This review contains spoilers, if you care about shit like that.

Let’s summarize the premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind really quick as I have a point that I want to make about it. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski. They’re lovers who have grown to hate one another and have broken up. Clementine goes to a mythical “memory erasure” agency called Lacuna Inc. to erase her entire relationship out of her mind. Joel finds out about this, and out of spite (says Winslet on the talk shows), he decides to get his erased as well. The memory-erasing guys go backwards, erasing the later memories first. When they get to the earlier ones, when Joel still loved Clementine and she still loved him, Joel decides to go to other memories and hide her. The memory-erasing guys are baffled at this and don’t know what is going on. It occurred to me that their confusion is not realistic. That isn’t what would really happen in this situation. I would think that everybody who gets their memory erased would get cold feet about the procedure once they get to the good memories and they would all try and go hide.

This is a logical flaw that I could see some critics using as a foundation for an attack against the film. I’d argue, of course, that not all flaws are necessarily detrimental to the film. Yeah, I’m glad that this mistake is in the film; it would be a lesser film without it. But it’s interesting that Charlie Kaufman did not consider this as it seems to be exactly the sort of thing that he would put into his picture. What would it mean if his memory erasure people behaved the way that logic dictates they would? Well, it would mean that Joel’s problem is typical. That he isn’t anything special. And Lacuna Inc. would take on a practical quality; it wouldn’t be one of those surreal “Charlie Kaufman” inventions. In having the Lacuna people being confused, Joel is made into a special case. The film is suggesting that his love for Clementine is one for the ages, one that has never been seen before. And as his behavior is original and incapable of being categorized, he is given free agency. While Joel hired Lacuna to erase his memory and they are only doing their jobs, there is an “individual against the collective machine” vibe going through the picture. On a superficial level, one that is hard to really ignore, Joel is protecting his love against these people who seek to erase it.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a very romantic film, and it’s curious in that Charlie Kaufman has not proven to be the very opposite of a romantic. He’s ironic, an absurdist and, stemming from that, a cynic. Consider that throwaway nihilistic joke at the end of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The novel had Barris marry Penny and it was a goofy ending, but really a happy one. The film throws that away completely. Being John Malkovich was a gloomy beatnik poem, and there was nothing but sadness tinged with an offbeat sense of humor at the end of that one. Adaptation is a special case in that it does have a happy ending. But of course Kaufman shows us the machinery and we can’t accept it. The moral of the story is “You are what you love, not what loves you,” but is this really the moral or is Kaufman providing one because he knows that we are looking for one? And is that really a decent moral? It’s proactive, but it seems to be saying that the action is the important thing. That looking for the ghost orchid is more important than actually finding it. If believing in such things makes you happy then I suppose it’s worth believing in such things, but I can’t help but return to Kaufman’s original position of how you really ought to look for something that you can actually find. Is resigning to enjoy the journey resigning to placation? Is the destination really completely insignificant? Well, I’m rambling; suffice it to say that if Adaptation had been told in any other way it would probably be easier to accept as a romantic movie. As it is, it’s difficult stuff. Christ, Adaptation was a strange movie, but yeah, Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation is not the real Charlie Kaufman. In the act of putting himself into the screenplay he has reduced himself into an artificial entity that he can act against. Same, of course, with the highly abstract portrayals of celebrity in Being John Malkovich and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. How can John Malkovich come out of a movie like Being John Malkovich as anything less than an idea? And certainly given the source material of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, there is great doubt as to whether we are seeing the "real" Chuck Barris. I have not seen the first collaboration between Kaufman and director Michel Gondry, Human Nature. I would have preferred to see it before reviewing this film. But would it be safe to say that they existed on a simpler level of artifice: that of the caricature?

The reviews of Human Nature, which uniformly describe it as an awful-in-an-interesting-way misstep for Kaufman, describe the hero as a shaggy horndog who was raised in the wild by apes. His name is Puff and he is being trained by the scientist Nathan Bronfman to control his sexual impulses. Puff seems to be the id uncontrolled by the superego. Puff seems to be the ultimate Kaufman protagonist.

