Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind allows for some interesting questions. Are there really people out there that we can’t avoid regardless of the enormous lengths we would take to eliminate them from our lives? Will we ever be able to map to specific memories in such a way that we can delete them like so many files in a leftover laptop?
But most importantly, who would you erase? I suppose movies like this are meant to inspire existential questions and thoughts - even those “deep” thoughts that seem so cliche once they come out. Case in point: As I was falling asleep last night, I pondered this last question and I realized that there might not be any one relationship that I would actually want to erase - each has made me who I am today. So there, I said it.
And the movie makes a fairly good case against the very industry that it has created. Joel Barish can’t remember anything about the previous two years in his life since everything was colored by Clementine. Immediately after the procedure, he is despondent and depressed and believes that he has just done nothing but stand still for two years. (Not a spoiler, this is in the first ten minutes of the film) If we do indeed develop the ability to erase people we love so intensely as to wanting to erase them, then we will erase all emotions we feel during that time.
This procedure, though, may have some benefits - erasing so many drunken encounters, failed pick-up attempts, but more seriously - traumatic events. The first “who” I really thought of erasing was a terribly traumatic personal relationship that would only require erasing one day and some memories of the aftermath. I would be healed! But then, even the positive outpouring which came from that would be erased and so many good feelings that came from the bad would be lost forever.
In the end, erasing may not be such an exciting prospect after all….
