Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Directed by Michel Gondry. Written by Charlie Kaufman, based on a story by Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, and Pierre Bismuth. Starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, and Tom Wilkinson.
Sometimes when I rewatch movies I saw several years ago, I have to pause and think, “Was that movie actually great, or was I just painfully in my twenties when I saw it?”
There’s a bit of trepidation that goes along with that thought. I was painfully in my twenties in 2004 and have little reason to trust the heightened emotional memories of the time (mental illness, graduate school, etc.). But I am happy to report upon rewatch that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is still great.
In fact, it’s even better than I remember.
The story behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind begins, as many great stories do, with some friends sitting around and wondering, “Dude, what if we could erase our exes from our minds?” Except they probably wouldn’t have said “dude” because they were French. Please substitute the appropriate French term to imagine the scene accurately.
The man posing the question was artist Pierre Bismuth, who became fascinated by the idea of what would happen if we were able to erase people from our memories. He even contemplated carrying out a performance art experiment of sorts, where he would send cards to people telling them that somebody had been erased from their minds. Sometime in the late ’90s he shared this idea with his longtime friend and filmmaker Michel Gondry.
Bismuth and Gondry had known each other since the ’80s, when Gondry was the drummer in the French pop band Oui Oui. That band, and music in general, was how Gondry got into filmmaking. He started out making music videos for Oui Oui; here is one that you can watch online: “Ma Maison.” His trippy videos caught the eye of Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk, and she brought Gondry on to direct the music video for “Human Behavior” (1993), the lead single from her first solo studio album, Debut.
Everybody should take a few minutes to watch that video and remember that it launched the illustrious careers of two world-renowned artists. Let that serve as a lasting reminder to all artists to live your truth and never let the world file down your weird edges. And maybe to include giant teddy bears and hedgehogs in all artistic endeavors.
Gondry kept making music videos for Björk and many other musical artists: “Around the World” by Daft Punk, “Everlong” by Foo Fighters, “Fell in Love With a Girl” by The White Stripes, and so many more. He also directed a bunch of high-profile ad campaigns, including the famous “Drugstore” ad for Levi’s and the even more famous “Smarienberg” ad for Smirnoff, the latter of which is cited as an inspiration for the “bullet time” visual effect used in The Matrix (1999). (To be more precise, John Gaeta, the visual effects supervisor for The Matrix, specifically named Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira (1988) and the collective works of Michel Gondry as inspirations for the funky time-and-perspective trickery that makes up the bullet time effect.)
Gondry’s career directing music videos and commercials was wildly successful, but his first attempt at directing a feature film was a dud. That was Human Nature (2001), which I have not seen, so all I know is what’s in the plot summary on IMDb: “A woman is in love with a man in love with another woman, and all three have designs on a young man raised as a chimpanzee.” Take that as you will.
Human Nature was Gondry’s first collaboration with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would be their second. Gondry presented Kaufman with Bismuth’s memory-erasing idea, and they put together a pitch to bring around to various studios in Hollywood. They both assumed it would be a tough sell, but it generated a lot of attention and a bidding war, and it was picked up very quickly. They didn’t have a script at that point; Kaufman had to go and write it.
This was in the early 2000s, when Kaufman had already earned a reputation as a screenwriter of weird films thanks to Being John Malkovich (1999), which was the debut feature film for both Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. It was the kind of film debut that garnered a lot of very position attention, and also the kind of film that meant when Kaufman and Gondry pitched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind nobody was really surprised by the whole “it takes place almost entirely in the main character’s mind” approach.
Humans have always been fascinated by the workings of our own minds. And I do mean always: there are Mesopotamian stone tablets that provide advice on interpreting dreams. One of those tablets is a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh that was infamously among the thousands of artifacts looted from Iraq and purchased by Hobby Lobby founder and odious evangelical Steve Green. According to the tablet and Gilgamesh’s mom, if you dream about hugging an axe, it means you have an epic bromance in your future, and also that you should never shop at Hobby Lobby.
That doesn’t have anything to do with this week’s movie. It’s just proof that humans have always wanted to poke around inside our own minds, and we have always used stories as one way of doing exactly that. The recent success of Inside Out 2 (2024) suggests that nobody is getting tired of the trope any time soon. We humans are terribly self-involved creatures, and it drives us nuts that we don’t really understand the workings of our own minds. We’re always looking for ways to conceptualize, visualize, and analyze what’s going on inside our troublesome noggins.
