(Electronic music)
- Hey Wisecrack, Jared here.
Let me ask you something: if you had the chance to wipe out the worst thing that ever happened
to you--to make it so that you had no memory of the event at all - would you do it? Or
more importantly, should you?
These are the questions at the heart of today’s movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
First released in 2004, this lasting film opened to rave reviews. Charmed by innovative
cinematography, unusual structure, and an all-star cast, critics and audiences alike
fell in love with this quirky, haunting story about the nature of human relationships and
heartbreak.
But after sixteen years, does the movie hold up? Was Kate Winslet just lucky enough to
cash in on the manic-pixie-dream girl phenomenon before it got stale… or is there something
really profound about the relationship she and Jim Carrey portray on screen? To answer
this question, we have to get to know the uncredited star of this movie: the human brain.
Specifically, we’re going to look to neuroscience to examine what this film says about the way
brains work, and what that means for us as human beings living with those brains. Sound
complicated?
- Dammit, Smithers, this isn’t rocket science. It’s brain surgery!
- Don’t worry, we’ll break it down for you in this Wisecrack Edition on Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind: Deep or Dumb?
Spoilers ahead for one of the few movies ever to put Frodo Baggins and the Hulk in the same room
- Alright guys let’s do a quick recap.
Sad-sack Joel Barish wakes up one day to find a huge scratch on his car and most of his
journal entries missing. On a whim, he ditches his usual commute and hops a train to Montauk,
where he meets and starts to fall in love with the quirky and impulsive Clementine Kruczynski.
After some jumping back and forth on the timeline, we discover that Joel and Clementine have
actually met before--in fact, they’ve had a whole life together, dating for what appears
to have been several years. Neither lover recognizes the other because they independently
arranged to have their memories of the painful relationship erased by a company called Lacuna,
Inc.
The film cuts between Joel’s bedroom, where Lacuna technicians are working to wipe memories
of Clementine from his brain, and the inside of his head, as he changes his mind about
the procedure and fights to keep those memories safe. While Joel and Clementine do ultimately
lose their memories of each other, they manage to retain a vague impression of their feelings
which sends them to Montauk at the same time: at the end of the film, it’s heavily implied
that the whole cycle of their relationship will now begin again.
To discern whether the film is deep or not, we need to dive into some philosophical and
ethical questions about the proper use of technology and our innate human abilities
when it comes to building our identities, selves, and experiences.
At a very basic level, the movie’s plot is driven by Joel’s choices about what to
do with his brain: that is, whether or not to eliminate Clementine from his consciousness.
He starts off wanting to alter his brain--even to the point of harming it--in order to avoid
the pain of having loved and lost Clementine.
- But as he goes through the night and starts to realize what losing Clementine really means--the
eradication of a huge part of his life and emotional experience--he makes a choice to
fight the procedure, and preserve as much of her as he can, pain and all.
- Joel’s decisions boil down to a choice between comfort and growth: he can live a
diminished but easy life without Clementine, or opt for a harder but richer experience
with her in it. But this is also a choice between two ways of approaching his physical
human brain: either as something to be trimmed down and controlled for the sake of efficiency,
or as something to be used to its full, messy potential, whatever the consequences of that
growth and freedom might be.
Philosopher Catherine Malabou has written about this exact dilemma in her conveniently
titled book, What Should We Do with Our Brain? The book draws on neuroscientific research
to discuss the concept of the brain’s plasticity. When we say “plasticity,” many of us are
actually thinking about the far more limited--and nefarious--concept of flexibility. Plasticity
involves adaptation and, according to Malabou, is “an agency of disobedience to every constituted
form, a refusal to submit to a model[...] To be flexible is to receive a form or impression,[t]o
be docile, to not explode.”
To put it another way, research and experience show that our brains are able to both adapt
to circumstances and resist them; to work with change and to create it. To borrow Malabou’s
analogy, our selves are like plastic explosives: able to mold to a given shape if necessary,
but also capable of radically changing our own form and that of our environment. Flexibility,
on the other hand, involves always taking the path of least resistance.
Looked at from this point of view, Joel’s decision to erase or keep his memories of
Clementine can be seen as a choice between exercising the full plasticity of his brain,
or doing the “flexible” thing by destroying those parts of his brain that are making him
uncomfortable.
