Film Analysis of “Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind(2004)”
The ending of Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind Explained⏤ It Was Never A Love Story
2004 ⸺ Drama/Romance/Sci-Fi ⸺ 1H48M
Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind is the film that got me into filmmaking. It is a poetic film with bold characteristics from the director Michel Gondry. Michel Gondry is skilful at producing a visual poem in such an expressive way and visualising complex emotions in pure graphics. These qualities make it so easy for the audience to get fully immersed in the characters within.
The writer of the film, Charlie Kaufman, whose writing complements the french visual styles of Michel Gondry, later directs the film Synecdoche, New York(2008). Therefore Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind can be interpreted as a stepping stone for Synecdoche, New York, a highly experimental film in both narrative and visual. Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind(whew, that is long!) is one of the most beloved films starring two talented actors, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. As this film is also dear to my heart, I decided to review Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind.
Telling the Story from the End
Joel(Jim Carrey) wakes up in his bed with a terrible headache but reluctantly heads to work. However, as Joel waits for his train, he is overpowered by a sudden urge to jump on a train heading to Montauk. Joel notices Clementine(Kate Winslet) on the beach, and Joel falls hopelessly in love with her on the train back. After their first date, the film visits their previous story; before they had erased each other from their memories.
In the film, Michel Gondry experiments with the concept of the human mind and memory. He further explores this concept of human subconsciousness in his later film, The Science of Sleep(2006), with a different visual style. However, let’s first observe the narrative structure of this film. Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind follows a reverse chronology, a storytelling technique with the plot in reversed order. This point is well explained in an article in The Atlantic by Christopher Orr. “The story-told-in-reverse is a common enough movie device, usually utilized to conceal information from the audience. But Kaufman and Gondry use it to a different end, gradually uncovering not hidden facts but forgotten emotions.”
In whatever way the film proceeds, the ending is inevitable. Yet the audience develops a different view of the two characters after the film circles back to its first scene. This reversed storytelling also correlates with the course Joel revisits his memories with Clementine. Starting from the end of the relationship, backtracking to their first encounter. The outstanding music by Jon Brion also follows this method.
If I may quickly jump into my sound nerd persona, a piece of music plays in the background as Joel wakes up in the first scene(“Theme” — Jon Brion). A distinctive sound accompanies the piano line in this soundtrack. This sound is created by reversing the ADSR envelope. In short, this happens when a sound plays in reverse. Due to this technique, the sound gives the impression of being sucked into a vacuum, leaving no residue behind. It is interesting how a narrative, visual, and sound follow this reversed concept. Now that I finished gushing over this film, I’ll go into detail about how the film displays this extraordinary method of storytelling without a character having to explain constantly to the audience.
How Can You Capture a Dream on Camera?
Everyone would have had the experience of being in a vivid yet overly-imaginative dream. After waking up, you might try to explain it to your mum in the morning but fail to describe every illogical logic and incomprehensible narrative of the dream. Yet Michel Gondry succeeds in visualising how a person’s mind process dreams.
One of the first scenes the memory exterminators visit is when Joel breaks up with Clementine. As the handheld camera follows Joel as he tries to catch up with Clementine, the camera is behind him. This way, the camera only shows what Joel sees and hides everything else. This camerawork is famous for being used in Martin Scorsese’s film, The Shining(1980). The camera follows Danny cruising around the hotel in his trike. This technique prevents the audience from seeing anything outside the actor’s eye-line, making the audience anticipate what will happen next. In The Shining, this camerawork causes fear and anxiety for the audience to guess what will be waiting for young Danny when he turns the corner.
However, Michel Gondry uses this same technique for a different purpose. As the camera has a limited view of the scene, Michel Gondry takes advantage of it by creating a visual illusion. Clementine disappears into thin air at the last minute and confuses Joel and the audience. The camera also shifts abruptly to expose the furniture and surroundings erased. In this scene, Clementine’s disappearance displays how the memories are erased from Joel’s brain, creating a film’s visual grammar. So in the other scenes, the audience knows what to expect with other memories with Clementine. These cameraworks set how the audience should comprehend the visual information in the film. Therefore, the camera tricks warp the audience’s perception and persuade them into the intricate structure of a dream effortlessly.
Other than the handheld camera, there are other visual tricks in the film to portray the human mind. Starting from Joel's emotional scene where he shouts out to stop the memory-erasing procedure, a spotlight appears. This theatrical spotlight hunts Joel around the frame while he attempts to escape from losing all the memories involving Clementine.
