What if you could erase the person who hurt you the most? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind imagines a small clinic that lifts painful memories out of your past and leaves the rest of you standing. But as Joel watches his memories of Clementine disappear, he changes his mind and fights to keep her. The pain we want to escape is tangled up with the love we were made to seek, and forgetting our mistakes only sets us up to repeat them.

In this episode of Mythic Mind Movies, Dr. Andrew Snyder, Kit, and David discuss Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s film as a descent into the underworld of the mind. Andrew reads Joel as an introspective Orpheus who loses Clementine from his conscious memory but keeps something deeper: the endurance and hope to say, “I choose you, no matter what.”

The conversation also explores the clinicians who sell an easy fix while their own lives are in shambles; whether the ending is futile or hopeful; why “can I do better?” is the wrong question to ask about love, with help from one of Tolkien’s letters and Lewis’s The Great Divorce; Patrick’s counterfeit romance built from stolen memories; and why, in an age of digital blocking and transhumanist promises, we have to affirm the real, including the parts of our past we would rather forget. As Andrew puts it, “The question is not, can I do better? The question is, can I be better to the commitments that I’ve already made?”