Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: 20 years on

Memory and the meaning of suffering.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A coupe sit on outdoor steps against a blue sky. One holds a plate and the other looks towards them.

Carrey and Winslet as Joel and Clementine.

Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out in 2004. Twenty years on, its stubborn insistence that the memory of pain gives meaning to our lives is as relevant as ever.

I first watched Gondry’s cult classic earlier this year, in the midst of recovering from postnatal PTSD. When we are faced with heartbreak, it can be easy to wish that we could retreat from painful memories, hiding them away until the initial pang has seemingly died down. That was my experience, at least. But I quickly learnt that the traumatic memory of my daughter’s birth would continue to resurface until I processed it and accepted it as part of my life. Just so, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind teaches us that being vulnerable to suffering is a gift, that suffering itself is necessary to our moral growth, and that our ability to remember the past is an invaluable faculty of the human mind.

The film begins simply, with a meeting between its protagonists, Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski. As Joel and Clementine start making small talk, they seem immediately comfortable, almost familiar with each other, and yet the atmosphere is eerie. Soon enough, we discover that Clementine was a patient at Lacuna, a clinic which erased every memory of Joel from her mind after their two-year relationship ended in a painful breakup. When Joel finds out, he asks Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, the director of Lacuna, to do the same for him. As viewers, we now start to wonder: was that meeting we witnessed their very first, or have they met again after their memories were erased, unaware that they loved each other in a ‘past’ life?

This tone of disorientation continues throughout the film, and that’s what makes it so special. As Joel’s memories of Clementine are erased one by one, he realises that the removal of one’s painful experiences is in itself a kind of trauma; what promises to be a relief, turns out to be nothing more than loss.

We experience this sense of disorientation and loss alongside Joel as we jump through snippets of his and Clementine’s happiest and saddest moments together, trying to piece together in our minds a linear narrative of their relationship. While this is happening, the film’s subplot focuses on Stan, Patrick, and Mary, three young people working for Lacuna. As Stan and Patrick, the ‘technicians’, work on Joel’s memory removal, Mary, Lacuna’s naive receptionist, muses on the beauty of their mission. She begins quoting aloud the passage of poetry which inspires the film’s very title, taken from Alexander Pope’s verse epistle Eloisa to Abelard (1717):

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.

Mary has an idealistic vision of her work: she believes she is helping suffering people experience the kind of ‘eternal sunshine’ that only a ‘spotless mind’ can achieve. But the human mind is not so simple. Joel’s desire for forgetfulness quickly turns nightmarish. As he realises he has made a mistake, he starts fighting to retain the memory of his love for Clementine, but his is a hopeless quest. Dr. Mierzwiak’s intervention ensures that the procedure is completed.

Left alone without Stan and Patrick, Mary confesses to the married Dr. Mierzwiak that she is in love with him. It is at this point that her idealism crumbles down. He reveals that they’ve already had an affair in the past and that she agreed to let him erase its memory from her mind. Mary is devastated. She decides that what Lacuna is doing is unethical - even if Mierzwiak technically has the patients’ consent to the procedure - and releases the clinic’s files back to the patients. It is this decision which leads Clementine and Joel, just a few days after they ‘meet’ again, to discover that they’ve already loved each other in the past.

Accepting suffering and holding it in our hearts, not with bitterness, but rather with courage, requires endless patience and infinite hope.

Although the script of the film doesn’t spell it out, Mary’s story emphasises that the absence of painful memories is in itself experienced as a painful loss. What’s more, it shows that, without the memory of the suffering which we have inflicted on others, and which others have inflicted on us, we are incapable of moral growth. Thanks to the knowledge of the past, Mary is able, this time around, to resist having an affair with a married man. Just so, the final scene of the film, which sees Joel and Clementine vow to renew their relationship, is hopeful not in spite of the fact that they have regained the memory of the ways in which they hurt each other in the past, but precisely because of it.

Accepting suffering and holding it in our hearts, not with bitterness, but rather with courage, requires endless patience and infinite hope. But that is what we were made for. Each one of us is called to endure pain in imitation of Christ, and, out of that pain, to discover a greater capacity for sacrificial love. We make meaning out of pain: that’s what human beings do.

The very last lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind perfectly express the fruits of this Christ-like acceptance. As Joel reassures Clementine that he can’t see anything he doesn’t like about her, she expresses her doubts and anxieties: ‘But you will! But you will.’, she repeats, ‘You know, you will think of things. And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me.’ Joel and Clementine look at each other, and, after a pause, they simply say to each other: ‘Okay’. Their ‘okay’ is not an indication that they are doomed to repeat old mistakes. Rather, it signals a new choice: this time, when their relationship becomes difficult, they won’t just run away; this time, they will face discomfort, heartbreak, and disappointment, armed with the knowledge that seeking a sense of permanence by loving another person completely is an inherently valuable pursuit. In accepting the most traumatic parts of our past we grow closer to God; and in bravely deciding to look ahead to the future with hope, we catch a glimpse of the unadulterated joy which we will finally experience in God’s eternity.

