Basically, the film shows a young man - who appears to be transgendered, or close to it, with his slight-bonedness, his high-pitched voice - walking through the city reflecting on his life, how he's different from others. At one point he says he doesn't understand people who are driven to live by working hard and being ambitious; he says that that's not the life for him, while others think he's the crazy one.
I liked that statement because it reminds me of what it's like to truly live in the moment, observing or feeling, not trying hard to accomplish anything or to prove anything at all. It makes you think, where do those moments go?
It was inspiring to see Jarmusch in the interview that accompanies the film in this DVD, how mellow he is, how cool. Just being. It was a gift, the reminder of experiencing life that way, for anyone mired in the rush of work and society. A gift worth holding onto.
The memorable parts of the movie, for me, are where he turns on a record player in the middle of a creepy moment (there's eerie sounding music here that appears and reappears throughout the film employing some kind of Southeast Asian instrument that I hear as 'dark and shimmery') and dispels the fear or anxiety, as something maudlin and jazzy fills the room. And he starts to dance. His dancing is idiosyncratic; combined with his movement in other parts of the film, he emerges as a long-necked ballet swan with a slight fifties pompadour doing a solo that feels 40's jitterbuggy.
Sometime after that, it gets silent again, and then he tells his friend (a pretty girl with dark hair, big eyes and a profile reminiscent of a young Elizabeth Taylor) that he wants to go back to the house where he was born and grew up. But that because it was bombed 'in the war' (a fictional war, it seems), it's now just a bunch of ruins.
The memorable 'insane' people he meets are a war veteran who lives in the ruins of his old building, his mother who is actually living in a mental hospital (at which point they talk again about a war), an anxious woman wearing some kind of slip while sitting outside another building that looks like it's crumbling, who ends up screaming at him in fear, and a black man who somewhat jovially tells him the story of a man who jumped off a building and committed suicide.
Jarmusch's prnounced sense of space is already apparent here. He captured a unique NYC of 1980 (or of the one or two years previous) by isolating parts to make it look post-apocalyptic. My favorite images are the crumbly buildings and the shots in alleys and streets between tall buildings.
The end shot on the boat pulling away from the southern tip of Manhattan feels prophetic and gives me the heebie jeebies because it's a long lingering shot of the World Trade Center which reminds me of all the Super 8 footage my family took of NYC when we were kids and it was still around.
The spirit of this film suggests that Jarmusch was channeling something purely felt rather than trying to know anything, and that's where the mellowness, the 'just being,' the coolness, becomes ultimately more powerful than all the busy bees in the world.
