You Are Not I

Despite the fact that his films, especially his debut Permanent Vacation (1980) and Broken Flowers (2005), would probably lead most viewers to assume that he could never be tied down by one single woman over a long period of time, Jim Jarmusch has been with the same exact dame for most of his life. In fact, this woman, Sara Driver (Sleepwalk aka Year of the Dog, When Pigs Fly), is a notable filmmaker in her own right who, at least during the early 1980s, seemed like she had the potential to become a more respected auteur than her white-haired neo-bohemian beau, or so that is the impression that Jonathan Rosenbaum gives in his somewhat obscure text Film: The Front Line 1983 (1983). Indeed, as Rosenbaum noted in his book, Driver received the ultimate compliment for a young avant-garde filmmaker when rootless cosmopolitan European alpha-avant-gardist Jean-Marie Straub said to her at an early screening at the 1982 Rotterdam Film Festival regarding her hypnotically haunting early work You Are Not I (1981), “I like your film ten times better than Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe movies.” As to what Driver’s 50-minute black-and-white film has to do with Poe or Corman, Rosenbaum attempted to make a connection when he argued, “Insofar as it uses narrative ambiguity and foregrounds some of its formal elements, YOU ARE NOT I demands a certain amount of collaborative work from the spectator. At the same time, it adopts the method of a Poe story, which requires the virtual submission of the reader/spectator to the will and power of the narrative voice.” Not unlike with her boyfriend’s first feature Permanent Vacation (1980), which she briefly appeared in and worked on as a production manager, Driver made her film while attending New York University’s graduate film school with the help of a Louis B. Mayer grant (the film had about a $12,000 budget). Based on the 1948 short story of the same name written by queer Beat Generation writer Paul Bowles about a schizophrenic woman that escapes from a mental institution and ultimately gets her sister to take her place that Driver liked so much upon reading it for the first time that she immediately knew she wanted to adapt it into a cinematic work, the film certainly gives one the impression that the auteur might have become the female David Lynch instead of a fecund Jarmusch. Despite being a relatively huge critical hit in Europe that had a long ride on the film festival circuit and was even described as one of the best films of the decade in Cahiers du Cinéma, You Are Not I was actually considered lost for nearly thirty years after the original negative was burnt in a fire in the warehouse where it was stored and the only other copy had deteriorated due to being screened one too many times. Luckily, source writer Bowles, who apparently regularly exchanged letters with Driver while she was assembling the film, was such a fan of the film that he had a pristine print, which was found in 2008 by a fellow named Francis Poole when he traveled to the writer’s old apartment in Tangier, Morocco to gather things for the University of Delaware’s library collection.  While I am not that familiar with Bowles' work, I have a feeling that he was more pleased with Driver's You Are Not I than he was with capitalist-minded Guido commie Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky (1990).

 A sort of avant-garde post-Gothic psyche-horror flick with seemingly nil direct cinematic influences (though Driver has credited German Expressionism, Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962), and John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974) as inspiring her in different ways), You Are Not I might be described as the female Eraserhead that Lynch’s own daughter Jennifer Chambers Lynch failed to make when she released her badly botched and laughably misandristic but nonetheless fleetingly entertaining debut Boxing Helena (1993). Indeed, if there is such a thing as true estrogen-charged arthouse horror, it is Driver’s film, which is what you might expect if Danièle Huillet had kicked her pansy hubby Straub to the curb, listened to some Joy Division and read some Flannery O'Connor, dropped the pedantic Marxist idiocy, and assembled a film that truly tapped into the darker depths of the innately irrational and labyrinthine female psyche. More specifically, You Are Not I is one of those handful of seemingly inexplicable female ‘psychic transference’ flicks like Ingmar Bergman Persona (1966), Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977), Michael Almereyda's Nadja (1994), and Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001) that hints at the melding of two different female identities. While co-penned, co-produced, and shot by Jarmusch (who also later acted as the cinematographer of Driver’s first feature-length effort Sleepwalk), the film has thankfully virtually nothing to do with the No Wave Cinema movement, which the filmmaker herself more or less confirmed in a December 2011 interview with George Sikharulidze of Senses of Cinema where she stated, “There were a lot of movies about the scene, but I was not interested in that kind of representation. In a way, the film was part of the No Wave movement because we all worked on each other’s movies, we were all in the scene together, but I never liked the kind of cliquish, who’s cool and who’s not setups.” Indeed, You Are Not I is far too aesthetically elegant, masterfully stylized, apolitical, and idiosyncratic to be associated with the proudly amateurish and dilettantish of No Wave figures like Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, James Nares, Scott B and Beth B, etc.  Unlike many of the major films of the No Wave movement, which were very much a glaring product of their particular zeitgeist, Driver's film has a truly timeless quality that, not unlike Eraserhead and the better films of Straub-Huillet like Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) aka The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach and their Franz Kafka adaptation Klassenverhältnisse (1984) aka Class Relations, totally transcends (and was quite atypical of) the era when it was made. As for Driver's own objective in terms of adapating Bowles, she confessed in 2011, “I just wanted to tell the story. I was interested in telling stories in a new way. My only intention was to make something that I thought Paul Bowles would be proud of and I would be proud of. And also make a movie that would get me to the next film, which I did. I mean, I think I felt so strongly about the story and what I was going to do, that I did not think what impact it was going to have.”

 A film that seems to completely psychologically imprison the viewer inside the uniquely unreliable psychotic mind of its ‘paranoiac’ (anti)heroine, You Are Not I is surely one of the most consistently fiercely foreboding films that I have ever seen and even by the very end of the work, I was not able to shake off the borderline severe sense of unease that it almost perniciously permeates. A sort of contra Girl, Interrupted (1999) in virtually every regard, Driver’s delectably dispiriting yet no less eccentric work features a gratingly homely lead of the somewhat ominous sort who through narration, strange facial expressions, subtle physical gestures, and highly personalized esoteric rituals forces the viewer to enter her metaphysical hell and ultimately confront a couple conspiring rural womenfolk, including her rather repressed looking sister. If I were to guess, Driver’s amply atmospheric Bowles adaptation is a sort of allegory for the filmmaker’s sense of alienation with female family members and her childhood community, as well as typical so-called gender roles in general, though the film thankfully lacks any sort of discernible feminist subtext. As Rosenbaum rightly noticed, “…YOU ARE NOT I begins more or less the way PSYCHO ends—with a schizophrenic in close-up remaining absolutely still while explaining everything off-screen.” Unlike Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s proto-slasher masterpiece, the unnervingly loony lady of Driver’s film immediately plunges the viewer into her uniquely unhinged psycho-neurotically nightmarish realm of morbid esoteric inwardness, as the film seems to take place entirely in her head. Notably, Driver would state regarding the very conscious influence of Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence on her film, “I think it’s because of the study of timing between people in that film […] It’s not stylistic, it’s just a gut emotional reaction—and wanting to involve and audience that much.” Indeed, despite the film’s excess of narration from the lead character, You Are Not I is an exceedingly visceral work that seems to have been made with the objective of haunting the viewer’s soul as opposed to picking at their brain or flattering their intellect (though the flick leaves the viewer with much to think about in the end). With the intent of attempting to depict a sinisterly sisterly territorial showdown of sorts between two diametrically opposed adult siblings—a schizophrenic free spirit and a grotesquely sexually repressed old spinster—Driver isolated lead actress Suzanne Fletcher from everyone else on the set and even had Melody Schneider, who plays the protagonist’s sister, bring personal items to the set to inspire an organic rivalry between the two actresses. Indubitably, You Are Not I is one of only a handful of films that I know of that effectively depicts the pathologically cryptic passive-aggressive ‘games’ that members of the so-called fairer sex play with one another.  In that sense, Driver's film, which has an intrinsically feminine touch to it, could have only been directed by an actual woman.

