“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d”

― Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

I don't know if postponement of pleasure is psychologically healthy or not. Freudians may be in a better position to tell whether such postponement increases or diminishes the kind of pleasure being sought, or whether this practice enhances self control or is simply another form of procrastination.
The piece of pleasure under focus here is this 2004 film which I immediately felt was a jewel, a chocolat fondant cake which should not be eaten casually in response to a mundane instinct of hunger. The consumer age we live in has sadly conditioned our interaction with any product we can buy. The array of emotions which advertising utilizes to emphasize the pleasure of consuming a product are necessarily fake if not gross, and this lack of authenticity transpires to the arts, but again, there are always exceptions.
So to go back to postponement of pleasure, I had no clue as to when I should watch this film. I had assurance from the conviction that Jim Carrey is an incredibly multi-faceted artist. His persona can be as superficially clownish in Ace Ventura as tragically pitiful in The Truman Show:

The script of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is not less emotionally intelligent than the performances of Jim Carrey. In the teaching profession, the term 'rapport' holds a central position in classroom interaction and in the resultant learning. Call me an anti-rationalist but I still believe only few are born teachers; likewise, few actors can build rapport with an audience as early as the first frames of a film.

If you are keen on the study of genre in literature or any of the liberal arts, you might have a solid conviction that mixing up genres is a risky business. This film nonetheless mixes science fiction, romance and comedy without running the risk of ruining the taste of the story. Eternal Sunshine thus finds a special niche of its own and succeeds in building an illusion of life in its comprehensiveness, contradictions and overwhelmingness.

The film is about forgetting and how necessary and controllable it is. Modern psychology says that forgetting is natural and that as we grow older, our memory become selective. The main thrust of Eternal Sunshine is how controllable that selection is. Can we trust the vital task of erasing painful memories to the highly unpredictable sub-conscious? Are memories definitely erased or only momentarily subdued? And then, to borrow teaching jargon, can learning to understand life happen if mistakes go unaware of or coerced so as not to happen at all?

I think that even Alexander Pope believed in the impossibility of a "spotless mind". This is merely a hyperbole pinched between desire and frustration. We have to walk the minefield of depression and evade self-flagellation as much as possible. A lot of people enjoy lamenting over spilled milk and that's because mourning one's past kills the need for action and provides further excuses for procrastination. I think we had enough of Hamlet: