Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Introverted nice man joel (jim carrey) hears of an experimental system to erase troubling memories, and dives proper in while his impulsive lady friend, clementine (kate winslet), washes her mind clean of their love-shattered courting. Joel’s recollections go backward in time from the final gasp in their like to their initial spark, but there are sideways detours along the way that take him to infancy and memories of his first childhood humiliation.
James joyce might have applauded this phil dick-caustic/gnostic rendition of his nighttown from ulysses, with clementine as joel’s face-converting penelope/molly bloom. Joel tries to combat the erasure in his very own thoughts, and the movie admits early on that it’s a fight he can not win. That he continues on fighting besides is the crux of everlasting sunshine, and a leap forward for charlie kaufman—writing about the human circumstance greater than wondering our lives as self-made fictions. The fantasies of the movie are greater “actual” than some thing he’d written earlier than, because they outline who we assume we are. Joel rediscovers his love for clementine thru delusion, that is to mention through his clouded memories of her. Such matters are valuable, and gondry revels in that world in all its fleeting, flickering, ever-mutating joys.