The film opens like a Meet Cute. Indeed, it's a film built around Meet Cutes, some not so Cute. A solemn, worried man named Joel (Jim Carrey) takes a train for no reason and at a station encounters Clementine (Kate Winslet), who thinks they've met before. He doesn't think so. She persists. He goes home with her and they sleep together. In fact they have met before and were in love, but it ended badly and they both had the memory erased.
That much is quite clear. It also becomes clear, later, that when the wounded Joel discovered what Clementine did, in revenge he sought to wipe her from his memories. His head is encased in a sort of aluminum football helmet attached to an alarmingly small laptop controlled by a technician named Stan (Mark Ruffalo), who drinks beer with his co-worker Mary (Kirsten Dunst). They're jumping on his bed in their underwear when Joel's mind goes "off the map."
Terrified, Stan calls in the boss, Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), who is alarmed, as well he might be. Inside the helmet, Joel struggles desperately to resist the loss of his memories of Clementine. He has literally changed his mind about changing his mind. Kaufman by now has jumped the rails and tumbled us into a labyrinth of time and reality. We see Joel and Clementine at various times before both erasures, after hers, and during his--when he even tries to hide his memories by disguising them both as childhood playmates.
Some viewers have been confused by the film's movement through chronology and locations, but I think the paradoxes are explained if we realize that everything is happening in only one place, Joel's mind. The disconnects are explained by his fragmented memories of when that they were together before, during and after the erasure. The train station sequence at the beginning is closer to the end of the movie's timeline.
Not that we're required to piece it all together. Gondry and Kaufman use qualities of the cinema itself to allow it to make emotional sense when it's baffling any other way. We know our minds easily comprehend and accept flashbacks, hallucinations and conflicting realities. Even small children seeing a flashback for the first time understand what's being conveyed. As impossible events occur, we understand they're subjective--generated in the minds of the beholders. That explains the crumbling beach house in "Eternal Sunshine" and the constantly burning home in "Synecdoche." We know at the time they aren't "real," and afterwards we're missing the point if we ask for an "explanation." These films are made with insight into how the mind translates information.
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