The Poem Kirsten Dunst Uses as a Tool of Seduction in Snowy Eternal Sunshine

Despite its warm title, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a quintessential winter movie. The poem that gives the film its title suggests that forgetting has a holy power. But does it?

via Focus Features

I’ve seen the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind so many times that it’s difficult to see it through any lens other than one of admiration and teenage heartache. I was graduating from high school when I saw it in the theater on its opening weekend. When a friend of mine asked me to see it with her and a group of friends, I hadn’t seen a trailer or even heard about it.

“What’s it about?” I remember asking her.
“Just come and see it,” she said.

She was sure it would be wonderful, and she was right. The answer to my question, it turns out, is that Eternal Sunshine is a film about memory, love, and suffering. The original script for the film is significantly weirder than what made it to screen, which should come as no surprise if you’ve seen other Charlie Kaufman or Michel Gondry films.

The final edit has an incredible cast, a bizarre and thought-provoking premise, gorgeous cinematography that swerves from dreamy kitsch to glitchy analog weirdness, and original music by Jon Brion that’s so good that I never hit skip when one of its tracks comes on.

The film’s title is also a line from a poem first published in 1717 that praises the holy power of forgetting and laments that we aren’t able to forget those we’ve loved. But Eternal Sunshine reaches a related conclusion that feels even deeper, in some ways, than the source material its title was drawn from.

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What Women Want

The poem that gives the film its name comes from the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard.” Based very loosely on the life of Héloïse d’Argenteuil, a 12th-century nun, writer, and scholar from France, the poem describes the aftermath of Héloïse (or “Eloisa’s”) affair with her teacher, Peter Abelard, who was some two decades older than her. It did not end well.

The story of these two lovers has been adapted many times. Alexander Pope’s version is a verse epic in the style of an epistle, or a kind of letter. This form of direct communication requires that the poet assume the point of view of the speaker in very direct ways, which means Pope was writing as Eloisa.

via Focus Features

The poem is quite long. In Eternal Sunshine, Mary reads out just the first four lines of the 14th stanza, but I’ve included the entirety of that stanza here for more context:

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
“Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;”
Desires compos’d, affections ever ev’n,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav’n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whisp’ring angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her th’ unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,
For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring,
For her white virgins hymeneals sing,
To sounds of heav’nly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day.

How is this poem used in the film? As a historical hat rack to hang some of its themes on and, interestingly, as a tool of seduction.

There’s Something About Mary

The characters in this film are richly drawn, but the two main female characters share a specific kind of cliched personality. Clementine (Kate Winslet) and Mary (Kirsten Dunst) verge on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) trope. The writer who coined the term, Nathan Rabin of the AV Club, wishes we would retire it, but it does have its uses. MPDGs are quirky female characters whose presence in a film serves only to nurture a male characters epiphanies and story arc.

We do get depth from Clementine, and she’s just as important to the story as Joel (Jim Carrey). Clem tells Joel about her childhood feeling like an ugly girl, her desire to have children, and her innermost desires. Some have even called her an anti-MPDG, citing her own words in the film as proof:

Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.

But Mary is a much flatter character than Clementine, and exhibits plenty of MPDG quirks: dancing around in her underwear, exhibiting a school-girlish infatuation with her boss, and a penchant for toting around a copy of Bartlett’s Quotations. She mistakenly refers to Alexander Pope as “Pope Alexander,” then giggles about her error. It’s pretty eyeroll-inducing.

Though Eternal Sunshine is mainly about the relationship between Joel and Clementine, it’s the relationship between Mary and Howard that has the most direct link to the poem that gives the film its name. Like Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” Mary is a young woman in love with a mentor figure more than twenty years older than her. But unlike Eloisa, and quite unlike proto-feminist Héloïse d’Argenteuil, Mary is completely under the spell of her teacher, a manic pixie nightmare chick trapped in a loop she’s not aware of.

Even before we learn about what’s happened to Mary and Howard in the past, it’s clear that Mary is into Howard. She’s wowed by his scientific knowledge and his work in memory revision, but that admiration for the work of his mind has clearly transformed into a full-blown crush. We watch as she tries to impress him by reciting a portion of Pope’s poem in this scene.

What’s touching in retrospect is that Mary is reading out a poem about the power of forgetting when she herself is unaware of how much her own forgetting has harmed her. She’s trying to seduce a man she’s forgotten that she’s already seduced by reciting a poem about forgetting. Oof!

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things

“Eloisa to Abelard” is an old poem based on an even older story, so let’s look at it line by line to better understand what Pope (as Eloisa) is saying in the stanza Mary recites part of in the movie.

I’ve included my own plainspoken echo of the sentiments of each line below in italics. One vocab note: A “vestal” was a woman who was purposely chaste.

Here we go:

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!

Wouldn’t it be nice to be removed from the world of sexual and romantic relationships?

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

What if I had no impact on the world?

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

That forgetful state of being would be like paradise.

Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;

If I desired nothing, I would have everything.

Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;

Balance would make me happy.

“Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;”

If I could forget my pain, I could sleep easy.

Desires compos’d, affections ever ev’n,

I wish I could love less intensely.

Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav’n.

If emotional extremes did not exist, I could be happy.

Grace shines around her with serenest beams,

A woman less tortured by lost love would be in a state of grace

And whisp’ring angels prompt her golden dreams.

I would have sweet dreams if I could forget him.

For her th’ unfading rose of Eden blooms,

That kind of woman would be as sinless as Eve in the garden.

And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,

Things would even smell better if I could forget.

For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring,

Only a woman who is a clean slate can be marriageable

For her white virgins hymeneals sing,

I would be supported in my endeavor of new love, but not in my current lamentations.

To sounds of heav’nly harps she dies away,

I could go to my eternal rest if I were blameless and wiped clean.

And melts in visions of eternal day.

Forgetting my pain would free me to live in perpetual happiness.

Interesting, right? Later in the poem, Eloisa expresses her desire to be exorcised of Abelard’s influence more directly. In other words, she would erase him if she could:

Ah, come not, write not, think not once of me,
Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee.
Thy oaths I quit, thy memory resign;
Forget, renounce me, hate whate’er was mine.
Fair eyes, and tempting looks (which yet I view!)
Long lov’d, ador’d ideas, all adieu!

Pope’s poem comes to the conclusion that it’s impossible to erase someone you’ve loved from your life and that suffering is just part of the deal. We can dream about how pure and holy we’d feel if we were able to shed our pain through the erasure of total forgetfulness.

Kaufman and Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine takes this a step further, and argues that even if it were possible to erase someone you’ve loved from your life, it would be inadvisable and futile. Our suffering, they might argue, is at least ours. Whether it has value or not, it’s ours, and it defines us in ways large and small.

If Eloisa’s wish for “affections ever ev’n” could come true for all lovers, things might be less painful. But they’d also be a lot less interesting. It reminds me a bit of The Good Place and its humorous and insightful commentary on how boring paradise would actually be.

Pope’s Eloisa seems to understand that there can be redemptive and instructive qualities to suffering by requesting that her sad tale be told to others in the future. And we get the sense in this film that once characters are able to stop erasing each other and take ownership of their stories, they at least have a fighting chance at living the lives they wish to live.

P.S.

• Emily Van Duyne wrote marvelously about a weird recent episode of Dickinson in which Emily and Lavinia time travel to the 1950s and meet Sylvia Plath.

• I’ve been meaning to post/fangirl about this photo for almost a month now. In related news, Gorman’s full-length debut was just released this week.

• Jane Fonda is set to participate in a poetry reading in support of Uni(verse), “the world’s first interactive poetry platform for the classroom and youth community,” created by LA-based education nonprofit Get Lit.