Visualizing a person’s thoughts and emotions is the concept at the heart of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film tells the story of a guy named Joel (Jim Carrey, in one of his best performances) who learns that his girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet, in one of her best performances), has undergone a procedure to erase him completely from her memory. He retaliates by choosing to do the same to her. The procedure is carried out by Howard (Tom Wilkinson) and his trio of employees (Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Elijah Wood in his first of several post-Lord of the Rings roles playing a weird little creep). While the procedure is in progress, however, Joel changes his mind. What follows is a chase through his mind as he tries to hide memories of his relationship with Clementine from the erasure procedure.
The film makes no attempt to be scientifically rigorous; Kaufman is very candid about the fact that he wrote the sci fi premise as a tool for exploring the story of a tumultuous relationship. On screen, this manifests with a deliberate mundanity: the ordinary doctor’s office, the unprofessional employees, the cheesy sleep helmet and clunky computers that make up the system. Even the assumed links between experiences, objects, and memories are more or less handwaved in favor of getting into the meat of what it means for the characters. We aren’t meant to care much about the neurology, because that isn’t the point. The point is Joel’s journey through his memories of the relationship, mostly moving backwards from its bitter end to its waning days to the excitement and warmth of how it began.
It’s less common these days, but when the movie came out there was a bit of commentary, including from Kaufman himself, that the lack of scientific rigor—and a lack of interest in scientific rigor—means it’s not really science fiction. I’ve never liked that sort of genre-splitting, and I suspect that in 2004 a lot of it came from a place of people thinking, “Well, if it’s good and emotional and wins awards, it can’t really be sci fi.” Which is, of course, silly, and “imagining a new technology that changes how people live” is one of the most classic sci fi premises out there, even if the science is wishy-washy.
What matters is that it’s a very effective way to tell the story of a relationship. One component of why it works so well is that Carrey and Winslet are both such good actors playing such messy characters—but without any sort of moralizing or judgment on how messy they are. Because they are messy! They have fantastic chemistry and charm, but he’s sulky and passive to a fault, and she’s a mercurial alcoholic, and sometimes we want to shove them both out a window because of how frustrating they are. It’s so easy to believe both that they love each other and that they eventually can’t stand each other. These are complicated characters in a complicated relationship, and for extra emphasis they are surrounded by the equally messy relationships of the doctor’s office employees.
That story would already make for a perfectly fine movie, but this movie is better than perfectly fine. It’s unique and wonderful, and that’s because of how it shows their relationship. The imagery that is used, the symbols that weave through the subconscious world, and the overall structure and composition of the scenes, it’s all visually striking and very memorable.
It was also, apparently, something of a trial to achieve during production. Gondry was the director and Kaufman was also heavily involved in the production process (which is unusual for a screenwriter), and there are two more people whose work is intrinsic to the look of the film: director of photography Ellen Kuras and editor Valdis Óskarsdóttir.
Quick aside: Film editor is the one high-level movie production role that has historically been held by a significant number of women, even in the most high-profile films. Still nowhere close to parity with men, but noticeably more than, for example, the percentage directors or DPs who are women. It’s rare for both the DP and editor of a major feature film to be women. Both Kuras and Óskarsdóttir are, obviously, very good at their jobs, and their work in the film is lovely to behold.
In a 2012 interview, Kuras spoke a bit about the particular challenge of filming a movie that Gondry wanted to look both realistic and surrealistic, the kind of film where one scene can be a convincingly drab New York apartment and another scene can be a brightly distorted childhood memory of bathing in the sink, and both scenes look and feel like a part of the same world. It’s a tricky balance, but they manage it by limiting the number of visual cues that separate the “real” world from the world inside Joel’s memories. There is very little CGI; the effects are mostly in-camera or practical, making use of techniques like forced perspective, split focus, and unusual lighting and sound to create the surreal instability of Joel’s flight through his memories. Both realities have the same texture and palette, which makes them hard to distinguish at first, but they operate by different rules when it comes to the navigation of time and space.
