Jim Jarmusch's Poetry of Post-Modernity

In a review of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984), New York Times critic, Vincent Canby, commented with ironic admiration that it was “the best 'European film' made about America.” Indeed, the Ohio-born director has a particular flair for bringing a foreigner's eye to bear on American culture, and once in an interview, even characterized himself as a "foreigner in his own country" - a filmmaker primarily interested in marginal figures and fellow outsiders.

It won't surprise fans of the director that his formative years were spent at the Cinémathèque Française, watching programs compiled by its founder, Henri Langlois. Throughout his career, the more meditative leisurely-paced aesthetic he encountered in those films has continued to color and shape the lens through which he dissects American culture. In Jarmusch's work, it is the presence of the foreigner or outsider that catalyzes a re-examination of the seemingly familiar. In a Kristevan reformulation of Freud’s uncanny, he reveals the estrangement wrought by America’s post-modern condition. One of indie cinema’s most successful pioneers, he has relied on inspiration from outside Hollywood to produce some of the most quietly revelatory films on American society as the epitome of post-modernity – as a dead landscape of sameness and simulation, mired in myth, and containing no more than the ghosts of its bygone greatness.

Mystery Train (1989) is Jarmusch’s most deliberate rendering of American post-modernity. An intertexual, color-infused pastiche of genres that blurs high and low artistic forms, it is essentially a triptych of stories on American culture, as filtered through the foreigner. One notes, in particular, its attention to (and deconstruction of) sameness from an outsider’s perspective. In the first segment, which follows the Japanese tourists, we see how Jun, unimpressed by the “exotic legend” of Memphis, remarks with a bored sigh that it looks a lot like Yokohama. In another comical moment, we see Mitsuko insist on Elvis’s "uncanny resemblance" to a smorgasbord of cultural icons and mythical figures: Madonna, Buddha, Christ, etc. Jarmusch, again, makes the ironic point that after awhile American culture all starts to "feel the same" - its empire of signs having grown so ubiquitous, such signs now seem emptied of any specificity or meaning at all.

Another one of the film's distinctly post-modern qualities is the dematerialization of Memphis's history, which haunts the oneiric hyper-reality of the screen. The pervasive presence of Elvis, the sounds of him and Roy Orbison on the radio, the incessant coming and going of the train, the sound of the gunshot, the derelict buildings, and the camera's tracking along the city's crumbling brick walls – these are, on the one hand, concrete cultural referents: Elvis mania, Sun Studio, the golden era of rock n’ roll, Martin Luther King’s assassination, and the urban decay in the subsequent decades. On the other hand, they merely seem to float like reiterated signs within a dream world that has become entirely alienated from the singularity of the city's past.

These chains of aural and visual details also bring about a post-modern disintegration of the meta-récit, or the unified vision of history as determined by society’s collective narratives and myths. Jarmusch takes a classical format – the 3-act play structure – then repeats motifs across each episode so that the viewer must constantly reconfigure the film’s spatial and temporal dimensions. It’s almost as if he/she were arranging the segments of the film like a puzzle, unable to fully make sense of it until he/she has all the pieces. The characters’ paths never cross directly, yet they are still connected within a web of sounds, images, and apparitions that allow us to situate them vis-à-vis each other at various moments and to understand how each character experienced the same mythic city in a markedly different and uniquely strange way. As the film unfolds, we see how sameness and repetition paradoxically give way to nuance and particularity – as signs and symbols take on a particular resonance for each character that interprets them.

Even as Jarmusch’s fragmented narrative constitutes a reaction to modernism, the film itself straddles modernist and post-modernist aesthetics. Much like the rest of Jarmusch’s oeuvre, Mystery Train is a humorously jarring combination of modernist formal austerity (a kind of deadpan, anti-dramatic poetry) and a peculiar infusion of pop culture and the influences of punk, hip-hop, and new wave music. It exhibits hyper-attention to form; like Warhol’s experimental films, it revolves around dead time and empty spaces. Yet, at the heart of its meditation are people within these significant, yet emptied out spheres, who are treated as either "alien" or "insignificant" to the cultural landscape. In this sense, Jarmusch is considered cinema’s equivalent of James Agee and Walker Evans, embarking on an “inquiry into the unimagined existence” of those at the margins, in the process re-examining and extending the boundaries of the American imaginary.

This makes him a rare auteur figure in the world of indie cinema. He is an artist with a recognizably distinct style – the typical definition of an auteur. Yet filtered through his personal visions are persistent universal questions of culture and voice in American society and how they can reclaim their uniqueness within a largely homogenized post-modern context. Mystery Train begins and ends with the same song, but at the end, it is not “the King” singing it but Junior Parker, who wrote and recorded the original version of the song.