Eternal Sunshine plot analysis

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry) is an excruciatingly painful confrontational indictment against our weakness and inability to move on from the past without succumbing to the desperate need against our better judgement to reclaim the sentimental mild painkiller of a problem relationship that’s over with someone unattainable. Remember how happy we were together = If I could only get her back I’d be happy again = And everything would be better. No. It’s so dangerous because for romantics in our mind our memories of emotions and fantasies about reoccurring connection is as potent powerful as the real thing.

 

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the first thing helpful to understand is the reason why its nonlinear narrative is arranged the way it is. Howard from Lacuna erases Joel’s memories starting with the most recent. So if we reverse their chronology what we get based on the color of CLEMENTINE’S hair is.
 
1. Green When JOEL and Clementine meet it’s at a party Joel’s fighting couple friends Rob and Carrie invite him to. At Montauk. On the beach Clem is wearing an orange hoodie and her hair is dyed green. Later that night she B&Es into a large beach house and once inside Joel mutters about his reluctance to be there and Clem disdainfully tells him So go. Humiliated he does.
 
2. Red Joel goes back to Clementine seeking her out at the Barnes and Noble where she works. Clem has dyed red hair. Filling in some blanks it could be Joel and Clementine experience their honeymoon phase during this time. Bliss. Their happiest. Their first time going to the frozen Lake Charles. And though not placed here chronologically and shown in its entirety it seems they go back to what they refer to as Our House on Montauk on a freezing day and run along the shoreline in the snow.
 
3. Orange Honeymoon’s over phase. Clem dyes her hair orange. At Kang’s Chinese restaurant having dinner Joel realizes he’s bored with Clementine. They argue. One day at the flea market Clem says she wants a baby. They fight some more over that. One night Clem goes out alone has some drinks wrecks Joel’s car doorscraped fire hydrant. They fight some more. Joel berates Clem assuming she fucked someone because that’s how she gets people to like her.
 
4. Blue Clem has gone to Lacuna to have Joel erased. Rob and Carrie reveal the truth to Joel well Rob does. Joel cries in car and throws tape out window. Joel erases Clementine. The next day he wakes up and ditches work to go to Montauk. He meets Clementine on the train. They go back to her place. The next night they go to the frozen Charles. The following morning they realize they’ve met before. And erased each other. Decide to get back together.
 
The fun part is the first time you see Eternal Sunshine you think when they meet on the train they’re meeting for the first time. And at the end you think it’s romantic that despite their flaws they accept each other because relationships take work and no one’s perfect. No.
     After the opening sequence when Joel is in his car crying we’re already in his mind and this is the first memory to be erased. Notice how when he has that interaction with his neighbor played by Thomas Jay Ryan there’s already a dot on Joel’s temple. The messy confusing aspect of us seeing Joel in his own memories is due to the conflict that is Joel’s jealousy Patrick is stealing his identity to hook up with Clementine.
     The midpoint of the narrative is Joel wanting to call off the procedure. Iconic line reading by Carrey. Can you hear me I wanna call it off? So because the time Joel spent with Clementine when she had dyed red hair was when they were happiest Joel chooses in his imagination dyed red hair Clem to spirit away reconcile and make a pact to outwit the procedure with.
     But the thing is this isn’t Clementine remember. Dyed red hair Clem is Joel’s idealized fantasy of her. Not real. The only Clementine we could ever consider real in the film is blue dyed hair Clem. At the end when dyed green hair Clementine tells Joel to meet her in Montauk that’s Joel telling himself to. Then how does Clementine know to meet him there?
 
There’s a scene towards the end while Joel and Clem are in his mind on the run from the erasure when they wake up in bed on the snowy Montauk and Clem gleefully says Look where we are but then Joel says Clem this isn’t good. Something ominous about the way he says that line. Because Joel knows that Mierzwiak is definitely going to look for them there. Why?
     Because it’s their happiest purest memory together? So why is Joel troubled? Obvious reason is because it’s surely going to be erased. But the fear in his reaction reveals a dual purpose. It’s because this regressive distant impossible to return to state of jubilation is precisely what deceptively leads Joel and Clem to wrongly foolishly vulnerably pathetically think they can repair their future. 
     That’s why the last scene of the couple running together on the snowy shoreline is jump cut repeated several times. And the sad heartbreakingly aching song plays again the one during the opening credits that Joel was in tears over when the film begins. This is a horror ending. Tragedy impact. They're like addicts. This toxic relationship is destroying them. Yet they will still go back to chase that elusive remote far-gone brief moment when they were in love along with the feelings it brought them over and over again for years to come. And it always ends the same. Impossibly.

Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus

Has there even been a truly great movie released in the last 10 years? First sign there’s trouble is how long it took me to come up with an answer to this question, which ended up being I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020, Charlie Kaufman). Although this does tell me a lot about my taste. Ordinary, plain, flawed characters inhabiting domestic spaces charged with fear or sadness? Yet still funny at times. Or formally experimental. Like Luis Buñuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Alan Clarke, Hal Hartley, Todd Solondz, Lars von Trier, Claire Denis and Michael Haneke.
     I don’t think I’ll ever give up on the state of contemporary movies. I’m just really picky. And it’s one thing if a personal favorite, a great movie, holds up over time. It’s another when you come back to a movie you enjoyed and over time you find it to prove itself to be even better.
     In the 90s I’d seen Todd Solondz’s first few films on vhs. But I was living in Portland, OR at the time it came out and saw Palindromes (2004, Todd Solondz) at the Fox Tower theater. It’s been so long since I’ve seen it since. So when I saw a new 4K restoration was screening in my neighborhood I wondered what it’d be like to see it after all this time in a theater again.
 

Palindromes is an abortion-pedophile comedy. Its protagonist is a child named AVIVA, who’s portrayed by several different actresses. But there’s nothing cringe about it. Its tone vacillates between tender, sad, shock, jawdropping, and hilarious. 

     Seeing the new restoration on a big screen for the first time I noticed right away that it’s shot on 16mm. I never noticed that before in all my years. It wasn't until later in life that I was able to recognize the difference between 16 and 35 projected. Something else I noticed for the first time: almost all of the actresses playing Aviva speak in a wispy babytalk withdrawn kinda way. I guess it's fitting because if this movie’s about anything, it’s children. 

 
I can’t believe I’d never wondered if the structure of Palindromes is a palindrome. Duh of course it is. I mean I don’t think it’s overt. Okay it’s made up of 8 chapters, right? Chapter 1 “Dawn,” and Chapter 8 “Mark,” each have a moment where Aviva asks if she’ll end up like Dawn Wiener; in “Dawn,” we hear Dawn Wiener killed herself because (according to Missy Wiener) she was pregnant from a date rape, and in “Mark,” we find Mark Wiener has been recently accused (according to Missy Wiener) of being a child molester.
 
In Chapter 2 “Judah” Aviva wants a baby (not love) and offers herself sexually to some dude, and in Chapter 7 “Bob” Aviva falls in love with some dude and offers to have sex (not to get pregnant) with him.
 
In Chapter 3 “Henry” Aviva’s forced to get an abortion, and pro-life protesters yell at her. Also in this segment Aviva’s mom warns her against having the child because of risks children of young mothers very often face: “What if it’s deformed? If it’s missing a leg or an arm or a nose or an eye? If it’s brain damaged or mentally retarded?” In Chapter 6 “Mama Sunshine” Aviva boards in the house of a pro-life Christian family, where there’s a scene with Peter Paul who prays for all of the unborn babies in heaven “even the ones that aren’t wrapped in plastic bags; even the ones that were strangled, suffocated, drowned, or incinerated; even the ones whose bodies were pulled apart limb by limb and cut off, eyes plucked out; even the ones who had no fingers or toes, missing ears or noses, no brain or heart.”
 
In Chapter 4 “Henrietta” Aviva runs away and hides in the back of a semi as a stowaway. In Chapter 5 “Huckleberry” Aviva runs away and drifts down the river in a boat.
 
I remember at the time it was first released I’d picked up on how it was the first Solondz film that didn’t have one of those surreal fantasy scenes, y’know (everyone loves Dawn, Maplewood mass shooter in the park, Scooby on Conan). But Palindromes instead has this kind of children’s story aesthetic thing going on throughout, with the lullaby, and pastel hued chapter cards.
     Palindromes also could be the first Solondz film to feature a scene with his philosophical dialogues. And who better but Mark Wiener to deliver them? It’s that scene at the end when Mark gives his speech about genes and randomness. That’s what sticks with me. That counterpoint. At one point in his speech, Mark mentions the “depressed type,” and the “mindless happy type.” Aren’t these 2 the only types found in all of Todd Solondz’s films? But in Palindromes, it’s clearly Aviva who’s the mindless happy type. And when depressed nihilistic Mark says: “You might lose some weight. Your face might clear up. Get a body tan, breast enlargement, a sex change. It makes no difference. Essentially, from in front, from behind, whether you’re 13 or 50, you’ll always be the same.” And I don’t need to put it into words, but in the “Huckleberry” chapter, times having changed quite a bit, when I saw that little boy actor playing Aviva, it meant a little more this time.
 
4/13/2025 Plaza Theatre
Atlanta, GA