Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Information

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a 2004 American romantic science fiction film about an estranged couple who have each other erased from their memories, scripted by Charlie Kaufman and directed by the French director, Michel Gondry. The film uses elements of science fiction, psychological thriller, and a nonlinear narrative to explore the nature of memory and romantic love. It opened in North America on March 19, 2004, and grossed over US$70 million worldwide.

Kaufman and Gondry worked on the story with Pierre Bismuth, a French performance artist. The film stars an ensemble cast that includes Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson, Elijah Wood, Jane Adams, and David Cross.

The title is taken from the poem Eloisa to Abelard by Alexander Pope, the story of a tragic love affair, where forgetfulness became the heroine's only comfort:

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;

The film was a critical and commercial success, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and has garnered a cult following. Winslet received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

Plot

The narrative opens with Clementine and Joel meeting, seemingly by chance, on the Montauk train.

Emotionally withdrawn Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and unhinged free spirit Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) strike up a relationship on a Long Island Rail Road train from Montauk, New York. They are drawn to each other despite their apparently radically different personalities.

Although they do not seem to realize it at the time, Joel and Clementine are in fact former lovers, now separated after having spent two years together. After a fight, Clementine hires the New York City firm Lacuna, Inc. to erase all her memories of their relationship. (The term "lacuna" means a gap or missing part; for instance, lacunar amnesia is a gap in one's memory about a specific event.) Joel discovers this by chance. He is devastated and hurt. He wants to hurt her (knowing, but perhaps not fully understanding, that she has no memory of him) and forget her, therefore he decides to undergo the procedure himself; a process that takes place while he sleeps.

Much of the film takes place in Joel's mind. It is apparent to the viewer that, as his memories are erased, Joel revisits them in reverse and regrets his decision. He re-experiences happier times, reminding him of his love for Clementine. As a result he embarks upon a desperate fight to preserve some memory of her, and his love for her. He seeks to conceal his memories of her in totally unrelated incidents - many of which tap in to primal and nascent sexual memories. Despite his increasingly frantic efforts the memories are slowly erased, with his last memory of Clementine being : "Meet me in Montauk".

In separate but related story arcs occurring during Joel's memory erasure, the employees of Lacuna are revealed to be more than peripheral characters. Patrick (Elijah Wood), one of the Lacuna technicians performing the erasure, is now dating Clementine. It transpires that he has been viewing Joel's memories, and copying aspects of their relationship in order to seduce her.

The practice (Lacuna) seem to conceal deeper secrets. While Patrick is trying to ensnare Clementine there is a rumbling sexual undercurrent between Mary and Howard. Mary, (Kirsten Dunst), the Lacuna receptionist,turns out to have had an affair with Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), the married doctor who heads the company.

Mary is in a sexual relationship with Dr Howard's technician yet seems infatuated with Howard. On the night of Joel's procedure things go wrong. She is drunk and stoned and terrified that Howard will judge her. When Joel manages to conceal his memories she persuades her boyfriend to call him. Howard resolves the issues however Mary makes a pass at him. Howard's wife has followed him it becomes apparent that Mary and Howard have had an affair (at least once) previously.

Mary learns that she had a relationship with Howard which she seems to have agreed to have erased from her memory (perhaps when it was discovered by his wife). Once Mary learns this, she quits her job and steals the company's records, then sends them out to all clients of the company.

Joel and Clementine come upon their Lacuna records shortly after re-encountering each other on the train. They react with shock and bewilderment, given that they have no clear memory of having known each other, let alone having had a relationship and having had their memories erased. Joel beckons Clementine to start over; Clementine initially resists, pointing out it could go the same way. Joel accepts this, and they decide to attempt a relationship anyway, starting their life together anew.

Cast

• Jim Carrey as Joel Barish
• Kate Winslet as Clementine Kruczynski
• Kirsten Dunst as Mary Svevo
• Mark Ruffalo as Stan Fink
• Elijah Wood as Patrick
• Tom Wilkinson as Howard Mierzwiak
• Jane Adams as Carrie Eakin
• David Cross as Rob Eakin
• Deirdre O'Connell as Hollis Mierzwiak
• Thomas Jay Ryan as Frank

Targeted memory erasure

Targeted memory erasure is a fictional non-surgical procedure. Its purpose is the focused erasure of memories, particularly unwanted and painful memories, and it is a mild form of brain damage which, to relieve his fears of the procedure, Dr. Mierzwiak tells Joel is comparable to a "night of heavy drinking". The procedure is performed exclusively by Lacuna Incorporated. The characters of Joel and Clementine used this procedure to erase their memories of each other. As part of the screenwriting and promotion for the film, a backstory for the technology was made, including a spoof website for "Lacuna, Inc." that described it.

Deleted and moved scenes

The shooting script " which has been published as a book  " and early drafts contain a fair amount of material that was either left on the cutting room floor or never shot.

