Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind explores the concept of memory and the possibilities once deleting memories becomes a reality. Upon this discovery, a market for deleting painful memories of loss and pain immediately surfaced. Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski take advantage of this new technology and erase each other from their memories in the wake of their broken relationship. Other than telling the creative love story, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind unveils new conflicts regarding memory and time as two people try to avoid the pain of lost love.
The interdependent relationship of memory and time is overtly exposed in this film. Memory is the recording of events over a period of time. Memories cannot be recorded without the passing of time, and for this reason memories are recorded in a linear fashion: past, present, and then future. As found in our readings, Taylor suggests, “The future is something necessarily lying ahead of us, and the past, behind us” (486). On the other side of the coin, time cannot exist without the recording of memories. If an observer cannot record memories, then that observer cannot distinguish previous events from present events. Establishing two points between two events is necessary to comprehend our linear conception of time. Furthermore, if the linear nature of time cannot be determined, then the concept of the future is an impossibility.
This impossibility is readily revealed with basic mathematic principles. To anticipate a future event, a trend must first be determined. In this model, the trend is the slope of a line that represents the linear nature of time, where the future is a point further down the line than the event point currently being observed. In this respect, the past is all the previous event points on the line of which the observer remembers traveling. For a line to exist, at least two points must exist. In terms of time, these two points would be an event in the present and a memory of an event in the past. By using the points remembered from previous events and the event point of the present, the observer ultimately calculates the slope of this line to anticipate future events. Therefor, without memory, the concept of time vanishes, as there are no past events for an observer to remember and thus no way to anticipate future events. There is only the present. Only a single existence. The late Alexander Pope romantically envisions the beauty of this reality in an excerpt from his poem “Eloisa to Albert”:
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;
In a world where memories can be eradicated from a heartbroken citizen by going to a clinic, the nature of both memory and time are challenged. In this film Joel and Clementine rashly delete each other from their memory in a desperate attempt to elude the pain of their shattered relationship. However, upon doing this, they run into each other again and fall in love for a second time. The conflict between time and memory comes fully to light when their deleted memories are exposed to them. After reviewing their previous medical records and seeing the ugly side of their relationship and breakup, they realize their previous records suggest they will eventually hate each other and suffer at the hand of their relationship. It seems as though this would encourage them to go their separate ways and avoid the massive heartache likely to ensue. Surprisingly, Joel and Clementine ultimately choose to start over with a new relationship and love each other with reckless abandonment.
Why would they make this decision in the light of such exceptionally clear and personal evidence that strongly indicates their relationship will fail?
Based on the concept of time being linear in existence, Joel and Clementine found themselves in position of the “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind,” as described by Alexander Pope. Previously, their relationship was following an event curve with a downward slope. The future events of Joel and Clementine's relationship, as predicted by them, seemed to only get worse. This was due to the fact that the slope of their satisfaction in their relationship was negative and showed little signs of improvement based on the memories of their most recent events. Upon deleting their memories, Joel and Clementine deleted all of the previous event points of their relationship and all of the slopes and predictions of the future that came with those points. For this reason, they found themselves in a situation where they could start over and re-establish the direction of their relationship. Joel and Clementine’s story artfully exposes how the manipulation of memory has the capacity to control time and its interpretation.
