Image courtesy Focus Features
The first time I saw Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind it was 2004. I was 15. I watched it a second time, 15 years after it came out, on my 30th birthday. It was a perfect. Finally 30, I wanted to wallow in its whimsy and recent-past-nostalgia, its palpable alienation, its ephemeral love, its fractured memory (we are grown up, already?). An Instagram post of Clementine in blue hair (caption- Life to The Fullest! #aesthetic #katewinsletshairineternal) reminded me to watch the film again. I tumbled through pages and pages of captioned, enhanced, multiplied pictures of Winslet’s Clementine, in a wormhole of her bright hair colors.
I realized I remembered very little of the film’s details. Just its impressions. Beck, old Hindi songs, LIRR trains. Clementine’s beauty. She was so beautiful. Kate Winslet’s hair, blue and green and red and orange. Others have been drawn to analyzing the importance of Clementine’s hair in this now classic indie film, the meanings of her green or blue, and yet I was drawn to the shifting primacy of these colors as a whole.
If you have seen the film, can you remember the scene when Joel and Clementine are running through time, attempting to salvage Clementine in Joel’s memories? Clementine hides in Joel’s childhood memory, and becomes his mother. Joel is a little boy again under the kitchen table. She stands in her high white boots, her hair so red, bright, like Ronald McDonald grew his hair out into a 1960s sweep, waves of silky red brilliance. Like that red when she sits in the woods with Joel, in two pigtails, army pants on, looking like a grunge dream. She is #aesthetic. That red reminded me of autumn, a collection of leaves had coalesced upon her head. A red of savage vulnerability. Oh my darling/ oh my darling/ oh my darling Clementine!
I definitely had a crush on Kate Winslet/Clementine. Her hair was part of that, probably for all of us. I was entranced by its dimensions. She looked like a person multiplied across parallel universes, infinite. Clementine’s hair is her self-expression, her magical power, her pain and desire for escape. She follows her own compass, a child of the universe.
What did she aim for in her hair transformations, blue to red to orange desire? Clementine was this punk princess, a trapeze artist across time, transformed with every dye job. Was it her disguise? Was she starting over, and over, and over? Was she living in the moment, living life to the fullest? I’d like to live my life to the fullest, and I saw that immediacy in her hair.
I thought of that still of Clementine’s blue hair, on Instagram, or Tumblr, and then wondered, how does this film fit into our current world, a film about two lovers who use new technology to erase each other from their minds after they break up? There is a way social media effects our memory consolidation, the evidence and residues we collect of others, our recordings. It makes erasure either impossible or much easier. There is a softness and three-dimensionality to memories that is either flattened out in the internet or expanded further, out of time, into four dimensions, the connections across past and present much easier and more dizzying.
Clementine is someone etched into our brains, a pain we are too eager to rid ourselves of. I not only wanted to be Clementine, to have her hair, but to be with someone like her in the future, queer and whimsical as I was. At 30 years old, I did, finally, try the deluded experiment of love, and it was just as wild as Eternal Sunshine made it out to be, just as brilliant and mind bending and loving.
The character of Clementine in Eternal Sunshine is green and orange, specific and insecure, unapologetic. I have never been unapologetic. Not concerned with niceness, from herself or others. I love that. I am writing that down, at age almost 30, to be less concerned with being so fucking nice. To one day dye my hair a primary color. But I can’t really do that, I am black, my hair would not take it well, the illusion does not translate. I wonder what age Winslet was when making this film. Did Winslet like dying her hair all those different shades? Did she feel like a science experiment, or a cooler version of herself on holiday from the rules of the respectable world? (I later discover she did not dye her hair, but rather wore a series of sophisticated wigs).
Kate Winslet’s performance is authentic, doe-eyed, humming, and her Clementine effuses, brims over with energy and vulnerability. I forgive her for everything, at once, as I want to forgive myself for everything, all the life that I have lived and not lived in my twenties, too tame and ashamed. She is a vulnerable multi-colored radical we all can look up to.
Zebib K. A. is a writer, psychiatrist, and movie lover living in NYC. She comes from a black/immigrant background, identifies as queer, and explores these identities in her writing.
She can be found at medium.com/@pegasusunder and on instagram @pegasusunder.