A major change that came in editing was that the sequence of scenes where Joel and Clementine are shown (re)meeting in Montauk and then going to the Charles River got moved from near the end of the film to the beginning. According to the Kaufman interview published with the shooting script, this was done to make sure the audience liked Clementine, as without it, their initial impression of her, based upon scenes from the end of Joel and Clem's first relationship, might have been too negative.

Dropped scenes included dialogue on the train, dialogue in Clementine's apartment, scenes with Joel and Naomi (the girlfriend he had before Clementine, portrayed by Ellen Pompeo), Joel in the Lacuna office describing his negative feelings about Clementine in more detail, and scenes showing Joel and Clementine on their first "date" to the theater. The dialogue from the deleted Lacuna office scene is used later, when he is listening to a tape of himself describing Clementine's personality flaws, and brief moments of the cut scene showing their first "date" are mixed in with the jumble of memories Joel sees of Clementine as the erasure process comes to an end. In fact, much of the content of the film was moved around in editing. A fair amount of scenes were changed on-the-spot by director Michel Gondry, including scenes showing the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in the streets of Manhattan. Another dropped scene was one that took place in a bar where a very drunk Clementine tried to make Joel jealous by coming onto another man (which might have prompted Joel's claim in his taped interview with Mierzwiak that Clementine was very promiscuous). Another deleted scene that appears in the special two-disc DVD set is an extended scene in the doctor's office when Mary Svevo is listening to the tape of her file. Mary is saying in the tape why she should have the procedure done, especially after having to get an abortion. Yet another showed Joel and Clementine together on the couch reading the mystery novel "The Red Right Hand", the one Clementine is seen reading in the diner at Montauk where she and Joel (re)meet for the first time.

Awards and recognition

Kaufman, Gondry, and Bismuth won the 2004 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

American Film Institute

The film was nominated twice on American Film Institute lists

• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - Nominated
• AFI's 10 Top 10 - Nominated Science Fiction Film

Critical reception

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was met with overwhelming acclaim, earning a Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 93%, and Winslet's performance was generally praised. Roger Ebert commented, "Despite jumping through the deliberately disorienting hoops of its story, Eternal Sunshine has an emotional center, and that's what makes it work." Ebert later included the film in his "Great Movies" series. Similarly, A.O. Scott of The New York Times praised the film for being "cerebral, formally and conceptually complicated, dense with literary allusions and as unabashedly romantic as any movie you'll ever see."

Time Out summed up their review by saying, "the formidable Gondry/Kaufman/Carrey axis works marvel after marvel in expressing the bewildering beauty and existential horror of being trapped inside one's own addled mind, and in allegorising the self-preserving amnesia of a broken but hopeful heart."

In 2006, in issue 201 of Empire magazine, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was voted #83 in their 201 Greatest Movies of All Time poll as voted for by readers. That same year, Winslet's performance as Clementine was included in Premiere magazine's 100 Greatest Performances of All Time at #81. Claudia Puig, reviewer in USA Today said about her performance that "Winslet is wonderful as a free spirit whose hair color changes along with her moods. She hasn't had such a meaty role in a while, and she plays it just right."

Carol Vernallis points out that Gondry's experience in directing music videos contributed in the film's mise-en-scene and sound design. Vernallis describes some threads of the visual, aural and musical motifs throughout the film, and how some motifs can work in counterpoint.

In November 2009, Time Out New York ranked the film as the third-best of the decade:

In the past, both director Michel Gondry's kindergarten arts-and-crafts aesthetic and Charlie Kaufman's Möbius-striptease scripts have come off as insufferably twee and gimmicky. So why does this existential meta-rom-com always leave us teary-eyed and genuinely moved?...[T]he duo finally finds the right combination of high-concept and humanity here, taking the what-if idea of a company that lobotomizes the lovelorn into territory that's funny, painful, poetic and unsettlingly weird.

Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "Only the bizarre and byzantine brain of Charlie Kaufman could turn this 2004 story about erasing all memories of love into one of the most romantic movies of the decade." Slant Magazine placed the film at number 87 on their list of the best films of the 2000s. Paste Magazine named it one of the 50 Best Movies of the Decade (2000-2009), ranking it at number 5.

At the end of 2009, The Onion's AV Club rated Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as the number one film of the 2000s, beating out the likes of Christopher Nolan's Memento and the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men. The article states, "It's the rare film that shows us who we are now and who we're likely, for better or worse, forever to be."

It has been calculated to be the tied-for-second most critically acclaimed film of the 2000s (behind There Will Be Blood and tied with the three Lord of the Rings films) by virtue of its number of appearances on prominent 'films of the decade' lists.

In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked the film at #24 on its list of "101 Greatest Screenplays."

Music and soundtrack

The soundtrack album for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was released by Hollywood Records on March 16, 2004.

The score was composed by Los Angeles musician Jon Brion. Other songs featured are from artists such as Jeff Lynne's E.L.O. ("Mr. Blue Sky" was featured in trailers and television spots but not used in the film), The Polyphonic Spree, The Willowz, and Don Nelson. Beck, in a collaboration with Jon Brion, provides a cover version of the Korgis' "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime".