In both Malabou’s book and Eternal Sunshine, flexibility is presented as the guiding philosophy
of neoliberal capitalism. According to both texts, we live in an economic system that
demands flexibility from its actors, and offers them products and services which will increase
their flexibility--for a price.
Eternal Sunshine, perhaps simplistically, portrays business as the process of taking
advantage of people who are suffering from confusion or pain. Joel’s very first lines
frame Valentine’s Day as a corporate plot to sabotage our emotional state:
- But the film ultimately earns that critique. Keeping with the same theme, the movie makes
it clear that Lacuna, Inc. survives by profiting off of people’s desire to be rid of those
“crappy” feelings of heartache. As Dr. Howard himself points out:
- It’s even implied that clients may become dependent on the memory-erasing procedure
over time, and will go to extreme lengths to get it done:
- The ways in which the company takes advantage of compromised people become less subtle and
more disturbing as the film progresses. Shortly after arriving in Joel’s apartment, the
Lacuna, Inc. technicians assigned to wipe his memories turn his home into their own
personal AirBnB: drinking, getting high, and even having sex near his unconscious body.
- This trend takes a turn for the seriously f***ed up when we learn that one of the technicians
stole a pair of Clementine’s underwear while they were erasing her memory
And that he's been using information stolen from Joel’s old letters to try and trick her into falling
in love with him.
- The unethical behavior reaches its climax when we find out that Howard coerced Mary,
his own secretary, to wipe her memory after the two of them had an affair together:
- What Joel, Clementine, and Lacuna’s other customers lack that leaves them open to such
exploitation is the flexibility that society demands of them. Such a demand, according
to Malabou, is at odds with our true nature as human beings.
As beings with plastic brains, we can indeed bend when we wish: but we are also capable
of resistance, creation, and other acts of free will in the face of obstacles. Too often,
though, in a culture so tightly focused on work and productivity, the full plasticity
of our brains is reduced to the concept of flexibility, and “presented simply as the
possibility of increasing or decreasing performance. Very often, the brain is analyzed as personal
capital.”
This idea of the brain as personal capital--something you can optimize and invest in for greater
output, like a factory production line--is even more prevalent today than when Malabou
first wrote about it in 2008. In Silicon Valley and beyond, we find workers taking drastic
steps to alter their brain functioning for improved performance on the job. Workers engage
in so-called “brain hacking” practices--fine-tuned sleep and break schedules, the use of nootropics,
and even LSD-microdosing--in an attempt to put in longer hours and produce more work,
whether or not this serves their own health, well-being, or growth.
These practices and others are examples of Malabou’s “flexibility” in action: hijacking
your own brain chemistry to meet an unreasonable deadline demonstrates a profound ability and
willingness to adapt to circumstances, rather than improve them. From an economic perspective,
then, to be flexible is to up skill, reorient, and change as often as necessary to satisfy
the demands of society, rather than take the drastic action of trying to change those demands.
Lacuna, Inc. promises its customers the flexibility that is so highly prized in our society and
economy. Without their procedures done, Dr. Howard’s
patients are inflexible: fixated on past lovers, dead pets, or any of the countless disappointments
and setbacks that are a part of being human. He explains his service to Joel as a way for
people to become unstuck--not by overcoming the challenges they face-
- But by smoothing out their lives so they can continue forward uninterrupted:
- In her discussion of mood-regulating drugs like Prozac, Malabou claims that our society
commonly judges such treatments based on their ability to “reduce vulnerability, chronic
disturbance, and psychical precariousness [and] give back the appetite for mobility,
the capacity to rid oneself of rigidity and of fixity in one’s identity”--in other
words, we say that a psychiatric drug or treatment is working when it makes the person using
it more flexible in their approach to work, relationships, etc.
Now, this is not to say that Malabou is against such medication--on the contrary, she makes
a point of saying how useful it can be. She is simply pointing out that the discourse
around the effectiveness of psychiatric medication tends to focus on whether it makes the person
taking it pliable, productive, and eager to fit in, rather than on whether it helps them
be more strong-willed, creative, etc.
Howard’s procedure can be thought of as just such a flexibility-enhancing mood-stabilizer.
In some sense, he is a modern-day lobotomist, cutting out those parts of the brain which
are thought to be the source of uncomfortable, unproductive feelings like sadness, depression,
or anxiety.
When the wider system demands that its individual members adapt, no measure is too extreme.