 Featuring a female lead whose mind and motivations seem more arcane than that of ‘The Gamin’ played by Adrienne Barrett in the quasi-Expressionistic cult classic Dementia (1955) aka Daughter of Horror directed by John Parker, You Are Not I is a decidedly Delphic flick that stays with the viewer long after it has concluded. In an assumed attempt to make the film seem less enigmatic, Driver handed out a publicity flyer during screenings where she provided the following synopsis: “…It is the story of a young woman, Ethel, who escapes from a mental hospital during the chaos of a nearby multiple-car accident. She is mistaken for a shock victim by a rescue volunteer who finds her trying to place a stone in a dead woman’s mouth. The volunteer drives her to her sister’s house. The sister is confused and angered by the sudden arrival of the psychotic Ethel. Not wishing to be alone in the house with her, the sister brings two neighbor women over. Finally the sister calls the hospital and finds out that Ethel “wasn’t released at all but somehow got out.” They nervously await the attendants from the hospital while Ethel, refusing to speak, formulates a plan to stay in the house.” Ultimately, the ‘plan’ that the lead carries out is arguably the most inexplicable and sphinxlike aspect of the entire film, but I guess that is what one should expect from a bat-shit crazy bitch who has a curious fetish for placing stones in the lifeless mouths of female cadavers. 

 You Are Not I opens with a still photograph of lead Ethel (Suzanne Fletcher of Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983) and Driver’s Sleepwalk) sitting on the ground and jotting notes juxtaposed with the character narrating, “You Are Not I. No one but me could possibly be. I know that. And I know where I have been…And what I have done. Ever since yesterday, When I walked out the gate during the accident.” From there, Ethel somehow manages to get over the barbed wire fence located around the mental institution where she has been imprisoned and then wanders like a forlorn somnambulist to the scene of a tragic three-vehicle car accident where over half a dozen or so people have died. After thinking to herself, “Of course! This is just in man’s world. If something real should happen…they would stop sinning,” Ethel begins singing to herself like one of the little girls from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and then steals and subsequently wears a pair of dress shoes that she finds on a male corpse. After also stealing a large coat from a cadaver that she will place a number of important stones in, Ethel begins roaming around the woods and complains to herself in her own mind, “I always hated cars. Hated to see them go by down there. Hated to see them disappear way off up the valley toward the next town. Made me angry to think…All those people moving from one place to another…Without any right to. Whoever said to them, ‘You may go and drive your car this morning to Clifton. You may driver wherever you want.’ No one. I know that. I know there’s no chief that says things like that to people…But it makes it pleasanter for me…When I imagine such a person does exist. Perhaps it would be…Only a tremendous voice speaking over a public address system set up in all the streets.” Indeed, it seems as if Ethel welcomes and even derives a sense of schadenfreude from the tragic accident, which ultimately acts as the genesis of her fight for freedom. 

 Upon encountering six corpses lying side-by-side and covered with white sheets, Ethel begins placing stones that she has found in the woods inside the mouths of these unfortunate car accident victims. When a rescue crew member spots Ethel doing this to another corpse that she later finds, he sensibly yells to her, “What are you doing? Are you crazy?” and she reacts by self-righteously replying, “It’s my sister and she’s dead!,” even though her sis is far from dead. After the medical volunteer has Ethel sit next to a couple wounded survivors from the car accident, she begins repeating to herself out loud every couple seconds, “She’s dead.” Notably, Ethel also reveals her innately insane sense of inwardness by curiously thinking to herself, “It seems to me that life outside was like life inside. There was always somebody to stop people from doing what they wanted to do. That was just the opposite of what I’d felt when I was still inside. Perhaps…What we want to do is wrong. But why should they always be the ones to decide? For once, I will decide what was right. And do it.” After giving the rescue volunteer the address of her sister’s house, Ethel curiously thinks to herself while being driven to the truly humble abode, “I managed to count the gas stations along the way. And I found…There was one more of them than I remembered.” Naturally, Ethel’s Sister (Melody Schneider) is quite angered when she shows up at her home and complains to the rescue volunteer when he asks her if she is alright, “She don’t look well yet to me.” Of course, Ethel is not only far from alright, but she also has big plans that defy both logic and reality. 

 While standing outside the house while turned in the opposite direction of her conspicuously cunty-looking sister, Ethel smirks in a sinister fashion while thinking to herself, “I often feel that something is about to happen…And when I do…I stay perfectly still…And let it go ahead. There’s no use wondering about it…Or trying to stop it. At this time, I had no particular feeling that a special event was about to come out…But I did feel that I would be more likely to do the right thing if I waited and let my sister act first.” Upon having her discernibly scared sister escort her inside the house as if she is a retarded child, Ethel is somewhat annoyed to see that everything in the house, including the rooms, has been somehow “reversed” by her sibling.  After thinking to herself, “I decided to say nothing and let her do the explaining if she felt like it. It occurred to me that it must have cost her every cent she had in the bank,” Ethel begins laughing hysterically about the prospect that her sis has wasted all her money on the seemingly imagined ‘reversal.’ After a couple of minutes, Ethel’s sister tells her to sit down and then exits the house.  Ethel's sister is almost deathly afraid of her and the mentally perturbed protagonist seems quite proud of that fact to the point where it becomes a source of solace for her.

 Looking for assumed ‘backup’ in case her estranged nutjob sibling blows a fuse, Ethel’s sister brings back an overweight old housewife named Mrs. Jelinek, who is also totally petrified by the protagonist even though she probably weighs twice as much as her. Under Jelinek’s recommendation, Ethel’s sister decides to “call the home” so she can give the head psychologist, Dr. Don, a piece of her mind about the fact that her sister looks no less deranged than when she was originally institutionalized and that she should never have been released from the psych-ward in the first place. After her sister goes to fetch another old fat woman named Kate Schultz, Ethel thinks to herself while humming like an autistic toddler, “I did not even look up when she went out […] I had made a big decision...And that was to stay right in the house and, under no condition, let myself be taken back there. I knew it would be difficult…But I had a plan. I knew it would work if I used all my will power. I have great will power.” Resolving to “keep quiet” so as to “not break the spell that is starting to work,” Ethel thinks to herself like a true megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur, “I knew it was going to be a battle between my sister and me…but I was confident that my force of character and superior education had fitted me for just such a battle…And that I could win it.”  Sort of like if Nietzsche had regained some of his mental faculties after his mental break and decided that he would use his philosophical prowess to free himself from his scheming sister's care, Ethel decides that she will use her true ‘Will to Power’ to reclaim the house and banish her sibling. 

