Remembering What Love Can Be: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Sylvia Plath’s Mad Girl’s Love Song
Valentine’s Day is here! Often seen as an annual milestone or celebration of all things rosy, red and romantic, 14th February is for some, a pause-point where relationships are reflected upon and revisited with either bitterness or saccharine-splendour. Such an iconic date, therefore requires an iconic film for this fortnight’s study of cinematic and poetic parallels.
Aside from the rose-tinted, romantic cinema of fantastic films such as When Harry Met Sally, Notting Hill or perhaps even the tearjerking, heart-breaking behemoth that is The Notebook (a self-confessed favourite of mine if I’m in need of a good-cry), I found myself compassed towards a film moored upon more complex concepts of love. Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is undoubtedly a film founded upon more than convention or tradition in it’s documentation of love and relationships within the modern world. Tinkered and tailored by the talented-hands of writer Charlie Kaufman, Gondry’s movie monitors the minutiae of two relationships that are caught in crisis and spaced apart by memory and difficulty.
At the forefront, our protagonists, Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) are rigged into a non-linear narrative where their lives are dissembled into strands. Gondry forces us to learn through the past as it is revealed that Joel and Clementine had once shared a serendipitous encounter – leading ultimately to a romantic relationship that was both stricken with sadness and glimpses of glowing warmth. Unfortunately, the sadness bores a whole into whatever happiness was shared by Joel and Clementine, influencing Clementine’s rash decision to upend their time together through the ‘deus-ex machina,’ of memory erasure company Lacuna (itself translating to gap or cavity).
Joel soon learns of this and through much coercion, persuades the ‘memory-erasure’ company to induce amnesia upon him. The continuation of the film follows Joel as he experiences an Orphic retreat into the cavernous depths of memory as he attempts to ‘rescue’ Clementine from being forgotten. Beautifully, the film ends with the remotest sign of hope – that despite ‘forgetting,’ one another and then being reminded of the bitterness they experienced in their time together, we are left stranded and glued to the belief that Joel and Clementine might find a future together. However, it is the second relationship between Lacuna’s ‘head-honcho,’ Dr Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and the company’s secretary Mary Svevo (Kirsten Dunst) that resonates most with this fortnight’s poem of choice – ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song,’ by Sylvia Plath.
Like Gondry’s film, Plath’s poem encroaches upon the theme of love hesitantly. Whereas other texts have often swelled with romantic iconography, labours of love and the dramatic urge to conjure up fantastical tales that ultimately end like most fairytales, Plath and Gondry conquer more diminished ground, as they explore the abrasion and frictions cultivated by romantic thinking. When observing Plath’s poem, it is instantaneously evident that this is a poem crafted by Plath in both tone and texture. Her voice stretches with an earnest elasticity as she traverses numerous emotions in the wake of what appears to be a darkened realisation. Plath’s narrator shoulders an internal cavity, an absent presence that is in the process of being mourned.
It is unknown whether Plath’s narrator is mourning a real person or an imagined entity – but through this pursuit of discerning the truth from fiction, Plath prompts us to imagine memory as an obfuscating element, capable of limitation and disassembly. The repeated, bracketed refrain “(I think I made you up inside my head)” emphasises the intoxicating craftsmanship of both imagination or remembrance. In reading this refrain, Mary’s infatuation with her employer Howard runs parallel. In the closing moments of the film, Mary unearths the discomforting truth that her and Howard had an affair with one another. Mary’s intense adoration for Howard and fears of the affair being uncovered eventually motivate her to seek out Howard’s treatment of ‘memory-erasure.’ With the illusion now dismantled, Mary sinks into disbelief, saddled with distrust and a fear of the unknown, she leaves her job and with her the confidential documentation of every previous Lacuna customer. Like the narrator in the poem, Mary oscillates between certainty and uncertainty as her romantic feelings for Howard blur into an unconscious desire that is buried deep with her past, not necessarily her memories of the past.