I think that part of the reason for the popularity of Ron Jeremy in adult film is that heterosexual men feel weak by their sexual impulses and less masculine through them. To show any need is to be less masculine. Men can only orgasm and retain their masculinity if it is used to defile their partner. To conquer her and exhibit domain over her. Otherwise it will reveal a crucial weakness. Ron Jeremy is a little turd and a comic character and so men can safely displace their sexual impulses through him. He can come and he doesn't lose anything, because he was never really a man to begin with. Also with Ron Jeremy as a sex icon, women are in fact given a higher sense of power than they would if they were partnered with a Terminator figure who uses and disposes. The more misogynistic variety can be sexier, but it's more dangerous and harder to pull off successfully. The Ron Jeremy kind of erotica is certainly less threatening. (It was done successfully in Fight Club where a muscular Brad Pitt goes to work on Helena Bonham Carter hours on end. You only hear Carter moaning, Pitt doesn't seem to make a peep save maybe a few commands. Ed Norton interrupts him and Pitt answers the door full frontal showing only a hint of pubic hair and offers Norton the chance to finish her off. Norton declines. Carter, disoriented with ecstasy, asks who he's talking to. Pitt slams the door and tells her to shut up. The whole segment is very sexy, but you're just laughing at how brazen and tasteless it is before you get a chance to be offended or feel guilty about it.) Ron Jeremy seems to represent the fusion of sex and comedy in general, the way that we prefer to see sexuality. If we can laugh at it, we're not threatened by it.

Kaufman's protagonists have typically been Ron Jeremy figures. As he's an intelligent and wholly self-conscious artist, he has contempt for them. Kaufman doesn't seem to have genitals and thus has contempt for those that do. These wholly artificial characters that he has created, they exist so he can condescend to them and reaffirm his masculine status of stoic and conqueror. Kaufman, even when he puts "himself" in the movie, writes scripts about ugly, obnoxious, morally bankrupt people that he is above. It's not only in the plotting that we see Kaufman's cynicism; it's in the tone and perspective of the work. The cynicism goes down to the bone. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is Charlie Kaufman’s first optimistic movie. It’s a very smart and complex picture, but in a few spots, the right spots, it’s stupid and simple enough to be naïve. Kaufman seems to have been totally pussywhipped when making this movie. Head over heels in love.

The film is a comedy in many aspects, but for the first time he really seems to be using his protagonist as a mouthpiece for himself, an alter ego. There isn't the sense of condescension that you see in the other films. The picture could have very well gone down that path and become another typical Charlie Kaufman picture. But somehow it doesn't. Part of it is, I suspect, because of Michel Gondry who genuinely loves people. It’s rather interesting that in the case of Charlie Kaufman, we regard the screenwriter as the author of the piece and not the director. This is because none of the directors that have brought Kaufman’s films to the screen have made feature films without him. We need to be careful, however, not to discount the director’s presence entire. Spike Jonze may be more conducive to Kafka’s work than any other director, although that is certainly a hypothesis that still needs to be proven in its entirety. He’s flat and sort of matter of fact about absurdity; he accepts it as something almost obvious. There is a portal into John Malkovich’s mind. Yeah, this is funny but these things happen. It’s conducive to the tragic elements of Kaufman’s work and it’s conducive to his hatred towards his characters.

As a personality George Clooney is intelligent, a humanist and an energetic presence. He also loves a good poop joke. There is an operatic quality to the banal vulgarity of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. He doesn’t rise above TV’s bad taste; he rises above the limitations of TV and takes its kind of bad taste along with him. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is simultaneously and without contradiction celebrating and condemning vulgarity. The movie is about the exhilaration and poetry of hitting bottom. (I think Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is a masterpiece and the best Charlie Kaufman movie to date.)

