Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind/The Self

(Eric."Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." 22 October, 2008. Online image. Yahoo Creative Commons. 21 February, 2010.)

The self can be such a fluid creature that many different ideas and opinions can be drawn up about this supposed single entity. How can a person of preferred mental health seem to have differing thoughts? Why do we question ourselves before our thoughts have chance to be proven wrong? Some like Sigmund Freud explain it by arguing in favor of different levels of the self within one person.
One idea cultivated by Mr. Freud was that the self is in three different pieces and each has a different function. This model being called the “Iceberg Theory” claims that the self comes in a faze of three different parts, each acting together and separately. The uppers most part would be the tip of the iceberg or identity. The identity of a person tends to be the part of a being that is known to others because of basic wants, ideals, and actions.
The second part would be called the middle of the iceberg or the ego. The ego would be the driving reasons behind why a person would commit to the actions, beliefs, and wants that they have. The bottom part of the iceberg in Sigmund’s theory would be the super ego, or the unconscious.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind questions the importance of an event in a person’s life, both good and bad. In the film the main character, Joel, is laden with the grief of his past relationship with had lasted a good deal of time but ended rather painfully. He later learns that the main female character, Clementine, had a medical procedure done to cause her to forget everything that related to Joel as well as Joel himself. Joel then deems that he wants the operation done as well to rid himself of his painful memories.
As Joel has his memories erased, he finds that forgetting all about his time with Clementine is not what he wants. The main conflict then becomes Joel against the forces driving his memories of Clementine away after he battles with himself, coming to the revelation that he does not want to forget. The most important scenes I believe of the movie are the scenes’ showing his realization that forgetting is not the answer. One such scene is when he is under bed covers with Clementine, this being one of his favorite memories as he calls out to the people working on him to let him “keep this memory”.
Although the title Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind suggests that one could be happy if all bad memories were taken away, the story it tells proves this as false. The experiences a person deals with throughout their live makes the self that they are. By taking away part of the one’s memory, one’s self is also being taken away.
As to order and chaos, the office that allows for the treatment is offering order to disturbed and unset minds. The order it offers however also gives a great deal of chaos to provide its manufactured order of the mind. The chaos of the peoples own minds can thus be thought of as a sort of natural order in which the introduction of memory loss is unnatural and chaotic.