Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004) - You Can't Have That!

★★★★☆

I guess there’s always something hurtful or humiliating that we want to hide and bury deep in our memories. If possible, we’d all like to keep the good memories and get rid of the bad, but the thing is, bad memories all come from the so-called sweet ones. Unless you’re willing to let go of all of them, you can’t have eternal sunshine or a spotless mind or whatsoever.

Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) can’t stand the hurt love brings, and is receiving a treatment that’d erase all his memories about Clementine (Kate Winslet), the one he used to love but now hates so much, just like the most of us feel about relationships. This is a very tricky, intriguing, complicated film about memories, say, Joel’s struggles to want to keep the sweet memories while erasing the painful ones with Clementine, which is like I said completely impossible. Things are pretty dreamy and illusory in the film since you have no idea whether it was truly happening like that or it was just Joel’s picky memories. One thing for sure, nonetheless, he’s hurting himself by compelling memories to work the way they possibly can’t.

Memories, as you may know or may not, are all emotional and deceptive. Those bad could be good, and those good could be bad. It all depends on how you feel while you’re recalling. Your feelings are indeed fickle, so are your memories about what’s taken place in your life. What really happened could be very different from what you think happened since what you’ve gone through would definitely influence the way you look at your past. So don’t think of it as something solid. Don’t be so serious about memories. They’re neither real nor reliable. Whether or not they’re pleasant, we ought to learn to accept them all so as to have a complete, satisfying life. There’s no way to separate the good from the bad, because they’re all interconnected.

‘Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind’ is not a film just to entertain or move. It’d give you a lot of headaches instead if you don’t pay serious attention. It’s a film not everyone would like, but it’s certainly a film that everyone would not forget after viewing.