 After talking to Dr. Don, Ethel’s sister learns that she was never actually discharged from the mental institution but instead “somehow she got out,” so she wastes no time in making a call to have a couple fellows from the nuthouse come down to pick up her unhinged sibling. Meanwhile, Ethel proudly thinks to herself that neither Mrs. Jelinek nor Mrs. Schultz will dare to have the gall to do anything to her unless they are willed by her sister, who is far too petrified herself to sick the two old farts on her sibling. As Ethel thinks to herself like a bat-shit crazy braggart of the cunningly sadistic sort, “For although I had never done her any harm, she had always been convinced that someday I would. It may be…that she knew now what I was about to do to her. But, I doubt it, or she would’ve run away from the house.” As all three women wait in a discernibly horrified fashion for the guys from the mental institution to arrive, Ethel begins planning for a brighter future of the domesticated suburbanite sort, thinking to herself, “The house was already ugly…But I was already getting ideas for making it look better.” Ethel seems to more or less look at the three women as insignificant maggots, thinking to herself with a sense of self-satisfied glee, “I could’ve laughed out loud when I thought of what they were really waiting to see. If they had only known it.” When the guys from the mental hospital finally arrive and proceed to take Ethel away, the protagonist stops in front of her sister, pulls out a stone from the pocket of the coat that she stole from the corpse at the accident site, and then aggressively places the rock in her sibling’s mouth. After Ethel’s sister screams in abject horror, the screen cuts to black and the protagonist proceeds to narrate, “I felt that my front teeth were broken. I could taste blood on my lips. I thought I was going to faint. I put my hand to my mouth…and I knew…that this was the turning point. I shut my eyes very hard. When I opened them…everything was different and I knew I had won. For a moment, I could not see very clearly. But even during that moment…I saw myself sitting on the sofa. As my vision cleared, I saw that the men were holding my sister’s arms…And she was putting up a terrific struggle.” 

 In the end, Ethel’s sister replaces her and is brought back to the mental institution instead. While being strapped to a stretcher in an ambulance before heading to the loony bin, Ethel’s sister cries hysterically, or so the unreliable protagonist narrates in vivid detail as if she is the one that is actually being restrained. Indeed, despite still sitting at home in a chair, Ethel is somehow able to retrace her sister’s every move while she is being transported to the mental institution, including regarding the EMTs that, “They kept promising her ice cream for dinner but she knew better than to believe them.” Upon finally arriving to the nutward, Ethel’s sister takes a stone out of a pocket of the coat  that her sis had been previously wearing and then places it in her mouth, thus causing her to choke. Eventually, Ethel has a revelation of sorts and thinks to herself in a prideful manner regarding the seemingly inexplicable accomplishment of switching places with her sister, “The strange thing, now that I realize it, was that no one realized she was not I.” Somewhat curiously, at the end, Ethel remains sitting in the same chair where she has sat for about the second half of the film because she lacks the drive and motivation to move and thinks to herself, “I could walk upstairs, and look into her bedroom, if I wanted to…But it’s such a longtime since I’ve been up there and I no longer know how the rooms are arranged…So I prefer to stay down here.” Meanwhile, Ethel’s sister is portrayed jotting down what may or may not be the film’s story in a very Expressionistic room in the mental institution that looks like it could be inside the lunatic asylum featured in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). 

 It should be noted that Jonathan Rosenbaum speculated in his book Film: The Front Line 1983 that director Sara Driver would probably not have a successful filmmaking career in the United States due to her avant-garde approach to the artistic medium, writing, “More recently, she cites as the two films that have most impressed her Dreyer’s LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’AR and Tarkovsky’s THE STALKER, both of which might be regarded as archetypes of the European art film. Whether or not that tradition has a viable future in this country, Driver is clearly a filmmaker to watch; it’ll merely be our bad fortune if we have to cross the Atlantic in order to see her work.” Unfortunately, it seems that Rosenbaum fears were not unfounded, as it has been over two decades since Driver has directed a film, not to mention the fact that she has only managed to complete two features, which include Sleepwalk (1986) aka Year of the Dog once again starring Suzanne Fletcher and the German-Dutch-American coproduction When Pigs Fly (1993) starring Marianne Faithfull and Alfred Molina.  Still, the two features that Driver has directed are notable for being a rare example of American ‘magic realism’ (or what Rosenbaum describes as works belonging to the ‘fantastique’ genre). Aside from her two features and the occasional short like the documentary The Bowery, Spring 1994 (1994), Driver has unfortunately been mostly regulated to living in the shadow of her longtime boy toy Jarmusch, whose films she has worked on a variety of capacities that certainly seem to be beneath her talent as a rare genuinely talented American female arthouse auteur.  Personally, I will take one Sara Driver over a dozen Sofia Coppolas any day.  Indeed, as far as depictions of female schizophrenia go, You Are Not I can only really be compared to Teutonic auteuress Helma Sanders-Brahms’ singular dark masterpiece Die Berührte (1981) aka No Mercy No Future, even if the two films have little in common aesthetically aside from featuring fairly homely and deathly pale she-schizos and sometimes transcending the line between reality and deluded fantasy. In other words, Driver’s film features easily one of the most unsettling yet, at the same time, truly cinematic depictions of feminine mental derangement ever committed to bold black-and-white celluloid.  In that regard, Driver's film(s) also has much in common with the cinematic oeuvre of Austrian artist Valie Export (Unsichtbare Gegner aka Invisible Adversaries, Menschenfrauen), though she has credited some more surprising personal influences. Indeed, at a retrospective of her work held by Anthology Film Archives entitled Sleepwalking: The Films of Sara Driver, the filmmaker had a couple of her favorite films screened, including the Val Lewton produced cult horror classic Cat People (1942) directed by Jacques Tourneur and Jack Hill's Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told (1967).  Of course, in terms of atmosphere, You Are Not I is pure and unadulterated oneiric horror cinema that owes just as much to Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962) as it does an avant-garde work like Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943).  Simply judging by her films, I would most certainly more enjoy raiding Driver's DVD collection than that of her lover Jarmusch, who probably owns one too many French New Wave flicks for my taste.

 When mentioned by an interviewer at Senses of Cinema that some critics interpreted her film as telling a story that manages to “question our notions of insanity and it is a play between real and dreamy” while other critics though it was “simply about depersonalization and identity confusion,” Driver revealed regarding her personal thoughts on You Are Not I, “I’m very boring, it was very pure. It was very surprising because I found out it was being shown to a group of psychiatrists as an example of schizophrenia (laughing). But I think in their early twenties, a lot of women go through this; they sort of have a little bit of obsession with women and madness – you go through your Sylvia Plath thing, and you go through your Zelda Fitzgerald thing, but I did not look at madness that closely.” Apparently, source writer Bowles claimed that he sired the story while in a semi-conscious state that was, “a second between waking and sleeping, or sleeping and waking,” but I find that somehow irrelevant to the film, as Driver transformed it into her own highly personalized and even metaphysical story that is comparable to Lynch’s Eraserhead and Guy Maddin's Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) in terms of being a highly intimate auteur piece of the totally transcendental and seemingly allegorically psycho-autobiographical sort. In terms of its literally and figuratively dark post-Gothic aesthetic, unconventional time running time, fiercely foreboding and paranoiac ‘Kafkaesque’ tone, macabre quirkiness, and otherworldly phantasmagorical ‘modernist horror’ approach, You Are Not I also deserves comparisons to criminally underrated Dutch auteur Adriaan Ditvoorst’s 48-minute Willem Frederik Hermans adaptation De blinde fotograaf (1973) aka The Blind Photographer. Although it might seem like a strange comparison, both Driver and Ditvoorst’s films reveal that they even beat Kubrick at his own game in terms of transforming someone else’s story into something that is completely and unmistakably their own.  Indeed, after watching You Are Not I, I can only assume that Mr. Jarmusch is with a woman whose mind is much darker, stronger, and labyrinthine than his own, hence why he managed to reach the mainstream yet Driver's filmmaking career fizzled out before it ever really got to blossom.  Of course, if the schizophrenic protagonist of her film is in any way autobiographical, I can see why Driver might find a hard time finding funding for her films.  After all, You Are Not I features what is probably the most innately horrifying and intimidating frail young woman in cinema history and I say that as someone that regularly sees a literally skeletal young woman every day with the unfortunate wasting away illness of Crohn's disease who puts the average holocaust survivor to shame in terms of resembling a walking and talking corpse.

