Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’ “It was supposed to keep going…”

 © 2017 by James Clark

      We coffee drinkers appreciate the world of taste. (I suppose smokers could be included as seekers of such deal-making, but in the sense of diminishing returns.) What is there about wide consumption of those stimulants which merits strong attention to the point, in fact, of producing a feature film, namely, Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), by that finder of diamonds in the rough, Jim Jarmusch?

One factor to be recognized, in fathoming the characteristically odd unfolding of the disclosure, is that in all (but one) eleven disparate vignettes the players are seated at a table in a coffee shop with, with one exception, at least one other aficionado. That leads us to a first premise that something about the interaction at those tables is largely (though not exclusively) responsible for the supplements of a cup (or more) of coffee and a cigarette (or more). Though most of the conversations consist of rather bewildering tatters of good will, there is one tete-a-tete which seems to have found its way to a field of reflection which might provide more than those copious dead-ends which most viewers of Jarmusch’s films readily assume to be all there is and consequently find themselves obliged, in respect to the whimsy and comedy, to maintain that grotesque errancy is as much as anyone will ever know and that that status quo is acutely gratifying. One other element of this scenario, which should be mulled over, is the cast’s being show-biz notables, many of whom having appeared in previous Jarmusch movies and consequently bringing those dramas into renewed considerations.

The twosome we want to look at first gives us, for openers, about 25 seconds of anxious silence to match the spare black and white format. Moreover, they are not members of Jarmusch’s retinue. And yet they manage to evoke the more notable content of Jarmusch’s work by their involvement in those elemental presences of the design and body language, and by their passion for high flying, augmented by their recourse to the mood-altering, title-salient products at hand. The couple commence their show of force by having Meg glaring at Jack and then bidding to begin with cogent poise. She in fact begins by asking him, “Tell me about your Tesla Coil.” He remains inert and she adds, “C’mon, Jack. Tell me about it.” This scene presents the most muted recourse in the film apropos of the drink and the smoke, on account of being one of only two of the episodes submerged in something beyond hard-core personal attitude. Jack does eventually inform her that the latest version of his studies and invention of an electrodynamic mechanism is ready to test (he having in fact brought it along to the rendezvous; though perhaps not for the purpose of displaying and discussing it). It was one thing to be a devotee of the scientist, Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) whose expertise pertained to the processes of an electrical/ resonant transformer-circuit, leading to a payload of high-frequency alternating-current electricity. It was something quite different to couch his enthusiasm for this worthy in near-religious devotion—claiming that Tesla was the true inventor of the telephone, the radio, lasers and you name it; leaving the more popular early figures connected with those treasures being frauds and thieves. Meg sips her coffee and Jack glares at her lack of total concentration. He shoots her way, “If the world had paid more attention [to what the going concern was doing], the world would be a much better place.” (Free electrical, because wireless, service, for instance, would be underway to sustain a fabulous utopia.) Jack’s inspiration along those lines culminates in the sense of “the world as an acoustical resonator, a transmitter of acoustical resonances.” This does grab Megs fancy. “What a beautiful idea!” she applauds. Encouraged, he puts into play his model, only to have it, after a moment or two of attractive sputtering, crash. Meg suggests that the nodes were not close enough to each other; and Jack thanks her for a plausible explanation. “It was supposed to keep going,” he ruefully admits. He mentions an occasion when they’ll meet again (for bowling) and he leaves in a distracted mood. She lights a cigarette and her posture is coiled.

We could maintain that there is something about Jack’s fanatical panacea that smacks of Nobody, the finder of god in the name and presence of one non-galvanized William Blake, in Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995). We could also maintain that this episode of an 11-part sequence smacks of the dogmatic boy-partisan in Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002)! And then we could add that Jack and Meg were, in 2003, the complement of the garage rock/ blues/ rockabilly band “The White Stripes” which might, in this context, pertain to the war paint which Nobody added to a more problematically grounded William Blake, in the film showing how complex poetry can be. On taking this perspective we depart the facile characterization of Jarmusch’s “quirkiness” and enter upon measurements of where the world of taste can lead. Meg is a far more desultory investigator than the mom facing down presumptuous malignancy. How far, if at all, does she, as part of a duet, gain from the situation of shared visions? Jack, Nobody and the snot are some kind of disparate murderer’s row. What are the leeways for dovetailing with such encounters?

