“The beauty of ideas is that they are like waves in the ocean and they connect with things that came before them, and I think it is very important to embrace things that interest you and influence you, and incorporate them into what you do, as all artists have always done. The ones that say they don’t, are lying. Or are afraid that their work won’t be seen as being original, somehow.”
– Jim Jarmusch
Being away from the major studio / Hollywood system allows Jim Jarmusch to make his films exactly how he wants them to be, which is one of the reasons why they are so distinctive in their style. While promoting Paterson he talked about the main difference between today’s blockbusters and his film, “This is just a quiet story, life isn’t dramatic, always. This is about the day-to-day. It was less intentionally an antidote to all this action, violence, abuse of women, conflict between people, but I’m sure that’s part of it. We need other kinds of films. With my films, my hope is that you don’t care too much about the plot. I’m trying to find a Zen way where you are just there each moment and you’re not thinking too much about what’s going to happen next” (Perry, 2016). In an era of super heroes, fast paced sequences and action packed experiences, Jarmusch almost mockingly turns in the opposite direction. As he once explained: “I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural. I’m not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream” (Hirschberg, 2005). The first and main subcultural influence on his work is the New York Punk scene. His work can be easily comparable, “In the same way that punk musicians rejected the complex instrumentation and studio effects of prog rock, their film counterparts rejected the use of the optical printer and the protracted planning typical of structural cinema” (Suárez, 2007: 17). The outsider style of the characters, the abandoned and forgotten locations and even the work ethic, like for example working with friends and doing things with a deep sense of personal preferences, are extremely influenced by the artists who were a part of this movement. Also the value of being self-taught, the dislike for structural rigour, the fluidity between art forms, mainly between musicians and filmmakers, in this case the fact that armusch as also makes his own music, and even when he reached bigger audiences, he continued to avoid the mainstream way of working by still collaborating with his friends.
The main outsider though it will always be himself. Like it was said before he never really fitted in while growing up and as Tom Waits said “The key, I think, to Jim, is that he went grey when he was 15 … As a result, he always felt like an immigrant in the teenage world. He’s been an immigrant – a benign, fascinated foreigner – ever since. And all his films are about that” (Hirschberg, 2005) and this is transparent in his films because, in the same way he felt like an outsider in his own land and home, his characters do too. He once said: “If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you’ll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry” (Piazza, 2013: 233). This statement shows that even in his adult life he still has this feeling of alienation, his interests are still disregarded by the majority, because unfortunately Americans still live in a very ignorant society, that refuses culture as a manifestation of social class.
Like himself, his characters are also outsiders which is a big part of his style, he takes inspiration for them not only from his own personal experience but also from his punk influences. The people in his films are usually lonely, marginal and selfish outsiders who are usually seen as foreigners even in their own space and home. They are alienated from the rest of the world and they have no interest in being “the better man”. In fact, most of them do not even have any faith or hope in themselves. They have little to no motivations in their lives and lack any decision making capabilities.
Most of what happens to them is not preceded by any kind of personal challenge but rather often the catalyst of such occurrences is a random or external event. For example, in Down by Law, Bob gets arrested because, in an act of self-defence, he threw a number eight pool ball at a man and he dropped dead on the floor. The characters’ actions are not seemingly tied to previous actions nor a direct consequence of the characters’ will at the moment. This somehow does not make them less interesting, on the contrary, it makes the audience more intrigued and curious, since the viewers, and even the characters themselves, do not expect that these actions and its results happen and have those consequences.
When it comes to locations, Jarmusch does not care to show the most fabulous American landscapes or cities with streets filled with light, movement and skyscrapers. On the other hand, his settings are commonly the places which have been forgotten by time or abandoned by society’s evolution and the passing of time. Besides the Punk movement’s complete disregard for the conventional, his hometown, Akron, is another massive influence on his location choices. From New York’s grim side in Permanent Vacation, as it can be observed in figure 1, to the empty streets of Memphis and Detroit in Mystery Train (1989) and Only Lovers Left Alive (fig. 2), respectively, the places he choses to present to the audiences often neglect the advances of society due to external forces, such as the people’s new fondness of big and luxurious cities instead of industrial and working class cities. The locations mostly go hand-in-hand with the characters’ personalities, and as I already stated before, the characters are usually lonely and alienated people having similar qualities and characteristics as those abandoned and lonely cities in America’s interior land. Also, both the people and the localities lack life and emotion which works as a projection of their personalities.
Fig. 1: Permanent Vacation (1980) by Jim Jarmusch
Fig. 2: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) by Jim Jarmusch