-Ty E

Men in Orbit

 

When I saw avant-garde jazz musician and all around ‘hipster renaissance man’ Jim Lurie for the very first time while watching his buddy Jim Jarmusch’s classic ‘buddy flick’ Down by Law (1986) well over a decade ago, my immediate instinctive reaction was to want to kick his ass and knock the perennially ‘tragically hip’ look off his relatively swarthy face, yet my view of him has changed somewhat since then after seeing him in other roles like the strip club manager/quasi-pimp in Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984) and as the inmate Greg Penders in the tastefully trashy HBO prison series Oz (1997-2003) and now I can actually watch him in films without getting the urge to cause his hospitalization. Indeed, one cannot look at someone as a totally insufferable pretentious twat who would dare to get high on LSD with his comrades and direct a film in his apartment about spaceflight involving the most ludicrously ‘lo-fi’ of science fiction scenarios. Indeed, for his second (he previously directed a short the same year entitled Hell Is You (1979)) and ultimately last film Men in Orbit (1979)—a largely plot-less and superficially experimental 45-minute anti-sci-fi Arte Povera that seems like it was assembled in a couple hours that might be best described as the Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) aka A Trip to the Moon of the Colab-sponsored No Wave Cinema movement—Lurie boldly went where no self-stylized hipster had gone before by pretending his dilapidated apartment could pass for outer-space, thus making the flick a great double feature with Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky (1982). Hopelessly hipster-esque in its innately ironical portrayal of burnout neo-bohemians as brave and adventurous men of science, the film was shot on Super-8 with an incredibly low but not surprising budget of $500, which Lurie managed to secure via a quite questionable insurance claim he made after staging a phoney robbery in his own apartment where his beloved saxophones were supposedly stolen. Considering that James Bidgood created a kaleidoscopic Uranian universe in his mere apartment for his high-camp queer masterpiece Pink Narcissus (1971) and Apollonian pornographic auteur Wakefield Poole achieved something nearly as grand with his experimental fag fuck flick Bijou (1972) long before Lurie assumedly thought he had a bright idea while stoned to make a film in his flat about a space trip where he and his comrade are actually tripping, Men in Orbit is in no way cinematically revolutionary and is ultimately more plot-less and, in turn, more pointless than the most static of Andy Warhol’s mostly botched pre-Morrissey cinematic experiments, yet it still has its charms as a sort of hyper hokey Super-8 abortion that demonstrates the inexplicable lows that those involved in the so-called ‘No Wave’ scene went to when it came to effortlessly defecating out what is nothing short of true disposable art. In fact, with the original film print being long lost, it was assumed for a period of time that Lurie's celluloid anti-love letter to true Aryan technological supremacy was forever lost, but a fittingly low-quality version of the work was eventually accidentally located at the end of a mislabeled 3/4" U-matic videotape that turned out to be compilation reel for a weekly Manhattan public access TV program called Red Curtain (1979-1983) and later released in 2012 as part of the offbeat sci-fi DVD set Orphans in Space: Forgotten Films From the Final Frontier. Needless to say, Men in Orbit will probably only appeal to Lurie fanboys, No Wave completists, and fanatical fans of lo-fi sci-fi. Admittedly, why I decided to take the plunge and actually watch the film is still somewhat of a mystery to me, but I have a suspicion that it was largely the result of me wanting to confirm my assumption that the No Wave scene was comprised of a collective of the most singularly lazy, decidedly derivative, and uniquely uncreative filmmakers that ever got together and formed a noted filmmaking movement. 

 In an assumed attempt to rationalize why Men in Orbit is so superlatively shitty and patently pointless, director Lurie stated in the fairly worthwhile documentary Blank City (2010) directed by French documentarian Celine Danhier regarding the film and the curious artistic philosophy of the No Wave movement, “I hid the fact that I knew how to play the saxophone from people…and I would make these movies because nobody was doing what they knew how to do. If you knew how to do something it was like, ‘No, no, no…you can’t have any technique.’ Technique was so hated. The painters were in bands, the musicians were painting or making films. I mean, nobody was doing what they knew how to do.” Undoubtedly, if the film has any real discernible technique, it was provided by British filmmaker turned painter James Nares (TV Faces, No Japs at My Funeral), who acted as the cinematographer of the film (notably, Lurie previously appeared as a culture-cringing Roman dandy who proclaims to be Jesus Christ in Nares’ sword-and-sandal No Wave epic Rome ’78 (1978)). Indeed, if there is any possible indication that Men in Orbit might be set in an atmosphere lacking in gravity like outer-pace, it is the result of Nares' oftentimes cockeyed and spastic ‘floating camera’ technique, which he achieved by standing on a ladder while hovering over Lurie and filmmaker Eric Mitchell as they less than triumphantly trip in their piece of shit makeshift spaceship. In fact, it would probably be more logical to credit Nares as the true director of the film and Lurie as simply the star, ‘co-writer’ (obviously, the film was completely improvised and had nothing resembling a real physical script), and musical composer. In fact, in an interview conducted by filmmaker and media artist Andrea Callard (who unwittingly “saved” Men in Orbit from being lost forever after sending a tape featuring her own work and Lurie's film in one of the twenty-two boxes of materials she had given to New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections), Lurie would admitt, “I probably put more thought into the sound than the camera. And what James Nares did was more than brilliant, achieving a weightless quality by floating the camera, constantly, above us. It was shot in Super 8.” On top of that, Lurie more or less holds his co-star Mitchell responsible for forcing him to assemble the anti-NASA vanity piece in the first place, or as he also revealed to Callard, “The driving force behind all of this was Eric Mitchell, who basically demanded that everyone make a film. I doubt much would have happened without his unstoppable and sometimes annoying energy. He had an idea to open a theater using the films that we would all make.” Of course, as the innate incoherence and technical ineptness of Men in Orbit—a work that seems like the director’s half-hearted attempt at making a film with the same structure as the discordant degenerate jazz he composes—surely demonstrates, Lurie is at his best when doing virtually nothing like creating preposterously pretentious facial expressions and poses in his buddy’s films and not when assaulting the art of cinema by laughably attempting to degenerate it into the filmic equivalent of freeform jazz. 

 Notably, Lurie has become a recluse of sorts over the past decade or so because he has suffered debilitating neurological problems as a result of chronic Lyme disease, which was only further compounded by the fact that he had to leave the rotten Big Apple because an unhinged six-foot-three half-Korean/half-Jew ex-friend named John Perry began stalking him. Of course, one would never suspect this while watching Men in Orbit, which makes Lurie seem like a sort of exceedingly extroverted and buffoonish hipster party boy that loves nothing more than indulging in McDonalds and LSD with his friends. Indeed, the film hardly seems like it was created by an artist of any sort, as it is essentially an absurdly amateurish homevideo that feels like it was created solely to entertain the director's hipster friends. In terms of political messages, the film makes a fairly passive attempt to mock NASA and mainstream America’s Cold War obsession with the Space Race of 1955 through 1972, though I suspect Lurie would agree with his Hebraic hipster ‘spiritual father’ Norman Mailer when he wrote, “the real mission of the Wasp in history was not, say, to create capitalism, or to disseminate Christianity into backward countries. […] It was to get the U.S. to the moon” (of course, one could much more easily argue that, as noted at the end of Uncle Adolf's Bavarian bohemian junky poet mentor Dietrich Eckart's classic posthumously published pamphlet Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zwiegespräch zwischen Hitler und mir (1925) aka Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: Dialogues Between Hitler and Me, the real mission of the Jews in history is to destroy the world via the atom bomb and class warfare, among other things). Probably one of only a handful of people in the world that has the racially schizophrenic distinction of being both half Hebrew and half Welsh, Lurie still manages to look and act quite like his frog buddy Mitchell in Men in Orbit to the point where the viewer might confuse the two while watching the film. Despite being ostensibly brilliant and cultivated neo-beatniks tripping on the supposedly creativity-inspiring drug of LSD (which certainly acted as an inspiration to right-thinking writers like Ernst Jünger and Aldous Huxley), the two would-be-iconoclasts strangely manage to not say a single eloquent, intelligent, or insightful thing during the entire film, thereupon making them seem like the all the more stupid and swarthy fathers of Beavis and Butt-head (of course, at least the latter two are devoid of pretense and have at least a tad bit of good old-fashioned prole charm and wit). 

