I was reading Sei Shonagon’s A Lady in Kyoto right before watching the film. My interest in Shonagon began when Maggie Nelson referenced The Pillow Book in her seminal work Bluets. Not much later, I was surprised to find a book authored by Shonagon in a local store. These books are concerned with the quotidian thoughts, events, rituals, and stories of a court lady. There isn’t a radical narrative, nor a formal innovation at play, rather a set of unusual (therefore, interesting) particulars
I think Jarmusch attempts just that. The film assembles a set of unusual particulars, a set of four, the triptych (japanese couple, italian widow, three suspects), and the fourth invariables (the hotel, receptionist and bellhop, Elvis, and so on). As Roger Ebert writes:
Jarmusch believes in an American landscape that existed before urban sprawl, before the sanitary sterility of the fast-food strips on the highways leading into town. His movies show us saloons where everybody knows each other, diners where the short-order cook is in charge, and vistas across railroad tracks to a hotel where transients are not only welcome, they are understood.
“Mystery Train” is Jarmusch’s third film, after “Stranger than Paradise” and “Down by Law.” In all three there is the belief that America cannot be neatly packaged into safe and convenient marketing units, that there must be a life of the night for the drifters and the dropouts, the heroes of no fixed abode and no apparent place of employment. These are the people that songs like “Mystery Train” are about, and although in fact their lives may be flat and empty, in Jarmusch’s imagination they are the real inhabitants of the city, especially after midnight.