Stranger Than Paradise 9780231851022

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CULTOGRAPHIES

CULTOGRAPHIES is a list of individual studies devoted to the analysis of cult film. The series provides a comprehensive introduction to those films that have attained the coveted status of a cult classic, focusing on their particular appeal, the ways in which they have been conceived, constructed, and received, and their place in the broader popular cultural landscape.

OTHER PUBLISHED TITLES IN THE CULTOGRAPHIES SERIES

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW Jeffrey Weinstock

FRANKENSTEIN Robert Horton

BAD TASTE

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

Jim Barratt

Ian Cooper

DONNIE DARKO

MS. 45

Geoff King

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

QUADROPHENIA

THE EVIL DEAD

Stephen Glynn

Kate Egan

THIS IS SPINAL TAP

DEEP RED

Ethan de Seife

Alexia Kannas

FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!

BLADE RUNNER

Dean DeFino

SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY Glyn Davis

Matt Hills

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN Alessandra Santos

STRANGER THAN PARADISE Jamie Sexton

WALLFLOWER PRESS LONDON & NEW YORK

A Wallflower Book Published by Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York • Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-231-18055-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85102-2 (ebook)

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Series design by Elsa Mathern

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Stranger Than Paradise, Video, Television, and I

1

1

Production and Initial Reception

11

2

Film Analysis

28

3

Subsequent Reception

80

4

Status as a Cult Film

95

Notes

109

References

111

Index

119

v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Ernest Mathijs and Alexia Kannas for reading and commenting on earlier versions of the manuscript and the two anonymous reviewers for their supportive suggestions. Miriam Grossman at Columbia University Press has been very helpful in terms of guidance. Finally, I thank Annie Barva for her extremely thorough editing of the manuscript.

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STRANGER THAN PA R A D I S E

INTRODUCTION STRANGER THAN PARADISE, VIDEO, TELEVISION, AND I

I first saw Stranger Than Paradise (1984) on a VHS cassette around 1994 as a university student—not an officially released videotape but a blank cassette that had recorded the film from a television airing. The transmission of feature films on television and the recordable VHS cassette are two ways of accessing films that are important within studies of cult film. The second way in particular was seen as affecting the processes whereby a film could build a cult reputation. The emergence and rapid popularization of the videocassette from the late 1970s into the early 1980s brought with it ideas about a “revolution” in terms of how people could access and watch movies (Newman 2014), which concerned the Hollywood studios because they believed that it would detrimentally affect their revenue streams. Such concerns led Universal to take court action against Sony, though the protracted case was settled eventually in favor of the latter in 1984 when home taping of television content was deemed 1

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to be fair use. By this time, as Michael Newman (2014) has noted, the studios had already established a legitimate network of home-video distribution to retail outlets. Although videocassette recorder (VCR) technology was initially sold primarily as a time-shifting device, by the late 1980s it had taken on a new purpose. Joshua Greenberg writes that “the VCR had been reconstructed as a medium in its own right, through which motion pictures moved from Hollywood studios to home viewers and for which the television itself was an accessory that facilitated display—these were ‘movies on video,’ not ‘movies on television’ ” (2008, 12). As such, the home gradually supplanted the cinema as the most common site to view films. Stranger Than Paradise was released during a VCR “boom.” Although VCRs were luxury items when they first entered the consumer market in the 1970s, the 1980s saw a huge growth in VCR ownership and rentals. In 1981, VCRs were in approximately 2.4 percent of US households; in 1984, the year Stranger Than Paradise was released, this figure had increased to 17.6 percent; and by 1986, the year the film was first released on VHS, VCRs were in approximately 37.2 percent of US households (Wasser 2001, 68). The rise of VCRs in households rose similarly in the United Kingdom during this period, from less than 5 percent of households in 1979 to more than 40 percent by 1986 (Gunter and Levy 1987, 487). Owning (or renting) a video recorder enabled people to access films in two ways: first, through renting or purchasing a film on videotape and, second, through recording a televised film. Purchasing films on tape was expensive at first, so the main ways people accessed officially released videotapes was through renting. Taping a film from a television broadcast may not have resulted in a top-quality copy of the film, but it did mean that people could actually own a copy of the film,

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which they could then play whenever they wished, something that was rare prior to the 1980s. Through taping films and renting them—and, as prices fell, purchasing them—viewers could access films as never before. Previously, to see a film more than once, you would have to go and see that film at the cinema repeatedly. Repeat viewing is, of course, a process heavily associated with cult films and could enable particular films—such as El Topo (Jodorowsky 1970) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman 1975)—to play midnight slots for long periods. Video did not rely, however, on a film playing in a particular space at a particular time (or even across a lengthy time span), which benefited those who did not live close to cinemas. Repeat viewing also took on new dimensions with video because people could use the pause, rewind, and fast-forward functions to replay segments and closely observe films. As a result of these developments, it was no surprise that many exhibition sites associated with cult cinema began to decline. The midnight-movie circuit in the United States, for example, dropped in popularity, while other venues that have become associated with cultism—albeit largely retrospectively—such as grindhouse cinemas and drive-ins, also disappeared rapidly. Such sites and circuits are connected largely to US film cultures, and it is arguable that the arrival of video helped to disperse the idea of the cult film farther around the globe. In the United Kingdom, for example, although there have been scattered examples of midnight screenings and even cinemas that occasionally gained a cult reputation—including the legendary Scala Cinema—such circuits and spaces were not in plentiful evidence. The small screen certainly was important to my own discovery of movies. My initial experience with cult cinema was via the television slot Moviedrome (BBC2 1988–1994,

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1997–2000). Presented and introduced by film director Alex Cox—who had a cult reputation, largely through directing Repo Man (1984)—the slot showed cult films, often double bills. In fact, in the first episode of the show Cox even explained what a cult film is, though I didn’t personally catch the show that early, not becoming alert to its existence until 1990. This show—although only in the years when it was introduced by Alex Cox, who ended his involvement after 1994—was the formative television slot for discovering cult cinema in the United Kingdom and has gained a cult reputation over the years (Egan 2017). Yet I have to admit that I wasn’t totally sure what a cult film was at this point, even if I embraced many of the films screened in this slot. Oddball films, neglected films, and countercultural films certainly seemed to be important to the category, though it was difficult to sum up in any definitive manner. (This lack of a clear definition is something that many would hold against cult as a legitimate category over the years, although considering the ways in which cultism sometimes goes against legitimate cultures, this vagueness seems apt.) The slipperiness of cult is nevertheless important to this study: the ways that cult as a term can denote films belonging to other categories are a crucial component of this book. Stranger Than Paradise was and is called a cult film, an art film, and an American independent film, to mention only the more robust categories it has been assigned to. A number of cult films are denoted primarily by a more established generic category, but Stranger Than Paradise is a film that has belonged to a large number of different modes and generic designations during its lifespan. For me, then, television and the VCR acted as my gateway technologies into the world of cult film. Around the early 1990s, British television was going through a number of changes, including a reduction in foreign-language cinema. Nevertheless, it was clear that, compared to today’s television 4

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environment, British television certainly offered a much wider array of filmic content than it does now. BBC2 and Channel 4—“minority” channels—were where less-mainstream content could be found, including a number of subtitled European films, cult films, and films from the emergent American independent cinema. These movies were often tucked away late at night in the schedule, but this is where the video recorder came into its own as a valuable tool that could increase one’s access to and ownership of a range of films. Although in 1994 foreign-language films were still being shown on British television, their screenings had declined, largely due to the increased commercial environment of British television, which in particular led to Channel 4 reducing its devotion to minority audiences and seeking a wider viewership (Andrews 2014, 74–75). Channel 4 still had a remit to experiment and cater to minorities, though, hence its increasing attention to the screening of American independents: often art-influenced, niche films that nevertheless did not carry subtitles. Fittingly, this was a period in which the production and distribution of American independents was expanding dramatically, with Channel 4 partially funding a number of such films. Channel 4 was also the channel from which my friend taped Stranger Than Paradise, though I was thankful he had edited out all the ad breaks so that I didn’t have to fast-forward through adverts during each intermission. I had seen my first Jarmusch film around six months earlier: Night on Earth (1991), at Cinema City, the primary art cinema in Norwich, England. I had quite recently become interested in American independent cinema, and Jarmusch was a figure considered important in this field by journalists documenting this burgeoning movement. Having not seen any of his films previously, I was keen to see what kind he made. Such anticipation was heightened by the fact that Tom Waits had produced the soundtrack; I was and remain passionately 5

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interested in music, and Waits was someone I had discovered (and came to love) only a year or so earlier. (The importance of music to Jarmusch’s films is, as I argue later on, a key dimension in his cult reputation.) Fascinated by Night on Earth, I was then on a mission to seek out Jarmusch’s other films to date, subsequently watching Down by Law (1986), Stranger Than Paradise, and Mystery Train (1989). Stranger Than Paradise was a much different film than Night on Earth: it was far more minimalist in nature and austere in tone (heightened by the washed-out feel imbued by Tom DiCillo’s black-and-white cinematography). Divided into a tripartite structure, the story begins with Eva (Eszter Balint) arriving in Manhattan from Budapest to stay for ten days with her cousin Willie (John Lurie) until their aunt Lotte comes out of the hospital. While Eva stays with Willie, not much actually happens in conventionally dramatic terms, but there is a gradual development of interpersonal relations between the two characters, albeit conveyed mostly through minor gestures. In the second section, Eva has moved on to Cleveland to stay permanently with Aunt Lotte, while Willie and his buddy Eddie (Richard Edson) continue to slack around the Lower East Side, making a living through gambling. After almost encountering trouble when they cheat at cards, they decide to get out of town for a while and visit Eva in Cleveland. After staying with Aunt Lotte, Willie and Eddie take a trip with Eva to Florida, a decision that soon turns sour for Eva as the men take the opportunity to gamble and leave her alone to entertain herself. At the end of the film, after accidentally being handed a stash of money, Eva decides to go to the airport. When Willie reads the note that Eva has left at the motel room stating her intentions, he goes to the airport to try and stop her. The film ends with Willie boarding a plane to Budapest to stop Eva but ending up leaving the United States on

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Figure 0.1: Eva, Willie, and Eddie on a Florida beach

the flight, while Eva, it is revealed, does not get on the plane and remains in Florida. Although Down by Law had prepared me to some extent for Stranger Than Paradise in that it is closer aesthetically to Stranger than to Night on Earth, I found it to be more amusing and accessible than Stranger. Down by Law features black-and-white cinematography, a slow-moving, elliptical narrative, and, like Stranger, an avoidance of heightened drama, but it is more obviously comedic in tone, largely owing to the manic presence of Roberto Benigni. Stranger Than Paradise also has a comic character in Eddie (Richard Edson), though he is not as prominently or overtly comic as Benigni, and the film’s humor is far dryer. At first, I wasn’t even aware that the film was supposed to be a comedy, and the lack of narrative drive left me, after the first ten minutes or so, feeling somewhat bored. Yet somewhere between those somewhat inauspicious first encounters with the film and the end credits, something magical seemed to happen: I unsuspectingly became absorbed in the film and—almost in

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spite of its formally distanced aesthetics—felt connected to the characters, in particular Eva. The fact that they were not immediately likable was important—these were characters who subtly grew on you because the director had no interest in trying to force you to become instantly connected to a “good” or likeable character. Stranger Than Paradise instead presented a completely different, alternative mode of characterization that was far more interesting and complex than was standard. It was this dimension of the film—alongside its rather slow but incrementally hypnotic atmosphere—that first drew me in and that inspired me to want to watch it again. Since that first encounter, I have seen it numerous times, and each viewing has led to an increased appreciation and discovery of fine-grained nuances within its simple yet complex architecture. In particular, repeat viewings have led to my appreciation of the film’s formalist precision, which not only feels aesthetically fresh but also is key to the creation of a nonsentimental mode of character interaction: often punctuated by long silences and laden with underlying tensions, the interpersonal dynamics at first prove to be challenging but soon become fascinating. And although the narrative progresses to bring Eva and Willie closer together, it does so in a manner that avoids sentimentality. I now own the film on a Criterion DVD, very different from the modest, bootlegged tape on which I first saw it. Yet although I value the packaging and extras on this DVD, the restored digital presentation doesn’t add a great deal to the experience of watching it on an off-air VHS recording because the film is a lofi production in the first place (and, fortunately, the quality of the bootlegged tape I initially watched it on was also decent). Criterion, of course, represents the more legitimate end of film culture: it has released a range of classic and artistic films and is renowned for presenting such films in top-class transfers with a number of extra features. Cult cinema has 8

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often been distinguished from this more legitimate realm, so the fact that the company has released this film, alongside Down by Law, Mystery Train, and Night on Earth, may alert us to a problem in calling Stranger Than Paradise a cult film. Yet Criterion doesn’t release just classic and art films—it has released a number of films frequently referred to as “cult movies,” such as The Blob (Yeaworth 1958), Carnival of Souls (Harvey 1962), Equinox (Muren and Woods 1970), and Hausu (Obayashi 1977). It can do so because “art” and “cult” are not mutually exclusive: values can shift over time, but it is also the case, as I proceed to argue over the course of this book, that they can coexist at the same moment. They do in Stranger Than Paradise, which was and remains a rather unusual film in terms of its cult trajectory. In the following pages, I explore these issues in more detail and analyze the film and its broader place within the cult-film canon.

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1 PRODUCTION AND INITIAL RECEPTION

PRODUCTION CONTEXTS Tales detailing the production of Stranger Than Paradise have proliferated since its release in 1984 and should be considered a factor informing its cult credentials. In their introduction to The Cult Film Reader, Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik list a number of processes and attributes that can feed into a film’s cult status, one of which is production legends. They argue that cult films are often the result of “accidents”; that they “invariably have complex, confused, controversial, or bumpy origins, wrought with smaller or bigger narratives (‘legends,’ ‘myths’)”; and that “they seem to happen, more than to be planned” (2008, 7). Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog 1972) and Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979) are notable films whose legendarily difficult production circumstances have lent them a cult aura. Both films had their production troubles, the nightmare conditions under which they were made, caught on camera and subsequently documented—in Burden of Dreams (Blank 1982) and Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Bahr, Hickenlooper, Coppola 1991), respectively. These films were plagued by chaos, obsession, and volatility, 11

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and the subsequent making-of documentaries focus heavily on these aspects, leaving many viewers marveling at how the films were completed. By the time the documentaries were released, the two films had already built up cult followings, but these followings were arguably heightened by the making-of features, which themselves also gained cult reputations. It is now difficult to think of these films without reference to their making-of counterparts, paratexts that have bolstered and informed the reputation of the ur texts. Stranger Than Paradise did not gain its cult reputation via the more typical production stories centered on chaos and madness, however; neither was it mythologized in a makingof feature. Its production stories and paratexts are far more modest, which seems apt considering that Jarmusch’s persona and style are commonly linked to restraint and control. Yet these texts—consisting mostly of anecdotes frequently mentioned in articles on Jarmusch, interviews with him, as well as a more modest making-of Super 8-mm short film shot by his brother Tom—are nevertheless important. Although the film’s production may have not been permeated by a sense of danger or madness, it was still complex and bumpy, and initial reviews of the film as well as later articles about Jarmusch frequently drew on these stories of the unusual production. In contrast to cult-fueled legends built upon stories of chaos and disaster, there also exist cult films whose smallerscale production stories have become a core part of their reputation. These smaller-scale features are often—as has been the case regarding Stranger Than Paradise—linked to themes of economic paucity and are more likely to accompany lowerbudget, independent productions. These features are usually break-out hits: films that have attained an unexpected degree of acclaim, recognition, and, in many cases, box-office success that contrast with their modest origins. The Evil Dead (Raimi 1981) is an example of this type of film, and numerous 12

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accounts of its bumpy production exist (Egan 2011). Since the increased commercialization of the American independent filmmaking sector around the beginning of the 1990s, reportage of such stories has become more common and can be used as marketing hooks for the films concerned. In a number of examples, including The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez 1999), Clerks (Smith 1994), Primer (Carruth 2004), and Tarnation (Caouette 2003), the film’s tiny budget is so frequently reported that it comes to form a core part of the film’s identity. What links these two different forms of production stories is that the films in both groups have succeeded against the odds. Most films made on a tight budget will never get a theatrical release, so those that go on to make a profit or are subject to critical attention or both tend to have their modest production origins reported on. This was certainly the case regarding Stranger Than Paradise, the initial reviews of which often recounted aspects of its production. I outline some of the chief details of that production history here for those not familiar with it. Jarmusch had already made a feature film—Permanent Vacation (1980)—before he started work on Stranger Than Paradise. He made that first film while a student at New York University, where he was enrolled in the Graduate Film School. He used his grant money to fund the feature, which cost approximately $15,000, and submitted it as his graduate thesis film. The film was considered too long for submission, however, and Jarmusch eventually left the course without a degree (Suárez 2007, 21). Permanent Vacation did not receive a theatrical release in the United States, though it did play some festivals and received limited distribution in France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands (Van Gelder 1984). It was particularly appreciated in Germany, where it won the Joseph von Sternberg Award for best picture at the Mannheim Film Week in Germany in 1980 and was selected for the Forum 13

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section at the prestigious Berlinale in 1981.1 The film was also covered extensively in an edition of the German cinéphile publication Filmkritik in 1981 (Suárez 2007, 28). Jarmusch has continued to gain admirers from many countries outside of the United States, which is fitting for a director who takes inspiration from an international repertoire and who tends to seek funds from different countries to enable him to work outside Hollywood. After Permanent Vacation, Jarmusch had planned to work on a film entitled The Garden of Divorce, which he had written with Luc Sante, but it was never filmed. He instead started making a short film, Stranger Than Paradise, which would eventually become a feature. Stories around the film’s production often highlight its unusual and drawn-out nature. The film was initially made possible through contacts that Jarmusch had built up: he was given approximately forty-five minutes of unexposed film stock by Wim Wenders, leftover from the production of Wenders’s film The State of Things (1982), and some black leader by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Although he had met Straub and Huillet through the festival network, his relationship with Wenders dated back to his days at New York University. It was here that as a film student he was asked to work as an assistant on what would become Nicholas Ray’s final film, Lightning Over Water (1980), which Ray codirected with Wenders. Ray, who had met Jarmusch while teaching at New York University, was dying of cancer when Lightning Over Water was made. Originally planned as a fiction film, it eventually became a documentary about Ray’s failed attempts to realize his original vision because of his deteriorating health. The short version of Stranger Than Paradise eventually constituted the first section of the feature film and was titled The New World. During the editing of the short, Jarmusch began to plan turning it into a three-part, feature-length film, 14

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so he showed the short at a number of international festivals with hopes of raising additional money to complete the longer feature. The film played at a few European festivals, including Rotterdam, where it received an International Critics Award, and Hof, Germany, where Jarmusch met Otto Grokenberger, a Munich businessman who, along with the German television channel ZDF, financed the longer feature. Because Jarmusch had agreed to hand over the rights of the short film to Grey City Films in exchange for lab costs incurred, he then secured a loan from filmmaker Paul Bartel—whom he had also met at a film festival—to buy back the rights to the film (Suárez 2007, 28–29). This was an important step: Jarmusch has gained a reputation for retaining the negatives of his films, which has bolstered his status as an autonomous, independent filmmaker, a theme to which I return in chapter 3. The production of Stranger Than Paradise was therefore made possible through a number of informal contacts and friendships that Jarmusch had established, while the serious attention paid to his previous film in Germany opened up funding avenues for the completion of the new feature. The new film was completed at a cost of approximately $120,000, with a substantial percentage of the budget allocated to licensing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s song “I Put a Spell on You” (1956). Most of the personnel involved in the production were, as with Permanent Vacation, friends and contacts whom Jarmusch had met either at film school or through the more informal, downtown cultural activities in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It would star John Lurie, Eszter Balint, and Richard Edson, all of whom were involved in either music or filmmaking or both. Lurie, who also composed the score for Stranger Than Paradise, was a musician and member of the “fake jazz” combo the Lounge Lizards; he was also a filmmaker and actor, having made the low-budget, Super 8-mm short Men in Orbit (1981), and had appeared in a number 15

