Mystery Train (1989)

Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train arrives in Memphis for a single night and breaks itself into three stories, each one circling the same dilapidated hotel, the same missing television, the same Elvis portrait on the wall. A Japanese couple on a pilgrimage of the pop-culture variety, an Italian widow hauling a coffin, and a trio of accidental thieves drift through the same intersection without ever quite colliding. The camera is patient. The jokes are dry. Nothing is explained to us, which is the film's most admirable quality and also the reason it resists the classification exercise we undertake here.

The cast is a polyglot assortment, and the hotel's night clerk and bellboy are Black, but this is auteur casting instinct, not a demographic program. Women carry two of the three segments, though the film offers no argument about gender and seems unaware that one could be made. A liquor store clerk's racial slur triggers the shooting in the final story, and the moment lands with blunt force, but race here is texture, a fact of Memphis, not a thesis. The thieves rob for whiskey and panic, not as an indictment of capital. The climate goes unmentioned, the body goes unmentioned, the mind's wiring goes unmentioned. Everyone is broke, drunk, or lovesick, and the film finds this sufficient.

Jarmusch's deadpan observational manner leaves no room for sermons. He never addresses the audience, never explains the moral, never instructs. The result is a film that predates the cultural vocabulary we now apply to it and would likely decline the application. Memphis is a city of ghosts, and the film treats it as one, which is a poetic position and not a political one. We are left with a triptych that is charming, wry, and entirely indifferent to the ideological expectations of a later decade.