That’s also where the editing of the film comes in. Óskarsdóttir has also talked about the process. Her perspective on it is delightfully no-nonsense. About figuring out how to convey the director’s vision when it’s not necessarily captured on camera, she said, “A director might say, ‘What about that shot where he’s sitting and you can see that he’s thinking, and then he stands up and he’s very disturbed’. And you look at the shot and there’s just some guy standing up and walking across a room.” I love that. We always think of films showing us a director’s vision, but the editor is the one who has to look at everything that’s been filmed, all those variations on guys standing up and walking across rooms, and put together the pieces that actually capture that vision.
Apparently the editing room for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a somewhat crowded and contentious place, as Óskarsdóttir and Gondry—who both describe themselves as stubborn—frequently clashed over how to piece the movie together, and Kaufman was also offering his input. That’s a lot of opinions to wrangle, and it was by no means a simple process, as on the whole the movie is non-linear and a bit inside-out in terms of structure, and on a granular level there are scenes were elements are repeated, deleted, or obscured for emotional impact.
They all knew it could very easily be too confusing for audiences, and there was a lot of trial and error involved in shaping the film into something that told the story as effectively as possible. They were also aware that filmgoing audiences in 2004 would have expectations for a non-linear film about memory, as Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) had come out just a few years prior. The movies are very different, but what’s in a movie is not the same thing as what casual audiences pick up from promotions and taglines. Interestingly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of the few movies I’ve read about that used the test-screening process as an actual, good-faith beta-read on the film (rather than the usual studio-mandated test-run for marketing). They made note of where the test audiences were confused by the film’s timeline and re-edited some things to address the problems. In an interview with AV Club, Gondry said about the test screenings, “We need other people to watch it with us and come at it from a fresh perspective.”
Luckily for us, all of that effort and all those editing room arguments were worth it in the end, because the movie comes together wonderfully. I know there are some people who found it confusing, but for the most part critics and audiences had no trouble with the film’s nonlinear structure—or understood that some parts are meant to be confusing, because Joel is often as confused as we are.
It’s a beautiful movie. I love the way it meanders back and forth between stark winter landscapes and cozy domestic interiors, from scenes of acrimonious commotion to moments of oppressive loneliness. I love how all of that beauty works together with the strong writing and fantastic acting. No element feels out of place. There are some movies where it’s easier to imagine them in a different form, such as a novel or a stage play, but this isn’t one of them. The quirky movieness of it all is part of the film’s statement about how we might visualize and experience our own memories.
Perhaps the most impressive part of the movie is how all of those elements combine to send us on such a powerful emotional rollercoaster. We’re along for the frustrating, painful, but still hopeful ride of Joel and Clementine’s relationship, and we never really get away from it, even in those moments when we are convinced they are terrible for each other. We see in excruciating detail why they fell apart, but in the end we still get that little pang of hope, the same one the characters are feeling, that maybe they can work it out. Maybe they can find happiness again, and maybe it will be worth it even if it is temporary. People aren’t neatly-trimmed puzzles pieces made to fit together without friction, after all, and memories are not cleanly cleaved into pleasure or pain. We’re all so much more complicated than that.
What do you think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Do you think it holds up twenty years later?
Next week: We’re wandering down a haunted road through time in Mattie Do’s The Long Walk. Watch it on Hoopla, Kanopy, Amazon, Roku, and more.
This is one of my all-time favorites. I have watched it many times since it released, and every time, there’s something new to think about. The long meet cute-opening immediately followed by Joel crying his heart out in the car, Mark Ruffalo’s performance as a sweet loser watching his girlfriend flirt intensely with their boss and suspecting that they have a history, the artsiness of Joel and Clementine that demonstrates that they are kindred spirits, the subtly repeated shot of Joel and Clementine frolicking in the snow on the desolate beach while the melancholic “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” closes us out. Damn.
Agreed! That repeated beach shot is so very good. The movie is full of details like that to notice and mull over.
Interesting– it never occurred to me to analyze this film as science fiction. What are the inconsistencies in the Lacuna process that stuck out for you?
The thing that haunted me most about the film was piecing together which of the secondary characters might also have had their minds edited, and it does seem like it’s all of them. Maybe it’s reflective of something we all actually do in real life, suppressing uncomfortable associations as a survival impulse?
Not so much inconsistencies has just a general hand-wavey-ness about how memory works–or at least how the characters are told it works. If the characters who work at the doctor’s office have had their memories altered, then obviously the process isn’t actually linked to physical objects, because they are surrounded by physical objects specifically tied to their interpersonal drama.
