To forget is not always the easiest solution

Rating: 9/10 (29 December 2014)

It took me a little while to work this movie out because it was a little odd at the beginning. Okay, I knew it was about how a man (Joel) was having all memory of his ex-girlfriend (Clementine) erased from his memory, and that it is basically a love story in reverse, but as I said the beginning left me a little baffled. Basically Joel goes to the beach and meets Clementine and they begin to hit it off and after their first date he parks outside her house so she can get her toothbrush and some guy comes up to him and asks him what he is doing. Suddenly it jumps to a scene where he is driving home crying, and for a while I thought there was a sudden jump of two years to when they had broken up. When, later on in the movie, the scene where they first met was completely different to the opening scenes of the movie I was under the impression that there was a huge continually stuff up. However, how can a movie, with a huge continually stuff up, get a rating of over 8 on IMDb? Well, all is explained in the end.
As I mentioned, this is basically a love story in reverse. The story begins after they have broken up and Joel discovers that Clementine has had him completely erased from his memory, so he goes and visits the same doctor to have the procedure done to him as well. This is when we get to the core of the movie as it jumps between Joel's memory and events going on in Joel's bedroom with the people who are doing the erasing. Thus what we have are in effect two stories going on which at first do not seem to be related at all, but slowly become interrelated.
The way this film has been set out makes it quite different to the 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and boy gets girl again' typical Hollywood theme. If seen in the normal order then that is basically what the film is, but it isn't. The film begins with the break up and then we watch, through Joel's memories as they are progressively being erased, the relationship as it unfolded. However, the relationship begins with the break up, and then moves through the fights – all of the painful parts – however things begin to change when we get to the good parts – the parts that Joel does not want to forget. Joel knows what is going on, and when he realises that all of the good parts of the relationship are being removed he suddenly wants it to stop, and thus we have this psychological fight where is tries his best to retain his memories, while the doctors on the outside are fighting to complete the process.
I guess sometimes, especially when we go through painful experiences, we would like them to be removed from our memory so they do not come back to haunt us, but the question is then raised is that healthy, and is it possible. We are told at the beginning that all evidence of the relationship must be removed because by seeing (or even hearing) one element from that relationship can end up triggering those forgotten memories. This is where the film gets interesting because one of the assistants, who assisted in Clementine having her memory erased, falls in love with her and uses his knowledge to start a relationship with her. However therein lies the problem – while she may have forgotten, he hasn't, and what is worse, he is using the knowledge that he gained from assisting Joel in deepening the relationship, but this has an opposite effect.
Then there is what is going on on the outside, but I won't go any further than that because I have already pretty much spoiled the movie (even though I have put a spoiler alert on this review). However, what I picked up in the movie is the idea of removing memories (and it appears that many are well aware of this aspect as well). Just because we have bad memories, or more precisely, memories that hurt us, does not mean that they are useless. First of all our memories define who we are, whether they are pleasant or not, and to remove those memories will end up undermining our character. Secondly, if we seek to remove the bad memories it does not mean that only our good memories will remain. As can be seen in this film, the good memories of the relationship are inextricably tied up with the bad, so by removing the bad, we are also removing the good. It is clear that Joel wanted all of the bad memories removed, but when he suddenly realised that these bad memories were connected to the good memories, and the good memories were also being removed, that was when he wanted it to stop. Finally, just because all of the bad memories are removed does not necessarily mean that we will not repeat the same mistakes. In fact, by removing them means that we are more likely to do so. As Winston Churchill once said: he who forgets the past is doomed to repeat its mistakes.