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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a 2004 romance/science fiction film that explores themes of love, attraction, and memory.

It is a Focus Features film written by Charlie Kaufman, taken from an idea given to Michel Gondry by Pierre Bismuth. Pierre is a French performance artist who, according to Charlie Kaufman, mailed a note to his friends explaining that he'd had them erased from his memory, to see what their reactions would be. One of these friends was director Michel Gondry, who took the slip to Charlie and asked him to work out a story. The resulting screenplay was written by Kaufman and directed by Gondry.

Set largely in Rockville Centre and Montauk, Long Island, and in New York City, the film stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet and includes supporting players Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Tom Wilkinson. It opened in the United States on March 19, 2004.

The movie's title is taken from a line from Alexander Pope's poem Eloisa to Abelard, spoken in the movie by Dunst's character:

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.

Plot summary
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) meet for what they think is the first time on a Long Island Rail Road train from Montauk to Rockville Centre. They are unaccountably drawn to each other despite radically different personalities.

As it turns out, they were once lovers, but after two years their relationship was in a decline. Clementine decided to break up with Joel and hired a New York firm called Lacuna, Inc., to erase all memories of him from her brain. Joel was disconsolate upon finding out what she had done and decided to undergo the procedure himself. However, while having his memories erased, his subconscious rebelled, and Joel realized he wanted to hang on to his memories of her after all. A good portion of the film takes place in Joel's mind as he tries to figure out how to preserve some memory of his love for Clementine. We watch their love and courtship go in reverse, as the memories are slowly erased while they both try their best to resist the procedure and hide.

Toward the end of the film we realize that the meeting on the train takes place chronologically after Joel and Clementine had their memories erased of each other, and that it is in fact the second time they are meeting for the "first" time.

Music from the film
The soundtrack album for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was released by Hollywood Records on March 16, 2004. It features the score, composed by Los Angeles musician Jon Brion, as well songs from artists E.L.O. ("Mr. Blue Sky"), The Polyphonic Spree ("Light & Day," "It's the Sun"), Beck (a cover of the Korgis' "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometimes"), The Willowz ("Something," "I Wonder"), and Don Nelson ("Some Kinda Shuffle," "Nola's Bounce").

Movie details
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Linear chronology of events depicted in the film
Sometime during or before 2002, Lacuna's Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and receptionist Mary Svevo (Kirsten Dunst) have an affair. When it goes bad, Dr. Mierzwiak convinces Mary to have her memory of their relationship erased but does not undergo the procedure himself.

During 2002, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) meet at a beach party in Montauk, New York to which he has been invited by his friends Rob (David Cross) and Carrie (Jane Adams). Joel and Clem sneak into a beach house together, but he gets cold feet and leaves her there. This is the very last memory of Joel's that we see being erased.

Sometime later, Joel approaches Clementine at the Barnes & Noble where she works and asks her out. (This is the scene in the film where all the books' covers and spines are erased and turn white.) She accepts, and they become a couple. At some point, they take a trip up to the frozen Charles River in Boston and lie on the ice together. (This is the scene in which Joel tells Clementine that he is "just happy." It must take place sometime in late 2002 or early 2003 because the weather is cold enough for the river to have frozen.) This is the first time they have ever been there together, but it is the second time in the course of the movie that the audience sees them there together.

Sometime in late 2003, Joel and Clementine's relationship begins to take a turn for the worse (in the movie, this is the scene in the Chinese restaurant, where they are the "dining dead").

Sometime in January or early February 2004, Joel and Clementine have a nasty fight at the flea market. They go home and eat Chinese takeout. She gets bored, goes out without him, and comes back at 3 a.m. very drunk and having damaged Joel's car. They have another nasty fight, and she storms out.

Sometime after this, but before Valentine's Day, Clementine gets Joel erased from her memory by Lacuna. Patrick (Elijah Wood), one of Lacuna's technicians, uses the mementos of her relationship with Joel that she has surrendered to Lacuna in an effort to seduce her.

Sometime closer to Valentine's Day, Joel goes to the bookstore, where she fails to recognize him, and he sees her kissing Patrick. He never actually "sees" Patrick's face, and instead simply notices her kissing someone, and thusly subsequent memories of this provide him merely with a faceless person.

Just before Valentine's Day, Joel arranges with Lacuna to get his memory erased of Clementine. The night of the procedure, February 13, Mary learns of her failed relationship with Dr. Mierzwiak.

