I devour filmmaker interview compilations. Paul Cronin’s Herzog on Herzog and Vernon and Marguerite Gras’ Peter Greenaway: Interviews sit atop the heap, but Ludvig Hertzberg’s Jim Jarmusch: Interviews, which I’m now plowing through, might approach their level. The editor’s task of sifting through hundreds upon hundreds of print-media conversations, be they digital files or yellowed clippings or rolls of microfiche, sounds Herculean enough, but I have to believe these books do 51 percent of their standing or falling on some combination of the filmmaker-subject’s clarity, honesty, and willingness to both repeat and, when necessary, self-contradict.Not that Jarmusch flip-flops much. I get from him the sense of a man with strong aesthetic, political, and production-related convictions — much stronger, in the first two cases, than any convictions I can hold. But when it comes to his personal ethos of working with friends, writing stories around those friends, and shooting within budgets that let him retain control of his movies — Jarmusch operates as the fullest possible embodiment of the much-thrown-around concept of independent filmmaker — I hope to hold myself to the very same rules. After Stranger than Paradise set Jarmusch’s first big wave of popularity rolling in 1984, incredibly unappealing but presumably lucrative directorial offers poured into his office — Porky’s sequels, Porky’s clones, and clones of Porky’s sequels, as I understand it — and only time will tell if I can lash myself to the same mast. With any luck, I’ll simply avoid success!
Which brings me to Jarmusch’s hatred of ambition. Often, filmmaker-interview-compilation editors inflate their own workload by trimming the occasions when the filmmakers repeat themselves. This makes a certain kind of sense — any creator operating from an even somewhat solid philosophical platform occasionally makes the same points over three decades of conversation — but I’d rather they didn’t. To me, the filmmaker’s essence resides in those repetitions. (It resides in the contradictions, too, but it especially resides in the repetitions.) Going on the evidence in Jim Jarmusch: Interviews, Jarmusch hates a few things I like, including Los Angeles, El Topo, and ambition.
When anyone whose work I love hates things I like, I feel I have to go back and reconsider those things. I find Los Angeles too well-geared to my preferences for a city to turn my back on. (I do suspect that Jarmusch, like any diehard New Yorker, feels the standard moral obligation to loathe L.A., a loathing that only runs in one direction.) Alejandro Jodorowsky made El Topo too brazenly to avoid alienating (at least) half his viewers, so someone else disliking it wouldn’t surprise me — but I can’t get enough of it. (I admit to a little surprise, though, that Jarmusch himself shot my other favorite acid western.) Ambition, though; should I re-evaluate ambition?
It feels heretical even to consider letting go of ambition. How can you accomplish anything without it? In his interview with Tao Lin, Michael Silverblatt cops to having avoided Lin’s work due to his distaste for the sort of ambition that must drive a mid-twentysomething who can generate like six books and a constant stream of publicity. But then he found out that Lin writes about depression, which complicated things: Lin’s ambition alienated him, but Lin’s depression drew him in. “I don’t like ambition,” Silverblatt protests, and Jarmusch makes similar claims throughout his book of interviews. Yet he has become one of the most respected and artistically successful filmmakers in America. Zuh?
In Permanent Vacation, Jarmusch presents an ambition void of the gapingest kind. Alongside my reading of interview compilations, you see, I’ve been watching various filmmakers’ first features: Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Aaron Katz’s Dance Party U.S.A., (past Marketplace of Ideas guest) Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha, Peter Greenaway’s The Falls — I’ll probably re-watch Christopher Nolan’s Following again too, since I remember it being pretty damned cool. These films offer the clearest possible view of a young director’s, er, ambitions. I can only conclude from Jarmusch’s first that, while not quite as devoid of ambition as his answers to journalists’ questions would have us believe, he mostly works up ambitions about not having ambition, at least as conventionally understood. His characters don’t want money, nor do they want fame, nor do they want love. But they all want something.
One of classmates in Japanese often talks about his first trip to Japan. With next to no money, he hitchhiked around the country, living on gas-station onigiri and handouts from friendly families. (From what I understand, this approach to traveling plays better in Japan that in, say, Russia.) Even while cringing about the discomfort and demoralization of such an experience, I envied the crap out of the guy for having it. Our teacher asked how he could possibly have done it. “I guess I’m just a bum, he concluded.”
You could call Aloysius Parker, Permanent Vacation’s protagonist, just a bum. He would probably state it with more beatnik-y eloquence. Lacking employment or any non-institutionalized family, Aloysius roams freely through decimated late-seventies N.Y.C., establishing the rich Jarmuschian structure of the eccentric’s journey from the orbit of one fellow eccentric to another. He makes his teenage- pompadour-wearing, herky-jerky-proto-rockabillying way from a slip-clad, Lautréamont-reading ladyfriend to a delusional ‘Nam vet to a slow jokester loitering in a theater to a lonely saxman. He also visits his insane mom, steals a car, sells the stolen car, and hops a boat to Paris. All part of, as he says during the final bit of narration, his permanent vacation.
Jarmusch’s interviews reveal that the film has a wide documentary streak: Chris Parker, who plays Aloysius, actually lived like this, never working, bouncing from couch to owned-by-someone-who’s-barely-an-acquaintance couch. Sometimes Jarmusch and his crew couldn’t find Parker when it came time to shoot, but they only had to call around to get an idea of where he might surface next. By taking Parker’s lifestyle and building a full-length, color-saturated, hauntingly atmospheric cinematic drama around it, Jarmusch somehow ambitiofies the unambitious. It helps the film’s mythos even more that he financed it with scholarship money meant to pay his tuition, which pissed off N.Y.U. enough that it denied him his degree.
But lacking the old piece-o’-paper does not seem to have hurt Jarmusch’s career. An innate need to make films has propelled him forward ever since, credentials be damned. I find something hugely appealing in this combination of the drive to create with no particular desire for success. I can easily imagine a fixation on “making it” tripping up a filmmaker like Jarmusch, or, worse, rendering him vulnerable to the siren song of the play-it-safers offering a sizable payday to sit in the folding chair on “Meatballs meets Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I think of it as a close cousin to Aloysius Parker’s need to live in precisely his own way; if he tried to concentrate on both living like that and, say, getting an MBA, it’d make him stumble. Drive without ambition seems to produce interesting things; drive with ambition has, to my mind, started to seem slightly poisonous.
i was just talkin about your racism, not really into this vid. that bresson guys alright but you must end up with a pretty narrow view on many things just cos theres a jewish or black guy
Posted by: Wilmayxi042 | May 04, 2011 at 04:19 AM