"How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!The world forgetting, by the world forgot.Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd..."

I’m not exactly sure what this quote means but I like it. How much I wish I could have the procedure done in the movie to forget someone. The one guy I loved and wasted 3 years on is moving to San Diego next week and I’ll never see him again. I feel like the characters in the movie must have. What is the point of having the pleasure if all you’re left with is the pain? I’d rather not have any of it at all. I’d rather have no memory than have a bad memory of a good thing. It’s not worth it.

I think I love this movie because it gives the viewer a chance to see what it would be like if you never met the person that caused you so much pain. I must have a bleak outlook on life right now because if you really think about it everything that brings you pleasure can give you pain. And when you surrender yourself to something, such as love, you can be destroyed by it in such a vulnerable state. But humans really are pleasure seekers and when we feel love we can’t stop ourselves. We can seriously consider the consequences but it’s really an unstoppable force. Something that could only be leveled by a brain-damage inducing machine. The movie let me escape into my desire of "I wish I never met him." But it is really kind of sad because that’s not the way the world is. When life wants to teach you a hard lesson you get to deal with it. We don’t have an easy way out of our pain. We can’t go see Dr. Howard to zap our brain. We can’t medicate ourselves to the point where we won’t remember someone who hurt us. If we do it’s with drugs or alcohol, not with an uppermiddle-class American procedure like what was shown in the movie, making an appointment just like a dentist.

Pain shapes people, without it we wouldn’t have much character. If Joel didn’t have memories of Clementine what in his life would he have? He is portrayed as a boring thirty something year old working class American. Granted, I don’t know his life but his childhood memories didn’t reveal anything traumatic. Clementine, on the other hand was created to be a weird character. She dressed weird, she acted weird, she died her hair weird colors, her name was even weird. The writer of this movie wanted to make it very clear that these two people were opposites and complete personality antithesis’s of each other. I would like to know what went on in Clementine’s life to make her the way she was. I would have liked to see her memories. I have a feeling she had some alarming ones.

Because of my current situation, I’m biased. This movie is really a powerful love story, sending the message that fate brings two people together and cannot be overcome! That even erasing someone from your life completely to the point of erasing a memory won’t stop love! It’s a cute message but it’s not real. One of my favorite Dylan lyrics goes "It was gravity which pulled us down and destiny which broke us apart". That message I can more relate to. I wish love was controlled by fate and I wish pain could be erased from your memory but unfortunately it’s only a movie.