The same night, Patrick and Clementine visit the frozen Charles, where Patrick tries and fails to reenact the magic of the night that Clementine describes in a love letter to Joel, which Patrick found in Joel's mementos of the relationship.

Valentine's Day 2004, Joel wakes up with his memory erased. He decides to skip work, takes the Long Island Rail Road out to Montauk and (re)meets Clementine there. They go back to her place, have a few drinks, and Joel leaves with her number, promising to call her. When he does, they make a date to go to the frozen Charles the next day (February 15), which they do. (This is the first time we see them on the ice together though it is the second time they are there chronologically.) Meanwhile, Mary has quit her job and starts mailing out the memory files and tapes that she stole from the office to Lacuna's clients (including Clementine and Joel).

The morning after their date on the Charles (i.e., February 16), Joel drives Clementine back to her apartment. She asks if she can come over to his place to sleep, and then slips inside to gather some toiletries. While she's inside, Patrick approaches Joel.

Clementine picks up her mail (which includes the file that Mary sent to her the morning of Valentine's Day) and Joel and Clementine drive off. They listen to the tape of her talking to Dr. Mierzwiak about Joel prior to her erasure. They both get freaked out, and Joel drives Clementine back to her place and makes her get out of the car.

Agitated, Clementine drives herself to Joel's apartment. She finds him there listening to the tape he made about her, which he found in his mail upon getting home. She listens for a while, but is hurt by some of the things that he says about her on it and decides to leave. Joel follows her into the hallway and asks her to wait. Clementine does, but tells Joel that their relationship is bound to fail. Joel shrugs and says "Okay" in a tone which indicates "I don't give a damn about what might happen. I want to be with you now." Clementine feels the same way. Both of them begin to laugh over the absurdity of the situation and with relief that they aren't going to walk away from true love.

Deleted and moved scenes
The shooting script--which has been published as a book (ISBN 1557046107)--and early drafts [1] (http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/spotless.txt) contain a fair amount of material that was either left on the cutting room floor or never shot. A major change that came in editing was that the scene in the beginning with Joel and Clementine on the frozen Charles (the second time they'd been there chronologically) got moved from near the end of the movie to the beginning. (According to Charlie Kaufman, this was done to make sure the audience liked Clementine, as without it, their initial impression of her, based upon scenes from the end of Joel and Clem's first relationship, might have been too negative.) Dropped scenes included dialogue on the train, scenes with Joel and Naomi (the girlfriend he had before Clementine), and scenes showing Joel and Clementine on their first "date" date. (Some of these were used as memory flashbacks right after Clementine says goodbye to Joel at the crumbling beach house toward the end of the movie.)

Frames of reference
There were numerous frames of reference in Eternal Sunshine.

One was reality, shown in the group of scenes at the beginning and end of the movie that take place just before, on, and after Valentine's Day.

The rest of the scenes could be broadly classified as taking place in Joel's memory, but these can be subdivided into:

Memories that Joel gets to relive as if they were really happening (e.g., the date on the frozen Charles).
Memories in which Joel narrates in a voiceover (e.g., the "dining dead" meal).
Memories which Joel watches take place and with which he can and does interact.
Memories in which Joel is a participant but can "break character" and change the way the scene turns out.
Memories in which Joel relives various moments of his childhood with Clementine in the place of one of the people in the memory.
Memories that had been erased and lingered on in a degraded form (e.g., the faceless beings in the Lacuna offices).
Some events that actually took place during Joel's erasure (e.g., the technicians Stan [Mark Ruffalo] and Patrick's conversation about Patrick's seduction of Clementine) bleed through to memories Joel is reliving.

The end
Charlie Kaufman made it very clear in an interview that the story ended with the final scene of Joel and Clementine in the hallway, in which they had agreed to give their relationship one more try. He said it was up to individual members of the audience to decide what would have ultimately happened.

There is much debate as to what the triple-played scene of Joel and Clem playing in the snow right before the credits means. In at least one interview, Michel Gondry has said that he wanted the scene of them playing in the snow to loop throughout the credits. This desire apparently sprang from the initial intent that the movie end with the depressing revelation that Joel and Clementine spent the rest of their lives meeting, breaking up, and getting erased, only to meet again. However, Gondry said that this was not done, because it would ultimately detract from the credits.