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of low-budget films, including Eric Mitchell’s Underground U.S.A. (1980) and Amos Poe’s Subway Riders (1981). Edson was briefly a drummer for the bands Sonic Youth and KONK. Balint was a member of the legendary Squat Theater in New York, where she was also a regular DJ. The cinematographer for the film was future filmmaker Tom DiCillo, like Jarmusch a former film school student at New York University. Downtown culture in New York City of this period has now become almost legendary, and it was within this context that Jarmusch produced his first features (see Hawkins 2015 for a detailed overview of film and downtown culture). One particularly notable aspect of downtown culture in this period was that there was a real sense of creative intermingling: many artists would dabble in different types of cultural activities, and a number of venues hosted a mixture of varied artistic performances. According to Lydia Lunch, a key participant in the postpunk, downtown scene and member of the no wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, “Everyone was doing everything. You painted, you were in a band, you made films, you wrote songs. It was all just so interconnected” (quoted in Masters 2007, 20). Jarmusch himself exemplified this cultural mobility: as well as making films, he also wrote poetry and performed music. The tendency to work across different artistic media was symptomatic of challenges to cultural boundaries and hierarchies taking place in the early 1980s. Although downtown culture at the turn of the decade was diverse and varied, certain intellectual and practical approaches to cultural production were nevertheless influential. Postmodernism and the punk-inspired tenets of do-it-yourself (DIY) inspired many artists working in this context, including Jarmusch. The concept of postmodernism is very broad and complex, but two aspects related to a postmodernist outlook are crucial in thinking about downtown art in this period: first, an attack on cultural hierarchies, in which demarcations 16

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between high and low forms of culture are dismantled, and, second, a questioning of originality and a belief in the idea of creation as thievery. The latter idea is key to Jarmusch’s working methods, and he has spoken openly about it, contending that “nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination” (Jarmusch 2013). The tenets of DIY, meanwhile, which stress the importance of people taking culture into their own hands (for example, by self-publishing books and fanzines or by releasing records independently), was also very important. DIY challenged the hierarchies demarcating professionalism and amateurism as well as the idea of specialized roles: it was common practice for people to swap instruments within music groups or to be involved in different production assignments on a film set or to move across disciplines regardless of any formal training. I discuss the impact of punk and DIY further in the next chapter, but it is worth touching here on the crucial inspiration provided by DIY. Punk music, in particular, was a cultural movement that often stressed DIY values. Jarmusch has acknowledged the influence of the DIY principles punk encouraged. The most important aspect of punk music for him was, as he explained, that “you didn’t have to be a virtuoso musician to form a rock band. Instead, the spirit was more important than any kind of expertise on the instrument” (Belsito 2001, 27). Jarmusch himself was involved in postpunk music by playing in the Del-Byzanteens, a band often categorized as “no wave.” Although no wave music attempted to go beyond the musical conventions associated with punk rock, it remained committed to the DIY ethos that punk had helped to promote widely. Stranger Than Paradise is infused with the DIY spirit and was made by Jarmusch and a number of friends rather than by a “professional” crew. Yet even though DIY principles influenced the film’s production, the final film differed from many of the 17

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films linked to the punk and postpunk underground. Unlike the short underground films being made at the time—such as the confrontational cinema of transgression—Jarmusch’s film edged slightly more toward the professional end of the production spectrum. And, as I demonstrate in chapter 2, the film also varied significantly from the punk films made by directors such as Amos Poe and Eric Mitchell (whom Jarmusch had worked with, having recorded sound for Mitchell’s film Underground U.S.A. [1980]). In fact, although Stranger Than Paradise emerged from the underground DIY activity rampant at the time, Jarmusch as a filmmaker was also keen to distance himself from any typical trends associated with underground filmmaking. He has discussed his keenness to differentiate himself from expectations after making Permanent Vacation. Of the use of music in that film, he claims that he did not want to use contemporary “new wave” or “no wave” music because he didn’t want the film to be about a specific cultural scene lest it become dated (Eue and Stukenbrock 2001, 6). Because many of the so-called punk films documented new music scenes, Jarmusch deliberately avoided this tactic despite claiming that music culture was a big influence on his work. This avoidance points to the contrary nature of his filmmaking personality, a trait also evident in his discussion of Nicholas Ray’s criticism of different versions of the Permanent Vacation script: “he was telling me to put more action in the film. Instead, every time he’d tell me about that, I’d go home and take more action out of the script and make it even more passive in a way. Just because I didn’t want to imitate him” (Belsito 2001, 24). A stubborn and contrary commitment to doing things his own way, which involves challenging well-worn conventions as well as avoiding fleeting trends, has remained constant across Jarmusch’s work and is a core factor of his cult reputation. I return to this theme in chapter 3, but for now I must mention that if in 18

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Permanent Vacation Jarmusch had attempted to avoid many of the features associated with new wave/punk cinema, this avoidance was even more pronounced in Stranger Than Paradise.

INITIAL RECEPTION: A POST–MIDNIGHT MOVIE? Stranger Than Paradise showed at a number of festivals in 1984 and was positively reviewed by many critics on its initial release. Entering the film into festivals was a logical step at the time because both Permanent Vacation and the short version of Stranger Than Paradise had been warmly received at festival screenings. The feature version of Stranger Than Paradise quickly gained more acclaim and acceptance than Permanent Vacation, winning awards in Europe and the United States. Opening at Cannes, one of the most prestigious global film festivals, the film went on to win the Caméra d’Or, awarded for the best debut feature at the festival (the criteria for this competition excluded student films, which is how Stranger became classed as a first feature). That the main Cannes prize, the Palm d’Or, was won by Wim Wenders for Paris, Texas (1984) added to a sense of uncanny coincidence and furthered the connections between these two directors, which continued after Stranger Than Paradise when Robbie Müller became Jarmusch’s cinematographer for his next feature, Down by Law. Müller had worked on a number of Wenders’s features, including Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), and Paris, Texas, as well as on Alex Cox’s film Repo Man (1984). To date, he has worked on five Jarmusch features.2 Later in 1984, Stranger Than Paradise gained more prestige when it won the Golden Leopard for best film at the Locarno Film Festival. Although the film first established its credentials in Europe, it also—unlike its predecessor—made 19

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a big impact in the United States and gained wide theatrical distribution there, which was aided further when the film won a National Film Critics Award in early 1985 and then the Special Jury Recognition at Sundance in 1985, where it was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. At this stage, the Samuel Goldwyn Company had already picked up the film for distribution in North America. Winning awards at established festivals is an important means by which smaller films can gain attention. As a sign of prestige, the award victory can function as a guarantor of quality and as a tool in marketing campaigns. The types of festivals that Jarmusch’s films played at, though, were mainly art-focused festivals. These festivals tend not to be considered important in building a cult reputation, which is more often linked to disreputability and a lack of critical acclaim from more highbrow critics on a film’s initial release. Cult fans often consider prestigious, art-focused festivals as belonging to “official culture,” which makes them antithetical to cult (Mathijs and Sexton 2011, 36–45). The only exception is when a film proves to be controversial or even scandalous at such festivals (which Cannes has often witnessed—see Corless and Darke 2007) by “upset[ting] and expos[ing]”—via the controversy it generates—“the otherwise neatly hidden processes of valuation” (Mathijs and Sexton 2011, 39). The types of festivals most associated with cult films are genre festivals, in particular “fantastic” film festivals, which tend to focus on horror and science fiction filmmaking, two genres that the more prestigious film festivals have traditionally eschewed. In addition to accruing prestige through festivals, Stranger Than Paradise received mostly positive critical reviews. The film not only received coverage in fringe publications, as had its predecessor, but was also reviewed in a number of more mainstream publications. Coverage was staggered in line 20

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with the film’s gradual exhibition across and then outside the United States. It initially received positive critical attention in New York, with the New York Times becoming a high-profile champion of it. In addition to publishing a feature on Jarmusch and the film at its Cannes debut in October 1984, the newspaper went on to review the film positively. Vincent Canby noted its resemblance to early Wenders work and how it seemed more European than American: “It’s Mr. Jarmusch’s odd achievement to be responsible for one of the best European films ever made about America. We do live in peculiar times” (1984b). Almost two weeks later Canby was naming the film as his “critic’s choice,” declaring it a “wonderfully cockeyed ‘road’ movie” and Jarmusch an “American original” (1984a). He noted how the film at first seems bleak but “ultimately comes to look both beautiful and funny” (1984a). Although he described the film as almost European aesthetically—and here he was referring to European art-house cinema—he nevertheless outlined its originality. This opinion was particularly evident in the second article, in which he further specified the film’s distinctiveness despite its rootedness in particular traditions (in addition to European art-house cinema, he mentioned the genre of the road movie). Buoyed by awards and critical reviews, Stranger Than Paradise enjoyed a long run at the Cinema Studio in New York, though such a run certainly would not have guaranteed it a positive reception elsewhere because New York has a reputation for being a more receptive environment for experimental and art-house filmmaking. Just as the film had broken out of the underground context that Permanent Vacation was largely confined to (at least in the United States), so it also broke out of what David Sterritt called “the Manhattan art-theater ghetto” (1985). As the film gradually made its way around different parts of the country, it continued to build a strong critical reputation and, surprisingly, to earn healthy profits. 21

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A number of critics commented on the film’s freshness and originality: although it was often described as being very low budget and grainy as well as devoid of much action or a strong plot, it was considered charming due to its deadpan humor and “nonjudgmental” style. The unusual techniques of long takes, sparse dialogue, seemingly random scene closures, and black leader between scenes were perceived as stylistically original and daring; if elements of the film could be traced to other filmmakers and styles, the ways Jarmusch had fused all of these techniques together were considered to constitute a particularly original work. If generic designations were used, they were nearly always qualified—hence, Canby’s description of it as a “cockeyed ‘road’ movie.” Critics here were following Jarmusch’s own description of the film to an extent; he had in press-kit notes described the film as a “semi-neorealist black-comedy in the style of an imaginary Eastern-European film director obsessed with Ozu and familiar with the 1950’s American television show ‘The Honeymooners’ ” (Jarmusch 1984). Because of the difficulty in categorizing the film, many critics used terms such as oddball, eccentric, and offbeat to encapsulate its aesthetic freshness. (In chapter 2, I inspect the nature of “offbeat” as a category.) At other times, they would be more hyperbolic in stressing the film’s originality; Roger Ebert, for example, described it as like “no other film you’ve seen[,] . . . a constant, almost kaleidoscopic experience of discovery” (1984). A quote from Ebert’s review and another quote from Sheila Benson appeared on the two main posters promoting the film in the United States, which used the tagline “A New American Film” to stress its artistic distinctiveness. Not all reviews were so effusive, but even the few lessenthused critics tended to admit the film was distinctive. Pauline Kael admired the film but felt that it was slight. Calling it “softhearted fun” and “shaggy dog minimalism,” she added 22

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that its “format wears thin” (1985). The Spokane Daily Chronicle’s film reviewer Dan Webster spent a large portion of his review discussing how the film had received “rave reviews seldom accorded to a first-time director” but then proceeded to argue that they had overpraised the film just because it was a “bit different” from the majority of films around (1985). Webster, like Kael, admitted that the film was novel but didn’t agree that it was good-quality filmmaking and made some dismissive remarks about its cheap look and its “repetitive and inane” characters and actions. For him, the film’s muchpraised cool style was a negative quality; it would have been improved by more evident passion. Such critical dismissals of Stranger Than Paradise were rare, though, which was surprising considering the film was a low-budget, black-and-white film by a relatively unknown director and that reviews of it appeared in a wide range of newspapers across the country. In fact, it was quite remarkable that the film was reviewed at all beyond niche publications, considering that it was, in Jarmusch’s words, “basically an underground film that crossed over and got picked up for distribution” (Stark 2001, 49). As a film that picked up awards at prestigious festivals and was widely praised critically, Stranger Than Paradise should be considered an atypical cult film, even taking into account the varied processes by which films can attain cult status. Yet I still think it should be considered a cult film, for the following reasons: (1) its underground status; (2) the discursive means by which critics at the time classed the film as cult or linked it with cult films; (3) the fact that the film can be considered a “sleeper”; (4) the increasing labeling of Jarmusch as a cult director as his career has progressed; (5) the film’s status as a “game changer,” which was recognized occasionally in some earlier reviews and articles but which has grown in line with historical accounts of the American independent film movement. I address points four and five in later chapters 23

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but for now summarize how the film’s initial reception took on minor cultist overtones that have further strengthened as Jarmusch’s career has progressed. Jarmusch’s background in underground culture was and remains key to the status of Stranger Than Paradise as a cult film. Underground cinema of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s has been covered quite extensively in studies of cult film because of its subversive, antimainstream sensibilities and commitment to democratic participation in cultural production and because of the ways that it fostered a communitarian ethos among many of its participants. Also central to the underground’s standing within cult-cinema history is its links to the midnight-movie phenomenon, arguably the most privileged exhibition mode in cult-film history. J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book Midnight Movies (1991), for example, devotes considerable space to outlining the importance of underground-film culture in the late 1950s and 1960s and how this culture fed into shaping the subsequent midnightmovie craze of the 1970s. This culture was important in terms of foreshadowing common exhibition practices at midnightmovie shows: the screening of a mixed program of contemporary and repertory films from a wide range of different contexts (i.e., showing low-budget underground films along with European art-house features and resurrections of forgotten American films) in cinemas late at night. It was also important in fostering an audience for such filmmaking so that by the 1970s many so-called underground feature films were being made and shown at midnight screenings. Jarmusch lived on the Lower East Side, part of the downtown area of Manhattan, when he first moved to New York in 1975. Although this area has now become gentrified, it was at the time a hub for artists because of its low rents and had been since the explosion of underground activity there in the late 1950s. In this sense, Jarmusch was part of a scene that 24

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had a very distinguished cultural history, and from interviews he has given over the years it is clear that he was and is aware of this history and at the beginning of his career saw himself as belonging to such a historical continuum. But, as mentioned, he was also attempting to make films that were distinctive from some of the “new wave” and other underground films that were being produced around this time. As a film that both belonged to and deviated from a rather cultish underground scene, Stranger Than Paradise was seen by some critics as following in the line of more experimental midnight-movie cults such as Eraserhead (Lynch 1977). Although it was generally acknowledged that Stranger Than Paradise and Eraserhead were very different films aesthetically, they did share the quality of bold originality and were commonly referred to as “offbeat,” a filmic mode particularly associated with films enjoying popularity on the midnight circuit. Further, they both were very low-budget films shot over a considerable period of time. In reviews, other offbeat films with cult reputations were also drawn on to highlight the cult qualities of Jarmusch’s film, including Repo Man. If Stranger was commonly compared to European art cinema because of its minimalist qualities and glacial pace, critics also saw it as differing from this category because of its more offbeat qualities and association with cult or underground cinema or both. Stranger Than Paradise’s dry, absurdist wit was also linked to the offbeat, with some critics positioning it as a new variation of the midnight movie. Subsequent writings on the midnightmovie phenomenon have also considered it a kind of midnight movie. Hoberman and Rosenbaum write how such “quintessential midnight fare as Liquid Sky [Tsukerman 1982], Repo Man, and perhaps Stranger Than Paradise” achieved success during normal hours (1991, 321). Gregory Waller, in his survey of midnight screenings in Lexington, Kentucky, between 1980 and 1985, notes the waning of the midnight circuit as 25

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the 1980s unfolded but also stresses the importance of this exhibition space to the “commercial breakthrough of a new wave of independent American feature films from Eraserhead to Repo Man to Stranger Than Paradise” (1991, 184). For Waller, the cult midnight movie appealed to a largely countercultural audience and challenged conventions. Although the phenomenon gradually faded as video became increasingly popular, it was nevertheless seen as creating the conditions for the emergence of a successful new wave of independent films outside of the midnight circuit. Stranger Than Paradise did screen at midnight on a number of occasions, but not to the extent that it could straightforwardly be referred to as a “midnight movie.” As it transpired, the film was gradually released across the world in largely independent theaters but was positioned more as an art film via its festival recognition and widespread critical acclaim. This positioning was in part fitting, considering Jarmusch’s debts to art-film auteurs, yet the film was also indebted to more underground and populist influences, and the unusual ways that Jarmusch fused these stylistic inspirations led some critics to align it with the midnight movie. Due to the decline of the midnight circuit at the time of the film’s release, however, they tended to use language that suggested it was a kind of post–midnight movie. The film also enjoyed an exhibition pattern that aligned it with another type of cult movie: the sleeper. Though not as firmly connected to cult status as the midnight movie, the sleeper hit does often attain cult status; the importance of this exhibition pattern is indicated in the subtitle of the first of Danny Peary’s well-known compendiums of cult films, published in 1981, Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful. Because Stranger Than Paradise was a small film, it took a long while for screenings of it to make their way around America and other countries—it didn’t open in 26

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Australia, for example, until early 1986. Smaller films that create a buzz and slowly build up a following are often thought of as cult because they accumulate audiences primarily via word of mouth, in contrast to more mainstream films, which are more likely to receive widespread advertising and more concentrated releases (though, of course, such films can flop but later be rejuvenated by cultists). Stranger Than Paradise not only showed at some midnight slots but also performed well on video (Eller 1989), a medium that was changing the ways in which films were seen and consequently how they became cultified. In particular, the ability to own a film and to rewatch it—or portions of it—made it far easier for viewers to become familiar with specific films through repeat viewing. In many ways, then, Stranger Than Paradise is an unusual cult film but contains many elements that link it to cult cinema, and I explore these elements further in the forthcoming chapters. In the next chapter, I analyze the film itself, exploring key themes and formal characteristics that mark it as unusual and original, before moving on in the remaining two chapters to explore its broader status beyond its initial impact. Chapters 3 and 4 account for its cult status as well as its increasing links to other modes of cinema that have heightened its importance among a range of different taste cultures since its release.

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2 FILM ANALYSIS

This chapter explores three main aesthetic strands within Stranger Than Paradise: genre, music, and character. These three broad categories are in my opinion the most textually relevant areas via which the film was considered original as well as influencing its subsequent cult status. Although this chapter focuses largely on the text itself, I do also draw on a range of important contextual and critical issues where appropriate. I address the broader contextual and historical matters informing the cult status of the film in more detail in the next chapter.

