Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless
Mind (3 of 3)
Where, When, Why, How?
MEET ME IN MONTAUK
But there is "working"
and there is
"WORKING."
An ambivalent desire both wants to erase memories of the other and
retain them.
Signs in journal/signs in consciousness
Obviously, the erasure of the signs in his journal is bound up with the loss of
signs in consciousness, because he gave over a grouping of “all signs of
Clem” to Lacuna Inc. so they could finish the mapping procedure in a way that
was most "advantageous" to him. In some reduced fashion, his not being able
to find his entries is, at some level, related to his anxiety about not being able
to find the memories his journal cues.
Signs in journal/signs in consciousness
But the anxiety Clementine evinces is much more dramatic, as we
can see from the following quotation from the film:
“Now, Let’s go Now”


IN CLEMENTINE'S APARTMENT
Clementine watches out the window as Patrick nears. She's
crying. He makes his way up her front stairs. She swings
open the door and hugs him.

PATRICK
Oh, baby, what's going on?
CLEMENTINE
I don't know. I'm lost. I'm scared. I
feel like I'm disappearing. My skin's coming off. I'm getting
old and nothing makes any sense to me.


PATRICK
Your not getting old.
CLEMENTINE
Nothing makes any sense. Nothing makes
any sense.


She pushes herself out of the embrace and looks at Patrick.
The disturbing aspect of Clementine's anxiety is felt but not known to her:
that Patrick is using her in the most despicable manner because he not only
knows what has happened to her memories, but helped to create that condition
in the first place. If that kind of withholding of information was not
problematic enough, he also walks around repeating Joel's words in the same
locales where Clem and Joel established their ties in the first place.
When working through this anxiety, Clementine maintains a one-pointed desire
to go as quickly as possible to frozen bed of forgotten dreams to look up into
the void in the same way she did previously with Joel when they were a couple.
This desire speaks volumes about her unanalyzable attraction to Joel and the
unfinished "business" they have around the dissolution of their relationship.
When Clem goes with Patrick to her Ice-Shelter,
something shifts in her consciousness because all the
elements are the same except…
. . . Something is different . . .
something is transposed . . .
the locale remains the same, but now it points toward
an absent sign of erased memory.
She wants to relive the scene of past happiness, but its
absence creates a terrible anxiety, a kind of terror
pointing to something that is nothing!
The nothing of a feeling that is felt but can’t signify, can’t make meaning
so the meaning can pass from the register of feelings to the register of
cognition. The body feels; the mind’s eye is blank.
Blank as a result
of this process.
One could say,
then, that the signs
of their
relationship are
"out of time" and
"out of place." A
weird
displacement
occurs, when
memories
disappear from the
familiarity of their
setting only to be
lodged in another
area of the mind as
a compromised
hybridic graphing
of one sign onto
another, seemingly
unrelated sign.
When this
happens, a
sliced and
diced shift
occurs,
leaving a
"scarred"
emotional
cut across
the mind's
inability to
remember.
Does that
mean that
Clem's and
Joely's
memories
were
eradicated?
Yes and
No.
Although the systematic
eradication of memory
was attempted, it was
not completed. Left
behind were fragmented
traces of hybridic
attachments of other
signs that had seemingly
no relation to the
"mapping" process that
Lacuna Inc. attempted.
FINALLY . . .
What we witness and the
protagonists experience is a
displacement of once wellplaced signs into layered
phantasmatic memories that
cause an interesting
dilemma for all concerned.
FINALLY . . .
FINALLY . . .
FINALLY . . .
FINALLY . . .
FINALLY . . .
FINALLY . . .
FINALLY . . .
FINALLY . . .
FINALLY . . .