ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND | 20 Years of Perfection

quote goes how happy is the blameless vessel's lot the world forgetting by the world forgot Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind each prayer accepted any each wish [Music] resign Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes place on Valentine's Day 204 which was pretty much exactly 20 years ago I know right it's funny how time passed class ES one minute you're a kid hiding under a table from The Strangers in your parents kitchen or playing outside in the garden with your friends then in a Flash it's 20 years later 2024 you're an adult at least that's what your date of birth would suggest trying to find your way in a world that sometimes feels like it's changing right in front of you you get a job an apartment a car some days are good some not so much and if you're lucky you meet someone someone electric someone who fills your world with a turn little sunshine someone nice seem nice so God don't you know any other adjectives you're really nice God I have to stop saying that and sometimes that someone may not be your happily ever after people grow and change time passes and the electricity Fades until it feels like the world is collapsing around you like The Tide is coming in and washing everything away and in those moments you might want nothing more than to leave it all behind to forget it and we do that in our own way we throw out their things and avoid places that remind us of them we ask our friends not to mention them we delete old photos we block them on social media we ghost them leaving them on red but none of us have spotless Minds try as we might to selectively edit our memories to forget someone it's harder to forget how they made us feel because memories are not just defined by the clothes we wore or the words that we said memories are defined by the things that we felt and good or bad they become part of who we are which is why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is just as relevant compelling and Universal today as it was when it was first released on the 19th of March 2004 there is something about it that keeps us coming back over and over again maybe that's because it is stuffed full of tiny details that are only noticed with repeat viewings but it goes deeper than that see despite its eclectic structure it's deliberately disorientating visuals and its soft science fiction premise Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is at its core a story that has been told in cinema countless times Boy Meets Girl boy and girl fall in love but life gets in the way so boy and girl break up but come away from the experience as better people but Eternal Sunshine flips the story and tells it to us not just in reverse order but through the deeply subjective perspective of Joel played by Jim Carrey as he watches his memories of Kate Winslet's Clementine get erased one by one in front of his eyes and this is happening because Joel employed the services of Luna Inc a company that allows people to delete painful memories of people pets or experiences he does this in a moment of anger after learning that Clementine his ex-girlfriend had done the same thing and deleted every memory she had of him and she looks at me like she doesn't even know who I am so Frodo Bruce Banner and Mary Jane Watson set to work erasing Joel's memories of Clen starting with the most recent and working backwards through their relationship but as they do so Joel begins to realize that he has made a mistake and desperately tries to save these experiences by hiding them in other parts of his memory the Eraser guys are coming here so what if you take me somewhere else somewhere where I don't belong the premise is a bold one one that could have only been written by the same person who would go on to write several other Surreal High concept screenplays like being John malovich and SII New York the person who Roger eir described as the most gifted screenwriter of the 2000s but the credit does not set with Charlie calman alone Eternal Sunshine actually began as a conversation between director Michelle gondre and the third credited writer Pierre bisou a French artist according to gondre Pierre had the concept of sending a card to people mentioning that they had been erased from the memory of someone they thought they knew he wanted to study their reaction as part of an art experiment but he didn't end up doing it I loved the idea so much that we started to write a story together based on the idea gandre took this idea to calman who he was working with at the time on what would go on to become human nature the first feature film gandre would Direct together they turned the idea into a pitch for studios and according to calman it was so good that there was actually a bidding war we put it out there and within a few days we had several good offers all on a 5-minute pitch that I didn't expect much from it was picked up in 1998 by producer Steve Golan but it would take halman several years to actually finish the script and it was during this time that a little known filmmaker called Christopher Nolan debuted a movie called momento and although they pitched their movie years before momento came out the script still wasn't written and so calman understandably panicked there was a moment when suddenly momento people started talking about this movie momento when I totally freaked out um because I thought oh I can't