eternal sunshine of the spotless mind similar movies

We now know that the brain stores emotional memories very differently from unemotional ones. The emphasis on feeling over data processing puts Eternal Sunshine squarely in the mainstream of the brain sciences today. “It’s amazing how strong this feeling is.” “I really want her to pick me up,” the grown-up Joel says, as he relives the experience. There’s a wonderful throwaway line at one point in the film, where Joel is reliving a memory of hiding under the kitchen table as a 4-year-old, calling out for his mother. In Eternal Sunshine, the richness of memory is as much about emotion as raw data. The fading of memory in Memento is about the loss of pure information, like an erased hard drive.

Memento revolved around an older model of memory formation, from the days when the brain was imagined as a wetware computer. The film displays a more subtle model of memory formation than the acclaimed thriller Memento, in which a man incapable of forming long-term memories hunts down a killer he furiously scribbles clues onto Polaroids before his memory fades to black. But Eternal Sunshine still demonstrates a remarkably nuanced understanding of how the brain forms memories, particularly memories about intense emotional experiences. It’s on a par with a night of heavy drinking, nothing you’ll miss.”įor the record, using today’s technology, it is not possible to selectively erase an entire person from your memory. DNA” à la Jurassic Park * or some hopeless jargon about “hacking into the neocortex.” The closest you get is a nervous conversation between Joel and his doctor: “Is there any risk of brain damage?” The doctor replies, “Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage. But despite the futurist premise, Sunshine spares us the gratuitous speech explaining How It All Works. When Clementine (Kate Winslet’s character) first decides to shed her memories of Joel (played by Jim Carrey), she does it “on a lark,” the way you might get your forehead Botoxed on a whim.

Memory erasure, in Eternal Sunshine’s world, is just the next logical step up from breast augmentation and Prozac. Lacuna’s offices have been cunningly art-directed to look like a low-rent plastic surgeon’s, which is precisely the point. The film, as you may already know, tells the story of two star-crossed lovers whose stars have gotten so crossed that they decide to erase their memories of each other, using the services of a company called Lacuna Inc. One of the many rewarding parts of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the fact that the film contains almost no dialogue that sounds like actual neuroscience.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind similar movies