Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotted Mind

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Romantic drama films can usually be summed up by portraying a man and woman in a romantic conflict, emotional and heartfelt scenes, irony, dramatic music that relates to the scenes, and a hidden meaning watchers will walk away with once the movie has ended. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind not only includes all of the criteria, but also adds an exciting element to the film—science fiction. By adding this component, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind creates both a winning romantic drama and a nail-biting science fiction film all in one. Joel (Jim Carey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) were in love. When their love affair ended badly, Clementine resorted to Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) at Lacuna Inc. to have him erase her memory of Joel. Upon learning this information, Joel feels betrayed and sets out to have the doctor erase his memories of Clementine also. During the process of erasing his memory, Joel is hooked up to a machine that targets the memories of Clementine and erases them. While hooked up, he re-lives all the memories he has had with Clementine in his mind. As Joel is running around in his memories, he quickly realizes he doesn’t want to forget Clementine after all. In a panic, he tries to hide his memories of her with other memories in places of his mind that the erasing machine would have a hard time locating. His attempt to save his memories of Clementine failed and by the end of the erasing process he had forgotten who she was. Through the use of the scientific fictional idea of using a machine to erase a single person from one’s mind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind reveals the importance of memories in our lives. Roger Ebert, writer for the Chicago Sun Times, states that the insight of Eternal Sunshine is that, at the end of the day, our memories are all we really have, and when they’re gone, we’re gone”. Ebert is
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