by Robert Bouffard
I love to engage with media that challenges my beliefs. It makes me think deeply when a film or television show presents themes or characters who are opposed to my worldview. I like to understand where other people are coming from. Understanding and engaging others’ viewpoints are essential to forming your own.
I’ve come to this conclusion largely because I grew up in an atmosphere that discouraged this oppositional engagement. The suggested way of handling this was to shelter your mind and insist that you were right, which is counterproductive.
Nowadays, I get excited when I watch a movie and love it, only to realize it has an oppositional viewpoint to another movie I love. It just serves to materialize the sort of debate and cultivation of thought that I enjoy so much. These instances show me that contrasting ideas can coexist and each thrive, which is the kind of world I strive for.
So join me as I examine two movies that send opposite messages, but which I still love just the same.
Both movies that I have chosen here explore a number of different themes. But I’m boiling them each down to how they deal with one idea in particular: the relationship between memory and truth.
The two films are Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Each of these films presents memory in a unique way which perfectly fits the style and tone of the movie – Memento argues that we intentionally manipulate our memory by lying to ourselves to be happy and find purpose in life, which is quite a pessimistic worldview, while Eternal Sunshine explores the idea that we can and should learn from our past to create a better future.
Since I like to end entries in this series by discussing the movie I relate to more, I will begin by talking about Memento.
This movie is one of the earliest entries into the filmography of Christopher Nolan, who just so happens to be my favorite director. The film follows Leonard (Guy Pearce), a man with short-term memory loss as he attempts to track down the man who assaulted and murdered his wife.
In college I took a multimedia storytelling class where the professor asked if anyone had seen Memento, and if so, could describe how the plot was presented. I raised my hand and answered, “really weirdly.” While this response is accurate, I should probably elaborate. The story is presented in reverse-chronological order. Since Leonard suffers from short-term memory loss, the film puts you in his shoes by only ever letting you know as much as he does at any given moment. Scenes in color are shown one at a time, with each scene going further back in time, and these scenes are alternated with black and white scenes that are happening chronologically. Such a method keeps the audience in the dark along with Leonard, while also providing the necessary background information to the story.
So obviously this movie has a lot to say about memory and the way we use and interpret it in our lives. Nolan himself talks about how the film reconciles what is imagination and what is fact when it comes to memory. Right from the beginning of the film, it’s obvious that Leonard is an unreliable narrator. He can’t even rely on his own memory or be quite sure what is going on at a given moment, and this becomes crystal clear in the final scene.
Leonard has “the facts” of his mission of vengeance tattooed on his body to help him every time he effectively has a memory reset. The crimes committed against his wife are written across his chest along with daily reminders to eat, consider the source of information, reminders about keeping photos and notes, and other similar short statements along these lines. Perhaps most importantly, he reminds himself he’s looking for a white male named either John or James with a last name that starts with the letter “G”.
Throughout the movie, Leonard encounters a number of people who seem like they are there to help him before it’s revealed they have their own selfish reasons for having him around. First, an undercover police officer named Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) spends a large amount of time helping Leonard try to decipher the tattoos, photos, and information he has in his mission to find “John G”. But by the end, we find out Teddy was mostly just using Leonard as a reason to make side money off criminals. There is also Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), who positions herself as a helpful friend to Leonard, but is actually in a bad relationship and wants her boyfriend killed. So she takes advantage of Leonard’s condition to achieve her nefarious goal.
This is all just an example of how Nolan presents imagination and fact in relation to Leonard’s goals. Leonard is always searching for objective truth, but that is impossible to find, especially when you can’t create new memories. He is paranoid that someone is trying to set him up to kill the wrong person. But ironically, as he finds out at the end of the film, he was doing this to himself the whole time.
And there is the crux of the film – “We all lie to ourselves to be happy.” With a dead wife and nothing but anger within him, the only drive Leonard can find for his life is revenge against the man who killed his wife. Teddy tells Leonard that they had actually found and killed the real John G. about a year previously, hoping it would have made something click in Leonard’s mind so that the revenge would satisfy him and he could move on with his life, but it didn’t. His memory still reset and he still had the itch to get revenge.
Because he can’t make new memories, Leonard’s life is in a unique spot. He doesn’t feel like he has anywhere he can go – he needs to create another puzzle for himself to solve to give his life meaning. It’s tragic that the avenue through which he finds meaning is revenge, and not something positive, but it’s the only way he can see himself continuing on. He’s so full of anger and a desire for revenge that nothing will satisfy him other than getting revenge over and over. Nolan could probably make 20 sequels to Memento with Leonard as the main character because he will continue to send himself on wild goose chases. At a certain point though, it ceases to be anger at the man who killed his wife and turns into anger at the world for his condition.
