This article contains spoilers for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004)
“Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.” This Friedrich Nietzsche quote has lingered in my mind since I finished the 2004 cult classic “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” After the long-anticipated Ariana Grande album “Eternal Sunshine” was released last Friday, many fans pointed out that this film clearly inspired the album. After resonating with the album upon first listening, I decided to watch the movie to soak in the full effect.
The plot follows a couple whose relationship has failed and who both opt to completely erase the other from their memories through a scientific procedure. This concept is notably present on the album in the music video for “we can’t be friends (wait for your love),” where Ariana’s character Peaches (a nod to the movie’s protagonist Clementine) undergoes the same procedure. We witness each memory as it fades and changes to not include her ex-lover. I happened to stumble upon the film following a significant loss in my life and found the questions it poses surrounding the dissolution of love particularly poignant. Is it better to avoid the pain of a breakup if it means forgetting every loving memory you’ve gained along the way? Does avoiding painful memories trap us in a cycle of forgetting why the relationship ended in the first place?
The movie does a great job of conveying the depth of negative emotions after a breakup and is an excellent representation of how to process old memories one at a time. It begins with Joel, played by Jim Carrey, meeting Clementine, played by Kate Winslet. They embark on a beautiful relationship together, shown through several vignettes, that comes to a screeching halt after a particularly nasty fight one night. While Joel is trying to convince Clementine to work things out, he finds a letter that tells him Clementine has erased him from her memory with an experimental new procedure for the heartbroken. Beside himself, Joel vengefully insists on doing the same. The bulk of the movie is us inside Joel’s mind as he lies unconscious, and the doctors erase Clementine one memory at a time. They show us beautifully intimate and vulnerable moments alongside extremely nasty fights where they seem completely incompatible. At some point, Joel changes his mind and wants to undo the procedure, which leads to him and Clementine running through random memories to outrun the doctors, though their effort is futile.
After they have both erased each other, they meet again, seemingly by chance. It is then that a receptionist at the doctor’s office has a revelation that it is a horrible procedure to forget one’s past loves. She mails the couple their file to reveal the truth of what has happened and how rocky their relationship and the eventual breakup were. The couple decides they still want to get back together, even at the risk of getting hurt again and knowing they may be wrong for each other.
Many of the opinions I have heard surrounding this movie say either that it is super romantic and gives people hope or that it is the story of a toxic couple stuck in a never-ending cycle. In my eyes, it is neither. My main takeaway from this film is that people can endure so much pain and heartbreak that they want their memories erased entirely, yet when they weigh their loss against the love they experienced, they are still willing to try again. This is a commentary on how elastic our hearts are in the sense that we can experience horrible heartbreaks and still risk doing it all again to rediscover love. This means the love is worth the pain, and the memories are not meant to be erased. Our memories play an indispensable role in shaping who people become. If we deny them the ability to shape us, we will stay in denial forever and never evolve. How could we ever know what to seek in future partners, how to spot red flags and how to be better partners if we avoided ever grieving? Pain is an integral part of the human experience, and avoiding it forever would leave us all stagnant in our emotional development.
I also took away the idea that a relationship’s ending doesn’t have to be considered a failure or a waste of time as much rhetoric surrounding heartbreak would lead us to believe. Maybe loss and disconnection are how we discover who we really are to one another without rose-colored glasses. This can lead to us making informed decisions on how to move forward, either separately or, in some cases, through reconciliation. How can you look into someone’s role in your life unbiased until you experience life without them and fully take in their absence?
Circling back to the quote I began with, I don’t believe the forgetful gets the better end of the stick. Maybe they avoid the initial ache of loss, but they also rob themselves of feeling deeply and moving forward with lessons to better inform their life choices. This will leave them making the same mistakes rather than moving towards happiness and with the inability to eventually look back on their loving memories with joy. Someone’s permanency does not define their importance.
I would recommend this movie to everyone, especially those processing a breakup. Art such as this movie and the album it would inspire two decades later serves as a powerful catharsis to move us through difficult times. Isn’t it beautiful to think that someone made a movie based on the powerful feeling of heartache and that 20 years later, someone else experiencing the same thing used it to make even more beautiful art for us to listen to in our melancholy? I like to consider the universality of the experience and how the vast majority of people around us have gone through it. As halting as heartache can feel, it is essential to reflect on how universally people recover and move on to brighter futures.