h2>Dating : Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind — A Timeless Masterpiece
The idea of erasing memory of one who has hurt you might at first sounds brilliant especially when you just went through a massive terrible heart break. But heart break is a funny thing, it causes you pain without an actual event that injure your body. It doesn’t makes you bleed, but it hurts as if you are bleeding to death.
Memory is perhaps the main source of the pain in heart break. You remember beautiful things you used to have that in present time was gone. You remember you were hopeful for things that did not happen. So if memory is the culprit in heart break, perhaps if we can erase our memory of someone that have hurt us, we won’t be hurting anymore.
Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind captured that idea beautifully. Of how you could ‘cure’ your broken heart by erasing the memory of your lover. Of how you could ‘undo’ your pain by forgetting. You could erase you ex lover from your memory, but you could not choose to only erase the bad memories, you have to erase everything about him/her. As erasing only the bad things and retain the good ones will only leave you to long for those beautiful moments of you together and hurt you even more.
The story of Clamentine and Joel is the story of every lovers who have loved with all their hearts even though they know how exhausting and vulnerable a relationship could be.
Clamentine interpret love as excitement and spontaneous things. She could fall in love instantly and carelessly. She thought that love should be full of colors and rainbows. Once the relationship felt plain and boring, she wanted to free herself from it. She even went the extra mile to erase Joel, the one she was madly in love with. Clam was impulsive. She changed her hair anytime she got a change of mood. She was unstable and unpredictable.
Joel was the exact opposite of Clam. He was calm and quiet. He was kind, careful and calculative. He read a lot and spend most of his time thinking. As two different poles of magnet that attracts each other, Joel and Clam was drawn to each other from the first time they met, and their other ‘first time’ after they both erased their memory of each other.
At some point in their relationship Clam thought how she was started to be ‘infected’ with Joel’s dullness. Through out the relationship, she tried to turn Joel to be more like her yet she was the one who turn into Joel. She got upset with herself and impulsively decided to erase everything about Joel. When Joel found out how Clam did not recognize him anymore as she had erased him from her memory, he was heart broken. He wanted to revenge what Clam had did to him, so he also decided to sign in for the memory erasing program.
Right after they both erased their memory, they started to miss something they didn’t even remember. They felt there was something in their life unable to be explained, like when Joel, the well planed guy, impulsively jumped into a train to Montauk. He didn’t know why he suddenly had an urge to go there, but he did it anyway. Joel’s instinct had somehow pushed him to go back to the place where he first met Clam. While Clam who just had a fight with her rebound boyfriend also decided to go to Montauk. There in Montauk, once again they had their second first meeting and soon be drawn to each other again.
The idea of erasing memory was tragically and romantically appealing. It would make heart break much easier. But erasing memory is a curing intervention, not prevention.
You could still fall in love to the same person that you have had tried so hard to forget just like how Joel and Clam were instantly head over heels with each other all over again, even after they had erased everything about themselves.
It was romantic how they could both fall in love once again despite the odds and it was ironic how they have gone so far only to go back to where they started. Perhaps for Joel and Clam, it would feel like having everything finally fit to its places again and the puzzle of their life begin to make sense. But, once they have almost finished solving the puzzles, it was the moment to hurt and erase each other again.
After its first release fifteen years ago, this movie is still the best romantic film I have ever seen. How the idea was translated in a non linear story and how the color of Clam hair could be the guide for the movie timeline were absolutely brilliant. The surreal world that Michel Gondry created to describe Joel’s mind was weird, uncommon yet so beautiful. Until today, when I watched any romantic film I could not help but compare to Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. It is indeed a timeless masterpiece.