do this anymore and we um I called Michelle and said I'm not doing it and we called Steve Golan and said we're not doing it and Steve Golan was very angry and said you are doing it and um so um so we did it but um yeah I mean I I I uh I mean I I I so so I had no I wasn't influenced by momento um uh except in that way and at first glance you can see why momento and its subjective storytelling nonlinear structure and focus on memory as a core plot device would cause calman some worry but of course that's about as far as the similarities go Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a very different story from momento in just about every way I mean for a start it's not a thriller it's a romance it's a deeply human and strangely Universal story it just happens to use a concept that feels more at home in a movie like Total Recall not a Suburban contemporary breakup movie but that's kind of the beauty of it Eternal Sunshine makes a conscious effort to downplay the memory eraser technology calman and gandre knew that this was just a way in which they could tell the story of Joel and Clen and so they focus on that story and in doing so they tell us that we don't need to worry about all of this because the movie is not about a company that can erase people's memories it's a movie about Joel and Clementine I think we knew I think Michelle and I were in agreement from from the beginning that it should be should be uh uh the science fiction aspect of it should be really played down would focus I think in my mind anyway would focus the story on on the relationship and and that aspect of it rather than the the sort of technological aspect of it we don't need or want a long-winded explanation of how it works or how it was invented or anything like that just like you don't need or want a long academically explanation of the word ver similitude we are told that this is a world in which some ramshackle Backstreet business has technology that can erase your memory and we happily accept it this is a haulk RAID and I think it takes real confidence as a writer to take this approach of less is more when it comes to story elements like this and to recognize that putting too much emphasis on this strange technology could risk turning it into a gimmick that distracts from the story you're trying to tell but writing the story was only the first piece of the puzzle the job now sat with Michelle gondry to bring it to life on film but he was a good person for the job Eternal Sunshine was only his second feature film but G was part of a wave of '90s directors coming into Hollywood from a background of music videos and advertisements on the former he was probably best known for his multiple collaborations with bork while the latter well he basically invented bullet time 3 years before the wowski but particularly through the music videos he directed for bork gandre quickly established a highly distinctive style and an ability to express complex ideas with surprisingly simple but technically Innovative visuals he applied this approach to Eternal Sunshine of course but we'll come back that because Gund knew that every good love story is anchored in its cast and The Chemistry Between the Romantic leads and who better to play the Sullen low energy depressed and vulnerable male lead than Jim [Applause] Carry he like a glove after catapulting to superstardom in 1994 with the triple hits of Dumb and dummer Ace Ventura and The Mask Jim Carrey was one of the biggest names in Hollywood but this popularity was firmly attached to his outrageous comedic Persona before Eternal Sunshine he had only really had two attempts at more dramatic roles The Truman Show and The Majestic but even those roles had flashes of humor and eccentricity and neither of them were anything like Joel and Eternal Sunshine Michelle gandre admitted that he never even considered Carrie for the part he only started thinking about it when Carrie approached him saying he was interested but the more he thought about it the more gandre realized how good this could be now I'm about to play the audio from an interview with gandre who not only has a ridiculously fake French accent but he's also speaking over a crackly phone line 20 years ago so yes I have captioned it so you can understand what the hell he is saying about casting Jim Carrey the fact that he's like is so removed from from what we saw what I read on the paper was challenging I like the fact that he he doesn't have the the coolness of most of Hollywood actor was really interesting for me um I mean all the all his energy that he need to stand in M of his role he he had to keep it inside and maybe that give him some intensity I told you but at least gandre is very aware of what his accent sounds like be nice to everyone we have to get good good story out we do have to get the story out I'll kind of translate as well if that's okay oh yeah I like when you translate my uh English into English anyway like any good director gandre adapted his style to get the most out of his cast particularly Jim Carrey see while the rest of the Ensemble were encouraged to improvise their movements and dialogue Carrie was told not to gandre felt that if he gave Carrie too much room for improvisation then his Natural Instinct would lean towards comedy don't call me Antoine my name is Wally yes I know but how can a woman love a man with a name like w my God there's people coming out of your butt he said in another interview that