Review of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "The Quest to Forget"
By Ethan Segal M'07 As a medical student I generally try and find ways to
improve my memory-but aren’t there some that you just want to purge
from your brain? Well, that’s the subject of the latest movie by writer/director
team Charlie Kauffman and Michel Gondry. “Eternal Sunshine”
is being billed as a romantic comedy that stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet
as brokenhearted lovers who try to erase the memory of their failed relationship.
Jim Carrey, in probably the most reserved performance of his acting career,
plays Joel, a socially inept loner who in a St. Valentine’s Day fit
meets Clementine, played to the hilt by Winslet as a wild and moody bookstore
clerk. After Joel is dumped, he finds out that Clementine is seeing a doctor
to have their relationship erased from her memory and in retaliation; Joel
decides to do the same. Kauffman, known for his offbeat screenplays (Being
John Malkovich, Adaption) provides the right angular story for Gondry to
do his cinematic magic. Gondry has really expanded on the hyperactively
surreal music videos he made for Bjork and The White Stripes and he fully
immerses the viewer in Joel’s mind. At times overwhelming, this is
a movie that needs to be seen many times to fully take in all the details
that Gondry lays before the eyes. Ironically, there doesn’t seem to
be much sunlight in Joel’s mind. Most of the scenes, particularly
those in which Joel goes through the memory erasing process, are ominous
and dimly lit. It becomes clear to me by the end of the film that the filmmakers
are saying that erasing one’s unpleasant memories is not a good thing,
that we use our past-failures of love and success to reminisce on life,
learn about ourselves, and to grow as individuals.
But what about truly traumatic memories, like the ones that plague patients with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), many of whom do not respond to conventional psychotherapy? Should these memories be erased? These questions are presently being asked by Dr. Roger Pitman, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist. Recently featured in an article in the New York Times Magazine (online) entitled, “The Quest to Forget,” Dr. Pitman conducted a pilot study to see if giving the beta blocker, propranolol, can prevent PTSD in a group of screened patients brought into the emergency room. After nineteen days of treatment on either propranolol or placebo, the subjects described their traumatic experiences in a 100-word narrative on tape. The following week they had the narrative played back to them and their physiological reaction was measured. Those given placebo showed the characteristic stress response: increased heart rate, sweats, and high respiratory rate. Those given propranolol showed nothing. Although not really the same memory neutron bomb portrayed in “Sunshine,” Dr. Pitman admits that propranolol probably inhibits the emotional response to all emotional salient stimuli, including positive ones. Both “Sunshine” and “The Quest to Forget” explore the issues in interesting ways and are worth checking out.