When commenting on poetry and the film at hand, it would be inexcusable to ignore the relevance of Alexander Pope’s Eloise and Abelard, a 1717 verse poem that repeatedly inches and encroaches upon Gondry’s vision. Gifting both inspiration for the title of Gondry’s film and a tokenistic recital by Kirsten Dunst’s Mary (prior to the revelation about her amnesia), the poem sources an astounding amount of inspiration.
Like the film, Eloise and Abelard’s narrative is concerned with the influence of memory on love, as both pairs of lovers are mastered by their acceptance that memory can be both corrosive and comforting. Mary and Howard’s trials are softened to some extent, by the process of memory erasure, whilst Pope’s lovers are forced to endure the gradual disintegration of memory due to old age and time. Gondry’s use of science-fiction technology reminds us that this is a modern story, a tale where technology shortens the span of suffering and medicates our grievances.
As an audience, we are prompted to perceive Howard in a troubling light. Being an older male, in a position of power in both a patriarchal sense and in his role as the creator of the memory-erasure technology, Howard is forced to be distrusted in his interactions with Mary. Mary’s infatuation with Howard is notably genuine, but because we are given very little time to know the version of Mary prior to the memory-wipe, it does make us question whether Howard merely used his technology to make his life easier, rather than hers. Plath’s unreliable narrator guides her story with similar vagueness. Like the narrator, our knowledge of the unknown lover is darkened and cut-short. We aren’t sure if this lover is a real person, a fictional construction or a chimera of both. Upon discovering the nature of her history prior to the memory-wipe, Mary is like Plath’s narrator, in a process of repair, tending to their reality and their own distrust of how their feelings are now tainted because of their inability to recognise the person they felt such feelings for.
Aside from Mary and Howard’s troubled relationship, Gondry’s central narrative featuring Joel and Clementine navigates the narrowing regions of love with an equally poetic scope. Gondry’s and cinematographer Ellen Kuaccras’ efforts in using striking imagery and setting to map Joel and Clementine’s experiences is tremendously crucial in helping their story translate. Arguably, the moment revisited by Joel in his memories that is most prominent, is their evening date on the frozen Charles River. The vulnerable ice that is courageously ventured by Clementine, yet cautiously spanned by Joel is a guiding symbol of their relationship.
In one sense, we can locate both character’s personalities in their manner of movement across the ice, and in another we can isolate something more vast and transient. We might see the frozen Charles River as a metaphor for the glacial seizure of memory, awaiting to be thawed and returned to flow. Similar to time, a river can be seen as a symbol of transition and change, an ever-flowing vein that is never the same.
Frozen out by Clementine, Joel seeks a way to return to the flow of life, an action that he imagines might restore his life and provide him with a rebirth unchallenged by the hooks of memory. Whilst Joel believes this is the outcome of the process, it is indeed disproven by an unknown feeling that forces him to truant work and visit Montauk where he meets Clementine for the first time (again). Both Clementine and Joel forcibly try to alter the flow of their lives, and take separate routes.
As we know, this doesn’t happen and because of this Gondry’s vision becomes clear. Gondry again steers his protagonists into the hands of serendipity, where unknown elements provide them with a chance to start again, together. Plath’s narrator seeks this also in the final stanza, where a wish for something unexplainable is expressed: “I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again.” Such a request helps close the poem with further clarity, as we begin to understand what the narrator wants in their life; consistency. A thunderbird is a mythological entity/creature often located in Native American mythology or belief, a beast that returns in specific seasons for a specific purpose. In pleading for their love to be fixed to something of this nature, the narrator reveals that her unknown lover is the exact opposite to this thunderbird, a being that is unmistakably real, but never present or consistent.
