Paterson—A Poem to Poets

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.