Thursday 7 November 2019

Film Reviews: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Nonlinear Structure

Fig. 1: Theatrical release poster for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).

This review is going to investigate Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and the nonlinear storytelling style that the film uses to portray memory and its degradation. This will be done by looking at nonlinear storytelling styles that originated from Bertolt Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’ style in comparison to the traditional ‘dramatic theatre’ storytelling method, how nonlinear storytelling was popularized in the late 1990’s by Quentin Tarantino and the tropes that as a consequence find their roots in this type of storytelling, and how this applies to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind follows protagonist Joel Barish (portrayed by Jim Carrey) as he struggles to deal the breakup between him and now ex-girlfriend Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet). Joel learns that Clementine had hired firm Lacuna, Inc. to erase her memories of him and their relationship, causing Joel to decide to go ahead with the same procedure. As a result, the main narrative of the film is based inside of Joel’s subconscious as his memories of Clementine are erased. A second separate story takes place during this that focuses on Lacuna’s employees, one of which is responsible for removing Joel’s memories of Clementine (and uses them for his own gain to seduce the latter). Another employee, Mary (Kirsten Dunst), finds out that she had also gone through the procedure following an affair with the head of the company and releases all of the confidential tapes of clients recounting the memories they wish to have erased by sending them back to the clients. Joel awakens from the procedure and unknowingly reunites with Clementine, who he now believes is a stranger; they spend some time together and end up discovering their tapes and consequently their previous rocky relationship. Despite this, they decide that they want to be together regardless of their past history.

Nonlinear storytelling, as its name suggests, operates in a method opposing the traditional linear method of constructing a narrative. Instead of progressing from beginning to end without interruption, nonlinear narratives are much more abstract in the sense that they can begin and end at any point in time (Palmer, 2016), and they are notorious for often including “numerous flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks, [and] memory sequences” (Palmer, 2016) amongst other types of devices. Nonlinear narratives can be found as far back as the silent film era (Lara, 2015), and some argue that the first renowned depictions of nonlinear storytelling can be traced back to Bertolt Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’ style of storytelling.

Fig. 2: A diagram that attempts to visualise the nonlinearity of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s plot (2013).  

Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’ style arose from Brecht’s objective to keep the audience at an emotional distance from the characters and action happening onstage as this would mean that “they could make considered and rational judgements about any social comment or issues in his work” (BBC, 2019). This was done using multiple different theatrical techniques in efforts to constantly remind the audience that they are watching a performance (BBC, 2019); some of these techniques include montages, breaking the fourth wall, narration, songs and music, freeze frames, signs, and technology (BBC, 2019). Alongside this, epic theatre is known from its deviation from dramatic theatre’s emotional, chronologically-ordered linearity – epic theatre “often has a fractured narrative that is non-linear and jumps about in time” (BBC, 2019).

In more a more modern sense, nonlinear storytelling was massively popularized in the 1990’s with the onset of Quentin Tarantino’s films and their unconventional narratives. Examples of these would be Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), and, later on, Kill Bill (2003), and within these films, fractured timelines allow the viewer to piece together the story themselves while also serving an aesthetic function (Laight, 2018). Tarantino also makes use of various devices besides nonlinear storytelling to differentiate his work from the classical style of storytelling, including those like unreliable narrators, the referencing of external media, chapter headings, and stories within stories (Laight, 2018).


Fig. 3: Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is one film of his that is defined by its nonlinear structure and the techniques it uses to heighten the audience’s experience and understanding of each story as they piece themselves together over the course of the film (1994).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is considered to be a film that, as a whole, is nonlinear, but makes use of the hybridization of specific types of nonlinear narratives and tropes (Aronson, 2019). In a more encompassing sense, this is evident through the broken narrative alone; the film continually switches between times in the past with little indication as to where exactly in time each scene takes place besides small clues that the audience is expected to pick up on to understand the regression of Joel’s memories of his and Clementine’s relationship as their past is uncovered (Brek, 2018). This is without taking into account for the film’s secondary storyline taking place between Lacuna’s employees; when doing so, the film as a whole switches between both unspecified times in the past and between the past and present. The use of a nonlinear structure, however, has proven much more appropriate for attempting to recreate “phenomena surrounding subjectivity such as memory, impressions and imagination” (Lara, 2015), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is no exception.

