Poetry has been a consistent, and often humorous, element in the films of Jim Jarmusch. Think of Down by Law (1986), in which Roberto Benigni is infatuated with the poetry of Robert Frost and asks, with his thick Italian accent, “You like-a Bob Frost?” Or Dead Man (1995), in which Johnny Depp’s character is inexplicably named William Blake. Or Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), in which John Hurt somehow convincingly plays Christopher Marlowe as a vampire who has been alive for hundreds of years. But Jarmusch’s love of poetry comes to the fore in his latest film Paterson (2016), set in the New Jersey city of literary fame—the city of Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams (who of course features prominently in the film).
Paterson is pro forma Jarmusch in that almost nothing happens in the film. In place of a plot there is a diurnal filmic sequence that is repeated with minor variations: Paterson (Adam Driver, we’re never given a first name), a bus driver who writes poems, wakes up around 6:00 a.m., looks at his watch, kisses his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), has Cheerios for breakfast, walks to work, writes poems for a while before his shift begins, talks briefly with Donny (Rizwan Manji) who is his shift leader (or something like that), drives his public transport bus, takes a lunch break during which he writes more poetry, walks home, greets Laura—who is always engaged in some new artistic project—has dinner with her, walks their English bulldog Marvin (the winsome Nellie), stops in the local bar for a beer, goes home and goes to bed. This sequence is repeated for a full week, Monday through Sunday, with little development. It is emphatically quotidian, which is where Jarmusch started with his great early films Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984).
As an artist of the quotidian, Jarmusch’s technique is minimalist; it reminds me of the music of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, the smallest of alterations in pattern resonating louder and louder over time and through repetition. His films are, in this sense, anti-filmic—or at least anti-Hollywood—eschewing narrative and the eye candy of constant action and special effects.
Another less commented upon aspect of Jarmusch’s postmodernism is his self-conscious play with genre. He’s been quietly ticking off the boxes of the major American film genres, but always twisting or subverting them: Down by Law is a jailbreak film, Dead Man a western, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) a gangster/samurai movie, Broken Flowers (2005) a mystery/road trip film, The Limits of Control (2009) a spy thriller/action film (with absolutely no action), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) a vampire/stoner film. Paterson is no exception; it’s Jarmusch’s romantic comedy. It’s a story of the love of Paterson and Laura (the Petrarchan reference too obviously spelled out in the film itself); but it’s also about Jarmusch’s own love of poetry.
I was surprised on learning at the end of the film that the poems—uninspired plums-in-the-icebox-style Williams stuff—were written by a professional poet, Ron Padgett. I was grimacing throughout the film each time a poem was read, both because of the poetry itself, which I assumed must have been written by Jarmusch—or perhaps even Adam Driver—and also at the Hallmark-card-kitschy way in which the poems were presented on the screen. This, I thought with a pang, is exactly the kind of innocuous bullshit that people think that poetry is.
A friend justly pointed out the problematic class assumptions lurking beneath the poems, which are either sappy love poems or poems about objects directly in front of Paterson. No doubt Jarmusch and Padgett were going for Williams, but this is denatured Williams: “The Red Wheelbarrow,” for example, now mostly encountered in isolation in anthologies or the classroom, was incorporated into Spring and All, a work at least as formally innovative as The Waste Land. And “This Is Just to Say” was radical in a Duchampian ready-made fashion. Not so, the boring object poems in Paterson. No doubt unintended, the effect of the poems in the film is to suggest that this lowly bus driver is completely incapable of ideas or extended thought or reflection, despite shots meant to convey thought and reflection. Williams’s dictum “no ideas but in things,” is transformed here into: “No ideas. Things.”
The love story has its own troublesome aspects, with Paterson lovingly indulging in his stay-at-home wife’s dilettantish arts and crafts activities and dreams of fame and success, while he labors away at work and his poems. When Laura’s dog Marvin (spoiler alert—kind of) eats Paterson’s notebook that contains all of his poems, handwritten naturally, it feels too much like the old tale of the wife thwarting the great work of male genius.
The best parts of Paterson are the scenes in which Paterson is driving his bus route through the city, the conversations between passengers that he overhears, the unadorned poetry of daily life that emerges through the liminal space of transit. This is what Jarmusch shares with Williams: the rootedness of his films in a particular place. Each of his films is a kind of paean to a place and its unique life, colors, textures, and rhythms. It’s usually a city—New York (Permanent Vacation), New Orleans (Down by Law), Memphis (Mystery Train), Madrid (The Limits of Control), Detroit (Only Lovers Left Alive)—but sometimes a particular landscape—the wild west of Arizona (Dead Man) or upstate New York (Broken Flowers).
Paterson is not one of Jarmusch’s best films. His poetry lies elsewhere, in the painterly eye he brings to composing single frames; in the development of short sequences and their repetitions; in his ability to work within while ultimately transgressing the boundaries of genre; and in his ability to capture the soul of the place where he shoots.
February 2018