Down by Law: A Meditation on American Urban Decay
This review was written as part of a contest. I wish the piece was longer, but the word limit on submissions was around 500. Part of me wants to write a longer version of this review — and, perhaps, I will at some point — but for now, I will treat this is as a “stylised abstract” (if you will) of my opinions on Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law.
Jim Jarmusch possessed an early penchant for images of American urban decay. His fondness is felt in the miasma of broken Manhattan in his charmingly amateurish navel-gaze Permanent Vacation. It is felt later through the spiritual/physical emptiness of Mystery Train’s Memphis, Tennessee. Yet it is in Down by Law’s oneiric New Orleans that Jarmusch begins to use his adolescent jazz-inflected staging, that had before felt like the bubbling undercurrents of a style yearning for substance, to push his nose into the clogged arteries of America’s ghost cities — to paint the existential deserts of American urban fringes.
Like its brothers — Detroit, Flint, St. Louis — the New Orleans of Reagan’s 1980s was one of industrial abandonment, falling employment rates, and displaced people. It, like many an American city, was a hive propped up by self-serving industrial powers. The work, along with its typical promise of economical fertility, was to be stripped away; its people and its culture left behind in the wake. Jarmusch’s New Orleans elevates this economic betrayal to the level of mythology — of mythic lyricism and conflated Gothic duality, floating on the borders between life and death; of the hypnagogic; of sordid urbanism and Cajun wilderness. Where once the urban rhetoric of an American Dream rattled the sidewalks, pessimism has reacted and found itself crawling in from the gutter. Robert Muller’s observational gaze holds the curiosity of an outsider, as passengers driving through the city, witnessing with the privileged distance of a stranger. The howl of Tom Waits’ funeral mambo ‘Jockey Full of Bourbon’ blasting from our jalopy as we cruise on by.
Forgotten streets are haunted by forgotten people, spirited characters with shattered spirits. Broke-on-their-luck disc jockeys, the very smooth-talkers that comfort American airwaves, and desperate pimps become pawns for back-door opportunists; working girls can find no work. There is something to be said here of the way impotency translates itself through climate and character. In response, figures like Roberto Benigni’s Bob cut through the stalwart pessimism, his obliviousness often transforming the bleak doldrums into a comedic riot. Its three stooges — Jack, Zack, and Bob — are confined to a cell, distant by character but close in space. Yet their uncertain journey, their shared anger at the oppression and misery around them, are what fuel their camaraderie. The few glimmerings of humanity that this world possesses cut through in those rare moments of solidarity, sparse though they may be, but still glowing against choking darkness.
Jarmusch’s tale of three white men in New Orleans is at risk of detaching itself from any profound comment on the socially-marginalising wave that global capitalism crashes onto the American working city — yet it is hard to dismiss how non-judgmentally he treats and how complexly he constructs its people, so much so that they become more than just that, they become inseparable to this world, part of the very fabric and rhythm of the city. Hollow as ghosts may be, Down by Law shows that life still beats through these forgotten veins, struggling from the punches but determined nonetheless to keep itself breathing.
