Netflix Streamer: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

In every movie enthusiast's experience, there is always one film that tends to get away from you in one way or another. When you try to go rent it at the video store, it's not there, and as luck would have it the store only possesses just the one copy. My personal favourite is when that said movie is on television, but you find this out half an hour into its broadcast. Such a movie for me has always been Eternal Sunshine of  the Spotless Mind, a thoughtful film by Michael Gondry that explores the notion of memories. When I realised it was on Netflix a couple of months ago I was ecstatic, setting aside the chunk of free time necessary to watch and enjoy the film completely. Unfortunately, it just so happened that every free moment I chose to try and watch this film was right before bed, and so I would watch the opening seven minutes or so and assign it for another day- realising I was too tired to give the movie the attention it deserved. When I finally watched the film last night,  I felt like I had conquered my white whale, and found a fantastic film.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind finds Jim Carrey as the eternally awkward Joel Barish who has recently gotten out of a relationship with the free-spirited, and emotionally inconsistent Clementine,  played by Kate Winslet. Joel has an encounter with Clementine that would make Gotye proud, and soon finds out that she has undergone a procedure to remove him from her memory. Joel, upset and angered, decides to have the same procedure done, while we the audience, watch as Joel takes a last journey through all of his memories of her, both good and bad.

Jim Carrey taking Somebody That You Used to Know to a whole new level. 

Of course, the obvious conflict occurs- does Joel actually want to get rid of these memories? And it's exactly there that Gandry gets us thinking about our own lives. Almost everyone I know has had memories that are horrible, as well as experiences and people that we would rather forget. The question is what would we do if we had the chance to remove them? Even after the film was over, I pondered this question over and over again in my dreams. The answer everyone would give if asked this question in public would naturally be some stock explanation about how we are a product of our experiences. But I think that when one looks further, it becomes a much more difficult question.

For example, what if deleting some memories would lessen or completely remove an irrational fear within you? Most of such fears began with an event that took place so long ago that most of us do not remember it. If one's fear of dogs could be cured by the deletion of some memory that they themselves cannot recollect, then I am sure that it would be a popular procedure.

Of course, the film is not just about memories, and focuses in particular on romantic memories, and of relationships gone terribly wrong. These motifs affect all of the main characters in the movie, with even the bumbling employees that carry out the procedure (Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood), finding themselves embroiled in the dilemma.

As we follow Joel on his journey through his own memories, it's impossible not to feel a nostalgia for any experiences you might have had. Here, both Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet excel as they commit the mistakes you have seen yourself and others you know make so many times. It's hard not to feel the gentle pain of past and current failures as you watch Clementine offer advice instead of just listening, or see Joel attempt to fix the deeply flawed Clementine and get frustrated when it doesn't work. What makes this experience even more profound is that most of the film, including Joel's journey through his memories, is shot out of sequence. Although this is slightly confusing at first, Gondry handles this with an intentional roughness that makes the checkpoint "day number... " frames in 500 Days of Summer seem unnecessary. In fact such is the nature of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that the two films would probably make a fantastic pairing in the aftermath of a bad break-up.

In these winter months of celebration and thanksgiving, it is so easy for people to get depressed over the state of their lives compared to it's state a year ago. But movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind encourage us that whatever positive or negative experiences lie in store could just be meant to happen.