A little googling reveals that veteran indie filmmaker Jim
Jarmusch loves poetry, writes poetry, and was deeply influenced by one of his poetry
teachers, Kenneth Koch. These poetry fixtures make their way into every warp
and weft of Jarmusch’s new, quite lovable utopian movie,
Paterson. So many “Jarmusch touches” we like from earlier films find
a mellow presence here—his absurdist humor, his car-ride format, and his quirky
characters with their just as quirky conversations. His head, his poetic head,
is actually the centerpiece of this movie. The richness of the concoction makes
it hard to find a starting point for talking about
Paterson, but a few facts about the film are easy to tick off: It
takes place in Paterson, New Jersey, a 19th-century factory town and the place
that inspired William Carlos Williams to write his book-length poem titled
Paterson. Williams said of this lengthy work:
“A man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving, and concluding his
life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody . . . all the
details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions.”
Paterson, the low-key, poet-bus-driver
protagonist of the movie (Adam Driver) is that “man as city,” just as Jarmusch
also is, being the poet-filmmaker of William Carlos Williams’s original notion.
Both artists’ visions are set in the same working-class city, in the same scrubby
park facing the Passaic Falls, which is also where Paterson the poet-bus-driver
writes in his Secret Book, which all poets and writers have, including the
filmmaker by his own admission.
Details were important to Williams
and so they are to Paterson the poet and to Jarmusch depicting both the poet
and the city. The tempo of the film has the same tempo of diurnal routine,
which is monotonous. However, the pacing of Paterson’s day from waking to eating
breakfast, to working and returning from work, to his nightly beer in the
corner bar with the regulars, complements the tempo of the poetry spoken in the
movie. The lines come out slowly as the poet is hearing them and writing them
down. That pace, that thinking rhythm, that poetic meter, is the flow of the
movie we watch. We hear the poems that Paterson writes in his head through
voice over as he drives his bus, or as he sits in the park facing the falls and
writing in his Secret Book. His lines have a gentle, down-to-earth cadence and
create a magical component to his routine—and for the movie. All of the poetry
and allusions to poets and poetry that thread through the film transform life’s
routine monotony into the rich realm of art. Ron Padgett, a winner of the
William Carlos Williams poetry award, wrote most of Paterson’s poems.
The story covers one week in the
life of Paterson the man and Paterson the city, which again plays on Williams’s
“man is a city.” Subtitles announce Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so forth,
coming round to Monday again, when the film ends, and luckily, because we
couldn’t have endured another week of Paterson’s routine. Long poems like
Williams’s Paterson are often divided
into books or numbered sections, just the way this movie is divided into days
of the week. The movie proposes that routine has a counterpoint: What a poet—or
any thinking, creative individual—can find within him or herself during that
inescapable routine that pays the bills can be a gold mine, the real sustenance
of life.
Life has catastrophes too, and one
happens to our poet in the movie, though his face rarely registers a ripple,
even when he jumps on Everett in the bar to wrest a gun from him. It’s a quick
action without words. Williams once wrote that the course of Paterson’s river
symbolized the course of his own life (and maybe ours): “the river above the
Falls, the catastrophe of the Falls itself, the river below the Falls, and the
entrance at the end into the great sea.” He also found that the sound of the
Falls was a language, one he struggled to interpret in his long poem. But at
the same time, the poem was “the search of a poet for his language, his own
language.”
Jarmusch’s Paterson plays on the poet’s search for his own language in the
ordinary, working-class milieu of Paterson, New Jersey, where hum-drum life
repeats week after week without financial gain or promise. Poetry gives meaning
to Paterson’s life as a bus driver, just as his wife Laura’s artistic endeavors
feed her hopes for future recognition. Maybe her black-and-white, hand-painted
fabrics will catch on so that she can open her own shop; maybe her country
guitar playing will attain stardom; maybe her charmingly decorated cupcakes at
the local farmers market will take off. (There’s a sly pun here: “sell like
cupcakes.”) Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) is a classic Jim Jarmusch character—over the top but
appealing. She’s Paterson’s muse. His love for her has no beginning or end—it’s
the love of fairy tales. The audience sees her more critically, as ditzy, like a
cuddly kitten in bed, fascinating in her mercurial antics, peppy with
personality, and possibly a prototype for the surface qualities that attract
men. She also comes across as self-absorbed. She sends Paterson out each night
to walk her bulldog Marvin, and in other ways there’s a suggestion that he’s
convenient for her. Overall, her character is intended as humorous.
