Like Memento before it, Eternal Sunshine begins long after the central events driving the characters have taken place, allowing us to unravel the unknown mystery alongside Joel, only we don’t even know it yet. Through an association-based procedure, the company (whose name happens to mean ‘gap’) erases a specific person or event from your memory for a fee, and also erases any trace that you underwent the procedure. to help him forget his ex-girlfriend, Clementine Krucsynski (Kate Winslet), after she did the same thing to him.
Jim Carrey’s Joel Barish enlists the services of Lacuna Inc. It cuts a hole through the fabric on which the film is projected, and plays around in that empty space. Our desire for a lack of emotional connection when the memories associated with it are too painful. Not the space in the room, but the absence that causes it, and the threat of that absence becoming permanent. Yet Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind manages to explore the part of those experiences we don’t actually see. A shot of an empty room still evokes loneliness through the memory of a person, be it a character in the story or someone we know, and heartbreak tends to manifest as the physical display of emotions, seen through the actions of the performers and on their faces. They’re not only abstract, but they’re also inherently the opposite of the things we most associate with cinema, a pictorial medium. These are common experiences we share, but ones that are rarely explored in the form of visual narrative.