Volume
2, January 2005
ISSN 1552-5112
an international and interdisciplinary journal
of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Internal Sunshine:
Illuminating Being-Memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Unlike novels, historians’ constructions do aim at being reconstructions
of the past.
Through documents and their critical examination of
documents,
Historians are subject to what once was.
They owe a debt to the past,
a debt of recognition to the dead,
that makes them insolvent debtors.
Our problem is to articulate conceptually what is as yet
only a feeling
expressed through this sense of debt.
-Paul Ricoeur, Time
and Narrative[1]
Released earlier this year, Michel Gondry’s Eternal
Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (2004) is indisputably a meditation on memory’s
role in love and love lost. Eternal
Sunshine surrealistically documents the attempt of one man, Joel Barrish,
with the help of a futuristic medical procedure, to literally erase all the
memories of his ex-girlfriend from his mind, only to regret the decision once
the procedure begins taking effect. Eternal
Sunshine seems to continue a long line of films and other cultural
documents in recent years consumed with memory.
“After more than a decade of intense public and academic discussions of
the uses and abuses of memory,” Andreas Huyssen recently wrote, “many may feel
the topic has been exhausted. Memory
fatigue has set in.”[2] Yet, Eternal Sunshine may also allow us
a way out of this postmodern mood—the vague affect that, even while conceding
that the “act of remembering is always in and of the present,”[3]
even while acknowledging, embracing (why not?), that the past is hermetically
“preserved in time,”[4]
our understanding of the past is rarely about the past. Does Eternal Sunshine, for instance,
merely reinforce the cliché that it is better for one to have loved and lost,
than never have experienced love in the first place? Or, more pointedly, does the film suggest we
need to remember simply so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes we once made
again, as several characters in the film do?
Such an argument certainly requires more space than allotted here, and I
would of course resist simply reducing the film to such a simple maxim;
however, Eternal Sunshine’s representation of one man’s memory does
challenge previous cinematic notions concerning the act of remembering.
Specifically, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind
offers a (late) postmodern view of memory, which resists earlier postmodern
tendencies of historicity—neither toward Fredric Jameson’s “nostalgia films”[5]
nor toward any notion of the past as simply simulation. It resists—as defined by Svetlana Boym—both
reflective and restorative[6]
forms of nostalgia; it neither claims the past as an objet a of longing,
nor asserts the past to be absolute truth and tradition. I am tempted to suggest that Eternal
Sunshine’s notion of time instead exists in an affective space which
punctures the past, present and future, but which also remains essentially
outside all three planes, too. It
revises a postmodernist view of memory, which respects the unrepresentability
of events, while also allowing for the possibility of knowability. “Adopting
St. Augustine’s fine formulation, there is a present of the future, a
present of the present and a present of the past,” writes Gilles Deleuze,
“all implicated in the event, rolled up in the event, and thus simultaneous and
inexplicable.”[7] When I conclude, I will return to this notion
of Eternal Sunshine as intuiting a web of time outside its own visual,
deconstructive spectacle. For now, I
have chosen to limit my analysis to a brief discussion of the film’s use of
light and lighting as a crucial means for illuminating how memory and perception
are staged within the course of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I would offer, moreover, that these lights
evoke Deleuze’s notion of the recollection-image[8]—something
which actualizes a pure recollection of an unrealizable past, which can exist
only as a virtual element. In other words, “memory is not in us.”[9] As such, the film also employs natural light
to highlight this absence of memory—the moments before we “move in a being
memory”[10]—the
notion of characters living in and perceiving the immediate moment, as opposed
to putting themselves into the past.
This later becoming is realized by the use of the artificial
spotlight—emerging more prominently as the film progresses and Joel’s memories
fade—which provides a powerful metaphor both for the artificiality of mental
recollection and for the claustrophobia, the suffocating loss, of inevitably
fading personal memory.
