Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: 20 years on

Memory and the meaning of suffering.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A coupe sit on outdoor steps against a blue sky. One holds a plate and the other looks towards them.

Carrey and Winslet as Joel and Clementine.

Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out in 2004. Twenty years on, its stubborn insistence that the memory of pain gives meaning to our lives is as relevant as ever.

I first watched Gondry’s cult classic earlier this year, in the midst of recovering from postnatal PTSD. When we are faced with heartbreak, it can be easy to wish that we could retreat from painful memories, hiding them away until the initial pang has seemingly died down. That was my experience, at least. But I quickly learnt that the traumatic memory of my daughter’s birth would continue to resurface until I processed it and accepted it as part of my life. Just so, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind teaches us that being vulnerable to suffering is a gift, that suffering itself is necessary to our moral growth, and that our ability to remember the past is an invaluable faculty of the human mind.

The film begins simply, with a meeting between its protagonists, Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski. As Joel and Clementine start making small talk, they seem immediately comfortable, almost familiar with each other, and yet the atmosphere is eerie. Soon enough, we discover that Clementine was a patient at Lacuna, a clinic which erased every memory of Joel from her mind after their two-year relationship ended in a painful breakup. When Joel finds out, he asks Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, the director of Lacuna, to do the same for him. As viewers, we now start to wonder: was that meeting we witnessed their very first, or have they met again after their memories were erased, unaware that they loved each other in a ‘past’ life?

This tone of disorientation continues throughout the film, and that’s what makes it so special. As Joel’s memories of Clementine are erased one by one, he realises that the removal of one’s painful experiences is in itself a kind of trauma; what promises to be a relief, turns out to be nothing more than loss.

We experience this sense of disorientation and loss alongside Joel as we jump through snippets of his and Clementine’s happiest and saddest moments together, trying to piece together in our minds a linear narrative of their relationship. While this is happening, the film’s subplot focuses on Stan, Patrick, and Mary, three young people working for Lacuna. As Stan and Patrick, the ‘technicians’, work on Joel’s memory removal, Mary, Lacuna’s naive receptionist, muses on the beauty of their mission. She begins quoting aloud the passage of poetry which inspires the film’s very title, taken from Alexander Pope’s verse epistle Eloisa to Abelard (1717):

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.

Mary has an idealistic vision of her work: she believes she is helping suffering people experience the kind of ‘eternal sunshine’ that only a ‘spotless mind’ can achieve. But the human mind is not so simple. Joel’s desire for forgetfulness quickly turns nightmarish. As he realises he has made a mistake, he starts fighting to retain the memory of his love for Clementine, but his is a hopeless quest. Dr. Mierzwiak’s intervention ensures that the procedure is completed.

Left alone without Stan and Patrick, Mary confesses to the married Dr. Mierzwiak that she is in love with him. It is at this point that her idealism crumbles down. He reveals that they’ve already had an affair in the past and that she agreed to let him erase its memory from her mind. Mary is devastated. She decides that what Lacuna is doing is unethical - even if Mierzwiak technically has the patients’ consent to the procedure - and releases the clinic’s files back to the patients. It is this decision which leads Clementine and Joel, just a few days after they ‘meet’ again, to discover that they’ve already loved each other in the past.

Accepting suffering and holding it in our hearts, not with bitterness, but rather with courage, requires endless patience and infinite hope.

Although the script of the film doesn’t spell it out, Mary’s story emphasises that the absence of painful memories is in itself experienced as a painful loss. What’s more, it shows that, without the memory of the suffering which we have inflicted on others, and which others have inflicted on us, we are incapable of moral growth. Thanks to the knowledge of the past, Mary is able, this time around, to resist having an affair with a married man. Just so, the final scene of the film, which sees Joel and Clementine vow to renew their relationship, is hopeful not in spite of the fact that they have regained the memory of the ways in which they hurt each other in the past, but precisely because of it.

Accepting suffering and holding it in our hearts, not with bitterness, but rather with courage, requires endless patience and infinite hope. But that is what we were made for. Each one of us is called to endure pain in imitation of Christ, and, out of that pain, to discover a greater capacity for sacrificial love. We make meaning out of pain: that’s what human beings do.

The very last lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind perfectly express the fruits of this Christ-like acceptance. As Joel reassures Clementine that he can’t see anything he doesn’t like about her, she expresses her doubts and anxieties: ‘But you will! But you will.’, she repeats, ‘You know, you will think of things. And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me.’ Joel and Clementine look at each other, and, after a pause, they simply say to each other: ‘Okay’. Their ‘okay’ is not an indication that they are doomed to repeat old mistakes. Rather, it signals a new choice: this time, when their relationship becomes difficult, they won’t just run away; this time, they will face discomfort, heartbreak, and disappointment, armed with the knowledge that seeking a sense of permanence by loving another person completely is an inherently valuable pursuit. In accepting the most traumatic parts of our past we grow closer to God; and in bravely deciding to look ahead to the future with hope, we catch a glimpse of the unadulterated joy which we will finally experience in God’s eternity.