Carrie was particularly annoyed when filming this scene he's in the frame and he' see Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten dun be crazy and improvising and going off script and he got so frustrated he said why are they improvising you told me the opposite and I had to explain to him that it was different for his character gandre would also deliberately try to throw Carri off and give him confusing or surprising directions right at the last minute and I tried to keep him off balance as much as I could sometime would roll the camera at the wrong time and I would give like the wrong order at the last minute just to create a little panic I think by putting him of balance that made him forget about who he what he should do to be the character and he he became the character but while Carrie has said that he found gondry's unconventional approach frustrating A Feeling shared by his co-star Tom Wilkinson there is no denying that it worked besides a tiny handful of moments where we Glimpse the more familiar Jim Carrey he otherwise absolutely disappears into this role it's such a strong performance and I think the quietness and subtlety of it works even more effectively because we know what Carrie is usually like by casting him against type it gives us a subconscious sense that Joel was once a happier fun more energetic person but the loss of CLM has been so devastating that this is all that's left of course that didn't stop the studio advertising the movie as a wacky Jim Cary comedy any risk of brain damage it's on a par with a night of heavy drinking nothing you'll [Music] miss but speaking of casting against type let's not forget about Kate Winslet like Carrie she was very much at the peak of her Fame at this point having come off the Blockbuster success of Titanic I Winslet could have had any role she wanted in Hollywood but chose to chase smaller independent roles instead working with prominent directors like Jane Campion and critically acclaimed old actors like Judy Dench and Jeffrey Rush by 2001 she had three Oscar nominations but they were mostly for historical dramas so she began looking for something more contemporary when I read this script I just thought it was so entirely different from everything I'd ever done because I'm so used to being seen in these kind of corset pieces and the English Rose and d d and Clementine is just a foulmouthed lunatic and what I find fascinating about Kate Winslet here is that she is playing two versions of her character in this movie there's the real life Clen who Joel and Patrick interact with in the real world at various points in the story and then there is the CLM who exists inside Joel's memories a Clen whose best and worst qualities are exaggerated because we see her as Joel remembers her not necessarily as she actually is and it was all the more powerful for her to be playing such a high energy character across from a sullen and depressed Jim Carrey Jim Cary and I for a start paired together it's a really unlikely pairing you know you would not imagine that he and I would end up doing something like this together I'm playing the Jim Cary part and he's actually playing the sort of Kate Winslet part on the 10th anniversary of the movie film critic Allison Herman wrote a fantastic piece on Flavor wire about the character of Clen and her Association or rather subversion of the manic pixie dream girl Trope now that term wasn't coined until 3 years after Sunshine came out but it has been retrospectively applied to clim by some critics the manic pixie dream girl Trope is now more closely associated with Zoe Des Chanel's characters and things like 500 Days of Summer but it was first applied by critic Nathan Raven to Kirsten dun's character in 2007's Elizabeth Town the manic pixie dream girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer directors to teach brooding Soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite Mysteries and Adventures Clen at first glance appears to fit the Trope exactly you know me I'm impulsive but the story takes her character down a different path we see the low lights of her relationship with Joel as Herman says the audience learns that the booze she pours into her coffee isn't an endearing Quirk it's a sign of the drinking problem that led her to Total Joel's car she's Mercurial irresponsible and resentful of Joel to the point of being outright nasty Clementine's flaws aren't unforgivable nor are they supposed to be there a reminder even a demand that we take her personhood as serious L as we would any characters with a less flighty personality or less colorful hair Herman's piece and the many others since is such a good deconstruction of claim's character the manic pixie dream girl Trope itself as well as the Myriad other ways in which women in film are consistently reduced to tropes and labels Damsel in Distress F fatel psycho ex-girlfriend or more recently Mary Sue and let's be clear that male characters also Fallen to similarly reductive tropes the buff Action Hero the douchebag jock the brooding lover the gay best friend and like any storytelling technique a Trope can be used well or it can simply be the product of lazy writing but using such labels to describe a character is almost always done as a way to avoid actually analyzing the specifics of that character and what the story wants to say about them and this is something that's done far more to female characters than to male ones and it has more often