With that constellation to guide us (and particularly the supernova of Tesla’s avant-garde reflections with which Jarmusch is well up to speed), we can draw upon such superstructures as implicated in the far from trivial pursuit of smelling the coffee. “Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil” is the bemusing scattergun just visited. “Somewhere in California” features Tom Waits and Iggy Pop really getting into the produce while taking some of our time in recalling the New Orleans jail in Down by Law (1986)—also by Jarmusch—where Waits and John Lurie portray feuding hipsters. The jukebox gives off arrestingly incongruous Hawaiian tunes while Iggy, hunched over like a relic, checks the playlist for his own products. Waits arrives, claiming to have, in the capacity of a medical doctor—music and medicine, being in that place where they overlap (Iggy, in a bid to maintain goodwill, concurring, “the organization, the humanity of the thing…”)—saved lives in a 4-car pileup and delivered a baby. Iggy tells him he ordered for him, a moment which gives the multitasker an opportunity to mount another high horse. “You ordered for me?”/ “Is it cool?” the hapless embracer of taste and sensation apologizes. That both of them, while smugly proud to have beaten their addiction to cigarettes, begin to smoke from the contents of a package left on their table, finds us watching body language saying much more than their words. The gusto of their first drags eclipses their having rattled off testimonials like, “I’m so smoothed out…”/ “Yeah, the focus!”/ “We can take a smoke because we’ve beaten it…” That bit of euphoria leads to a reckless bit of pushback from an Iggy whose congeniality is part and parcel with being a star. “I didn’t see anything of yours on the jukebox…” Any traces of the disinterestedness of the world being a transmitter of acoustical resonances vanish at the speed of light in Waits’ ready spleen (which, in Down by Law, flares up along lines of a deft range of authoritative patter, in the capacity of a DJ). The insulted sultan wonders if, with such a problem with the jukebox at hand, Iggy would not be happier at a Taco Bell or a House of Pancakes (such ridicule being a self-styled pacesetter’s feeling free to read the Riot Act). Bidding to bring back his tattered, unsuspected purchase on what was a joy for Tesla (before is loss of grip), Iggy recommends a drummer he has recently encountered, an ardent heart with “an industrial beat.” “You think I need a drummer?” the virulently resentful colleague sneers. With that, the imperfect work-in-progress declares, bemusingly but understandably, that he has to get back to his wife at the motel. “See you soon…” he excruciatingly remarks. Their handshake in close-up is a dead-hand’s letdown to the spunk and wit of the departure-handshake in Down by Law. Its textured close-up recalls the fizzling Tesla Coil disappointing Jack. Once alone, Waits checks that jukebox and mutters, “You’re not on it either.” Returning to the table, he furtively lights up another cigarette. His posture is coiled. The Waits in Down by Law was driven, with uneven results, to the standpoint of not “jerking off.” Clearly easier said than done. Our seemingly lightweight film plumbs “industrial” weight. The allure of ruling the roost, a staple going back, in the form of great wisdom, as far as Plato, who would insist that one’s “advantage” in social affairs be the key, is a drug far more devastating than coffee and cigarettes.

The structure of our presentation attends to the variants of that beloved decadence, along with a catchment of other film works widening the probe. Before twigging upon the spearhead provided by Kiarostami’s 2002 masterpiece, Jarmusch stockpiled three vignettes (including the skirmish between Waits and Iggy) groping for a critical mass of problematics. In another such build-up, Roberto Benigni (the no-problem inmate in Down by Law) wildly overdoes the coffee and cigarettes in a café smeared with graffiti—recalling the cell, and especially recalling Waits’ digs, before arrest, with walls scribbled with memos to eschew jerking off. (The cave-drawing facsimiles suggest that the malaise going viral vastly predates Plato.) Here his patented goodwill undergoes deliriousness, from the stimulants of the place and the pressures of the planet. (Soon we’ll encounter puritanical rockers, under the rubric, “Delirium.”) Back at “Strange to Meet You,” a shuddering protagonist (the ordeals of the body very much a main concern) welcomes a man out of nowhere—Jarmusch very intent here upon the theatre of the absurdist, Samuel Beckett—and declares, “You know my mother!” Then the stranger, numbly not registering that surprise, puts together his own obligation of goodwill, on noticing Benigni has a large number of empty mugs and cigarette butts to complement his near-intensive-care disarray. “I drink coffee at bedtime to help me dream fast, like an Indie race…” There is some musical chairs clownish fuss, and the stranger, mentioning he’s uncomfortable about an imminent dental appointment, is absurdly rescued by the long-time fixer (here approaching social suicide) races off to face the dentist.

