eternal sunshine of the spotless mind is a strange, sad, and beautiful journey through the mind of one man, joel barish, who determines to (and then, fervently, not to) forget his love for a quirky, compelling and often troublesome woman named clementine. an inverted love story by design and yet so much more than this, the story delves into the nature of identity; and how memory and experience--good and bad--shape us as individuals. joel wrestles, briefly, with whether he'd give up his painful memories of clementine---until he realizes too late his naiveté--that the bad experiences are intertwined with the good; that they in fact are as important and necessary as the good and in fact often lead one on a path to things overwhelmingly fulfilling and wonderful. through parallel plot lines the film at the last touches on inevitability---with one disgruntled tell-all employee and an open-ended finale which hints at the very real possibility of a happy ending, in spite of joel and clementine's mutual, inherent and essentially human flaws.