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.

Review

Culture

Music

27 February 2025

6 min read

The biblical undercurrent that the Bob Dylan biopics missed

In the best of Dylan’s work is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A colorful mural depicts the eyes of Bob Dylan staring to the side.

Dylan mural, Minneapolis.

Nikoloz Gachechiladze on Unsplash.

The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown begins with his arrival in New York and concludes with his performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He begins the film as a complete unknown, as he arrives with no backstory to share or, where he does, one that he has invented. He ends it as a complete unknown, because he consistently refuses all the boxes or labels in which others want to imprison him.

This aspect of Dylan’s life and career has also characterised many of the earlier biopics, such as 2007’s I’m Not There which features six different versions of Dylan as poet, born-again Christian, outlaw, actor, folk singer, and electrified troubadour. Suze Rotolo, his girlfriend throughout much of the time covered by A Complete Unknown, described the way in which he absorbed influences at this time like a sponge:

“He had an incredible ability to see and sponge – there was a genius in that. The ability to create out of everything that’s ﬂying around. To synthesize it. To put it in words and music.”

Focusing on this aspect of Dylan’s life and practice can, however, lead to a minimising of his upbringing and also to a misleading sense of brilliant but entirely disconnected phases – essentially a series of rejections – as having characterised his career. There are some important elements of Dylan’s life and ideas that are overlooked, underplayed or simply lost as a result. Many of these involve the particular expression of spirituality that has informed his work from the beginning.

As Rabbi James Rosenberg has explained: “Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941. He spent the majority of his childhood, including his high school years, in Hibbing, about 60 miles northwest of Duluth. His father and mother, Abram and Beatie, whose parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, sent both him and his younger brother David to the local synagogue for their Jewish education leading to Bar Mitzvah at age 13.”

As a result, Dylan’s songs have from the beginning of his career been suffused with the phrases and imagery of the Bible; interestingly, not just the Hebrew Bible, but the Christian Bible too. Whether it’s the references to Judas in “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side” or quoting Jesus in ‘the first one now will later be last’ (“The Times They Are A-Changin’”) or the Old Testament stories that feature at the end of “When the Ship Comes In”, wherever you look within Dylan’s lyrics the influence of the Bible is apparent.

Follow that thought with another which notes the prevalence of apocalyptic images (storms, hurricanes etc) and events (‘The hour when the ship comes in’, the moment when “The Times They Are A-Changin’” or the night when the “Chimes of Freedom” ring, for example). Then think from where images of apocalyptic events primarily derive in the Western imagination and you’ll be circling back to the Bible, and the Books of Daniel and Revelation in particular. That is of course what Dylan himself did following his born-again experiences in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but the Bible was always the original seedbed for his images and ideas.

Then, look deeply into one of the most apocalyptic of his early songs – “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” – and you’ll see a manifesto to which he has held throughout his career and which illuminates his work in every decade and every change of direction within his lengthy career. The central character in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” commits to walking through an apocalyptic world in order to tell and think and speak and breathe and reflect what he sees in order that all souls might see it too. In a much later manifesto song – “Ain’t Talkin’” – he puts it like this:

Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’

Through this weary world of woe …

Heart burnin’, still yearnin’

In the last outback, at the world’s end

Throughout Dylan’s career, he writes songs about people travelling through life in the face of apocalyptic storms seeking some form of relief or salvation or entry to heaven. So, what we have in the best of Dylan’s work is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century (and then twenty-first century) culture.

It's actually all there right at the beginning in the song that he wrote for and sang to his hero Woody Guthrie:

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home

Walkin’ a road other men have gone down

I’m seein’ your world of people and things

Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song

’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along

Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn

It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born

(“Song to Woody”)

Dylan’s songs, from that point onwards, have documented where his pilgrim journey in the eye of the apocalypse has taken him; often with imagery of storms lighting his way. He has travelled the paths of political protest, urban surrealism, country contentment, gospel conversion and world-weary blues. On his journey he: saw seven breezes blowing around the cabin door where victims despair (“Ballad of Hollis Brown”); lightning flashing for those who are confused, accused and misused (“Chimes of Freedom”); surveyed “Desolation Road”; talked truth with a thief as the wind began to howl (“All Along the Watchtower”); sheltered with an un-named woman from the apocalyptic storm (“Shelter from the Storm”); felt the idiot wind blowing through the buttons on his coat, recognised himself as an idiot and felt sorry (“Idiot Wind”); found a pathway to the stars and couldn't believe he'd survived (“Where Are You Tonight? Journey Through Deep Heat”); rode the slow train up around the bend (“Slow Train”); was driven out of town into the driving rain because of belief (“I Believe in You”); heard the ancient footsteps join him on his path (“Every Grain of Sand”); felt the Caribbean Winds, fanning desire, bringing him nearer to the fire (“Caribbean Wind”); betrayed his commitment, felt the breath of the storm and went searching for his first love (“Tight Connection to My Heart”); then, at the final moment, it's not quite dark yet but he’s walking through the middle of nowhere trying to get to heaven before the door is closed (“Tryin' To Get To Heaven”):

The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies

I've been wading through the high muddy water

With the heat rising in my eyes.

Everyday your memory grows dimmer.

It don't haunt me, like it did before.

I been walking through the middle of nowhere

Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door.

(“Tryin' To Get To Heaven”)

Whatever the crises we face, whether personal or political, there’s a Dylan song that says there’s light at the end of the tunnel if you keep walking toward it and, whatever the song, there’s a depth of insight and compassion for those who are struggling along the way.

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