Notes toward a critical essay on Paterson (2016). (Jarmusch, director; lead actor, Adam Driver).
As I mentioned the other day to someone who asked about this film, I had to say, when they asked if it is about the city of Paterson, New Jersey, that it would be wrong simply to say it was about the city, but also wrong to say that it was not about the city.
The film is about the many ways that art, or things very like it, create meaning in human life and make it bearable as well as excruciating with, paradoxically, utter joy in the moment. More specifically, it points to the power of poetry and even more exactly, the poetry of the image.
Paterson is a poet and a bus driver surnamed Paterson who is living in Paterson, New Jersey. Closely tied to his location, he is widely read as to the books in his little basement office but working within the style of the Paterson poet William Carlos Williams. The unity of time is specific: it is one week in the poet's life at work, driving and writing, and at home, with his wife, Laura.
At first the relationship of Paterson and Laura seems utterly retro and as a feminist I asked: why is she a child-like housewife? Yet the film asks us to look at Paterson, the poet, as the center of an array of artists he knows or meets and who are embedded, like it or not, in an America of consumer capitalism and technology, the successor to the ruins of earlier industrialization that constitute the shabby rust belt city of Paterson. Paterson the poet has chosen security and routine in order to protect his artistic life; his wife Laura is exploring the more typical artist's pursuit of risk. She does not see herself very well and so does not realize the risk inherent in her being incapable of focus on one medium. Paterson has chose a hidden life; Laura dreams of a celebrity life.
At the center of their life together is the visual. Laura fails to see her own skills, such as a good eye for design, and almost unconsciously transforms rooms and clothing with black and white shapes and graphic patterns while pursuing fantasies of a cupcake business or a stage career as a country singer with a black and white harlequin guitar (which she first must learn to play). She paints the house, many objects, even her clothes, even her farmer's market cupcakes, in black and white designs. She is distracted by the celebrity and consumer world that her husband has rejected.
Paterson, by contrast, refuses to have a cell phone, an alarm clock, or to photocopy his small journal where he writes his poetry daily. His quest for simplicity meets impermanence. [Spoiler alert:] This tragic meeting occurs when his journal is left where their adorable but feisty dog can find it and ... treat it as a chewy toy, completely destroying it. A photocopy of the poems might have saved them, even if they were never to be published. The only other poets are an amateur rapper in the laundromat, a sweet and open schoolgirl who briefly shares a poem she has written, and a Japanese businessman/poet who has come to Paterson expressly to experience the city of a favorite poet, William Carlos Williams. This last encounter opens a new page for Paterson, literally as well as in his ability to live not for, but in, each moment.
Paterson combines his nightly dog-walk of their English bulldog with a pub stop. There we see his friend ,the chess-playing bartender, and a neighbor/actor, a performing star-crossed lover who literally uses drama to effect change. He performs passionately in scenes that take place before his would-be girlfriend, who is sitting at the bar, to her amused disdain. Still, Art, of a kind, the pursuit of pattern and meaning, has affected all of them, including Paterson's seemingly superficial wife Laura. But change? In a Paterson, either the poet or the city, who seems not to change from day to day?
The poetry in this film, displayed across the screen as Paterson writes in his notebook, is that of Ron Padgett . Also from a modest background (as is Paterson, apparently) and with the same extraordinary ability to be captivated by the most minute or seemingly trivial object, Padgett and Jarmusch collaborated after having both been students (at different times) of Columbia University professor and poet Kenneth Koch, and meeting through a mutual friend. Padgett's spare, finely wrought, deeply informed poetry is not just free verse superbly done, but a poetry of strong, image-based observation, with attention to order and meaning that is simple but also seems carefully patterned so as to delight and enlighten.
A lover, a new and absurdly designed guitar, a new notebook...there is change in the discovery of meaning. Jarmusch matches the cinematography and economy of content to lighten the impossibly weighty questions of relating art and the artful to the dreadfully ordinary. Only Paterson as poet can bring the images closer and closer to life, wonder, joy, love, relationships. Words, on a page, and shown in this film literally on the movie screen as Paterson writes them, can do that.
(Notes dated 2/18/21; edited 7/18/21)
No comments:
Post a Comment