The description of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a 'romantic comedy' is a gross underestimation of the prowess and impact of cerebral yet sensitive movie. Charlie Kaufman takes routine notions of love, relationships and memories, turns it on its head and takes us on a philosophical journey.
The premise of the story is relatively simple, introverted boy meet extroverted girl, opposites attract, eventually each gets sick of the others eccentricities and follies, want nothing to do with each other and break up. As break ups go, there is always an overpowering desire to forget, to attain a 'clean break' for a 'fresh start'. The film allows us to witness the procedure that Joel undergoes, motivated in part by a desire for revenge and sheer desperation, to forget Clementine as she forgot him. What plays out on screen is the atrophy of a relationship, in almost no order.
This is where Lacuna Inc. comes in, it promises as Mary says” to let people begin again. It's beautiful. You look at a baby and it's so fresh, so clean, so free. Adults, they’re like this mess of anger and phobias and sadness, hopelessness. And Howard just makes it go away." At first glance, it appears as though the film tries to glamorize this magical ability to forget an entire relationship; it is fraught with beautiful quotations that make the idea seem surreal and desirable.
"How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot?
The world forgetting, by the world forgot:
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd"
- A. Pope
"Blessed are the forgetful,
for they get the better even of their blunders"
-Nietzsche
But around the same time the Joel realizes he does not want to go through the procedure, the viewer recognizes that the movie serves to demystify the idea that forgetting certain parts or people would essentially change your life. And you realize this because even after the treatment, Joel and Clementine continue to be the same people, running around in circles, with the exact pattern of repetitive behaviors and notions and conceptions; Clementine continues to 'apply her personality in a paste', Joel continues to be shy and awkward. The most striking example of this is how Clementine repeats the lines "I’m not a concept, Joel. I’m just a fucked-up girl who is looking for my own peace of mind" at the beginning of her relationship with Joel. Neither sees any drastic change in their self-perception, and it obvious how they continue to be attracted to each other.
What then strikes the mind then is how many times have Joel and Clementine done this to each other? How many times could they have fallen in love, broken up, undergone the procedure only to start over again? That is perhaps the only purpose that the parallel story of the workers at Lacuna Inc. serves, to give us a definitive timeline and a crushing impossibility of them getting the procedure again. That, and as proof that Joel and Clementine are not exceptions to the inefficacy of the treatment.
The appeal of the movie is that this miraculous forgetting procedure is not the crux or point of the film. It could've gone into an entirely different tangent about the ethics and 'when scientists play god', but what it is a love story, and not science fiction. What Kaufman is probably trying to tell us is that even in a world where there is no such procedure (yet), our lives are circular, that we are just a series of repetitions, that every relationship is the replica of the previous one, that we are simply trapped; trapped by our own ideas of who we are.
I remember one "mathematician's God" concept, which says God is nothing but a ten dimensional object, as human beings can't go above three or rather four dimensions (time), they see a 3-dimension projection of God, which actually is any human being. The process of visualising a ten-dimensional obj. is tough, but ultimately its something like a series of repetitions.Actually it's all possible outcomes of a human life in all possible timeline. I probably came a long way from the subject & I won't try to explain the probabilistic approach of this timeline, but it's randomised & pre-determined. Which means, if we can go to the tenth dimension, we'll knnow all about this universe, what it was,is & will be. That's why it can be compared to God. Ultimately "we are simply trapped". Nice article. & it's my fav romantic movie. :)
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