Haunting melodies 

--"A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" 

The idea of a "haunting melody" is not particular to film. For example, Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" starts with the plea to stop the song. The singer of this song must imagine s/he is attempting to ward off the song's fatal powers, but will end up by giving over to the song's celebration of the interminable.  With the beguine, something begins again, something that has never ended but is perhaps forgotten when the words "foxtrot," "rhumba," and "lindy hop" are spoken.  But the beguine's uncanny resemblance to a beginning reminds one of five and dime eternal returns and the spinning obsessions of phonographic memory.

Film extends the effect of this genre of song. Haunting, acousmetric qualities of little songs are exploited to encourage the activation of memory, many times visualized in a flashback. But the flashback only appears when the song needs explanation. When the flashback is not present, but the song is, it as if something remains to be seen or remembered. As in the logic of the acousmetric, without synchronization with the flashback-image there is a niggling sense of something amiss. However, these songs don't gesture to an omnipotent being. Rather, songs without flashback introduce the relative impotence of subjective fantasy that the song activates.