Essay about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Memories guide us through life.They guide us so we can reach perfection. Have you ever been in the

Memories are important, they are a personal record of our past experiences, and could be called the history book for our life. In the poem "The Heroes You Had as a Girl", author Bronwen Wallace tells the story of a woman who meets her high school hero later in her life, reflects on her memories of him, and ultimately decides not to talk to him. The effect that this topic has on everyone is the knowledge that we can be captivated and let our memories control us, and by knowing that our memories hold that much power, it may make it more mentally efficient to make accurate, and personal decisions in a fraction of the time. The topic and overall meaning that this idea holds convey a message that resonates with the idea that memories are in fact the central hub of our decision making. People remembering memories can affect their perspective on their lives to such an extent, that they prefer to immerse their mind in their past memories rather than the current reality.

Have you ever wanted a bad memory erased? Is love erasable? These questions are attacked head on in the wonderfully complex drama Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. After working together on the film Human Nature, director Michael Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman discussed the possibility whether or not they would have their memory erased of a bad relationship should the opportunity present itself (dvdtalk). Out of that discussion a movie idea was formulated, pitched to a studio, and a film was created showing the potential impact of doing so. Through Kaufman’s brilliant and strange storytelling, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes its audience on a journey challenging us to ask: what would we do

Anyone reading Joshua Foer’s “The End of Remembering” can assume that he knows a lot about the brain and how it works. After all he graduated from Yale in 2004, and later went on to become the 2006 United States Memory Champion. With Foer’s interest in mental athletes he decided to do a journalism project to study them. This project would end up being the result of his book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything from which “The End of Remembering” is one of the chapters. In this chapter Foer’s lays a solid foundation of the development of writing. He also includes historical views of remembering and how we learned in terms of our memory. Foer not only gives historical views but supports his claims with science

Everyone is affected differently by memories. Some choose to dwell on the past and often struggle in their present lives, while other let memories inspire them to make improvements in their current lives. Amanda and Laura from “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams and Beatty and Montag Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, choose to allow memories to positively or negatively dictate their lives.

Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski were a couple in love. Everything changed when Clementine woke up one day and just decided to have Joel erased from her memory. He was “boring” and she wasn’t happy and wanted to move on. Joel then decided he wanted to also remove Clementine from his memory. This was all possible due to Lacuna Inc. who asked those wishing to remove a particular person from their memories to remove anything from their homes that could possibly be associated with that person. They sit the patient down, map out where memories are located that are associated with each object. Then, the company sends a couple of their scientists/psychologists to the home at night after they’ve fallen asleep. They then track down any remaining memories as they appear while asleep

Over the first two weeks of this course, I’ve done a lot of introspective thinking. After going to lecture, one thing stuck out to me most, and that is the idea that nothing is real. Not me, not you, not anything. Reality is simply a social construct. This made me think of memories and how if nothing is real when it happens, then nothing I look back on is real either.

  Memories are works of fiction, selective representations of experiences actual or imagined. They provide a framework for creating meaning in one's own life as well as in the lives of others. In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, memory is a dangerous and debilitating faculty of human consciousness. Sethe endures the tyranny of the self imposed prison of memory. She expresses an insatiable obsession with her memories, with the past. Sethe is compelled to explore and explain an overwhelming sense of yearning, longing, thirst for something beyond herself, her daughter, her Beloved. Though Beloved becomes a physical manifestation of these memories, her will is essentially defined by and tied to the

Everyone has a different mentality, whether they have a growthful mindset or a fearful mindset. No matter what mindset a person has, memories help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present. Memories are a part of us and many of them reflect on the person we were or still are. They help us learn from our mistakes and give us tips on how to improve the person we are today. Memories can also be used to teach others and give people an insight on the world’s past.

Experiences humans have had in the past affect the choices they make. What if our memories never affected our future choices? In The Giver, Lois Lowry shows us a society where all memory of the past has been taken away in order to create peace and order. The community assigns one person to hold all the memories of the past. In The Giver, things begin to change when Jonas receives his first memory.

Loftus and Palmer support the reconstructive memory hypothesis. They believe that information gathered at the time of an icident is

What was the worst thing that has ever happened to you? Perhaps you totaled your brand new car leaving the dealership, or you lost your dream job? Maybe you were bullied as a child, or were the victim of a crime. Did you go for a routine checkup, only to be told you an expiration date? Maybe you watched on as a pair of taillights faded into the darkness, as the love of your life left you. Worse still, maybe you witnessed your best friend’s, your parent’s, or your child’s chest rise and fall for the last time. Whatever came to your mind when I asked you the worst event of your life, remember that. Recall that emptiness, and that crippling pain. Now if I offered you an out, a way to delete that memory from the depths of your mind, would you take it?

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.

Childhood memories linger in the back of people’s minds, until a sense of déjà vu lets

It is a common belief that memories are important, but why is that so? Is it because memory can be a marker for a person’s level of intelligence or does it have to do with the effect memory has on person? Memory can be thought of as a recollection of an event that has been pieced together from information by the mind. These collections of memories that a person possesses are what define their identity, assist in future decision making based on past experiences, and describes life experiences. But memory can be a tricky. The tendency to distort one’s own memory can be a way to make the world more understandable and allows a person to place these experiences in terms better fitting to their own needs. The Yellow Birds narrator, Bartle, presents the connection between truth and memory in an interesting way. Through Bartle’s memories the idea of personal truth stems from a distorted account done for his own peace of mind versus the acceptance of the factual truth.