Joel's childhood
The Clementine in Joel's memory suggests to his subconscious self that he somehow hide her in other memories in which she did not belong, the idea being that this would somehow enable Joel to remember her after the procedure was over. Joel therefore conjures up memories from his early childhood (the scenes in his mother's kitchen), and when this fails, she urges him to hide her "in his humiliation" (the scene in which his mother walks in on him masturbating and the scene where some bullies pressured him into hitting a dead bird with a hammer). This does cause problems with the memory-erasing procedure, and leads Dr. Mierzwiak to come over to Joel's apartment to help Stan, which leads to Mary's discovery of her past relationship with the doctor.

Mary Svevo
When we first see Mary, the movie shows in a variety of ways that while she is involved with Stan, she has a crush on Dr. Mierzwiak. Late in the movie on the night Joel's memories are erased, Mary makes her feelings known to the doctor, and they end up kissing. Mrs. Mierzwiak shows up and in the ugly scene that follows, Mary learns that she had had a relationship with Mierzwiak, and she let him erase her memory of it. Devastated, Mary goes to the Lacuna office and listens to her tape. (In an early version of the script, there is a bit of dialogue in which we learn that Mary had an abortion in the wake of the affair.) Mary clears out her desk, steals all Lacuna's files and tapes, and mails them to their clients, on the grounds that the procedure is morally wrong.

Details over which various people have obsessed
Did Kate Winslet dye her hair for this movie?

Supposedly, she did not: all of the color changes were accomplished with wigs.

Was Clementine using drugs on the train?

No. She was using some sort of nasal decongestant inhaler. (The scene was set during winter, and she had been outside in the cold; also, she had been crying a lot recently.) There is no suggestion in the scripts that she was a drug addict, though there are several references to her drinking too much. Some say that depicting Clementine as a drug addict would have substantially darkened the movie and made her much less of a character whom the audience could like.

What was with all her different hair colors?

They served to establish that Clementine was a flaky sort of girl. It has also been speculated that they served as a guide for viewers to understand what was going on ("Blue Ruin" indicated recent events, and the other reflected other times during Joel and Clementine's relationship).

Who or what is "Huckleberry Hound"?

Huckleberry Hound was a television cartoon character who was popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His signature song was "Clementine." In the movie, Joel tells Clementine when they first meet that his favorite toy as a child was his Huckleberry Hound doll. During his conversation on the train from Montauk, he neither knew who Huckleberry Hound was or what the song was, because of his memory erasure--Huckleberry Hound was too intimately tied up with his memories of Clementine to be spared in the procedure.

How did Joel and Clem know to meet each other in Montauk?

In the last scene from Joel's memory, when he is reliving the night he and Clementine broke into the beach house, Clementine tells him to meet her there. We can assume that this instruction lingered in Joel's mind and was the impulse for him to suddenly ditch work and go out to Montauk. As for Clementine, this was never made clear. There is a scene in which she suggests to Patrick that they go there, so Montauk was definitely on her mind before she (re)meets Joel. It may also have been a special place for her when she needed to go think things over, much like the frozen Charles River was a place she enjoyed frequenting.

What was the symbolism behind the skeleton picture?

Joel painted the picture of Clementine in a skeleton costume sometime when their relationship was still a happy one. When he was ridding his apartment of mementos of her, he apparently overlooked it. At the end of the movie, he finds it after searching his apartment post-erasure for evidence of their relationship, after learning about it when he receives his file from Mary. Although it depicts Clementine with "Red Menace" hair (it was "Blue Ruin" when they [re]met), he recognized her, and she recognized herself when he showed it to her.

There has been some debate over the meaning of the picture, in which Clementine is depicted as some sort of skeletal escort of the dead on a boat. This could be a reference to the River Styx or Lethe, where souls lose their memories after drinking from the water. The scene of the picture was inside a bottle, so some observers have intuited that the picture was like a "message in a bottle" to Joel about his and Clementine's love.

Why is Clementine called "Tangerine"?

Joel nicknamed Clementine that when she dyed her hair to match her orange sweatshirt. ("Clementine" is also a variety of tangerine.)

How did Joel realize that Patrick was trying to seduce Clementine?

