Stranger Than Paradise · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Eva plays the same song again. Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put a Spell on You"—all voodoo growl and operatic threat—pouring out of a little tape player in a cramped New York apartment while nothing whatever happens around it. That's the joke. It's also the method: the most excessive voice in America landing on the flattest possible surface. If you want a way into Jarmusch's film, and into a whole strain of movies that refuse to behave the way movies are supposed to, start there. A song about being seized by passion, played to people who can barely be bothered to move.

For sixty years Hollywood ran on a simple engine. A character sees a situation, the situation demands something, the character acts, the act changes the situation. Deleuze called this the movement-image: perception feeds action, action closes the gap, and the cutting exists to keep the circuit humming toward a resolution. Willie, Eva, and Eddie have no such engine. They perceive plenty—America, mostly, and each other—and it goes nowhere. Nobody rises to an occasion because the film supplies no occasions. This is what Deleuze meant by the crisis of the action-image: characters who can still see but can no longer respond adequately to what they see. Jarmusch's genuine invention is to have found this state funny. The European art film treated the paralysis as spiritual weather. He treats it as three broke people on a couch.

Watch where they go. New York, Cleveland, Florida—a city, a suburb, a resort—and the black-and-white flattens all three into the same grey nothing. They drive to Lake Erie and it's a white void; the Florida coast sits under overcast skies looking like the New York apartment with more sand. Deleuze has a name for a place that has stopped being a setting for action and becomes pure texture instead: the any-space-whatever, the espace quelconque. Here it comes in its disconnected form—each location sealed off from the last by a hard cut to black, so that space never accumulates into a journey. The dossier puts it exactly right: the interchangeability is the argument. The road, in American myth, transforms you. This road delivers you to a different room with the same feeling in it. That's the voyage-balade, the trip that changes nothing, and Jarmusch inherits it straight from Wenders' Alice in the Cities, where America is already a landscape of interchangeable emptiness seen through a stranger's eyes.

Then there are the blackouts. Each scene is a single fixed take that plays to its end and fades out; a new scene begins from darkness. No crosscutting, no dolly into a face to tell you how to feel. The camera sits on its tripod like a proscenium and lets the moment run at its own speed—pauses uncut, silences held past the point of comfort. Deleuze would call these stretches temps mort, dead time: passages where nothing advances a plot, where the everyday is simply endured in front of you. Most films bury dead time. Jarmusch builds the whole thing out of it. When a character speaks and three empty beats pass before anyone answers, you're watching duration itself become the subject. The device is borrowed and rerouted—the titled chapters and ironic pop songs come from Godard's Masculin Féminin, the wide fixed frame that won't privilege people over their environment comes from Tati's Playtime—but the flat, patient cruelty of the timing is Jarmusch's own.

Eva is the one who makes it land. She is the film's real seer—Deleuze's voyant—the watcher who registers everything and acts on none of it. Alert, wry, visibly processing an American reality duller and stranger than she was promised, she gives us the opsign: the pure optical situation, a person who can only look. Her looking has no motor consequence. It just deepens. And the performances that carry all this come by way of Bresson, whose Pickpocket method—cast non-actors, coach the expression out of them—is the direct template. Lurie and Edson withhold rather than project. What you get is a cinema of the body: attitude and posture doing the work that plot and emotion usually do, the deadpan slouch itself becoming legible, a gest that exposes a whole relation to a country nobody quite wants to be in.

What did this do to film? It proved you could make art cinema for $110,000 out of donated stock and no-wave musicians, and have Cannes recognize it instantly as a form. More than that: it gave the American time-image a vernacular. Antonioni's emptiness cost money and wore a tie. Jarmusch's costs nothing and tells jokes. Nearly every American independent film that trusts stillness, that lets a scene breathe past its usefulness, that finds comedy in people failing to have the reaction a script would demand—all of it runs downstream of this. He took the most rarefied thing in postwar European cinema, the image where action stops and time shows through, and made it look like something you and your friends could shoot in a weekend.

So watch it again, and notice what you're doing while you watch. You're waiting for the plot to start. The film decided, quietly, in its first blackout, not to give you one. The waiting is the film. Once you stop resenting that, you can see them clearly—three people, killing time, in a country that turned out to be a stranger than paradise.