GENRE AND THE OFFBEAT As discussed in the previous chapter, many critics grappled with describing Stranger Than Paradise in generic terms, often referring to it as “offbeat” in the process. Offbeat and quirky are terms that have more recently been employed to designate a range of American independent films, and one particularly prominent way in which quirkiness and the offbeat are located in films is, as Geoff King has noted, through

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complicating genre conventions (2005, 167). Although American independent films have often been positioned as trying to avoid or evade genre—in the sense of distancing themselves from the disreputable taint of the “genre film” and attempting to produce something less formulaic—many of them have engaged with genres in different ways. This relationship is, to an extent, similar to the relationship between art cinema and genre, but András Bálint Kovács has pointed out that many modernist art films are nevertheless rooted in more traditional genres (2007, 83). It is also the case that both art cinema and American independent cinema themselves can act in generic ways. Kovács writes, for example, that many modernist art films could not “avoid the repetition of some of [the genre’s] most successful forms, which resulted in the crystallization of what could be called ‘modernist patterns’” (83), and others have looked at the art film as a specific type of film in broadly generic ways (see, e.g., Bordwell 1979 and Thanouli 2009). American independent cinema is now at a stage where it is often associated with particular filmic elements, hence functioning partially as a generic category. Michael Newman argues that American independent cinema functions more as a cycle than as a genre: Indie cinema is not specific enough to function as a historically stable, well-recognized genre like science fiction or a group style like Soviet Montage with clearly identifiable visual techniques shared among a movement of like-minded artists. It makes more sense to see it as a cycle or large-scale production trend within the American film industry which brings its own assumptions about cinematic form and function shared by filmmakers and moviegoers, a category in some ways similar to classical or art cinema. (2011, 22–23)

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In order to make a clear distinction between cycles, on the one hand, and genres and movements, on the other, Newman plays down the complexities of the latter, but all of these categories, whatever their differences, still offer conventions by which audiences can identify and classify them. It is via such conventions that American independent cinema has functioned increasingly in generic ways, even if it doesn’t constitute a genre in the more traditional sense. Janet Staiger has claimed, for instance, that although independent film does still indicate industrial processes such as financing and distribution, it also refers to conceptions of quality that differentiate it from Hollywood norms (she uses the term indie to refer to more evaluative and generic functions). She lists these conceptions as (1) dialogue for purposes other than the advancement of a plot; (2) “quirky” or odd characters; (3) emphasis on certain methods of creating verisimilitude; (4) ambiguity and intertextuality in narrative and narration (2013, 23). Newman also lists a number of viewing strategies associated with American indie films, both formal and social: “viewers are encouraged to read independent films as more socially engaged and formally experimental than Hollywood; more generally, they are encouraged to read independent films as alternatives to or critiques of mainstream movies. Taken together, these viewing strategies account for much of what makes the category ‘independent cinema’ cohere” (2011, 22). Both American independent cinema and art cinema have functioned as categories to indicate broad types of filmmaking that differ from Hollywood norms, and the figure of the auteur has often been key in positioning specific films as nonformulaic. Even if an auteur working within these fields draws on already established conventions, the peculiar ways in which he or she shapes these conventions can lead to a film being hailed as original or creative. This was certainly the case regarding Stranger Than Paradise: although 30

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it drew on conventions and tropes from popular genre forms and art cinema, it was the strikingly unusual ways Jarmusch fused these elements together that led to its critical adulation. Stranger also bears traces of some forms of older independent American films within this mix. More importantly, particularly concerning its long-term reputation, many of its elements would become linked to some characteristics that would eventually be associated with a more generic conception of American independent cinema. Art-cinema influences on Stranger Than Paradise are apparent in its slow pace and episodic narrative, main characters who lack any clear goals and remain somewhat ambiguous, Lurie’s score, and Jarmusch’s authorial presence. Although formalist definitions of art cinema have been criticized for reducing this heterogeneous category (e.g., Andrews 2013, 172–174), the features that David Bordwell and András Bálint Kovács outline as characteristics of art cinema are nevertheless generally applicable to most of the work of filmmakers who did have some influence on Jarmusch, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, and Wim Wenders. Clearly he is drawn to some of the more radical, often minimalist art-cinema tendencies from around the 1950s to the 1970s. Ozu’s influence is most evident, particularly in the long takes, distanced camera setups, avoidance of classical conventions such as shot-reverse-shot, overt transitions between scenes, and an often elliptical approach to narrative. Antonioni’s filmmaking can also be considered an important predecessor, again through extensive use of long takes as well as a focus on humans who are struggling with meaning and are often isolated and alienated. Antonioni’s characters also tend to struggle to articulate their dissatisfaction, leading to communication problems, a key aspect of Stranger Than Paradise. Bresson’s influence is most detectable at the level of acting, in particular his idea of actors as “models” 31

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who should not perform in a theatrical, overdramatic manner. The following maxim from Bresson’s book Observations on Cinematography is typical and very much applies to the way Jarmusch tends to approach acting: “Models. No ostentation. Faculty of gathering into himself, of keeping, of not letting anything get out. A certain inward configuration common to them all. Eyes” (1977, 40). Jarmusch probably read this book of maxims; certainly a number of Bresson’s ruminations seem to apply to Stranger Than Paradise and to Jarmusch’s aesthetic style more broadly. “The thing that matters,” Bresson writes, “is not what they show me but what they hide from me, above all, what they do not suspect is in them” (1977, 2, emphasis in original), a comment that neatly applies to the acting and characterization in Stranger Than Paradise, particularly regarding the characters’ lack of self-awareness. Finally, the Wenders influence is apparent not just through the personal ties he shared with Jarmusch but also in style and theme. Beyond already mentioned elements, the ambivalent fascination with American culture is a Wenders preoccupation that is particularly important to Jarmusch. Wenders’s films often present an outsider’s perspective on America, and although Jarmusch himself is American, Stranger does unroll largely from the perspective of a European outsider. Both Wenders and Jarmusch, then, not only adopt an outsider view of American culture but also fuse elements of European art cinema with aspects of popular culture. The art-film stylings of Stranger Than Paradise seem designed to reverse stereotypical associations of America and Europe. Although stylistic elements such as minimal dialogue, long takes, and washed-out, desolate landscapes are often associated with the “serious” European art film, in Stranger they are filmed in America by an American. They are thus at once reverential and parodic—inspired by particular filmmakers but also using these stylings in an almost extreme way 32

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at times, as though mocking how some people reduce art films to a schematic list of negatives (e.g., boring, depressing, spartan, etc.). Of course, the film does this in a way that attempts to reclaim the virtues of the art film, but without rejecting American filmmaking. As such, Jarmusch also drew inspiration from a number of American filmmakers. Although he was interested in both independent and Hollywood films—at least in particular Hollywood auteurs such as Nicholas Ray—independent filmmaking was the most important inspiration for him. His independence was of course in part determined by budget restraints, but it is clear that Jarmusch was also attempting to avoid a number of Hollywood conventions regardless of budget because his penchant for alternative forms of filmmaking was stronger than his interest in more popular forms of cinema; as he stated in an interview in 1989, he didn’t watch many mainstream American films, preferring art films and trash films (Rose 1989, 5). New American cinema and underground cinema are the two most important American movements whose traces can be detected within Stranger Than Paradise. “New American cinema” was the name given to a number of low-budget, feature-length films that attempted to provide something fresher and alternative to Hollywood films. It was coined by Jonas Mekas, who formed the New American Cinema Group in 1961 to encourage and promote a new form of American cinema. Films and filmmakers were associated with this group either through formal membership or through having their work singled out in the pages of the journal Film Culture, where Mekas wrote pieces such as “A Call for New Generation of Filmmakers” (1959) and “Notes on the New American Cinema” (1962). Thus, although John Cassavetes was not an official member of the group, his debut feature Shadows (1959) was singled out as representing a shining example of a new, fresh form of filmmaking and was awarded the first 33

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Film Culture Independent Film Award in 1959 (an award that was given out until 1968). Other filmmakers associated with this new cinema included Shirley Clark, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, and Richard Leacock. It soon became clear, however, that Mekas’s desire to establish a new American cinema was going to be much more difficult than he initially envisaged because of financing and distribution difficulties. Mekas would eventually establish the Filmmakers Cooperative to support and distribute smaller-scale films, a much more feasible initiative. In the process, Film Culture and Mekas shifted more toward supporting and covering avant-garde and underground films than they did low-budget features. Although Stranger Than Paradise evidences underground influences, its length and the inclusion of character and narrative align it more with the type of underground features that would be made in the late 1960s and 1970s, in particular the work of Paul Morrissey. The rough look and blank gaze typical of Morrissey’s filmmaking (following in the footsteps of his mentor, Andy Warhol) as well as the focus on hapless outsiders are characteristics that can be found in Jarmusch’s breakthrough feature. Jarmusch, though, avoids Morrissey’s sometimes campy histrionics, is formally far more controlled, and avoids the controversial sexual and narcotic content typifying such Morrissey films as Flesh (1968) and Trash (1970). The earlier new American cinema is a more prominent influence, something alluded to in the American posters for Stranger, which proclaimed it “A New American Film.” Cassavetes’s film Shadows, in particular, is a key influence (and is discussed further later in this chapter) in that Cassavetes made it on a shoestring budget without any star names (and, like Stranger, it was shot on 16-mm film), focused on beatnik characters, and deliberately tried to create a film that avoided many Hollywood conventions. Cassavetes was probably a model for Jarmusch, as he has been for many other independent 34

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filmmakers, in that he remained largely wedded to making films for artistic reasons more than for financial reasons: although he did make a couple of Hollywood films, he rejected them as compromised; and although he continued to act in Hollywood films, he tended to do this in order to give him the financial stability to make his own films without compromise. If there is a key difference between Stranger Than Paradise and the new American cinema, it is that the improvisatory and documentary tendencies of the latter did not prove so important to Jarmusch’s aesthetic: he applied a formal rigor to his films that was often absent in new American cinema (as well as in a number of underground films from the 1960s up until the early 1980s, including punk films, which are discussed further in the next section). The key point to make here is that Jarmusch’s marriage of tendencies across art-cinema, avant-garde, underground, and other independent filmmaking imbued his film with an unusual quality that was key to its standing out and becoming such a landmark film within an American independent canon. Influences are easy to detect in this film, but Jarmusch mixed aesthetic characteristics of very different types of cinema in such a peculiar manner that Stranger Than Paradise was rarely considered to be derivative. One further ingredient of this aesthetic mix was the way Jarmusch alluded to more popular genres. Due to Jarmusch’s greater interest in art and trash filmmaking, mainstream influences are not quite so overtly inscribed into the fabric of Stranger Than Paradise, but aspects of more conventional cinematic practice do nevertheless inform the film. It is their absence, however, that proves to be more important than their presence. Although one could claim that all forms of alternative films depend on the knowledge of—and absence of—mainstream norms, I would claim that Jarmusch tends deliberately to evoke particular conventions and patterns in a manner that foregrounds such absence. He does 35

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this through continually alluding to conventions only to play around with them, much as a film such as Un chien Andalou (Buñuel and Dali 1929) constantly alludes to classical narrative conventions only to stymie expectations (albeit in a very different, more confrontational manner). For example, Jarmusch employs—as is conventional in mainstream cinema— a three-act structure, but as J. J. Murphy notes, he departs from common rules outlined in numerous scriptwriting manuals (2007, 41). Whereas in a typical three-act trajectory the middle act is usually the longest, often twice the length of the first and third acts, Jarmusch instead created three acts of reasonably similar lengths (thirty-three minutes, twenty-five minutes, and twenty-six minutes, respectively), so that the middle section in his film is the shortest section. The script, as Murphy notes, is also far shorter than a typical script (2007, 31): whereas it is common to have around a page of script for each minute of film, the script for Stranger Than Paradise is only around fifty-five pages. Jarmusch alludes to and defies a number of narrative and dramatic conventions in other ways. The narrative setup of the arrival of an unwanted relative and the drama that unfolds from this setup connect the film in part with melodrama. Although in many respects the film does evade melodramatic conventions—in particular the intense emotionalism associated with that genre—it does draw on them to an extent. Jarmusch’s decision to focus on interpersonal relations and individuals who are at the whims of—yet are largely unaware of—external forces shaping them is certainly something shared by melodrama and Stranger Than Paradise. Also suggestive of melodramatic conventions is how the main characters in the film struggle to articulate how they feel, though Jarmusch shifts the tone away from the subjective and emotional onto a more distanced perspective. Kovács—who argues that melodrama is one of the traditional genres that has 36

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most influenced modernist art cinema—writes that it “has always to do with the lack or insufficiency of words and verbal expression, which is why grand gestures and music play a central role” (2007, 85). In Stranger Than Paradise, representation of individual subjectivity is avoided; even expressive gestures and musical cues typically associated with melodrama are downplayed, so that the film can be considered a dampened melodrama. A further hint of melodrama is the series of chance events that occur toward the end of the film. Eva is handed money because she is mistaken for someone else, which allows her the means to fly out of America, but it is Willie who, after going to find Eva at the airport, ends up getting on the plane that he thinks she is on. This sequence deliberately plays on how melodramas (and many other films) rely on unexpected and often miraculous events to reach a firm, usually happy conclusion. Typically, though, Jarmusch does not provide a conventional happy ending, instead concluding wryly as Willie and Eva miss out on a reunion that the narrative seems to have moved toward; closure is offered instead on a more thematic level by ending ironically with Willie, who has been repressing his Hungarian ancestry throughout the movie, going back to Hungary. The chance event leading to the conclusion of Stranger Than Paradise, in which Eva is misrecognized, also recalls the crime film. The man who hands her the money (played by graffiti artist Rammellzee) is obviously involved in some sort of shady business, possibly a drug deal. In this scene, it is as though Eva has accidentally stumbled into a different narrative, marked by its genericity, an accident that enables the main narrative in which she is centrally involved to come to a conclusion. Crime is also evident when Eva tells Willie that she stole cigarettes and in the scene where Willie and Eddie are caught cheating at cards. All three instances of crime are rendered unusually, the first two by occurring—like the 37

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majority of Willie and Eddie’s gambling—offscreen. The third instance is shown, though even here generic expectations of heated confrontation and violence are deflated when the other card players work out what is going on and react in only a lukewarm way. One of the players (played by Rockets Redglare) does react heatedly, in line with generic expectations, and tries to grapple with Willie, but the other two card players remain passive so that Eddie and Willie are able to leave without much of a fuss, and the more emotional card player berates the others for just sitting there and not sticking up for themselves. A further generic model that Jarmusch draws on in Stranger Than Paradise is the road movie. Although the allusions to melodrama and the crime film are indirect, the road movie is a more overt influence on the film, so it is no surprise that it was the genre most cited in reviews of the film. The road movie has a long cinematic history and has manifested itself across quite a range of different types of filmmaking, including lowbrow populist films such as Cannonball Run (Needham 1981)

Figure 2.1: An unnamed character played by Rammellzee mistakenly hands Eva a package of money 38

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and Road Trip (Phillips 2000) as well as artistically acclaimed cult films such as Easy Rider (Hopper 1969) and Two Lane Blacktop (Hellman 1971). And although it has been described as a genre that “catches peculiarly American dreams, tensions, and anxieties” (Cohan and Rae Hark 1997, 2), it has also appealed to art filmmakers from different countries, including Wim Wenders in films such as Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976). It is a popular generic model that nevertheless carries with it a sense of rebellion, manifest in the tradition of what Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark term the “rebel-road film” (1997, 2), and has also interested modernist art filmmakers more broadly as a type of film focused around the narrative theme of wandering or travel. In this filmmaking mode, the main characters “travel[s] around in the world most often with no specific goal. . . . The primary purpose of this genre is not to get the protagonist somewhere, but to explore the protagonist’s world with the help of a constantly changing environment” (Kovács 2007, 102). This generic mode, then, would have appealed to Jarmusch in the ways it had a marked influence on New Hollywood and European art filmmakers as a familiar generic template that opened up the opportunity to explore issues of American-ness and European-ness. It was also a suitable template through which to explore themes such as duration and boredom, which are central in Stranger Than Paradise, and to reflect Willie and Eddie’s outlaw credentials (their Beat-inspired look and refusal to engage in gainful employment).

MUSIC AND SOUND Jarmusch is a prominent example of a director whose auteur credentials are informed centrally by an interest in music. Whereas early perspectives on auteurism largely overlooked the sonic dimensions of authorial style, a growing interest in 39

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what James Wierzbicki (2012) has termed “sonic style” has emerged more recently. A key text in the development of research into music and auteurism is Claudia Gorbman’s article “Auteur Music” (2007), in which she argues that music has become an increasingly important component of the director’s stylistic arsenal. She uses the term mélomanes (music lovers) to describe a relatively new breed of directors who “treat music not as something to farm out to the composer or even to the music supervisor, but rather as a key thematic element and a marker of authorial style” (149). The growth of music as a key auteur tool is, Gorbman argues, in part a result of a number of directors growing up with popular music and in part a consequence of digital technologies that have rendered music “more accessible and malleable” (149), which cedes more creative control to directors in this area. Thus, “for many filmmakers music is a platform for the idiosyncratic expression of taste, and thus it conveys not only meaning in terms of plot and theme, but meaning as authorial signature itself” (151). Jarmusch is indeed one of the names Gorbman mentions, even though she does not look into his use of music in detail. Other scholars, however, have analyzed the influence of music on Jarmusch’s filmmaking, including Juan Suárez (2007), Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (2015), and Sara Piazza (2016). This influence not only manifests itself via the selection and use of music on the soundtrack but also permeates his films on a number of levels. In addition to hiring musicians as actors and incorporating musical themes into the content of some of his films, he has been formally and stylistically inspired by music, an influence that I consider in this section by exploring the relationship between Stranger Than Paradise and the punk and postpunk cultures that Jarmusch was immersed in at the time he was making the film as well as the formal influences

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of minimalist music, before delving into the use of sound and music on the film’s soundtrack.

Punk, Postpunk, No Wave It is crucial to mention the cultural context within which Jarmusch made Stranger Than Paradise because it influenced his approach. As noted in chapter 1, the New York downtown scene was a vibrant network of artistic cross-pollination, with many people engaged in creative activities across different media. As a member of postpunk band the Del-Byzanteens and a writer of poetry, Jarmusch very much fitted in this cross-media scene. It is no surprise, then, that music heavily influenced his films in a number of ways. Punk was a crucial impetus of the downtown cultural activities of this period. Although primarily associated with music, punk also influenced creative practice more broadly, particularly through its emphasis on widening cultural participation via DIY. Many soon considered punk music to be overly conservative in its reliance on rock-based traditions and overly commodified by an industry it initially sought to challenge. As a consequence, the term postpunk was commonly applied to music that continued to emphasize DIY approaches and antiestablishment attitudes but that challenged musical conventions to a much greater extent. I would stress, though, that it can sometimes be difficult to fully demarcate punk and postpunk because the latter is a continuation of the former. In addition, as predominantly musical terms, punk and postpunk are not so frequently applied to filmmaking. Although there have been a few studies of the notion of “punk cinema” (e.g., Thompson 2004; Rombes 2005; Barber and Sargeant 2006; Laderman 2011), forays into “postpunk cinema” have been scarce.1

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The “no wave” artistic scene is particularly relevant to Jarmusch’s development as an artist because he was an active participant in it. A downtown phenomenon of the late 1970s and early 1980s, no wave is again largely associated with music and stemmed from punk. Many no wave musicians reacted against traditional rock ’n’ roll conventions by exploring more experimental techniques such as dissonance and atonality (Masters 2007, 32). No wave was in part a deconstruction of rock’s standard lexicon and an attempt to reinvent a new musical idiom, hence the ironic play on the term new wave (which was commonly applied to the more commercial acts associated with punk). The bold “no” announced a negation of standard idioms and skills and indicated a broader social negativity underpinning the outlook of a number of no wave artists. The term no wave also referred to other artistic practices as well, including film. Filmmakers linked to no wave filmmaking include Vivienne Dick, John Lurie, Eric Mitchell, James Nares, and Amos Poe (for more on no wave filmmaking, see Benedetti 2015). In fact, despite the general lack of formal research into postpunk and cinema, no wave stands as a good example of postpunk cinema, as stressed by Jon Dale, who argues that “if post-punk had a chronologically correct visual correspondent, it was the year-zero of No Wave filmmaking in New York” (2009). Jarmusch is often connected to no wave cinema, and it is worth noting that Stranger Than Paradise did screen as part of a no wave cinema program hosted by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in 2012 alongside films such as The Blank Generation (Kral and Poe 1976), Underground USA (Mitchell 1980), and They Eat Scum (Zedd 1979). Due to the difficulty of separating punk from postpunk in any total manner, I discuss Stranger Than Paradise in relation to both concepts. As mentioned, a number of scholars have looked into the idea of punk cinema, but there is far 42

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from unity of opinion on what it is. Chris Barber and Jack Sargeant’s (2006) collection of essays on punk films, for example, tends to privilege films that engage with the punk subcultures by representing them or prominently employing punk music or both (though the collection does also focus on other ideas central to punk film, such as the filmmakers’ attitude and the film’s style). Stacy Thompson (2004, 2005) puts forward a more materialist and stricter definition of punk cinema. For Thompson, DIY ethics and resistance to corporate culture are the most crucial elements that feed into “punk cinema.” In this sense, the musical traits of speed, energy, and antiauthoritarianism on the level of a film’s aesthetic form and content are not as important as the ways in which political and economic concerns feed into the film’s form and content. A punk film should not have any connections to the major studios, and filmmakers should not need formal training and should be able to produce without prohibitive financial investments. Further, the work produced by such filmmakers should “aesthetically reflect these material concerns” (Thompson 2004, 161). Thompson also suggests that whereas punk music is typified by speed, punk films tend to slow things down in an attempt to contrast strongly with commercial cinema: “To resist the easy commodification of their films, they slow their narrative pace to a crawl, scarcely move their camera, make infrequent cuts and, in general, forego most of the techniques that would lend their films commercial viability” (2005, 25). Thompson notes Amos Poe’s film The Foreigner (1977) as a film that exemplifies such cinema. It is a low-budget work and announces itself as such in its aesthetics and more explicitly in the final credits, which state that the film was made possible by a $5,000 loan from Merchants Bank of New York. For Thompson, the film exemplifies punk filmmaking in its ignorance of mainstream conventions. Poe’s announcement 43

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that the film was made for such a low budget and his ability to complete a feature film despite his lack of professional knowledge emphasize the DIY approach. The film’s grainy look and the ways that it structurally differs from commercial features (lots of longueurs as well as an often puzzling narrative) highlight its difference from mainstream cinema. The Foreigner was often referred to as a punk film also because it in fact depicted punks in its narrative; Poe’s previous documentation of the punk scene, The Blank Generation (Kraal and Poe 1976), would have strengthened this perception. Yet for Thompson it is not so much the featuring of punks within its diegesis that is crucial to The Foreigner’s status as a punk film but rather that the scenes depicting the punks are never integrated into the film in a logical manner. Discussing one extended scene, Thompson argues that the scene’s “refusal to make sense in corporate terms opens up the possibility that the film aims at something besides profit. If Poe can ‘waste’ film . . . on a scene that neither forwards the plot nor develops characters and cannot be contained within the film’s narrative, then this is because he is not solely out to make money” (2005, 28).