Retrospectively, Plath’s narrator wishes that her place was elsewhere, but is unfortunately tasked with remaining in love with somebody that is vaporous and ungraspable. Clementine and Joel’s love also requires the intervention of something unexplained, in the form of serendipity. Whereas technology was helped to drive them apart, it is the unexplained that is used by Gondry to join them together again. Serendipity, like the thunderbird, is a symbolic reference to the romanticism celebrated by humans across the globe, the unexplained branching of people meeting people and falling in love, the unexplained trueness of love that is invulnerable from harm or collapse. Both Gondry and Plath use a shared requirement for magic, chance – call it what you will – to invite a spark of hope into a bleak reality.
Burning with Plathian dynamics, Kate Winslet’s Clementine shares some commonality with the poem's narrator. Both appear to endure the traits of mental-illness, and therefore offer us something incredibly unique; the experience of someone who has to navigate a romantic relationship aside navigating their own mental health. Critics have often commented on Clementine’s alignment with Borderline Personality Disorder and in doing so might have shifted our own perspective of Clementine as a character. Her inconsistent emotional temperament, rash decision making and quick-attachment to those she feels profound emotions for, definitely tick a few boxes if we the average cinema-goer was forced into making a diagnosis. And because of this, the quick incline and messy decline of her and Joel’s relationship might become more understandable.
However, Joel himself is not liberated from the weights of mental illness or unstable mental health. His own social anxiety, insular introversion and abundant depression deigns him a contrast to Clementine’s own quirks and symptoms, as he becomes abrasive to her actions throughout the film. Gondry’s film colours our perception of mental illness with a shade of reality that has often evaded film (especially romantic films) and in doing this offers us a balanced documentation of how mental illness can unfortunately sidetrack or sabotage relationships. Plath’s poem, aptly titled “Mad Girl’s Love Song,’ casts an authentic portrayal of mental illness, as the narrator spears to slide into different moods throughout the changing stanzas.
Manifesting an unreliable narrative voice, Plath sculpts the poem with care, utilising the instability of mental illness to portray a realistic consciousness that is afflicted with flights of fancy and untrusting confidences in what is real or isn’t. Whether it is the repeated refrains that appear in brackets, or words and phrases such as “insane,” “bewitched,” and “moon-struck,” Plath is painting an obvious picture of the conflict experienced when mental illness and romance intertwine. Slight double-entendres wander into sight throughout the poem, with a tongue-in-cheek playfulness, with the phrase “moon-struck,” linking to concepts of lunacy, or “bewitched,” being bonded to the misogyny associated with witchcraft.
But looming throughout is Plath’s most prescient image: “arbitrary blackness gallops in,” and “God topples from the sky.” Both these lines translate the steep, unmoving presence of depression (something that Plath sadly suffered from herself). In expressing this, Plath’s narrator shines a spotlight on the sudden consequences that depression can lend to somebody in a relationship.
Like Clementine and Joel, Plath’s narrator is swayed aside from her rose-tinted spectacles by the dreadnought of depression, an anchor that restricts those looking to reach the heights of a loving relationship. Yet, Gondry isn’t himself restricted by such a fate. Clementine and Joel, despite their fears, decide to try again. Instead of darkness, we are illuminated with hope. Both characters are given a second chance to welcome their periled past with a nuanced perspective that only science-fiction can offer, and with this examine the prospective horizon that will either envelop or develop them.
Both the poem and the film illustrate a bountiful canopy, where the joints and tendons of memory, imagination and mental health interlink and impact upon one’s ability to love. They are artifacts, capable of illustrating darkness and light and because of this, they offer us the chance to fatten our humanity with increasing sincerity when we look at those around us.
Love is something that often gets bejewelled with cosmetic appendages and things that are meaningless, especially when Valentine’s Day swings around. However, love can be something more. It can be memories moored upon immovable places, it can be daring dives into the unknown, it can be making a mistake, it can be acceptance, it can be something that changes its colours (like Clementine’s hair) and it can be something totally indescribable.
We all arrive with baggage from a previous destination, and wherever we decide to place that baggage, whether that be Montauk, Mauritius or somewhere as unexotic as Market Harborough, it’s who we share that baggage with that makes it special and something that no longer weighs us down.
