Stranger Than Paradise · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

They drive out to see Lake Erie. Eva stands at the edge of it in her coat, and the lake isn't there — just a white field where the water should be, snow and fog erased into one blank screen. Eddie says you come all the way out here and you can't even see anything. Nobody is disappointed, exactly. They look at the nothing for a while and then they go back to the car. That shot is the whole film, and it is also a small lesson in what cinema can do once it stops telling stories.

Deleuze split film history at a hinge. On one side is the movement-image: a person sees a situation, the situation demands something, and the person acts to change it. Perception flows into action, action resolves the situation, the cut serves the chain. Hollywood ran on this for fifty years. On the other side is the time-image, which appears when that circuit breaks — when a character can perceive perfectly well but can no longer act in any way that matters, and so is reduced to looking, waiting, enduring. Deleuze called this a 'pure optical and sound situation,' an opsign. You don't act on what you see; you're just stuck inside it. The frozen lake is exactly that. There is a perception, the white void, and there is no action it could possibly trigger. So the characters do what time-image characters always do. They look.

That reduction of the agent to a watcher — Deleuze's word is voyant, the seer — runs through all three of Jarmusch's drifters, but Eva carries it. Eszter Balint plays her watchful and unimpressed, a center of gravity precisely because she wants nothing and reacts to little. She has come from Budapest to the New World, and the New World turns out to be Willie's shabby flat, a TV dinner, daytime television. The immigrant story promises transformation; this one withholds it. What Eva does instead of striving is press play on her cassette recorder. Screamin' Jay Hawkins howling 'I Put a Spell on You' is the one wild American voice in the film, and the joke is that it travels with her — the same song in New York and Cleveland and Florida, a sonsign, a pure sound-situation, that ties the geography together precisely by proving the geography never changes.

This is where Jarmusch's real invention lives, and it's worth naming carefully, because it's so easy to file away as mere slacker mood. He built the film out of dead time. Deleuze borrowed temps mort from the critics around Antonioni: the stretches a normal film cuts away from, the waiting and the in-between, here held until they become the subject. Every scene is one fixed take, the camera locked off, frontal, theatrical, and it keeps running after the dramatic beat has passed — actors slouch, smoke, watch TV, run out of things to say. Nothing advances. That holding is the content. And the places these takes are held in are what Deleuze called any-space-whatever, espace quelconque: not settings that frame an action but deserted, drained, interchangeable voids — Willie's flat, the snowbound nothing at Lake Erie, the generic Florida motel. The black-and-white flattens New York and Cleveland and Florida into one continuous grey, which is the film's deadpan thesis stated as photography. America's variety is a rumor. Every place is the same dead end.

Then there is the black leader. Each take dissolves into black and the next emerges out of it, so the film advances as discrete blackout panels with darkness between them. This is the boldest stroke, and it is an idea about the cut. Classical editing joins shots so the join disappears; you flow from one to the next on a matched movement. Jarmusch does the opposite. He puts a gap where the join should be — what Deleuze, late in his account, calls the interstice, the cut that connects by not connecting, an AND rather than a because. The blacks don't bridge the scenes. They quarantine them. They withhold the transitions that would build momentum, and momentum is the one thing this film refuses to manufacture.

Put it together and you have a near-perfect specimen of what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image — the moment the old sensory-motor cinema came apart and modern cinema began. The signs are textbook. A dispersive situation: three loosely connected people who don't add up to a group with a goal. Weak links: the elliptical blacks, the slackened causality. And above all the voyage-balade, the trip that transforms nothing. They go to Cleveland. They go to Florida. They win money at a dog track, almost catch the wrong plane, and end exactly where they started, only further apart. The road movie's promise is that the road changes you. Jarmusch's road only confirms the sameness.

None of this fell from the sky, and Jarmusch never pretended it did. The locked, frontal, low static frame held through dead time is Ozu's, studied and transplanted. The dedramatized drift through emptied landscapes with no payoff is Antonioni's L'Avventura. The black-and-white transatlantic road movie, a European eye on American blankness, is Wenders — who literally handed Jarmusch the leftover film stock that seeded the whole thing, so the lineage runs through the negative itself. What Jarmusch added was compression, and the nerve to make boredom funny. He proved, on almost no money, that a film could be built entirely from the parts other films throw away — the waiting, the in-between, the long flat moment after the point — and that an audience would pay to sit in it. Half of American independent cinema walked through the door he left open.

Watch it again and watch what he refuses. Every time the film could cut to the interesting thing, it stays in the car. That staying is the art.