After this scene with Joel, several methods are used to visualise the memory removal simultaneously. But the most frequent one was the darkness. Joel follows Clementine only to discover the dark emptiness or Clementine dragged into the dark. Similar to the limited view created by the camera frame, the spotlight confines the audience's field of vision to its subject. The spotlight is a searchlight of the exterminators from which Joel strives to hide Clementine. The light seems almost like a security guard's flashlight, discovering their hiding spot from scene to scene.
The limited circular perspective of this spotlight suggests the vintage film's iris-out transitions, closing down to end the memory in this case. This light indicates closure. Accordingly, the light constantly reminds the audience that the inevitable end of Joel erasing Clementine is near. Yet, it keeps the scene in its climax stage and keeps the audience focused on the character's emotions. Every dialogue is the last farewell, and every scene is a final glance.
Memories Erased, But Not Truly Lost
Some significant changes in visual form emerge after some time. Since the entire memory-wiping procedure is in Joel’s head, the location is flexible. It switches every second following Joel’s memory, and as his train of thought interferes, random cut scenes occur in the film. The unconventional flow of the film resonates with how the human mind operates. Jumping from one idea to the other, random thoughts interrupts the main subject every once in a while.
This concept is visualised as a video montage by patching random images that reference the character’s dialogue. As Clementine confesses to Joel about her feeling ugly as a child, the old childhood picture of Clementine and her ugly doll appears on-screen, correlating with her dialogue. This representation of the dreaming process can be directly compared with Michel Gondry’s later film, The Science of Sleep(2006).
The Science of Sleep is a film revolving around a man’s dream, constructed with colourful stop-motion animations and optical illusions. The visual cue that separates the dream from reality is a cardboard-based set and colourful animations. However, the method used in Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind is quite different.
The overall colours are more realistic, and people can’t tell apart reality and dreams only by visual elements. The colourful image from The Science of Sleep was meant to distinguish dreams from reality. However, Joel’s anguish in his dreams is the reality in Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind. Joel reminds himself of his love for Clementine in it and strives to keep her in his memories. Due to the realistic colour grading, the emotions that Joel goes through feel authentic, not fictional.
As I mentioned earlier, there were several ways to show the process of memory-wipe, and they share the same trait. This trait eventually refers to the film’s central theme. Let’s go through each one of them. The first method is text, characters, and furniture vanishing between cuts as the camera angle shifts. This technique is only to display the memories fading in Joel’s head. However, the other three methods have deeper signification in the film: Darkness, ocean, and books.
Darkness is the most frequent method used in the film, swallowing down the memories into a complete blank. To stop Clementine from being dragged into this darkness, Joel runs away from this in numerous scenes. The following method is the beach. The beach refers to Joel’s memory of meeting Clementine for the first time in Montauk. This beach delivers the most famous scene in the movie, Clementine and Joel lying in bed on the beach. The memory of this location where they first met means that their relationship is about to be thoroughly erased. So the beach starts prowling in other memories to erase them, shown as sand covering up or ocean water ruffling into the house.
The last method using the book is the most interesting. As Joel talks with Clementine at her work in their final memory, the books on the shelves flip, hiding the spines one by one. When facing the spines to the wall, the information of the books is hidden, showing only the white papers. After the conversation is over, Joel is left alone with walls of white, empty books without faces.
The three methods have the same function. They cover up the objects but do not obliterate them. When there’s darkness, the light reveals what is hidden. The ocean can bury a cherished item, but this doesn’t mean it is lost forever. There is no way to distinguish a book with its spine to the back, but its words are still there.
Final Message of the Film
Clementine and Joel choose to remove each other from their memories, yet they meet again and fall in love. The film’s central theme points out how people do not change and make the same mistakes. The three methods of erasing the memory remind the audience of this message. The idea of a fresh start that people crave is a myth. It’s the memories and the experience which allow people to act differently, not by eliminating them.
Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind is realistic although a dreamlike film, which might be why it is so captivating. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet’s talented performances created iconic characters in the story, and the songs written by Jon Brion are beautiful but just delicate enough for the narrative. Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind isn’t a simple love story between a couple. It’s about the emotions attached to cherished memories, which feel unbearable sometimes. The film successfully captures this sentiment and displays it within the frames. Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind is undoubtedly one of my favourite films, and I hope the readers had a similar experience watching it.
