Jim Jarmusch - The Rock and Roll Poet

Many of the greatest modern American directors had their beginnings in the independent cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s. Among their eclectic, wacky styles stands the figure of Jim Jarmusch, the rock and roll poet. If one imaged his work embodied in human form, it would be harder to think of a figure that better fit it than Jarmusch himself, a skinny man with striking white hair sitting almost unnoticed, nonchalantly chilling in the background of a café with a cigarette in his mouth, reading a book with sunglasses with carefully selected beats playing as the soundtrack, giving off an irresistible aura of cool.

Many of his contemporaries have found a way to merge into Hollywood without completely giving up their unique voices, as exemplified by Tarantino from Resevoir Dogs to Kill Bill, The Coen Brothers from Blood Simple to True Grit, Steven Soderberg from Sex, Drugs, and Videotape to Oceans 11, Richard Linklater from Slacker to School of Rock, Wes Anderson from Bottle Rocket to The Grand Budapest Hotel, or Gus Van Sant from Drugstore Cowboy to Milk, but Jarmusch perhaps more resembles Woody Allen in the way that he has never played ball with Hollywood or made one film that felt bigger than the last one. He has made every film under his own conditions. Though they feature more and more famous faces, they remain as low budget and independent as ever even when descending into genres like cowboys and indians, mobsters and samurai, or zombies and vampires.

Critic Kent Jones said referring to Jarmusch’s work, ‘There's been an overemphasis on the hipness factor – and a lack of emphasis on his incredible attachment to the idea of celebrating poetry and culture. You can complain about the preciousness of a lot of his movies, [but] they are unapologetically standing up for poetry. [His attitude is] 'if you want to call me an elitist, go ahead, I don't care.’

I cannot claim to be an expert on poetry, but it is true that his scenes have a quality that seems to make the everyday mundaness feel more beautiful or meaningful than they normally would. If poetry could be described as something written in a style which takes on deeper artistic meaning given reflection, thought, and analysis, then Jarmusch films poetry with his camera.

The short one shot scenes in Stranger than Paradise capture inconsequential moments that take on a sense of meaning simply through their existence. It goes to show that anything captured on film, for the simple fact of being recorded, takes on a certain gravitas that it would not have had had it not been filmed. The magic of film now makes the mundaness of watching tv alone in your room eternal, and under the right direction, even profound.

In a similar way, the coincidental interconnectedness of Mystery Train adds a level of wonder to each segment. The characters criss cross through pure coincidence and have little to no effect on eachothers lives, yet the meaningless of their encounters seem to make them all the more meaningful in some way. Our ability to watch these strangers occupy the same physical space without knowing each other makes you think about the person sitting next to you and how they got here and where they will go and what they will do later.

This sense of mindless coincidence in the universe is most powerfully felt in Mystery Train, but also features in Night on Earth, and Coffee and Cigarettes which are also broken into shorts. In Night on Earth five taxi drivers drive clients through five cities in the US and Europe, and in Coffee and Cigarettes, multiple people converse, or argue over a cup of coffee while smoking. None of these people are really connected, but the idea of these stories being edited together gives them a feeling of the vastness of the world we live in, and a birds eye view into short segments of strangers lives who do not know each other, or us, as they live out their short unextraordinary stories on screen.

Yet Paterson must be Jarmisch’s most obviously poetic film, featuring one week in the life of a man who works as a bus driver, but spends his free time writing poetry about everyday objects, feelings, or events. Nothing much happens in the film, but that is the point. Jarmusch finds that the deepest poetry is seen in the daily comings and goings of an average man’s life. What seems like nothingness is what actually holds the most important meaning in our lives.

Jarmusch also uses genre filmmaking to evoke powerfully poetic images that are anything but typical Hollywood films. In Dead Man, a Western of sorts, Johnny Depp is guided by a British educated Native American named Nobody who now belongs in neither community. He believes that Depp’s character William Blake is a reincarnation of the English poet who does not remember his past life. The strikingly beautiful black and white landscapes matched with Neil Young's score and Jarmusch’s typical absurd, comedic dialogue make for a surreal, philosophical take on the Western and life and death.

