By classification, drifters are a part of a group. We like to group things together, the rich with the rich, the mammals with the mammals, and the drifters with the drifters. Jim Jarmusch portrays drifters, not lonely people. People who share only an adjective. Jarmusch shares at least a haircut with half of his protagonists, people who need other people, drifting for appearance, boredom, or the unwillingness to break their stubborn ways. Lonely people are segregated, they are alone because they are. They don’t choose to be, it isn’t a conscious decision. Drifters can be lonely at times, but they will always need a healthy populous to skirt around in order to survive. The Jarmusch cool, lonesome hero is a myth. They’re needy, they’re cultured, they’re relatable.
But it’s all subjective isn’t it? Of course, I don’t know why the fuck people classify things in the first place. It gives them something to do, me as well. Thanks.
Now, we’re going to do this film-by-film, as my memory works on numbers, not names and I need a shitload of tabs open to correct characters’ names. Full disclosure.
Permanent Vacation-Perhaps the easiest. Built on a short Jarmusch did at NYU, the film evolves into a feature made up of what is basically a bunch of shorts. A format that Jarmusch uses comfortably over his career, and a main piece of evidence against the cool, lonesome hero image. Allie wanders around the city trying to connect with other drifters. A veteran hiding out from imagined gunfire, a sax player attempting to collect tips while playing in an empty street in the middle of the night. The whole thing is about human connection outside of normal society. A leaving, breathing, connected world. Not the standard of course, but active and similarly structured. Allie is a man religiously seeking attention. A good first parody of lonesomeness. He’s also the first in a thread of Jarmusch characters with approximately the same hair, sharing it with Jarmusch and Elvis.
Stranger than Paradise-We have Willie, the ’suave’ one, and Eddie, the wannabe one, neither of which qualifies as lonesome, or is portrayed at lonesome. A picture where Jarmusch steps outside of his comfort zone a bit and nails it. Sure Willie denies Eva respect initially, but she comes around to earn it and I could bullshit on some kind of theory tying in with mine, but really the end result is that Willie is clueless. It is why he does what he does. He looks out for himself and that tries to briefly cover for his mistakes, before falling right back into them. Eva is inanimate as far as he’s concerned. And Eddie, he’s a schmuck who does what Willie does making him clueless by association.
Down by Law-The hair-apparent and a frequent collaborator, Tom Waits puts in his first Jarmusch appearance. Rugged, busted and on the outs of society. He, as Zack, and John Lurie, as Jack, refuse each other as friends upon their mutual imprisonment until the imprisonment bonds them. Throw in a foreigner who outsmarts most Jarmusch characters and actually breaks his habits (well, at least within the restraints of screen time) by having the balls to stay with his happiness, his human relationship. The three men break out of prison, working together to escape the swamp outside of prison, and then split at the fork at the end of the road. Why? Answer one is because they’re fucking stubborn and dumb. Answer two is pride, also known as answer one. Zack and Jack are the prominent Jarmusch drifters, feeding on one another to move forward. It’s sweet, it’s pathetic, it’s fear. Lonesome it’s not.
Mystery Train-Jarmusch’s most symbolic and aware film. Jun, Johnny, Jarmusch, and Elvis. The hair, the careful grooming, the image. It’s here in colors. Elvis, he represents sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. Jun, this foreigner to Memphis, the half of a couple who has more trouble adapting to his new home, has taken on this persona without even knowing a thing about Elvis. Johnny, a Brit, is the same. A man who openly criticizes his nickname, which is obviously, “Elvis.” They’ve all taken on this image, without any direct connection to the man. His persona has filtered through the subconscious of society, spread so thinly that people follow it without any clue to its origin. They know it secondhand, a term not familiar to a lonesome person. The film also brings back the ‘short’ format, loosely used here as it is cut into thirds rather than smaller conversations, and wraps up stunningly neatly.
Night on Earth-Full of the early mentioned clueless behavior, the film is neatly divided into five sections. The segmenting done once again, showing Jarmusch’s inability to follow a character though an entire relationship with another as if a point is reached where he no longer knows what to do. Neither do I. The characters, such as Isaach De Bankole’s Ivoirien and Roberto Benigni’s reckless Italian aren’t cool, aren’t witty. They act like ignorant lunatics, resulting in ’accidents’ surely not their fault, a car crash and the death of a clergyman respectively. On the other hand, Mika works his drunk passengers for pity, while neglecting any trouble not of the greatest concern as unworthy. Helmut is literally a fucking clown. The film also contains Jarmusch’s exception, as everything must have one. Corky, a female, a gender with which Jarmusch distances himself and covers nicely because of it, never removes herself from herself. A loner? No. Cool? Arguably so. Clueless? If so, the only casualty is her own person, and she won’t ever know it.
-The first of Jarmusch’s solely culture-based films, this time Native American. Another note of full disclosure and evidence of the far-reaching trickle down effect: After I watched this I questioned its accuracy in the depiction of Native Americans. Thank god, I also had some intelligence trickle down and before checking anything else questioned every other movie’s depictions. Turns out, Jarmusch’s was very accurate. William Blake transforms over the course of the picture from a innocent, quiet, white collar fellow to a gun-toting, face painted, dazed man floating to his grave with a face completely confused. He’s out in the water, helpless, having completely abandoned reality for the person on the WANTED poster, completed engraved and lost in an image. His current, and currently lonely, persona heading downstream by means of tradition.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai-The second of the culture films, Ghost Dog follows, well Ghost Dog, as he gives his entire life to the samurai way. He essentially enslaves himself to an old white gangster who saves him once when he’s a kid, bleeding his way into a debt brought upon by mistaken circumstances per Rashomon. Ghost Dog has no individual character to speak of, he lives by the samurai code and becomes it completely. His will is no longer his own, his triumphs and faults the samurai’s, not Ghost Dog’s. His enslavement gives him a new respect for life, and a new respect for death, his stubbornness causing him dearly in the end and he’s okay with it, okay with bleeding out in a city street as a little girl, open to influence watches on.
Coffee and Cigarettes-The quintessential picture about schmucks taking part in the self-identified practice of the 80’s, sitting down to some coffee and cigarettes. All of them integrated into this lifestyle of when and how to have conversations, how to look, what to do. Jarmusch’s least intimate piece.
Broken Flowers-I’ll give Don Johnston this, he’s the least affected, the most distant of Jarmusch’s leads. He sinks and sulks through his old black book like a guy without a care in the world, wishing his wife had left and he had just been left alone. I believe he only follows Winston out of boredom, and retains that boredom throughout his journeys, melancholy only slipping in at the end for his son. Maybe his dream to offer someone else a life that can go on without distraction. He surely can’t give it to the women currently or previously in his life. And that’s what makes the end so heartbreaking, so emotional, so human. Sorry Don, you’re not lonely. You’re not calm and cool. You’re sad.
The Limits of Control-The limits aren’t those ordinarily defined as so, like The Nude following and tempting the Lone Man, trying to distract him from his assassination mission. The limits are placed by the mission itself stringing the Lone Man around perfectly with matchboxes, foreign language inquisitions, and the ultimate goal. The Lone Man is so individual, so powerful yet the whole movie we are watching him follow someone else’s orders, adhering to a very strict protocol to accomplish something for no reason of his own.
Ranking the Films:
10. Broken Flowers
9. Coffee and Cigarettes
8. Permanent Vacation
7. Down By Law
6. Dead Man
5. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
4. Mystery Train
3. Night on Earth
2. Stranger than Paradise
1. The Limits of Control
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