It’s easy to see that we could do a “cigarettes and coffee”
discussion on poets, poets and cities, Paterson and Williams, Paterson and
Paterson, and Jarmusch and his various tentacles to poetry that contribute to
the movie. This is a film that pays homage to poetry and poets, in the form of being
a poem itself. The way many contemporary artists mark their paintings with
words, so Paterson, a visual work, has language typed into it, and language is the
movie’s most important idea. It includes Paterson’s encounter with a rapper in
a laundromat (Cliff Smith, “Method Man”). Paterson pauses in the doorway to
watch the rapper wrestle to get his lyrics right. His cultural language is
almost incomprehensible to us but captures the deepest core of his being and
his experience. It’s authentic art.
One of the great
successes of Paterson is watching
Driver’s face as poetry lines come out of him. He’s in that space where his
eyes and head have departed from reality and the fusion of language, thought,
and feeling emerge, of their own accord, the door and channel to the
unconscious mind open. It’s quite marvelous. When he’s behind the wheel of the
bus, we feel the vehicle’s graceful gliding through the streets that seems to
reflect Paterson’s interior complacency and mildly expressed curiosity in what
his passengers are saying. His bus is always filled with diverse people—America’s
melting pot—talking to each other in humorous or ironic ways. One small
inconsistency in Paterson’s character involves cell phones. He doesn’t own one,
but when he borrows a passenger’s to report the breakdown of his bus, he types
away with both thumbs—no novice.
Details in Laura
and Paterson’s matchbook-size home, neat and tidy, show us that he was a marine
and now a bus driver. His basement study is full of literature, so that he’s
not exactly “working class” but much more Rodin’s thinker. Will his poetry ever
be discovered like Williams’s was? Williams was a physician with more steps up
the ladder of influence. Is the message then that all through America’s
working-class towns are Patersons, whose gifts will never be discovered? Do
they have to be? Well, for economic reasons it would be helpful, but for a life
worth living, a life with the reward of art, no, recognition isn’t necessary.
It’s the gift of art and creativity that rewards. This notion, however, is another
example of the movie’s utopian ideals, for how many people struggling to make
ends meet at a boring job that eats up each day, really feel the bliss of art
during that inescapable, often suffocating routine? And when finally released from
it at 5 o’clock, the worker is too exhausted and drained to feel creative;
weekends go to family chores; money is always an overriding worry. In real life,
creative, artistic fulfillment takes money to buy time, or rare, sheer will.
The fate of
Paterson’s Secret Book leads to one last Jarmusch-style encounter that gives
the film one more fairy-tale or parable touch. A Japanese poet-tourist visiting
Passaic Falls because of Williams’s legacy there, converses with a rather
listless Paterson sitting on the park bench, no longer in possession of his
Secret Book. The visitor is like an angel or a harbinger for Paterson’s future.
He could even be a phantom that Paterson’s imagination conjures in order to
pick up and carry on after his “catastrophe,” for by nature Paterson’s an
upbeat guy who enjoys the details of his daily city rides and the odd
conversations that take place in seats behind him. He has no enemies, he has no
prejudices. He even accepts taking care of Marvin, the stout bulldog, who is
jealous of Paterson’s intimacy with his mistress, and in this regard,
Paterson’s complacency becomes his Achilles heel.
“Monday to Monday,” depicting Paterson’s routine
and Jarmusch’s layered meanings, nicely bookends the movie. But it’s a dream
that routine could be so nice, and yet, poetry embodies the quality of dreams,
and so, the total effect of Paterson
moves beyond “language” to define it. Like poetry it flows toward “the end into
the great sea,” laced with nuggets of gold.