Article

Culture

War & peace

21 March 2024

4 min read

Letter from the Balkans

An audience with a crown prince tells the story of troubled lands and resilient inhabitants.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

An orthodox cathedral, with prominent roof domes.

St Sava Cathedral, Belgrade.

Ben Asyö on Unsplash.

It’s only halfway through our supper by Stone Gate, the most ancient entrance to the old citadel of Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, that we realise votive candles are burning in the archway outside. Closer inspection reveals three or four simple pews before a niche shrine to Our Lady and the stone walls covered with inscriptions to the local deceased.

Families, young and old but mostly young, gather in the gloaming for their dear departed. This is a profoundly Catholic site and the little restaurant, brightly lit and jolly, nevertheless feels reverential and on holy ground. Some 80 per cent of the population of Croatia is Roman Catholic, while just 3.3 per cent are Serbian Orthodox.

A five-and-a-half-hour bus ride east and we’re in Belgrade, capital of Serbia. Here, the proportions of the faithful are almost exactly reversed – 81 per cent are Orthodox and a little under four per cent Catholic.

These statistics serve as a grim reminder of the phrase that entered our political lexicon in the first half of the 1990s: Ethnic cleansing. In that civil war, as the former Yugoslavia broke up into its constituent republics, Croatian Serbs and Serbian Catholics – those who survived, that is – were displaced.

So we’re less likely to see the kind of Marian devotion that we witnessed in Zagreb being honoured in Belgrade. This is essentially a technical, creedal difference between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, in how the incarnation of the Son proceeds from the Holy Spirit. It’s no big deal theologically and shouldn’t detain us. But it quietly points to the fragility of peace, not to say democracy, in the Balkans.

A fresco of the Christ in its dome has a bullet hole through the forehead, not so much crucified as assassinated.

A mural depicts an icon of Christ with a bullet hole in his forehead.

HRH Crown Prince Alexander, head of the Royal family Karadjorjdevic, which ruled the kingdoms of Serbia and (later) Yugoslavia until the Second World War, carefully refers to it as “democracy at midnight” over coffee in the Blue Room of Belgrade’s Royal Palace. He returned to his ancestral home when Slobodan Milosevic was deposed at the millennium.

The Crown Prince helped his country return to democracy by uniting the opposition which defeated Milosevic in the elections of 2000. Even today, he calmly states that western democratic leaders often fail to understand how the mindset of eastern autocracy works and agrees that it is “work in progress”. Eternal vigilance is key.

In this context, the Serbian Orthodox Church is doing well, but it’s also still work in progress. Under communism, a substantial number of Serbian bishops were appointed by the Soviet regime, for purposes of control and information gathering. That culture wasn’t cleansed overnight, nor has the communist legacy been entirely expunged from the Church.

“You’ll see what I mean when you visit our family chapel in a moment,” the Crown Prince tells me. Sure enough, a fresco of the Christ in its dome has a bullet hole through the forehead, not so much crucified as assassinated. Prince Alexander will not restore it, so its serves as a constant reminder of what can be. His guiding principle is that “only dictators alter history.”

Elsewhere, our guide points to desecrated icons and the ghostly shadows of Soviet insignia on marble pillars. Alexander is an unassuming and modest man, referring to the 18 Serbian parties he convened at a conference in 2000 as “the democracy by email”.

When we’re joined by his wife, Crown Princess Katherine, she corrects this, proudly stating that her husband returned democracy to the region. There is probably some truth in both their versions of events. The consequence of that could be a restoration of a constitutional parliamentary monarchy in Serbia – we’ll see, or perhaps our successors will.

From the Palace, we visit St Sava, called a temple but really the Serbian Orthodox cathedral consecrated to the memory of the founder of the national Church. This, again, is work in progress. Started in 1935 and only now approaching completion, it’s a paradigm of the troubled contemporary history of Serbia. Communists have razed it and Nazis have parked their trucks and tanks in it.

It is unashamedly modern, though it honours ancient Byzantine mural and fresco methodologies. Its biblical stories in gold leaf use the traditional crafts, linking Belgrade to its ancient past, whatever despots may have done to interrupt its devotional history. We’re linked to the palace we’ve just left by enormous doors, inscribed with multi-lingual prayers of welcome, donated by the royal family.

Perhaps the allegory it offers is best illustrated by the image of Christ – no bullet hole now – in the dome, which was built and raised, centimetre by centimetre, from the ground. All 4,000 tonnes of it. The metaphor of rising from the ashes of war writes itself.

And that’s the takeaway from Belgrade. Serbia – and the wider Balkans – suffered a 20th-century of unfathomable bleakness. Its people have endured and their spirit isn’t broken, a moral exemplar for western Europe. Belgrade resonates to its folk music and young laughter over broken bread and wine outpoured (gosh, do they eat and drink – for who knows what tomorrow holds?).

The phoenix, which naturally shares Greek roots with Serbian royalty, would be the go-to cliché for the cyclical regeneration of Belgrade. But as this city approaches Easter, there is of course something else more fundamental going on.

Belgrade has faith in itself, as well as the God who has delivered it. It’s a resurrection story really.