- Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind themes movie#
- Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind themes license#
I’d be ripping out fundamental pages from my book of evolution.
If I were to erase partners from my memory, I’d not just be deleting spaces and private moments. Love cannot, and does not, exist in isolation.
Kaufman’s script, which culminates in the saddest happy ending ever written, in fact hints at the all-encompassing penetration of love. To remember her, he runs the risk of forgetting himself – the song his mother hums, the playground bullies, those rainy evenings. Joel lets Clementine invade his obscure childhood memories so that he can preserve some of his residual feelings.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind themes license#
That closure is the mind’s license to process heartbreak. That memories are not tangible images but intangible emotions. It counts on us knowing enough hurt to conclude that self-preservation is not a reversible condition. By now I have lived enough to recognise that the film wants us to scoff at its wishful mentality. In 2019, I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with the most spotted mind possible.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind themes movie#
I vowed to wipe out every memory of the movie from my pained mind. Would they, like us, keep finding one another till there was nothing left to find? A year later, we separated. Lacuna Inc is shown to disintegrate, which meant that another breakup would come with the rider of having to remember – and perhaps resent – each other. I thought the film was designed to remind us of the elastic umbilical cord that connects bitter lovers the thin line separating birth from rebirth was defined by the symbiotic equation between time elapsed and thoughts eroded. Here, Joel’s inability to get over Clementine resonated for a different reason: The comfort of familiarity transcending the irrationality of remembrance. A year of forgetting, but not forgetting enough. I was about to rekindle an old romance a year after it first imploded. I had by then acquainted myself with the inevitability of sunshine being – unfailingly, eternally – followed by sunset. When I rewatched the film in 2009, the heart was fragile. But every new experience apart erased a little more of our oldness together. Lacuna Inc.’s memory-erasing procedure – and Joel’s brain battling to retain his happy memories with Clementine – stood for the time we spent away from one another in faraway lands, battling hard to not forget each other, while defying the distractions of growing up. The life-cycle of Joel and Clementine’s companionship reflected our fleeting bouts of intense proximity there were ups, downs, newness, nowness. In my head, the idea of two lovers repeatedly gravitating towards each other despite the promise of doomed fate morphed into the tale of a desperate couple repeatedly visiting each other to sustain their slender shot at togetherness. Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine’s (Kate Winslet) story of resorting to a memory-erasing procedure to move on from one another, then, became an allegory for my perception of physical distance. It was my first – and I hoped, last – romantic relationship. When I first watched this film in 2004, I was in long-distance puppy love.
Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by Charlie Kaufman, epitomises this shape-shifting power of perspective. Like memories, the best of films count on time to humanize, and personalise, their long-term worth. It expands – and succumbs to the glorious vagaries of – time. But a truly timeless film doesn’t disregard time. That is, the films will be of a single stature, irrespective of when they are viewed. The term suggests that great movies will remain the same – great – across eras, civilizations, cultures. For a medium that thrives on the artistic compression of time, it baffles me that “timeless” is the adjective of choice used to describe the finest of cinema.
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