The Ending Of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind Explained
The dawning of the new millennium brought with it a sense of experimentation and upheaval to filmmaking as writers and directors pushed the boundaries of storytelling. One of the hallmark films of this breakout era was "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," a twisty, cerebral exploration of love and memory. The movie asks its audience to consider if our memories of our relationships can be trusted, and whether or not it matters as it ponders the existence of soulmates and destinies. It's considered overly depressing by some and ultimately hopeful by others largely thanks to its polarizing ending.
"Eternal Sunshine" has a nonlinear, dreamlike structure that can leave audiences feeling off-balance; the final act sees Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) — who are under the impression they've just met — finding out that they'd been in a long-term relationship together and the breakup was so brutal that that they erased each other from their memories. They also strongly suspect that they'll make the same mistakes this second time around. Clem thinks it's pointless to go forward, but Joel stops her, wanting to try again anyway.
The ending isn't ambiguous — Clementine accepts Joel's request — and yet it brings up questions as to whether their meeting hours earlier holds enough promise to try to combat the clashing sensibilities that contributed to their inciting breakup. That meeting, incidentally, actually takes place at the start of the film, which is where any serious study of an ending must begin.
The story of 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'
As "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" opens, Joel wakes up feeling off. He finds an unexplained large dent on the side of his car. He stands on the platform of his commuter train into the city, looking antsy. In a burst of spontaneity, he bolts and gets on the train to Montauk instead. He spends a blustery day on the beach and in the local diner, seemingly shadowed by an odd blue-haired woman in an orange sweatshirt who eventually introduces herself as Clementine.
There is an awkwardness to their meeting, but the two are clearly drawn to one another. They wind up spending the next several hours together. They return to Clem's apartment, where she runs inside. While Joel waits, a stranger (Elijah Wood) knocks on his car window asking questions that don't initially make sense. Then the scene cuts to Joel crying in his car as the film's opening credits roll.
That first act plays out entirely linearly, so it comes as a huge shock when suddenly scenes start to repeat, blur, and dissolve altogether. Joel is unnerved, but as he moves through these surreal landscapes and dissonant events, he uncovers that Clem had him erased from her memory after their breakup; he — out of pain, spite, and desperation — asked for the same to be done to him; and that he is in the midst of the procedure at that very moment.
The business of memory erasure
Lacuna, Inc. is a small business with a bustling clientele, particularly around Valentine's Day, in which customers can have their memories erased after the painful loss of a loved one, either through death, divorce, or other. Technicians have patients revisit their memories in a lab in order to map them on a brain scan, then the technicians erase the memories overnight in their homes while the clients sleep, allowing them to wake up none the wiser in the morning.
The ethics of such a service are never addressed outright, but that doesn't mean the film doesn't have a clear opinion on the matter. Joel is outraged and insulted that Clem would wash her hands of him so capriciously, yet the pain he feels from that harsh emotional abandonment is so piercing that he rushes to have the procedure performed on himself out of a naked desperation to feel nothing at all. It's a rash move, and one he almost instantly regrets.
From another perspective, starry-eyed Lacuna receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst) is a true believer in the program and has almost a cult-like adoration for company founder Howard (Tom Wilkinson). However, when Mary finds out things are not what they seem, she reacts instantly. With no uncertainty whatsoever, Mary seeks to correct the grievous wrongs Lacuna has perpetrated on its clients; in a way, she wakes up to her true feelings just as Joel does.
A look inside the mind
The flashback has long been a storytelling device used to revisit a character's memory of an event. but "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" didn't seek to simply revisit memories — the characters live inside them, manipulate them, and ultimately erase them. For this to visually translate on screen, the studio hired the famously innovative director Michel Gondry. Gondry used old-school visual effects tricks like forced perspective and trick sets to build a world inside Joel's mind that was off-balance and ever-changing.
When setting up the procedure, Howard tells Joel that he will awaken afterwards with a sense of being unable to grasp an idea, like waking from a dream. However, the essence of dreaming is notoriously hard to capture on film, and it speaks volumes about the attention to detail of both Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman that the dream-like memory sequences are so visceral and affecting.
Each individual memory is lit differently, has a different saturation of colors, and fades away or disappears each in its own specific way. Moreover, the distortion of faces and voices further adds to the surreality of these remembered moments, and if a moment is revisited more than once, the distortion only becomes more pronounced and the separation from reality more distinct.
"Eternal Sunshine" is all about clever visuals, like using Clementine's hair color to telegraph where in the timeline each scene takes place, but it's in the inventive structuring of Joel's memories where the film really stands out.
