Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Talking Back to Science?

The following review originally was posted on cinekklesia on June 5, 2005.

Perhaps art (or the experience of art) is destined to be a circular exercise, constantly reverting back to itself for re-interpretation. When I first watched Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), I was in a depressed state, and the movie touched off lots of emotional buttons, reminding me of my numerous relational failures. Having just watched it a second time, I now have some analytic distance, and my comments will reflect that (if I had written these words after my first viewing, you would have been forced to sift through a bunch of emotional blather).

So, how is this circular? First, let's look at the film. Jim Carrey plays Joel Barish, a man depressed by his bad fortune with women; he's so down and out on Valentine's Day that he decides to ditch work and take the train to a deserted beach town named Montauk. He has no idea why. Just a lark, just to get away. While there, he meets Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), a blue-haired free spirit who spends her days working as a "book slave" for the local Barnes & Noble (and who spends her free time drinking lots of hard liquor). Joel and Clementine make an odd couple, but they fall in love and subsequently spend much of their time shouting at each other (aah, the joy). (Note that I am twisting this plot summary for the sake of convenience; the movie is not nearly so sequential. When Joel and Clementine first meet and when they really first meet are actually...different events.)

During the first third of the movie, we realize that another party has entered their relationship, namely Lacuna, Inc., a clinic that promises to erase any memory of any person — of course, its assumption is that clients will want to erase memories of old romances, affairs, and even marriages gone awry.

We learn that Clementine has opted for the procedure so that boring, conservative Joel can be erased from her life. When Joel inadvertently discovers this, he also schedules an appointment so that the immature, impulsive Clementine will cease to exist in his mind. However, during Joel's procedure, his subconscious (or is it his conscious?) state realizes that he doesn't want to forget Clementine after all. Many good memories are wrapped up with the bad, and he's willing to live with the latter in order to save the former. Much of the film is a trip through Joel's mind, as he wages a neurological struggle against the medical technicians scouring his brain. (We learn that these technicians have their own host of issues regarding memory and erasure.)

The message of Eternal Sunshine is pretty clear. Namely, relationships are complicated, they have good and bad elements, and we learn from both our positive and negative experiences with loved ones. Since we cannot extricate only the negative bits of a relationship, and since our identities are defined largely by our interactions with others, then we do ourselves a disservice if we try to erase completely our experience with any given person. We, in fact, erase a part of ourselves.

(Thus, while I would have preferred to erase my previous depressive state—when I watched this movie for the first time—Michel Gondry would remind me that such a state makes up a small part of who I am; erasing it would prove ultimately detrimental. Hence, the circularity: I had my own little "Eternal Sunshine" experience while watching Eternal Sunshine!)

In a tangential way, this movie also touches upon new scientific realities coming down the pike. This past week, I was listening to a radio interview with scientists who recently published an article regarding the neurobiology of falling in love. They argued that our initial experience of "love" affects us neurologically in the same manner as hunger, thirst, or drug "addiction." Their data stem from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) performed on subjects who self-claimed that they were in the midst of romance (i.e., they were unable to stop thinking about their beloved).

As neurology marches forward, it appears that there exist fewer mysteries out of reach. If we can explain love on a neurological level, then who needs poetry? What's there to ponder or discuss? We just need to look at the data. It appears that after its relatively brief fling with post-modernism, the Western world is moving back to its Enlightenment mold, one in which science becomes the dominant public language and where mysteries are not sources of wonderment but mere problems to solve, hurdles to overcome.

Lacuna, Inc., embodies this trend: bad memories do not have to be sources of emotional pain or existential questioning; rather, they are mere problems (annoyances, really) to be eradicated so that we can go on living the lives we were "meant" to live: happy, productive, always forward-looking, never wasteful.

Joel Barish, however, points us in a different direction. Even though neurology can explain why he's feeling so down and even though it can offer him a relatively easy solution, he decides that he would rather take his chances with the messiness of relationships and the pain of bad memories. His choice mirrors what many of us probably will face in our own lives. There is nothing inherently wrong with knowing how we function neurologically; however, what actions we take with that knowledge will have to be decided through prayer, Scripture, and purposeful reflection. Neurology perhaps can tell us "what is." What should be done lies beyond the MRI.