If anyone were primed to love Jim Jarmusch’s new movie, “The Limits of Control,” it should be me. Since the late 90s when I first encountered his films (first in an overwrought review of “Dead Man” by music critic Greil Marcus in an online column that no longer exists anywhere online) I’ve followed his output closely. Mutual Jarmusch admiration was one of the first things I remember having in common with Berliners when I arrived in 1999. It so happens that they love his movies even more over here. That’s not entirely surprising as more often than not his movies are European art house styled with pulp characters of modern day American mythology—lonesome travelers, taxi drivers, junkies, drifters, losers, seekers, wanderers on the borders of society.
Also, I should mention that Jim Jarmusch comes from Cleveland, Ohio, the “mistake by the lake” as southern Ohioans snarl (that city’s once toxic river recently came back to life after notoriously catching fire in 1969). But I claim it and I became even more tribal about the Buckeye State after I came to Germany, realizing that Ohio means nothing to most Germans, even though it has more Germans than practically any other state. So, I constantly remind people that Jarmusch is “from Ohio” when they mention one of his movies. It’s annoying, but I can’t help it. I’m just proud of the guy. But back to the movie…
The trailer came out a few months ago and it looked great. I was excited. Isaach De Bankolé as a stoic be-suited badass wandering around southern Spain—through the gorgeous back streets of Madrid and Seville—like a spy or assassin, always ordering two espressos, a soundtrack featuring Boris and Sunn O))). It had to be the greatest Jarmusch movie ever—but it wasn’t. In fact, it might be his worst. Yesterday, I walked out of the Kino, the same where I saw “Ghost Dog” ten years ago, thinking “what was he thinking?”
Today, I had the same question in my head. But it had a more positive spin this time around, as that confounded movie had wound itself around the dendrites of my brain. It was beautiful. The music was beautiful. It’s aura was dreamy and quiet and totally meaningless. At first blush, it doesn’t seem to be about anything. There’s no real narrative, unless a well-dressed guy traveling around, practicing tai chi alone in his hotel, always ordering two espressos at a cafe, trading matchboxes with random, nonsense-babbling strangers while collecting tiny messages from those matchboxes (repeat seven times) counts as a narrative. It’s funny: I normally don’t even need a movie to have narrative. But this pushed to me need one, to grasp for something like… meaning. And so now, twenty four hours later, I think I’m getting closer to that meaning and it has something to do with Buddhist existentialism, nothingness, the struggle between art and commerce, life (of course), internal dialogue versus external dialogue and the meaning of meaning itself. Which is to say that I still have no idea what this movie is about. That is frustrating because I’m sure it really is about some very specific things. Artists usually hate explaining their work and I can’t blame them. The art is the explanation.
David Lynch wrote recently in a book on his ideas that there’s a single Bible verse that contains the core idea for his movie “Eraserhead,” a confounding and incredible movie that no one has quite cracked yet (and Stanely Kubrick’s favourite). Lynch said he’d never identify the verse, which is, I think, both admirable and annoying.
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