What Eternal Sunshine can teach us about heartbreak, 20 years on

It’s been over 20 years since Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind first hit the silver screen. The poignant sci-fi-cum-romance stars Jim Carrey as Joel, a melancholic introvert, and Kate Winslet as Clementine, his antithetically enigmatic, spunky girlfriend. The film takes us through Joel’s memories of the ill-fated relationship as he attempts to erase Clementine from his brain – a service offered by the fictional firm Lacuna, Inc. – after he learns that she has had him erased from hers.

It’s a love story told in reverse. Early on in the film, we witness the argument which finally rends the couple apart for good. Joel has stayed home; Clem, visibly drunk, has come back late. The tension is palpable and quickly boils over. “Face it, Joely [...] in your little wormy brain you’re trying to figure out: did she fuck someone tonight?” Clem spits at him. Joel hits back with twice the venom: “You see, Clem, I assume you fucked someone tonight. Isn’t that how you get people to like you?” She storms out; it’s the last time the pair see each other before Clem visits Lacuna to erase Joel. It’s difficult to imagine any chemistry or affection between such a discordant pair, but by the film’s close – after we’ve witnessed Joel’s happier, more blissful memories of the relationship’s honeymoon phase – it’s difficult not to root for them to remember one another and “give it another go-around”.

It’s a film that has tugged on the heartstrings of viewers across the world. Like me, Maia Wyman – a writer and video essayist better known online as ‘Broey Deschanel’ – is one of these myriad devoted Eternal Sunshine fans. “I’ve seen it, like, 13 times now,” she tells me over Zoom, putting my paltry eight watches to shame. She watched the film for the 13th time while writing the final chapter of her new book, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Love, Loss and the Fade to White, which deftly combines “film exegesis with memoir”. In the book, Wyman traces the history of the revered film, from its inception and creation to its achievement of cult classic status to its subsequent internet virality, two decades after its release. 

Below, we speak to Wyman about the book, the film’s enduring rewatchability, and its infamously ambiguous ending.

A lot of the book is about your personal connection to the film, and how your interpretation of it has changed over time. When was the first time you watched it? How did you discover the film?

Maia Wyman: I watched it for the first time when I started dating this person that I write about in the book. I watched it when he was gone, when we were in a period of long distance. I’d seen it a lot on Tumblr, so I already had a kind of low-level awareness of the more visual aspects of it, but yes, [seeing it online] kind of led me towards it.

You write that the film is “designed for repeat viewings”. What do you think it is about Eternal Sunshine that makes it so easy to rewatch again and again?

Maia Wyman: I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I think the more formalistic and technical elements of the movie make it this very multi-layered film: Michel Gondry’s practical effects – like the way he has this dialogue kind of coming in and out at times – make it so there’s something on screen that you might miss the first time, but the next time you catch it, and that changes how you think about the film. There’s that layering, and Charlie Kaufman’s really complicated narrative structure – the non-chronology of it makes it seem like a hologram, layered on the inside. That’s what makes it such a complicated film.

There’s also the emotional element, of course. It’s open-ended and ambiguous. The characters are  specific, but they also feel kind of archetypal – you can resonate with them, but you can also project yourself onto them pretty easily as well. I think Clementine talks about that, with her hair changing and her Manic Pixie speech, where she tells Joel he’s projecting onto her this idea of who he thinks she is. I think that happens with us and the characters as well – we’re able to have different emotional resonances depending on where we are in life.

When was the last time you rewatched it, and what was your interpretation of it that time?

Maia Wyman: The last time I watched it I really focused on the scene where Joel and Clementine are on the train – it just felt completely different with the knowledge that she’s already gone through this memory-erasing procedure, and for some reason, I had never thought to consider that for the past 12 times I’d seen it. The sequence feels really strange because there’s this loud, honking music and very strange brass instruments – it’s kind of disorienting. But it’s because she is disoriented. These two people are disoriented. They’re not meeting for the first time, they have just undergone this huge neurological shift. I felt a lot of empathy for Clementine, and perhaps resonated with her a lot more than I had before.

