ABSTRACT
This chapter explores various ways Indiewood filmmakers have represented musical styles and performance techniques associated traditionally with singer-songwriters as vehicles for revealing emotional interiority. Continuing to examine the productive tension between sincerity and irony developed in Chapter 1, this chapter draws heavily from Lee Konstantinou's concept of post-irony in which authors use reflexive literary techniques to reach toward honesty against the foil of ironic contradiction. The first part of the chapter explores the post-ironic dimensions of singer-songwriter Jon Brion's performance practices and his score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Brion's music is interpreted as a post-ironic soundtrack because it uses markers of indie singer-songwriter styles to highlight the emergence of characters’ expressive sincerity amid reflexive narrative slippages. Analyzing scenes from Eternal Sunshine, Magnolia (1999), and The Life Aquatic (2004), the second half of the chapter examines how the presence of singer-songwriter voices in the soundtracks and sometimes performing bodies on screen can contribute to the confessional aspects of a film's post-ironic narrative.