Joel’s memories being played out of order plays out in an effective way that perhaps a linear storyline might not have been able to offer; with Joel regressing further and further into his memories and having an overall theme of reverting backwards to the beginning of his and Clementine’s relationship, the audience is left rooting for them. This is due to the fact that the worst memories Joel has of their relationship wherein it was falling apart came first in the film’s overall chronology in conjunction with the better memories of the beginning of their relationship coming last even if it’d actually played out the other way around in reality for Joel and Clementine. This, then, heightens the emotional impact of the film for the audience towards the end upon realising that Joel and Clementine’s meeting at the beginning of the film was in fact following the erasure of both of their memories – perhaps this scene and the following ones would not have been as impactful if shown in a traditional, linear format?

The main clue that the viewers are given during the film that allows them to piece the disordered chronology together is the colour of Clementine’s hair. It has been regarded as an important feature of the film not only due to its implications pertaining to symbolism in Joel and Clementine’s relationship (with the name of each colour having a meaning as well as signifying the state of their relationship such as the ‘Green: Revolution’ colour that Clementine sports upon hers and Joel’s first meeting signifying the ‘spring’ of their relationship (Cady, 2014)), but because it allows viewers to understand at what point in the past (or present) a scene is occurring. This crucial detail prevents the film’s unconventional storytelling method from becoming too confusing for viewers to follow along with.

Fig. 4: Clementine’s hair colour changes four times throughout the film – when put in the correct chronological order, it changes from green, to red, to orange, and finally, to blue. Each represents not only a different stage in Clementine and Joel’s relationship, but allows the audience to know when exactly each memory is taking place (2004). 

The disordered chronology brought about by the procedure that Joel undertakes is underpinned by other aspects, too – different tropes and narrative devices apply rather frequently throughout the film as well (ones that are Brechtian in nature, similar to those that Tarantino uses, or otherwise). Narration is used at the beginning of the film when Joel notes of his uncharacteristic impulsiveness on the morning that he decides to abandon work for the day and boards a train to Montauk, where he meets Clementine, and montage sequences do happen in the film when displaying aspects of Joel and Clementine’s relationship; a prominent example of this would be after Joel regresses to the day in which he and Clementine first met and explored the abandoned house – after Clementine urges him to meet her in Montauk before the memory collapses, there is a sequence of clips shown in succession of some of Joel’s memories with her before he awakens. It could also be argued that there is some loose variation of an unreliable narrator in Joel, because the further back into his memories that the audience is taken, Joel seems to conjure up a very idealistic version of Clementine in his mind that doesn’t necessarily match up with the less savoury memories that Joel has of their relationship.

Fig. 5: Joel narrates the scene in the beginning of the film when he boards a train to Montauk instead of going to work (2004). 

The cinematography and how each memory transitions between one another is also incredibly significant when considering the film’s focus on memory and its degradation – the transitions, while fluid, are juxtaposed “with increasingly choppy effects signifying the memory removal” (Cady, 2014) as a consequence of Joel attempting to stave off the memory deletion process. This is evident when comparing the memories gradually fading to white earlier on in the film as opposed to entire constructs and spaces being removed later on following Joel’s realisation that he doesn’t actually want to remove Clementine from his memory (Cady, 2014). Joel’s consciousness delving deeper and deeper into clip-shows of his disappearing memories is a way of showing how the character interprets “his inner timeline as a series of events” (Cady, 2014) – not only with the way in which the memory erasure is affecting him personally, but the way in which the character is experiencing the memories.

Fig. 6: Buildings and scenery fall apart in Joel’s mind the further into his memories he travels and the more his consciousness attempts to fight against the erasure procedure (2004). 

There is also the way in which the nonlinearity of the film changes multiple times. One instance of this is the scene in which Joel and the idealistic version of Clementine attempt to stow themselves away in a memory of Joel’s childhood to prevent the memories of Clementine from facing further destruction; not only does this show the degradation of the memory, but the way in which memories can not only be distorted willingly, but also without actually removing the memory itself; “not only is the course of memory nonlinear, but also changeable and altered without necessarily being destroyed.” (Cady, 2014).

To conclude, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a nonlinear narrative because of its incredibly disordered chronology as well as its usage of devices typically associated with that of nonlinear storytelling, from Brechtian techniques to much more modern ones. Not only that, but the film’s storyline benefits greatly from having such a structure in terms of emotional payoff and how it affects the audience’s perception of the characters’ relationships with one another alongside the way in which the memories can be pieced together to form a coherent understanding of how Clementine and Joel’s relationship specifically played out.

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