 To write a detailed synopsis of Men in Orbit would be patently pointless, as the film is mainly comprised of the two leads, who seem hopelessly in love with one another and their own imagined witticisms, sitting in their big boy toy spacecraft and doing such marvelously mundane things as shaving, slurring words, giggling like preschool girls, pointlessly bickering with ‘Mission Command,’ and eating greasy McDonalds hamburgers in a slob-like fashion that would most certainly deeply offend modern-day hipsters, who tend to like to wear the coveted ‘good guy badge’ of partaking in veganism. Admittedly, I think it is most fitting that Lurie and Mitchell’s ‘inebriation’ seems to begin to peak after takeoff  and especially once the two vaguely delightful dullards have reached outer-space. When engaging in messy verbal diarrhea while in orbit, the two men spend more time heckling ‘Mission Control’ (Michael McClard) than admiring the view. In fact, the two autistic astronauts probably spend most of their times giggling like a Mexican schoolgirl whose brother just touched her nipple. In between shoving McDonalds hamburgers down their throats that they have hanging from a wall next to their seats in the cockpit of their spacecraft, Lurie and Mitchell also engage in ‘avant-garde shaving’ to ostensibly demonstrate they are real men who do real manly things. Of course, no film featuring John Lurie would be complete without the musician playing an instrument in an obscenely obnoxious fashion that is bound to alienate and/or inspire Fremdscham in most viewers. Indeed, while Lurie strums his git-fiddle in a merrily lackluster fashion, Mitchell delivers his most humorous dialogue when he ironically sings, “America is really great…I like Texas, that’s where I come from.” Via TV monitor, the boys also talk to their discernibly homely ‘wives’ (played by their then-real-life girlfriends Becky Johnston and Mary Lou Fogarty) in a manner that resembles a couple people plagued with ‘trisomy 21’ (which would most certainly be a great name for their spacecraft) attempting to flirt with one another. Strangely, after talking to their spouses, Lurie remarks, “I’m not sure if I want to go back or not” and his comrades concurs, replying,“I’m not sure myself either.” Towards the end of the film, Lurie states in an overtly tongue-in-cheek fashion while smoking and eating junk food, “We’re going to spend these last days of space as relaxed as possible.” Unfortunately, Lurie and Mitchell’s spacecraft does not pull a Space Shuttle Columbia style disaster in the end, which would have been the perfect way to conclude such a chaotic film. 

 As Andrea Callard would note in her introduction to her interview with John Lurie in regard to Men in Orbit and how the original print of the film is presumed forever lost, “It was not unusual in the 70s for Super 8mm filmmakers to cut and edit their original footage, handle it many times, then screen the results using unpredictable projectors, without ever making prints or video copies. Keeping track of everything one made did not seem so important at the time. One just moved on to the next compelling idea.” Indeed, Lurie’s film, like many contemporary consumer goods, looks like it was made to be disposed of after only a few uses, yet it somehow lives on today, which is quite possibly the most strange thing about it (it should be noted that a number of classic No Wave films are either completely unavailable or assumed lost). In fact, Lurie seems so proud of the film that he actually went so far as to have it taken down from YouTube after filing a copyright claim, thus more than hinting that he no longer subscribes to the ‘no bullshit’ punk-beatnik ethos of his youth. I can only assume that Lurie is somewhat of a hypocrite as he stated in his somewhat recent interview with Collard regarding Men in Orbit, “It was great back then. It was all energy and ideas. There was no concern for money or credit. It was really pretty wonderful. Very soon after that everything changed for the worse.” Of course, Lurie should probably feel lucky that there are actually foolish people out there like myself who would dare to watch such a remarkably retarded piece of painfully schlocky Super-8 sub-twaddle. Notably, when asked in an interview with Filmmaker Magazine how he came up with the idea to shoot a sci-fi film in his apartment and how it was to act while high on LSD, Lurie got a little bit pissy and stated like a true art fag queen, “How did you come up for the idea is a question that really baffles me. Acting on LSD is not acting at all, is more the capturing of a weird event. Dock Ellis pitched a no hitter once on LSD but it is not something I would recommend to young actors take to improve their performance.” Indeed, “a weird event” is probably a good way to describe Men in Orbit, as it is hard to fathom that such a work was not only made, but is also still championed by the sort of shameless cultural parasites that like hanging out a modern art museums where images of erect horse cocks and unclad bull-dykes with mega-bushes are passed off as art. Considering that musician Arto Lindsay (who not surprisingly played guitar in Lurie and his brother Ethan's jazz group The Lounge Lizards) once described it as, “one of the best movies ever made on the Lower East Side,” one must just assume that the film is simply one of the most longwinded inside jokes ever made, though I doubt Lurie intended to make it at the expense of both the No Wave scene and himself, which it ultimately accomplishes. 

 When everything is said and done, Men in Orbit ultimately proves to be a more tolerable experience than Lurie’s Jap-produced proto-reality-TV series Fishing with John (1991), as it is short and almost sweet and thankfully does not feature the Stranger Than Paradise (1984) star engaging in the pointless platitudes that he is arguably best known for. Additionally, the sci-fi featurette benefits from featuring an original quasi-punk and noise soundtrack as opposed to the sort of aesthetically aberrant avant-garde jazz music that one typically expects from proud negrophile Lurie. Indeed, arguably the greatest thing about watching Men in Orbit is that, if one did not know better, the viewer would probably assume that Lurie is the sort of guy that likes drinking cheap beer while watching football and Girls Gone Wild videos as opposed to being a pathologically posturing neo-beatnik whose greatest contribution to film is being a mensch that has the dubious talent of looking simultaneously intricately bitchy yet pretentious in most of his major acting roles.  A work that might be best described as a heterosexual hipster low-camp take on science fiction that semi-succeeds in it's assumed objective of attempting to make space-travel seem hopelessly banal, the film ultimately seems like it features the most real and vulnerable depiction of Lurie to date, which is no small accomplishment considering that he seems like a fairly impenetrable guy.  In that sense, LSD certainly seems to have some benefits, as it forced two of NYC's most perennially posturing and image-obsessed hipsters, Lurie and Mitchell, to take off their carefully constructed masks and do more than leaning against a wall while looking so tragically forlorn like they do in most of their acting roles.  A stupendously stupid piece of passive-aggressive NASA-parodying, Men in Orbit is to Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) what the scribblings of Anton LaVey are to the philosophical hammering of Friedrich Nietzsche, as a cheap carny-esque sub-bastardization that does not even touch the surface of its progenitor yet still makes for a fleetingly entertaining experience. Of course, one of the film's greatest attributes is that Lurie—a hardly productive half-Hebrew hipster—is the ultimate anti-Faustian man and thus the idea of him becoming a brave astronaut is about as likely as Haiti becoming a world power or Austrian avant-garde Peter Kubelka directing a feature-length film with a linear plot and starring mainstream Hollywood actors. 