Wake me up before you go
As Joel's memories of Clementine are erased in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," he very quickly regrets his decision. His memories are too bittersweet. As Lacuna's program forces him to move past the painful memories of the breakup, he encounters the moments that are precious to him, and he can't bear to let them go. Like being in a lucid dream, he begins to fight the erasure.
As he does, he visits moments in his life that Clem was never part of, and the very nature of memory comes into question. Are our memories all that we're made of? Are we fundamentally changed without them? What are the ethical repercussions of removing parts of someone's psyche? Joel's erasure of Clementine also erases childhood memories of Huckleberry Hound, and the likelihood that other areas of his life and memory are entangled in his memories of Clem is high.
The process also investigates whether we are forever changed by our experiences, unable to lose those milestones, whether we remember them or not. Joel's repressed and buried memories of humiliation, for example, clearly influenced who Joel became as an adult even though he had pushed them far beneath his consciousness.
Whatever the dangers, Joel instinctively rejects them, and relentlessly tries to wake himself up and salvage his memories of Clementine before she vanishes forever. She's a part of him, and he doesn't want to lose that.
Mary learns the truth
While Joel's subconscious is fleeing Lacuna's program, their employees are making themselves at home in his apartment, monitoring his progress. The lead tech is Stan (Mark Ruffalo), who has a casual romantic relationship with Mary. She joins him after the procedure is underway to partake in Joel's liquor, dance on his furniture, get high, and have sex. Their party is interrupted, though, when Joel's nocturnal rebellion disrupts the computer, and Stan calls in Howard to solve the unprecedented issue.
Once Howard arrives, Mary's infatuation with him is obvious. She fawns over his brilliance and tries to impress him with quotes she's memorized from "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations." As their work ends, Mary impulsively kisses Howard. She immediately apologizes and confesses her long-standing crush. He demurs half-heartedly, mentioning his family, but the two embrace again just as Howard's wife shows up and sees them through the window.
The two plead they had a momentary lapse in judgment, but his wife responds that Howard is cruel to leave Mary in the dark and tells her they had an affair already. Mary is shocked, but Howard admits it's true, saying Mary insisted on having the procedure to get over her feelings. Devastated, Mary walks off in tears.
Rather than go home, though, she ransacks the Lacuna offices to locate her file. After listening to her recorded memories, Mary leaves her job there and absconds with all the client files.
A new kind of identity theft
Stan's assistant for the erasure is Patrick, who's revealed to be the stranger outside Joel's car window at the start of the film. Socially awkward and desperate for approval, Patrick tries to impress Stan with news that he now has a girlfriend. Unable to stop himself from babbling despite Stan's obvious disinterest, Patrick reveals the disturbing information that he's started dating recent Lacuna client Clementine, having become enthralled with her during her own erasure session. He also walked off with a pair of her underwear, indicating that he's a major creep. Just to drive the point home, though, when he runs off to console a hysterical Clem — upset due to her own missing memories — his backpack contains Joel's memorabilia of Clementine that Patrick is using to win her over himself.
This gross violation of both Joel's and Clementine's personal information brings up even more questions about the ethics of meddling with people's minds, and juxtaposed against the way Mary uses the same information, Patrick's actions seem malevolent and possibly criminal. To gain intimate access to Clementine, he lies about almost every aspect of himself.
Joel, for his part, wants to protect her, but he's been immobilized and made obsolete as part of his own procedure as well. They are both at the mercy of whatever sinister intentions lie unseen outside their slumbers.
The persistence of memory
As Joel's mind visits the house on the beach where he and Clementine first met, the rooms fill with water, and everything crumbles around him. He's going to lose this final memory, he knows, but the image of her in his mind whispers the words, "Meet me in Montauk," and suddenly Joel awakens in his room.
We are back at the scenes from the first act. Against all odds, Joel and Clementine have both been drawn to Montauk, where they meet again for the first time. Once again, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" examines what makes a person who they are; do people make memories or do memories make people? With this return to Montauk, the film is suggesting that there are forces in the universe greater than the human mind can comprehend. Is it fate? Is the film suggesting the existence of soulmates? It doesn't go so far as to definitively answer that question. However, the film seems to be saying that some people are always going to be drawn to each other — are always going to find each other — regardless of any other circumstances. In a sea of cynicism and underhandedness, that's a strong message of hope to rise above the rest.
