Eternal Sunshine

Warning: If you haven’t seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind yet and plan to see it, you may not want to read my thoughts on the movie until after you’ve seen it.

Jake and went to see Charlie Kaufman’s new movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Since I have seen several of Kaufman’s movies and have enjoyed all of them on some level and I’ve also been a longtime fan of Jim Carrey I knew I was likely to enjoy this movie. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much it touched me.

Before I went to see it, I already knew the pretext of the movie but I was slightly misguided. All the text I read said that the movie was about two people who were in love and then break up and the woman has the man erased from her memories and he starts to do the same but changes his mind knowing he could have another chance with her since she doesn’t remember him anymore. I think that could also have made a good movie but this movie was slightly, albeit significantly, different. While it’s true that Carey doesn’t want them to erase his memories, they do get erased. All of them. And at the end, both characters are starting over. Neither of them have the memories of the relationship.

Besides the beautiful imagery and the touching romance, the most interesting part of the movie is the very end. When both characters find out how they end up after having just re-met (even though, they think they met for the first time) they have a decision to make. “Do you go into a relationship even if you know how badly it ends?” Do you go into it knowing it will end? Knowing you will say mean, hurtful things about each other down the line? Do you do it even when you have evidence it won’t last?

I’ve written about changing the past and about selective memory so it shouldn’t surprise you that the questions above might fascinate me. I’ve also been in relationships that didn’t end so beautifully or ones where there was too much pain. People have often assumed that I would have preferred never to have gotten into those relationships. People have even told me I had made a mistake. Knowing the ending, the pain, the anger, the sorrow, would I have chosen not to date the person at all? You might be shocked to know the answer isn’t an easy, “No.” I can’t say that it’s a decided “Yes” either. Despite the ending and the terrible moments, there also were euphoric moments. There was kindness, joy, laughter, and love. There was learning and growing. Even if I may know how the relationship ended, I wouldn’t know what kind of person I would be had I chosen a different path. And I guess I always opt to take the known over the unknown. At least this way, I can come up with a plan.

I also think that besides forgetting unpleasant moments in our lives, we have a lot of faith in our ability to not make them reoccur. We fool ourselves into thinking we can change people. We can change situations. We can break habits. Given the chance to do it over again, we can make it work. The ending made me wonder whether they chose to be together despite the fact that they knew it wouldn’t work or because they decided it would be different this time around (more of the former, I think). It’s amazing how many of us make the same mistakes over and over again.

What if I knew my marriage would end badly? What if I knew all the terrible fights to come? Would I choose to never get married? Would I get out of the relationship now? What if I had forty years of bliss and wonderful memories with my husband and then two years of terrible fights in the end? What’s the point at which it’s best to have never gotten involved? How many bad memories does it take to make the good ones worth erasing?

I guess I don’t have the answers, just more questions. Maybe that’s why we don’t know the future and why we don’t get the choice.