The opening moments of the film offer a fascinating
cinematic glimpse into the possibility of one person being emptied of memory. The film opens with Joel awaking after the
above procedure has already taken place and successfully removed the memory of
Clementine (and much of the past two years involved). Naturally, there is therefore a curious
emptiness to his existence—prior to thought, before memory—in these first few
shots. The natural light of the opening
scene highlights how Joel is stuck squarely in the moment, perceiving only the
world around him, serving in stark contrast to the majority of the rest of the
film, where he is literally trapped inside his own mind and his own memories,
often in darkness. The first shot of the
film is a close-up of Joel awaking. His
eyes, upon opening, first gravitate to the bright light of the window, shown in
the next shot. As Joel sits up in bed
and kicks off the blanket, a long shot captures Joel’s entire room—importantly,
the natural light coming through the window serves not only as the literal
center of the shot, but it also provides the sole source of illumination in the
otherwise cool blue and gloomy set. Joel
is almost in darkness as a silhouette against the bright background. The natural light here suggests a new
beginning, free of the tainting influence of memory.
The natural light continues through the next scenes;
“it is in empty time,” writes Deleuze, “that we anticipate recollection, break
up what is actual and locate the recollection once it is formed.”[11] Even Joel’s voice-over contributes to the
sense of mental emptiness here—his first words are “random thoughts for Valentine’s
Day, 2004,” suggesting no basis for a unified thought process, presumably from
having been cleaned of so many of his most prominent memories. “I ditched work today. Took a train out to Montauk,” he continues in
a flat, emotionless voice, “I don’t know why.”
In many ways, this is Joel’s motivation throughout the first twenty
minutes of the film; he does not understand why he is so empty and why he does
the things he does and points towards the film’s conclusion, which will call
forth the question of “why?” as it pertains to present layers of time. As in Joel’s apartment, the natural light
again beats off the dreariness of the train platform and the quiet commuters
waiting. He mentions he needs to get his
car fixed—another seemingly random observation from his spotless mind, but
which also points out one of his few new memories, having noticed the
unexplainable dent on the side of his car just a few minutes earlier. In Montauk, the light snow falling on the
sandy beach and blue ocean shore—Joel walking completely alone—provide other
examples of pale natural light filling in the void of memory. The idea that this shot of Joel walking
across an empty beach could signify the emptiness of memory is reinforced when
the film then immediately cuts to the blank pages in Joel’s diary, a result of
him having torn all the pages out connected to Clementine, which of course he
doesn’t remember doing. Denied cohesive
memory and still trapped only in the process of immediate perception, Joel’s
empty voice-over continues as he childishly digs a hole in the sand: “sand is
overrated. It’s just tiny little
rocks.” Having had Clementine removed,
her existence once the dominant blot in his life, Joel now has little of depth
or substance to remark on, backgrounded by the natural light and the brightness
of the sun over the ocean. Light and
setting creates a cold void here, a barrenness meant to signify the absence of
Joel’s memories.
Natural light, however, diminishes over the course
of the film—not only because Joel begins the process of becoming memory (even
while it is paradoxically being removed), but also because the removal
procedure crucially takes place at night.
Over fifty-three minutes into the film, a three-and-a-half minute
montage of Joel inside his own memory begins, with the spotlight as the
central, unifying motif. The spotlight
follows Joel around as he works his way through his own pure recollection. Joel is seen lying on the frozen Charles
River with Clementine; the film then cuts to him lying with her on the floor of
Union Station. While attempting to
penetrate the past, Joel’s recollection moves laterally through the separate
“circles” of memory which are contracting back to the “point of view of the actual
present.”[12] He rests on the floor confused by the sudden
shift, under the glare of an anonymous spotlight. He turns to her, only to see Clementine
literally pulled out of the light—taken from that particular memory. He then finds himself back on the river,
alone.
This is the crucial point in the film when Joel
realizes he doesn’t want the procedure anymore, the limits of his few memories
of her represented by the spotlight.
Perhaps, Joel begins to realize not only his love for Clementine, but
also the need for a past, a pre-existence, which cannot be reclaimed or
reshaped, but which also, cannot be ruptured from his existence either. He crawls and runs along the river, trying to
find Clementine, followed by the spotlight.