-Ty E

Permanent Vacation

Admittedly, while I tend to either love or hate most auteur filmmakers, especially those of the arthouse or avant-garde oriented sort, Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers, Only Lovers Left Alive) is a rare a filmmaker that I both like and loathe, though his most recent films have caused me to feel mostly more of the latter. Of course, unlike a lot of contemporary cinephiles (who typically borrow most of their ideas and fetishes from the French New Wave and the anti-Occidental Frankfurt School influenced academics and critics), xenophilia, non-ironical ethno-masochism, flagrant La Nouvelle Vague worship, dimestore existentialism, post-Beat Generation hipsterdom, and degenerate jazz are things that leave a rather bitter taste in my mouth, so naturally I find it to be an innately impossible task to fully embrace any of the films in Jarmusch’s somewhat uneven oeuvre. Although not really a major figure of the movement when it was still around, Jarmusch's roots lie in the underground No Wave Cinema scene of the mid-1970s through mid-1980s where he did things like work as a second recordist on his bud Eric Mitchell’s largely forgotten midnight movie Underground U.S.A. (1980), acted as a cinematographer on his longtime girlfriend Sara Driver’s Paul Bowles adaptation You Are Not I (1981), and ultimately directed his first and mostly rarely seen feature Permanent Vacation (1980), which I finally decided to watch the other day after many years of procrastination. According to Jarmusch himself, it was his comrades of the No Wave scene who talked him into directing his first feature, or as the auteur stated in the documentary Blank City (2010) directed by Celine Danhier, “I used to sort of follow Eric [Mitchell] and Amos [Poe] around and they were always saying, ‘Jim, when are you going to make a feature film. Come on, Jim make a film.’” I must confess that, after reading a couple reviews of Permanent Vacation, I expected the worst and braced myself for a film that I assumed would be an all the more slow, pedantic, and posturing take on Jarmusch’s second feature Stranger Than Paradise (1984), yet it ultimately somewhat surprised me and exceeded my admittedly fairly low expectations.  Indeed, while I would probably hate Jarmusch if I met him in real-life, his debut at least allowed me to somewhat understand where he is coming from and why he has an insatiable love for old dead negro jazz musicians, goofy anachronistic clothing, emotional sterility, and seemingly pointless posturing (or what he and his fans probably call ‘style’).

 Shot on a relatively miniscule budget of around $12,000 as an intended master's thesis while Jarmusch was attending the film program at NYU (somewhat humorously, he was denied a degree because the university did not appreciate the fact that he used his Louis B. Mayer Foundation scholarship to fund the film), Permanent Vacation is a slow burning, very consciously stylized, semi-autobiographical (the lead character is a composite of Jarmusch, his factory worker brother, and lead actor Chris Parker), and a virtual manifesto of the filmmaker’s seemingly fairly consistent Weltanschauung as a passive nihilist, self-stylized NYC hipster, degenerate jazz lover, and perennial too-cool-for-school rebel-without-a-cause. Indeed, for a Jarmusch fanboy to describe the film as one of the director’s lesser works (even respected critic Jonathan Rosenbaum described the film as, “The only Jim Jarmusch feature that qualifies as apprentice work”) is nothing short of hipster heresy and strong evidence that they do not actually sincerely like the auteur or his films, but instead are more interested in what he and his films stand for (e.g. negrophilia, hipsterism, passive nihilism, etc.). Featuring a real-life eternal wanderer and decidedly disillusioned social outcast in the lead role (Jarmusch specially tailored the character for the lead ‘actor,’ who fittingly uses his real name), Permanent Vacation is a sort of overtly offbeat (anti)bildungsroman about a metaphysically dead hipster hobo and fiercely forlorn fashion victim who probably felt he found a true kindred spirit (or at least, a cool quote to steal) when he read Arthur Rimbaud’s words, “I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.”   While Jarmusch's film will not give you hope for hopeless hipsters, it will give you the sense that Nietzsche was right in regard to his ideas of the ‘eternal return’ and especially ‘Amor fati’ (of course, Jarmusch is still interested in these themes as Broken Flowers (2005) especially demonstrates).

 While fairly unknown (it never received a theatrical release) and poorly reviewed in the United States, Permanent Vacation was well received in Germany where it earned the Josef von Sternberg Award at the 1980 Mannheim-Heidelberg International Filmfestival and impressed New German Cinema ‘alpha-auteur’ Wim Wenders so much that he gave Jarmusch some film stock to work on his next feature Stranger Than Paradise (notably, Jarmusch also worked as an assistant on Wenders’ doc Lightning Over Water (1980) aka Nick’s Movie about the remaining days of Hollywood rebel Nicholas Ray, who the filmmaker also acted as a personal assistant to). Undoubtedly, one of Jarmusch’s greatest ‘talents’ as a filmmaker is that he is one of the few American filmmakers that has been able to express the sort of existential despair that is quite common in the films of the great European arthouse filmmakers of the post-WWII era, especially those of New German Cinema. Indeed, as a largely plot-less work sprinkled with occasional cinephile references that features a quasi-antihero with a flat affect and nothing to live for except vintage negro music and attempting to look and act ‘hip’ (personally, I found the young man to be quite unwittingly ludicrous, which is probably the only thing charming about him), Permanent Vacation almost seems like Jarmusch’s attempt to make a NYC equivalent to early Wenders flicks like Summer in the City (1970) and The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972). With its gritty and almost cinema-vérité realist aesthetic, Jarmusch’s film falls somewhere between the scum-covered American-dream-damning of exploitation auteur Nick Millard’s anti-masterpiece Criminally Insane (1975) and the German era ‘hard ghetto’ meditations of Iranian auteur Sohrab Shahid Saless like Tagebuch eines Liebenden (1977) aka Diary of a Lover and Ordnung (1980) aka Order.  As far as American influences go, aside from the No Wave scene, Jarmusch's film seems to owe a very heavy debt to the fairly small yet nonetheless very important and highly influential oeuvre of largely forgotten NYC underground auteur Peter Emmanuel Goldman. Aside from the plight of the lead in Permanent Vacation being quite similar to the protagonists in Goldman's features Echoes of Silence (1967) and Wheel of Ashes (1969), the opening scenes of the almost somnambulist-like masses walking in slow-motion in the seedy streets of NYC bears a strikingly resemblance to various scenes in the forgotten auteur's short Pestilent City (1965) to the point where it almost seems like borderline plagiarism.  Luckily for Jarmusch, Goldman is now largely forgotten today, including among serious cinephiles, even though his final feature Wheel of Ashes starring Pierre Clémenti is probably the only real direct link between the NYC underground and La Nouvelle Vague.  Of course, what makes Jarmusch important and singular is that he dared to make such decidedly dejecting and audience-alienating works in the land and era of Spielberg and Lucas where movies are mostly made with the exact opposite intent as Permanent Vacation, which is a work that prides itself on escaping from the escapism of Hollywood and instead dwells in an inwardly dead state of mind where Weltschmerz reigns. 

