If they had held onto all of their past memories, they would never be able to experience the birth of a new relationship with each other. And they are only able to do this because they have forgotten their past with each other. They have decided that the love and happiness they feel at the start of the relationship is worth the immense pain that comes from the inevitable break-up. They have decided to relive their relationship again and again, forever. Joel and Clementine have reached the ultimate Nietzschean goal: the affirmation of the eternal recurrence. The final scene of the movie shows them running down the beach where they meet again and again and again. They, in light of this information, having just met, decide to pursue a relationship anyway, with full awareness of exactly how the relationship will end. They end up listening to the tapes sent to them detailing the problems of their past relationship. At the end of the movie, Joel and Clementine are re-introduced and start a relationship in much the same fashion as the first time, unaware of the pitfalls of their previous relationship. The movie took a slightly different angle than I did. I thought the point would be something along the lines of Tennyson’s “‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all” that we need to remember and be grateful for all the good times we had. They had quoted Nietzsche and I thought it was going to push against his need to forget. In this letter she includes a tape of everyone describing who they wanted erased and why.Īt this point of the movie, I thought I had caught on. Over the course of performing the procedure, an employee of Lacuna (the company which carries out the memory erasure) decides that it is unethical to erase memories and then writes a letter to every former client of Lacuna. He tries to fight against the procedure, but eventually fails. During the procedure, Joel realizes that he has many happy memories with Clementine that he doesn’t want to lose, even though the relationship has ended. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Jim Carrey plays Joel a man who decides to have all of the memories of his ex girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet) erased. Now that we have a grasp of some of Nietzsche’s philosophies, we can talk about the movie. It is unclear whether Nietzsche believes that this will literally happen or if it is simply a thought experiment we can use to check to make sure our lives are going as well as we want them to, but the effect is the same: motivating us to make sure our lives are joyful. Essentially, the eternal recurrence is the idea that every minute detail of your life will be lived by you again and again and again eternally. He only mentions it a few times in all of his written works, but also seems to think that it is his most important philosophy. ![]() They simply live in the moment.īesides memory, the other important Nietzschean idea for this movie is the eternal recurrence. They simply go through life looking for pleasure and avoiding pain, and so do not have elements of the past weighing them down. Animals, Nietzsche thinks, don’t have much of a long-term memory. Nietzsche thinks that unless it is your calling to be a historian and learn absolutely everything you can about history, if you remember everything, you will never be able to be happy. In the Untimely Meditations Nietzsche argues that the only way to be happy is to sometimes forget. There are two important ideas here: the purpose of memory, and the eternal recurrence. Whatever the reason, I didn’t like Nietzsche, but this movie made me much more sympathetic to Nietzsche’s arguments.īefore we can dive into the movie itself and how it thinks we can live a happy life, we should get some of Nietzsche’s ideas on the table. Maybe it’s just my bias against continental philosophy generally, maybe one too many of his ideas are racist (this is broadly the issue I have with Aristotle, except Aristotle was sexist), maybe I disagree with his metaphilosophic views enough that it makes it difficult for me to communicate with him. I always have had a hard time with Nietzsche. ![]() It’s a difficult question that they handle remarkably well. Nietzsche and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are ultimately concerned with how we can live a good and happy life. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a deeply philosophical piece of art dealing with broadly continental themes, specifically drawing from Nietzsche. ![]() Everyone should watch it if they haven’t yet. It is an excellent movie and one of my new favorites. This website was not envisioned to be a movie review site, but when my girlfriend suggested Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for our weekly movie night, I knew I had to write about it.
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