Charlie Kaufman's Angels: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Kaufman finds himself flung into the annals of rom-com history with his memory-erasing, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
After crusading into John Malkovich, deciphering human nature, tinkering with dangerous minds, and searching for a ghost orchid, moviegoers across the world were excited to see what kind of surrealist conjuring would appear next from Charlie Kaufman. And out of the permutations and possibilities, the last thing many probably expected was a mid-budget romantic comedy titled “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. Unbeknownst to Kaufman and longtime friend, Frenchman, and film’s director, Michael Gondry, the movie would become a critical success, a box office triumph, and a cult classic speaking the good word to romantics, depressives, and generations of everymen in search of a manic pixie dream girl to call their own. Now, sixteen years after the film’s release, I still marvel at what “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is able to achieve despite conceptual and story obstacles stood in the way.
“Eternal Sunshine” takes us back into the brain of Joel (Jim Carrey), a grey coated lowest common denominator with a nondescript job and an unbearable melancholy in the form of his ex-girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet). It was a bad break up. Painful to the point of both parties opting to undergo memory erasure, courtesy of Lacuna Inc. The company (cult? syndicate?) specializes in a quick procedure where even the worst of memories can be rid of entirely. In the waiting room of their lobby there are other patients looking to permanently scrap thoughts of family members and pets— never world wars or climate change. For erasing personal sufferings is much more important than the plagues of humanity. For Joel, it’s only fair; Clementine erased him first. Lacuna’s lead doctor Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), describes it to Joel as an overnight get-out-of-your-head operation, or “brain damage” to be more precise. Once Joel goes to bed, it’s off to the races as Howard and his associates, Stan (Mark Ruffalo), Patrick (Elijah Wood), and Mary (Kirsten Dunst) hunt down memories of Clementine and zap them out of existence. There’s only one problem— Joel, inside his mind, experiencing memories reviled and cherished, realizes that he’s made a mistake and wants to keep a piece of Clementine around. And although he is not in control, he proves to a gifted and determined backseat driver.
An internal cat-and-mouse pursuit ensues as Joel and Clementine run through his memories in search of solace from the searchlights and alarms wanting to take her away. While alongside the couple sprinting for escape like outlaws on the run, audiences can’t help but feel a sense of peril as the film enters sequences that emit terror and unease. Faces begin to blur and turn upside down, bodies disappear like a rapture, worlds come crashing down. Memory is a haunted house. The fluidity and pace at which Joel’s recollections fold on top one another is a perspective on human memory that feels organic and obvious even though there is no reference to what memory looks, smells, or feels like. With this film, Kaufman emphasizes his unique ability to create sensory images out of intangible ideas. How would we interact with our inner monologues? Turn to “Adaptation”. What does narcissism sound like? Perhaps the singular voice in “Anomalisa”. Can memory be visualized? Just look at “Eternal Sunshine”.
The bubbly torment of “Eternal Sunshine” comes in a form that is tailor-made for Kaufman’s existentialism. Romantic comedy is a paradox; it is a genre that, while layered with comedy, relies on the anguish of audiences to hit hard. These are films that are designed to dig into the romantic traumas of viewers through jokes. To watch one is a brutally uplifting escape, and Kaufman and Gondry managed to craft a perfect tool to navigate bloody rom-com battleground of the early aughts.
After the 90s, a decade full of the genre, the new millennium brought the rom-com to factory-line plateau with titles such as “The Wedding Planner” (2001), “Just Married” (2003), and my personal trauma, “Maid in Manhattan” (2002). If “Eternal Sunshine” had not been treated carefully, it may have been destined to fall into bargain bins of Rite Aids everywhere or misplaced on a rack of John Grisham novels, lonely and forgotten. For anyone without prior knowledge of the film, the original trailer, a Frankensteining of quirky moments and Daryl Braithwaite’s garish “As the Days Go By”, could be seen as a death sentence straight into the DVD graveyard. Not only was it marketed in genre that was over-saturating cinemas, but its casting of Rubberface himself, Jim Carrey, against Kate Winslet, still stuck under the thumb of “Titanic”, was an odd couple pairing that seemed like a somewhat risqué choice even for the esteemed surrealist writer. To intrigue even further, Carrey and Winslet would not be playing into their more exploited traits of eccentricity and humility, respectively. Carrey would play the straight man and Winslet, the bombastic love interest. Through world-class actors in their own regards, their chemistry was a gamble in a genre dependent on that sole factor.
Obviously, after many years of inspirations and accolades (including Best Original Screenplay), these decisions paid off. With its mouthful of a title, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” would go on to become one of the most highly regarded visual poems to love and memory in the art form. With Its casting hitting a jackpot and its melancholy lighting the way, “Eternal Sunshine” flourished as Charlie Kaufman fed the stale genre with his classic interrogation of big questions, trademark surrealist brandishings, and a refusal to conform to romantic comedy norms.
As funny and sweet as the movie is (thanks to Gondry’s directing), there is a darkness amidst the resolution of “Eternal Sunshine”; it was written by Kaufman after all. While the film can be seen as an exploration of unrequited love for “the one”, it also illustrates the desolate trap that romanticism inadvertently sets human being up for. After Clementine’s “meet me in Montauk” moment and an inevitable reunion between the two lovebirds, the last shot of the film has the couple running in the snow only to be played again and again on repeat. The impact of these last seconds of the film hit like a gut punch. After rekindling their relationship, are Joel and Clementine doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again? Is this a film about the resilience of true love or cyclical heartbreak? We have to decide for ourselves. Like many of his stories, Charlie Kaufman leaves no concrete evidence for one ideology over another. The question of whether a glass is half full or half empty is never Kaufman’s prerogative; instead, he is more concerned with pointing out that a glass exists in the first place. In other words, his films are moral quandaries, never moral solutions. And for him to do so in a rom-com, warms and freezes the heart all at once.