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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Look at the picture on the wall. Three rooms, one absent king, and a night that happens all at once.