As the story progresses, this claim shows all too true. The first scene shows Joel skipping work, he says that he does not understand why he does this, and further that he is not an impulsive person. The film plays with the ideas of of memory, society, and perception, questioning the balance of association’s effects on a character, and a character’s effect on the memories they form.
Eternal Sunshine offers an intricate mix of psychological and philosophical subjects that help underscore the importance and influence of association. The film shows associations, bridges by which memories are interconnected, still persist even after the deletion of the memories to which they are tied.
The word, “lacuna” itself means gap or emptiness which, as the story reveals, is exactly what the service provides. Both main characters, Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski, opt to have this procedure following a painful breakup- each therein erasing the memory of the other. Lacuna is a company in Michel Gondry’s film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which offers a procedure to have specific events removed from one’s memory. The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Memory and Association Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Directed by Michel Gondry