Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind
This is a very complex movie that was put together in a way to make you feel one thing in the beginning and change how you feel about the characters at the end. The basic premiss of the movie is a love story. A couple gets together and spends time together only to come to a point where they break up. Once they have broken up their feelings don’t just disappear and so she decides to go through with a procedure of erasing him from her memory to help her to move on with her life. He finds out this is what she has done after seeing her and her “acting” like she didn’t know him, when she actually had no memory of their involvement anymore. He follows through with the procedure as well because of his hurt that she could want to eliminate him from even her memories. You get to see the process of his memories being erased and then his subconscious deciding that he did not want to forget they were ever together even though it is over.
In the end they end up meeting each other not knowing that previously they had been involved and start going through with another relationship. They do end up finding out that they both erased one another, but end up deciding that the feeling they feel is really something and could be worth the same result all over again. (Better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all)
Of course there is way more to the story and a couple sub-plots, but I really want to focus on the core idea this movie is getting across.
What I took away from this movie most of all was as humans we are dealing with disappointment every day. Sometimes that disappointment is easy to brush off and sometimes we need to find justification to move forward in our lives. When faced with disappointment it is also very easy to turn it into anger to help us to let it go. In the case of this movie this certainly applies. The disappointment of loosing a relationship is like going through a grieving process. There isn’t a death of a person, but instead of a coupling. While we all deal with grief differently, there is one way that many of us can relate to; denial. Denial is a powerful emotion in that it can lead us to a place where we suppress events to the point they do not exist, or rewrite our history to better suit ourselves and accept an event. In the case of this movie the flaw that comes in literally rewritting their past is that they do not get the lesson that comes from any event which leads to an end (either good or bad). Because they did not learn the lesson they are destined to repeat the same mistake again. In the real world it is shown by us dating the same person over and over again from people who have similar personality traits or reacting to situations in ways that cause they same results that proved to not work the first time.
When they literally rewrite their past in the movie, they end up not just with someone with similar traits, but the same person. The love story part comes in when they decide their feelings mean more then the inevitable tragedy. We tend to find a familiar in live and stick with it, when it actually does us more harm them good.
After some serious thought I came to this conclusion as to the particular predicament…
To learn is to grow. To grow is to change. To change is unknown therefore unfathomable to a mind that only knows the past, thus spawns fear. Yet to resist any of this creates anxiety and unhappiness because to be happy we crave growth and therefore change, which happens regardless. So, acceptance is the lesson but that would mean living in the present which is hardest to do of all!
My final consensus of this movie is it is showing us to live in the present and accept ourselves for what we are, even our flaws and mistakes. To be in the present is to accept where you currently are without judgement. That is the hardest thing to do because we naturally judge
