in catharsis too, noting that “the emotional wringing you get from tragedy triggers the endorphin system”.
In the case of sad films then, is it an exact science? Perhaps what draws us to these tales of woe is far more than a cognitive response. Kaufman rejects science as a plausible rationale behind our psychological reaction to pain: scientists Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst recklessly drink and get high whilst on duty, meanwhile we uncover chief scientist Tom Wilkinson may have performed surgery as a cover-up for his extra marital affair. The bogus methodology of the entire memory loss operation is symptomatic of Kaufman’s metaphysical concerns about love and grief, inferring Joel’s growth is subsequent to his accepting of emotional equilibrium.
Stoicism is so passé, instead we find ourselves living in the age of “depression Barbie” who sits in bed all day watching reruns of the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, scrolling through her estranged best friend’s Instagram. This throwaway moment in Greta Gerwig’s sugary blockbuster may be played for laughs, but there’s an expository truth in its satirising of our appetite to indulge in certain content as a means to feel worse than we already do. I personally never understood why friends of mine would actively submit themselves to the tribulations of Marley and Me (2008) - knowing it would reduce them to tears - but one person's dog-rom-com is another person’s Blue Valentine (1986). In the case of Eternal Sunshine we find ourselves at a veritable crossroad - its ironic title suggests that the mind prospers from the relief of misery, but Kaufman proves otherwise. Whereas similar breakup movies of that era such as Mike Nichols’ Closer (2004) present a more jagged, cynical outlook of dying love, Eternal Sunshine reminds us of Tennyson’s lasting sentiment, imploring it’s better to have faced the trials of life as opposed to not at all.
Words: James Punshon