This by way of the protracted lack of self-mastery. Therefore, we behold the only soloist of the scenes, “Renee,” an attractive young woman in a café where the tables are covered by linen checkerboards and each table sings with a little bowl of cut flowers. Renee, as we are about to see, has an affinity to the blossoms; but a simmering hatred of checkerboards needing constant attention, needing attention to advantage. She’s perusing a gun catalog and what she has in mind speaks to her fastidious, chic demeanor and perfectionist expectations. Our first glimpse over her shoulder finds a title, “Field Notes” [field energies being, in fact, not her cup of tea]. She’s shown at the outset adding cream to her coffee, and then politely but firmly ticking off the waiter going ahead and adding to her composition. “I really wish you hadn’t done that. I had the right color and the right temperature.” She adds more cream to dilute the blackness, and adds more sugar. But her face indicates that the operation was not a success. (During these manoeuvres, we receive a glance of a tattoo on her forearm, with two hearts pierced by an arrow. The telegraphed perfection may, like her coffee, already be obsolete.) After her routing a few times the smitten waiter (each time calmly covering her already violated cup), her magazine discloses the title, “Ballistics for Big Game.” Her impact seems far from such carnage. She gazes into a hopefully clean slate and then inhales two drags being a relief from other drags, and an enlivement, for however long.

A cut to “No Problem,” unearths a similarly pacesetting soulmate for Renee, similarly bewildered in feeling lost. (Their kinship and hardship is sharpened in that cut’s tracking from her beehive-coiffeur-drag in the zone of hurtin’ to a black Parisian, chaffing a bit at the kitsch painting on the café wall where he uneasily awaits an arrival by rolling a pair of dice, always coming up identical. Someone had left a pair of glasses and he picks them up, finding them of no use to him, an assessment perhaps off the mark. A faint musical component, vaguely rockabilly, is one affinity with Renee; and a more self-evident bridge is his taking a deep drag from his cigarette.) He, too, has to brace himself against an importuning contact whose track record should not be ignored. Actor, Isaach Bankole, has made a mark in being a Paris cab driver peppered by a relentlessly hostile blind woman fare both riveting and nightmarish in the Jarmusch film, Night on Earth (1991). Here he goes on to become a relentless pest for the man ignoring the glasses, in his anxiety about how these “best friends” have drifted apart. “I thought something was wrong…” He’s also noteworthy as the sanguine Rust Belt proprietor of an ice cream truck, in Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999). His friend is played by actor, Alex Descas, who figures in many of the filmic conundrums of Claire Denis, as does Bankole. In titles like No Fear, No Die (1990), I Can’t Sleep (1994) and Trouble Every Day (2001), Descas displays a vivid sense of desperation. (Both of these actors go on to work in Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (2009), as being embroiled in revolutionary assassination.) As with the complex stresses of the White Stripes, the episode, “No Problem,” carries tons of irony, not for the sake of “quirky” entertainment. Renee’s quiet rage that the precision she has attained to and lives for is not forthcoming in the world at large functions as a navigation aspect for the otherwise incomprehensible denial of wrongness on the part of Alex. The latter, like Renee, more about taste than talk, soon confirms that his “friend” has come to be, in his eyes (perhaps needing stronger glasses) a dead loss. The erstwhile candy-man begins with ritualistic hugs and  bright smiles, in contrast with Alex’s sombre tone. The latter gives Bankole a cigarette, and that now-famous heartfelt drag comes over both of them. Bankole smiles and Alex doesn’t, a situation prompting the echo of the smiling street vendor to ask, “So, are you sure that everything is OK with you?” (The package of Camels to which they repair is conspicuously on the table, perhaps hoping to convey to one and all that the possibility of rigorous movement in a desert is attempting to replace the tonality of the kitsch on the wall beside them.) Descas insists that he’s where he wants to be and relays back, “What about you?” With another of those ingratiating smiles, Bankole insists, “Everything’s OK! Not perfect, of course. But pretty much OK…” The friend now subsiding into a more distant, pensive attitude, the OK one silently ponders the mood. “You didn’t call for so long,” is how he hopes to reach a breakthrough. Alex hopes to disentangle this moment of a friend becoming an memory, by tossing out, “I just wanted to see you, that’s all…” He, like Renee, up to here with the mania of care-giving, gives sort shrift to the fading friend’s surmise, “When I got your call I had an intuition there was something you needed to talk about.”/ “Are you crazy?” Embarrassed by his own rudeness, he uses some of the candor to admit to his missteps he tends to neglect. “I don’t really understand, OK?” “I understand, that’s cool!” the ice cream man, not without the strain of seeking nourishment, persists. They drink their coffee, each looking away, toward the camera. Bankole comes to the juncture of mooting, “I guess I’m gonna go… You got nothing to talk about. I don’t want to be a problem.” While scrambling a bit to soften the blow, Alex pronounces an African, perhaps Creole, coverage of the fateful, inscrutable tailspin. “OK, OK, I understand,” the sanguine one assures. “No, you don’t understand,” is some more candor from the cornered revolutionary. Once more alone, like Renee, he goes to the well of smoke to stop the bleeding. He rolls his dice and the duality comes up again. Then there is a close-up of the ashes in the ash-tray.

