This essay is part of theScreen Shotsseries, monthly takes from LARB’s own film and TV team.
¤
FOR THOSE WHO have never seen the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I present an instigating question: if you could have a crushing blow, a haunting heartbreak, erased from your memory, would you do it? It’s brain damage, admits Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), the pioneer of this experimental treatment, “but it’s on a par with a night of heavy drinking.” It is this justification that, presumably, gives the impulsive Clementine (Kate Winslet) the push she needs to go through the procedure and have her boyfriend, Joel (Jim Carrey), erased. Eternal Sunshine follows Joel’s journey to forget her back—neurologically speaking—as an act of righteous retribution.
Acting out of impulse and spite? Refusing to learn from painful experiences and instead lashing out and self-medicating with mind-numbing technology? Forgive us, evolved readers between the ages of 18 and 30: it was 2004, and we were still reeling from the anticlimactic emotional terrorism of Y2K.
Joel regrets the procedure almost immediately, so he and the Clementine who lives in his memory fight to get away from the erasing mechanism. The machine is operated by a group of twentysomethings (Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst) who have the ruthless tech-optimism of a young Mark Zuckerberg without any of the vision. In one sequence, Joel rolls around in bed, under the sheets, with Clem. “You’re pretty … pretty … pretty,” he murmurs, reassuring her, kissing her. “Please let me keep this memory,” he thinks to himself, shouts to someone who will never be able to hear. “Just this one.”
I tear up on watching, and I wonder if I did that the first time around—if, frankly, I had lived long enough to recognize how joy can turn into a pain you wouldn’t surrender if you could. I don’t remember this line from the last time I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; I can’t remember when I last watched the movie, period.
What does it matter what I remember? The film itself documents my own memories of it like a long-forgotten diary entry. The ways it has stayed with me, moved me without my knowing, elude my grasp. But Eternal Sunshine is, at its heart, about the failures and imperfections of the individual’s reminiscing. Maybe this looking-back is not something I can do alone.
¤
It is one thing to reflect, to look back, and another to look back together, which is the essential exercise in an anniversary piece. I have pitched, if not fully drafted, all the following, which constitutes a kind of typology of the genre:
It has been x years (usually with a five or a zero at the end). Why does this movie hold up so well?
It has been x years. Why doesn’t this movie hold up at all?
It has been x years. This is why we are still talking about this movie.
It has been x years. Why don’t people ever talk about this movie?
It has been x years. There is still time for us to reckon with how great this movie has always been and how we have never, as a species, fully appreciated it.
It has been x years. We get older, but our favorite movies stay the same age.
It can be embarrassing to rewatch the movies that made us, especially as they pop up as the new, “top” titles on Netflix. It’s a little like hitting middle age and dreaming that you’ve shown up to the SATs naked. Streamable media flattens the film as a historical object: is what the anniversary piece is chasing a fix to this problem? A response to the instinctive sense that each film has a history, an aura, that can only be invoked by counting the years gone by? If that’s so, then why does the five or the zero mean anything (as, for commissioning editors, it inevitably does)?
The real contradiction comes when the collective meets the personal or intimate. An enterprise as doomed as it is essential, the anniversary piece forces us to remember the same thing together and, in the process, tests the limits of criticism’s subjectivity. It’s not just about what I, the critic, think or feel, but also about how I remember what I once thought and felt. I have to be myself now and the person who saw the movie in 2004, and also, for the essay to truly transcend, I have to also be you, my fellow time-traveler. And if I want to hit all the emotional beats? I have to be Joel a little bit, and also Joel’s memory of himself, and also Clementine, or at least my envisioning of her.
In the anniversary piece, more than any other form of film writing I can think of, the writer has to play all the parts.
¤
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is 20 years old, which is how old I was when I saw it for the first time. At the time, it was one of the artiest films I’d ever seen, which tells you something about how many movies I’d seen. Revisiting the film now, I’d forgotten the supporting cast was stacked, with Dunst playing a haunting supporting role and even smaller parts held down by David Cross and Jane Adams.
I’d also forgotten how the movie ends.
