All of which is to say that, whenever a movie with a cabdriver as the protagonist comes along, I’m there. Night on Earth was a special treat: five cabdrivers, in five different cities. It can also be characterized as five encounters, five moral tales, five city portraits. Of course, the first episode, set in Los Angeles, is closest to my heart, and I can write about it with the most authority, but first some more general thoughts on Jim Jarmusch’s work.
I have a special fondness for some Jarmusch films that are generally counted among his minor works: Night on Earth, and also Ghost Dog and Coffee and Cigarettes (how could I not love a movie that begins and ends with the two best versions of “Louie, Louie,” the original, by Richard Berry, and Iggy Pop’s cover?). I prefer them to Dead Man, his most recent film to receive serious critical attention. After his first few films, it seems that critics, and maybe even some ordinary fans, started to take Jarmusch films for granted, in the same way that an older generation of critics and fans took Howard Hawks films for granted. The pleasures they offered were evident, but predictable. With Hawks, critics have come to value these pleasures more highly and to appreciate the variations he worked on recurring themes. Maybe Jarmusch’s day will come also.
Both Hawks and Jarmusch create a special complicity among their actors and a sense of conviviality that passes across the screen so that we in the audience may come to regard them as friends rather than as performers enacting a role. Jarmusch seems to have a real fondness for actors, equaled among his contemporaries only by Quentin Tarantino, and this feeling elicits a special grace in their performances. I could make a long list of actors who have never been better than in a Jarmusch film. It would include not only Tom Waits (hopelessly hammy under Robert Altman’s direction), Henry Silva, Roberto Benigni, and Jessica Lange, but even Bill Murray (in Coffee and Cigarettes), Johnny Depp, and the always reliable Forest Whitaker. After seeing Stranger Than Paradise, I was convinced that John Lurie, Eszter Balint, and Richard Edson would become big movie stars. Lurie and Edson have been good in bit parts since, but they never found another director who appreciated them enough.
I can’t claim that Winona Ryder and Gena Rowlands have never been better than in the Los Angeles episode of Night on Earth, but they do create a feeling of camaraderie that is strong and affecting. Ryder’s unflappable tomboy cabdriver Corky is a fantasy, I suppose, but at least it is a generous fantasy, full of life and respect for human possibilities. She reminds me of Cagney’s cabdriver in Taxi! She has the same bravado and professional pride. When her passenger, casting agent Victoria Snelling (Rowlands), offers a request or a reproach, she answers with the good-natured refrain “Sure, Mom” or “Okay, Mom,” echoing Cagney’s repeated response to his wife’s nagging, “All right, Ma.” Victoria is impeccably mannered and coolly professional. We can gather from her side of the frequent cell phone calls she makes and receives that she is successful, but also stressed-out and dissatisfied. Corky notices the vulnerabilities in Victoria, but she doesn’t allow herself to feel superior; instead, she uses the knowledge to create a bond between them. In the end, she teaches Victoria a small lesson, but we may wonder how long Victoria will remember it.
Interspersed with this encounter between Corky and Victoria, there is a portrait of Los Angeles at dusk. Jarmusch’s portrait is certainly not literalist, but it is evocative, and it has aged much better than the hysterically pessimistic visions of the city prevalent in the early 1990s. As in The Replacement Killers, the downtown railway station fills in for the airport. A taxi ride from the airport to “Beverly Circle” would as a rule proceed north on the San Diego Freeway (now the most congested, despised freeway in Los Angeles), then east on Sunset Boulevard, and through the residential quarters of upper Beverly Hills, which have a spooky, funereal quietude at night (I wouldn’t live there if they paid me to). Visually, it wouldn’t be very interesting, and it wouldn’t reveal much of the city. Instead, Corky takes what we call here “surface streets,” and the sights glimpsed in passing are not to be found on any direct route from the airport to Beverly Hills, with one or two exceptions.
Jarmusch concentrates on structures that some might call seedy but are actually just ordinary. He values a takeout stand as much as a landmark (another virtue he shares with Tarantino). The only landmarks in Night on Earth are the Great Western Forum, in Inglewood (then a sports arena, now a megachurch), and the statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle on the Sunset Strip (still standing today). There are also some iconic images, such as a car under a tarp that recalls a famous photograph from The Americans, by Robert Frank, taken in Long Beach. Frank’s car was flanked by two small palm trees, and Jarmusch concentrates on these transplants, which always look a bit scraggly in his movie (as palm trees often do outside of Beverly Hills).
Most of the shots come from around Hollywood, with an emphasis on its poorer, eastern end. I recognized a Pioneer Chicken stand on Western, near Sunset (since demolished), and a minimall at Sunset and Harvard (its stores are now all Armenian businesses). Things change, things stay the same. If you rephotographed most of his locations today, they would be changed beyond recognition. But every shot could be almost exactly duplicated somewhere else in the city. And maybe that used-car lot that could be anywhere is still there and still under the same ownership. Auto dealerships are now our most enduring institutions.
With some justice, Philippe Garnier lamented the disposability of Los Angeles architecture; he called it an "architecture of amnesia." He noted, “Intersections change so fast that remembering how they used to be has almost become a civic duty.” Yet as Eric Hobsbawm noted in his autobiography Interesting Times, American cities, Los Angeles included, have changed less radically in the past fifty years than European cities. And perhaps Los Angeles has changed less than any other U.S. city. Because it was first for so many years—it built the first freeway system, the first airport for jet airliners, the first midcentury-modern baseball stadium, the first shoddy neoclassical cultural palaces—it is in many ways the oldest U.S. city. Jarmusch knows New York better, but he values what is ancient in each of the cities he portrays.
Thom Andersen teaches in the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts. He directed and produced Los Angeles Plays Itself, a video essay about the city of Los Angeles and the movies.
http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=401&eid=553§ion=essay&page=1
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