Indeed, Joel, Clementine, and Mary prove Howard’s procedure to be instead an unethical Dr. The film’s own truth on screen, though, argues against Howard’s status as an ethical doctor. The procedure makes the threat to “surgically remove someone” a reality as the patient escapes to, what Howard says to Joel, “a new life awaiting you”. This offers a consequentialist way one creates value to affirm life, as Howard treats people who themselves have rationalized their depressive trauma to be so severely life-threatening that they resort to the artificial method of surgical erasure. Howard, then, can be viewed from Mary’s own Nietzschean reading as an ethical doctor insofar as he “heals” patients from psychological trauma through their volition. This composite action of life-affirmation is formally the “transvaluation of values” ―the life-activity of Nietzsche’s post-modern ubermensch who is not passively slave to metaphysical ‘-isms’ but instead actively engaged in the subjective creation of relative truth. Memory then functions subordinate to truth, and truth in turn functions subordinate to the chief good, “life-affirmation”, e.g. In short, the aphorism articulates Nietzsche’s principal theory of value creation which holds that one is naturally driven by the will to power―an ineffable force that drives all life―and subjectively creates value relative to this drive. Howard Mierzwiak, it still is a clue to understanding the film and can lead us to looking at Nietzsche’s fitting theories on truth and memory, and their value. While Mary later reveals that she memorized the aphorism―ironically so―simply from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations out of romantic desire to impress her boss, Dr. Mary Svevo, the receptionist for the memory-erasing firm suitably named Lacuna, Inc., cites a famous aphorism from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil twice, both times as a congratulatory slogan for Lacuna: “Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders”. Making my job easier, the writer of the film Charlie Kaufman already includes some philosophy―namely, Nietzsche. ![]() As they grapple between love and hatred, the truth on screen remains constant with love’s truth offering a higher-order determining force. Particularly, the circular arcs of Joel, Clementine, and Mary reveal inescapable relationships with love that powerfully transcend their ephemeral painful memories. The film as such may be painful to watch, though I’d like to argue that in its pointless absurdity, there is―with the reliable help of philosophy! ―something to be gleaned that goes a long way beyond two hours spent on traded witticisms, cinematographic eye-candy, and an attractive cast. ![]() Instead, the romantic tragicomedy presents an island of depressed, anxious, and bipolar misfits trapped in an elaborate circular plot, destined to the eternal recurrence of their dysfunctional relationships. For any happy couple in the audience, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind might fail to offer truths relevant to their relationship.
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