Down by Law · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

It starts with the city moving and nobody in it yet. Müller's camera slides sideways past the shotgun houses and chain-link of New Orleans, level with the sidewalk, while Tom Waits growls "Jockey Full of Bourbon" over the top. No hero, no problem to solve, no one to root for. Just a place going about its business, filmed as if it were the subject of the movie rather than its backdrop. That opening is the whole argument of Down by Law in miniature: here is a film where the world will keep happening, and the people inside it will mostly watch.

That's a strange thing for a movie to do, and it's worth being precise about why. The usual machinery of cinema runs on what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze called the action-image: a character sees a situation, the situation demands something, and the character acts to change it. Cause, effect, resolution—the engine that drives almost every crime picture, and Down by Law is nominally a crime picture. A disc jockey and a pimp get framed, land in jail, break out. But notice how little any of them does about anything. Zack and Jack are set up by others; they don't outwit the frame, they just absorb it. The escape itself happens offscreen, in an ellipsis, as though the one genuinely active event were beneath the film's interest. Deleuze had a name for this slackening: the crisis of the action-image, the moment when characters can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. They've gone from agents to watchers. Deleuze called such a figure the seer—someone who endures a situation rather than mastering it.

What the seer is given instead of action is what Deleuze called pure optical and sound situations—opsigns and sonsigns. When you can't act on what you see, you're left simply seeing it, and the image stops being a cue for the next move and becomes something to dwell in. The prison cell is the purest stretch of this in the film. Three men in a flat, fluorescent-lit box, lit by Müller with a hard institutional clarity that flatters no one, and the camera refuses to cut them loose. They pace, they bicker, they go quiet. Bresson built A Man Escaped, his great prison film, out of exactly this patience—diegetic sound doing the dramatic work that dialogue withholds, keys and footsteps and routine carrying the weight, duration forcing you to serve the sentence with the prisoner. Jarmusch takes the lesson and removes even Bresson's escape-mechanics. The cell isn't a puzzle to be solved. It's a condition to be lived.

This is where the film's slowness stops being a mannerism and becomes its meaning. Deleuze's word for those stretches is temps mort—dead time, the everyday held past the point where anything advances. Jarmusch and his editor Melody London organize whole scenes around it: shots that begin before the action and end after it, a punitive evenness that makes you feel the hours. Benigni's Bob writing English idioms on the wall—"I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream"—is dead time turned almost holy. Nothing is accomplished. A man is just reciting a sentence he half-understands, with the sincerity of a student, and the scene tips from comedy into something tender precisely because the film has nowhere it needs to hurry off to.

And the spaces themselves change character. Deleuze noticed that when the action drains out of a setting, the setting becomes what he called an any-space-whatever—not a stage for events but a fragmented, affective zone that exists for its own mood. The bayou is this exactly. When the men break free, they don't break into a landscape with edges and destinations; they break into fog and Spanish moss and gray water that goes on without horizon. Müller films them the way he framed lone figures against the emptiness of Paris, Texas—small bodies in deep negative space, the freedom indistinguishable from being lost. The structure is the old voyage form Deleuze diagnosed in modern cinema: the trip that transforms nothing. They wander, they nearly starve, Bob stumbles onto a roadside diner and a woman to love, and the others simply walk off in opposite directions at a fork in the road. No arc closes. The journey was the point, not its end.

It helps to see whose movie Jarmusch was actually making. Ozu's pillow shots—those autonomous cuts to a teapot or a corridor that punctuate a scene without explaining anything—are the direct ancestor of Müller's still studies of New Orleans, intervals that breathe rather than transition. Tati's method of dropping one exuberant, oblivious body into a world of restraint gave Jarmusch the engine of Benigni against the studied cool of Waits and Lurie: comedy from incompatibility, not from plot. And Cassavetes had already proved that black-and-white, available light, and jazz musicians on both sides of the camera could be an aesthetic position rather than a budget excuse. Jarmusch's specific invention was to fuse these into a distinctly American deadpan—to take Bresson's spiritual patience and Ozu's contemplative cut and run them through three guys who can't stand each other, and find that boredom, rendered honestly, is funny and sad and oddly free.

What Down by Law did to American filmmaking was give independence a grammar. After it, you could make a movie about nothing happening and have that be the form's confidence rather than its failure. The whole later lineage of mood-over-plot American cinema is sitting in that prison cell, learning to wait. Watch it again and stop waiting for the story to start. The story is the waiting. That's the freedom the title is being ironic about—down by law, and yet the camera, at least, is loose.