than not done in bad faith bring it back to Eternal Sunshine clim is an example of how this temptation by critics to ascribe labels like manic pixie dream girl to genuinely complex characters in film is to almost deliberately take Nuance out of the equation when trying to understand a character anyway as Herman points out there is a moment in the film where Clen explicitly critiques this Trope that at the time wasn't even a Trope yet too many guys think from a concept or I complete them or I'm going to make them alive I'm just a [ __ ] up girl who's looking for my own peace of mind don't assign me yours to the extent the manic pixie dream girl character even exists at all people have this tendency to use it as a criticism of the dream girl even though the entire point is usually to highlight flaws in the male protagonist who sees this girl as the solution to all of his problems and so idolizes her and holds her to an impossible standard I still thought you were going to save my life even after that he's supposed to learn that this is um hang on let me just get this right oh yeah unhealthy Behavior Eternal Sunshine literally shows us how Joel remembers Clen and how he sees her in his memory and it also shows how those memories are exaggerated distortions of reality the entire story is telling us that people are complicated and imperfect and are memories of them especially so it is also consistently showing us the nuances and details of claim's character both versions of her and so it's frustrating that some people feel comfortable including her on a listicle as an example of a Trope that is designed to homogenize female characters in movies just because she has blue hair and swears okay one of my favorite scenes with cl is this one in Joel's final memory the one of their first meeting as the memory collapses Clen Whispers in his ear in Joel awakes after the treatment having completely forgotten Clen but this subconscious Instinct makes him go to the beach where of course he is reunited with Clen but now they're strangers yet she like Joel had a similar instinct to go to the beach on that day it begs the question what made Clen go there did Clen have the same experience says Joel did Joel in her subconscious also tell her to meet him in montar the questions that show how clim is a character interesting enough that you could make this entire movie from her perspective instead and it was also one of the questions that keeps audiences coming back to this movie over and over again but putting the characters to one side I think another part of the appeal of this movie is the Simplicity of its aesthetic everything is grounded in a very mundane Suburban reality including Joel's memories there are surreal touches to them even the occasional horror element but these memories still have a kind of off-kilter sense of realism because many of the more outlandish moments are still achieved in camera by filming on location and through techniques like force perspective now we've already talked about how gandre bought The Surreal style of his music videos to Eternal Sunshine but another key creative lead on this project was the Director of Photography Ellen curus Michelle and I sat down and we started talking about ideas you know how do you make this person disappear how can we do things things with light an illusion and I think we both realized that we on the same page cus had a background of documentary film making which was a perfect match for gondry's vision his first movie had been a fairly structured and studi bound project and so for this he wanted to use locations and experiment with improvisation and spontaneity in a way that he hoped would lead to a more creative and distinctive final film the characters often did not have marks or overly precise blocking and so two camera operators would have to try try and capture the action as best they could with gandre giving them directions through radio earpieces and so Michelle could literally direct the actors before the shot but also the camera whilst the shot was happening so it gave the actors a lot of freedom because it meant that we could just do the scene differently every single time which just meant that everything was very spontaneous and kind of fresh in every take almost the entire story is told from Joel's perspective and so the camera is handheld throughout to emphasize that subjectivity and like everything else this instability becomes even more pronounced when we're in his memories cus came up with the idea of lighting a lot of the memory sequences with a single bulb attached to the camera to give it a sort of tunnel vision effect that added to the surreal nature a lot of those scenes have where this effect was not being used instead they would use other techniques to convey the unreality of it all and with only a handful of exceptions would try to preserve the authentic Feeling by achieving their effects in the camera Michelle wanted to make it very clear that we weren't locking things off on a tripod to do some of the in camera effects instead of using green screen this scene was done just by holding up a blurred sheet of plastic to make the color and definition of the background fade while this long take that features pretty much the entire cast was done with careful Framing and the actors running back and forth behind the camera so that they could appear to be in two places at once I go back and forth three times to both positions in the scene and