Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016)
I saw this when it came out, went to the cinema with my other half on a rare occasion we managed to do just that. When you rarely go to the cinema the stakes are high: the film has a lot of responsibility. I remember we both pretty much hated it, but on rewatching it now I am easily reminded why. It was primarily the eponymous Paterson’s (Adam Driver) relationship with his wife, Laura (played by Iranian-French actor Golshifteh Farahani) which really wound us up, but it was also the poems that Paterson writes and recites (as if writing by hand, i.e. in that slow, stunted pace).
First, on the relationship. For a start, their interaction throughout the film, aside from the early morning cuddles in bed, is so stiff and formal. This must have been deliberate, but why? Was this somehow meant to resonate with the incredibly fastidious 60s fetishism that Paterson (the character) very self-consciously possesses (suffers from), expressed through his refusing to use a mobile phone or computer, and the ultra-anally selected, assembled and maintained interior of the bungalow they share.
Second, the poems, about which not much effort is made (aside from watching the end credits past the accreditation of the music used) to inform the audience that the poems Paterson writes and recites in the film as his poems were mostly (except for the final one, I think?) taken from a 2013 volume Collected Poems by Ron Padgett, a real, and living (born 1942) American poet. The poems are very much of a time, the ’60s, essentially, these pithy observational compositions that either have a semantic twist at the end or kind of start heating up in terms of the colourful poetics of the phrases as the poems progress away from, deliberately mundane, banal, even, points of departure (‘We have plenty of matches in our house’). I initially got into that kind of thing (in the 1980s) through Richard Brautigan and I definitely wrote stuff like that, too. For a long time, though, it became redolent of that ironically American insularity (ironic, because, unlike Britain, the USA isn’t actually and island).
The style is also very like Frank O’Hara, particularly Lunch Poems, made available in a natty little pocket-sized edition that I too (as Paterson does here, in his lunch box taken to work as a busdriver) carried around as a matter of routine, maybe 20 years ago. Padgett’s Wiki entry tells us that
[i]n 1960, [he] left Tulsa to study at Columbia College in New York City. At that time he was interested in Pound, Rimbaud, the Black Mountain poets, and the Beats but soon he fell under the spell of the New York School, particularly the poetry of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch.
Now, throughout the film, on both occasions, the poems he writes were winding me up in the way that they were such an obvious pastiche of that particular style of the New York School mined by O’Hara – so it turns out they weren’t written by someone unknown for the film (my assumption, Jarmusch, even) but they were written by someone influenced by NY School luminaries like O’Hara. Towards the end, after the couple’s bulldog has shredded his ‘secret notebook’ containing the only copies of all his work to date (on a rare occasion when they went out to see a movie), Jarmusch gives us a slow pan of Paterson’s studio bookshelf, too much to take in without the computer’s space bar pause button on my second viewing. Scouring the spines, we do see a volume of Kenneth Koch (On the Great Atlantic Rainway), but nothing by John Ashbery. Now, I bother to dwell on this because Ashbery is the only poet from that scene that a) I still love to read, b) that fascinates me, and c) I can really identify as an artist who works in the textuality of sound rather than words. There’s a much more dismantled, even anarchic, free flow to Ashbery’s work whose character would have made this a very different, and much better film had it been what Paterson was supposedly composing and reciting.
Overall, though, having revisited this (partly with an intention to revisit and catch up with Jarmusch, but also on the recent enthusiasm of a trusted creative collaborator) it is kind of a good film, there’s plenty to really like. But I still can’t swallow the couple’s relationship without gagging, and it does kind of ruin the film as a whole, to me… I really don’t vibe with the way the characters are set up in this really staid traditional husband-and-wife formation: what place does such an archaic and hackneyed trope as the beautiful housewife who is somehow too dumb to realise that the food she makes so enthusiastically to feed the Working Man she’s married to is unwittingly and unknowingly disgusting? That shit is straight out The Two Ronnies. Actually makes me think of one of their old jokes about a coded acronym from a working white collar husband to his housekeeping wife, NORWICH: Knickers [sic] Off Ready When I Come Home. But what use is it to Jarmusch here? The worst is when she’s trying to cheer him up after the dog decimated his notebook, she offers to play the new song she’s learning on the guitar (on which she’s a total beginner) and the way he declines is so painfully patronising and condescending. There’s also the fact that, in a film that uses a looped narrative of daily repeated routines, he spends a chunk of each evening at a bar, on his own, chatting with other locals and regulars, while she stays home on her own, which she has just done all day while he’s out driving a bus for a living.
Yet, throughout the film, she’s the far more promising character, including in terms of her own creative artistry. And it’s her (brilliant) suggestion to try and stick the book back together… because then the words would be freed from their idiotically epigonal ’60s-festishism pastiche and… the poems would no longer be Ron Padgett’s. Reconstitution, I think that’s calle
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