Doctor, Can You Fix My Broken Heart?

Abstract

Media Review for The Journal of Medical Humanities, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” dir. Michel Gondry. Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry. It was released in the UK on 30 April. (http://www.eternalsunshine.com/) “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.” (Nietzsche, quoted by Mary in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) Charlie Kaufman’s (Being John Malkovich, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Adaptation) script for Director Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (April, 2004) is the latest Kate Winslet (Clementine) and Jim Carrey (Joel) movie. This comic tragedy raises questions about the role of medicine by considering the prospect of memory deletion. Characters utilize this technology to forget that they have ever met somebody, usually because the grief of those memories is too much to bear. However, to say this is a movie about medicine and its role in society would be an overstatement. The ethical issues presented by the film are not quite as overt as, say Extreme Measures (Michael Apted, 1996) and, as such, it offers a wider range of interpretations on the rights and wrongs of human modification through medical technologies. Indeed, it stretches the debate on what might be considered the proper domain of medicine. Like all the best examples, it develops a narrative where technology is presented as a seamless part of human relationships, thus subverting the technological character of the decision. The capacity for medicine (or technology) to correct human woes is one of the core narratives of this movie, which is more prominently about the irrelevance of fatalism and the importance of memory. Towards the end of the movie, this is signposted when, at the point of realizing that the lead couple (Winslet and Carrey) are doomed to hate each other and break-up in the end, they desperately resign themselves to still wanting each other. Yet, they commit to each other without the expectation that the relationship will be permanent and even that they will most likely grow to despise one another. In this moment, they realise that this future’s inevitability has no bearing on the feelings they have in the present or the