Joel spontaneously decides to skip work and go to Montauk Beach in February
He meets a girl named Clementine in Montauk and ends up hanging out with her that night and when he drops her off to her house in the morning, she asks if she could come over to his house, he says yes and she runs inside to go grab her toothbrush. We then proceed to a flashback.
Joel goes to see Clementine to say sorry to her but she doesn't recognize and has a new boyfriend. He tells his friends about the encounter and they tell him the truth: that Clem had him removed from her memory. Devastated, Joel decides to visit the clinic that did it for her.
Joel decides to undergo the procedure himself.
Joel is asked to think of memories tied to certain objects associated with Clem.
Joel begins to see unreal situations with himself in them.
The more recent memories Joel has of Clem are negative and makes Joel feel glad he's forgetting her.
On the night they broke up, Joel tries to go after her but in this dream reality, Joel tells her that he's forgetting her and he's glad about it and the world around them begins to self-destruct, meaning the memory is going away.
A sweeter memory of Joel and Clem on a frozen lake.
As Clem leaves the memory, Joel protests; he yells, hoping the doctors might hear, saying he wants to call all of this off.
He tries to hold on to Clem and run away
But the doctors keep chasing him on the expected memory map and keep erasing the memories.
So Joel decides to hide in a place they wouldn't expect to look for him.
As they hide in his childhood, the doctors get continually confused as to what's happening and as to why he's running.
But they always end up finding them and erasing the memory. In fact, in this scene of his mother bathing him in the sink, she was singing 'Oh my darling, Clementine' to him and in the beginning of the movie we find out that Joel has forgotten all about that song.
Out of options of places to hide, Joel decides to enjoy his first memory of Clem and how he fell in love with her.
They just wait for the inevitable in peace.
Before completely leaving his memory, Clem tells Joel to meet her at Montauk.
Joel's erasing memories all combine into one before completely fading away.
Mary, the secretary of the clinic quits due to her own heartbreak and deems the whole erasure process useless as the pain always comes back, and sends records to every patient of whomever/whatever they had erased.
After finding their records in the mail and finding out the truth about their relationship, the current Joel and Clem realize what will happen if they get back together again but they were essentially ok with this reality. The happy days outweigh the difficult ones for both of them. Knowing what they know, they would still go through everything all over again.
The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind explores the nature of a breaking relationship. The pain experienced is one that makes you want to forget everything about the time you spent with that person. This forgetfulness can be detrimental to oneself as we need our memories to grow from. The movie uses a technology that erases a part from someone’s mind, but often, we do this naturally. We start off on Valentine’s day with Joel waking up, feeling cynical and glum about the day. Long story short, Joel meets a girl named Clem and they hit it off and she’s about to come over to his house. We go to a kind of flashback, Joel is trying to say sorry to Clem, but Clem doesn't remember him, Joel talks to his friends about him and they tell him that she had all her memory of him removed and he decides he wants to remove her from his memory as well. Almost as soon as they begin erasing his memories, he wants to call it off but there's no way out. He keeps running away with Clem, hiding from the doctors; the doctors were fooling around while doing their job which allowed Joel to keep running. In a subplot, the doctor's secretary had her own memory removed because she had an affair with him and decided it was too painful to remember her love. But she fell in love with him again and found the entire erasure process useless and tells all his patients the truth about their forgotten memories the next day. Joel realizes there's no hope in hiding and decides to enjoy his last moments with her. While parting from his memory, Clem tells Joel to meet her at Montauk, where Joel and Clem meet again in the first scene the viewer sees with them together. Back to the present, the secretary has sent out the tapes of the patients describing their old memories and Joel and Clem realize the truth about their relationship. Shocked, Joel tells Clem to leave. Clem comes finding Joel again and he says sorry. Clem tells him that they can't be together because they already know whats going to happen, they're going to get bored of each other. Joel says ok, then Clem says ok and they both start laughing manically. They come to the realization that they don't care. Because being with each other is what makes them feel most alive. Even if they end up getting their memories erased again. This brings up some really odd questions about memories. Are memories all that important? They can really end up hurting us, convoluting us. But there are also some really sweet, good memories that of course we don’t want to erase. This movie plays with the good and the bad as if they go hand in hand; can’t have one without the other. We are the way we are because of all of our experiences, not just the good ones. We can’t erase our actions, even if we erase our memories. Their natural tendencies won’t change with erasing part of their memories. Trying to erase memories instead of processing through them is trying to erase oneself. With the film’s quick paced, jump-cutty, shaky, blurry scenes to it’s slower, absolute, gentler scenes, like the first one of them on the ice, we see the difference between what Joel wants versus what Joel has. Joel let all the nice moments pass him by, took them for granted. With the more slow paced scenes, we see Joel happier and less confused.
5 words: forgetting, distorting, relationships, regret, traces
The protagonist must come to the realization that good and bad go hand in hand; erasing his memory is only a temporary, ineffective solution, learning from his mistakes and enjoying every moment is what should be his main goal.
