New Age, Alternative,
Metaphysical Publication
Aquarius-Atlanta.com

THE MOVIE MYSTIC
By Stephen Simon

ETERNAL SUNSINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

“Change your heart,
and look around you...
Change your heart,
it will astound you
... everybody`s gotta learn sometime... ”

Your heart has been broken in a love relationship that ends.

Someone offers you the chance to literally erase that relationship – that person – and everything about it and them – from your memory forever.

Would you do it?
Should you do it?
COULD you do it?

Such is the provocative premise of ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, my favorite film of 2004. (I am avoiding the connotation of "best" because I think that notion indicates an absolute and I believe that, as it relates to the utter subjectivity of film, we can only speak for ourselves.)

To delve into the story too much would so much lessen the discovery of and fascination in its intricacy that I will only say that the heart of the film takes place in the mind of its main character Joel, played with nuance, sensitivity, and endearing vulnerability by Jim Carrey, in the first role in which he literally disappears into his character. As Carrey remembers Clementine, the great love of his life (played with heartbreaking, poignant, eclectic and luminescent beauty by the inestimable Kate Winslett, who also stars in FINDING NEVERLAND, my close second choice off 2004), each memory is, at his request, systematically erased... or ... is it? Can it ever be?

The touchstone of Spiritual Cinema is the asking of questions about who we are and why we are here. As such, ETERNAL SUNSHINE is perhaps a seminal film and one that I passionately recommend that you see with other friends and loved ones because the discussions afterwards hold the promise of a very emotional catharsis. Beyond, beneath, and above the story itself lie hypnotic musings and tantalizing possibilities.

The extraordinary Japanese film AFTER LIFE illuminated the intriguing dilemma of having to choose one memory in which to spend eternity. In ETERNAL SUNSHINE, the haunting question relates rather to the potential erasure of memories of those we have loved and who have loved us. What happens to our experience of those memories if the love transforms into pain, heartbreak, and sadness? Do we live in the sunshine of the love as it was when it shone most brightly or do we suffer in the darkness of the pain of the aftermath of heartbreak and disillusionment? No matter how deeply our pain might run, would we erase those memories if we could? Or, perhaps, can we choose to experience both the light and the darkness, simultaneously and forever? The choice is always ours. If we could literally erase those conscious, and even subconscious memories, would something still remain in the depth of our unconscious, waiting to be triggered anew at a particular moment? Most importantly, what indeed ARE those memories? When we know that time is an illusion, and that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, what do we make real and what do we render to our dream and other than conscious states?

Isn't this all a metaphor for our journey through our lifetimes, when we make decisions in the world between death and life and then play out those commitments in the moments between life and death? When, no matter what, we recognize each other without the assistance of conscious memory. When we know we`ve been together before because we have. When only the illusionary veil of the cycle of death and life separates us from remembering who we have been to each through the centuries. When we make these eternal commitments, we have intentions that may not ever consciously occur to our human selves but, somehow, we find each other and play out the scenarios. On our way home... to oneness.

Perhaps, then, at the depth and breadth of its vision, this amazing movie even presents us with the hope that our running can finally come to an end in the ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF (OUR) SPOTLESS MIND. As such, the film is nothing less than a reflection of those extraordinary promises that we make to each other, the “knowing” that no disappointment or heartbreak can erase from the blueprint of our soul. When entertainment can do this, it transcends the experience of movies and touches the face of eternity. And offers tantalizing glimpses to us of whom we may really be.