Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Mystery Train
1989 · Jim Jarmusch · Mystery Train on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look for the Elvis portrait hanging in every hotel room. (setting)
The same cheap tinted picture, often a little crooked, presides over all three sets of guests. The rooms are nearly identical, so three groups of strangers unknowingly share one stage dressed with the same icons.
Payoff: Memphis keeps its myth on the wall while the city itself peels. The portrait is how the film tells you an absent king still runs the place.
Notice that the camera almost never moves to follow anyone. (camera)
Robby Muller holds a frontal, eye-level frame and lets people walk in and out of it. Action plays out inside a fixed rectangle, which gives every scene the look of a lit diorama.
Payoff: A still frame makes you watch the whole room instead of the person speaking, so you catch the wallpaper and the waiting. In the reading: temps mort. The reading calls these held stretches dead time: minutes where nothing advances and the everyday is simply left open.
Watch the reds and greens in the night scenes. (light)
This is Jarmusch's first film in color after two in black and white. Muller pushes sodium orange, candy red and green past plausible levels, and photographs peeling paint and cheap furniture with tenderness.
Payoff: The palette converts a run-down town into something dreamlike, so decay reads as beauty rather than as social evidence. In the reading: espace quelconque. The reading calls emptied Memphis an any-space-whatever: a place that stopped hosting action and became pure mood.
Listen for the radio DJ and the same Elvis song returning. (sound)
Tom Waits voices the DJ. The broadcast of Blue Moon comes back across separate stories in separate rooms. John Lurie's spare instrumental underlay never crowds the diegetic music out.
Payoff: The airwaves are what these strangers actually share. Sound does the joining the plot refuses to do.
Watch Screamin' Jay Hawkins hold still behind the front desk. (performance)
Hawkins plays the night clerk in a blood-red suit with exasperated dignity and almost no movement. Cinque Lee's bellboy fidgets beside him. Jarmusch casts working musicians and lets their real-world aura do part of the acting.
Payoff: Underplaying is the house style here. The comedy lands because a beat is held a moment past where another film would cut.
Once you have seen it
Track the lobby clock and the gunshot across all three stories. (structure)
Melody London does not lay the segments end to end. She overlays them, so one offscreen shot is heard three times in three rooms at the same instant. What felt like after was meanwhile.
Payoff: Three presents run at once and never merge. The night is lived three times rather than told once. In the reading: points/series of present. The reading calls this peaks of present: coexisting nows that refuse to line up into a single chronology.
Count what the Japanese couple's pilgrimage actually changes. (structure)
Jun and Mitsuko cross an ocean for the birthplace of rock and roll. They photograph a plaque, tour Sun Studio, ride a bus, argue about Elvis and Carl Perkins. Jun ranks his snapshots instead of living the trip.
Payoff: The trip transforms nobody. Jarmusch builds feeling out of arrival and waiting rather than out of anyone being changed by travel.
Look at how often characters are framed inside doorways. (staging)
Jarmusch blocks flat and symmetrical, stacking people against the boxy planes of the rooms. Memphis outside gets the same treatment: wide, depopulated streets with nobody crossing them.
Payoff: The geometry keeps everyone parked and parallel. Lives that never touch are still held in the same shape.
Carry this in: Look at the picture on the wall. Three rooms, one absent king, and a night that happens all at once.