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Joel's trapped in a nightmare, but he got there by following a dream, a dream that's both tenderly hopeful and profoundly American: the second chance, the clean slate, the shot at redemption. There's another reason amnesia movies are everywhere: America is the land of amnesia, a frictionless meritocracy where anybody can start over at any time and work his way to the top, and every baseball team can show up on opening day with an undefeated record. It's not a mental problem; it's a national tradition. Compared with other nations, America itself is an amnesia patient, a country with only a fairly recent history to speak of, fabricated out of whole cloth a mere 200 years and change ago by a bunch of people who figured they'd start afresh on a brand-new, spotless continent. Maybe that's why we think we can go overseas and build brand-new nations from scratch--hey, that's how we did it, right? Wipe the slate clean and reprogram the patient? But as Joel discovers in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it's not quite that simple: however much you wipe and wipe that slate--out, damned spot!--something, some mysterious, unerasable palimpsest, remains behind.
It would be tempting to end here with the historian George Santayana--"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"--but I think the comedian Steven Wright said it better: "Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before."