“I apply my personality in a paste.”
As we sift through the memory fragments in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
one thing sticks out: the ever-changing hair of Clementine.
“It changes a lot, the color.
That's why you might not recognize me.”
Clementine’s hair is a character in itself.
It’s a barometer of the state of her relationship with Joel.
And if you look closer,
the shifts in its color offer a symbolic guide
to the surreal journey inside Joel’s head --
Clem’s hair even whispers to us some clues
about the film’s greater wisdom and life lessons.
“This whole thing with the hair, it’s all bullshit.”
“I really like your hair.”
“Thank you.”
“I really like your hair.”
“Thank you.”
So let’s take a look at what Eternal Sunshine is telling us
through the secret symbolism of Clementine’s locks.
Before we go on,
we want to tell you a little bit about this video's sponsor.
Mubi is a curated film streaming service with a twist.
You get 30 films per month, a new film every day.
It's a handpicked selection of influential movie jams
from around the world.
We're huge fans of Mubi here at ScreenPrism.
So click the link in our description below
to get a full month of Mubi for free.
“Hi there.”
“Hi.”
On the most basic level, Clementine’s changing hair color
serves a practical function in the narrative.
"Oh, man!"
"I matched my sweatshirt exactly."
"I like it."
Because memories are shown to us out of order in the film,
the hair color helps situate us, offering a clue to where we are
in the chronology of the relationship.
Sliding Doors used the same technique -- giving Gwyneth Paltrow two hairstyles
to tell us immediately which is its two alternate-universe narratives
we’re in at any given moment.
"Haircut suits you, by the way."
But Clementine’s hair evolution is also there to add texture and depth
to the story on the figurative and emotional levels.
Most fundamentally, the hair color’s progression signals to us
the symbolic seasons of Joel’s and Clementine’s relationship.
The day Joel first spots Clementine at the beach,
her hair is green --
and fittingly, as they first meet, we begin the springtime of their love.
Green evokes nature, growth, and flowering,
and this is when their love springs into life.
“It was so intimate, like we were already lovers.”
Green is also the color of renewal.
When he first meets Clementine,
Joel is consumed with melancholy and indecision
over his failing relationship with Naomi.
“What’s your girlfriend’s name?”
“Naomi, but we’re not really...”
Clementine, with her exciting presence, seems to represent a way out
of this doom and gloom,
a fresh start and the promise of new adventures.
“Ah, alcohol!”
The dye name,
"Green Revolution"
makes us think of something earth-shattering, sudden, powerful.
And this is exactly how Joel sees Clementine when they meet --
as a bold, bright force of nature who can revitalize his life.
"Come on, man.
The water's fine."
“I’m just...happy.”
As the couple move into the full-blown Summer of their relationship,
Clem’s hair turns red -- the undisputed color of love.
This part of Joel’s memory is defined by pure happiness.
"I love you, Antoine."
"Hmm, lucky me.
Lay one on me."
[Kissing sounds]
"Don't call me Antoine."
And Clem’s red hair embodies the Honeymoon phase of a romance --
that most passionate and thrilling time
when a couple experiences the joys of truly knowing each other,
before the fresh, new love is burdened by too much history.
It’s significant that Clementine’s hair is red in the memory
that makes Joel realize he doesn’t want to erase her at all.
“Can you hear me?
I don’t want this anymore!
I want to call it off!”
She has this red hair as the couple runs away
and fights to stop their love from getting erased.
So the red underlines the deep passion and love at the core of their relationship
--
the feeling they forget later on when trouble hits paradise,
but that, when it comes down to it, they don’t want to give up.
"Then hide me somewhere... somewhere REALLY buried."
It hasn’t occurred to Joel that after the memory-erasing procedure
even the most beautiful red-haired memory will be gone, too.
His realization that he doesn’t want to give it up reminds us
that so often we place too much value on outcomes.
"It's all falling apart.
I'm erasing you and I'm happy!"
We imagine that if a relationship ended in heartbreak,
then the whole thing was worthless --
but even if we end in a place of pain,
the best parts of the journey that got us there
have a deep, intangible, even sacred value that we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss.
"Remember me.
Try your best."
We might argue red is also the quintessential color of Clementine herself,
embodying the strong personality that Joel falls for.
"Look, man, I'm telling you right off the bat.
I'm high maintenance,
so I'm not gonna tiptoe around your marriage
or whatever it is you've got going there.
If you wanna be with me, you're with me."
She’s sweet and warm, energetic and mischievous,
fiercely independent.
And something of this personality is captured in this dye’s name.
"Red--Red Menace."
“Are we like those poor couples you feel sorry for in restaurants?
Are we the dining dead?”
When Clementine dyes her hair orange, this marks the autumn of the couple’s love.
The color most associated with fall,
orange can be seen as a fading version of red --
a visualization of passion that’s slowly dying out.
Likewise, Joel and Clem have grown distant by this point.
They can barely stand each other.
“It’s just...”
“Repulsive.”
“It’s repulsive.”
Now that their exciting passion isn’t center stage,
it’s clear the two are no match made in heaven.
"Clem, do you really think you can take care of a kid?"
"What?"
She’s fun-loving and novelty-seeking; he’s introverted and suspicious --
and their differences result in a failure to communicate.
"Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating."
Their final argument illustrates that they now bring out
each other’s worst selves --
"And what are you like, a wino?"
"A wino?
Jesus, are you from the 50s or something?
A wino?"
Clem’s reckless need for stimulation,
“I kinda sorta wrecked your car.”
meets Joel’s paranoid insecurity.
“I assume you [BLEEP] someone tonight.
Isn’t that how you get people to like you?”
Clem stands up and storms out,
her orange hair soon fading into the dark of the apartment.
