Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind is a movie that focuses around two characters, Joel Barish and Clementine Krucyznski. The movie begins with Joel Barish impulsively skipping work to take a train to Montauk’s point. That day, he meets Clementine, they begin talking, and they feel a strange connection. The movie appears to skip forward by a year, though later we find that this is actually nearly the end of the story rather than the beginning, and we find Joel distraught that his girlfriend has left him. As it turns out, she has had a new procedure done that can erase a specific part of her memory, i.e., him. Being very depressed about this, Joel decides to have the same procedure done to him, but while undergoing that procedure, he changes his mind, but cannot do anything about it because he is unconscious during the procedure. This movie encompasses many interesting philosophical concepts including those of memory, identity, loneliness, anguish, despair, the absurd, and morality. In this paper, I will explore these concepts and relate them to the movie as well as to the ideas of various philosophers, primarily the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre. The most obvious and overwhelming concept in the movie is the problem of memory. The entire movie is based around memory, the creation and destruction of both Joel and Clementine’s memories. What is interesting however, is the idea of recurrence. Nietzsche conducts a thought experiment in Beyond Good and Evil that basically asks, if the life you live now, were to be repeated over and over, would you still live the same way? For Joel and Clementine, that answer appears to be yes. Initially, for Clementine at least, that answer would have seemed to be no, but after listening to her file, everything that she has said about Joel, her mind appears to change. This is because of the idea of recurrence. It seems that no matter what we think we desire, we are almost destined