Notably, many of the vocal songs either revolve around memories or the sun.

During the scene where Clementine enters Joel's apartment finding Joel listening to the tape about Clementine while staring at the skeleton painting of Clementine, the underscore is a poignant arrangement of "Oh My Darling Clementine." The harmonic voicings are such where the melody is clear up until the point of the line "you are lost and gone forever", where the arranger opted for use of dramatic diminished chords in the harmony thereby understating the fact that the two are gone and lost forever having no memory of each other.

Three filmi songs from old Hindi films can be heard playing in the background. "Mera Man Tera Pyaasa" (My heart is thirsty for you) from the film Gambler (1971) performed by Mohammed Rafi, "Tere Sang Pyaar Mein" (With you, in love) performed by Lata Mangeshkar, and "Waada Na Tod" (Don't break the promise) by Lata Mangeshkar from the film Dil Tujhko Diya (Gave my heart to you) (when Clementine invites Joel to her apartment for a drink). All the three songs are listed in the original soundtrack credits.

The musical score from the film's opening scenes have also been used in television and cinema adverts in the UK for mobile phone company Vodafone.

Music relating to the film

Many bands have referenced the film in song, including The Morning Of in their song "Tell Me I'm Wrong", Breaking Benjamin in their song "Forget It", Bayside in the song "Montauk", O.A.R. in the song "Love and Memories", Backseat Goodbye in the song "Technicolor Eyes", Epik High in the song "Free Music", Christmas Fuller Project in the song "Meet Me in Montauk", The Autumns in the song "Clem", Sarah Jaffe in the song "Clementine", Signalrunners with the track "Meet Me in Montauk", and Circa Survive in the song also titled "Meet Me in Montauk" as well as several other songs on their 2005 album, Juturna.

Rapper Jay Electronica sampled songs from the soundtrack on his mixtape, "Act 1: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge)." "Your Ex-lover is Dead" by Stars is also a reference to the film, and the video to the song is also reminiscent of the film due to the band performing lying down on an iced over lake. Vienna Teng has said that her song "Recessional" was inspired by the film.

Ryan Star's "Losing Your Memory", from the album Songs from the Eye of an Elephant, includes the lyrics "I wake in Montauk with you near." In the context of the song, it is a clear reference to the film.

Dream pop group Memoryhouse sampled Jon Brion's score cue "Phone Call" for their 2010 single "Lately".

Rapper Mac Miller references the film in his song "Of The Soul."

Film setting and locations

The film is set largely in the Long Island suburb of Rockville Centre, in Montauk, Long Island, and in New York City.

According to the end credits, it was filmed in and around Brooklyn, Manhattan, Montauk, Mount Vernon, Wainscott, and Yonkers, New York; also Bayonne and West Orange, New Jersey. The Barnes and Noble scenes were filmed at the Columbia University Bookstore. Clementine's house was filmed in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Some of the scenes in Yonkers were filmed along Riverdale Ave and Valentine Ln. Also, the Charles River scene was filmed at FDR State Park in Yorktown, New York. The deleted scene of Joel and Clementine's first "date" to the theater was filmed at the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street in New York.

All of the train scenes were shot aboard a Metro North Train train along the New Haven Line, and the Mount Vernon East train station substituted for the Rockville Centre station.

Home video

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was released on DVD in the U.S. in separate anamorphic widescreen and full screen editions on September 28, 2004. Both editions carry English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround, English DTS 5.1 Surround and French Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround tracks. Bonus features included on this disc are:

• Feature Commentary with Director Michel Gondry and Writer Charlie Kaufman
• Deleted Scenes
• A Look Inside Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• A Conversation with Jim Carrey and Michel Gondry
• The Polyphonic Spree "Light & Day" Music Video
• Lacuna, Inc. Commercial

A special two-disc widescreen Collector's Edition DVD was released in the U.S. on January 4, 2005. Features on Disc 1 are identical to the single-disc edition. Bonus features on the two-disc edition include:

• Collectible Packaging and Booklet with Photos
• A Conversation with Kate Winslet and Michel Gondry
• Inside the Mind of Michel Gondry
• Additional Deleted / Extended Scenes
• Anatomy of a Scene: Saratoga Avenue
• "The Misadventures of Superdog" by Joel Bar(r)ish (22 second Easter egg accessible just below other features)

A HD DVD edition was released in the U.S. on April 24, 2007, with a 1080p / VC-1 video transfer, and both English and French Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 Surround tracks. This edition includes all the bonus features from the two-disc Collector's Edition, sans the collectible packaging and booklet.

A Blu-ray edition was released in the U.S. on January 25, 2011, with a 1080p / MPEG-4 AVC video transfer, and English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround and French DTS 5.1 Surround tracks. This edition also includes all the bonus features from the two-disc Collector's Edition, sans the collectible packaging and booklet.

See also

• Amnesia
• Memory
• Brain Candy