Joel catches on in stages. When he sees Clementine, who doesn't recognize him, at the bookstore, Patrick shows up and kisses her (and she calls him by name). During his erasure, the sound of Stan calling Patrick by name bleeds through. He also hears Patrick tell Stan that he has fallen in love with "the girl with the potatoes" and has stolen her panties. Later that night, the sound of Patrick calling Clementine "Tangerine" bleeds through into his memories. Joel realizes Patrick is trying to seduce Clementine using the diary entries and mementos he surrendered to Lacuna before the erasure (as well as those Clementine gave up before she underwent the procedure).

How did Joel's car get damaged?

Clementine was driving drunk and ran it into a fire hydrant the night she and Joel had their big argument and she stormed out.

Did Joel slit his throat in one scene?

No. He pretended to slash his throat and used a ketchup packet or something similar for the blood, in an attempt to get Clementine's attention.

What was the elephant parade about?

The scene with the circus elephants that plays while Mary quotes from "Eloisa to Abelard" is a pleasant memory that Joel had of Clementine. According to Kaufman, the parade was just something that the cast and crew happened upon when they were out filming one night and took advantage of, the appropriateness of the saying "elephants never forget" being a coincidence. Indeed, if you look carefully you can see a woman behind Joel waving at the camera briefly.

What was the voice on the wind at the beginning of the movie?

The voice heard when Joel is poking around the beach house at Montauk was that of Clementine from the night two years before when she and Joel sneaked into it after meeting at the beach party, a relic of the erasure.

What was the deal with the car that fell from the sky?

A common explanation is that the car that fell from the sky was an indication that Joel's memory of the time when he was trying to get Clementine to let him drive her home was falling apart.

What was up with the potato people?

They were another device to establish Clementine as being a bit eccentric by giving her an unusual hobby. If you pay close attention to Joel's apartment in the scenes that take prior to his erasure, you'll see two of these potatoes on his TV set. They are dressed up just like Joel and Clementine were on the night they first lay together on the frozen Charles.

How did Clementine realize Patrick was a creep?

The movie did not make this absolutely clear. However, there were three scenes in which it was shown on some level that he was making her uncomfortable. First, there was the suspicious look that she gave him right after he gave her the Valentine's Day gift that Joel had planned to give her. Second, when Clementine and Patrick were on the frozen Charles, she had a bad reaction to him saying the exact same thing that Joel said to her--pre-erasure--the first time that Joel and Clementine were on the Charles. Finally, when Clementine and Patrick were driving back from Boston and Patrick told her that she was "nice," she had a hostile reaction. Together, these scenes imply that Clementine was experiencing some sort of "deja vu" with Patrick. As for why she had an extremely hostile reaction to him right after getting out of Joel's car, the movie did not make clear. However, it would be logical to assume that in looking at her file, she saw Patrick's name as one of the "erasers" and realized what was going on.

Why did this movie get an "R" rating in the U.S.?

There are a few sexual references, three characters are shown smoking marijuana in several scenes, and there is a fleeting bit of rear male nudity. However, it was the approximately thirty uses of the "F-word" that guaranteed the R rating — any film with more than two or three uses of that word automatically gets one.

Why was Joel confused about wearing pajamas?

At the very beginning of the movie, when we see Joel get up out of bed, he stares --with a confused expression on his face-- at his pajama sleeve. He then kicks off his blanket, and we see he is wearing blue pajamas. In the scene immediately following the credits (about 17 minutes into the movie), the movie shows us that Joel apparently bought the pajamas the night before the first scene of the movie. This was before he had his memory erased. When he woke up, his memory had been erased. Therefore, he had no memory of buying the pajamas and was surprised to be wearing them.

What was the cassette that Joel threw out of his car just after the credits finished?

The cassette simply had music on it. Apparently, one of the songs reminded Joel about his relationship with Clementine, so he threw it away. Since this happened before Mary mailed out all of Lacuna's files and tapes to Mierzwiak's patients, there is no way that the cassette could have been either of the ones that Joel or Clementine made denouncing each other immediately prior to having their memories erased.

Quotations from Eternal Sunshine

Joel: Sand is overrated. It's just tiny, little rocks.
Joel: Why do I fall in love with every woman I see that shows me the least bit of attention?
Clementine: Drink up young man. It'll make the whole seduction part less repugnant.
Joel: Valentine's Day is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.
Clementine: You're not a stalker or anything, right?
Joel: I'm not a stalker. YOU'RE the one that talked to me, remember?
Clementine: That is the oldest trick in the stalker book.
Joel: Really? There's a stalker book? Great, I gotta read that one.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Eternal sunshine".