Before summarizing how the other segments make their contributions, let’s not fail, as Alex does, to provide some clarity about rolling the dice and facing a volatile bifurcation that won’t go away. The notion of deep uncertainty in nature—likened to a thrilling and dangerous blast of intent—was a nightmare to august mathematical and mechanistic maven, Albert Einstein. Another practitioner in this vein was Nikola Tesla. Yet another was Michele, the tough risk-taker not tough enough, in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016).

That takes us to a spate of far less resolved incidents being almost clownish in their incompetence to realize how howlingly immature, destructive and tasteless their energies run. Particularly significant within the total impact of this pattern are the damaging propensities leaving those game to countenance major change to be facing virulent and outrageous obstructions. First, we have the title, “Twins.” where Joie Lee—twin sister of Cinque Lee (the diffident desk clerk in Jarmusch’s Mystery Train [1989]) —rolls her own cigarettes by way of Export cigarette roll-your-own papers. Here we have a Cinque edifyingly far less accommodating, sneering, in fact (“Are you a cowboy?”), at the dynamic notions of roll and export, and its factor of import, by definition. The vignette, set in a hard-luck café in Memphis, the setting in Mystery Train, features none of the patient drollery by which confluences could arise—confluences seemingly facilitated by the situation of virtually identical sensibilities. As if the ego-saturated fractiousness of the twins were not impediment enough to kill the mystery of the mystery train that’s right in front of their nose (they hate Elvis), their server (played by Steve Buscemi) who also appeared in Mystery Train as a gentle soul beset upon by violent tastes) is a garrulous conspiracy freak veering into that assertive virus which kills the love of seriously creative adventure. While the sluggish customers are distractible enough on their own (one denying to him that they’re twins, the other confirming they are), Buscemi’s wobbling solicitude increases the payoff of this taste disaster. He tells them they remind him of Heckle and Jeckle (cartoon blackbirds); and from there, toeing a line between hospitality and fending off troublemakers, he runs off a twin’s story pertaining to Elvis having been a twin. The born storyteller being trapped in the food and beverage industry, portrays Presley’s mother having sold off baby Aaron (due to lack of funds), to an upshot that the adult Aaron pays the star a visit which sets off the former’s impersonating the famous brother with the latter’s blessing—Aaron having gone the Vegas and fat junkie route while the King confined himself to wisdom. After his rude assessment of the expose, “So what’s the punch line?” Cinque declares, “My favorite Elvis quotation is, ‘The only things blacks can do for me is shine my shoes’.” While the waiter was bent on inspiration from the phenomenon of Elvis, Joie shows her sense of rightness to consist of accusing the musician (she finds boring) of pirating the work of black blues notables. From there she goes on to fault her brother for borrowing her shirt and shoes. Her credo of rugged individualism may not be entirely off the mark; but it becomes a death knell for crucial sharing. “Why are you copying me? Get your own style. Your style’s my style because you’re always copying me!”