Figure 2.2: Debbie Harry making a cameo appearance in Amos Poe’s The Foreigner 44

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Although I think that Thompson may underestimate how depicting punk subcultures or even being connected to them—as was the case with Jarmusch—feeds into perceptions of what constitutes a punk film, his conception of a punk film is interesting in terms of going beyond these overt surface markers and thinking about film form. Stranger Than Paradise was linked informally to punk and postpunk subcultures via the figure of Jarmusch and many of the film’s personnel, who were part of an informal network of downtown friends and artists. Jarmusch was also inspired by the tenets of DIY culture and has even noted that The Foreigner was a key film in helping him realize that “it was possible to make films, without much money and without really any expertise” (Belsito 2001, 29). Stranger Than Paradise does share qualities with The Foreigner, particularly its rough, grainy look, an interest in outsider characters, and a slowed-down pace, which, for Thompson, resists the speed of contemporary moving-image culture (such resistance may well have been appealing to Jarmusch, who has often spoken of his antipathy to MTV and a desire to go against the quick editing and glossy images that characterize it [Keogh 2001, 109]). Yet Stranger Than Paradise also differs from many other films released in the late 1970s and early 1980s that were called “punk” because Jarmusch was keen to differentiate himself from many other downtown films. He did so, first, by avoiding contemporary punk and postpunk music on the soundtrack and, second, by drawing inspiration from minimalism to a far greater extent than other downtown films of the period.

Minimalism Minimalism is a term that has been applied frequently to Jarmusch’s films, and although minimalist traits are evident in a number of downtown films, including Jarmusch’s debut 45

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Permanent Vacation, they are even more fully developed in Stranger Than Paradise. Minimalist elements in many of the punk/downtown films were confined largely to narrative and character: an aimless and often attenuated narrative drive as well as characters often inscrutably lacking psychological motivation were features most associated with minimalism. These traits are also evident within Stranger Than Paradise, but they are more formally central to it and more grounded within minimalist musical traditions. Before exploring the film in relation to minimalism, though, I need to draw attention to the divergent ways that minimalism has been applied in practice. Definitions of minimalism have often varied; arriving at a coherent and unproblematic definition is further complicated by the ways in which minimalism has been evident across a number of different artistic practices such as theater, painting, sculpture, music, and film. It is the musical manifestations of minimalism that I believe are most pertinent to an understanding of Stranger Than Paradise, though this does not discount minimalist influences from other art forms; in fact, one cannot totally separate artistic media in this way, considering that many minimalist artists worked across different media. As Pwyll ap Siôn and Tristian Evans have pointed out, minimalist music has been strongly associated with other media since its inception in the 1960s, and many minimalist composers have “worked closely with other media in order to realize their own musical aims and objectives” (2009, 672). Brendon Joseph has argued, however, that minimalism emerged “as an audio-visual movement” (2008, 54). Minimalist music was therefore importantly influenced by advances in other media, yet this does not mean that it can be reduced to a form of imitation. Siôn and Evans have elaborated further on this point: “Minimalism’s ability to be both self-sufficient and open to outside influences allowed it to become a parallel 46

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analogue to other media rather than merely imitating or reflecting them. Its aim was to set up musical equivalences with painting, sculpture, dance or film, in order to coexist with—rather than become subservient to—these forms” (2009, 674). This sense of fluidity between media indicates how certain aesthetic traits associated with minimalism can flow into different media forms, providing templates that others can take up and adapt to their own purposes. If, as Siôn and Evans propose, minimalist music took inspiration from other art forms, the manifestations of minimalism in music also fed into other modes of creative practice. It is important to note that the connection between Stranger Than Paradise and minimalism is far from arbitrary; the context Jarmusch emerged from would have facilitated in him an awareness of certain strains of minimalist art. The no wave scene itself was in part inspired by minimalism: first, it was a movement characterized by multidisciplinary work; second, some currents of no wave were specifically influenced by minimalism—figures such as Tony Conrad and Phil Niblock were actively involved in the downtown culture of the early 1980s, while artists such as Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca were extending minimalist influences into no wave music; third, both movements were attempting to alter musical vocabularies (though minimalism was engaged chiefly with classical traditions). Emerging in New York in the 1960s, minimalist music is often associated with a number of key figures, including La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. One central idea of minimalism is the reduction of the sonic palette—a tendency to work, for example, with a limited number of chords. According to Michael Nyman, this reductionism was in part a reaction against a trend toward complexity and multiplicity within experimental music up to 47

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this point. Elaborating further, he writes: “This music not only cuts down the area of sound-activity to an absolute (and absolutist) minimum, but submits the scrupulously selective, mainly tonal, material to mostly repetitive, highly disciplined procedures which are focused with an extremely fine definition” (1999, 139). Juan Suárez has examined the minimalist aesthetics of Stranger Than Paradise in some detail. He argues that Stranger Than Paradise recalls one of minimalism’s central concerns, formal reductionism, through its limited camera movement and static sequence shots, “which in painting and sculpture entailed paring down the artwork to its most basic material components—lines, surfaces, and masses that do not necessarily represent anything but simply are” (2007, 30). He claims that the film can’t be totally reduced to a minimalist aesthetic because it does represent but that this aesthetic informs the film on a formal level through “its emphasis on and the inert physical presence of the performers, and its impersonal landscapes” (30). Everything is stripped down in the film: the narrative is thin; the characters are taciturn and often inscrutable; the filmic environment consists of austere interior spaces and featureless expanses. Suárez also notes how the film’s modular structure—composed of blocks punctuated by black leader—in concert with its abrupt transitions and lack of tonal development echoes minimalist art. There is a narrative in Stranger Than Paradise, but it is buried beneath the film’s surface flatness and emerges—like the characters— both subtly and incrementally. Jarmusch does not signpost dramatic events in a conventional manner, therefore requiring audiences to attend actively to the film’s nuances. Stranger Than Paradise conforms to other precepts outlined in definitions of minimalist music. Kyle Gann describes a list of features prominent within minimalist music and claims that although no minimalist work contains all of these 48

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features, he can think of no minimalist work that does not contain any of them (2004, 300–302). The four features most relevant to Stranger Than Paradise are stasis, repetition, additive process, and audible structure. Stasis and repetition are the most frequently mentioned features of minimalist music, though both can be somewhat misleading in that they make sense only through comparison with more traditional compositional forms. So although a piece of minimalist music may seem static on an initial, cursory listen, a more concentrated hearing may reveal a great deal of sonic information but on a more gradual, incremental level (variation may arise more within notes than between them). The technique known as additive process often involves beginning a musical work with a basic, repeated pattern and gradually adding a number of subtle variations to that pattern so that a complex work slowly unfolds. An example is Terry Riley’s composition In C (1964), which begins with musicians playing a regular pulse in major C and includes fifty-three short musical phrases; the piece develops into an increasingly dense and variable sound field through gradual chord changes and through the musicians’ choosing which phrases to play and for how long, which adds a dynamic density—as well as a degree of unpredictability—to the music.2 The term audible structure refers to how the structure of a work is highlighted on that work’s surface, so that the listener is confronted with the work’s building blocks. Both stasis and repetition are important features of Stranger Than Paradise: the film features, with some notable exceptions, relatively static camera setups and long shots. Much of the camera movement is very slight, involving a number of reframing shots, with only a few shots featuring more complex and prolonged camera movements. Murphy has noted how the film actually features more static shots than moving shots (2007, 27–45): out of sixty-seven single-take 49

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shots composing the film, only thirty of them feature any camera movement. These long, often static takes, combined with the black leader interspersed between scenes and the structuring of the film into three sections of approximately similar length, create both stasis and repetition. Stasis and repetition also feature in the content of the film, specifically the lack of conventionally dramatic occurrences and the repetition of mundane actions. Additive process is evident in the film’s almost imperceptible accumulation of resonance. It begins with a very simple situation and progresses through small, mostly undramatic moments. So although the film could be considered simple on a macrolevel (narratively modest and employing a very basic set of camera setups), it also contains a great deal of nuance and complexity at a microlevel. Such overtly aimless scenes seem to be going nowhere, narratively speaking, and this aimless stasis is emphasized by the rigid camera setups and long shots. The ways in which noneventful, aimless scenes are patterned across the film also become repetitious—to the extent that different locations bleed into one another—as the drama within the film plays out in a minor rather than major scale. Finally, the film is also minimalist in terms of audible structure through the foregrounding of formal elements: the constant and unusual interruption of scenes with black leader, the repetitive setups and absence of analytical editing, and the division of the film into three sections—all work to foreground the film’s formal structure. The foregrounding of structure in Stranger Than Paradise also relates to a film movement that had links to minimalism: structural filmmaking. Jeffrey Ruggles has suggested that structuralism “brought minimalism to film and theatre” (2003), and it is clear that there were concrete links between these two movements: Tony Conrad, for example, produced music associated with minimalism and films that were often 50

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termed “structural.” Stranger Than Paradise does have some similarities to Conrad’s film The Flicker (1965), which consists largely of alternating frames of black and white in different permutations. Though Jarmusch’s film isn’t nonrepresentational like many structural films, its formal organization is rigid, and the inclusion of black leader to punctuate scenes draws attention to the film’s material in a manner similar to structural filmmaking. Whereas The Flicker uses rapid alternating patterns that produce stroboscopic effects, Stranger Than Paradise slows down the alternation of frames (black leader and filmed footage) to a crawl, which, with the addition of representational drama, produces a less-manic but still hypnotic effect—as it did for critic Bruce Bailey, who wrote how “the uncompromising realism of Jarmusch’s offbeat technique hypnotizes us into an appreciation of life in the land of the barely living” (1985). Stranger Than Paradise’s merging of minimalist and punk influences was one factor that led to its standing out in the critical landscape. These two strands were often considered antithetical. Suárez, for example, writes that many of the first wave of punk filmmakers reacted “against the dry formalism of structural cinema” and that structural film “played for punk filmmakers the role that prog rock played for punk musicians: it was the ‘established’ aesthetic that served as a foil for their own efforts” (2007, 17). Although these things are true in the main, Suárez does note that some filmmakers affiliated with punk did incorporate structural gestures into their work, giving Jarmusch and Bette Gordon as prominent examples. It was Jarmusch, however, who blended these two divergent practical and aesthetic strands in strikingly overt ways, creating a particularly distinctive film in the process. Although his previous feature Permanent Vacation, exhibited a few minimalist features, Stranger Than Paradise heightened significantly the presence of this influence. 51

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Béla and Screamin’ Jay Though musical influences permeate Stranger Than Paradise on a number of levels, the film does not feature a great deal of music on its soundtrack. “It’s surprising how ‘little’ music— in terms of length—there is in Stranger Than Paradise,” writes Sara Piazza, “especially with regard to how much it contributes to determining the film’s overall atmosphere” (2016, 115). Before discussing the specific music in the film, however, it is worth mentioning Jarmusch’s approach to the soundtrack. Piazza has argued that Jarmusch’s soundtracks are democratic in their organization of all the sonic elements involved in a film. It is common in filmmaking for the soundtrack to be organized hierarchically: sound is generally subservient to the image, and the intelligibility of speech is the most important aspect of the soundtrack, a hierarchy Michel Chion terms vococentrism (though he notes that verbocentrism might be a more accurate term) (1999, 5). Jarmusch’s approach to dialogue and vocals on the soundtrack of Stranger Than Paradise is unusual: he often uses dialogue, for example, in a poetic manner—so that speech edges closer to music by being subject to rhythmic inflections—or he has characters speaking different languages but won’t use accompanying subtitles (those viewers without the requisite language skills may thus appreciate the sonic, as opposed to semantic, properties of such dialogue). Piazza eloquently sums up Jarmusch’s approach to sound as follows: “The various types of sound matter—music, words, and noise—do not compete or relate to each other hierarchically. Instead, they form an organic albeit constructed soundscape. . . . In his films words do not dominate, music does not accompany, noise is not necessarily confined to the background; rather all these kinds of sound

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matter are interconnected, sometimes performing different functions from their usual ones in cinema” (2016, 295). The scarcity of music in Stranger Than Paradise is in line with the economic employment of sound as a whole: dialogue, too, is less frequent than is conventional, and sound effects are kept to a minimum. Like the film as a whole, the soundtrack is informed by minimalist principles: a strippedback sonic palette that actually strengthens the force of music and other sounds when they do materialize. The two main pieces of music in the film are the score provided by John Lurie and the repeated use of one music track—Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s recording “I Put a Spell on You” from 1956. Both choices were unusual among the films connected to downtown punk/postpunk filmmaking. Although John Lurie was connected to the no wave movement, his band the Lounge Lizards was far from typical in the no wave scene. The Lounge Lizards played what Lurie called “fake jazz,” a sound indebted to bebop but performed by people who were not skilled jazz musicians. And although there was an undertow of noisy dissonance to their early music, this would soon be abandoned for a more relaxed sound. As such, and bolstered by their donning of suits and ties for performances, the band was challenging audience expectations, as Michael Shore pointed out in the Soho Weekly News in August 1979: the Lounge Lizards, he stated, “appear to be self-conscious young art Punks out to (a) confound audiences at places like Hurrah or Tier 3 by playing rather straightforward electric hard bop, (b) enlighten said audiences by playing said music, or (c) both” (quoted in Masters 2007, 168). In addition to choosing an atypical no wave musician to score his film, Jarmusch also asked Lurie to create something different from his Lounge Lizards output, therefore producing a doubly contrary score congruent with how the film’s style

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was both built upon and diverged from many punk films. The Screamin’ Jay Hawkins track is a rock ’n’ roll song of the 1950s, albeit a rather unusual one. Originally intended as a conventional blues ballad, the released version was recorded while Hawkins was under the influence of alcohol and became weirder than originally planned as Hawkins performed a demented vocal over a waltz tempo. As with Lurie’s score, this track may also be considered a doubly contrary choice: it was both a slice of popular music from the 1950s rather than a contemporary punk/no wave tune and a rather eccentric and wayward example of such music. Lurie’s soundtrack and “I Put a Spell on You” perform multiple functions within Stranger Than Paradise. First, both are used in ways that are repetitious and that therefore link again to minimalism. The Hawkins track is used at three separate points in the film—another unusual tactic—while the Lurie score is stripped down and weaves in and out of the film for brief moments at the beginning or end of scenes, during which it only subtly varies or “develops.” The two pieces also serve as opposing symbols: one representing American popular culture, the other European high culture. On the one hand, they indicate broad aesthetic tendencies that feed into the film: the ways, for example, that Jarmusch draws on an international repository of both popular and high culture. On the other hand, they relate to one of the film’s themes—the demarcation between European and American identities and the negotiation of such identities via specific cultural resources. If the music operates on one level as a marker of opposites, on another level it functions ultimately to muddy such neat distinctions. As such, it is also important that neither score nor song is straightforward in terms of provenance: one is a European-style piece of music created by an American; the other is a popular American song in waltz time, which links it to European culture. 54

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The ambiguous nature of the music again chimes with the film’s overall thematic concerns. The film is, after all, about immigrants and their attempts to fit in American life. Like the pieces of music used in the film, Willie (Lurie) is American on the surface but is in fact from Hungary and tries to repress this part of his identity. Eva (Balint), having only just arrived in America, is less obviously able to pass herself off as a cultural insider like Willie, but the fact that she repeatedly plays “I Put a Spell on You” indicates that she is keen to embrace American culture and, like Willie, to assimilate. The composite effect of the music’s status and functions within the film indicates the hybrid nature of people and culture. Eva’s repeated playing of “I Put a Spell on You” establishes a clear link between her and the song. Unlike Lurie’s score, the song is used diegetically: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s track is part of the narrative—to the extent that it causes friction between Eva and Willie—but Lurie’s score more diffusely indicates underlying and (certainly in Willie’s case) unwanted facets of identity and establishes a downbeat mood. Thus, the opening shot of Stranger Than Paradise—Eva standing at the airport accompanied by overhead plane noise—ends on a segment of Lurie’s score, which continues over the simple credit sequence. The slow string melody, underpinned by a double-bass pulse, injects the scene with a serious, stark atmosphere (emphasized by the static shot lingering after Eva has absented the frame, the following minimal white-on-black credits, and the blackand-white cinematography). Jarmusch also highlighted in press releases and interviews that Lurie’s score was inspired by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, which is important because it indicates that Eva is representative of Hungarian-ness to Willie. The film score is therefore linked to Hungarian-ness and acts to reinforce a part of Willie’s identity that he is largely repressing. At this stage in the film, the score points to an interruption in Willie’s life brought about by Eva’s arrival. 55

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The next time we see Eva, she is in Manhattan, walking to Willie’s apartment. In this scene, she plays “I Put a Spell on You” for the first time. After walking into a static frame from the right, she stops, takes out a portable cassette player, and presses “play.” As the song blares out, Eva continues her walk, but now the camera moves for the first time as it tracks her movements laterally. Within a film marked by static camera setups, the camera movement here functions to highlight the importance of Eva as an animating figure. It is Eva’s arrival that leads to the film’s narrative and thematic development; without her arrival, Willie would probably be stuck in the same cyclical set of routines (mostly gambling and watching television). Although the film is largely static and uneventful, Willie does undergo a journey, both personally and literally, but this journey does not lead to personal revelation—in line with the aesthetic of the film as a whole, his personal development is subtle (he has changed a bit, but there’s no sense that he has undergone any significant transformation). The music in this walking scene also acts as a kind of propulsive force. As soon as it is played, the camera starts to move, as though stimulated by the song. Formally, this sequence is symptomatic of Jarmusch’s avoidance of traditional sonic hierarchies within filmmaking. Rather than music merely supporting or accompanying the image, here it seems to be influencing the form of the work itself, just as more abstract musical principles inform the film’s aesthetic shape. Piazza has dubbed this movement/music synthesis ambulatory music, noting that it is a trademark of Jarmusch’s filmmaking (2016, 119–122). It is a process where music and motion are inseparable and where the music itself will loosely match the rhythm of movement (movement both of characters and of the camera). Such scenes often show figures walking and, through rhythmical interlocking with the music, stand out as musical moments. Unlike more typical musical moments in 56

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films, however, which often exploit the rhythms of editing, Jarmusch creates a slower, more reflective musical pace based around lateral tracking movements. Although “I Put a Spell on You” is not used in this way subsequently, it is still associated with motion: the second time it is played with the motion of Eva herself, who within a static frame casually dances to the song; the third time with the motion of the car (Eva plays it in the car as she, Willie, and Eddie are driving to Florida). The final point regarding the use of “I Put a Spell on You” is the importance of how the song is played and by whom. It is always played by Eva on a portable cassette player (and her playing of it forms a progression—the first time she plays it while alone; the second while alone initially but then interrupted by Willie; and the third time while with Willie and Eddie—and the song plays once in each section of the film). As such, the song belongs to what Chion has termed “on-the-air” sound, a particular form of sound that is transmitted electronically. He writes that these “sounds . . . consequently are not subject to ‘natural’ mechanical laws of sound propagation”: In fact, to an ever greater degree, these sounds from television sets, clock radios, and intercoms are taking on a unique status in the films they appear in. Sometimes we hear them in sound closeup—clear and sharp, as if the film’s loudspeaker were directly plugged into the radio, telephone, or phonograph depicted on the screen. At the other extreme they can be identified in the setting by acoustical traits to produce an effect of distancing, reverb, and the particular tone color of the speakers or whatever their onscreen source is. (1994, 76) The playing of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s track three times on a portable, mono cassette recorder is indicative of the film’s 57