It’s beautiful that these two people are drawn to each other, regardless of whether or not they’re good for each other, wondering whether love can prevail over these ‘imperfections’

In the book, you talk about the taboo idea that heartbreak can feel equal to – or worse than – grief. It’s funny it’s taboo, given that almost all of us have firsthand experience of how crushing heartbreak can be. Do you think society could become more accommodating or understanding of heartbreak? There’s a lot of pressure to continue as normal when you’re going through a breakup – I think that’s partly why the idea of Lacuna’s memory-erasing procedure appeals to so many viewers.

Maia Wyman: I think it definitely can. I feel like heartbreak and the concept of love are so ubiquitous – every song, every great piece of art, is about heartbreak somehow. But it feels very romantic in the way that’s presented, and not very in touch with the uglier aspects of heartbreak, like extreme resentment towards the person you dated, feelings of sexual inadequacy, or all these different feelings that are much uglier and can persist for a very long time. I think looking at it as a form of grief makes a lot of sense; I know that there aren’t enough cushions for navigating the grieving process in general, but yeah, it feels like by contrast [breakups] are seen as a frivolous thing. But I think it should be taken seriously – I think that losing someone, even if they haven’t actually passed away, is extremely… I don’t want to say traumatic, but it’s an extremely difficult process.

I think you could argue it’s traumatic. Obviously, losing someone who has passed away is more permanent, but I had therapy after a breakup once and I was actually encouraged to look at it as though it was a bereavement. It was helpful – I suppose it’s more difficult to move on from something if you’re implicitly told the way you’re feeling isn't valid, or something.

Maia Wyman: Yeah – it becomes embarrassing after a while talking to friends about it, because people are like, ‘Why aren’t you over this?’. I still talk about this specific breakup that I write about in the book. I did yesterday! It’s still something that’s impacted me a lot. Even though I have moved on romantically, they’re still a person who’s extremely important to me that I don’t have around anymore, and it’s sad.

The general lack of empathy around heartbreak is kind of funny because, well, we’ve all been there.

Maia Wyman: I think it also comes into this hyper-individualist, ‘pull up your bootstraps’, ‘just work on yourself’, ‘get over it’ mentality that we have in the West. We don’t have community support very much here. So I think [the lack of patience with heartbreak] is very much tied into those things as well.

I also wanted to talk to you about watching the film through a present-day lens. Today, in the age of smartphones and social media, there’s a lot more ‘evidence’ of our past relationships knocking about. Many of us block our exes and purge photos of them from our social media feeds in the wake of a break-up, which feels quite Eternal Sunshine-esque – quite reminiscent of the scene where Joel is bagging up all the things in his apartment that remind him of Clem. Do you think Eternal Sunshine was ahead of its time, in this regard? 

Maia Wyman: It was 1,000 per cent ahead of its time. It taps into this idea that technology preys upon our emotions and preys upon our vulnerabilities. Capitalism strips your humanity away, but then will sell you an app to make you feel more human. I think that Eternal Sunshine very much predicted this era; it predicted the way that technology inserts itself into these very natural human emotions and profits off of it.

Relatedly, you speak a bit about how – largely as a result of dating apps – people have a very logical approach to romance nowadays. By contrast, at the end of Eternal Sunshine, Clem and Joel decide to take a chance on one another again, despite the illogicality of it. I liked that you saw the romance in this – could you elaborate a bit more on your interpretation of the ending?

Maia Wyman: That’s one of the things that evolved for me with the repeat viewings – I think being more on the dating scene and feeling misunderstood, or cast aside, or dismissed, has led to me feeling like the ending is bittersweet. It’s beautiful that these two people are drawn to each other, regardless of whether or not they’re good for each other, wondering whether love can prevail over these ‘imperfections’. Dating apps try to apply an almost ‘scientific’ approach to dating in a way that feels very antithetical to the concept of love, which is this amorphous idea. The movie has definitely shaped the way I approach dating; someone can’t necessarily ‘tick off’ every single box. You’re not interviewing someone! You want someone to meet your standards, sure, but also their imperfections can double up as virtues in other ways. The movie taught me that.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Love, Loss and the Fade to White is out now