Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (5 Stars)

Okay, after watching "I love you, Phillip Morris" yesterday I had to watch another film with Jim Carrey, and this was the best choice I could make. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is one of the best films I've ever seen. It's definitely in my top five. The screenplay by Charlie Kaufman is mind-blowing.

Click here to read my last review. That includes the facts about the film, and I can't improve on what I wrote, as far as the facts are concerned. I'd just like to add something about the underlying philosophy. Forgetting the past is criticised in no uncertain terms. That's something everyone should take from the film. However painful a person's memories might be, it's better to remember them than to forget them. To quote the famous words of George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". We see this in the film in the case of Mary Svevo, but I won't say anything more about it here because it would be a spoiler.

Mary changes her attitude once she realises what she's forgotten. She begins by saying, "Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders". This quote from Friedrich Nietzsche is so important to her that she says it twice during the film. My regular readers know that I have a low opinion of Nietzsche, so I'm glad that she rejected this philosophy by the end of the film.

Let me quote Nietzsche's "Midnight Song". I've added my own translation, which is more accurate than the official poetic translations:

O Mensch! Gib Acht!	O man! Listen!
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?	What is the deep midnight saying?
"Ich schlief, ich schlief.	"I was asleep, I was asleep,
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht.	I awoke from a deep dream.
Die Welt ist tief,	The world is deep,
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.	Deeper than day could know.
Tief ist ihr Weh —	The world's woe is deep,
Lust — tiefer noch als Herzeleid.	And the world's longing is deeper than heartache.
Weh spricht: Vergeh!	Woe tells it to cease,
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit,	But all longing wants eternity,
Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!"	Deep, deep eternity."

Night knows secrets that day doesn't. We can conclude that night keeps the secrets from day, jealously concealing the knowledge gleamed from dreams. The night is the messenger of forgetfulness. The world is torn between two extremes: longing for the future and heartache for the past. Nietzsche sees woe as a negative element that tries to hold back longing. Woe is the ally of heartache and wants to preserve it. Woe wants to keep the world centred on the past, but longing strives forward to eternity. This might not seem bad in itself, but we see the consequences in the context of Nietzsche's other writings. By striving towards the future we abandon the past completely. This means that in the quest to become the Übermensch, the Superman, the weak ones of the past are trampled underfoot.

That's a very brief explanation of the poem, I know. Philosophy students have written whole theses about this poem, not always agreeing with one another in their expositions.

A balance is needed between the past and the future. As a certain eccentric film fan once said:

"Live in the present, fight for the future, remember the past".