Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Movie Review Example

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The critically-acclaimed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind  shows an inaccurate account of the deterioration of memory. With the modern apprehension of the possibilities of developing Alzheimer’s personally in addition to watching someone we love develop the same tragic neurodegenerative disease, movies about this deterioration are magnetic to a population which watches these occurrences increase annually. The debut of this hit film predictably drew an enormous crowd and the inaccuracies were deceptively convincing to a layman, proving irresistible to a population that is growingly fearful of the pain and frustration of memory loss.

In this movie, Jim Carrey’s character, Joel, and his former girlfriend Clementine (played by Kate Winslet) form a pact to jointly erase their memories of the bitter relationship they once had. The Lacuna Inc biological engineering facility allows them to achieve this. As the induced memory loss procedure begins, the unconscious part of Joel begins to protest what is being done to him. He doesn’t want to lose any fraction of his memories of the relationship he had with Clementine. As a result he attempts to hide the memories in another part of his brain. His struggle throughout the motion picture is to preserve the memories of his ex-girlfriend.

The entire concept of a biological engineering procedure being able to locate and remove all components of a memory regarding a specific relationship is ludicrous. Memories are amalgamations of touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing – functions that are relegated to specific and multiple sites within the brain. First of all, the brain places different attributes of each memory in various regions of the mind in such a way that trying to determine a pattern to these placements has confounded even the most prominent neurological scientists. For a film to claim that not only a memory but an entire relationship can be expunged neatly by some rogue scientists in their apartment is absurd. Events occurring in a person’s life link inextricably and unpredictably to an immeasurable number of other, unrelated memories.

Memories of an intimate relationship have universal aspects as well as physical attributes. Charles Kaufman is well-known for his base plotline of the protagonist being held by force in an unwanted situation, while the subsequent attempts to escape from the entrapment drive the plotline of his movies. As opposed to deceiving the patrons who purchase tickets to his movies, the genre of his film  – at least in the case of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind­ – should be explicitly categorized as a Romantic film. This would curb the deception of the typical layman as to the complexity of neurosciences and its intricacies, which Kaufman leads his audiences to believe is outlandishly simplistic. Recently our studies in behavioral and cognitive psychology made this film and its absurdities backed by the musings of Nietzsche – a philosopher with absolutely no education in the intricacies of neuroscience – made the film almost unwatchable as it was truly a fairy tale under the guise of true and empirically-verifiable science.