October 11: Mystery Train (1989 -- Jim Jarmusch)

★★★★

I get pulled into movies like Mystery Train easily.  This one teased me by giving me touchpoints among three narratives that enticed me to compare the stories.  In two of the sections, the characters walk by the same empty lot with a city scape in back.  All characters pass by an abandoned movie theater.  All also go to the same hotel, and all comment about the lack of a TV.  All listen to the same radio show with Elvis’ version of "Blue Moon."  All rooms have a little chain that holds (or held) a plastic radio, and all the rooms have a picture of Elvis.  In each story, there’s the same crumbling overpass with the same train passing over it, and a gunshot punctuates each story.  I can’t stay away from an enticement like that.

Each of these stories has foreigners in Memphis, too, and they’re all dealing with crises in this city of logistics (there is transportation everywhere) and rock n roll/blues legends.  It’s an empty, desolate cityscape, and the young, hyper-styled, Japanese couple fixates on music while they work out their relationship.  The Italian recent-widow, who seems to know a good deal about guns, has just lost her husband and finds herself drawn in by a ghost story about Elvis…until Elvis actually appears to her.  A Brit hipster deals with his breakup and loss of a job by dragging his friends into an evening of drinking and violence.  

The Memphis cityscape is tired and beaten down, and the characters of the story, universal in their cultural range, are beaten down, too.  However, as the city has given rise to musical legends, so does it (and its music) get these pilgrims to pull themselves together and head  down the road to the rest of their lives.  It’s a wonderful experience to watch this happen in all three stories as the owner and desk clerk wearily take stock of yet another set of people moving on with their lives.

There’s something oddly positive about Memphis in Mystery Train.  It’s not a city of people – in fact, the city appears to almost devoid of residents. – but it’s a city of inspiration, a city where the urban ruin somehow lifts people up and sends them on their way.  Like its trains, planes and trucks do.  And like the music that found its birth here does.