 Almost terminally nihilistic teenage protagonist Aloysious Christopher Parker (Chris Parker) is a man with no plan aside from perennially drifting from one place to another, or as he less than eloquently narrates in a fairly monotone fashion that makes one question whether or not he is a eunuch (he sounds like a drug-addled lesbian hooker), “My name is Aloysious Christopher Parker and, if I ever have a son, he'll be Charles Christopher Parker. Just like Charlie Parker. The people I know just call me Allie, and this is my story -- or part of it. I don't expect it to explain all that much, but what's a story anyway, except one of those connect the dots drawings that in the end forms a picture of something. That's really all this is. That's how things work for me. I go from this place, this person to that place or person. And, you know, it doesn't really make that much difference.” A sort of passive misanthrope who probably does not even have enough energy or will power to truly love or hate people, Allie compares people to inanimate objects and rooms, stating that, when it comes to individuals, there always comes a time when the, “newness is gone [...] And then there's this kind of dread, kind of creeping dread. You probably don't even know what I'm talking about. But anyway I guess the point of all this is that after a while, something tells you, some voice speaks to you, and that's it. Time to split.” Although he is still just an adolescent, Allie is already wise enough to know that, “People are going to be basically the same” and thus has no problem physically and emotionally drifting in and out of peoples’ lives like some sort of melancholic ghost (actually, Allie's parasitic lifestyle, superficial charm, lack of long-term goals, criminality, emotional shallowness, and proneness towards boredom, among other things, indicated that he might suffer from psychopathy). Upon randomly dropping by the dilapidated apartment of an assumed lover named Leila (Leila Gastil), Allie is asked, “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you since Thursday” and he less than emotionally replies as if it is no big deal that he has worried the shit out of his quasi-girlfriend with his unexpected absence, “Walking….Just, walking around. I can’t seem to sleep at night. Not in this city.” Not even seemingly vaguely interested in love or even carnal pleasures, Allie proceeds to goofily dance to degenerate jazz while Leila hypnotically stares out of a window as if hoping that she could be anywhere else other than where she currently is in life. When his culturally confused one-man dance session is over, Allie demonstrates he is a degenerate descendent of Narcissus by intently staring at himself in a mirror while combing his hair and proudly declaring, “You know, sometimes I think I should just live fast and die young. . .and go in a three-piece suit like Charlie Parker. Not bad, huh?” Needless to say, Leila is less than impressed with the protagonist's outmoded James Dean-esque declaration, but it seems that in Allie’s own mind he is a misunderstood superstar who is the only person that is truly capable of understanding his own brilliance. 

 In a scene that seems to reflect Allie’s fragmented mind and incapacity for concentrating on anything for any extended period of time, the protagonist reads an excerpt from mysterious pseudonymous French poet Comte de Lautréamont’s classic proto-surrealist poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror (1868) aka The Songs of Maldoror and then says to Leila, “I’m tired of this book, you can have it.” When Leila tries in vain to receive some warmth and affection from the protagonist by complaining, “I’m tired of being alone,” Allie matter-of-factly replies, “Everyone is alone” and then goes on a predictable pessimistic rant where he attempts to rationalize why he is proud of being a bum and then mentions how his once-normal mother went totally insane after his father abandoned their family. After discussing the fact that he has not seen his institutionalized schizophrenic mother in over a year and that he would like to the visit the ruins of his childhood home, which was supposedly destroyed in an imaginary war by “The Chinese,” Allie leaves Leila for good and heads to the place where he was apparently born, though he does not seem to find what he is looking for. In the ruins of where he was born, Allie bumps into a shell-shocked war veteran (Jarmusch regular Richard Boes) who is convinced that he is still fighting the Vietcong. After giving him a cigarette, Allie gives the mentally unhinged vet the somewhat sound advice “go some place different […] that’s what I’m going to do” and the ex-soldier abides as if following an order given to him by a drill instructor. Unfortunately for Allie, he is far less open to taking advice from others, as he is a young man who treasures personal sovereignty above all else, even if it requires that he lead the life of the most destitute of rootless cosmopolitans. 

 When Allie visits his mother (Ruth Bolton) at the scum-covered mental institution where she has been interned, it becomes quite apparent why the protagonist has a hard time emotionally connecting to other people, as his mentally perturbed progenitor barely acknowledges him and treats him like he is a pestilence when she actually does, randomly stating to him regarding his eyes in a fashion that reveals that she clearly has yet to get over her husband leaving her, “They don’t belong to you. They were taken out of your father’s head.” With his mental mommy treating him with an emotionally crippling combination of disdain and apathy and her all-the-more-mental roommate laughing hysterically for seemingly no reason, Allie naturally decides to use the opportunity to leave when a nurse (played by Jarmusch’s longtime girlfriend, filmmaker Sara Driver) comes in the room and tells the protagonist to temporary leave so that she can give the patients their clearly much needed medicine. After his brief stop at the ghetto nut-ward, Allie walks through a ruined neighborhood that resembles a bombed-out third world city where he happens upon a literally raving mad yet stunningly beauteous Hispanic woman (María Duval of Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1988)) who is wearing nothing but a slip and has make-up smeared across her tragic little face. When Allie asks the loony Latina “Are you alright?,” she screams, “Go! Get out of here!,” so the protagonist decides to go on his less than merry way.  Of course, seeing such a ravishing babe in such a sad and sorry state only provides validity to Allie's hopelessly pessimistic personal philosophy.  Indeed, it as if misery, absurdity, and destitution follow Allie everywhere he goes, but I suspect he would not have it any other way.

 In a fairly blatant tribute from Jarmusch to his mentor, Allie wanders into a movie theater that is screening Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents (1960) starring Anthony Quinn and Peter O'Toole, though the protagonist seems less interested in seeing the film than chatting up random strangers that he meets in the lobby. After buying some popcorn and asking an attractive movie theater employee about the “Quinn Eskimo movie,” Allie is told a story relating to the Doppler effect that he surely will forever cherish about a suicidal saxophonist playing “Over the Rainbow” by a jolly middle-aged negro (Frankie Faison of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008)) with a bad case of the giggles. After leaving the movie theater without actually watching the movie, Allie happens upon an avant-garde saxophonist played by John Lurie (who co-composed the film's musical score with Jarmusch), who asks him, “What do you want to hear, Kid?,” to which the protagonist replies in an uncharacteristically excited fashion, “I don’t care, as long as it’s vibrating bugged-out sound. Man, what a sax.” After Lurie passionately plays an autistic avant-garde jazz version of “Over the Rainbow” on his sax, Allie goes to spends the night on a roof on some random apartment building. The next day, when some random young bourgeois bitch in a fancy convertible asks Allie to do her the simple favor of putting her envelope in a mailbox that he is obnoxiously leaning on, the protagonist retorts in a prissy fashion, “What do I look like, the mailman?” and then steals the young lady’s car after she makes the mistake of attempting to deal with the letter herself. As the young lady bitches about the fact that Allie has stolen her car, some random negro hobo pops out of nowhere and adds insult to injury by boorishly blabbering, “That dude was wild style. Ohhh, no. You better get your ass out of her before he snatches that up too.” After some momentary hesitation, Allie decides he needs quick crash and opts to sell the stolen convertible for a mere $800 to some lowlife crook played by French-born No Wave auteur Eric Mitchell.  Of course, since the car is stolen, it is no big loss for Allie, who just wants to get the hell out of the rotten Big Apple before he rots with it.

