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

Belief

Culture

Time

12 March 2024

5 min read

Ted Giola is right: we’re all addicts now

Addiction to distraction prevents deep thought about our place in time.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A clock repair peers at a clock he is repairing, amid a see of alarm and wall clocks on display

There’s a joke told by David Foster Wallace in a speech called “This is Water”. Two young fish are swimming and come across an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish says “Morning boys! How’s the water?” The two fish swim on until one of them turns and asks, “What the hell is water?” Unlike fish, however, for humans time is the water in which we swim. There can be no understanding or meaning in life without time.

Take the ending of the old BBC sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth. It’s set in World War One, as a group of soldiers try to escape the near-certain death of going over-the-top. In the last episode, they are stood at the foot of their trench, waiting to attack the enemy. Suddenly, the artillery stops. One soldier takes this as good news: “It’s over!” he shouts, “The Great War: 1914 to 1917!”

This joke only makes sense with time. I can only find this funny from the perspective of someone in a different time from those in the narrative. This only makes sense to someone who knows the war instead finished in 1918. Time makes the joke.

Robert Jenson, the late American theologian, was wrong about a lot. But he was often wrong in the right way. Jenson wasn’t afraid to follow through on the implications of some of Christianity’s most fundamental claims, even if led him down paths others would be wary of treading. If Jenson ends up entering the pantheon of the Church’s great teachers, it will be for his flaws as much as his successes.

We are, Giola argues, entering a ‘post-entertainment culture’. We’re no longer seeking entertainment. We’re seeking distraction.

One of the most helpful aspects of Jenson’s theology is on time. We often think of time as some sort of process, a way of moving through life and getting from A to B. However, Jenson stressed that time is a creature: a thing given existence by God, not just some neutral aspect of the universe to be taken for granted. God is without time and may have created us to be creatures without time, too. But God did create time and created us to live within time. This suggests we might learn something about human nature by reflecting on what it means to be creatures that inhabit time.

But time is so ubiquitous that we can’t think about time except as creatures within time. It is, in other words, like trying to bite your own teeth.

Okay, great. Time is important. Big deal. Why should you care? Isn’t this just the sort of nonsense philosophers come up with to look busy? Well, this matters because our ability to think with and in time is under serious threat. And with it, our ability to flourish as creatures.

For the last two years, the famed music critic Ted Giola has offered his thoughts on the state of culture. This year’s is a rather bleak read.

Giola argues that we’ve misunderstood the relationship between art and entertainment. We often think of art as something done for the artist, while entertainment is something done for the audience. Creatives must choose whom they create for: themselves, or their audience.

Instead, Giola suggests it’s better to think of a food chain. Entertainment is parasitic upon art and uses the artistic to fuel its inexorable growth. Recall Martin Scorsese’s infamous comments about the Marvel cinematic universe: they’re not cinema, they’re rollercoster rides; they’re not art, they’re entertainment.

But there’s always a bigger fish. We are, Giola argues, entering a ‘post-entertainment culture’. We’re no longer seeking entertainment. We’re seeking distraction.

But the short-term, instant response culture that social media habituates us to cannot come at the expense of the long-term work of genuinely deep thought.

Films become TV shows become TikToks. Books become blog posts become tweets. The ways in which we engage in reflection upon the world around us are increasingly reduced to shorter and shorter soundbites and the expense of substantive, thoughtful analysis.

Distraction involves short, repetitive interaction with stimuli to produce dopamine hits. Because this leads to pleasure, we repeat the process until we become habituated to it. We become addicted to it.

Crucially, this addiction to distraction itself is the very thing being sold. We don’t become addicted to the content of what we watch; we become addicted to the form of it. “The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously said, and so it is here too. We are becoming habituated to addiction itself. Distraction is merely the way in. We are, as Giola shows, all addicts now.

There are, of course, numerous worrying issues this raises. Giola himself does a fantastic job at covering some of them. However, in addition to all the psychological harm this addiction does, our addiction to distraction is curtailing our ability to inhabit our nature as creatures in time.

As we saw earlier, time brings perspective, and perspective brings understanding. We depend on time itself to help us make sense of events in the world and in our lives. The creature that is time is, in this respect, a gift from God and a reminder of our own limitations as co-creatures with it.

But, the more we become addicted to short-term distraction, the less able we are to inhabit understandings of the world that emerge as a result of long-term reflection and deep thought. We are becoming creatures in time who are gradually losing sight of our dependency on time itself to understand what is most in service of the common good.

Look, social media and everything that accompanies it can be great. The ability to respond to news in real time has its benefits. Public narratives have become increasingly democratised and that is only a good thing. But the short-term, instant response culture that social media habituates us to cannot come at the expense of the long-term work of genuinely deep thought.

If we are to move away from the near-universal sense that everything is on the verge of collapsing into chaos, perhaps the first step we might take is to begin again to work with, not against time. If the short-termism underwritten by addiction to distraction is one of the myriad factors that contributes to our pervasive sense of unease, perhaps we might commit to thinking more slowly?

Robert Jenson was right; time is a creature. We forget this at our peril. Some things can only be healed with patience and the slow passage of time. Until we retrieve an understanding of time as gift, not burden, our capacity to grapple meaningfully with the real substantive issues we face will remain beyond our reach.