Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process

By Allen H. Redmon

Contributions by Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, Marc DiPaolo, Emine Akkülah Doğan, Caroline Eades, Noelle Hedgcock, Tina Olsin Lent, Rashmila Maiti, Allen H. Redmon, Jack Ryan, Larry T. Shillock, Richard Vela, and Geoffrey Wilson

In Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process, editor Allen H. Redmon brings together eleven essays from a range of voices in adaptation studies. This anthology explores the political and ethical contexts of specific adaptations and, by extension, the act of adaptation itself. Grounded in questions of gender, genre, and race, these investigations focus on the ways attention to these categories renegotiates the rules of power, privilege, and principle that shape the contexts that seemingly produce and reproduce them.

Contributors to the volume examine such adaptations as Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, Taylor Sheridan’s Sicario and Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Wolf Totem, Spike Lee’s He’s Got Game, and Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. Each chapter considers the expansive dialogue adaptations accelerate when they realize their capacity to bring together two or more texts, two or more peoples, two or more ideologies without allowing one expression to erase another. Building on the growing trends in adaptation studies, these essays explore the ways filmic texts experienced as adaptations highlight ethical or political concerns and argue that spectators are empowered to explore implications being raised by the adaptations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781496832627

Book preview

JIM JARMUSCH’S PATERSON

Poetry, Place, and Cinematic Form

JACK RYAN

A PASSION FOR POETRY TEXTURES NEARLY ALL JIM JARMUSCH FILMS. SOME CONNECTION TO poets and poems can be seen scattered across films even when deeper connections do not exist. For example, in Down by Law (1986), Roberto (Roberto Benigni) exuberantly expresses his passion for Walt Whitman and Bob Frost. The film concludes with a shot that visually echoes The Road Not Taken, one of Frost’s most renowned poems. In Mystery Train (1989), a pair of Japanese tourists walk down Chaucer Street in Memphis. Jarmusch creates a more intricate nod to poetry in Dead Man (1995). The film features a protagonist named William Bill Blake (Johnny Depp), and Jarmusch inserts language from the poet William Blake throughout the screenplay. He even allows Nobody (Gary Farmer), Bill Blake’s aboriginal guide, to quote from Blake’s Proverbs from Hell. As Hugh Davis notes, these nods to Blake move beyond a mere adaptation of Blake’s poetry: The film represents a synthesis of the very different media of poetry and film into a form that transcends what either can do individually (94).

A similar kind of synthesis of media exists in Ghost Dog (1999), as brief poetic passages from the Hagakure, a collection of meditations meant to instruct samurai warriors, are superimposed on the screen. Broken Flowers (2005) features a main character, Don Johnston (Bill Murray), who doubles as an aged Don Juan, in the Byronic sense, and who sets off on an American road trip to visit his former lovers. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), the eternal vampire protagonists of Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), immerse themselves in art and culture, and they remark on the renowned artists they have known, including Shelley and Byron.

One sees a more substantial connection to poetry in two earlier Jarmusch films. Jarmusch’s first feature, Permanent Vacation (1980), offers a protagonist, Aloysius Parker (Chris Parker), who reads Comte de Lautréamont, the French poet who influenced both the Surrealists and the Situationists. Parker is also clearly influenced by the Beat movement. He presents himself as a jazz hipster wandering New York City in search for something unnamable. Stranger than Paradise (1984), which launched Jarmusch’s independent career, does not present an overt thematic or narrative connection to poetry, but his empty mise-en-scène does expose every grungy detail of the Lower East Side of 1970s New York with observational precision. His use of blackouts to separate narrative episodes produces the effect of stanza breaks that lends the film a poetic visual style. The film moves with a poetic sensibility.

With Paterson (2016), Jarmusch combines these narrative and stylistic sensibilities in such a way that he begins to answer the question so many of his films propose: What makes poetry? Jarmusch’s protagonist, a public bus driver and unassuming poet named Paterson (Adam Driver), moves through the city of Paterson, New Jersey, listening carefully to his passengers’ conversations and observing the city and its people with anonymous dedication. Jarmusch’s bus-driver-poet does not seek self-conscious ideas and meaning from his urban environment. Rather, he discovers poetic inspiration from mundane things like a box of matches, a yellow raincoat, a shoebox, a beer glass. In this way Jarmusch’s film concerns itself less with the political or ethical questions poetry might raise and more with the adaptive process of creating poetry, with the reason poetry exists. Jarmusch clarifies this interest by offering his audience a poet who does not share his poetry. Paterson’s poems mean to enrich his life. They help him examine and engage the world around him. As such, Paterson allows poetry to exist outside the demands of any audience.

Jarmusch’s inspiration for his Paterson occurred more than twenty-five years before the release of the film, while he was reading the beginning of William Carlos Williams’s epic poem Paterson. Williams’s opening words intrigued Jarmusch enough that he took a daytrip to Paterson, New Jersey. Motivated by the diversity of the city, its history, its poets, and especially the Great Falls of the Passaic River, Jarmusch began to make notes about a guy named Paterson who lives in Paterson: a working-class guy but also a poet, and, as he told Geoff Andrew, the idea remained with him for a long time (20). Jarmusch began to work with some aspects of Williams’s poem and against others as the years passed. The writer-director keeps Williams’s idea that a man in himself is a city and that there are no ideas but in things (xiv, 6). Jarmusch uses some of Williams’s images and metaphors to examine creativity. The director insists on the importance of personal relationships and the power of art. Still, his film is not so much a straight adaptation of Williams’s poem. Jarmusch admits to Amy Taubin that Williams’s poem is a bit too abstract, or maybe a bit too philosophical for [him] somehow (3). Jarmusch wanted a film that celebrates imaginative possibility, a quixotic sensibility anchored to everyday experience. He wanted his protagonist to give shape and meaning to the beauties of the seemingly dreary world around him. To achieve these aims, Jarmusch needed to work against the modernist inclination in Williams’s poem. He refuses to offer his protagonist a world that changes, or to let some hero’s quest fulfill him. Any sense of fulfillment Jarmusch’s Paterson finds is more private, extending from his poetry, and arises to the extent that he can add thoughtful and mindful substance to ordinary existence.

Jarmusch’s Paterson ends where Williams’s ambitious poem begins, before the Great Falls of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. Jarmusch sets within this scene a lyrical encounter between his protagonist and a Japanese poet (Masatoshi Nagase) visiting the site that inspired Williams. After sitting down next to Paterson on the only available park bench, the visitor opens a Japanese translation of Williams’s Paterson, which includes an English translation on every other page. He sees Paterson glancing sideways at the book. The visitor asks, Are you from here in Paterson, New Jersey? Paterson replies, Yes, I am. I was born here. The visitor asks if Paterson knows the great poet William Carlos Williams here in Paterson, New Jersey. Paterson answers, Well, I am aware of his poems. The visitor says, May I ask if you too are a poet of Paterson, New Jersey? Paterson does not accept that title, responding, I am just a bus driver. But the audience knows differently. They have listened as this unassuming man composed poetry in his head, watched him carefully record his work in a notebook, and heard his calm recitations in voiceover. The Japanese visitor also seems to know different: A bus driver in Paterson. Aha. This is very poetic. This could be poem by William Carlos Williams.