Two other undeclared wars confirm, by way of variations, the state of virtually universal ambush coming to pass by way of being in the public’s eye. In “Cousins,” uber-actress, Cate Blanchett, is held hostage to family protocol by Shelly, a local malcontent pouncing upon the jet-setter having promotional work to do there. People like Shelly might see themselves as genuinely “family-oriented;” but our episode here wants to bring to bear the caution of self-exposure to creatures one would otherwise never imagine allowing  pawing over hard-won plateaux. Both roles are played by Blanchett (the star a lithe and well-spoken blonde, Shelly a pudgy Cockney with too much black hair). Whereas the identical Lees in the previous story elicit the (smashed) possibility of heart-to-heart, the duo here seem to be from two very distant galaxies. The first moment shows Cate struggling to find poise while staring at the headlights coming around the corner. Those headlights soon show how ugly and dangerous such ritual madness can get. Shelly discerns the “star power” being excruciatingly ill at ease—Cate flashing a “Cut!/ Print” glow of a smile from out of her gloom before the arrival, and going on to the nonsense, “Wish you could stay longer!”—and helps herself to “Pretty cheap, man!” apropos of public relations being conducted for the media in the royal relative’s suite. (That was prefaced by the carnivorous non-pleasantry, “You’re not taking Mr. Cate and the baby on your trip?”)  Then she pokes her for the paparazzi outside. “God, that must be a real fuckin’ drag sometimes. Not for me, I’m free! No one’s following me, that’s for fuckin’ sure!” A desperate Cate tries to remember a boyfriend the cousin had the last time she was set upon; and that sets off the saga of her latest, Lee, who’s in a band which made a CD two years ago and has yet to distribute it. Hearing that Cate did not see the disc Shelly sent, the latter condemns, “I mean you’re in a different fucking city every day of the week!” Cate closes her eyes, Shelly adopts a sit-in position. (Prior to that she had pointedly got around to the innuendo at the heart of the visit, namely, her being “mistaken” for Cate at the door of a club; and promptly bounced when the misapprehension was realized. As with Buscemi’s story of Elvis’ kin pigging out, Shelly, who, though, would never pass for an artist, could put herself together to look the part long enough to be an obscene brute, which might have devastating consequences for Cate’s work going forward. Unless… [Earlier, Shelly forces a cigarette on non-smoker, Cate. That, and the espresso they order in the hotel lounge, would not have made headway toward Cate doing something wise about trolls.])

“Quirky,” “gentle,” Jarmusch has a hard, dark side few want to contemplate, because the odds could not be worse. Strangely, enough, those odds could not be better, when a safecracker’s touch comes into play. As we round out the horrific table talk, let’s see where joy can abound. In an entry called, “Delirium,” Bill Murray, as famous as Cate Blanchett, has (by some twist of fate) become a café waiter serving two members of the Wu Tang Clan hip-hop phenomenon. Desperate for a return to something resembling mojo taste, he has taken to drink quantities of coffee out of the 12-cup container, actually reserved for the customers. But the just-mentioned customers prove to be as deleterious as Shelly, though practised in a precious rhetoric. Like a couple of Major Barbara’s cleaning up a gin-mill, they emit a contempt (however velvety) of their surroundings (as with the twins and the cousin). “Caffeine makes you irritable, we don’t mess with coffee.” Murray has a smoker’s cough which serves as the starting gate for a detailed array of chemical poison. “Are you a doctor?” Murray asks. The more overbearing team member (sort of like Waits) defines himself as an expert of alternative medicine (an expertise giving a pass to all the other drugs, “nice stuff,” in his duffle bag). One of the regimes to break the habit is oven cleaner, which, like Benigni’s near-convulsive delirium, Murray is quick to sample. The talkative invader ends the house-to-house ill-will with, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