When he finds her, Joel grabs Clementine’s hand and they run together to
find a place where she can’t be taken away again. However, the spotlight follows them
everywhere, as he moves from recollection to recollection. On the one hand, the spotlight signifies the
procedure hunting his memories down for deletion, yet Joel’s inability to
outrun the spotlight, with or without Clementine, suggests that the small
circle of light also represents the limits of Joel’s memory, and, by extension,
the limits of his recollection of a sealed past which remains outside him. All he remembers of the river, for example,
is what was originally right in front of him.
The all-consuming natural light of the opening of the film, which
offered the opportunity to perceive the entire surroundings, has now been
reduced to this confined space of limited and quickly fading recollection. The spotlight follows the two of them as they
visit memories of spending time with their friends and returning to the
doctor’s office in a vain attempt to stop the procedure. Clementine is erased from these memories, and
Joel is left only with his light. Here
again, the spotlight signifies the limited perception of Joel’s remembering,
which remains in and of the present.
He cannot again completely experience the moments he thinks he
remembers; Joel can only see limited illuminations, fragments in his
imagination vaguely informed by his understanding of the past.
The Union Station/doctor’s office scene echoes
similar sequences throughout the film.
The spotlight follows them as Joel runs with Clementine away from a
drive-in theatre; through the bookstore she works at and back to the doctor’s
office. Most pointedly, the finale of
the memory scenes—that is, the last memory to be erased, if not necessarily the
climax of the film itself (it is debatable where such a moment is located in
the film’s narrative)—also uses the spotlight to great effect. Joel remembers when he first met Clementine
on the beach in Montauk. The first scene
is bathed in natural light, as he recalls her first conversation with her. During this moment, Joel realizes that he
needs to just enjoy the moment, knowing he can stop the inevitable loss. The brief natural light suggests here the
willingness finally for Joel to just accept the moment as is, without thinking
of what came before or what comes next.
Quickly, the sequence turns to night, however—reflecting the unavoidable
fading of even this last memory. Joel
follows a freezing Clementine into a warmer, abandoned summer home—the same
home illuminated by natural light as Joel walked the Montauk beach in the
film’s opening. This scene is
illuminated again by the spotlight, following Joel around as he contemplates
the final moments of his memories with Clementine. At first, the spotlight appears to be that of
a flashlight Clementine finds which she uses to search her way through the
house; yet as the scene progresses, a clear rupture occurs between the light
emanating from her flashlight and the free-floating spotlight confining
Joel—his attempts at puncturing into the past have now turned back on
himself. Thought initially to be just
another prop, this light too becomes the disembodied embodiment of Joel’s
recollection-image. Clementine walks
around the house, looking for alcohol and checking out the second floor, while
Joel simply paces about, under the glare of the spotlight, resigned to both the
internal limitations of his memories and the eternal, irrevocable decisions he
has made. He is unable to follow her up
the stairs, just as in the original past itself, as though literally trapped
within the limits of his own memory and experience, trapped within the
light. The spotlight, essentially Joel’s
memory, becomes this man’s only source of comfort as he confronts the
inevitably of forgetting. The spotlight
also signifies the suffocation Joel feels from memory, knowing he cannot reach
back to his past and realizing that the past is literally vanishing around
him. As he talks about wishing he “had
stayed” with Clementine that night, following her up the stairs, the
summerhouse comes crashing down around him.
He realizes the failure of his love, and the failure of his
nostalgia—“one is nostalgic,” writes Boym, “not for the past the way it was,
but for the past the way it could have been.”[13] But, of course, Joel now momentarily accepts
the past “the way it was.” The sand and
ocean floods over the kitchen and living room floors; his spotlight becomes the
only constant for him in a past literally crumbling down for good.