Jarmusch also sunk his teeth into the vampire genre with Only Lovers Left Alive which examens the ups and downs of immortality and how it would permit you to be able to completely absorb everything cultural that one life does not give you the time to read, learn, watch, or listen to. Not only does he have a blast playing with the tropes of the genre, but Jarmusch uses it to comment on what a beautiful experience life is, and how we should take advantage of all the wonderful things humanity has left behind, even if humanity seems to be destroying itself at the same time.

Jarmusch does not only look rock and roll, but his films have Rock and Roll in their genes in a way few films do. Tom Waits and Iggy Pop have appeared in several of his films, and Tom Waits and Neil Young have contributed soundtracks to his films. Then the soundtracks in themselves show such a deep appreciation and love for music that is hard to match. Mystery Train is itself is a dedication to the King and others who made their careers in Graceland. However, on second thought, maybe it is not fair to only call him Rock and Roll. RZA of the Wutang Clan also scored Ghostdog and appears in several of his films.

In fact pegging Jarmusch down in any way shape or form can be difficult. His strangest hybrid must be the character played by Tilda Swinton in The Dead Don’t Die. She is a Scottish mortician who also is a samurai, and in the end turns out to be an alien. Jarmusch projects can be as weird and impossible to describe as they can be simple and uneventful. Ghostdog is probably the best example of a bonkers plot and mixture of styles. It is a film about a black man portrayed by Forrest Whitaker who takes up the code of the samurai to work for a mobster who saved his life and who uses passenger pigeons to communicate. It is such a surreal strange plot that it is outstanding how good it holds together.

As exemplified by Ghostdog, Jarmusch also should be lauded for his diverse casts. Long before it became politically correct to cast more minority actors, Jarmusch was doing it naturally in almost all of his films. His films are a testament to the diverse makeup of America, and his black, latino, and Native American characters are just as rich and well developed as any of his white ones. Hopefully one day all casts will look more like Jarmusch casts.

Many people compare him to European directors, and he certainly has more in common with French New Wave aesthetics than those of Hollywood, yet it is difficult to think of a director who has better captured lesser filmed American cities like Memphis, Cleveland, and New Orleans. His portrayal of the American countryside in Florida, New York, and Louisiana is also extraordinary. His sense of place gives his films a documentary-like quality. His fascination with everyday people and deadbeats leads him to neighborhoods, houses, and flats where normal Americans live, and the way he captures them with his camera feels truly honest and representative to their settings.

However, speaking about the poetry and the documentary-like quality of his representation of America, I would not want to give off the idea that he is a realist director. He adapts European style film techniques to film characters and plots that have something more in common with the Coens. And while his films are slow and poetic, they are thoroughly entertaining, sometimes violent, and constantly funny.

Much of this humor comes from his interest in foreigners in America, and he has a real talent for writing dialog for actors speaking English as a second language. This is best evidenced by Roberto Begnini in Down by Law, whose ‘I scream you scream, we all scream for ice cream’ scene is a brilliantly stirring moment of comic protest. Similar characters can also be seen in Stranger Than Paradise, Mystery Train, and the great Armin Mueller-Stahl in Night on Earth.

If I had to choose a favorite part of Jarmusch’s oeuvre it would be the New York section of Night on Earth. It is perfectly composed of performances from a diverse cast of outsiders, hilarious dialogue, and a surprising ending and change of tone. Giancarlo Esposito is desperately trying to get a cab, but due to the color of his skin, no one will pick him up. Finally hope arrives in the form of a taxi driver who has recently arrived from East Germany. The only problem is... he can’t drive. In a gut busting turn of events the driver accepts to switch places with his passenger so they can safely arrive to Brooklyn. On the way they bond and we find out that Mueller Stahl is a retired clown who still keeps his little red nose on him. They also pick up Esposito’s firely, fuck shrieking sister in law in the form of Rosie Perez. Mueller Stahl seems to fall in love with her and takes complete enjoyment from their curse laden, insult shouting argument. When he drops them off, or, better said, when they drop themselves off, you feel like you experienced something really special with these strangers who are about to part ways forever. In the end, our German taxi man puts on his clown nose and smiles as he drives off, taking the first wrong turn and losing his way immediately. He quickly realized that without his friends, he is lost in an unknown city and everything feels a lot scarier. He is a foreigner in an unknown, hostile place who will either sink or swim, but, like his passengers, we leave him, never learn what the universe will make of him.