you can see when you watch the movie it's not perfect just before the camera comes to me on the other side I'm putting the hat back on and I'm going it's simple stuff but they're all techniques that required a lot of trial error and creativity to pull off effectively and that's not to say there are no digital effects but they are used very sparingly mainly in this scene where Joel first tells clam he is erasing her from his memory look get it out here it's all falling apart now you might have been focusing on the crashing car but did you notice that Kate winon also only has one leg here it's another detail to look out for next time you rewatch it even this scene an extended one take where Joel goes back and forth down the same street was achieved in camera with some creative editing and set dressing so what I did is I leave the car and run this way on after I ask him to run back to his car and what we do is we flip the shot and instead to run where K is he's actually running back exactly where he was so there's four shots and we had to create seamless transitions from one shot to the other and matching a human body we used a couple of tricks to create the transitions like a lampost we use some morph as well but while Joel is fighting for his memories across years and years of his life inside his head the secondary story is taking place pretty much all in a single night as we follow the Luna team a then relatively unknown Mark Ruffalo plays the technician overseeing Joel's memory eraser along with his colleague p petric played by Elijah Wood in his first role after finishing the Lord of the Rings rounding out of the cast is the original manic pixie dream girl cursed and Dunc and the late Tom Wilkinson playing the head of Luna Dr Howard MVC these scenes help anchor the increasingly bizarre memory sequences in reality because containing all of this to a very specific time and place helps to give us a common frame of reference for what is real and what is taking place inside of Joel's mind but calman and gundry go beyond this being a mere framing device they give the secondary characters stories in their own right the main one of which is kirst and dun's character Mary revealing she has a crush on Howard which he initially tries to rebuff but it is soon followed by the Revelation that they have been here before and that Mary had her memories of Howard erased we have a history I'm sorry you wanted the procedure you it is a subplot that calman uses to Echo one of the central themes of Joel and Clem's stories you can erase memories but you can't erase feelings and this idea that love is something deeper and more nebulous than and simply words on a page or shared experiences is also reflected in Elijah Woods's character who uses Joel's Diaries as a way to seduce Clen he says the same things to her that Joel did and takes her to the same places but Clen knows that something is wrong because even though her memories of Joel are gone something inside her remembers not what was said in these moments but how they made her feel and ultimately it's this that pushes her to Breaking Point even if he still can't quite pinpoint what is wrong and funny and nice what like the first time Joel and Clen meet towards the end of the movie she tells them not to joke about her name so no jokes about my name oh my daring oh my daring my Dar Clementine Huckleberry Hound that sort of thing it's a good meat cute and they begin hitting it off and it's made even better because we have seen Joel's memory of this for real but the second time they meet at the start of the movie Clen tells him the same thing no jokes about my name for her this is something she has had to tell people her whole life but Joel well at this point in time he has had his childhood memory of the song erased and so he simply says I don't know any jokes about your name Huckleberry Hound I don't know what that means oh my darling Oh My Darling Oh My Darling Clementine no sorry just but the conversation goes a different way and the two Begin to Fall in Love for a second time the movie is telling us that we are more than our words and it is telling us that life is about the journey not the destination at the end of the movie after finding out that they had each erased each other from their memory Joel and Clen choose to start over again despite knowing where it ended last time they both know that even if the ending might be a painful one there is still joy and life to be found along the way they know how they made each other feel and would rather relive both the highs and lows instead of just feeling nothing at all it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all we forget that in the throws of grief which is why people seek out Luna or do the modern day equivalent of that but this is what Eternal Sunshine tells us loss and grief is part of the bitter reality of human experience and it's at its most painful when the love was strongest would any of us choose to give up those moments of Joy delight and happiness just to spare ourselves the future pain of loss I know what I think maybe you feel differently but is this a question that gets to the very Heart Of The Human Condition and it's an idea that has kept us coming back to this movie over and over again it's the idea that makes this movie [Music] eternal

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Id: ecW8addfTVo

Length: 25min 43sec (1543 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024