I am writing this reader’s post after watching Citizen Kane, which gave me a lot of inspiration about how audiences and the movie interact. From Citizen Kane, we see narrative in forms of memory, in fact, in different aspects and versions of memory, such that they seem to piece together a story. Through such nonlinear narratives, why would the audience be able to understand what’s going on? Bordwell, Thompson, and Smith describe narrative as a chain of events linked by cause and effect occurred in time and space.
However, they also remind us that narration can control what we know and when we know it (which ties back to Citizen Kane, as the story literally is about information control). In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), this manipulation of time and information becomes the emotional core of the film.
The story itself is simple: about two people (Joel and Clementine) meeting and falling in love on a train. Eventually, they experienced a painful breakup due to miscommunication. Both decided to undergo a medical procedure at a company called Lacuna, Inc. to have each other’s memories erased. However, the erasing process forces them to relive their experiences with each other in reverse–so they ended up experiencing their final fight, and moving backward to their first moments of love. As Joel revisits these memories, he realizes that he didn’t actually want his memories of Clementine to be erased.
Unfortunately, the erasing process was complete, and both of them forgot about each other. Although later by chance they met on a train and fell in love again, just like they first did, ending the movie merrily, what is more important is the narrative structure of this film.
The plot is nonlinear and disorienting by design. The film begins after Joel and Clementine’s relationship has already ended and been erased, but neither the audience nor Joel realizes this right away. By employing nonlinear storytelling and restricted narration, we learn Joel’s memories in reverse, mirroring the mind’s gradual erasure. The result is that the audience experiences forgetting alongside the character, and become trapped inside the narrative logic of memory rather than time.
In this work that narrates time reversely, temporal order and causality are also mixed up. As memories collide into one another, spatial and continuity break down, forcing the audience to think hard piecing these scenes together. In one moment, Joel runs through his own memories to “save” Clementine, blending dream logic with narrative motivation. Bordwell would describe this as a manipulation of time and space that adheres to cause and effect–that the cause (Joel’s resistance to forgetting) to the effect (the reappearance of moments in the past).
But even when the film bends time, the emotional coherence is maintained, which is the unity of meaning. During the final scene, the directors decide to end the film with an open-ended narration: Joel and Clementine listens to tapes of their past relationship. This provides neither a full disclosure nor disunity, but an open-ended interpretation which we do not know what will happen in the future.
Revisiting this movie after reading through this chapter and watching Citizen Kane, I found a lot more fun in exploring the relationship between how the human mind absorbs information and how narration techniques could best serve the human mind in understanding what filmmakers are trying to tell. The emotional power of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does not come from the story itself, but definitely from how it’s told, which is all the power of narrative form.
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