It is hardly brain surgery to keep a bead on and circumvent the numerous clans from hell over-spicing (and under-spicing) our days. Accordingly, there is another glimpse of mobsters (recalling the protractive, easily-led Mafiosi in Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, where that Wu Tang duo, in a cameo, salutes a less than fully balanced hit man) being hypochondriacs. The title, “These Things’ll Kill Ya,” is, appropriately, strictly cartoon. The middle-aged standbys squabble about their (futile) addiction to coffee and cigarettes. The schoolboy son of one of them comes up with expensive Japanese nibbles, eliciting from his proud father, “It’s a refined taste… Lately, he’s been the silent type…” Lately, that is, he’s been inducted into that mob of precious, self-impressed geeks far more effectively destructive than the elders. The episode, “Cousins?” wherein two Brits in the movie/ TV business meet at a tea-friendly cafe in LA and reveal their unspoken sense of superiority of articulation and sensibility, as compared to crude Americans, discloses that whole nationalities can furnish a perhaps suave, diplomatic mugging of others. The one who has become famous in a British TV serial, intones, “Americans are too safe.” The more tentative (Iggy-like) bloke showers his compatriot with praise, and they, old-school (too safe?) discuss the difficulties of bringing off comedy. (How many Brits have produced a film like this?) The great rhetorician runs with this spate of safe bashing to the upshot, “If I ever win a Golden Globe or Oscar, in my acceptance speech I’ll ask, “Why can’t Americans make a decent cup of tea?”

The final episode, “Champagne,” picks up, somewhat, where Jack and Meg left off. In a dark, quiet corner of a Rust Belt factory winding down (perhaps the then White Stripes home town of Detroit), one of two near-retirement-age men on coffee break, reminds the other—fading fast—that they are at work in “The Armory,” perhaps in fact not about more slick violence, but the New York Armory Show of 1913, where avant-garde stirrings came ashore in still-old New York, in the era when Nikola Tesla arrived there. The one with the poor memory for the mundane does, however, cling to touches of poetry. He recalls an operatic number from way back and asks his co-worker/ friend, “Do you know that song? I can almost hear it now…” Not getting a reply he insists, “It resonated right trough the whole building…” [wide-scale resonance being a concern of Jack and Meg]. The more scientifically inclined friend puts together is own version of the sublime: the work of Nikola Tesla, who “perceived the earth as a conductor of celestial resonance.” This prompts the esthete to lament, “I have no idea what you are talking about. Can you explain it for me?” Although the complexities have eluded the more pragmatic friend, forcing him to declare, perhaps impatiently, “No, not really,” we should not underestimate the remarkable dialogue in play. In response to the exigency for understanding (taste) in the air, the poet proposes they pretend the coffee is champagne. That taxes the interplay too far, his pal having to look more down-to-earth than he really is. “Why would I do that?” (The safe actor planning a diatribe at the Golden Globes being truly out to lunch.) Rather than giving up on the possibility of urging each other to understand what each is getting at, there is the pretender’s response, “to celebrate life, like the rich, elegant people do, the classy people.” Fortunately for him, there is his antithesis for the sake of life beyond clichés. “Simple, working man’s coffee.” A synthesis is still very remote; but the dialectic bearing down on a working man’s construct has a touch of youthfulness, a nice relief after a flood of stalemate. As no doubt a much repeated barb, the champagne dreamer emotes, “You’re so provincial, Bill. Do you know what your problem is? [“What?”] There’s no joie de vivre.” Bill plays along, and the poet, finding in cliché enough truth, toasts Paris in the 1920’s, Josephine Baker and Moulin Rouge to the fore with their melodramatic sizzle. Bill’s antithesis is New York in the 1970’s. The toastmaster forgets where he is, which elicits one of his many laments, “Say it isn’t true” [that his quest for delicious adventure must end in failure]. He falls asleep; and it might as well be the end of his life. But the exigency of a cogent confluence has made a modest and memorable advance. (Despite the Samuel Beckett touches— “You alright?”/ “No, not really. I feel so divorced from the world. I’ve lost touch from the world… Do you know that song? The saddest song ever written…”—this is a surprising outstripping of Theatre of the Absurd.) The final fade is overtaken by the march of the ending credits, introduced by, “And now the news!” followed by a far more spirited rendition of “Louie, Louie” than what we heard to open these slight but thrilling moments.