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Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind Essay

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie about both the value of memory and, because every sci-fi movie ever has this theme, playing God. Let us focus more on the memory because in my opinion it just more interesting. Joel, after his ex-girlfriend Clementine stops recognizing him, discovers she went to a clinic that allows for a memory to be removed precisely from a person's brain. Devastated, he decides to go to through the same procedure himself. Most of the movie takes place in Joel's mind as his memory is being removed. This movie uses structure in the most interesting way, beginning with a scene fairly far in the film's actual timeline, as Joel and Clementine meet for the second time with their memories erased. The film assaults us with random memories and experiences of Joel and Clementine …show more content…

The movie's title refers to the poem Eloisa to Abelard, which elements memory and man's loss of innocence of wonder as a consequence of it. As it says in lines 207-210, "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's goal seems to reject this idea in every sense by showing how the distracted the lack of memory to the least. The film has an overall ton of gloom all throughout it, with a washed out color palette, as if to say, this is what we get by destroying memory. The constantly changing set composition of anyone who is in the film serves to portray Joel's ruthlessness. The fractured and repeated dialogue conveys Clementine herself becoming fractured, a key piece of dialogue here is "I'm lost, I'm scared, I feel like I'm disappearing." As we see, Clementine's identity is being taken with her memory. The director doesn't stop by saying we need memory to be stable, he goes on to say, without memory we are destined to repeat our

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