What unites Howard’s patients--or his target demographic--is a desire to shortcut the hard
work of integrating negative experiences into their lives, so that they can go back to living
in a way that doesn’t require change. They want to express flexibility, rather than plasticity--and
Howard is willing to help them do it.
Clementine poignantly expresses this understandable wish to wipe away difficulty
while describing her childhood to Joel
- If, as Malabou claims, trying to “magically change” ourselves by being eternally accommodating
is a waste of our true potential, then what should we do instead? What would a fully realized
plastic brain--and self--actually be like? In other words, if we choose not to automatically
go along with the demands to be flexible, then what is the alternative we’re fighting
for?
According to her, “The plasticity of the self [...] implies [balance] between the preservation
of constancy [...] and the exposure of this constancy to accidents, to the outside, to
otherness in general.” She adds that, “If we didn’t explode at each transition, if
we didn’t destroy ourselves a bit, we could not live.”
To simplify, Malabou claims that to be really human--to express plasticity--is to balance
the need to adapt against the need to grow and change. Yes, we all decide to make sacrifices
for the sake of productivity from time to time: we might stay late at the office one
night because the boss asked us to, or skip out on a movie night with friends because
our teacher wants that term paper submitted by midnight. But when we become so flexible
that we iron out every inefficiency in our lives--when we’re so afraid of “explosions”
that we take no risks--then we’re in trouble.
In other words, the “spotless mind” from the Alexander Pope poem that gives the movie
its name isn’t a desirable thing at all. We need our “spots,” traumas, heartaches,
etc. in order to live full lives that have some meaning outside of our ability to satisfy demand
- So, what do we do? As individuals in a society that demands we stamp out the troublesome,
unproductive parts of our brains in order to succeed, how should we make the best use
of our brains? That is, how do we accomplish that most cyberpunk of goals that Malabou
sets up in her book’s opening pages: neuronal liberation?
Her answer is simple: we ought to refuse to be flexible, and exercise the explosive, creative
dimensions of our brains’ plasticity to the fullest extent possible. As she puts it,
we should “visualize the possibility of saying no to an afflicting economic, political,
and mediatic culture that celebrates only the triumph of flexibility, blessing obedient
individuals who have no greater merit than that of knowing how to bow their heads and
smile.” (Malabou)
Joel, Clementine, and Mary take up this fight by pushing back against the erasure of their
own and others’ memories--that is, by being difficult, and refusing to let things run
smoothly for the sake of smoothness.
Joel demonstrates plasticity by working with his projected image of Clementine to evade
Howard and his technicians:
- And when it becomes clear that he won’t be able to run forever, Joel even manages
to seed a subconscious direction for his waking, post-procedure self, again via his image of
Clementine:
- While Joel wakes up and follows his subliminal urgings back to Clementine, Mary raids the
Lacuna, Inc. offices and sends out all of their files to their previous customers, in
effect ruining the procedure for all of them and upsetting the smooth operation of the company
- With their painful history thus revealed to them, present-day Joel and Clementine must
decide whether or not to pursue a relationship together, knowing in advance that they are
likely to hurt each other very badly. Their choice is the film’s ultimate example of
plasticity in action:
- The flexible thing for Joel and Clementine to do in this situation would be to accept
the futility of pursuing a relationship together, and go their separate ways to live comfortable,
productive lives, either alone or with better-suited partners. Instead, they willingly blow up
their chances at untroubled singledom or functional romance, opting instead for a dynamic which
has been empirically proven not to work. Inherent in our plasticity is the ability to make choices
of our own free will--perhaps especially when those choices don’t make much sense.
The film’s final shot is a looping clip of Joel and Clementine playing on a snow-covered
beach in Montauk, implying that this cycle is likely to play itself out again. Their
relationship isn’t perfect--it may not even be a good idea--but it is their choice, made
in defiance of flexibility, and therefore an expression of the brain’s plasticity:
that is, its vast potential to create--and destroy--both itself and its environment.
These neuro-rebels have done Malabou proud--and they’ve earned themselves a solid “Deep”
from us.
But what do you think, Wisecrack? Are there ethical or practical limits to how much we
can--and should--optimize our brains for given purposes? Have a favorite movie or TV show
that explores how people relate to their own minds? Let us know your thoughts in the comments
below. A big thanks to our amazing patrons for supporting our channel and the podcasts.
Hit the subscribe button, and as always, thanks for watching. Peace.