Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind reflection

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

            Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind was a very interesting movie. Normally I can guess what’s going to happen, but this movie had me on the edge of my seat. Jim Carey as Joel and Kate Winslet as Clementine are the main characters. Clementine is one of those free spirited girls, who doesn’t care what other people think and just rolls with the punches. She worked a bookstore and she changed her hair color from blue to green to red. Joel on the other hand is a bit more reserved, not so much as the wild and crazy side, but something from the first moment he met her just clicked. They met at a friend’s beach party and hit it off right away, Joel noticed how fun and free she was.

 They were in a relationship that started out fun, and they were just absolutely crazy about each other, they joked, laughed and played. As things time went on they got more involved and the pieces just started falling apart. They were fighting more, she wanted a commitment and was talking about the future and he was very responsive. Clementine came home one night, extremely late and drunk, she told Joel that she had accidently wrecked his car. Joel was upset and angry and accused her of sleeping around and cheating on him, for her that was the last straw. She packed up her stuff and she left him.

When Joel had time to think about it, he regrets how things happened and missed her. It was Valentine’s Day and decided to surprise her at work with a gift, but when he got there to his surprise Clementine acted as if she had no clue of whom he was. Not only does she not recognize him a guy named Patrick comes up to meet her, and supposedly it’s her boyfriend. He went to his friend’s house to vent and that is when they dropped a big bomb on him. They handed Joel a letter that said “Clementine has had Joel Barish erased from her memory. Please never mention their relationship to her again Thank you Lacuna INC,” he doesn’t know what to think. To get some answers he visits Lacuna INC to find out what they do, and sure enough they erase certain memories from people’s brains. The company basically causes brain damage in order to delete memories from the brain. I believe out of spit Joel decides since Clementine did that to him he was going to do the same thing to her. They asked him to pack every single item he has that reminds him of Clementine and to bring it to Lacuna INC. Using the items they will spark of memories and Lacuna would be able to make a map of this brain of where Clementine memories would be and in one procedure in one night only she would be completely erased out of his mind, just that easy.

So a crew comes over to the house after he takes a drug that causes him to knock out and they get started on deleting his memory.  As Joel is asleep he is seeing the memories starting with the most recent, all the fighting and bickering, and he is happy that they are going away. The procedure is going just as well as he thought it would go. As the memories went on, he remembered why he loves Clementine so much; he remembered the good things about her. He decided that he changed his mind and he didn’t want this anymore. So in his mind him and Clementine hide in other memories that doesn’t involve her so he can keep her in her mind. The doctor running the machine finds them though and deletes her anyways. There was no way of working around it and she gets completely erased from his mind. Later down the road a few months late, by fate they meet again but only as strangers. They hang out and click just as they did before. As Joel drops her off at her house one morning they find their files from Lacuna and read and listen to all the tapes, and it’s all very shocking and scary for them. They come to the conclusion that what they had was real and to start over with each other.

When I first started watching this movie I thought that he had a memory disorder of some short, because it was the type of movie that begins at end then comes moves to the beginning of their relationship. I was extremely confused at first, and I was in for a shock. I don’t believe that any of it could ever be possible though. The fact that you can delete certain memories from your brain is most likely never going to be possible. I can’t even imagine the science it would have to include in order for it to become is remotely possible.

The brain is a very complex place, and adding brain damage to in order to erase memories could possible cause permanent brain damage I believe. You can’t pick and choose what you remember and what you don’t remember, that’s almost playing god. You remember things for a reason; it is what makes you who you are, helps define who you become. They were erasing long-term memory, which remains there on a relatively permanent basis. Because of you long-term memory it helps to make future decisions, so by erasing long-term memories it could affect the decisions you make in the future. Clementine could have been a short term memory but since their relationship continued it transferred to long-term by a process called encoding. Long term memory has an unlimited capacity to store information, so no matter what happened with Joel and Clementine, if they both haven’t had the procedure done they would have always remembered everything that happened in that relationship. Remembering everything they just couldn’t bear to remember all the bad times, because they were both hurt by one other.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is a fictional movie, it’s not possible to cause brain damage in order to erase memories, and for that sake I hope that it never will be. Could you imagine how people would take advantage of the option to erase memories? There are a lot of things that I wish I couldn’t remember, but never in my life would I choose to delete them from my memory. Memories are what make you who you are, how you learn.