Column

Culture

Politics

11 January 2024

4 min read

After Angela: why Christian Democracy still works

Feeling somewhat labelled, George Pitcher unpacks why Christian Democracy still appeals to him, even in the UK, and explores its philosophical roots in the breathless thought of Jacques Maritain.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A politician stands a labelled lectern speaking and gesticulating with a hand.

Angel Merkel, addresses her political party.

When I’m accused of being a “leftie” in the predominantly Conservative area of East Sussex in which we live – though there are signs of automatic Tory support fragmenting – I usually reply that actually I’m a Christian Democrat.

At one level, this is a case of simple literal determinism: I’m a Christian and a democrat. Tick. But Christian Democracy is more complicated than that – not least because its continental European iteration was built on the re-building of a pan-national concord after the Second World War and the establishment of the European Union, a narrative from which the UK has largely excluded itself.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was a paragon of this ideology, growing out of the re-unification of Germany that began in 1989. It’s unlikely that her political ideology would have prospered in Britain.

The so-called three Fs of social conservatism are family, faith and flag. I sign up to the first two. But not the nationalism of the third. Here, I’m squarely in Christian Democrat territory.

It’s that ideology that appeals to me. Essentially, Christian Democracy is rooted in an attempt, since the 19th century, to reconcile Catholic social teaching with democracy and capitalism (tick, again). In that context, it combines left-wing economics with social conservatism.

I awoke with a start some years ago with the realisation that I’m socially conservative. My divergence from my socially liberal friends had been so gradual as to be imperceptible. But here I stand, I can do no other.

I oppose assisted suicide – a liberal standard – not, as I’m accused, because of some vague commitment to the sanctity of life but because I believe there’s extreme moral jeopardy in the state endorsing in its legislature that some lives are not worth living. I believe that same-sex unions should be blessed in Church (and I have done so), but I also believe that’s a definitional difference from marriage as celebrated in church.

The hard right uses woke as a term of abuse when all it really means to many of us is being "awake" or "quite nice". By this ascription, for instance, someone who holds that refugees should be treated with dignity can be described as woke. But I also believe that a male cannot become a woman – and be recognised by the state as such – simply by declaring that he is so. Nor do I think that history can be judged by contemporary mmores,and I find cancel culture abhorrent. That makes me anti-woke in some circles.

By these criteria, I’m socially conservative. So be it. The so-called three Fs of social conservatism are family, faith and flag. I sign up to the first two. But not the nationalism of the third. Here, I’m squarely in Christian Democrat territory.

As for a social economy, I believe in a state big enough to provide free health care at the point of delivery, education as a right and not a privilege and a welfare state robust enough to support the marginalised and vulnerable – in scriptural terms, “the poor”. Again, that’s Christian Democracy, at least as Merkel might understand it.

But ideologies need ideologues and Christian Democracy’s problem in the UK is that we have not too few, but too many and too varied.

All of which will guide my vote this year’s general election. There won’t be a CDU on the ballot paper and, even if there were, our ridiculous first-past-the-post electoral system mocks our democracy. When the Liberal Democrats struggle to maintain a toehold in parliament, despite being a widely credible alternative in many Tory seats, what chance for a more esoteric political initiative?

An argument may be mounted that with the Church of England established in law, 26 bishops sitting in the legislature of the House of Lords as a consequence, and the head of state as the Church’s supreme governor, Christian Democracy is already pretty well served in the UK.

Wisely, British Christian Democrats have endeavoured over the past three decades and more to be a movement within politics, rather than a political party (though no disrespect is intended here to the Christian People’s Alliance). This is Christian Democracy as an idea, rather than a voting option.

For this idea to have traction, it needs a political ideology, which may or may not be along the lines of the one I’ve adumbrated. But ideologies need ideologues and Christian Democracy’s problem in the UK is that we have not too few, but too many and too varied. So it may be as well to look to a contemporary historical leader of thought.

The nearest thing that European Christian Democrats have to a uniting figure is the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who died in 1973. To read Maritain at length is to leave one breathless with anticipation for what could be.

An albeit dangerous summation of Maritain is that he calls the West to a “New Christendom” that defines the state not by Christian faith, but attempts to define our faith through a secular prism, to make it active in the public square.

I particularly like the way this is described by American theologian William T, Cavanagh: “[T]his means in effect that there is trash to be picked up, businesses to be run, wars to be fought. These things are not our ultimate end, but neither are they simply cut loose from any spiritual significance.”

If we’re able to unpack that sense of purpose, then just maybe we can approach an election with this unifying political slogan: Vote Christian Democrat.