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
Through Nolan’s application of editing, such as flashbacks, in Memento, the story of Sammy Jankis can be linked back to Leonard’s past as well as the central theme of the fragility and unreliability of memory. Leonard’s unreliable memory is clearly conveyed as the sequence rhythmically displays scenes showing that the protagonist’s wife survived the assault, which is evident as she removes the shower curtain from her head in a flashback. This indicates the unreliability of Leonard’s memory and the devastating result of ‘Conditioning [himself] to remember, learning through repetition’. Nolan’s employment of flashbacks within the sequence expresses Leonards desperate attempt to escape guilt through the fragility of his memory. This is exemplified in the flashback when Leonard’s memory of pinching his wife adjusts to him injecting insulin into her. Nolan’s utilisation of editing illustrates the fragility and unreliability of Leonard’s memory, specifically when he learns that he
The style of eliciting non-memory and memory emphasises the lost of innocence of childhood and of life lived in contrast with life wasted, and the disillusionment that followed leading to his insensitivity and ultimate self-destruction. This information is expository, but it flashes back to Anders' past. The author uses effectively the flashback to provide another viewpoint of the central character because Anders was pictured as unsympathetic in the beginning of the story. The memory itself, fittingly, is narrated in present tense in contrast with most of the story
A system is a set of interrelated parts. Systems theory assumes that a system must be understood as a whole, rather than in component parts. It is a way of looking at the world where all the objects are interrelated with one another. Many family systems are addressed in the movie Little Miss Sunshine.
A majority of the film takes place in the mind of Joel as he tries to find a way to hold on to his memories of Clementine while the employees from Lacuna work to erase the memories. The audience is magically placed into the mind of Joel as he is having his memory erased of Clementine. The flashbacks begin, transporting the audience on a journey in their relationship but in reverse. Director
The film Little Miss Sunshine, Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Farris, explores the lives of a regular American family and how they change their lives in front of us in the ‘Combie’ van on the road to the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. The film examines the issues of winning and losing, and what it means to be a winner, throughout many sequences in the film as well as exploring the value of family. The directors and the cinematic team use an extreme range of camera techniques, costuming, and sound techniques to reshape our understanding of winning and losing in the world we live in today.
The Flashbacks are used to recount the events that happened before the opening sequence of the film where Joel awakes and has no memory of Clementine, the flashbacks fill in the crucial backstory for us the viewer, The story is told from the most recent occurrences, then through past memory’s and pivotal moments of the relationship then back to the first day Joel and Clementine met.
In the movie Wit, English literary scholar Vivian Bearing has spent years translating and interpreting the poetry of John Donne. Unfortunately, she is a person who has cultivated her intellect at the expense of her heart. Both colleagues and students view Bearing as a chilly and unfriendly person lost in her private world of words and mysterious thoughts.
There are multiple things that Hansberry could do to improve the quality of Walter and Beneatha’s acting. Mama and Ruth gave the audience a sense that the play was taking place
The film gave an interesting take on artificial selective amnesia. I don’t necessarily agree with the use of the procedure but I can see way in which it could be potentially useful. However, I don’t see it as becoming reality due to the complexity of the brain and the level of difficulty it would most likely be to map out where exactly certain memories would be and remove those memories without damaging other memories or parts of the brain. The way the director of this film used the blue, green, red and orange colors of Clementine’s hair was brilliant. It helped the viewer to keep track of at what point a certain scene was taking place. The way that Joel and Clementine change each other throughout their relationship was also interesting. Clementine transforms Joel into a more adventurous person and then Joel makes Clementine feel happier. I would definitely recommend this film to anyone in psychology to give them a different aspect of selective amnesia, as it also shows the importance of memories and the roles they play even if one doesn’t necessarily realize that it is playing a part in how they act or
Memories, even painful ones, are vital to these characters and the decisions they make. They are not easily extracted from one's life. Removing the characters' memories is not foolproof; the procedure ignites its own thread of drama and turmoil. Jim Carrey captures the entirety of Joel's emotions; his regret over choices made and careless things said, his growing desperation to save what little of Clementine remains in his mind, and his growing realization that even if he no longer loves her, or what their relationship had become, he could still love his memories of her. He also learns that some relationships cannot be erased, but must be resolved, and through his own mental conversations with his memory of Clementine, he attains closure, even as his memory of her
Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us
Most of the movie is taken in Joel’s mind or his memory removal process. Starting from his nearest memory that they broke up till his last remaining memory of Clementine that they first met at a beach. I think the most possible reason the movie is called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind is referring to the deepest memory (or say, soul) survived and reserved in their both minds that brought them back to the beach and met each other again. This title quotes entirely from Alexander Pope’s poem which know as describing a very contradictory mood from the unattainable love. So does it, the movie shows Joel wants to remove all memory of Clementine while he still loves her, but then during the process he changes mind and want to try his best to keep these memory which is the “spotless mind”. In my mind, the soul theory is the personal identity that the movie most engage. According to the soul theory, to have a same identical, it’s not necessary to have a same memory, but it’s necessary and sufficient to have the same soul. In the movie, though Joel erased his memory, he still has his soul which makes him fall in love with Clementine again, even in theory he can never love her then. On the other hand, this movie seems to intensely against Loke’s memory theory that sharing a memory of an experience is necessary and sufficient to be a same person. And I think the movie also presents its own personal identity that for one person to be identical to the other person, they should have
Memory is at the heart of the way most people think of personal identity. Memento, a film by Christopher Nolan, investigates this connection as it follows the main character Leonard Shelby, a man who is unable to make new memories. Leonard, a former insurance investigator, suffers from anterograde amnesia and is forced to make sense of his life with photographs, notes, and tattoos-mementos that he creates for himself. The film follows Leonard on his quest for vengeance of the murder of his wife, following a nonlinear structure that makes the film unpredictable and puzzling. What starts out as a run-of-the-mill murder mystery transforms into a complex philosophical study of identity and memory as we learn more about who Leonard really is and
Psychologically, Olive has a strong sense of attachment to her family. Olive has formed a strong emotional bond with all members of her extended family, even her stepbrother. When Olive’s brother realizes he is color blind, she provides powerful consolation to him. There are four qualities of attachment that the Hoover family exhibits; they spend a significant amount of time together, they are aware of Olive’s needs, they are committed and responsive to Olive, and they are available to her (Zastrow and Kirst-Ashman, 2010, p. 129). Olive’s parents encourage autonomous decisions, such as allowing her to
The movie features Joel and Clementine as a couple, and they end up having problems. Clementine takes the extremely very easy consequence but very easy way of moving on from an ex. She went to Lacuna secretly and Joel had no idea about what was going on, the dates, seconds, he was just lost and upset that she moved onto someone else instantly. Joel went to her job and seemed as if she didn’t even know who Joel was or anything literally about him. At her job, her supposed boyfriend who is pretending to be Joel after she erased her memory about him.