In one ending, the couple manage to find each other and try again. They hope their near-miss—their almost having lost one another forever—will make them each more tolerant, softer toward one another’s faults. In the shadow ending, the same happens, except that the relationship fails a second time. They erase each other. They come back together. Over and over, they try, they flounder, they wipe the slate clean, they fall in love all over again and take another stab at forever; they do this for decades. Both endings were considered. Director Michel Gondry only shot the first, less pessimistic ending, but the second still feels of a piece with the muddled, cloudy mood of the film, Picasso’s Blue Period via an off-season beach day at Montauk. No wonder I couldn’t remember which one I actually saw and which I’d read about somewhere years ago.
The despair of the alternative ending peeks through the drawn curtains of the film that got made. When Joel and Clementine meet for the first time after their mutual memory erasure, they are attracted to one another. They part ways, only for Joel to call Clem that evening and ask to keep talking. In the glow of the lamp, Carrey’s Joel looks happy but older, the warm light settling into the lines in his face. This is the face of an aging Joel who will waste his entire life on an impossible romance. And in Eternal Sunshine’s final shot, the couple runs together in the snow, two dark figures against an overwhelmingly dingy white landscape. The action is upbeat, but the palette, the vibe, is gray.
Joel and Clementine run from the foreground toward the horizon, when the video skips, and they start from the beginning. It happens again. This jerky disruption of space-time evokes the memory wiping. What is happening in between these sprints? How much time elapses between skips? Whose mind are we in right now?
The anniversary piece is a noble attempt to pin down the movies that live in our minds, and to do so together. Whether I am writing on the anniversary or the anti-anniversary of Michel Gondry’s film is unclear. The film, I keep hoping, will tell me what to do.
¤
I just called it Gondry’s film, but Eternal Sunshine is textbook Charlie Kaufman, a writer who burst onto the scene with the 1999 absurdist comedy Being John Malkovich. Kaufman was a co-writer on Eternal Sunshine and wouldn’t direct his own script until 2008 with Synecdoche, New York. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind remains inherently representative of his oeuvre, combining a surreal imagination with a keen attention to the drab drudgery of modern life.
The stagy qualities of Eternal Sunshine scream Kaufman; as Joel’s memories are wiped, the crumbling walls and edifices keel over like the wonky set of a school play. Literary and pop culture references abound. When Joel holds open his eyes in an attempt to wake up from the procedure, a flash of A Clockwork Orange (1972) flickers through my mind like it has been spliced into the reel. His ability to move from one space to a completely different one by walking through a doorframe feels like the manic counterpart of the depressive “Sound of Silence” sequence from The Graduate (1967). Books and artists flash through Joel’s memory, names like Tom Waits and Al Pacino. On first meeting Clementine, Joel deems her name “magical” because of its association with the Huckleberry Hound cartoon that features prominently in his most precious childhood recollections. When he meets Clem later, after the memory wipe, he has not only forgotten her but also the theme song and the positive association he once forged between the woman and the show.
These books, jingles, images: these are the core memories (Pixar hasn’t trademarked this yet, phew) that anchor our own stories. They even secure our feelings about the people we love.
¤
Looking back, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind might be best enshrined as a key artifact in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) trajectory. “I apply my personality in a paste,” Clementine informs Joel, staunchly unwilling to hear any mealymouthed defense of herself. Honesty above tact, to a fault, is the MPDG’s credo. She dances in the rain; she introduces her lover to art and music and yelling one’s name into a canyon; to call her impulsive is an understatement. The MPDG teaches you—yes, you, educated but spiritually numb white guy—how to live. In exchange, you make sure she doesn’t scream herself right off that cliff.
As smug dog parents like to say of their rescue dogs: Who saved who?
Garden State, Almost Famous, and (500) Days of Summer are three more movies from the decade that cemented this type. Eternal Sunshine and (500) Days foreground the constructedness of the MPDG, weaving her status as a male-authored fantasy object into the conceit … the other two, not really. (The 2012 film Ruby Sparks, written by its star, Zoe Kazan, would have been the historical end point of the form as it then circulated, had enough people known to go see it.) But a paradigm like the MPDG is not so easily erased or “canceled” as it is reframed.
“I’m not a concept,” Clementine explains (in one of many flashbacks to their initial meeting and courtship). “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m going to make them alive, but I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.” At the time, the monologue felt fresh and edgy, but now I hear those lines and I think: isn’t what she says about not being a concept just what a concept would say? Needless to say, this MPDG would still fail the “real woman” CAPTCHA test.
