CLEMENTINE ETERNAL SUNSHINE UPDATE

In his internal journey back through time, Joel finally learns his lesson. All the pain we encounter in the film’s title sequence and immediately thereafter is the consequence of a failure of communication, or openness - and, by implication, of trust. The failure of the relationship is squarely on Joel’s shoulders he could never reveal himself to Clementine, as she notes at one point in one of his memories, whereas she shared everything with him. They were so nearly perfect for each other, almost but not quite counterbalancing each other’s excesses. Kaufman takes us backwards through the fractured prism of memory to peel away the layers of emotional evisceration to show us not just that Joel and Clementine did love each other, but why. How many damaged former lovers have talked about wanting to forget someone? Haven’t we all? Kaufman’s twist on the love story is to say, Ok, what if you could? What would be the price? And the price, as Eternal Sunshine shows us, is unbearably high. Eternal Sunshine starts us with the corrosive ruin of a relationship and asks a different, but more intriguing question: how could these two people ever have loved each other in the first place? This is a question surely most of us have asked of our own failed relationships and those we have experienced at a remove.

CLEMENTINE ETERNAL SUNSHINE UPDATE

The dramatic effect is of a reverse bittersweet American update of Ingmar Bergman’s harrowing Scenes From A Marriage (1973).īut Kaufman takes the conventional romantic paradigm, where love flowers and then has to fight to survive, and turns it on its head. Time in Joel’s mind works in reverse because the “procedure” works by burrowing from the exterior - the most recent memories - into the “emotional core” - the oldest - which, as Howard explains patiently to Joel, is then destroyed. Two distinct threads of time are at work in the film: the subjective, non linear time of Joel’s mind and the objective linear time of the subplots – the B story love triangle between Stan, Mary and Howard and the C story, Patrick’s duplicitous pursuit of Clementine. The shift into the interior, non linear world occurs at 22 minutes, when he takes the sedative to render himself unconscious and only emerges again at 92 minutes, just 11 minutes from the end of the film.

Most of the action of the A story, Joel’s journey back to his love for Clementine, takes place inside his mind. Structure and theme in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless MindĮternal Sunshine uses non linear time to mirror the process of memory.

Clementine eternal sunshine