Like a leaf falling from a tree, their romance is headed towards the inevitable
end.
“The perfect ending to this piece-of-shit story!”
"It's called Blue Ruin."
"Right."
"The color.
Snappy name, huh?"
By the time Joel sees Clementine again, she’s erased him from her memory,
“Excuse me?
Can I help you find something sir?”
and symbolically, this is mirrored in her hair’s fourth color --
a wintry shade of blue, aptly named
"Blue Ruin."
As Joel drowns in sadness, his world is drowned in this sea of blue,
and he soon undergoes the procedure to wipe Clem from his memory, too --
"You did it to me first!
I can't believe you did this to me."
at which point, it would seem, their romance is definitively over.
So just as winter is the season when living things die,
“The bloom is certainly [BLEEP]ing off the rose at this point”
the cold, somber hair color represents the death of their relationship.
“You spend that much time with someone only to find out she’s a stranger...”
But winter is not only the season of death --
it can also be the season of hibernation,
and it always gives away, eventually, to spring.
This is not the end for Clem and Joel.
And the clue, once again, lies in the hair.
A distinctly lighter patch bursts from her roots,
meeting the blue ends and creating a whiff of green in between.
The near-ombré coloring is a potent visual metaphor
that evokes the thawing winter snow,
from which new green life can sprout once more.
Under this promise of renewal, Clementine and Joel meet again,
"Hi."
"I'm sorry?"
"I just said hi."
"Hi, hello, hi."
and their romance is reborn.
The near-miracle of their meeting again, even though neither remembers the other,
reveals the optimistic heart of this movie.
"I'm gonna marry you.
I know it."
"Hmm... okay?"
It’s affirming that -- however hard we may try --
we can’t erase our deepest nature, who we are, and what we love.
Despite all our misguided efforts, that inner seed inside of us
will lead once again to a flower.
Winter doesn’t just exist to make us all miserable --
there’s a purpose to the blue season, just as there is to the others.
This is the time to let die that which should die.
And there are some aspects of Clem’s and Joel’s dynamic that need to
be shed.
As we saw in their springtime when they met,
Joel expected Clementine to be the energizing cure-all
for his depressive tendencies.
"I thought maybe you were a nut, but you were exciting."
This led him -- in their fall -- to be excessively critical and disappointed
when she failed to live up to impossible expectations.
"You could've killed somebody.
I don't know, maybe you did kill somebody.
Should we turn on the news and see?
Should I check the grill to see if there's any children or small animals?"
"It's just a [BLEEP]ing dent, Joel."
For them to have a real future, he needs to stop seeing her
in this manic-pixie-dream-girl light -- as she bluntly tells him:
“Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them,
or I'm gonna make them alive.
But I'm just a [BLEEP]ed-up girl who's looking for my own peace of mind.”
“I’m not a concept, Joel, I’m just a [BLEEP]ed-up girl
who’s looking for my own peace of mind.”
Clem, too, needs to face up to her restlessness
and understand that chasing after new, exciting things won’t satisfy her.
"I'm always anxious thinking I'm not living my life to the fullest, you know?"
A quieter life with Joel may just be the balancing force she needs.
Ultimately, winter is the time for both to let their illusions die --
their illusions about each other, their illusions about themselves,
and their illusions about what a relationship ought to be.
If there’s one thing we know about seasons,
it’s that they repeat.
And the resounding message announced by Clementine’s hair is
that this couple’s seasonal pattern will replay all over again.
“I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you.”
“But you will, but you will.
You will think of things.
And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped,
because that’s what happens with me.”
“Okay.”
Crucially, Eternal Sunshine ends with the couple accepting
this inevitably repeating cycle.
“Okay.”
[Both laugh]
As the music comes on, they disappear into the frame of white winter slow --
this time fading not into the oblivion of forgetting,
but that of acceptance.
This is perhaps the most profound truth in the movie:
that acceptance sets us free.
"This is is Joel.
It's gonna be gone soon."
"I know."
"What do we do?"
"Enjoy it."
We find peace not by cutting out what hurts us,
but by including our pain
as an indispensable part of our joys and ourselves.
We have the sense that for Clem and Joel,
both nothing and everything will be different.
The notes will repeat, but the music will become richer
now that these two understand their relationship on a deeper level.
The condition of modern life is forgetfulness --
we’re constantly pushed to move on, to overcome, to repress --
"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot, the world forgetting by the world forgot,
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, each prayer accepted and each wish resigned."
but the braver, human choice is to remember, to face the truth, to stay aware.
Clem’s and Joel’s choice to relive the seasons of their love,
no doubt, accompanied by a whole new array of hair colors,
is an affirmation of the life cycle itself.
Where there is death, decay and disappointment,
there is also birth, discovery, and always love.
"I mean, how many hair colors could there be?"
Hi guys, this is Grace.
And today I want to talk to you about one of our favorite places
to watch movies -- Mubi.
Mubi is a treasure trove of films from around the globe.
Every day a new film is added and the oldest is taken away.
So in this world where it's very easy to spend hours
debating what you should watch,
Mubi is like having a really cool friend with amazing taste in movies,
making it so much easier for you.
They feature hard-to-come-by masterpieces, indie festival darlings,
influential arthouse and foreign films,
lesser known films by your favorite famous directors, and more.
Plus you can even download the films to watch offline,
and there are no ads, ever.
One movie you can watch right now on Mubi is Three Times,
Barry Jenkins has said that this movie's triptych structure
was a major influence on Moonlight.
Three Times features three different love stories,
set in different eras, and with different characters,
but starring the same two actors.
We can't recommend Mubi highly enough.
You can try Mubi out right now for free for a whole month.
Just click the link in the description below.