Watching Eternal Sunshine with my mom in 2004
One of my first real movie reviews was a forum post about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I loved it. My mom said all the time-jumping almost made her throw up.
Long before I would think of writing reviews of anything, I posted a little one to my forum in March 2004, about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I had clearly just watched it and needed to tell somebody.
I wrote up the plot earnestly: a guy named Joel learns his ex has had her memories of him erased, decides to do the same to his memories of her, and then, mid-procedure, starts reliving the good parts and tries to hold on. At fifteen that premise hit me hard. The best I could manage to say about it was that it was “interesting, it really made me think about things,” which is exactly what you say at that age when a movie has rearranged your brain a little and you don’t yet have the words for it.
The detail I love most now is that I watched it with my mom. The movie jumps around in time, first person to third and back, without the usual connective tissue, and I reported in the post that it “almost made her throw up.” She wasn’t wrong that it was disorienting. I just happened to like being disoriented.
I also linked the trailer and helpfully warned everyone that “you must have Apple Quicktime Player to view this one,” which is the most 2004 sentence I have ever written.
I’ve seen a lot of movies since, and I’ve gotten more careful about how I talk about them. But I’m not sure I’ve ever been more honest about one than I was at fifteen: it made me think, it was hard to follow, my mom nearly lost it, and I loved it anyway.