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lo-fi soundtrack. The quality of the sound here is contrasted to Lurie’s score, which helps to root it within the diegetic world inhabited by Willie, Eva, and Eddie. Lurie’s score can be heard much more clearly and is therefore differentiated from Hawkins’s track through audio clarity. “I Put a Spell On You” sounds much tinnier, as though emanating directly from the portable mono cassette player, and thus is marked clearly as “on-the-air” sound in contrast to the nondiegetic score. The lo-fi qualities of this song gel with the largely lo-fi sound of the film as a whole: Jarmusch chiefly relies on location sound recording, and even though some re-recorded sound was mixed in postproduction to provide consistency, the sound in Stranger Than Paradise is still somewhat rougher around the edges than is common in Hollywood productions, and background noise tends to be more “intrusive” than is conventional (N. Johnston 2014, 72). The lo-fi nature of the sound is in part related to technical issues (the filmmaker did not have the financial means to create a soundtrack on a par with a typical Hollywood soundtrack) but also is in part artistic in that the sparse nature of the soundtrack conforms to the minimalist strategies that Jarmusch has often employed throughout his oeuvre. As with his approach to the image track, Jarmusch shaped the technical limitations of raw, lo-fi recording into a deliberately sparse and aesthetically distinctive shape. The fact that “I Put a Spell on You” is played by Eva is significant. The scene where she opens her bag to take out the cassette player and then proceeds to walk the streets accompanied by the blaring song forms a striking image due to its unusualness. At the time the film was made, mobile music— although far from new—was entering a new stage due to the omnipresence of personal stereos and boomboxes. Personal stereos offered people new ways to experience their immediate environments by overwriting the external soundscape with one’s own personalized music choices. Although they 58

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often received criticism for their asocial dimensions—in particular how they cocooned listeners in their own solipsistic worlds—they were not as controversial as the boombox. Boomboxes enabled a more social form of public listening by allowing groups to play and listen to music but proved to be controversial in that they were far more intrusive to others outside the group and were considered to constitute a form of noise pollution, a criticism that led to antinoise legislation in an attempt to counter their perceived social menace. The boombox was therefore linked to new forms of musical listening as well as enmeshed within heated political debates. Joseph Schloss and Bill Bahng Boyer write: “The boombox, with its widespread adoption by consumers in the last three decades of the twentieth century[,] foregrounded the enjoyment of recorded music in public space to an unprecedented extent, making sound more visible, definitely more audible, and drawing attention to the politically charged and contested dimensions that listening often presents” (2014, 399). The “politically charged” nature of the boombox was undoubtedly heightened by the fact that it was often identified with lower-class black youths (usually male) and in particular with hip-hop culture. Hip-hop emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a new, culturally vibrant music phenomenon and offered a way for disenfranchised youth to empower themselves. The phenomenon was strong in New York, particularly in the Bronx. Because Stranger Than Paradise features a very brief appearance by graffiti artist and hip-hop performer Rammellzee, it is evident that Jarmusch was well aware of hip-hop culture at this juncture. Rammellzee had also made appearances in the seminal graffiti/hip-hop films Wild Style (Ahearn 1983) and Style Wars (Silver 1983) and was a figure who characterized the intersections between uptown hip-hop culture and downtown art/punk culture, along with 59

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better-known artists such as Fab Five Freddie and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Rammellzee also recorded, with K-Rob, the seminal rap record “Beat Bop” (1983), which was produced by Basquiat (who also designed the record cover) and featured violin played by Eszter Balint. These factors feed into Stranger Than Paradise, and black American culture—in particular hip-hop—is a kind of absent presence within the film. The film does not feature many black characters, yet the brief appearance by Rammellzee, Balint’s appearance on “Beat Bop,” and Eva’s continual playing of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on a portable cassette player allude to hip-hop and black music culture more broadly (something that Jarmusch would explore more overtly in Mystery Train, and he would draw on hip-hop more directly in Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai [1999]). Eva’s use of the portable cassette player should therefore be linked to the boombox and hip-hop culture to an extent, although Jarmusch plays around with cultural signifiers and meanings. Thus, rather than the typical black American male, we have a white European female playing music by a black artist while she is in public; rather than the extremely powerful stereo boombox, we have a small, mono cassette player; and rather than contemporary hip-hop, we have an unusual rock ’n’ roll number from the 1950s. Despite the ways that Jarmusch creates a striking inversion of aspects of boombox culture, there still exist a number of commonalities between Eva and aspects of hip-hop culture. She is poor, like many ghetto youths involved in that culture; in fact, her cassette player could be perceived as a kind of poor man’s boombox. In ways similar to her use of slang and an old rock ’n’ roll song to parade her willingness to assimilate, she uses the cassette player to replicate—in a slightly awkward manner—an aspect of American culture she is aware of. A more important similarity is the use of music as a prominent and assertive symbol of identity. Eva uses her 60

Figures 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5: Eva playing “I Put a Spell on You” at three different moments in the film

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cassette player the way individuals and groups might use a boombox to assert identity and territorialize social space. As such, the early scene in which she walks through the Lower East Side playing music provides us with an early indication of her headstrong personality; although this personality is not immediately evident in her initial interactions with Willie, it becomes more forceful throughout the film. The third time she plays the song, when she is in the car with Willie and Eddie, indicates her growing confidence. Although the first playing of it occurs before she has arrived at Willie’s apartment, the second playing occurs when she is on her own in his apartment but is interrupted by Willie when he returns home. Willie claims, “I really hate this kind of music,” and turns the cassette player off, indicating how he is in control at this point in the narrative. The third time, the song is played at a moment when Eva has gained more confidence; the fact that she plays the same song in the car with Willie (and Eddie) present demonstrates her unwillingness to be dictated to by Willie, who she knows doesn’t like the song. Fittingly, following Willie’s protest and Eddie’s support (he states that he likes the song, that it is “real driving music”), Eva, in the back seat of the car, does not turn off the song and continues to play it while she expresses her satisfaction by smiling and bopping her head.

CHARACTERIZATION AND ACTING Eva Versus the Hipsters Eva acts as the key character in Stranger Than Paradise in terms of her status as the instigator of dramatic tension and action (albeit of a minimal kind) and as a strikingly surly, unconventional female character. She is arguably the character who acts closest to a viewer surrogate, and it is important 62

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that the film opens and closes on her. When the film was made, the American independent film sector was a far cry from the force it would become in the 1990s, with only a few independent productions being picked up for theatrical distribution. Hollywood productions at the time, as they continue to do, often featured female characters who were subordinate to male characters. Jarmusch’s film goes against such conventions by presenting Eva as a character who not only drives the drama of the film but is also presented in a quite distanced manner, at least initially. Of course, the distanced presentation of characters—emphasized by the lack of close-ups and static shots—is part of the film’s aesthetic and was commented on in reviews. Yet though the distanced aesthetic never crumbles, we are invited, through subtle developments, to become involved, even invested, in the characters, which is quite a feat considering Willie and Eva are particularly sullen and withdrawn. Rather than presenting charismatic characters who get involved in a series of dramatic actions, the film gives us aimless, lethargic people who do little for long periods of the film. The film doesn’t try to impose the characters on viewers but instead requires viewers to invest in protagonists who do not reveal very much about themselves. Discussing Stranger Than Paradise, Piazza notes that Eva “does everything she can to be accepted by the male characters” (2016, 139), but I think this description overstates Eva’s determination to fit in. Eva desires to fit in to an extent, which is sometimes indicated in her demeanor when interacting with Willie, yet her eagerness to belong never comes at the expense of pleasing him at any cost. Her character remains consistently brusque and stubborn throughout the film, and she does not attempt to adapt her personality to Willie’s requirements. She does occasionally try to please him—through, for example, bringing home 63

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cigarettes—and it is clear that when Willie and Eddie turn up in Cleveland, she is pleased to see them. Yet these acts are occasional, small gestures that only subtly indicate— without fully revealing—how she feels toward Willie, and they are accompanied by a number of other acts in which she challenges Willie’s comments. The first two shots of Eva indicate independence: first, she is standing alone at the airport, and then she is walking through the Lower East Side playing music. Both of these shots are from low camera positions, which render her quite imposing, and she is tracing her way from the airport to Willie’s flat in a purposeful manner. The third time we see her, though, she is inside for the first time, having just knocked on Willie’s door. The camera is now looking down on her as, to her left, Willie towers over her. Willie at first dominates the conversation and tells her to stop speaking Hungarian before ordering her to come in, which she does so only tentatively. If Willie’s first encounter with Eva suggests that he is going to dominate her for the rest of the film, the previous

Figure 2.6: Eva is genuinely happy that Willie and Eddie have come to visit her in Cleveland 64

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Figure 2.7: Eva arrives at Willie’s apartment

presentations of her as a strong, independent figure indicate that he will not get his way so easily. By occasionally challenging Willie’s opinions and actions, Eva critiques the rather shallow nature of his existence. Both Willie and Eddie are hipsters, concerned as they are with wearing particular clothes, having specific tastes, and avoiding the workaday, nine-to-five routine. In this regard, they share commonalities with characters from another seminal American independent production, John Cassavetes’s film Shadows (1959). Shadows includes hipster characters, Ben and his friends, who dig jazz and hang around bars and cafes. Both films, at least to an extent, critique the depicted hipsters, though in very different ways. In Shadows, a tension between creativity and compromise runs through the film, a theme that contrasts with Ben’s hipster lifestyle: unlike his brother, Hugh—who is a jazz performer, albeit compromised—Ben doesn’t engage in any artistic pursuits and is criticized by David at a party for just hanging out “all day in cafes doing nothing, repeating the same routine.” Although Hugh’s artistic sacrifices cause him obvious 65

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anguish, his final appearance in the film nevertheless shows him defiant as he and manager Rupert commit themselves to putting on a good show, no matter how compromised. In contrast, Ben ends the film walking alone after telling his friends, “I don’t know why we do this, man,” and states, “I’m not going to do it anymore.” Hipster is a term that has undergone a number of changes across different social and cultural contexts. In the America of the 1940s, it referred to a black subcultural figure, as Anatole Broyard outlined in his essay “A Portrait of the Hipster” (1948), but it was soon being applied to white bohemians who were inspired by black culture (in particular jazz music and jive talk) and who withdrew from social norms and expectations by living life in the moment (Greif 2010, 21). Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” (1957) remains one of the most cited pieces on the hipster from this era, its title indicating the importance of black culture. In Shadows, Ben is, of course, black, though like his sister, Lelia, he is lighter in skin tone than his brother, Hugh, and can pass himself off as white; and it is notable that he hangs out with white friends, who fill up time by drinking, talking, womanizing, and listening to live music. If the liminal space between black and white enabled Cassavetes to probe the intersections between these cultures—in particular the rise in the prominence of the hipster—Stranger Than Paradise embeds traces of black culture in a less-direct fashion. Just as Willie has negated his family roots, his hipster identity is at a remove from its prior manifestations. Although Ben is a poseur, he is nevertheless a poseur who is passionately interested in music and keen to live an intense life. Willie and Eddie are hipster characters who are drained of energy, who have no seeming interest in culture, and whose lives seem far from intense even if they do live hand to mouth.

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Broyard noted the importance of jive to hipsters and how it was connected to relieving anxiety: “Since articulateness is a condition for, if not actually a cause of, anxiety, the hipster relieved his anxiety by disarticulating himself. He cut the world down to size—reduced it to a small stage with a few props and a curtain of jive. In a vocabulary of a dozen verbs, adjectives, and nouns he could describe everything” (1948, 721). Inarticulacy in Stranger Than Paradise is heightened to unusual proportions; Jarmusch permeates already sparse dialogue with pauses and muffled speech. As Jennifer O’Meara has noted, Jarmusch tends to record sound in perspective, which, though more “realistic” than conventional sound recording, is a method not commonly employed because it can reduce clarity (2015, 58). This technique thus stands out as unusual among vococentric conventions, though it gels with the film’s overall theme of miscommunication and inarticulacy. Willie’s inarticulacy is also highlighted by his tendency to make nonsemantic sounds, so that, as O’Meara points out, “his mouth becomes an instrument that randomly whistles, hisses, and clicks” (58). His inarticulacy is also foregrounded when he attempts to tell Eva a joke and then forgets the details of the joke, resulting in an awkward grappling for words. Such inarticulacy is indicative of Jarmusch’s characters across his oeuvre and relates to his interest in the sonic—as opposed to the semantic—properties of communication. It also links Willie to a broader tradition of hipsterism: in the absence of Willie showing any interest in cultural pursuits, these musical sounds—the whistling, clicking, and hissing— are a spectral echo of the hipsters of the 1950s and their association with music. This inarticulacy may also be related to education: Jarmusch has spoken about how Willie and Eddie are supposed to be from a working-class background but don’t belong to a working-class milieu (Jacobson 2001, 15).

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They are outsiders and hustlers, two other facets that link them to hipster culture. At one stage in the film, Willie and Eddie discuss the awful possibilities of working in a factory for a living, a scene that stresses that they have consciously decided to opt out of “normal” life. Eva, however, punctures Willie’s conceited posturing, which is in part informed by the suppression of his Hungarian identity—even his name, “Willie,” is made up to make him appear more American—his birth name is Béla (another sly reference to Bartok). Although Willie is mostly dominant in the first section of the film, Eva gradually asserts herself as the film progresses. Yet she appears to gain strength and win over Willie not by consistently trying to please him but mostly through her intractability. That both characters are stubborn and taciturn contributes to the film’s lack of dialogue and conventional dramatic development. Their relationship in the film is in one sense a war of attrition marked by sulking, mumbling, miscommunication, and lassitude—ingredients not often highlighted in mainstream filmmaking. Yet Jarmusch avoids having one character emerge totally dominant in this situation: Willie does not, for example, radically change his character or open up to Eva. Instead, their relations progress almost imperceptibly, and their attitudes toward one another are never fully revealed but rather are hinted at indirectly through gestures, actions, and speech. Eva often challenges Willie’s statements or actions, in contrast to Willie’s friend Eddie, who is content to play second fiddle to him. Willie is therefore used to getting his own way and being boss, which adds to the tension between him and Eva caused by her arrival. She represents for Willie at first an unwanted guest—an intrusion upon his solipsistic existence—as well as a distasteful reminder of his Hungarian roots. That she isn’t willing to kowtow to him further exacerbates such tensions. Her intractability is foregrounded 68

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in the first section of the film, as is Willie’s hostility to her presence. He doesn’t do anything to welcome her or entertain her; in fact, he leaves her on her own when he goes out gambling with Eddie, despite Eddie’s suggestion that she go with them. He seems to show concern for her only when she goes out alone, warning her not to go to certain areas because it is dangerous, a patronizing comment that Eva treats with due contempt. This undercurrent of female independence in the face of a male relative’s concern once again thematically echoes Shadows, particularly when Hugh concernedly urges Leila to catch a cab home and not walk home alone at night. Over the course of the first section of Stranger Than Paradise, though, Willie does gradually alter his behavior toward Eva. At first, he is openly hostile to her after she answers his phone when he is asleep, moaning at her, “Don’t answer the fucking phone.” He initially just wants her to stay out of his way, but because he is overprotective of her, he also doesn’t want her to go out either; he wants her to remain locked up inside and to keep quiet. Eva, though, bored, isolated, and reserved, does occasionally interact with him, and these conversations further deepen their relationship despite the absence of overt dialogue and gestures indicating their feelings. And it does seem that Willie warms to her because she is independent and doesn’t willingly go along with everything he says. When he is eating a TV dinner, she asks him, “Why are they called ‘TV dinners’? It doesn’t even look like meat,” to which Willie replies, “This is the way we eat in America.” (Willie commonly uses his knowledge of living in America to exert his power in the relationship, but usually to no effect.) In a later scene, she asks him questions about American football as they watch a game on television, and again he gets annoyed at her repeated questions, to which she responds, “I think this is a really stupid game.” 69

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It is when Eva returns home while Willie is playing solitaire that a significant change occurs in their relationship. She returns with some food, including a TV dinner, and a box of cigarettes. Her ability to get hold of items useful to him, especially the fact that she stole the goods, shows a side of her to Willie that brings out the first moment of warmth between them. Willie states, “You’re alright, kid, I think. I think you’re alright,” and shakes her hand, a gesture followed by them smiling. Yet although this moment certainly indicates a shift in their relations, it does not herald a total redirection in tone. In the next scene, Willie returns home as Eva is listening to her tape, and he turns it off, negating one of her symbols of America, telling her that he “hate[s] this kind of music.” She curtly rebuts his criticism of the music, stating—in the most memorable line of the film—“It’s Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and he’s a wild man, so bug off,” in response to which he laughs, slightly incredulously. Eva here uses her ideas about America (Screamin’ Jay and the slang phrase “bug off”) to assert herself, which Willie undermines even though he finds her Americanisms amusing. Willie’s softening toward Eva is further indicated when he brings her a dress, but this gesture is still linked to his need to control. He wants her to look a certain way, but she once again refuses to be molded by him in this manner, bluntly stating that she thinks the dress is ugly. Willie once again appeals to the need to fit in, telling her, “You come here, you should dress like people dress here.” When Eva later leaves to go to visit Aunt Lotte, she is wearing the dress, a gesture that initially implies she has been persuaded by Willie. Once beyond the apartment block, though, she changes into her old clothes and throws the dress in the trash. In the last scene of the first section, Eddie is visiting Willie after seeing Eva on the street when he is on his way to Willie’s. Willie asks Eddie if she is wearing the dress he brought her, and Eddie, lying, answers affirmatively. It seems 70

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Figure 2.8: Eva, having left Willie’s apartment, immediately takes off the dress he bought her and puts it in the litter bin

that if there is one thing that Eva has learned from Willie, it is the skills of deception, which she uses to her advantage. Yet she is still as stubborn and independent as when she arrived. Willie, meanwhile, smiles to himself, deluded into thinking Eva has acquiesced to his desires. The pattern set in this first section generally continues throughout the next two sections. Although Eva is visibly happy that Willie and Eddie visit her in Cleveland—even saying “I’m so happy to see you” when they first reencounter each other in the hot-dog restaurant—this happiness doesn’t last very long before Willie lapses into old habits. Eva expresses her dissatisfaction as their trip to Florida turns sour. First, Willie makes her hide in the car when they book a motel room in order to avoid paying for three people. Second, he tries to make her sleep in the foldout bed, but she flat out refuses (unsurprisingly, Eddie ends up sleeping in it). Then she wakes up to find Willie and Eddie have left—to bet on dogs, though they fail to leave a note—and strongly demonstrates her dissatisfaction, shouting, “Fuck!” when she realizes what has 71

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happened, sarcastically adding, “That’s nice,” before angrily exclaiming, “I can’t fucking believe it!” Her much-anticipated trip to Florida has turned out as glum as her visits to New York and Cleveland. Her disappointment at this sense of déjà vu is acknowledged as soon as she enters the motel room and mumbles how it “looks familiar.” The pattern of repeated actions and grimly similar landscapes, in addition to the formal structuring of the film, relates in part to the themes of stubbornness and routine that run through it. Stranger Than Paradise largely revolves around mundane activities not commonly considered to be entertaining—such as watching television, sitting around, driving—a focus that exemplifies the characters’ listlessness and obstinacy. Willie, Eva, and Aunt Lotte are presented as stubborn beings stuck in their ways, an attribute of their personalities that stymies conventional dramatic progression. This characteristic is overtly pointed to when Willie mentions to Eva how Aunt Lotte is always speaking in Hungarian, to which she replies, “She’s so stubborn, it’s funny, like the rest of the family,” which is one of the few moments in the film when any character demonstrates self-awareness. On the main, though, there is an absence of soul searching, which leads to a repetition of behavioral gestures and activities, a process that for Eva becomes increasingly exasperating. As such, an exaggerated deus ex machina—in which Eva is mistaken for someone else and given a package of money—allows the film to conclude on a more conventional note, albeit with a twist. After discovering that Eva has left, Willie and Eddie rush to the airport so that Willie can prevent her from getting on a plane. But Eva doesn’t take the only plane leaving to Europe on that day because it is bound for Budapest. Ironically, Willie ends up on the plane, presumably heading back to the place of his birth, which he has spent most of the movie attempting to deny.

