It’s a damn shame a preview for a cheesy period piece, The Alamo, opens for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (coincidentally, in the original screenplay a character shouts “Remember the Alamo!”). That’s all right though. The feature film was so splendid that I forgot all about the opening act until now.

The fascinating idea of memory-erasure was introduced to director Michel Gondry (of Björk music video fame) by a friend, the artist Pierre Bismuth. Gondry, inspired by the idea, contacted Charlie Kaufman (they’d worked together before on Human Nature). At the time, Kaufman was in the process of writing Adaptation, but eventually, this wistful, beautiful screenplay was created.

Eternal Sunshine is the story of Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet), their initially exciting relationship with which they grow tired and the outlandish procedure offered by Lacuna Inc. (www.lancunainc.com) that allows them to eradicate each other completely from their memories. The film is humorous—“We’re especially busy after Valentine’s day,” says Mary, the naïve Lacuna receptionist (Kirsten Dunst)—and poignant—“Please let me keep this memory…please,” begs Joel as he struggles desperately through the fuzzy-tiger-print blankets of his mind for Clementine.

I almost felt like Craig and Lotte in Being John Malkovich—Gondry’s camera allowed my entrance (and not at $200 a pop) into Joel’s mind, and the vivid experience of his memories, constructed in an M.C. Escher-like maze, was so wonderful I was reluctant to exit at the match-cut into the next scene, into the world outside Joel’s head. The subplots—that is, outside of Joel’s memory—are almost retellings of Joel and Clementine’s love story. Individuals are plagued with unfulfilling romantic relationships, desire is created and unable to be satiated, and in the end—wait, I won’t tell.

Time may appear puzzling in the film, but Gondry offers many clues that appear in the form of minute, seemingly dismissible details. His gorgeous depictions of Joel’s memories (aided no doubt by Jon Brion’s music, his first major score since Magnolia) almost drown out the ominous voices and occasional mechanical clicks that infiltrate the scenes, but the entirety of this experience is crucial to Joel and the viewer. It is a consciousness inside a consciousness—or maybe, the consciousness of the lack of a consciousness, or both at once. Joel swallows a pill and falls into the abyss of his own mind. Lacuna Inc., run by a soft-spoken Dr. Merzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and his reckless employees, Stan (Mark Ruffalo), Mary, and Patrick (Elijah Wood), take care of the rest.

The procedure itself is rather perplexing as we watch Stan traverse Joel’s mind with much neglect and roughness. In the process, something goes wrong—Joel in Joel’s memory understands the presence of the bodiless voices; it is a moment of realization comparable to Malkovich in Malkovich’s gaze. Joel no longer wants to delete Clementine, and the film unfolds Joel’s mental struggle to save Clementine with the assistance of the Clementine he has recreated in his mind (he begins to store her in very comical, and often times, Alice in Wonderland-like, sketches of his deeply buried memories). Merzwiak figures out Joel’s ploy and the rest of the film is Joel’s frantic attempt to hang onto the last threads of Clementine, while the culmination of awkward tensions explodes in the lives of Joel’s technicians.

Two details in Being John Malkovich recur in Eternal Sunshine. Just as Craig Schwartz begins to master his puppeteer command over John Malkovich, so does Joel in his mind, though the attempt is not nearly as successful as Craig’s (this seems to happen in Adaptation as well—two men fighting in one mind). Also in both films, the tale of Heloise and Abelard appears: in BJM, Craig performs the story in a puppet show on the street corner; in Eternal Sunshine, it appears in a quote from Alexander Pope’s poem “Eloisa and Abelard,” which appears in the film and also from which the film derives its title. In both films, love affairs are doomed with as many mishaps as Heloise and Abelard’s, though no one really breaks a vow of celibacy, nor is anyone castrated.

Eternal Sunshine portrays a relationship that is not itself glorified by the conventions of romantic-comedy—it is only glorified by the memories of a person. The real thing is not quite as good as the memory believes it to be, and when the memory struggles to remain optimistic, it recreates and projects its desires to do so. With the mind in such disarray, it is no wonder Mary says of the procedure, “It's beautiful. You look at a baby and it's so fresh, so clean, so free. And adults … they're like this messy tangle of anger and phobias and sadness … hopelessness.” Is this acceptable?

The film as a whole evokes some bewildering issues of the free-will agent and determinism. Things happen—we as agents have a hand in that, or so some of us like to believe—and when things do not happen the way we imagined they would, or the result is less than satisfactory, we also have the agency to erase distasteful memories (at least in the diegesis of Eternal Sunshine). This does not obliterate the time that has passed (“It appears as though there have been pages ripped out…This will be my first entry in two years,” Joel thinks as he opens his journal), unbeknownst to the patient. It is incredibly bizarre to even fathom such rupture in time, as a viewer.

It is extremely agonizing, as Joel realizes with his procedure, to annihilate a person, his experiences with that person and the change he personally underwent in his relationship with this person. And perhaps, we realize that even attempts to appease one’s suffering are futile. As Eternal Sunshine progresses, the narratives reveal that perhaps some things are just meant to happen, whether or not we try to ignore and even obliterate that they have happened before. The film suggests that should we ever have the chance to do it again, perhaps we can absolve our regrets by doing what we actually wanted to do.

Editorial Note: Neither Grace nor I want to be the ones to say anything that would detract from the delightfully spontaneous feeling of the film; this makes the movie difficult to discuss. Therefore I will content myself by saying that watching Eternal Sunshine can be equated, in my mind, to the feeling one would get if he or she were to walk into a Dalí painting; time functions nonlinearly, sand is definitely not confined to the parameters of a beach and color serves to both visually and linguistically enhance the impact of scenes. This film is like a subdued Jolly Rancher candy: suck on it and drool—its flavor will last longer than the candy itself. -S. B.