Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Postmodernism Analysis:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is 2004 romantic comedy starring an ensemble cast including Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson and Mark Ruffalo. The film is directed by Michel Gondry a film and music video director who is known for his manipulation of mise-en-scene. This is very pertinent to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as we see Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) being chased through his memories as they are one-by-one being deleted. This obviously means that the film changes setting very rapidly and this causes the audience to feel a lot of confusion over time and space and this is one of Strinati's 5 key elements of a postmodern text.

Eternal Sunshine deals with the matter of using technology to manipulate mental or emotional activity. Joel and Clementine (Kate Winslet), the couple around whom the story revolves, find "Lacuna", a company that erases memories, and decide to undergo the procedure that erases bad memories after they break up. In the film, we see a society that has placed personality, nature and that which makes us human way below technology as they allow they memories to be erased. We see that people have personalised memories that have the bad memories erased from their minds. To the society, a personalised memory is more "real" than a normal one and this shows Strinati's "mediaization" or the distinction between culture and society".

As we see Joel being chase through his memories, reality becomes a lot more harder to distinguish from memories. The audience can't tell what is a memory and what is actually happening outside of Joel's head: The whole notion of reality is lost and we can see a decline in a meta-narrative. If there is no definition of reality then it goes against what is natural and things like religeon etc. This is postmodern as there is no answer to the social and economic problems in the film, apart from the idea of erasing the problems if they are memories.

Bricolage can also be seen in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in fact it is a key component of the film. The way Joel's memories are jumbled together and sometimes overlaps shows his confusion. In the photo above for example, a memory of Joel in bed is mixed together with a memory with him on the beach. The mix of old and new together makes it postmodern. As Joel's journey through his old memories progresses he realises that he doesn't want the memories to be erased because there are also some good memories of his and Clementine's relationship too. He tries to break out and at one point he revists a memory that has already been deleted, there are people with no faces and is very surreal. This is another example of postmodernism, by transforming a certain feature of a scene; all reference of identity, the meaning is changed from a boring memory to a rather scary, vivid memory.