Let me set the scene for you. A little mood music, please.
It is March 19, 2004. It’s freezing out. It’s a Friday night, but the theatre isn’t packed, because this is a ten o’clock show. The couples have all caught the early screenings of 50 First Dates and all the other residual, month-old Valentine’s Day romantic comedies, so the Tenplex actually looks a little lonely. That’s fine, though: it reflects my mood. Three months prior, my long-term girlfriend and I broke up. I lost it a little after that, and moved into my mom’s attic. I am twenty. I am depressed. I am heartbroken. A lonely movie theatre is just what I need.
I walk in to the theatre and see trailers (no joke, I can recite them from rote memory, that’s how vivid this all is) for The Door in the Floor (looks kinda interesting), Garden State (puke), and a strange Fandango ad with brown paper bag hand-puppets. I just want to watch my damn movie. The screen finally fades in to Jim Carrey’s face, asleep, and then a low Jon Brion-orchestrated score follows. I’m already feeling my spirits rise, and then I hear the first line of dialogue, as Joel Barish writes in his journal: “Random thoughts on Valentine’s Day, 2004: today is a holiday made up by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap…”
End scene.
I’m lucky that, of all the films about heartbreak I could have become obsessed with (I was in a very vulnerable place), Eternal Sunshine is the one that came out that year. It’s far from an embarrassing film to obsess over. It was almost universally praised, won the AFI Award for Movie of the Year, was nominated for six BAFTAs and two Oscars (and won—thank God—Best Screenplay, though it’s an absolute fucking sin against humanity that Carrey didn’t get a nom). But even with all that praise, all those objective kudos letting me know I wasn’t insane to like the thing, there was something more personal going on.
As a very young and recently-dumped college student, Eternal Sunshine became something like fetish-porn for me for about half a year there. I saw it fourteen times (!) in the theatres, and have probably watched it about four times a year on average since. I immediately bought the poster afterward (An enormous picture of Carrey’s face, with the eyes torn out, over which it says “I’m Fine Without You.”). At a time when I never thought I’d fall in love again (I was twenty, what do you want from me?), I fell head over heels for every second of it. I fell in love with Charlie Kaufman’s mindfuck narrative structure, the way it seemed to throw every scene of the film into a blender and hit frappe, and yet at the same time how said structure seemed totally to match the visceral experiences of the characters’ own jarred memories. I fell in love with Michel Gondry’s visual tricks, the way he kept up the dream-like feeling of the inside of Joel Barish’s head doing nothing more than (for instance) flipping the books in Barnes and Noble so the pages face out instead of the spines, or double-tracked two pieces of dialogue over one another, or made a floodlight shine on Joel and Clementine on a frosty blue lake so that it felt like nothing else around them existed. I fell in love with every single performance in the film, from Winslet to Ruffalo to David Cross and Jane Adams’ small roles as Joel’s friends. I took every person I could convince to go to see it with me, and on nights when no one would come, I went alone.
It’s easy for me (and for you, reading this) to assume that I was simply biased, conditioned to like a film about heartbreak in a year that mine first was broken. But of course Eternal Sunshine has much more to offer it than emotional balm for the lonely (though it also offers that, which is a totally valid function for a film to perform). It is, I think, the only American film to properly and wholly handle the subject of Modern Romance. For anyone who hasn’t seen it—and if you haven’t, just stop reading this right now and go rent it, or Netflix it, or whatever it is you kids do these days—Joel Barish (Carrey) and Clementine have broken up after a long romance, and it wasn’t pretty. As a result, Clementine takes the drastic, impulsive measure of having Joel erased from her memory via a new technology created by Howard Mierzwiak at Lacuna Inc. Joel, hurt by Clementine’s compulsion to eradicate him completely, decides to get rid of her, too, and signs up for the same procedure. We watch as their relationship is deleted, scene by scene, in reverse order (which makes total sense, of course; Alzheimer’s victims lose their memories this way as well—plus there’s the added truth that we remember what is most painful first, and the quieter moments last). But halfway through the procedure and faced with some lovely times spent with Clementine, Joel decides he would not like to erase her after all, and tries to wake himself up before she’s gone completely.
If that summarization makes the film sound confusing or avant-garde, I assure you it is not. Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant screenplay keeps everything totally accessible, so that you never feel lost in time or place, and you’re free to fully involve yourself in the characters’ emotional trials. Probably his best decision is to allow Joel to take an active role in his memories, so that we aren’t just watching them disappear but watching Joel react to them, inside of them. In one memory, Clementine tearfully admits that she thought she was ugly as a girl, and would scream at a doll, who she named Clementine, to be pretty. Joel holds her and assures her she’s pretty, and she begs him never to leave her—and of course, by then, they’ve already broken up. “Please, Mierzwiak, let me keep this memory. Just this one,” Joel pleads, but no one can hear him. Again and again, our hearts are broken as we recognize Joel’s mistake in trying to get rid of his memories simply because they may be painful.
This lesson is really why the movie ends up being brilliant, and why it isn’t just about relationships. Who hasn’t wished, at some point, that they could forget something painful from the past, so that they could live a healthier, more functional life? Not just a break up, but anything: parents’ divorce, death, bullying, humiliation? How often, if you’re the kind of person who thinks about death a lot (like me), have you wished you could be totally unaware of the fact that you’ll die? How often have you wished you could unknow something that you know?
But the movie makes the (correct) argument that simplifying ourselves, dialing back to when we’re little kids without knowledge of the Big Bad World, isn’t the answer. That becoming aware of the horrible things that happen in the world may suck, but that along with that knowledge comes the knowledge of a lot of great things, too. You can’t fear death unless you’ve ever appreciated life. You can’t lament the wars on the news unless you’ve enjoyed being educated enough to understand it. And you can’t feel heartbroken about a relationship unless you knew love in the first place. “You’re going to find something you don’t like about me,” Clementine says, arguing that they shouldn’t date. “You’ll find something you don’t like and you’ll want to leave. And I’ll get bored with you, and feel trapped, because that’s what happens with me.” Joel thinks for a beat. “Okay,” he says, just before the credits roll. That’s what Joel learns in the film, and it’s a valuable lesson, one all-too-seldom learned, or at least headed, by yours truly, who still, even to this day, has to watch those opening scenes every time he gets hurt.
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks