Video
VIDEO
"MYSTERY TRAIN"
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Cast: Youki Kudoh, Nicoletta Braschi, Joe Strummer, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Cinque Lee, Rick Aviles. USA, 1989. In English and Japanese with English Subtitles. 110 mins.
HIDDEN GEM
Mystery Train is Jim Jarmusch's valentine to America. In this film Jarmusch digs straight to the soul of America's heartland - Graceland, and proceeds shooting. Elvis' Memphis forms the unlikely backdrop for four interrelated stories, the events of which overlap within literal yards of each other. The characters of these stories are, both literally and figuratively, riding the "Mystery Train."
Each of Jarmusch's movies - from "Permanent Vacation" (1980) to Cannes award-winner "Stranger Than Paradise"(1984), "Down By Law" (1986) and last year's "Night on Earth" - are cleveriy attuned assaults on America's sensibilities. Each film, in its odd-ball fashion more quirky and delightful than the last, is a cock-eyed discourse on our social and cultural proprieties. Their common saving grace is the sheer good-natured doggedness of their characters' innocence.
This is why Jarmusch's characters stumble about their environments with only the most delimited of personal spaces and shaded horizons. They aren't so much in constant awe of their predicaments as they are in constant awe of their constant awe. Thus when in this feature Jarmusch focuses upon foreigners trapped in that most unlikely Mecca of American modemity - Elvis' Memphis - he bounces his sentimentality for all things American against these outsiders' inability to fully fathom the depths of their unexpected alienation.
First we meet a couple of Japanese teens - tourists actually, Jun and Mitzuko - who have come to town to visit Graceland and Sam Phillip's legendary Sun recording studios. They, like any good tourists, take a lot of photographs. Mitzuko's proud of her t-shirt collection and Jun's got a cigarette lighter smoother than matches.
In another part of Memphis, at the airport, Luisa's husband's coffin is being held up by customs and she can't ship the bódy home until the next day. She's Italian with just barely enough English to get around town.
When a panhandler later harasses her on a darkened Street, Luisa steps into the lobby of the Arcade Hotel. There she literally bumps into Dee Dee, who's fleeing from her common-iaw husband because of her belief in their incompatibility. Dee Dee's waiting to catch the next day's train for Natchez, Mississippi.
The fourth story line concerns Dee Dee's common-law husband, Johnny, a British expatríate whom everyone calis Elvis because of his long sidebums. He is miserable because Dee Dee unexpectedly left him on the very day he was laid-off from his job. Johnny, his brother-in-law Charlie, and Johnny's friend Will proceed to get liquored up as they cruise town in Will's half-dilapidated pick-up truck. They commensurate about life's vagaries. They shoot a convenience store clerk during an aborted attempt to buy more liquor and then hide out in the Arcade Hotel.
The next morning at the Memphis train station, the ride bound for New Orleans calls for all aboard. Stumbling up to Jun's and Mitzuko's seat, Dee Dee asks if the train is bound for Natchez. All three passengers stare at each other incomprehensibly. The train takesoff out of town in onedirection while a half-dilapidated pick-up truck heads out of town in the other direction.
This is the story of "Mystery Train." But the beauty of Jarmusch's masterpiece is how much one can know about the story without really knowing much of anything at all. For Jarmusch himself knows there's something oddly engaging about candid snapshots which makes the whole exercise pointless - the charm behind the immediacy, so to speak. He's crafted a snapshot of remarkable fidelity to American lunacy in this break-through film.
Jun, Mitzuko, Luisa, and Johnny are somewhat like sophisticated tropical fish arbitrarily tossed into a foreign fishbowl. Their rules are roughly the same as everywhere else, but the natives joyfully play by another set of dimly perceived values.
Jarmusch chooses Graceland to represent the spiritual center of our post-modem culture. Vaguely in concurrence with Paul Simon's absurd notion that America shines like the Mississippi Delta, a shimmering national guitar, Jarmusch forcefully draws to our attention the unreasonable fact that we're witnessing the founding of a new civic religion in the Church of the Latter-Day Pelvis. And in its own way, like all such civic religions, this is ultimately no joke. In "Mystery Train" Elvis' spirit pervades Memphis with the same anthropological significance as religion, myth, and cosmology.
In constant accompaniment of "Mystery Train" is Elvis' 1956 recordingof "Blue Moon. "This beauty of a classic show-tune, adapted to a soft-spoken romantic rockabilly beat, is played in the film on cheap pocket radios, car radios, and a hotel lobby radio. It is pervasive in its intoxicating bonding pleasure, even as it unctuously freezes the film's four interludes in their concurrent time and space.
Each aspect of the narrative which ties together these disparate stories sheds light upon the ultímate lack of light itself. Jarmusch's "Mystery Train" is most certainly a mystery thing itself - - postindustrial America rolling tcits own beat in its own time.
-John Carlos Cantu