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Most amnesia movies are ultimately about redemption: someone's slate is wiped clean so that he or she can start afresh. But they are also often about atonementone must retrieve one's memory in order to make right the wrongs of the pastand The Bourne Supremacy is a heartening case in point. As Bourne stalks his former colleagues, he is haunted by resurrected memories of his first assignment, in which he killed an idealistic Russian politician and his wife and made it look like a murder-suicide. Once the nature of these memories becomes clear to him, Bourne sets out to find the couple's orphaned daughter, to confess what he did and to correct the false impression that has tainted her memory of her parents. What's more, Bourne holds back from seeking cold-blooded revenge against his cia bosses because he clings to the memory of Marie, even after she is gone. Thanks to Marie, he is more than just a set of lethal reflexes; he has grown, and may continue to grow, as a moral human being.
The role memory plays in letting go of the past is also central to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry from a script by Charlie Kaufman. The film concerns Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), who is heartbroken because his girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), has not only broken up with him but has had all her memories of him erased at a clinic called Lacuna Inc. Joel decides to return the favor by having all of his memories of her erased, too, but as the technicians visit his house and delete his memories one by oneworking backwards, as in MementoJoel is increasingly reminded of all the things he used to like about Clementine. He begins to hope he can save at least one of those memories; but alas, he cannot, and the erasure of Clementine from his mind becomes a moving analogy for the death that awaits us all.
While all this is going on inside Joel's head, the secretary for Lacuna (Kirsten Dunst) shows up at Joel's house and has a bit of a fling with one of the technicians, before throwing herself at one of the others. She says Lacuna is performing a great service, because they give people a chance to "begin again"; she compares it to becoming "pure" like a baby.1 But at the end of the film, she discovers that the boss she has flirted with has actually had an affair with her before, and has deleted her memory of that affair. This bothers her deeply; it seems that, given the chance to "begin again," she was just going to make the same mistakes over and over, instead of learning from them and moving on. So, to get revenge, she writes all of Lacuna's patients to let them know that some of their memories have been deleted, and she sends them the taped interviews in which those patients explained why they wanted their memories erased in the first place.2
These tapes arrive just as Joel and Clementine are getting re-acquainted, and the two seemingly new lovers get a shocking preview of the conflicts and mutually bitter criticisms that await them once they get to know each other again. One of the key questions posed by this film is whether people can get past their knowledge of each other and the hurts they cause each other to forge deeper, even more meaningful relationships, or whether they must always revert to some sort of naïve, innocent, pre-critical state. Clementine's namewhich means "merciful"sounds hopeful enough, but the title of the film alludes to a poem by Alexander Pope, based on the story of Abelard and Eloise, in which Eloise has become a nun yet remains torn between memories of her passion for Abelard and the vows she took before God. The film ends with an image of two people running on a snowy beach, and it loops this image three times before fading to the credits. Is it a sign that Joel and Clementine are doomed to repeat the cycle of meeting, breaking up, and erasing each other from their lives? Or is there an affinity with Hirokazu Koreeda's film After Life, in which eternal happiness is boiled down to a single memory and all else is obliterated?
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