Before apps and swipes, there was the prescient tech romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But author Sloane Crosley asks, is it romantic?
Eternal Sunshine belongs to a specific post-9/11 genre of romance. Like 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love or 2003’s Lost in Translation, there’s a looming sense that the world has gone to pot and we, the audience, are watching two people stuck in the middle, isolated from their collective reality. All romantic stories share some version of this premise—part of finding love is the necessary exclusion of that which you do not love, fueled by a fear of loneliness—but the discrepancy between the hectic worlds of these films and the earnest lives of their central characters is more of a yawning gulf, fostering a desire in viewers to shield these fragile souls from an absurd universe that seeks to tear them apart. What makes Eternal Sunshine so revolutionary is how well it employs technology to address that gulf, to grant its darlings a perverse wish fulfillment. It blends humanity and innovation like no other modern romantic film before it. In fact it’s our most prescient love story, released during the time before apps and swiping, before pixelated little buttons allowed us to “mute” or “block” with ease.
