Pitchfork

If you haven't yet, go see this (great) film. In a paragraph or two, I may spoil the hell out of it.

Given its subject matter, Michel Gondry's new film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has a particularly visual agenda, which makes great use of the medium's most important quality: its ability to collapse the distinction between linear and synchronic plot development. Charlie Kaufman has essentially written a film's film, which is fine-- wonderful, in fact-- but what storytelling role does Eternal Sunshine leave, then, for its soundtrack?

The answer here is not much of one. Jon Brion has written a perfectly ambient score: It's undistracting, yet contains interesting sounds and ideas for those who choose to be distracted by it. But with this balance comes a powerful dependence on Eternal Sunshine's visual elements. The value of listening to Brion's score by itself-- with the exception of his thematically tongue-in-cheek "Strings That Tie to You"-- is situated in the potency of its corresponding visual nostalgia. This seems to be the logical fate of most film scores, but in the case of Eternal Sunshine, Brion's insistence on certain themes popping in and out of his textures seems particularly appropriate, as the soundtrack's fluid matrix performatizes the cinematography's mind/body collapse: In the film, Brion's organi-synthgaze postlude "Phone Calls" plays after Joel decides not to try and save his first memory of Clementine, but just to enjoy it. Here, Brion's score meets Eternal Sunshine's oculophilia halfway, and fittingly comprises one of the film's most potent scenes.

By now I trust you've seen the trailers for Eternal Sunshine, and yes, the song that backs it (Electric Light Orchestra's "Mr. Blue Sky") is present here, despite not finding time in the film itself. The Polyphonic Spree also contribute two heavy doses of equally sugary pop ("Light and Day" and "It's the Sun"), while Anaheim garage trio The Willowz offer two shameless, anonymous, but ultimately tolerable White Stripes rip-offs. Also present is Lata Mangeshkar's Indian spook "Wada Na Tod", which plays from the kitchen radio in Clementine's apartment in a moment of comic self-indictment: Clementine works at Barnes & Noble, which these days seems to pride itself on its peddling of "world" music releases. The song title means "Don't break your promise," and subtly hints at Clementine's final request of Joel-- that he meet her again.

And then there's the Beck track, a cover of The Korgis' "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime". Scott Plagenhoef panned this track in a recent We Are The World review, but I think Beck did a really fine job reworking the original, and here's why: The song appears at three critical junctures in Eternal Sunshine when Joel feels trapped by the bitterly ironic circumstances of his memory erasure. Beck's cover logically cannot encompass "love's multiple dimensions" in the same way as the original version, as it would make for an odd juxtaposition: From Joel's perspective, love has only one side, its unrequitedness and devastation. In these moments, love is hardly "a journey always worth taking."

Fittingly, Beck revoices all the chords to be decidedly less bright and colorful, and with this move, he changes the tone of the song's repetitive lyrics from their originally bittersweet positivity to a perfectly contradictory melancholy. When Beck sings, "Change your heart," we know very well that Joel does not have the power to change his own. This is the song's beautiful ironic tension, which is used to fantastic effect in the movie's final scene: Joel and Clementine's mutual emotional attraction ultimately gives way to reason. It's triumph of reason over human emotion, summed up perfectly by their laughter-- Gondry's final nod to Nietzsche, who said (roughly) that laughter signifies the death of an emotion. Beck's song starts here again: Joel and Clementine have finally learned, and what they've learned comprises the film's disarmingly icy pessimism.