[Niamh.]

Originally Posted by Ammi

...Eternal Sunshine...

Spoiler:

...I also loved it, I don’t know why I’d only watched it once up until now...unlike Memento, I did remember the overall plot but had forgotten some of the details...actually, I’d forgotten about Mary and Howard, maybe because that part of the storyline took up a very small amount of screen time...but it was also such an important part of the plot...anyway, remembering some parts of movies over time and forgetting others is quite interesting as well...how we connect to some things and details more and how some things just pass through our memory stores, it’s all been very interesting....I liked the similarity to Memento in that it was also backwards, Joel’s relationship memories...he just passed fleetingly through the deterioration of their relationship, which became quite toxic and the whole reason why Clementine deleted him and his memories were more for the happy times ...but it showed that although memories could be deleted, connections couldn’t...as with Mary as well, she hadn’t lost that attraction she’d felt to Howard....and ughhhhhh, Howard was such a creep as well, he was responding to Mary’s ‘crush’ again until his wife came...good that Mary exposed the creeps and took away their power...what they did was obviously open to so much trust betrayal and that’s what Howard and Patrick did...I guess that it was essentially a love story but so many layers as well, just loved it.....

Spoiler:

Yeah Howard was a big creep as well, you could tell when Mary played her tape she wasn't fully sure she wanted to have her memory wiped but he pressured her in to it because he's a weak man and couldn't just..not sleep with her. In the real world he could have been sued/had his medical license (If you have a medical licence for memory erasure) taken, what he did was massive abuse of his position and extremely unethical.

I suppose the "moral" of the story is, break up's/grief are horrendous to go through but you have to go through and erasing the memories sounds like a perfect solution but really our memories make us who we are, can we ever advance personally without our experiences- good and bad? I don't think so

You can see with Mary's story for example, she would just continue to make the same mistake again without having learned any lesson without her memory. Howard had his memory, he's just using the "I'm just a weak man who can't be held responsible when a pretty young girl throws herself at me" card bleh