The conversation continues and Paterson and the visitor reveal a knowledge of poetry. Paterson mentions the subject of Frank O’Hara’s poem Naphtha, painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet. The Japanese visitor knows O’Hara and this specific poem. He returns Paterson’s mention of O’Hara with a comment about Allen Ginsberg, who was born in nearby Newark, New Jersey, and befriended Williams. Paterson admits knowing his poems as well as the New York School of Poets. The remark is interesting if only because these poets are known for utilizing everyday experiences in their work in just the way Jarmusch’s Paterson develops such things. Even more, many of the New York School of Poets worked everyday jobs just as Paterson does, effectively concealing their poetic lives from the people with whom they interacted on a daily basis. Dubuffet, the founder of the Art Brut movement, championed so-called low art, which he believed to be more authentic and humanistic than traditional forms of image making. Paterson appreciates Dubuffet having worked as a meteorologist at the Eiffel Tower in 1922—a job seemingly unrelated to poetry. The Japanese man is convinced that Paterson is indeed a poet. He presents Paterson with an empty Japanese notebook, which replaces the one Paterson’s dog, Marvin, destroyed the night before. The visitor leaves Paterson with the reminder that the blank page can inspire creativity. At this point Jarmusch’s character, like Williams’s own, awakens from a kind of slumber that had washed over him before the scene began. Jarmusch’s poet begins to create poetry again as he walks the streets of Paterson, New Jersey.

To appreciate the care Jarmusch takes to portray the method of poetry to which his Paterson awakens, one does well to trace the connections Jarmusch’s film makes to the priorities of the New York School of Poets, and, just as importantly, against the poet Williams creates, a man named Dr. Noah Faitoute Paterson, and the tradition in which he sets him. Jarmusch aspired to be a writer, first exploring journalism, then literature at Columbia University. He studied poetry with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro, figureheads of the New York School. Other New York School Poets include Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Ron Padgett, all of whom have a clear influence on Jarmusch’s thinking. Padgett and Shapiro edited the Anthology of New York Poets, a collection, Jarmusch notes, that became a bible for what is now the New York School (Kelsey 3). Jarmusch admits his connection with these poets in an interview for Tribeca Shortlist: When I’m gone, if people considered my films to be a sort of the cinematic extension of the New York School of Poets who try not to take anything too seriously and try to write to another person, I would be very honored if they thought of my films that way (Dawson).

Many of the scenes in Paterson include small unremarkable moments, indicators of the approach the New York School of Poets brought to their observational work. Jarmusch recreates the aesthetic of the New York School in the slow pace of the film, its spare plot, wry humor, empty spaces, quiet moments, and the economy of language and gestures used by Paterson himself. Adam Driver’s performance as Paterson typifies a Jarmusch protagonist, for he is not demonstrative and registers little emotion. In this way the performance recalls Buster Keaton, a Jarmusch favorite, who was funny in an extremely human way (Hertzberg 194). Such a character contemplates, observes, and listens with meditative focus; this is just what Jarmusch’s Paterson does as well. Unobtrusive tracking shots of Paterson as he walks and drives through Paterson, New Jersey, an urban space that is (in the film) diverse and accepting, are understated, formally pure. Stationary cameras and slow tracking shots have been a stylistic hallmark of Jarmusch’s films since the beginning of his career. He is particularly captivated by figures who walk, but his attention to Paterson takes a clearer purpose. His walks match Williams’s Paterson, who also moves through the city on foot in Book Two. Walking— is repeated throughout the first section of that book, illustrating the way Williams positions his poet as a surveyor and interpreter of the landscape.

Jarmusch refuses to offer his poet the quest Williams gives his protagonist. One sees this difference in the scene that has Paterson compose The Run, which verbally and visually captures driving his 23-bus route. After starting the poem inside his parked bus while waiting to begin his shift, Paterson returns to the work in voiceover after exiting the garage: I go through / trillions of molecules / that move aside / to make way for me / while on both sides / trillions more / stay where they are. Jarmusch uses a series of long and close-up shots edited to the rhythm of the poem. He presents images from both inside and outside the bus itself, at times presenting the parts of the bus mentioned in the poem: The windshield wiper blade / starts to squeak. / The rain has stopped. / I stop. / On the corner / a boy / in a yellow raincoat / holding his mother’s hand. At the conclusion of the poem, Jarmusch utilizes a montage, blending Paterson, the 23-bus, and the city of Paterson, which underscores how significant the city is to Paterson and his creative process. Additionally, with the special clarity that only cinematic form can provide, Jarmusch’s imagery captures the strange beauty of a neglected, ordinary city, which continually inspires his