Eternal Sunshine Metaphors

The metaphor of the storage and subsequent retrieval of memory is also sustained in Eternal Sunshine. Once again, the inscribed objects, which Joel brings to Lacuna to help create a virtual map of Clementine in his brain, are represented as housing the memories inscribed to them. Van Dijck writes: “Memory objects […] robust materiality seems to guarantee a stable anchor of memory retrieval—an index to lived experience.” Therefore, these objects also need to be erased in the process of forgetting Clementine, otherwise they would compromise the process as they could still provoke remembering. Furthermore, Eternal Sunshine, much like Memento, uses a series of ‘flashbacks’ to visually represent the Joel’s process of recollecting his experience
Memory inscription and storage are complicated by the procedure that is slowly erasing Joel’s memories of Clementine. The inscribed objects are going to be destroyed, and their mentally inscribe counterparts are being erased. To prevent these memories from being eliminated entirely, Joel takes his image of Clementine from his subconscious and tries to hide her in other memories where she does not belong. Nungesser confirms: “In keeping traces of memories at some other place Joel hopes to resist the procedure of elimination”. The active manipulation of memory traces, as with Leonard’s process of re-writing his inscribed objects, reveals the unreliability of the trace or inscription process. Memory objects can also begin as being signifiers of a happy experience and then be transformed to be representative of an unhappy one. The mutability of these objects is obvious in Joel’s treatment of his objects inscribed with Clementine’s memory: they begin as cherished objects that signify happy moments in the relationship but following the break-up transform into representations of a failed love and a painful ending. Furthermore, while the idea of memory storage, and the subsequent possibility of memory recollection, suggests that the memory, once stored, is a fixed thing that can be perfectly retrieved, Eternal Sunshine proposes that memory is actively constructed and reconstructed through the process of recollection. On this topic, van Dijck writes: “personal memories at the moment of inscription are prone to wishful thinking just as memories upon retrieval are vulnerable to reconsolidation.” When revisiting his memories of Clementine, Joel cannot passively view the moments as they were, but rather his experiences of and leading up to the present are actively informing his retrieval of the memories of the past. Nungesser writes