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Cult Characters Eva, Willie, and Eddie can be considered cult characters not just because they are the main protagonists in a cult film but also because they are embodied by actors with cult credentials. Eszter Balint, John Lurie, and Richard Edson are cult personalities for their small-scale reputations in independent/underground culture, having been involved in a number of hip, niche cultural practices. In this respect, they firmly fit into one particular conception of cult, the idea of more underground, obscure cultural agents and activities that represent something alternative to the mainstream. As Kate Egan and Sarah Thomas have argued, Establishing cult meaning and status is heavily dependent on the ability to differentiate something (a text, an image, an attitude, a viewing practice, an ideological position, etc.) from the mainstream, and ascribing a sense of the authentic is often central to the process. . . . [T]he authenticity of cult lies in the identification of alternative, subcultural texts and tastes which have been marginalized through “normal” boundaries of commodification and dominant cultural practices. (2013, 8, emphasis in original) Balint, Edson, and Lurie, to differing degrees, fit into this notion of cult subcultural alternative to the mainstream, which aligns with the profile of Jarmusch himself and of the film as a whole. Both Jarmusch and Lurie forged careers within the independent creative spheres and are often lauded for steadfastly avoiding commercial compromise. Lurie continued to make music and to act, and he even created his own cult

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television series, Fishing with John (IFC/Bravo 1991), until he was afflicted with chronic Lyme disease, which left him unable to play music (he has subsequently devoted himself to painting). Richard Edson is less a cult figure than Lurie, but he certainly has cult credentials beyond his appearance in Stranger Than Paradise. As the original drummer of Sonic Youth and a drummer of no wave band KONK, he carries with him the kudos of his downtown past. Since his appearance in Jarmusch’s film, he has gone on to develop a career as a character actor and has appeared in numerous films, including Platoon (Stone 1986), Do the Right Thing (Lee 1989), and Strange Days (Bigelow 1996). Balint was a member of the Squat Theater, an experimental troupe that was founded in Budapest and relocated to New York. Her father, Stephan Balint, was one of the cofounders of this now legendary ensemble that often staged performances in the storefront of its location on Twenty-Third Street so that the street itself became a backdrop to the theatrical performance. The location has also become legendary because it was a venue for live music performances and film screenings, and Balint would often act as DJ. Her cult credentials became further strengthened with the passing of time: as a skilled violinist, she began to record and perform live music from the late 1990s under her own name as well as to play with other respected musicians such as Marc Ribot and members of Swans (she guested on their album The Seer [2012]), adding to her noted performance on Rammellzee and K-Rob’s recording “Beat Bop.” She also sporadically continued acting in film and television, often in small parts, appearing in films such as The Linguini Incident (Shepard 1991), Shadows and Fog (Allen 1991), and Trees Lounge (Buscemi 1996). Most relevantly here, though, is her most recent return to the screen—eighteen years after her previous screen role—in comedian Louis C.K.’s television series Louie (FX 2010–). 74

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All the principal actors in Stranger Than Paradise, then, can be connected to cult via their embeddedness within particular cultural networks, specifically the postpunk/no wave movement, which has become one of the most recognized— and arguably romanticized—historical underground scenes. In this respect, James Lyons’s notion of a “constellation of cult stardom” (2013, 165) is useful to probe these actors’ cult stature. Discussing the independent mumblecore movement that emerged in the early 2000s, he examines how directors of these movies would often appear as actors in their own and others’ work, which constituted “a clustering and patterning of networked individuals who are constituted as intertextually and paratextually legible through their connectivity” (165). He argues that such networking leads to cultification of certain figures when fans utilize inside knowledge to track connections and links, which can generate a “special and privileged relationship to texts” (165). We can think of many people involved in Stranger Than Paradise as connected in this manner and can track their involvement in noted cultural texts, in particular downtown/underground film, music, and fine art. One mainstream film in particular, Desperately Seeking Susan (Seidelman 1985), bears traces of this cultural constellation, featuring as it does brief appearances by Stranger cast members Richard Edson, John Lurie, and Rockets Redglare. When Edson appears next to Madonna by the paper-vending machine in one scene in Desperately Seeking Susan, he looks and acts like Eddie, suggesting this is the same character in a different filmic environment. Director Susan Seidelman herself came from the punk underground and had previously directed the independent punk film Smithereens (1982). Desperately Seeking Susan marks a point where the filmic new wave briefly entered the mainstream; indeed, a figure who had emerged from New York’s musical underground, Madonna, was in the film and went 75

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Figure 2.9: Richard Edson makes a brief appearance in Desperately Seeking Susan

further than previous underground breakout stars such as Debbie Harry in achieving worldwide megastardom. Although the presence of recognizable “hipster” figures associated with underground culture fed into Stranger Than Paradise’s cult status, the increasingly prominent profile of the film over the years has fed back into perceptions of its actors, further enhancing their cult status. This is particularly the case for Balint, who was not as publicly known—even within niche circles—as either Lurie or Edson when the film was released. Her appearance in Stranger Than Paradise, however, extended her public profile, which led to more information being circulated about her past with the Squat Theater, biographical details that enhanced her status as an underground/ downtown icon. Her subsequent activities have just about kept her in the (niche) public eye and attest to her status as an uncompromising artist, but her appearance in Stranger Than Paradise has remained her most recognized achievement for many cult-film followers. In 2014, Balint appeared in six episodes of comedian Louis C.K.’s television series Louie, which raised her public profile once again. Her character, Amia, and 76

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the story that develops around Louie and Amia seem to be directly influenced by Eva and Stranger Than Paradise, as a number of writers have mentioned (Byrne 2014; Shetty 2014; Waters 2014). Like both Eva and Balint, Amia is Hungarian and becomes the focus of Louie’s romantic attentions, just as Eva does for Willie (Willie of course doesn’t admit it, whereas Louie openly declares his feelings for Amia). Louis C.K. himself is of Hungarian heritage, which also links him to Willie, and the cultural barriers separating Willie and Eva are also recalled in the series but this time in more exaggerated fashion because Amia can barely speak any English. Amia also has to leave for Hungary by the end of these episodes, which again recalls the end of Stranger Than Paradise, though of course Eva doesn’t actually return to Hungary. Balint stated that though she never discussed it directly with Louis C.K., she thought that “part of his inspiration in hiring me, and part of his aesthetic of some of that show, is that there’s conscious or unconscious hints or homage to ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ ” (Byrne 2014). Louis C.K.’s debut feature film, Tomorrow Night (1998), and his earlier short films, such as Ice Cream (1993),

Figure 2.10: Ezster Balint plays Amia in Louie (season 4, 2014) 77

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have also been linked to Jarmusch’s aesthetic (Jones 2014), which further strengthens the view that his six-episode story arc involving Balint as Amia is a direct homage to Stranger Than Paradise. One other character in the film who needs to be discussed a little further is Aunt Lotte, played by Cecillia Stark. Although not a cult figure in the sense that Balint, Lurie, and Edson can be considered, Stark certainly did gain a great deal of attention for her brief appearance in the film. Aunt Lotte is a headstrong, charismatic character who likes to play cards and cook. She frequently speaks Hungarian, much to the dismay of Willie, who keeps snapping at her to speak English. She is like Willie, though, in terms of her overprotectiveness of the independent Eva. Her lines within the film are not extensive but memorable, including her proudly exclaiming, “I am the winner,” in her thick accent to Eddie as she beats him at cards and then launching into a tirade of abuse in Hungarian at Willie as he drives off with Eva and Eddie to Florida. Notably, a few English phrases are interspersed in her rant, including

Figure 2.11: Aunt Lotte walks away from Eddie, Eva, and Willie as they leave for Florida 78

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“good for nothing” and, most memorably as she turns toward the camera and walks back to her door, “you son of a bitch.” Although she is related to Willie and Eva and shares their stubbornness, in other ways she functions as more of a counterpoint to Eddie—albeit far less hapless—in that her appearances within the film are often pointedly comic. Whereas Eva and Willie’s interactions do sometimes result in humorous moments, their sullen and taciturn characteristics tend to render such comedy bone dry. Eddie’s combined enthusiasm and dimness provide the more marked moments of comic relief in the film, supplemented by Aunt Lotte’s brief yet charismatic appearance. As such, it is perhaps no surprise that Eddie seems to forge a bond with Aunt Lotte in the film by playing cards with her and seems more interested in doing this than in going out with Eva and Willie.

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3 SUBSEQUENT RECEPTION

JARMUSCH: THE COOL AUTEUR As a surprise breakout feature, Stranger Than Paradise generated significant publicity for Jarmusch. In interviews that appeared after the release of the film as well as in the subsequent stream of profiles and reviews of his films, he was firmly being presented as an auteur figure. Unsurprisingly, this auteur status has annealed since the release of his second feature, and in this chapter I briefly consider how subsequent coverage of him over time has fed back into the status of Stranger Than Paradise. Before looking at Jarmusch through the lens of cult authorship, though, it is important to establish differences and overlaps between different types of auteurism, specifically cult auteurism. Authorship within cinema has historically been linked to the elevation of film as an artistic medium, as it has done within many other artistic disciplines. Although the location of film authorship across a range of films—including commercial and avant-garde films—has occurred throughout much of film history, the development of the medium historically has led to its becoming more generally accepted as an art form, 80

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and, as such, there has been a proliferation of directors who are considered authors (or auteurs). The phenomenon of auteurism in particular witnessed the extension of film authors across works that were previously not considered worthy of consecration. Auteurism is often used more broadly as a term to indicate film authorship, but it of course arose out of specific views toward cinematic art that discovered values within works that had hitherto been regarded as mass entertainment. Previous to auteurism, some Hollywood directors stood out as important artists—such as D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin—but they were exceptions who had an unusual amount of creative input within Hollywood productions: they produced, directed, wrote, edited, and created music for their films. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, cinematic art was more likely to be located within the international “art film,” a body of films often connected to auteur figures and held up as exemplars of serious art. These films usually stood in contrast to Hollywood and showed that films could be serious artistic products. Auteurism, of course, extended this conception of authorship to many Hollywood filmmakers who had not previously been considered serious artists. Although auteurism would soon become an established—though sometimes controversial—method of evaluating films, it was at first a rather cultist activity in the sense that it was challenging more traditional ideas of film art. It was intertwined with some American intellectuals’ broader acceptance of mass culture in the late 1950s and the 1960s (Baumann 2007) and was cultist in the sense of finding value in objects that had not been considered artistic and in generally challenging more accepted modes of aesthetic appreciation. Greg Taylor has written that “as a key instance of downward straddling, cultism assails normative taste distinctions by refusing suitable taste objects, instead seeking out inappropriate objects of a 81

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lower taste culture, or from the lower recesses of one’s own taste culture” (1999, 32). As I have noted elsewhere (Sexton 2014), many auteurists were attacked for obsessing over a cult of personality and for expending time on praising movies without much artistic merit. Over time, however, auteurism became more established; even if some of the underpinning theories may have been challenged, the idea of locating artistic value through an authorial lens is now prevalent across many areas of film culture. David Andrews has argued how the location of auteurs has now expanded into other forms of cinema—including commercial films and cult films—and is often used to make claims for artistic value: “Because auteurism is one of art cinema’s most basic building blocks, scholars may use its distinctive rhetorics as tools with which to identify artcinema vehicles in cult areas, where auteurs are just as plentiful as they are in more traditional contexts” (2013, 37). Ernest Mathijs and I (Mathijs and Sexton 2011) have also noted how auteurism is prevalent within the field of cult cinema and that cultist approaches to valuing authors overlap with more traditional modes of evaluation. Cultism often entails the blending of more established methods for detecting artistic worth with other, less legitimately sanctified approaches to discovering value within films; by relying on yet deviating from established traditional approaches, cultism has been one area where the location of artistic value in film has expanded beyond the more traditional notions of “art cinema.” As Andrews has argued, there are different types of art cinema, from the more traditional “legitimate” art film to the “illegitimate” or “quasi-legitimate” art film located within more popular genres such as horror and pornography. Some of these illegitimate or quasi-legitimate “exemplars later secure individual acceptance in legitimate spheres, but most never do; and in any case, their status remains qualified pending the acceptance of the original areas as legitimate by the wider 82

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culture” (2013, 29). Later in his book Theorizing Art Cinemas, Andrews discusses what he terms “cult-art” films, in which artistic and cultic values coexist. He notes different kinds of “cult-art” film: for example, he distinguishes between types of cult-art movies that may move from illegitimate to more legitimate channels in gaining their art status and types whose art status is qualified by cultism. Among the first type are films by filmmakers who may have started out by being embraced by subcultural groups but then gain interest from more legitimate institutions (examples include Dario Argento and Roger Corman); among the latter type are films by filmmakers who have been hailed in legitimate channels but who are subsequently subject to additional attention from cultists— such as Stanley Kubrick—or films by art auteurs that feature content strongly associated with low modes of cinema, such as the exploitation film, which qualifies their “art” status (Andrews notes Lars von Trier’s film Antichrist [2009] as an example) (2013, 102–113). Jarmusch should be considered both a cult auteur and an art auteur. From Stranger Than Paradise on in his career, it is arguable that he has straddled the borders separating these modes, though in a way that is rather unusual in that his art status is secure, so he can’t really be considered an illegitimate or a quasi-legitimate director. From the success of this film on, his films have often circulated in the more established artistic festivals rather than in the popular genre festivals more associated with cult cinema, and he has been covered prominently and often favorably in more art-focused publications. So why, one may ask, is he even referred to—as he is often—as a cult director? One core reason is his association with cultish figures and institutions and his background in the downtown scene of the early 1980s. Jarmusch started off by creating art—music and film—within this context, so this background has managed to stay with him (his 83

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link with the downtown underground and postpunk is still often mentioned) and has imbued his subsequent persona and films with a cultish aura. In this sense, he had built up cultist credentials prior to his validation as an art filmmaker, and journalists frequently picked up on these cultist credentials at the time Stranger Than Paradise was released, and he became a kind of poster boy for a new mode of American cinema. Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that after Stranger was released, Jarmusch was “at the height of arthouse fashion” and that the “aura of hip, glamorous downtown Manhattan culture . . . seemed to follow him everywhere,” so that he became “the chief means of the media in glamorising and indeed ‘selling’ the American independent cinema from the mid-80s onwards” (2000, 12). A cultic aura may have slightly preceded Jarmusch’s art-auteur status, but these twin sets of values often developed in tandem, which explains in part why he is quite an unusual cult director: his art and cult credentials do not often come into conflict with one another. Thus, although he was established within the more conventional, “legitimate” channels associated with art cinema, many articles would still emphasize his cult/cool credentials. Sometimes these credentials would be brazenly announced in headlines, such as “Too Cool for Words” (Rolling Stone [Homes 1986]) and “The Chronicle of Cool” (the Guardian [Goldfarb 1987]), with many articles over the years stressing how hip and cool he is and noting how he is a cult director. Jarmusch therefore became an acclaimed art-house director while continuing to enjoy a cool, cultish aura far from common among serious art-house auteurs. His background, appearance, and cultural tastes and preferences—particularly manifested via music—have since the release of Stranger Than Paradise continued to inform his reception: articles have often noted his “cool” tastes, appearance (slim build, white hair, dark clothing), and demeanor (laconic). Although 84

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Jarmusch-focused pieces frequently make such comments, his artistic credentials tend to attract more attention. Depictions of him thus emphasize his surface style, as exemplified through the concept of cool, but they also delve beyond such surfaces to reveal an “authentic” artist who cannot be reduced to the mere whims of fashion. Likewise, Jarmusch’s films tend to gel with his persona: his films, for example, are notable for a number of tropes and techniques that may prove pleasurable on a stylistic level but link to the thematic and formal preoccupations of a “serious” director. He bridges hipster style with deeply serious thematic and formal concerns. In this sense, he has to be distinguished as a specific type of hipster: not a slave to fashion who will follow the latest trends but a more “authentic” artist-hipster whose cool credentials are not tied to the changing nature of cultural trends. Thus, Neil Norman could claim in 1997 that Jarmusch was both “deeply unfashionable” and the “epitome of cool!” Although his appearance and demeanor are marked out as cool, his films—because they may require multiple viewings to fully appreciate and are often slow and elliptical—are considered “unfashionable.” Such comments should be related to Jarmusch’s indebtedness to art cinema and, more importantly, related to his stubborn, independent streak. I have previously argued (Sexton 2012), discussing actress Chloë Sevigny, that the combination of integrity and coolness can be particularly cultist. Stretching back to earlier hipster figures such as the Beats, coolness can be considered historically related to cultism in its mixture of solipsism and rebellion and in the placement of external reality into blocks of good and bad. As noted in chapter 2, Jarmusch draws primarily upon an earlier mode of hipsterism in his own life and work. Coolness today can still function in this way, but it is a concept that has increasingly infiltrated the mainstream, becoming, in Dick Pountain and David Robins’s words, the “dominant ethic of late 85

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consumer capitalism” (2000, 28). As such and in line with the increased fragmentation of the consumer marketplace into specialized niches, perceptions of coolness are bound to be contested because they are negotiated according to differing tastes and values. Degrees to which coolness is considered to be authentic or not are also important: if an artist is seen as adopting a cool posture in a manner that is considered “fake,” for instance, this appearance can negatively affect his or her status. “Inauthentic cool” is, therefore, a constructed judgment that is often tied with commercial concerns—that is, the idea that a team of promoters might be encouraging an artist to present himself or herself in a certain manner will probably work against that person’s gaining a cult status (though there are no absolute guarantees). Cool cult status is often reserved for those whose coolness is considered less constructed by others for commercial reasons and more an indication of how a person “really is.” This position need not necessarily indicate a belief that each person has an essence—though it may do so—but can exist as a position that identifies authentic/inauthentic and true/fake as relative tendencies that may be judged according to context and history. Thus, the fact that Jarmusch has managed to avoid working directly for Hollywood studios and has produced a coherent, identifiable oeuvre can be used to make a claim for his “authenticity.” This does not necessarily mean that he can be divorced from commercial concerns completely, but by comparing his career with that of others and his films with others emerging in similar contexts, we can claim that he has managed to ward off excessive commercial compromise and therefore has retained artistic integrity. Jarmusch’s interest in music is another facet of his working identity that undoubtedly imbues his profile with a cool, cultish aura. Because he often draws on a range of distinctive music from artists who often have a cult fan following, and because 86

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music is so central to his films—in the sense that music influences the form and content of his films (as discussed in the previous chapter)—he has often appealed to music fans and has been covered in a range of music publications. It is important that a great deal of the reporting on Jarmusch has appeared in more “alternative” music magazines over the years, including the now defunct Melody Maker and New Musical Express in the United Kingdom and Dazed and Confused and Spin in the United States. More recently, a number of music-based online sites have also covered Jarmusch prominently, including Pitchfork, which published a “Jim Jarmusch Mixtape” feature in 2014, including in it a number of key music clips from his films with accompanying text. In the introduction to the piece, Calum Marsh writes: “Jim Jarmusch is one of the most important figures in American independent cinema, but in a sense his legacy belongs as much to the world of music as it does to film” (2014). This is a key point in his cultism: he is a director often loved by a number of music fans and is often considered one of the most important music-oriented directors. There are a number of articles on Jarmusch and music, including a series of small articles by one of the most renowned contemporary music writers, Simon Reynolds (see, e.g., Reynolds 2009). Since the rise of streaming media, such articles often provide links to film clips or music tracks, allowing new fans to explore and discover Jarmusch’s work from a musical angle. In addition to published articles on Jarmusch’s music and the links they provide, fans also make Jarmusch-inspired mix tapes, which they upload to sites such as Spotify, YouTube, and Mixcloud. As if in reaction to this musical interest, Jarmusch has recently started to return to music, working with lutist Jozef van Wissem on two albums—Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity (2012) and The Mystery of Heaven (2012)—and forming his own band, Sqürl (with Carter Logan and Shane 87

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Stoneback), which has released four EPs and a live album and has provided soundtrack material for his films The Limits of Control (2009), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), and Paterson (2016).1

A SEMINAL AMERICAN INDEPENDENT FILM Jarmusch has maintained a dual cult/art-house reputation because of his position within the field of American independent cinema. As noted in chapter 1, Stranger Than Paradise is now seen as an important, landmark film. At the time of its release, it was hailed as marking a fresh stage in independent filmmaking, and over time it has become increasingly canonized as a seminal American independent film. Since the early 1980s, American independent filmmaking has expanded considerably; despite the many changes it has gone through, the period of growth in the early 1980s is often considered central to its “story” and as marking the beginning of a new phase of American indies (which, despite drastic changes over time, forms a continuum with present-day American independent cinema). One particularly notable development of American independent cinema over the past three decades is how it has become increasingly commercialized, with many so-called indie pictures being produced by major companies. The commercialization of the independent film sector led to some debates over whether particular “indie” films are authentically independent and to an increasing tendency for critics and audiences to categorize such films as either “true” or “fake” indies (Newman 2011, 224–226). Jarmusch’s status with respect to this debate has only increased, though, because throughout his career he has remained wedded to making films independently, retaining as much artistic control as possible (in most instances maintaining control of negatives and having final cut), not making films for big Hollywood studios, 88