This just shows the importance of memory in general. Leonard’s loss of it is what makes him feel hopeless and has him on a seemingly endless downward spiral of violence, anger, and aggression. Instead of facing his demons, Leonard runs from them and creates a worse life for himself and those with whom he comes into close contact. It’s ultimately a pessimistic message about the nature of humanity and what we have to do to keep ourselves going in day-to-day life.
On the flip side of all of this is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a sci-fi romantic drama that could only come from the mind of someone like Charlie Kauffman. When compared to Memento, this movie is told in a straightforward manner, but when compared to a typical romantic drama, it is presented in a wholly unique way.
After a messy breakup, Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) decide to have each other erased from their memories. But that is just the movie’s synopsis. It opens with their first encounter since having each other erased so they don’t recognize each other, and as the audience, we don’t know that they’ve had a prior relationship. It just seems like a typical meet cute from a romantic movie. They get along well and seem to have some chemistry going for them with Joel being the shy, introverted guy and Clementine being the quirky, spontaneous girl who would go up to and talk to a stranger on a train like they were old friends.
But as the movie goes on, we witness the turbulence in their relationship which led to their breakup and consequent decisions to erase each other. Clementine is known as impulsive, so she decides to have the procedure done after a particularly bad fight with Joel. Joel’s decision to do the same simply comes as a reaction to Clementine immensely hurting him.
Thus, much of the movie is actually taking place inside Joel’s head while he is having each and every memory of Clementine removed from his memory. This creates the perfect setting for the message the movie tries to send – Joel’s mind begins to fight back against the procedure after it’s implied this always goes down without a hitch for those performing it. As Joel experiences each memory with Clementine for the last time before their eventual erasure, he’s instinctively trying to save them. It’s as if something inside him knows it is wrong and unnatural to just eliminate any trace of a significant, formative experience in your life.
At the same time as Joel’s memory erasure, inside his own apartment, we get to see the way the doctors and technicians (the people performing the procedure) operate. Mary (Kirsten Dunst), the secretary at the office, flippantly says, “Blessed are the forgetful for they get the better even of their blunders.” I love the simple irony that accompanies this quote, because when she says it, Mary doesn’t remember that she’s had the procedure done to herself in the past because of an extra-marital affair with her superior, the head doctor. This implies the exact opposite of her quote, because even after her procedure, she begins falling for the doctor yet again and even acts on her feelings until his wife finds them.
The whole point of having memories of times that you regret is so you can learn from them. You’re destined to repeat the mistakes of your past if you don’t let yourself learn and grow. Mary eventually is told of her procedure and is then allowed to grow past her mistakes, and even takes it a step further to helping others learn from her mistakes. She sends information to everyone who had parts of their memory erased to let them know what they’ve done.
This helps to save Clementine and Joel’s relationship. Because after their meeting, they start to fall for each other again, even though they don’t realize they already have done so in the past. But with the extra information about what went wrong the first time around, they’re able to learn, grow, and start anew. Joel spent his entire procedure trying to stop his erasure from happening, and because of his second encounter with Clementine, he was given his second chance.
There is an important intersection between truth and fiction when it comes to memory. In Memento, we see the effects of suppressing the truth, which is universal. Leonard lies to himself every day and every moment just so he can get through life. He has the same access to the truth as everyone else, yet he repeatedly pushes it to the side in favor of fiction just so he can feel a sense of purpose. The truth makes us confront harsh realities which can be difficult to overcome. I don’t necessarily disagree with Memento in its worldview – I just think it doesn’t have to be that way. The film implies this is the way people are and always will be.
Eternal Sunshine, on the other hand, takes Memento’s conclusion and expands on it. It shows that people lie to themselves so they can try to make their lives better. But sometimes experiencing pain and hardship can be exactly what someone needs in the long run. The first image after the prologue is Joel sitting in his car looking utterly broken. But by the end of the film, he’s full of hope at what his relationship with Clementine could yield. They know there will be hardships and they know they’ve had their disagreements, differences, and struggles in the past, but they’re more than ready to take them in stride and confront them head-on, together.
The time spent in Joel’s mind was him having a chance to be reflective. He recognized the bad, but resolved to learn from seemingly negative memories to be able to create positive experiences in the future.