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

Digital

Fun & play

18 March 2024

4 min read

Fun is dead

When video games turn play into work, we need to play without fear of consequences.

Simon Walters

Simon Walters is Curate at Holy Trinity Huddersfield.

A woman stand in front of a large video screen displaying the Space Invaders title, hold her hands out in front of her.

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash.

Imagine there’s been a sudden change in plans. The evening meeting is cancelled at the last minute, or your friend is sick and can’t come round. There are no looming tasks that need doing, so you set out to have some fun. What do you do?

Karen Heller’s recent article in the Washington Post suggests that we don’t really know how to answer that question. ‘Fun is dead’, proclaims the headline, and her analysis is simultaneously insightful and depressing. Weddings have become stressful extravaganzas, holidays require a constant stream of activity, retirements should have a purpose and a plan. Our fun, our play, requires a reason to exist. Can we have fun without it having some larger purpose? Can we play without needing to post it on social media? Everyone else, it seems, is having much more fun than we are.

Take video games. You might think this ought to be the very definition of a playful activity, one with no particular end or purpose in mind. But even here, it seems we don’t know how to have fun without some type of incentive. Conversations about video games online are frequently so self-serious and toxic that you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was a matter of life and death, not differing preferences about fun. Some of the world’s biggest games – things like Fortnite, Genshin Impact, and EA Sports FC – give rewards to players who turn up to play every day. It sounds generous until the psychological hooks of these methods grip you far past the point of fun. Players talk about not being able to sustain more than one of these types of games, because otherwise they won’t be able to keep up. What starts as play quickly turns into a form of work.

The world of play is a world of grace, where we are free to find pleasure in an activity on its own merits.

I am as much a sucker for this method as the next person. I find myself drawn to games which start out as free and fun, but the fun inevitably seems to turn into a chore that I cannot dislodge. There is an unwritten pressure to turn up to play every day to complete daily tasks and keep up with the competition. I end up feeling guilty for wasting my time playing games, and anxious to keep up with what’s required when I do. No wonder, with all these contradictory pressures on play, I find myself more often than not vegetating in front of Netflix rather than really playing.

This is all a bit of a first world problem and might seem like another depressing indictment of modern society, but perhaps it shouldn’t be that surprising. As humans, we are always looking for some way to justify ourselves, some way of finding proof that what we do matters. Play, by contrast, demands that we step into a different sort of world. The world of play is a world of grace, where we are free to find pleasure in an activity on its own merits, and not for anything we might get from it in the end. Play, in its best sense, is purposeless apart from the joy of playing. "When we try to give our playful activities some wider purpose for why they matter, we are turning them into something else."

The world of the Christian faith is not often seen as a playful one. It seems so very serious, dealing as it does with matters of life and death. But within the serious world of the Church, a space for play emerges. After all, it is first and foremost a world of forgiveness from what we have done wrong in the past, present, and future. This forgiveness takes away the fear of failure. Whether I am greatly successful or not I am loved and forgiven by God. This is God’s gift, which cannot be earnt and cannot be lost.

The result, perhaps surprisingly, is that I am free to play, because I do not need my play to achieve anything for me. As the theologian Simeon Zahl puts it,

In play a person is free to engage with the world creatively, actively, energetically, but without fear of ‘serious’ consequences. The Christian is free to play with things that once seemed deadly serious, to find delight in what were formerly objects of fear, and to take themselves much less seriously.

In the world of video games, this idea is perhaps most clearly seen in the games produced by the Japanese game developer Nintendo. Their games, from Mario to Zelda, epitomize a vision for gaming which is driven by creating joy for whoever is playing, and not unnecessarily burdensome tasks. One of their best games of last year, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, doesn’t offer a prescriptive path for how players should approach its challenges. Instead, the player is given a toolkit and set loose to use it in the world as they see fit. The result is a sense of joyful freedom, a feeling that its world is full of delight and even silliness. It gave me some of the most fun playing games in recent years, without me even coming close to finishing it.

It's this playful attitude that I want to take into the rest of my life. What would it look like for us to see the world as a playground rather than an exam hall? The result wouldn’t just be a lot more fun. I think it would also be deeply Christian.