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and making films that bear the traces of an auteur who places artistic integrity above commercial interests. In the 1980s, independent feature films released theatrically in the United States were more associated with marginal, arthouse films than they would be in the following decades. Justin Wyatt (1998), Geoff King (2005), Yannis Tzioumakis (2006), and Alisa Perren (2012) have noted how the increased involvement of Hollywood studios in “independent” filmmaking led to shifts in the sector: higher budgets, increased involvement of film stars, and the production of more genre-based films reflected this changing climate, so that smaller independent films—in particular those that were more difficult to sell for reasons such as budget, pace, lack of stars—now found it more difficult to find a place within the exhibition circuit and thus to get noticed. Wyatt (1998) argues that the 1990s saw “major independent” companies such as Miramax and New Line affiliate with major Hollywood companies and thus begin to dominate the marketplace, leaving nonaffiliated independent producers to compete against specialty “indie” divisions of the major studios. Perren argues that Miramax was one of the main drivers behind a more commercially oriented mode of American independent cinema and that by the turn of the millennium “each major studio had developed at least one division modeled largely on Miramax’s production and distribution strategies. This move signaled a major structural transformation, as indie divisions became the primary means through which conglomerates financed, produced, and distributed a diverse range of niche-oriented films” (2012, 4). Unsurprisingly, this period saw the release of a number of more commercially oriented “independent” films into theaters. Although films in the more art-house-oriented mode of independent filmmaking continued to be made, the 1990s saw a wave of independent films linked to a “cinema of cool.” Perren notes that Pulp Fiction 89

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(Tarantino 1994) was a particularly important film in this regard: made on a high budget, featuring a number of recognizable star names, engaging with a number of “low”-genre films (particularly from exploitation cinema), and being produced by Miramax, which at the time was owned by Disney, it was a film that stretched the limits of the definition of an “independent” film. The fact that it was commonly designated an independent movie demonstrated how the types of films discursively privileged as “indie” were also shifting. Perren argues that many independents released in the 1980s not only had a lower budget but also often demonstrated influences from punk, avant-garde, European new wave, and New Hollywood cinema; they rarely conformed to standard genre conventions and were characterized regularly by minimalism, long takes, limited editing, and a gritty look. In contrast, the most privileged so-called indie films of the 1990s were more commercially oriented and more influenced by pop culture— particularly in the form of exploitation cinema, pulp novels, comics, and American crime films—often self-consciously so through the incorporation of intertextual references. There was also an increased emphasis on crime, violence, and sex as well as a firmer adherence to standard generic frameworks; also common was a more “flashy” stylistic repertoire, including pacey editing and often memorable pop soundtracks (Perren 2012, 94–98). Although the reasons behind these shifts were largely industrial—including the trend of opening these privileged indie films widely in theaters—Perren also notes a generational difference: many directors emerging in the indie scene of the 1990s were from Generation X and engaged increasingly with popular culture (2012, 98). Stranger Than Paradise has remained an important film within this context—and Jarmusch an important director— largely because it is both predictive of a number of directions that such cinema would take but also because it still 90

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stands apart from some of the more commercially oriented industrial and aesthetic tendencies of American independent cinema. The film does conform most heavily to the common characteristics Perren (2012) identifies for the American independent feature of the 1980s: in fact, it exemplifies the idea of independence more than any other film through its long takes; its minimalist, punk, new wave influences; its predominant use of long takes; and its “gritty” look. Yet though Perren argues that the typical characteristics of features from the 1990s are very different from the characteristics of independent films of the previous decade, Stranger Than Paradise can also be linked to some of these later features and considered, to some extent, as influential on this new phase of American independent filmmaking. The film is certainly easy to differentiate from the kinds of later films Perren discusses—the films made by Tarantino and his imitators but also films such as Clerks (Smith 1994), The Usual Suspects (Singer 1995), and Swingers (Lyman 1996)—particularly through its more solid rootedness in the avant-garde as opposed to pop culture and its grittier appearance, which is at odds with the more glossy productions that characterize the later cinema of cool (though Clerks is an exception in this sense). The playful, intertextual engagement with popular culture is already apparent in Stranger Than Paradise, as is the gamelike nature of film form that Perren (2012) notes is common in the cinema of cool and that Michael Newman has written about in more detail (2011, 34–42). Jarmusch’s gamelike approach to genre, however, is subtler and more elusive than the approach taken in the later cinema of cool. Whereas many of the later independent features would work within a particular popular-genre format—the crime film, for example—Jarmusch’s films tend to mix up genres in a slightly more unusual manner. Both approaches rely on knowledge of genre for audiences to understand deviations 91

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from generic conventions, but Jarmusch’s films arguably rely on more esoteric cinephilic knowledge and are therefore more likely to alienate audiences unfamiliar with the generic conventions being reworked or tweaked. It is also the case that Jarmusch has generally drawn on a different range of films, mixing up high and low art forms, but he has drawn on the “high” more regularly than on the “low,” whereas the cinema of cool tends to draw on low culture to a greater degree. For Jarmusch, working in the early 1980s, his low-culture references came largely from older B movies, pulp novels, and music. His cinematic preferences were to some extent influenced by the years that he spent in Paris, where he attended the famed Cinémathèque française and was exposed to a range of classical Hollywood films and B movies as well as to a number of art films. The cinema-of-cool directors, as Perren (2012) has noted, are a different generation who grew up with video culture. In contrast to the types of popular films Jarmusch was interested in, these newer filmmakers were often influenced—and this is the case for Tarantino in particular—by exploitation cinemas and frequently drew on the high sexual and violent content predominant across a high number of such films. Jarmusch has tended to avoid sensationalism, and, despite his claims to like art and trash films (J. Johnston 2011), he hasn’t evidenced a great deal of passion for exploitation cinema (and, indeed, when Eddie, Eva, Willie, and Eva’s date watch a kung fu film, we are not shown any of the film but only hear the soundtrack as the camera remains fixed on their unengaged reactions). It’s clear, then, that although Jarmusch did predict the cinema of cool to some extent, his filmmaking can be differentiated from the films of such cinema. Jarmusch’s subsequent career has seen him follow Stranger Than Paradise with a very consistent body of work. This consistency has not only strengthened his status as an auteur among many critics but also heightened his position 92

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as authentic independent director. His debut feature and the films that he made afterward can be held up as particularly influential on the subsequent development of areas of independent production but can also be differentiated from them as being less compromised. Jarmusch has managed to retain a great deal of directorial control over his films in a climate where such control has become more and more difficult to achieve due to increased commercial constraints. So even though Stranger Than Paradise was a low-budget “underground” film that made an overground impact disproportionate to its modest origins, Jarmusch hasn’t moved away from the style of this film in particularly significant ways (though he has made some modest changes). One of his most memorable tussles came with Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, which was distributing his feature Dead Man (1995) in the United States. Jarmusch agreed to trim fourteen minutes from the version of the film screened at Cannes, but he would not allow this version to be tampered with any further, much to Weinstein’s displeasure (Rosenbaum 2000, 16). Jarmusch’s stubborn refusal to cede to Weinstein’s request famously led to the release of Dead Man without much fanfare. It also cemented Jarmusch’s status as an uncompromising director. Despite his refusal to work within the typical constraints of Hollywood production, there is a sense in which Jarmusch’s avoidance of excessive commercial constraints has been exaggerated in order to emphasize his independence—an exaggeration symptomatic of a romanticist tendency within much journalistic discourse and among fans. Certainly, we can see the result of commercial pressures apparent within the progression of his career: the increasing inclusion of stars and other recognizable professional actors within his films; increased budgets and a less-gritty look to his films; firmer engagement with generic frameworks—particularly in Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of Samurai, and Only Lovers Left Alive—though 93

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he has continued to play around with generic formulae and expectations. The music soundtracks to his films, meanwhile, have arguably been increasingly organized with a view to commercial considerations—hence, for Only Lovers Left Alive not only was a soundtrack album released (by trendy indie organization All Tomorrow’s Parties’ record arm, ATP Recordings, which also released two EPs by Jarmusch’s band Sqürl), but Jarmusch and other acts who play music in the film also performed live for a selection of preview screenings of the film. These choices are responses to the commercial landscape within which he works, but they are quite modest commercial concessions. The fact that Jarmusch has managed to keep making films quite regularly outside of Hollywood’s orbit—he has released fourteen features in his career, including two documentaries (Year of the Horse [1997] and Gimme Danger [2016])—demonstrates his independence. Although he has made some small commercial concessions, they have never prompted accusations that he has sold out. In fact, in contrast to the commercial development of indie cinema in the United States, he stands out as a particularly principled director and a model of artistic authenticity.

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4 STATUS AS A CULT FILM

As mentioned previously, Stranger Than Paradise is not a typical cult film. Although more recent studies in cult cinema have stressed its complex nature and argued that there are different kinds of cult films (Hills 2011; Mathijs and Sexton 2011; Andrews 2013), Stranger Than Paradise still stands as a kind of cult outlier. In more recent years, there has been a large rise in the academic study of media fans; not all such material directly relates to cult, but a substantial proportion does, and this has had the effect of more closely aligning cult films (and other cult media) with intense, dedicated fandom. Of course, intense fandom was linked with cult films as far back as the 1970s, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sherman 1975) in particular becoming an exemplary cult film in its attraction of repeat viewers, who would often dress up and create a participatory performance within cinemas. Repeat viewing was also important for establishing the long runs of a number of midnight-movie hits that would be termed “cult,” such as El Topo (Jodorowsky 1970) and Pink Flamingos (Waters 1975). Both intense fandom and repeat viewing still feed into notions of cult cinema despite drastic changes in film culture over subsequent years. Fan studies tend to focus on 95

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visible types of fandom, which is understandable because the more visible fans are—whether proclaiming their fandom via clothing, purchasing or producing artifacts related to their object of fandom, or setting up sites and networks devoted to discussing their fandom—the easier we can detect and research them. And because a large corpus of such fandom is organized around “fantastic” film and television (largely science fiction, horror, and fantasy), these genres have become most privileged within discussions of cult media. This emphasis has been strengthened further by the rise of fantastic film festivals, which are commonly referred to as “cult festivals” and opposed to more prestigious “art-film” festivals. Cultism, at least as conceived by Greg Taylor (1999), shares with much fan studies research a desire to level the cultural playing field and to defend what may have previously been defined as trashy or worthless. Mark Duffett has noted that the tradition of fan studies comes out of a need to “represent fandom in a positive light” (2013, 24). Because the broad area of fantastic media was previously linked—with some exceptions—to low culture, then it is perhaps no surprise that fantastic media has occupied such a prominent place in cultmedia research in more recent years. Such conceptions of cult media are not invalid, but they do tend to marginalize other types of cult films. Certainly, a different approach to cult cinema focuses more on reclaiming trashy exploitation films, a reclamation that includes but is not limited to the idea of “badfilm” (Sconce 1995; Hunter 2013). Such approaches tend to fall into two main modes: one seriously reclaiming the value of exploitation films previously considered trash and the other more focused on finding unintentional hilarity within the “badfilm.” Stranger Than Paradise does not, however, fit such conceptions of cult. It was, as noted, well received critically and was thus not a critical failure resurrected and revalued by its audience. This film, along with most of 96

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Jarmusch’s work, also does not belong to the category of “fantastic filmmaking,” nor can one find a glut of visible fan activities related to the film. It is evident that there are a number of fans of the film and of Jarmusch, and they publicly express their admiration for his work and discuss it. Such activity, though, is more difficult to detect than is common because the average Jarmusch fan is, quite neatly in accordance with the persona of the director himself and with the nature of his films, rather modest about expressing his or her fandom. Just as a typical Jarmusch film does not impose its meanings on viewers with overt signposting, so it is common for Jarmusch fans not to spread evidence of their commitment across networked media. Instead, one has to search more carefully to find such evidence: although a few fan sites post information about the director and links to articles and reviews, and a few modest Facebook fan pages exist, it is more common to find Jarmusch fandom in comments made on the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) site and a number of other message boards, largely discussing aspects of his films and recommending other films to users, or in the posting of Jarmusch-inspired playlists on music platforms. Such unassuming fandom isn’t easy to research for obvious reasons and therefore often falls outside the boundaries of fan studies. The film also does not have the transgressive and excessive aspects of films marked as cult, such as shocking content. However, it can be considered excessive and transgressive on an aesthetic level in that its formal experimentation is particularly unconventional, although not extreme in the sense of providing over-the-top levels of stylistic prowess or excessive amounts of gore. Instead, the film is extreme in its minimalist avoidance of aesthetic norms. And although this aspect of the film does draw it close to other films and directors who have regularly been labeled as cult—such as Warhol 97

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and Morrissey—it is still distinctive in its avoidance of sexual, violent, and drug-related imagery. If in Morrissey’s trash trilogy the characters are similarly attenuated, this blankness is counterpoised against sexual behavior and narcotic consumption. In Stranger Than Paradise, the most extravagant behaviors the characters indulge in are gambling and smoking cigarettes. Considering that the film came out of New York’s downtown, underground culture, this puritanical streak was a rather radical gesture at the time, going against the controversial imagery prevalent in underground pictures and mounting a challenge to audiences via completely different aesthetic strategies. The film’s links to the underground do, however, connect it to a number of cult midnight movies from the 1970s. Although it does not share these films’ transgressiveness on the level of content, it does share other qualities with them. It was a low-budget independent film focused on marginal characters who don’t neatly conform to social norms. It was intertextual and hybrid in nature, playing around as it did with different generic templates and alluding to other films. Heightened intertextuality has been associated with cult films at least as far back as Umberto Eco’s (1986) essay on Casablanca and has continued to remain an important touchstone as a textual route through which viewers can make connections to other works and, in the process, display their cultural capital (Mathijs and Sexton 2011, 7). Likewise, marginality has historically been linked with many cult films, both in terms of their marginal status (in particular their distance from mainstream culture) and in terms of the characters represented onscreen, both criteria that Stranger Than Paradise meets. J. P. Telotte (1991) has argued that many midnight movies offered audiences the chance to experience and express difference. Stranger Than Paradise did this through its production status, characters, and offbeat aesthetic. Yet although such 98

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elements align the film with a number of midnight movies, its sense of aesthetic difference was more reliant on restraint and minimalism than was common: in place of the surreal imagery of films by Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch and of the marked camp of films by John Waters and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Stranger Than Paradise offered an experience in alterity that was different. It was much more influenced by a tradition of dry absurdism than by Dada and surrealism and depicted anomic characters who are as washed out as the film’s muted palette. If many of the midnight movies of the 1970s reflected a sense of cultural confusion—countercultural dreams mixed with cynical disillusion—then Stranger Than Paradise marked an end point to this tradition. Coming after the heyday of the midnight-movie phenomenon but also enjoying some midnight screenings, it can in hindsight be considered a disillusioned reflection of Reaganism as well as an aesthetic relative of the midnight movie of the 1970s. This combination is fitting in the sense that it was in this period that the midnight movie was being superseded by video as the privileged site of communal viewing. Such links to some typical staples of midnight programming—as outlined in chapter 1—certainly contributed to the cult status of Stranger Than Paradise, but equally important to such status was its freshness, the sense that it was pointing to new pathways in filmmaking. Enjoying early critical acclaim, the film has only grown in stature due to subsequent developments in independent filmmaking. Released during a period when a new spate of American independent films was being screened in theaters, it has become canonical. It has endured more than other independent films released around this period, with the possible exceptions of Blood Simple (Coen 1984) and She’s Gotta Have It (Lee 1986). It is notable that all these films were features made by directors who would go on to enjoy a profile of critical 99

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acclaim. The intertwining of a film with an auteur’s profile is one way in which the film can remain lodged within cultural memory. This is one reason why Stranger Than Paradise has maintained culturally visibility. Its status is further heightened because it can be considered a prescient film that, along with Jarmusch’s other work, can be linked to later trends in indie filmmaking, such as “smart cinema,” and in art cinema, such as “slow cinema.” Jeffrey Sconce (2002) first identified the category “smart cinema” to describe a range of films emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s and coming mostly from directors who belong to Generation X (see also Perkins 2012). Although many elements of “smart cinema” can be linked to that generation, they can also be detected in some of Jarmusch’s works. Of the five smart-cinema characteristics Sconce lists, four of them can be applied to Stranger Than Paradise (and to other Jarmusch films): the cultivation of a “blank” style and incongruous narration; a fascination with “synchronicity” as a principle of narrative organization; a related thematic interest in random fate; and a recurring interest in the politics of taste, consumerism, and identity (2002, 359). These elements may play out differently in Jarmusch’s film than in the later smartfilm cycle—certainly in Stranger some of the elements may be more muted than they would become—but the distanced, observational aesthetic as well as the structural interest in narrative form would become important to smart films, even if such films would not follow the more overtly experimental form of Stranger. Slow cinema is a relatively recent mode of filmmaking characterized by long takes, austere mise-en-scène, slow camera movements, and a distanced observational mode. Although it is often linked to older filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, Ira Jaffe has argued that slow cinema is less melodramatic in nature than such predecessors 100

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and that its characters are flatter, “affect-less” (2014, 2). Jarmusch is in many ways distinctive among the names often mentioned as exponents of slow cinema, such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Béla Tarr, and Pedro Costa, in that his films are generally more drily comic and adopt an ironic perspective more frequently than other slow films. Yet Jaffe does name Jarmusch as a director whose films exemplify slow cinema in that they have “a minimalist, slow-movie aesthetic, evident in their slow pace and spare plot, their empty moments and spaces, their economy of words and gestures, and their resistance to what Jarmusch once termed ‘over-blown action scenes’ and ‘overly dramatic scenes’ ” (2014, 15). Stranger Than Paradise is thus a film that crosses a number of categories: underground feature, art film, American independent film, smart film, slow film, and, of course, cult film. Some of these categories complement each other, but others coexist less smoothly. Cult cinema is often considered to exist outside of more official canons and critical acclaim, but this isn’t always true: there have been many films and film directors whose status has been linked to both more official critical acclaim and cultist obsession. Stanley Kubrick is a good example of such a director: acclaimed and canonized, he is also subject to obsessive fandom—as demonstrated in the documentary Room 237 (Ascher 2012)—and in this sense is subject to different types of appreciation. Although it is more common to think of cult films as being critical or commercial flops (or both) that then build up a devoted audience, this is far from being the only way in which a film can gain cult status. The enduring status of Stranger Than Paradise is intertwined with the subsequent career of Jarmusch himself. The film would arguably have continued to garner interest and build status anyway, but because it is linked to the larger oeuvre of a director who has worked outside of Hollywood and 101

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forged a distinctive cinematic voice, its status has grown. Jarmusch’s films after Stranger Than Paradise were often positively received but not to the same extent. There was a sense among some critics that each subsequent film was repeating stylistic tics, and some lamented what they considered the lack of depth to his work (e.g., Rosenbaum 2000, 11). Some critics also decried what they considered to be Jarmusch’s hipster “posturing” as an aesthetic weakness: for example, in his review of Mystery Train David Denby argued that “one feels Jarmusch has pushed hipsterism and cool about as far as they can go, and that isn’t nearly far enough” (1989, 122), and such critical objections were heightened following the release of his next feature, Night on Earth, in 1991. In some quarters, then, Jarmusch’s cool status and reputation were beginning to be taken to task, and his observational and dry aesthetic was beginning to be questioned. Dead Man, however, changed this trend: although it initially received quite a few negative reviews and was a commercial disappointment, some viewers saw it as marking a new phase in Jarmusch’s filmmaking in that it probed more deeply into serious themes, in this case Native American history. Even though the film was marked by some typical Jarmuschian traits—the dry humor tinged with irony, the filmic pace and rhythmic punctuations—it was also considered to be a development as opposed to mere repetition. Since Dead Man was released, and alongside the changes in both the independent and Hollywood sectors (which have converged to some extent), his films have received varying press, but his status is now secure in that he is admired by both critics and audiences. Jarmusch is now almost an elder statesman of indie filmmaking: a guarantor of quality, a stubbornly insistent director, a man who does not compromise lightly. In contrast to the more commercialized indie films being produced more recently, his work can be considered a more authentic 102

