Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The world forgetting, by the world forgot How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.

Alexander Pope

Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

In the time travel that is memory, there are times we rather forget. Our brains are filled with these intrusive memories, or unwanted travel, to another time and place. Eventually, this withers with the passage of time, but for some, this erasure can’t come soon enough. So this movie, in the exploration of relationships and memory and trying to forget, well, it touches upon a very relatable and universal wish: would we have never met.

Would we have never met, this pain would go away. Would we have never met my problems would be solved. If only, if only, we had never met. Only, this wish is a death of someone or someplace pivotal in our minds. If we make this death wish, that memory we want to erase must have meant something to us worthy of killing, worthy of violence. So this answer of erasing someone from our minds is somehow a non-answer.

The movie even shows that Clem and Joel find each other in Montauk even after their memories of each other have been erased. That’s the sort of beauty of things, even when your mind forgets, the body keeps a score. Maybe this is a curse, after all.

But in a way it shows us, the viewer, that a spotless mind is not in fact sunshine. That sunshine may be healing after pain, not burying the pain. Wishing something away doesn’t mean it goes away.