But this isn’t something that bothers me at all, as I don’t think the movie needs to be clear or specific about any of this. It’s just one of those things that gets me thinking and I like to mull over. What is tied to our memories? How are they linked together? How does the mind change to fill in the gaps? Does it matter what kind of memories are linked to what kind of emotions? I find it fascinating to think about!
I’ve always been in the minority in liking Human Nature and favoring it over several other Gondry and/or Kaufman works. That synopsis quoted above is simplistic and inaccurate. To me, the film’s key purpose is to explore how we change ourselves to be with other people, how much of our identities we’re really willing to give up, and whether it’s even possible to truly be oneself with someone else.
Patricia Arquette gives an amazing performance as a woman whose naturally heavy coat of body hair presents a challenge to intimate relationships. She falls in with psychologist Tim Robbins, who is obsessed with etiquette, hoping that his influence will make her a normal person. But when he brings in ‘wild child’ Rhys Ifans for study and tries to train out his animal behaviors, she sees that accepting her true self may be possible after all.
Gondry has spoken about it in a few interviews and that made me curious. His perspective seems to be that, sure, critics didn’t like it, but he stands by it. And I’m always curious when that’s how a director feels. I will probably watch it at some point!
It’s absolutely worth a watch. It was Charlie Kaufman’s freshman movie script and it shows both good and bad, it’s weirdly polished, perhaps too polished, and it’s not quite as smart or as weird as later efforts, but it has so many toes in those waters. (It’s his sophomore film because Being John Malkovich got made first, but drafts of Human Nature came first. It’s sort of a reverse Sophomore Slump where the more polished script made the less well liked movie.) The movie is a little bit Dr. Doolittle and a little bit Encino Man and a lot of asking weirdly deep philosophical questions while buried in what should be Silly Sitcom Premises. The cast is fantastic. The directing and editing are all great. There’s some parts that feel like outdated gender essentialism that you aren’t sure are in on the Dr. Doolittle farce of it all or just badly aged or worse both. But there are also some touching moments and interesting emotions and this side of Poor Things is worth a revisit or two.
This is one of my most favourite movies. I saw it twice when it came out and again a few years later. The writing, the acting, the filming, the effects and the editing were top notch. I think I will watch it again soon, just to see how it will make me feel this time around. It’s such a shame that Jim Carrey never got an oscar.
Agreed! Jim Carrey is SO good in this role. The acting is fantastic across the board.
Such a strange coincidence that my daughter just got me to watch this movie yesterday!
I haven’t watched this movie for a few years but I’m fairly certain there is no appearance by Kirsten Dunce. In fairness that could have been a memory that was erased ;)
I do recall enjoying the surreal clashing with the mundane. And the performances were good across the board. My biggest takeaway was the precious but ephemeral nature of memories and lived experience. The good ones are important to us (Joel) whilst the bad ones we choose to edit (Clementine) either ourselves or via external agency. However both types make us who we are. This is reinforced by hints that the supporting characters may also have undergone memory edits.
For me this movie plays in the same mind palace as Vanilla Sky, Inside Out, A Beautiful Mind, Through A Scanner Darkly et al. The fragility and wonder of the human mind is worthy material.
*facepalm* That’s the kind of error that happens when both me and the editor are finishing an article while traveling. I’ll flag the production folks to fix it.
I agree with you completely about the heart of the movie being about the importance of memories, both good and bad, in shaping who we are.
Fixed, thanks!
I love this film. It’s one I try to rewatch at least once a year. I find I notice different things throughout the years, even with Joel’s and Clementine’s relationship. The regression of Joel’s memories has on more than one occasion made me idly wonder what Clementine’s erasure looked like. And I’m glad you wrote that the writer/directors purposely downplayed Lacuna because it wasn’t meant to be the focus. That always aggravated me that a life altering tech was sitting in a dingy strip mall area like a knock-off chain store.
The mention about the idea to send cards to people telling them they had someone erased from their memory reminded me of a grear little book I read a couple of years ago – Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin. The premise is that memory erasure is a real technology, and as a result of a court case the company is required to notify everyone that has had the procedure and offer them a memory restoration. The book is a look into how different people respond to this as well as some of the sketchy motives and reasons behind the technology.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen this movie, I remember it being one of those films in that period, along with The Truman Show and The Majestic that allowed Jim Carrey to show off his acting chops a bit. Ironically, all three of these movies have Carrey examining his world and identity.