Joel and Clem embark upon a do-over
When Joel's timeline reconnects with the events of the movie's beginning, it skims over everything to the moment he watches Clem wake up in his car upon their arrival at her apartment building. This time the camera follows Clem as she goes inside to grab a few things ... including her mail.
In the car, she reads a letter from Mary, apologizing on behalf of Lacuna and returning Clem's file. Inserting the tape in the cassette player in Joel's car, Clem is greeted with her own voice talking about Joel's dullness. Both are stunned speechless, but in a noticeable switch from the past, Joel gets confrontational while Clementine wants to figure out what is going on. He insists she leave.
Later, when Clem comes to talk things out — again, in stark contrast to their previous behaviors — he's listening to his own tape, and his words are just as inflammatory as hers. She turns to leave, saying the tapes are right about how she behaves in relationships and that Joel will find things he doesn't like about her. But Joel shrugs his shoulders and says, "Okay."
That flippant dismissal of what Joel knows could and probably will be problematic later is not only indicative of the hazy veil of optimism with which we all approach new love, but it is yet another example of hope as a primary theme of the movie. Accepting the inevitable hardships as a given is an unwavering message of faith that the experience of loving someone is worth whatever tomorrow brings.
Maybe the journey is its own reward?
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" has been labeled a comedy and a drama, but no one seems to dispute that it's a love story at heart. However, there are multiple other interpretations that can be gleaned from the film. Instead of speaking specifically about love, the film's message about taking the journey no matter how it's going to end can be applied to all sorts of scenarios where bravery or encouragement is required. Following one's dreams — be it starting a business or writing a novel — is worth the effort even if failure and rejection may quite possibly await.
The movie also explores existential questions of self as it delves into the orthodoxy of its central premise. Beyond that, those questions of propriety can also be applied to issues of genetic engineering, scientific experimentation on animals, and questions of body autonomy. While Mary is told she insisted on her mind wipe, in her tape she sounds utterly reluctant and unsure. And when she learns the truth, she is desolate. Moreover, although Joel and Clem both hired Lacuna to erase their memories of one another, neither agreed to have their personal information hijacked by a deranged stalker.
Maybe Joel and Clem are actually kind of bad for each other?
One of the more interesting possible interpretations, however, is "Eternal Sunshine" as a toxic relationship marred by mental illness and alcoholism. Kate Winslet's performance is seen by some communities as one of the best ever portrayals of something akin to borderline personality disorder (BPD). While such a diagnosis is never given to Clem in the film, her behavior nonetheless exhibits many of the hallmark characteristics of BPD. And her alcoholism is nearly a matter of record as she's frequently shown sneaking shots of liquor and drinking to excess.
If Clem has unregulated BPD in addition to being an addict, Joel's casual brush-offs of her unhealthy behaviors is an indictment of anyone who doesn't take mental illness seriously as well as anyone who doesn't learn how to support a loved one with mental illness. Denial and avoidance will only exacerbate the problem.
Additionally, there is the issue of Clem's abusive treatment of Joel to address. She repeatedly berates him any time she gets frustrated, causing scenes and humiliating him in public at will. Even with her addiction and possible mental illness, her emotional exploitation shouldn't be simply smoothed over. Taken from this angle, a pessimistic view of the film is entirely valid.
Michal Gondry and Charlie Kaufman add some perspective
Genre confusion regarding "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" isn't unusual, as Michel Gondry told the Daily Beast that he would give different notes to his actors. To Winslet, he would say the movie was a comedy and that her character should be writ large on the screen. To Carrey, he would say the film was a drama and ask him to tone down his natural stage presence. This expands the disparity between Clem and Joel's characters, in a way explaining both their attraction and their unraveling.
As for Charlie Kaufman, his reputation for delving into the surreal with films like "Being John Malkovich" notwithstanding, in an interview with DVD Talk, he said that he wanted to downplay the science-fiction aspects of the story and focus more on the relationships. The Lacuna company, for example, was to be "as mundane as possible." This directive explains the excessive paper files, the obsolete cassette tapes, and the heavy square computer monitors, all of which were passé even in 2004.
Acknowledging that the relationships are the core of the film, it's perhaps Kate Winslet's notes on the script that were most impactful. According to Gondry, she advised him to embrace sentimentality. Perhaps it's because of this that Kaufman's original ending — in which the two part ways instead of reconciling — was rewritten.
Regardless of the impetus, the collaboration of Gondry, Kaufman, Winslet, and Carrey produced a visually striking and emotionally compelling film that will never be forgotten.