by Alaina Zhang for The 44 North, Newsletter & Reviews Editor
“Please let me keep this memory, just this one.” —Joel Barish, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Last quarter, I was lucky enough to take a class called Medieval Dreams and Visions. After reading works by Chaucer, Dante, and other authors who lived centuries ago, we ended the quarter by watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
The 2004 film follows a young man, Joel, as he revisits his diary after several years. Sitting next to the beach, the cold wind slashing against his face, he finds it difficult to recall why there are missing pages in his diary, remembered only by where they were torn away. The hollowness is all-consuming. Soon after, on a train, he meets a young woman named Clementine whom he quickly falls in love with. Later, it’s revealed that the two had previously been in a relationship, which ended poorly: Clementine had undergone a surgery to erase all memories of Joel. The disjointedness Joel feels at the beginning of the film was, in fact, the result of his own surgery to, in turn, forget Clementine.
The dream-like setting of the film lends masterfully to the theme of vulnerability it aims to portray. Not just a romance or sci-fi movie, the story is really about self-confrontation and reconciliation. Joel, upon realizing that he does not in fact want to forget Clementine, is forced to navigate his own brain and walk the memory lane of his mind. One of the most poignant moments in the film is when Joel enters the memory of being bullied by other kids and Clementine—a version of her inside his head—is watching. Childhood trauma is private and often so shameful that adults bury it deep inside themselves. Joel, however, is forced to confront those memories, which shaped who he is now. In a film, it’s healing for us to see Clementine bearing witness, whether real or imagined by Joel; Childhood trauma isn’t observable by our adult friends or partners, even if we verbally share memories with them. The scene ends with Clementine dragging Joel away, and although all of this takes place inside Joel’s mind, it’s real enough to make him—and us—feel seen in a vulnerable moment.
My perception of the film also shifted because of my class. One of the surrounding questions we were interested in throughout the quarter was why authors across the ages are so drawn to the experience of dreaming and continue to weave it into their works. In the movie, the dream world is less a dream and more a disorganized catalogue of memories, which invite us, alongside the characters, to navigate the reflection, trauma, and life that make up who one is in relationship with others.
For me, dreams have always been a special source of inspiration—a place where I can witness my deepest desires and hopes materialize in strange ways. My dream world is also a space where I truly feel safe and free, a space available only to myself. Admittedly, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to decipher the meaning of my dreams or know whether they have meaning at all, but what I do believe is that dreams can confirm my insecurities, trauma, restrained feelings, and thoughts. What surfaces in my dreams is a combination of magic and reality in its rawest form, and the act of dreaming alone can be reassurance that my life can take on alternative endings, parallel worlds, and unimaginable possibilities.
The idea of “making sense” of a dream is, in fact, similar to the art of interpretation itself. In our class, this was one of the reasons we attributed to the prevalence of using dreaming as a storytelling framework. When we read about dreams, there are often at least two, if not more, layers of interpretation at play: We’re simultaneously making sense of a bewildering experience and attempting to decipher why a work was presented through the lens of dreams in the first place. When creatives build dream worlds for us that don’t exist, or exist in a multiverse, the seeds are often personal or collective memory re-imagined. This unique meaning-making opportunity, via dreams, expands how we think and remember. In other words, we can see that more is possible beyond our waking, conscious hours.
That’s exactly what I felt Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind expressed. After Clementine and Joel realize what they’ve gone through, after they hear the ugly things they said about each other before the surgery, they still decide to give each other another chance—at least in being remembered if not in a relationship. They’re also choosing to give a chance to the idea of a possibility, even if it might not end in the best way.
Relationships can be terrifying. We can never know what someone else thinks, nor what their words and actions mean. Though the procedure of memory probing and removal in the film seems cinematic and unbelievable, we, too, probe through our own minds, equipped with nothing but fear, to dig up memories—ones we never wished to revisit—in search of some truth about ourselves. The difference between the film and reality is what makes it most powerful; the story asks: What if we were to show all of this to someone else, who we love, with an equally complex past? Would it really be incriminating? Or would it heal the ways we think we’re alone? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind provided me with a newfound perspective on what it means to be in a relationship with others, and to be in a relationship with oneself.
We spend almost a third of our lives in deep sleep, dreaming. Perhaps, like Joel and Clementine, we’re sorting through the entangled web of our dreams, trying to find the confirmation, confidence, and reassurance we all need to move forward when our eyes open again and a new, terrifying, inevitable day awaits us. But the landscape of memory is worth walking, because as Joel and Clementine show us, we’re never the only ones there when we think we’re better off alone.