Clooney and Jonze are conducive to Kaufman’s pessimism in general. But Gondry comes to it with sort of a naivety. Kirsten Dunst and Kate Winslet look good in this movie. They’re sexy and it’s a movie star sexy. Previously in Kaufman’s films it was either anti-movie star sexy (Cameron Diaz), a banal satire of movie star sexy (Julia Roberts), or just flatly normal femininity (Meryl Streep). In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Gondry blesses us in this film with images of Dunst dancing around in her panties. And Winslet’s terrific cleavage is known to us as well. Gondry sees these actresses in pure Hollywood terms: you get what you came in for when you saw Winslet and Dunst’s names on the poster. They're in the movie and they look gorgeous. Gondry’s attention to this detail is a tipoff of how the entire movie plays.

Joel is a sad guy and seems to be perpetually under a knitted cap, frowning and on the verge of crying. Jim Carrey, the Dionysus superhero of The Mask and Ace Ventura, is closed off and seems lifeless. The making him lifeless ends up not being the point however. Having failed rather miserably in the dramatic leads in The Truman Show, Man on the Moon and I’m assuming The Majestic, Carrey finally picks up on something. He proves so terrific in this dramatic role – it feels so honest and fits his skin so well – that we frankly feel rather ripped off that he wasted so much of his career in comedy. Jim Carrey is so good in the role that it never feels like subversion, or rather de-glamorization, of his screen persona like Diaz or Cusack in Being, and that is insanely important. Carrey looks good in this movie too. He’s handsome, beautiful enough to be in a movie filled with beautiful people. These people have a lot of problems.

Dunst works in the memory erasure business and is dating one of the technicians played by Mark Ruffalo. (Ruffalo, by the way, is Vincent D’Onofrio if Vincent D’Onofrio was an actor and not a ham. I can’t praise this cast enough. Everybody in this movie fucking rocks!) Secretly though, she has a crush on her boss played by Tom Wilkinson (typecast as Northeastern bourgeoisie, but would we want it any other way? I had to remind myself that he’s British and his flawless accent seems to be only the start of it. I can’t stop myself from waxing everyone’s car in this movie. While we’re at it, Elijah Wood is pitch perfect as well.) She plants one on the married Wilkinson, but he turns her down. She feels horrible about what she did. His wife ends up seeing them together. Dunst rushes down to explain what had happened trying to apologize. The wife rolls her eyes in disgust and orders her husband to tell the poor girl the truth. They had had an affair and he erased her memory of it. This sets into motion the ending, which I won’t spoil for you.

Then there is the case of Carrey and Winslet. There isn’t anything arbitrary about their failed relationship. Basically she’s an impulsive free spirit and he’s down to earth. This is exactly the sort of relationship that is perfect for a while and then gets sour. Opposites attract because we are all inherently imperfect and so we seek the qualities in a lover that we don’t have in ourselves. And of course living with your opposite day in and day out will eventually become stifling. Joel and Clementine erase their memories and with their memories erased they end up finding each other again. Some have interpreted this to mean that the film is about how you can’t avoid fate and you just have to go with it. I didn’t see it that way at all. I found it to mean that you can’t avoid your own psychology. Joel is exactly what Clementine needs and wants and Clementine is exactly what Joel needs and wants. Right that moment at least. The cliché says that we must learn history or we are doomed to repeat it, and that is ultimately the moral or lesson of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The thought is more profound than you would think initially. How often do you hear people lamenting for their “lost innocence” or their “youth?" Naivety is romantic because it’s not simple and not complicated with the presence of reality. I even praised this film as being “naïve” intending that word to mean “romantic." But indeed what kind of life, much less romantic relationship, can you have where you are continually forgetting your problems instead of internalizing them, accepting them and dealing with them? The ideal romance between Joel and Clementine is a perpetual series of meetings and beginnings. For those who go from relationship to relationship, it’s always a series of meetings and beginnings, isn’t it? The whole mindset is so unbelievably juvenile; they are looking for a series of highs instead of enjoying the plateaus and the lows. Jesus, I think that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind even has an Eastern viewpoint. I remember the Dalai Lama saying that we shouldn’t rush to drink our coffee, we should enjoy the time that we spend with the coffee. And I remember a yogi, I think, saying about sex that we shouldn’t treat the orgasm as a goal but as a surprise. We should enjoy the whole of lovemaking. That explains Joel and Clementine exactly. They represent the West as seen through Eastern eyes, running as fast as they can towards instant gratification.

