Eternal Sunshine
Jane and I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Friday night. I've been thinking about it ever since. I had vivid dreams inspired by the movie on both Friday and Saturday nights. I guess you could say the film impacted me.
I won't really say much about the plot, other than that two people fall in love, then have a falling out. One of them is an implusive sort, and she decides to go to Lacuna Inc., a firm which specializes in erasing memories. (As you might expect, Valentine's Day is a busy time of year for them.) When the poor sap finds out he was erased from his beloved's memory, he decides the only way he can handle the pain is to also have the procedure done.
For a movie that only runs an hour and 48 minutes, there is an awful lot of stuff going on. Heavy stuff. There were so many things that jumped out at me that I'm sure I want to see the movie again, because I know I missed a lot. But having said that, some things struck me immediately and have consumed my thoughts since Friday night.
Why do we love the people we love? Ask anyone in a relationship, and they'll have their own reasons. Their beloved may be kind, funny, creative, devoted, any number of things. But think about it for a moment: On any given day, how many of those traits that caused you to love who you love are exhibited? Lifelong love is such a marathon, a daily accumulation of experiences and mundane details of living life. Things like grocery shopping, laundry, watching TV, going to work, etc.
When we are forced to reckon with the reasons why we love who we love, either through tragedy or forced recollection, we don't remember the everyday details as much as we do the specific events. And typically, those specific events are in the early parts of the relationship. How did you meet? When did you first realize this was your life path? When did you first reveal your secrets to each other? That is a part of what happens in this movie, as Jim Carrey's character, Joel, finds most of his everyday memories of his darling Clementine, played by Kate Winslett, stripped away. The memories of their daily lives, much like our own, involve good and bad and everything in between, and though he treasures them, they fade out of his mind as a part of the Lucuna Inc. procedure.
But then, he reaches a memory that defines their relationship in some way, and in turn defines him. This memory isn't like the others, though it is just one of another in a series of events of their lives. This one is special. He doesn't want to erase this one. He needs to keep this one. The movie takes off from there, as Joel finds those little moments that define why he loved Clementine, and which in turn changed him as a person. To erase those memories is to erase a part of himself.
We all have those moments with the loves of our lives, but we don't think about them much as we move on down the path. We get caught up in the living of life, necessarily so. Sometimes it take a crisis of some sort for us to sort out the special moments that define us. We might not even know what they are until that moment comes. It would be hard, I think, for someone to watch this movie and not think about the people they love romantically, and what that love is based on.
What memories would you struggle to keep from being erased, and why? I can't say for sure, sitting here without a life crisis in the safety of my cubicle, but I have a feeling I would remember a game of hangman, drawn on body parts and jeans. I would remember a New Year's Eve party, where I was asked if I was willing to move to another part of the country. (The answer was "yes".) I would remember sitting in a car, venting about my job frustrations, and Jane just listening. I would remember her playing with Linus in Belize. I would fight for those memories.
Another thing this movie does is give a glimpse of the elusiveness of memory. Timelines become compressed, and people begin to appear in places where they do not belong. In the movie, Joel is doing this intentionally, as a way of foiling Lacuna's attempts to wipe Clementine from his mind. But this is also something that happens to people who lose their memories in the course of aging, or in certain cases of brain damage. People from middle age suddenly appear in childhood memories, and vice-versa. Relationships spring up between people in our memories who in real life have never met. Anyone who spends time with an elderly person sees this, and it is disconcerting for everyone involved. It can be an annoyance to people who have to sort out different (and usually worsening) accounts of reality, but that is minor compared to the consternation that the person whose memory is fading feels, because they typically understand and are aware that their memories are being compromised.
I see this with Jane's grandmother, Lillian. She is a wonderful woman, 92 years old and going very strong. But her memory, while still very strong, is starting to fail her in small ways. She is forgetting names occasionally, and it takes her longer to remember some things (though she usually does remember them). She's in an odd place now, where she is sharp and aware enough that she is aware of these minor lapses, but still having them and unable to do much about them. This movie made me think of her. Her husband, Heino, has been gone now for over 20 years. All she has of him now are memories, memories that tie her life together and form the basis of the love she had for him.
What happens if those memories start to be compromised? Like Joel, which memories will she fight to keep?
There are some great throwaway lines in the movie which are fairly thought-provoking in their own right. At one point during the memory wipe, Joel brings his memory of Clementine to his childhood, a place where the Lacuna technicians will not expect to look for her. There we find Joel, four years old, hiding under the kitchen table. Clementine morphs into the woman that used to babysit Joel, as Joel's mother prepares to leave for the night. Joel pleads for his mother to simply look at him and acknowledge him. He turns to Clementine and says: "It's amazing how strong the urge to have her pick me up is." He's bemused by it, more than anything, but it's a pretty amazing little moment.
Finally, the movie addresses this notion: Are we destined to make the same choices over and over again? It's not so much an issue of whether our lives would turn out the same if we started over at the very beginning, but whether if we were to go back to the beginning of our relationships and start from there, things would turn out any different. If Jane and I went back to when we were not together, but still attending the same parties with the same crowds, would we still end up together? In the movie, we see this happen at least a couple times: People go back to the starting points of their relationships, and they end up in the same places.
Is there destiny? Can we really change ourselves? Even if we were granted the ability to start over, would we just end up in the same places? Looking back, given the mix of people that Jane and I knew, and given our personalities, it seems inevitable that we would have ended up together. Certainly, if we both went back to high school, we would not end up with each other. But put us in the mix of friends we had in the Twin Cities circa Summer of 1994, and I suspect our lives wouldn't look too much different than they do today.
The movie ends with two people who see a glimpse of the boredom and monotony and the pain, in addition to the joy, that they will likely endure as they move forward. Having made the decision to avoid that pain the first time, they are faced with another decision. They can choose again to forget the whole thing, literally, with the help of Lacuna. They can choose to avoid the pain, and the joy, and go their seperate ways with the resolve to remember where they have been.
Or, they can move on and enjoy the good parts, even while understanding there are bumps in the road ahead, and that their life will not be a fairy tale. In other words, they can live life like most of the rest of us do.
I won't tell you how it ends, of course. But I think they made the right choice.
See this movie.
11:34:12 AM 
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