Eternal Memory Loss

 Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind revolves around the concept of deleting memories, specifically deleting people from your memory. The movie centers on a couple, Joel Barrish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet), who decide that they want to forget each other completely. The movie is beautifully portrayed as much the story unfolds as you see Joel’s memories of his past relationship with Clementine as they slowly get erased. Clementine, making a decision congruent with her spontaneous personality, decided to forget about Joel completely after they have a vicious fight. Joel goes to see her and realizes she remembers nothing about him, so he decides to retaliate. However, partway through the process, while he is unconscious, he realizes that he does not want to lose those memories. Eventually, after both their memories get erased, they end up meeting at the same place they first met, subconsciously drawn to retrace their steps because they do not have to the experience to change their ways.  

              The very concept of erasing someone from your memory raises a very intriguing set of problems. First of all, logistically, the holes in your memory, thought process, and very self would be astronomical. A person that you have spent that much time with clearly has had an effect on your personality and shaped in part who you are, everyone who you have interacted with shapes you in some way. Imagine for a second forgetting someone completely. The resulting gaps in your memory your brain would probably connect, like your brain connects images to make a dream. But it would also permanently damage your psyche. 

            Perhaps the biggest message that the movie sends about the dangers of such as a process is the inevitability of repeating those same mistakes. It is logical that without the past experience of having already experienced what to some sense you may be determined to experience, you are doomed to repeat your mistakes. Without the experience, you could not learn from that experience. This becomes clear when Joel and Clementine, after getting their memories’ erased, fall for each other again. The same thing occurs with Mary, a worker for the company that erases memories, falls for the doctor that runs the company again.   

            Another large problem that arises in the film is the question of whether anyone would actually want their memories erased. Joel, partway through the process of erasing Clementine from his memory, realizes that he does not want to continue, even though he cannot stop it. He desperately tries to save some memories, knowing that even though some of the memories hurt, he also was erasing many good memories, memories that shaped him. 

             In the end, the movie has a very negative view about erasing people from your memory, a view that I think makes logical sense in cases like Joel’s and Clementine’s where those were memories that had good along with bad and shaped who they were. Without those memories, they may be doomed to just repeat past mistakes. But I think the place of such a technique that could erase people from memories could actually have a place. Imagine instances of rape or molestation, where those memories were not the fault of the victim, little if anything could be learned from them, and they negatively effect the psyche of the victim.  

           Richard Taylor, in his essay “Space and Time”, discusses the various views of time and it’s relativity. He ends his discussion still mystified, “time remains hardly less puzzling than when St. Augustine tried, in vain, to comprehend it”. Despite this concession, he introduces some intriguing concepts. He states that “if every process were reversible, then there would be nothing to suggest any inherent direction of time”. The core concept ofEternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind is that time can be reversed. Taylor says, that once you start going down that road where you can go backwards in time, time does not have to have any direction. That would have huge implications obviously. Could I already be affected and changed by the future? 

Erase Your Memory, Erase Your Past

“We'll start with your most recent memories and work backwards from there, more or less.”

So instructs Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), a memory-erasing specialist, describing both the process of the procedure and the structure of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) itself. Even the “more or less” qualifier lines up with the occasional digressions from the reverse chronology of the film. The plot seeks to question our notion of Temporal Direction, as discussed by Richard Taylor. “We think of time as having a fixed direction, like … a river that cannot be reversed” (486). The characters in Eternal Sunshine appear to briefly reverse that river, traveling backwards through memory to a past self. Ultimately, however, the film seems to support that old adage, “Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.” The fictional technology allows characters to swim against the chronology of their life, but when they wake up, they are in the same river, and it is still flowing in the direction of those erased events.

The premise of the film is largely familiar: Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) fall in love, grow unhappy, separate, and wish to forget any of it ever happened. Of course, the plot hinges on the fact that they can forget. With a relatively painless procedure, those unpleasant bits of the past are removed. It seems simple enough on the surface, but it causes a rift between your “personal time,” as David Lewis phrases it, and “external time” – moments that exist for others no longer exist for you. In the case of Joel, the time he and Clementine spent with other friends still exist for those friends, but they have vanished from his (and her) past.

Throughout the film, I kept being reminded of Locke and his definition of identity as a continuous string of memories. If this is true, does Joel change his identity by plucking Clementine out of his life? It's a tricky question, since he would still have some degree of continuity; his personal timeline (as it is perceived by him) would remain seamless – perhaps with minor questionable details, like the missing pages of his journal – but it would not line up with external time. Manipulation of memory is similar to manipulation of the past, if you consider all your past life experiences to have informed or caused your present to some degree. Of course, I realize that the events of the past are separate from an individual's recollection of those events, but there can be no causality from past to present on an individual scale without some knowledge of those events. If Joel and Clementine, as a pair, share a past that neither of them remembers, a past that in no way informs their present or influences their future, is it really still their past?

The resurfacing of the patient files near the close of the film suggests that it is still their past, since it has the ability to affect their future. Yet their re-meeting and re-connecting (unaware of the “re” prefix to either of the actions) suggests not. To return to Taylor's river metaphor, Joel and Clementine swam upstream to a time before their relationship, but when they stop swimming, they glide right back through it again. They are uninformed of their past and thus doomed to repeat it. Even after listening to the leaked tape recordings, they choose to try again. Their repeated relationship begins with the same speech from Clementine, and they are ultimately the same people that they were when they began their first go-round. So what is there to assume but that their relationship will follow the same general trajectory and end in the same disastrous falling out? Will they be caught in an endless loop of erasing their relationship and then repeating it again? Taylor speaks of our perception of time's linearity, saying that “the future is something necessarily lying ahead of us, and the past, behind us” (486), yet for Joel and Clementine, it appears as if their past and their future have become largely the same.

It is even more fascinating to consider this relationship between time and memory on a larger scale. If the memory technicians were able to wipe the memory of, say, World War II from every human on the planet and strike the records from all books, could it still be said to have happened? Yes, I know this is a very “if a tree fell in the forest and no one was around to hear it” type of inquiry, but it still bears consideration. In external time, WWII is a reality. But if the personal timeline of every thinking, reasoning person on the planet aligned in such a way that excluded the war, did the memory technicians responsible for such a drastic act essentially alter history? And if so, could this be considered a form of time travel? Would the removal of such a monumental event from the collective memory of humankind mean that it is bound to happen again?