Accepting the Pain of the Inevitable Ending What makes me uneasy about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind now, as opposed to what worried me about it before, is that it possesses a bravery that I am unsure that I personally possess – it suggests that I’m wrong about fate. I no longer hold either of these interpretations of the ending, but I confess that, however much I admire and quite adore the ideas that the ending possesses, it still has a talent to freak me out, to make me uneasy. Both characters were right that love is real and powerful and special, but perhaps they were wrong that that love should be found in the company of the other – a mistake that I could see repeating and repeating ad infinitum.

Yes, the film suggests at the end that Joel and Clementine choose to relive and recreate all of their happy memories over and over again but at this point I simply could not get the anger and the hurt of their own personal ending out of my mind, the bitterness that drove each other to purposefully get their memories erased. For me, the ending twisted into a vaguely sinister tale of repeated mistakes and misplaced love after all, Joel bitterly refers to Clementine at one point in the film as “a stranger” that he has spent too much time with, and his words, playing on a tape in his apartment, hang over the couple even as they profess a willingness to do it all over again. This is exactly how I saw the film later in life – a mistake of a relationship doomed to repeat itself.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) – source: Focus Features Originally, I found the ending to be joyous: I saw the love that the two of them had for each other and almost dusted my hands of the bitterness that lay beneath the happiness, forgot about the final images of them repeating a snowball fight on a lonely beach, trapped to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. When I first watched the film, I didn’t realise what a revolutionary “okay” this would prove to be. This contract, this acceptance of prioritising the journey above the ending, is sealed with a simple “okay”. So, even though they verbally acknowledge, face to face, that they will inevitably go down the same road as before, a road that ends with resentment, rejection and, yes, that medical amnesic procedure all over again, they decide to be together anyway. Yet, in a small gloomy hallway in an apartment complex, Joel and Clementine find themselves in the first and most exciting beginning of a new relationship, where they can’t see a single thing to dislike about each other. Yet, crucially, I did not have a hope of grasping the idea that lay at its heart.Īt the end of the film the central characters, Joel ( Jim Carrey) and Clementine ( Kate Winslet), have discovered that they were previously in a failed relationship, and that both of their memories have been erased through a medical procedure. When I first watched Michel Gondry’s startling Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I was not in a position to understand it – I raved about the central performances, particularly that of Jim Carrey, and my eyes widened at the inventiveness of the storytelling, how the inside of a mind was told through such interesting visual means. Fate is a subject tackled repeatedly through storytelling, whether that be a mythical prophecy or two lovers destined to be together, but when applied to more realistic, grounded fiction, the idea that the central protagonists have no control over their own destiny makes me uneasy, perhaps due to the implication that, subsequently, I have no control over my own. Nothing freaks me out quite like the idea that ultimately, things are just ‘meant to be’.

Endless sunshine of the spotless mind