It’s not Clementine, or Winslet’s, fault. Quite literally, for most of the film, Clem is a product of Joel’s imagination, via his memory; this is a projection. (Or is it? The physics of this operation—Real Clem must remember what Imaginary Clem told Real/Imaginary Joel, to meet her in Montauk—are mysterious.) There might not be any way out from the matrix of Manic Pixie Dream Girlishness, and not just for the women who bear the mantle.
Charlie Kaufman’s seeming apology for his creation, a film searing with self-recrimination, is I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), which I watched during COVID-19 lockdown. The smart, quirky love interest, played by Jessie Buckley, feels the violence of being the fantasy of a “nice guy” (Jesse Plemons): “Jake is really great. He’s sensitive. He listens to me. He’s smart. There’s just something … ineffable? Profoundly, unutterably, unfixably wrong here. I almost wish he were horrible, some monster, that he beat me, that he was a drunk, that he ignored me.”
Even as the film critiques this toxic male’s alienation, it can’t, or refuses to, escape his dominance. After all, the MPDG cannot exist, would scarcely remember to eat, without the Depressive, Resentful Wife Guy’s moody prodding; if he goes, so does she. Watching the latter film, I fantasized about what Eternal Sunshine would look like told from Clementine’s point of view, pieced together from her memories. This is not a question I asked myself until this most recent rewatch, which might be a product of my own limitations, or a reflection of the limitations movies like these have bred in me.
Still, these types and archetypes live in all of us, move us, in ways we can’t possibly articulate. It’s not all for the ill: Eternal Sunshine is also terribly romantic, more romantic, on rewatching than I even remember. I’m older, so I’ve lived with this movie for almost as long as I lived without it, and I’d forgotten how much I remembered. Maybe it made me just a little bit profoundly, unfixably wrong, as culture is bound to do.
Putting aside his public spat with critic Mark Kermode and acknowledging the mixed critical reception of his films, Kaufman remains a critic’s filmmaker. He fixates on how taste shapes our movements through the world, how we relate to others (or fail to relate, in any healthy way). And what we like, what we don’t, how our preferences change, and how we persist in love despite ourselves … this might be what we’re really looking at when we write an anniversary piece. Directors and studios may cut and recut films, but, ultimately, it’s not the films that change; it’s us, and only if we’re not too mired in the movies that have made us.
¤
When I started writing this piece, Eternal Sunshine was streaming on Peacock, and by the time I finished, it had been removed. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has come under fire from critics and viewers for removing content from Max (formerly HBO Max)—including Westworld (2016–22), a series premised on the violent workings of nostalgia and cultural memory—to avoid paying residuals to creative stakeholders. But the movement of intellectual property from one streamer to another is the new normal, and some material is bound to slip through the cracks. The idea that all the movies, all the shows, are there for us if we need them is a myth, an illusion easily broken when you sit down to stream a 1996 Jane Campion film and find it’s impossible. We think that the portals will keep our movies and shows the same way our phones will keep our schedules, but these external hard drives of cultural memory cannot be trusted any more than our own feeble brains. Items cherished and despised and unremarkable drop off without warning, like the scenes and set pieces that dissolve into black as Joel and Clementine race from oblivion.
The best thing about film writing: It’s all from memory. It has to be, because movies are time-based media, and we can’t be in two places at once. I used to tell students, “Never write about close analysis from memory!” I stand by the sentiment, but technically, I was lying. That gap, between when you pause the video and when you begin to write, can never be closed. In the translation from image and sound, to experience, through absorption and reflection, into words, every description is a recollection, every assertion an interpretation. Anything I write about this movie, or any movie, it’s just my memory of it. I can’t “get it right,” only get at it rightly, and even so, the ekphrastic transfer tells on me, the author. What do I see when I look back? As Molly Haskell, David Thomson, and numerous film historians have stressed, criticism is irrevocably, undeniably personal: I can’t possibly give you a glimpse into the movie, as I see it, without giving you a piece of me with it.
To remember together is impossible; to remember alone is self-indulgent—but for the critic, to forget is the worst crime of all.