 Ultimately, Allie gets a passport, buys a boat ticket, and prepares for a pilgrimage to Paris where he assumedly plans to live in exile for an indefinite period of time just like so many artists and would-be-artists before him. Almost too fittingly in what one would might describe as a borderline mystical scene, Allie spots his French doppelganger (Chris Hameon)—a character that may or may not be inspired by a young version of Jarmusch's French-born buddy Eric Mitchell (who somewhat fitting plays the crook who gives Allie the money that he uses to buy his boat ticket)—while leaning against a fence while waiting for his boat to France. When Allie asks the stylish frog, “Are you going on the boat, too?,” the suave Frenchman says “No” and explains, “See, I had a lot of trouble, so I have to get out of Paris. And now my friends are crying. See, I never cry. 'Cause I know when things change, I have to go somewhere. And now I think that New York is going to be Babylon for me. Well, that's where I've got to live.” After sharing their tattoos (the Frenchman has one reading “mommy”), the two kindred spirits part way and Allie narrates, “I was thinking about the note I left her when I got on the boat. But how can you explain something like this to someone? I'm just not the kind of person that settles into anything. I don't think I ever will be. Isn't really anything left to explain that can be. And that's what I was trying to explain in the first place. Just not like that. I don't want a job, or a house, or taxes although I wouldn't mind a car, but... I don't know. Now that I'm away, I wish I was back there more than even when I was there. Let's just say I'm a certain kind of tourist...A tourist that's on a... permanent vacation.” In the end, Allie stares back at NYC as the city gets farther and farther away as his boat drifts to Frogland where the protagonist probably hopes to find a surplus of pretentious plodding deadbeats just like himself. 

 The fact that Permanent Vacation was included as a mere extra feature with the Criterion Collection DVD release of Stranger Than Paradise as opposed to receiving its own individual release is a true testament to the fact that it is most certainly Jarmusch’s most wrongly neglected and most understood work and the fact it only received a warm reception in Europe, especially Germany, is only fitting.  After all, as the great cinematic works of New German Cinema certainly demonstrate, no group of people expressed a great sense of existential despair, deracination, social and cultural alienation, and nihilism better than the post-WWII German filmmakers, but I digress.  Personally, I would rather re-watch the director’s debut any day over his later and more conspicuously contrived works like Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Broken Flowers (2005), The Limits of Control (2009), and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), but then again I am not a Jarmusch cheerleader and find many of fetishes and obsessions to be nothing short of odious, obnoxious and, in many cases, laughably shallow and insincere. Indeed, if I want to watch a film that pays homage to Godard and the French New Wave, I will watch an early Fassbinder flick like Götter der Pest (1970) aka Gods of the Plague or Der amerikanische Soldat (1970) aka The American Soldier and on those rather rare occasions where I get an irrational thirst for ebonics and negrophilia, I will most certainly go to a real black director like Melvin “Block” Van Peebles, Felix de Rooy, or Jarmusch's perennially pissy pipsqueak pal Spike Lee. Indubitably, what makes Permanent Vacation so raw, refreshing, and authentic is that it features a real-life shrieking hipster hobo of the pathologically posturing sort in the lead role as opposed to a dry Hollywood clown like Bill Murray or all-too-stoic exotic spade like Isaach De Bankolé (ironically, one of the biggest complaints that most reviewers seem to have against the film is lead Chris Parker’s grating voice and dubious acting skills, but I personally found these admittedly annoying ingredients to be perfect for the specific character). In fact, the film is such a singularly delectable and unadulterated expression of its particular zeitgeist that Jean-Michel Basquiat was snoozing in a sleeping bag in John Lurie’s apartment while Jarmusch was shooting the scenes where Parker hangs out with melancholy hipster diva Leila Gastil. Additionally, Jarmusch structured the film around Parker’s authentic natural aura and attitude, or as the auteur explained regarding the film in the doc Blank City, “…I wrote it for Chris who’s a very animate person in real life. And, as I started filming, he was not animated in the same degree, so I followed that and the style of the film sort of slowed down.” Indeed, Permanent Vacation is surely slow, but it would not work any other way, just as Jarmusch’s buddy Wenders’ greatest films would not either.  After all, there is nothing really exciting or action-packed about existential despair and passive nihilism.

 Although it might surprise some, Italian self-described ‘super-fascist’ philosopher Julius Evola had some positive things to say about beatniks, bohemians, hipsters, and other counterculture types in an essay featured in the volume L’Arco e la Clava (1968) aka The Bow and the Club, where he stated, “From our point of view, a brief study of these phenomena is justified, because we share the opinion, expressed by a number of “beats”: namely — and in opposition to what psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and “social workers” think — in a society, a civilization, like ours, and, especially, like that of the USA – one must in general admit that the rebel, the being who does not adapt, the a-social being, is in fact the sanest man. In an abnormal world, values are inverted: whosoever appears abnormal, in relation to the existing milieu, is most probably precisely the “normal” person, in the sense that in him there still subsist traces of integral vital energy; and we do not follow those who want to “rehabilitate” such individuals, whom they consider to be sick, and “save” them for “society.”” Of course, what separates super-fascists like Evola from neo-Beat hipsters like Chris Parker and Jarmusch is that, while the former supports a sort of active nihilism as endorsed by Nietzsche, the latter embraces a sort of frivolous passive nihilism that can only lead to a life of nothingness upon nothingness without end.  In a chapter entitled  ‘Sartre: Prisoner Without Walls’ featured in his classic text Cavalcare la Tigre (1961) aka Ride the Tiger, Evola would point out that commie existentialist messiah Jean-Paul Sartre once absurdly wrote, “Freedom, choice, nihilation, and temporalization are one and the same,” but of course such naive thinking only leads to the sort of psychological prison and metaphysical purgatory that plagues the protagonist of Permanent Vacation, which was highlighted by the Guido Baron when he wrote, “One finds oneself already faced with the well-known situation of a freedom that is suffered, rather than claimed: modern man is not free, but finds himself free in the world where God is dead. ‘He is delivered up to his freedom.’  It is from this that his deep suffering comes.  When he is fully aware of this, anguish seizes him and the otherwise absurd sensation of a responsibility reappears.”  Of course, like the protagonist of his film, Jarmusch seems to have bought into the existentialist con that he is totally free, even if the self-satisfied cynicism and literal jazz worship of his films says otherwise.

 Luckily, Jarmusch apparently does not fully embrace the attitude and lifestyle of the patently preposterous ‘pretentious deadbeat’ protagonist of Permanent Vacation, or as he stated in an interview with Bomb Magazine, “I think nihilism is a realistic outlook, but I see both positive and negative aspects in the approach of the main character. His self-imposed exile from existing institutions: work, school, family, etc., is certainly positive, but his difficulty in communicating with other people in the same situation is relatively hopeless. More and more, intelligent young people are put into this almost hopeless situation. That’s what the film is about.”  While it is certainly true that more and more people are dropping out society, these individuals, not unlike the protagonist of Jarmusch's film and the countless carbon-copy hipsters with ironic Civil War mustaches that currently live in NYC and other trendy urban neighborhoods, have ultimately taken a path that is ultimately more hopeless and senseless than that of the average sub-literate Evangelical Christian hillbilly.  Certainly, the same defeatist ‘postmodern slave morality’ that led Hebraic hipster Norman Mailer to proudly proclaim himself to be a “White Negro” and inspired William S. Burroughs to become a trust-fund-sponsored “junky” and “queer” also led Jarmusch to directing a film like Permanent Vacation, which also acts as a sort of unintentional cautionary tale about what might happen to you if you're a bourgeois white boy who starts mimicking the culture of poor old dead negroes. Naturally, the same dead-end passive nihilist (anti)philosophy also explains why that, aside from technical prowess and overall professionalism, Jarmusch’s films have not changed all that much since his debut, as they typically rehash the same sort of offbeat scenes and eccentric encounters. In fact, Jarmusch’s treasuring of the Tschandala and metaphysically dead deadbeats and derelicts seems to have only grown over the years, yet he is now much more personally distanced from his material and, to the decided detriment of his films, instead of hiring his friends to play themselves, he dreams up rather ridiculous fantasy characters like jigaboo samurais and undead rockers.  At least when Permanent Vacation was first released, the viewer could entertain the idea that Jarmusch might one day grow out of his already-then-outmoded hipster Weltanschauung.

-Ty E