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independent alternative, but Jarmusch himself can also be contrasted favorably to other more established and uncompromising auteurs through his hip status—via his links, for example, to a number of music artists and to the downtown, underground culture. No director, of course, is embraced by everybody, though, and Jarmusch does still provoke negative reactions, many of which describe him as a hipster posturer who makes arch films without much substance (see, e.g., Allan 2016 for a more recent critique along these lines). Just as Jarmusch avoided typical underground tropes in making Stranger Than Paradise, he also—as noted—was careful not to include contemporary punk and postpunk music of the time, so that the film did not become quickly dated. This avoidance may well have aided its longevity, though of course a number of other factors—including those noted in the previous chapter—have also fed into its lasting popularity. Some cult films may endure by transcending the time and place of their initial production origins—that is, by gaining the status of a “timeless” movie—but others seem to attract further cult attachments because they are so redolent of a different time and place, which can produce nostalgic cults. Even films that don’t attempt to signpost the cultural contexts within which they were made, such as Stranger Than Paradise, cannot completely avoid including such signposts, and so part of the continued resonance of Jarmusch’s film since the time of its release up to the current day is related to the context in which it was made. Although for most part this context informs the film more firmly on the extratextual level, it only heightens the knowledge needed to explore the film as a symptom of downtown culture in the early 1980s, which, as mentioned, has become legendary. Cultists with appropriate knowledge can then map aspects of the film to the culture: the input and appearance of Lurie, Balint, Edson, Driver, DiCillo, and Rammellzee feed into elements of downtown culture, 103

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as does Jarmusch himself. Further, the film can now act as a historical portal and may be considered nostalgic cult. In viewing it, people may gain pleasure in escaping the present and experiencing the past, whether that past be a period of American independent cinema before it became subject to increasingly commercialized forces or a supposed halcyon era before Manhattan became gentrified, when it was dangerous yet culturally vital. Finally, the film can be considered a musical cult film. This status was not evident on its release but has grown over time in line with Jarmusch’s evolving oeuvre. Sara Piazza calls Jarmusch a “hipster-artisan” because of his interest and activity in the fields of literature and music (2016, 77), which strongly influence his approach to filmmaking. Ever since he played music in the postpunk bank the Del-Byzanteens, it is clear that his fascination with music has continued to inform his filmmaking. After Stranger Than Paradise, he continued to produce distinctive musical soundtracks for his films and to hire musicians to act in his films (for instance, John Lurie, Tom Waits, Joe Strummer, Iggy Pop, Jack White and Meg White of the White Stripes, RZA [Robert Fitzgerald Diggs], and GZA [Gary Grice]). Instead of turning to soundtrack specialists, Jarmusch has attained the services of musicians he respects, such as Lurie, Waits, Neil Young, and RZA. The soundtracks to his films are often very different from other film soundtracks in terms of genre and theme: Mystery Train was defined by its rock ’n’ roll and blues flavor; Dead Man by its ragged, strippeddown country feel; Ghost Dog by RZA’s skeletal hip-hop beats; Broken Flowers (2005) by the prevalent accompaniment of Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz; The Limits of Control and Only Lovers Left Alive largely by drone rock; and his latest feature Paterson by cool, ambient music. As mentioned in chapter 3, this musical distinctiveness has led to Jarmusch’s films gaining a reputation for being touchstones in the vague category 104

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of “music cinema” or “sonic cinema.” Though not defined explicitly in online discussions, this category merely seems to denote any film that provides musical pleasures and that idiosyncratically integrates music and visuals. Music cinema also provides gateways to new musical discoveries, and because Jarmusch often combines well-known with lesser-known artists and is generally considered within broad indie and alternative music communities as having “good taste,” he is often respected as a type of musical guide. Jarmusch tends to like music that is respected within indie music cultures, but his taste is broad, and he likes and uses music that lies outside the indie or independent orbit. Neil Young and Tom Waits are artists who have recorded for many years and often for major studios, but they are nevertheless highly respected and influential within indie communities and have reputations for being fiercely independent. Likewise, the Wu-Tang Clan are hip-hop artists who appeal to many within the indie community; hence, many Wu-Tang-affiliated artists play indie festivals such as All Tomorrow’s Parties. At the same time, these broad musical tastes have allowed Jarmusch to reach other musical communities, including hip-hop fans (it is also notable that he provided narration for the album Wu-Tang Clan Meets the Indie Culture [2005]). His increased reputation for being a music-oriented film director should also be linked to changes in musical niches and tastes over the past twenty years. Having emerged from a musical context where experimentation and genre mixing was rife, the indie music scene arguably became increasingly ghettoized in the mid-1980s to the mid1990s, with various modes of white guitar music prevalent in it (Hesmondhalgh 1999). More recently, however, there has been a greater sense of generic interplay between different forms of music as well as a broader interest in different types of music among listeners. Jarmusch, with his interest in different modes of “black” and “white” music and in a range of 105

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different styles, may well have presaged the move toward greater musical hybridity and a broader tolerance for different kinds of music. As well as referring to Jarmusch as a “hipster-artisan,” Piazza also notes how Klaus Walter has criticized him for “hipster-casting,” which Walter sees as linked to Jarmusch’s “white Negro” complex (2016, 154–156). This criticism seems overly harsh: Jarmusch displays what has influenced him from both black and white cultures, and if his white characters sometimes take on inflections considered typical of black Americans, I would posit that they are not made to do so uncritically (hence, Mystery Train’s critique of Elvis as exploiting black culture and the “Twins” segment of Coffee and Cigarettes [2004]). Rather, Jarmusch demonstrates how black culture has informed broader culture, including his own creative tastes. Piazza also takes issue with Walter’s contention that Jarmusch’s “hipster-casting” is part of a conscious strategy and argues rather that it is linked to his love for music and his background in music culture. Although I largely agree with Piazza’s argument here, there does seem to be a sense in which this musical dimension of Jarmusch’s filmmaking is now being more fully exploited in the marketing of his films. As mentioned, Only Lovers Left Alive was promoted heavily via its music through special promotional screenings where music performances occurred and a soundtrack album was released by prominent former indie organization All Tomorrow’s Parties. Indie music audiences include, as I have noted, a number of Jarmusch fans, and so the promotional campaign for and soundtrack of Only Lovers Left Alive deliberately courted this constituency. Yet I would not concede that this campaign is evidence that Jarmusch has sold out: he of course has to take into account financial and marketing issues in order to keep making films, even though he is not the kind of person who will generally highlight commercial considerations. 106

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He still remains, particularly in contrast to a number of filmmakers negotiating today’s commercialized filmmaking landscape, relatively uncompromising. And it is notable that he, along with his band Sqürl, played on the soundtrack to Only Lovers Left Alive and performed at screenings of it, having returned to making music after releasing two records with Jozef van Wissem. In this sense, his promotional activities can also be linked to his personal, creative passion for playing and appreciating music. Jarmusch’s growing status as a music-oriented film director is another cult credential that can now frame Stranger Than Paradise in that the film can be read in terms of its use of music, its music-influenced aesthetics, and its casting of musicians. At the same time, Stranger Than Paradise can be read in contrast to later Jarmusch work and differentiated by its rough, lo-fi, and sparing deployment of music, a testament to the film’s low budget and humble origins.1 Although Jarmusch has remained wedded to “marginal” filmmaking and has continued to enjoy a mostly favorable critical profile, his subsequent films are nevertheless slightly more polished than Stranger Than Paradise, a development that reflects back on his breakthrough feature and singles out Stranger Than Paradise as a particular outsider film that has had an impact on the broader cultural terrain and has continued to be fondly considered by various audiences in unanticipated ways.

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1. PRODUCTION AND INITIAL RECEPTION 1 2

The Forum section of the Berlinale—short for “International Forum of New Cinema”—was a showcase for daring work by young artists. In addition to Down by Law, these five films are Mystery Train, Dead Man, Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, and a segment of the compendium film Coffee and Cigarettes.

2. FILM ANALYSIS 1

2

There have been a few published discussions of “postpunk cinema,” but it seems at present a rather inchoate term. Critic Scout Tafoya (2015) has published a “post-punk cinema manifesto” in which he makes a claim for this mode, though I have not yet found any other sustained discussion on this subject. In this sense, In C does not totally do away with indeterminacy, but its openness is nevertheless restricted by the composition (i.e., it is structured to an extent).

3. SUBSEQUENT RECEPTION 1

Sqürl was originally called Bad Rabbit, which was the name the band used to record material for The Limits of Control, but soon 109

3. SUBSEQ UENT RECEPT IO N

changed its name. At the time of writing, the band consists of Jarmusch and Logan.

4. STATUS AS A CULT FILM 1

With Paterson, though, Jarmusch did return to a more minimal use of music in his filmmaking.

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Tafoya, Scott. 2015. “The Post-punk Cinema Manifesto.” Keyframe, September 10. https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/the-post-punk-cinema -manifesto. Taylor, Greg. 1999. Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Telotte, J. P. 1991. “Beyond All Reason: The Nature of the Cult.” In The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason, edited by J. P. Telotte, 5–17. Austin: University of Texas Press. Thanouli, Eleftheria. 2009. “ ‘Art Cinema’ Narration: Breaking Down a Wayward Paradigm.” Scope 14. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope /documents/2009/june-2009/thanouli.pdf. Thompson, Stacy. 2004. Punk Productions: Unfinished Business. Albany: State University of New York Press. ——. 2005. “Punk Cinema.” In New Punk Cinema, edited by Nicholas Rombes, 21–38. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tzioumakis, Yannis. 2006. American Independent Cinema: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Van Gelder, Lawrence. 1984. “Stranger Than Paradise: Its Story Could Be a Movie.” New York Times, October 21. Waller, Gregory A. 1991. “Midnight Movies, 1980–1985: A Market Study.” In The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason, edited by J. P. Telotte, 167–186. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wasser, Frederick. 2001. Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR. Austin: University of Texas Press. Waters, Jodi. 2014. “Who Plays Amia on Louie? A Kickass Violinist, That’s Who.” Bustle, May 27. http://www.bustle.com/articles/25773 -who-plays-amia-on-louie-a-kickass-violinist-thats-who. Webster, Dan. 1985. “Stranger Than Paradise.” Spokane Daily Chronicle, April 13. Wierzbicki, James. 2012. “Sonic Style in Cinema.” In Music, Sound, and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema, edited by James Wierzbicki, 1–14. New York: Routledge. Wyatt, Justin. 1998. “The Formation of the ‘Major Independent’: Miramax, New Line, and the New Hollywood.” In Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Steve Neale and Murray Smith, 74–90. London: Routledge.

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INDEX

absurdism, 99 Aguirre, Wrath of God, 11 Alice in the Cities, 19, 39 All Tomorrow’s Parties, 4, 105 American independent cinema, 5, 29–31, 84, 87, 88–94,104 Andrews, David, 5, 31, 82, 83, 95 Antichrist, 83 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 31, 100 Apocalypse Now, 11 Argento, Dario, 83 art cinema/art film, 4, 9, 25, 29–34, 37, 39, 81, 82–85, 92, 96, 100, 101 Astatke, Mulatu, 104 auteurism, 39, 40, 80–82

Bartók, Béla, 55, 68 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 60 BBC2, 3, 5 “Beat Bop,” 60, 74 Benigni, Roberto, 7 Benson, Sheila, 22 Bergman, Ingmar, 100 Blair Witch Project, The, 13 Blank Generation, The, 42, 44 Blob, The, 9 Blood Simple, 99 boombox, 58–62 Bordwell, David, 29, 31 Boyer, Bill Bahng, 59 Branca, Glenn, 47 Bresson, Robert, 31–2 Broyard, Anatole, 66–67 Burden of Dreams, 11

B movies, 92 badfilm, 96 Bailey, Bruce, 51 Balint, Eszter, 6, 15, 16, 55, 60, 73, 74, 76–78,103 Balint, Stephan, 74 Barber, Chris, 43 Bartel, Paul, 15

C.K., Louis, 74, 76–77 Canby, Vincent, 21, 22 Cannes film festival, 19, 20, 21, 93 Cannonball Run, 38 Carnival of Souls, 9 Casablanca, 98 119

INDEX

Cassavetes, John, 33, 34, 65, 66 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, 101 Channel 4, 5 Chaplin, Charlie, 81 Chatham, Rhys, 47 Chion, Michel, 52, 57 Cinema Studio, New York, 21 Cinémathèque française, 92 Clark, Shirley, 34 Clerks, 13, 91 Coffee and Cigarettes, 106, 109n2 (chap. 1) Conrad, Tony, 47, 50, 51 coolness, 84–87, 88–92, 102 Corman, Roger, 83 Costa, Pedro, 101 Cox, Alex, 4, 19 crime film, 37, 38, 90, 91 Criterion (company), 8, 9

Egan, Kate, 4, 13, 73 El Topo, 3, 95 Equinox, 9 Eraserhead, 25, 26 Evans, Tristan, 46–47 Evil Dead, The, 12 Fab Five Freddie, 60 Facebook, 97 Film Culture, 33, 34 Filmmakers Cooperative, 34 Fishing with John, 74 Flesh, 34 Flicker, The, 51 Foreigner, The, 43–45 Gann, Kyle, 48 Generation X, 90, 100 Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, 60, 93, 104, 109n2 (chap. 1) Gimme Danger, 94 Gorbman, Claudia, 40 Greenberg, Joshua, 2 Griffith, D.W., 81 GZA, 104

Dada, 99 Dazed and Confused (publication), 87 Dead Man, 93, 102, 104, 109n2 (chap. 1) Del-Byzanteens, 17, 14 Denby, David, 102 Desperately Seeking Susan, 75, 76 DiCillo, Tom, 6, 16, 103 Dick, Vivienne, 42 DIY (do-it-yourself), 16–18, 41, 43–45 Do the Right Thing, 74 Down by Law, 6, 7, 9, 19, 109n2 (chap. 1) Duffett, Mark, 96

Harry, Debbie, 44, 76 Hausu, 9 Hawkins, Screamin’ Jay, 15, 53–60, 70 Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker ’s Apocalypse, 11 hip-hop, 59–60, 104, 105 hipsters, 65–68, 76, 85, 102, 103, 104, 106 Hoberman, J., 24, 25 Huillet, Daniéle, 14

Easy Rider, 39 Ebert, Roger, 22 Eco, Umberto, 98 Edson, Richard, 6, 7, 15, 16, 73–76, 78, 103

“I Put a Spell on You,” 15, 53–60, 61 Ice Cream, 77 IMDB (Internet Movie Database), 97

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INDEX

Jaffe, Ira, 100, 101 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 3, 95, 99 Joseph, Brendon, 46

mix tapes, 87 Mixcloud, 87 Morrissey, Paul, 34, 98 Moviedrome, 3 MTV, 45 Müller, Robbie, 19 Murphy, J. J., 36, 49 Mystery Train, 6, 9, 60, 102, 104, 106, 109n2 (chap. 1)

K-Rob, 60, 74 Kael, Pauline, 22, 23 King, Geoff, 28, 89 Kings of the Road, 19, 39 KONK, 16, 74 Kovacs, András Bálint, 29, 31, 36, 39 Kubrick, Stanley, 83, 101 Kulezic-Wilson, Danijela, 40

Nares, James, 42 new American cinema, 33–35 New Line, 89 New Musical Express, 87 new wave music, 18, 42 New York Times, 21 Newman, Michael, 1, 2, 29, 30, 88, 91 Niblock, Phil, 47 Night on Earth, 5, 6, 7, 9, 102 no wave music, 16, 17, 18, 42, 47, 53, 54, 74, 75 Nyman, Michael, 47

Leslie, Alfred, 34 Lightning Over Water, 14 Limits of Control, The, 88, 104, 109n1 (chap. 3) Linguini Incident, The, 74 Liquid Sky, 25 Locarno Film Festival, 19 Louie, 74, 76–77 Lounge Lizards, 15, 53 Lunch, Lydia, 16 Lurie, John, 6, 15, 31, 42, 53–55, 58, 73–75 Lynch, David, 25, 91 Lyons, James, 75

O’Meara, Jennifer, 67 Only Lovers Left Alive, 88, 93, 94, 104, 106, 107 Ozu, Yasujirō, 22, 31

Madonna, 75 Mailer, Norman, 66 Marsh, Calum, 87 Mathijs, Ernest, 11, 82, 95, 98 Mekas, Jonas, 33–34 melodrama, 36–8, 100 Melody Maker, 87 Men in Orbit, 15 midnight movies, 24–27, 95, 98–99 minimalism, 22, 45–51, 54, 90, 99 Miramax, 89, 90, 93 Mitchell, Eric, 16, 18, 42

Paris, Texas, 19 Paterson, 88, 104, 110n1 (chap. 4) Peary, Danny, 26 Permanent Vacation, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21, 46, 51 Perren, Alisa, 89–92 Piazza, Sara, 40, 52, 56, 63, 104, 106 Pink Flamingos, 95 Platoon, 74 Poe, Amos, 16, 18, 42–44, 52 Pop, Iggy, 104

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INDEX

postmodernism, 16 Pountain, Dick, 85 Primer, 13 punk/postpunk, 16–19, 35, 40, 42–45, 51, 53, 54, 75, 84, 90, 91, 103, 104, 109 Pwyll ap, Siôn, 46–47

Smithereens, 75 Soho Weekly News, 53 Sonic Youth, 16, 74 Spin, 87 Spokane Daily Chronicle, 23 Spotify, 87 Squat Theater, New York, 16, 74, 76 Sqűrl, 87, 94, 107, 109n1 (chap. 3) Staiger, Janet, 30 Stark, Cecilia, 78 Sterritt, David, 21 Strange Days, 74 Straub, Jean-Marie, 14 structural film, 50–51 Strummer, Joe, 104 Style Wars, 59 Suárez, Juan, 13, 14, 15, 40, 48, 51 Subway Riders, 16 Sundance, 20 surrealism, 99 Swans (band), 74

Rammellzee, 37, 38, 59, 60, 74, 103 Ray, Nicholas, 14, 18, 33 Reich, Steve, 47 Repo Man, 19 Reynolds, Simon, 87 Ribot, Marc, 74 Riley, Terry, 47, 49 road movie, 21, 22, 38 Road Trip, 39 Robins, David, 85 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The, 3, 95, 99 Room 23, 101 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 24, 25, 84, 93, 102 Ruggles, Jeffrey, 50 RZA, 104

Tarnation, 13 Tarr, Béla, 101 Taylor, Greg, 81, 96 television, 1–5, 15 Telotte, J .P., 98 They Eat Scum, 42 Thomas, Sarah, 73 Thompson, Stacy, 43–45 Tomorrow Night, 77 Trash, 34 Trees Lounge, 74 Two Lane Blacktop, 39 Tzioumakis, Yannis, 89

Samuel Goldwyn Company, 20 Sante, Luc, 14 Scala Cinema, London, 3 Schloss, Joseph, 59 Sconce, Jeffrey, 96, 100 Seidelman, Susan, 75 Sevigny, Chloë, 85 Shadows, 34, 65, 66, 69 Shadows and Fog, 74 She’s Gotta Have It, 99 Shore, Michael, 53 sleeper films, 23, 26 slow cinema, 100–101 smart cinema, 100, 101

Un Chien Andalou, 36 underground cinema/underground culture, 18, 21, 23–26, 33, 35, 73, 75, 76, 84, 93, 98, 101, 103 Underground USA, 42

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INDEX

video, 1–5, 26–27, 92, 99 vococentrism, 52, 67 von Trier, Lars, 83

White Stripes, 104 Wierzbicki, James, 40 Wild Style, 59 Wissem, Joseph van, 87, 107 Wu-Tang Clan, 105 Wyatt, Justin, 89

Waits, Tom, 5, 6, 104, 105 Waller, Gregory, 25, 26 Walter, Klaus, 106 Warhol, Andy, 34, 97 Waters, John, 95, 99 Webster, Dan, 23 Wenders, Wim, 14, 19, 21, 31, 32, 39

Year of the Horse, 94 Young, La Monte, 47 Young, Neil, 104, 105 YouTube, 87

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