An early draft of Kaufman’s screenplay puts them in the future where they erase each other from their memories for the umpteenth time. The actual ending of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a happy one. A genuinely happy one, one that makes sense, is organic, optimistic and humanistic. Joel and Clementine are revealed to not be morons. They know what they are getting into, and they end up learning and growing. They needed a bit of a push, thanks to an 11th hour development of Dunst’s that strikes at first as rather arbitrary in context of the plot (a la Adaptation it seems like Kaufman is having some fun at our expense), but somehow we forgive it, if for no other reason in that it forces about change. The development is less for our sake than for the characters’.

You can see how the sex in the film could have had a totally different edge. Joel seemed to be slightly modeled after Robert Crumb. He quietly draws cartoons in his book and they look very Crumb-esque. Trying to keep Clementine from being erased, he puts her in a repressed part of his memories, a moment when his mother caught him masturbating. He’s doing it to his comic books. He also turns her into his babysitter in another memory and we see a four-year-old Jim Carrey and Winslet in boots and a skirt. The little man and the tall domineering Amazon woman image is very Robert Crumb. The touch that Gondry gives this material though is so delicate and so precious. Joel never becomes the “Ron Jeremy” character that we see in sex comedies and in Crumb’s work. He isn’t reduced to a character or an archetype in other words, to make some sort of political statement about reducing masculine authority, or to reduce masculine authority to make the sex palpable, or to act as a conduit for the author’s sexual feelings. And Joel isn’t put into these situations so Kaufman can show how much he hates the character. The sex plays in a way that you don’t really see in movies: as intimacy. In the masturbation scene, when his mother catches him, Clementine laughs and then apologizes to him and tries to comfort him. We see them as little kids, and Joel just gets out of getting beat up. They play wrestle and try and smother each other with pillows and then we see them as adults doing the same. Joel grabs Clementine’s breasts and she rolls her eyes in response, before he plays dead. All the silliness in their relationship just feels so private; and when you see Clementine try to comfort him when he’s down, it,s hard not to melt just a little.

The metaphysics of the film always struck me as a little cloudy. Why is Joel a child in one memory and Jim Carrey as a child in another? And the film never seems to explore the idea that Clementine only exists in the terms that Joel thinks of her in, like George Clooney’s wife in Solaris. Well, even Citizen Kane ignored the Rashomon effect. The flashbacks in that picture only existed to show portions of Kane’s life and weren’t as much about illustrating the motivations of those that are telling the story, nor were they designed to turn Kane into myth really. Kane stays as a consistent character throughout the picture; there aren’t really any contradictions. Eternal Sunshine’s material is loaded as all hell, and covering every single base is likely to make for a muddy film.

I have to say that talking about the picture’s “flaws” brings up an interesting boggle for me. Again, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would probably not be a better film if these issues were addressed. It would be a rather pessimistic one. And so in consciously ignoring many of these issues, is the film itself guilty of the very thing that it criticizes its heroes for? Scott Tobias of The Onion A.V. Club says that the titles of Kaufman’s films “have either a metaphysical or an anthropological ring, either of which amounts to a detached sense of looking in from the outside." This is the very thing that Kaufman gives up (or Gondry takes away) in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and in doing so his characters are able to regain their free agency and become living breathing beings as opposed to specimens. The idea that this is a pessimistic movie made into an optimistic one perhaps speaks to this idea of spirituality over rationality or going with the heart over one’s better instincts. I don’t know. Is Kaufman being consciously hypocritical? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind feels sincere to me in a way that Adaptation didn’t. I love this movie, I love these characters and I love these actors, and I’m going to trust my instincts. But yeah, I have a little room for doubt. Maybe Kaufman is pulling one over on us after all.