Narrative Analysis Essay

For the record, I learned recently in my writing course that you should never really end an essay with someone else's words because it's like giving up your entire essay to somebody else and invalidating your own work--or... something along those lines. But I wrote this essay at 3.30 in the morning--around a fire alarm!--and by the time I got to the conclusion, I just didn't care anymore. I still got an A. And he didn't say a word about ending with a quote. So there.

'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind': A Narrative Analysis

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind begins with the assumed protagonist waking up and getting off of a hide-a-bed before, on impulse, skipping work to go to Montauk though he didn’t understand why. As the scene progresses, the viewer is introduced to the second central character, Clementine. Seventeen minutes into the movie, title credits and film score break in and completely cut off the movie in one fell, and relatively confusing, swoop.

From this point, Eternal Sunshine begins to work us backward through the story of Joel’s relationship with Clementine. There’s a lot of vagueness here, forcing the viewer to work to piece things together. Questions that came to mind about the first seventeen minutes: Was that a flashback? Or is that later plotline and we’re being slammed backward in the storyline and space?

We’re taken to a collection of scenes in the quite recent past depicting Joel talking to his friends about going to see Clementine to apologize, but she acted like she didn’t recognize him. His friends give him a card that says she had Joel’s memory wiped from her brain and they weren’t to ever mention her relationship to her.

In this fashion, the movie moves back and forth through the story space and timeline in an almost jarring manner. We move forward with Joel to the doctor’s office to discuss the situation, to his apartment to collect anything that would remind him of his ex-girlfriend, back to the doctor’s office, back to his apartment.

Via this memory-wiping procedure, we’re suddenly being dragged through this series of Joel’s memories that contain Clementine, and at first, the things we see are ugly, unhappy and give us a prejudice against his ex-girlfriend. The movie begins asking us to like her and then instantly turns it all around and requests that we dislike her.

In a manner, the opening of the movie serves as redemption for the next side of Clementine’s character, because it allows us to see that she is a round character, unpredictable and unstable, and it gives us more of her to hold onto. Despite the fact that we recognize from the very beginning that Clementine is at least half-crazy, fickle and eccentric, we do get the idea that she’s not volatile or caustic. Upon the inspection of Joel’s memories in backward motion, that idea is reversed, and we, as viewers, are no longer entirely sure of how to categorize Clementine’s role in Joel’s story.

While Eternal Sunshine takes us through Joel’s complicated relationship with Clementine, we’re introduced to a subplot involving the technicians Stan and Patrick, the company’s secretary Mary, and the doctor, Howard. We come to understand that Patrick stole a pair of Clementine’s panties when they wiped her memory the week previous and then that he was actively seeing her, using her memories of Joel—and Joel’s memories of her—to hold her attention.

Subplot two involves Stan and Mary, who are dating and proceed to get high while wiping Joel’s memory. The film alludes to the two having sex when the scene returns and they’re both naked as Stan realizes that things aren’t going as planned and has to call Howard, setting the two into a panic. When Howard arrives, this subplot stems to involve a history with Mary and Howard and we find out that not only does Mary have an interminable crush on the doctor, but they had, at one point, had an affair that Mary chose to have wiped from her memory.

While we travel back through Joel’s relationship with Clementine, we discover that he’s managed to remove himself in part from the process and he starts to change his mind. In order to attempt to hold onto something—anything—of this relationship, Joel tries to drag Clementine out of the memories as he remembers them, hoping that if he changes things, those changes might stay. The constant back and forth of plot from Joel’s rewinding memories to the present love triangles taking place beside his unconscious body continues to be somewhat jarring, but still manage to bring the story points into each other: points in Joel’s past explain portions of events taking place in the present; Joel keeps getting pieces of conversations taking place around his physical body that allow him to converse with mental images of people in his life, who are, while only extensions of himself, his mental recreation of his interpretation of those individuals’ behavioral patterns.

Joel’s final memory is of meeting Clementine, and when it’s all over, we’re brought back to the beginning scene of the movie, which brings the story full circle, back to Valentine’s Day, 2004. Mary, who resigned her position, sent every patient the company had wiped a letter and a tape of their information. Joel and Clementine, who had begun to begin anew, suddenly were provided with a history they didn’t remember, but regretted anyway. The story and plot ends when the two decide to stick it out together, even though they know from history that she’ll get bored with him and he’ll get exasperated with her and it might not last forever. Herein lies an overwhelming theme of the movie, in that nothing lasts forever, nothing has to last forever. But to mourn something’s end is far better than to force yourself to forget it ever happened. There is experience and knowledge to be gained with every experience, and to cut out two years of your life because the ending was painful is harmful to yourself far more than to anybody else.

“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.”

–Alexander Pope