When Clementine returns to Joel for their goodbye,
she walks down the stairs and into Joel’s spotlight—entering for the last time
Joel’s perception of this past. This
moment is followed up by a shot of Joel and Clementine together at the foot of
the stairs; importantly, the house at this point has completely fallen away,
except for the portion of the building covered by the spotlight. This image brings into relief how the
spotlight is literally the limits of his perception and memory; the only parts
of the house which still exist in the scene are the parts exposed by light,
just as the only portions of the home to exist for Joel are the ones which he
could have immediately perceived and stored for recollection from that
moment. The last shot of this scene then
is a close-up of Joel and Clementine face-to-face, though not embracing or
kissing, as though this is the closest physically Joel can get to Clementine
when trapped within his own mind. Here,
memory is a “mode of re-presentation [. . .] belonging ever more to the
present,” representing a past preserved in time. He cannot kiss or embrace Clementine, because
he cannot move beyond his mental existence of recollection images and into a
preserved past. Their faces are barely
illuminated by a small, tight spotlight—the memories of her have nearly
vanished for good, while the tightness of the shot calls attention to the
suffocating feeling of memory, the feeling of being dragged and walled off from
past experiences which remain progressively more in the past, and thus
representative of a memory one is increasingly unable to mentally access
again.
The preceding shot is followed by an elaborate
finale whereby Joel remembers driving away from his first meeting with her,
though the clear symbolism here is that he is also driving away for good from
the memories of Clementine. What makes
the sequence so striking, is that Joel and the car are surrounded on all sides
by final, brief images of his memories of Clementine—sitting in a restaurant,
visiting friends, going back to the bookstore, enjoying the beach, watching
TV—with these last glimpses again framed with the use of the spotlight,
including sometimes a red spotlight which evokes the car’s rear brake
lights. In this case again, memories of
Clementine are literally behind him and she has become “just a girl” to him.
As the memory is finally erased, the film cuts back
to morning, with successive shots of the two doctors in Joel’s house both
bathed in the natural light of morning.
They are framed from the point of view of the window, illuminated by the
sun; they are not the blank slate silhouette that Joel will be when he rises
from his bed, shot from the other side of the room and blocked out by the
bright backdrop. Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind has returned to its first pure state of memory absence
and the past has received its proper preservation from the present. The doctors leave, then Joel later awakes;
the film repeats the same shot of Joel first being drawn to the brightness of
the window and the establishing shot framing the window as the center of the
room. As this new day progresses, Joel
and Clementine again meet, without the memory of their past failed love, and
once again begin a courtship, emphasizing that perhaps one of the film’s clear
themes—echoed in the subplot with the one older doctor’s affair with his
secretary (who begin another affair after the first one had been erased from
her mind)—that to forget is to repeat.
The coexistence of sheets of the past must be retained; how events
interact in the collective present, the web of pasts, presents and futures,
must be restored. The film must return
to “the paradoxical characteristics of a non-chronological time: the
preexistence of a past in general; the coexistence of all sheets of past; and
the existence of a most contracted degree” in the present.[14] Or, put more simply, “contemporary nostalgia
is not so much about the past,” writes Boym, “as about the vanishing present.”[15]
The last shot of the film is of Joel and Clementine
running along the same Montauk beach together.
They are once again bathed in the intense paleness of snow and natural
light. The film frame then morphs to
pure white—the very last image of the film before the credits emerge. Here, the absence of communal memory, the
want of a shared past, becomes foregrounded by the bright natural light and
emptiness of the image. The white, blank
slate which closes the film suggests they have started over, “creative
forgetting” has won out, but much of Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind
suggests that they are doomed to fail again.
“We need both past and future to articulate our political, social, and
cultural dissatisfactions with the present state of the world,” writes Huyssen,
“memory discourses are absolutely essential to imagine a future and to regain a
strong temporal and spatial grounding of life and the imagination in a media
and consumer society that increasingly voids temporality and collapses space.”[16] Otherwise, the future—as in end of Eternal
Sunshine—becomes the past, anyway.
What Eternal Sunshine seems to advocate is not the knowability of
a definitive linear history, but the feeling that temporal boundaries will
simply reconstruct themselves in the absence of the possibility of a
preserved past—the future will simply replace the sheets of past until the
sheets remain. Whatever is ultimately to
be gained or loss by Joel’s amnesia, the film clearly foregrounds light as a
mark of the scope and limits of perception and the recollection image into this
sealed temporality.