The other day I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the first time. This icon of proto-hipster thousands culture had eluded me until now, and having finally seen it, I got what the buzz used to be about when I was entering college. It is a gorgeous movie that uses technically impressive structure and visuals to create something extraordinarily human.
I watched the movie with my friend Annie Dailey, a visual designer by trade, who just a few minutes into the movie posited a theory about Clementine's hair that not only held throughout the rest of the movie, but actually became a critical tool in watching it: Clementine's hair color is a timeline.
Clementine has four colors of hair throughout the movie: red, orange, green, and blue. When they first meet on the train (spoiler alert!) which we soon deduce is actually them meeting post-memory erasure, Clem's hair is blue. When Joel starts reliving the early days of their relationship, she has fiery red hair in those memories.
Annie, who is an amazing movie watcher because she picks up stuff like this all the time, pointed out that, you know those are the two ends of the color spectrum. ROYGBIV. The idea blew my mind, but it made sense: the movie features such a complicated braiding of time that it would be sensible of Gondry to give us a clue as to when in the relationship each memory took place.
Annie and I got pumped up by this idea — which I could find no support for on the internet, hence this blog post — and resolved that the key would be whether we ever saw Clementine with something like yellow or green hair. Because for most of the film, she's either red (early, passionate, happy memories) or orange (later in the relationship, when the passion starts to die down). In the present-day intercut scenes with Elijah Wood, she has blue hair, confirming that these most-recent interactions sit on the terminal, "BIV" section of the rainbow. All we needed was some yellow or, more probably, green to wrap the theory up.
When the green hair finally showed up, nearly at the end of the movie, my lord, we both got up and cheered. It's the scene where Joel and Clem sit on the wooden steps leading to the beach, reminiscing about the day they met. And knowing that the green hair indicated that the memory took place in the third, final phase of their relationship adds a ton of depth.
Most of the scene is a reenactment of their meeting, with a little bit of annotation spoken by the two characters. Without the hair color cue, it's not clear what exactly we're watching. Throughout the movie, Clem is a partner in helping Joel deal with her own erasure, and offers commentary on the memories throughout. So in this beach scene, we don't really have any reason to see any deeper into the fact that the two ex-lovers sit there, commenting on the day they met. With the hair cue, we immediately know what we're watching: two people in the end days of their relationship timeline, doing that thing where you sit next to one another and try to summon the memory of when you were in love. Notice how distant they are from each other despite the fondness with which they speak. We're not just watching Joel's memory; we're watching a memory of when he sat with Clem, trying to conjure up a memory. Ultimately, they break up, sending her into her post-relationship Blue hair.
I searched online a little bit after this movie, assuming someone else had posted this ROYGBIV-hair-timeline theory, but I couldn't find anything. Eternal credit to Annie and her amazing film-watching skills for picking this clue out the depths of her design-addled brain.
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