#Endless sunshine of the spotless mind how to
#Endless sunshine of the spotless mind movie

I'm a vindictive little bitch, truth be told.… you stop listening to what is true, and what is true is constantly changing.I'm always anxious thinking I'm not living my life to the fullest, you know? Taking advantage of every possibility? Just making sure that I'm not wasting one second of the little time I have.It'll make the whole seduction part less repugnant. I don't know why, I'm not an impulsive person. I could die right now, I'm just … happy.Are we like those bored couples you feel sorry for in restaurants? Are we the dining dead?.Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies. Random thoughts for Valentine's Day, 2004.I'm constitutionally incapable of making eye-contact with a woman I don't know.Why do I fall in love with every woman I see who shows me the least bit of attention?.Nowadays, we call this ghosting somehow, in 2004, it was harder to fathom.

It’s this zany unpredictability, after all, that led to her deciding to erase Joel from her memory without a proper breakup. And her wild impulsiveness, a point of attraction for the usual dream girl, is here a bit more double-edged. But she’s also older than that archetype-both of the leads are. Clementine, played with unusual vibrancy by Winslet-who’d never get a role this quirky again-is very clearly a riff on the manic pixie dream-girl trope that haunted films of the aughts, though the term itself was not coined until 2007. The experiment goes haywire instead of reliving a single minute, he winds up reliving his entire fated romance, snippet by snippet, completely out of order, with no control over what’s happening.Įternal Sunshine has more humor and a more legible romance than Resnais’s grimly nihilistic, harrowing classic, as well as tropes that speak to the moment of its release.

He survives, and because he clearly has no will to live, he gets recruited for a dangerous scientific experiment in which he’s sent back in time one year, for a single minute. The movie, written by Charlie Kaufman (who won an Academy Award for his work in 2005), bears more than a superficial resemblance to Alain Resnais’s 1968 masterpiece Je T’aime, Je T’aime, in which a lover’s death spurs a man to attempt suicide. But per its by-now famous conceit, that story unfolds in retrospect, flashing up on-screen as it’s being erased from the lovers’ memories bit by bit. Eternal Sunshine certainly has the rise and fall, and more than its share of sincere, lovelorn melodrama.

#Endless sunshine of the spotless mind movie

Only we don’t experience their relationship in real time, following the linear rise and fall of the typical movie romance, with its structurally predictable melodrama. Joel, played by Jim Carrey, and Clementine ( Kate Winslet) are the clashing, depressed, impulsive personalities at the center of Michel Gondry’s beloved 2004 movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. They don’t get married, but they do date. “I’m going to marry you,” says Clementine, aloud. “Why do I fall in love with every woman I see who shows me the least bit of attention?” Joel thinks.

#Endless sunshine of the spotless mind how to

He sees her again on the train platform headed back home-she playfully tries to get his attention-and again on the train itself, where she introduces herself as Clementine, defensively accosting him for not even knowing how to make fun of her name, the way everyone else apparently has. He sees her again at a nearby diner, where he catches her spiking her coffee. On the beach, Joel sees a woman with blue hair, in an orange hoodie. “Sand is overrated,” he thinks at one point, idly picking at his wet surroundings. It’s freezing cold and snowing-it’s February in New York-but he decides to walk the beach anyway so that he can write in his journal and mope in peace. A man named Joel heads out to work-then, realizing that he’s miserable, changes his mind and goes to Montauk.