Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Paterson

This film is too quiet and uneventful for the conventional film story. This film is a poem. It’s a poem like what bus driver Paterson writes: quotidian images, simple and prosaic, that blossom into a wider but unspecified suggestion of meaning. In general parlance — the image is the light bulb, the poetry the light.
The first poem we watch him write starts with the box of matches beside his breakfast Cheerios. The film teems with matches. The film starts with Laura saying she dreamt of having twins, one for each of them. When he leaves the house he sees two elderly twin men, another match. There are at least two sets of twin girls in the film and a couple of adult twin women. 
In another kind of  match, two guys brag about possible conquests. Two lonely young anarchists are isolated in their idealism. All the little dramas of which Paterson catches snatches in his bus are such matches, individuals connecting. Or splitting, like the couple breaking up in the bar.
Consider all the matches in the one-word title. Paterson is (i) the bus driver, (ii) his home town, (iii) his bus route, (iii) the epic poem by local hero William Carlos Williams, also set there. That poet is here aka Carlo William Carlos, a reversal of the original name, another form of twinning or match. 
The basic match is between the external and the interior life. As Williams explained his objective in his Paterson: "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city.” The prosaic New Jersey of Paterson’s world abounds with poetry. Outside a laundromat at night he encounters a rap song in the making, the washer thrumming out the rhythm. A carful of sinister blades produces another rap on dog-jacking. In his neighbourhood bar Paterson encounters the florid “acting” of rejected lover Everett. The bartender's angry wife conjugates “chess tournament” into the threat of “chest tourniquet.”  That’s poetry.
Even the film’s visuals are poetic: prosaic images that resonate into larger moods or themes. A bleak brick wall says “Fire.” The night view of the bar and its plush interior shadows evoke the urban blues. Like the words on the matchbox, the physical details work like a megaphone to project a poetic effect. That’s the essential poetic device of metaphor: a particular evokes something more general. However unpromising Paterson’s world may seem, to the observant, pausing and reflecting eye, it can be poetic. Like the gift of the blank notebook, the ostensibly prosaic world holds limitless opportunity for the responsive imagination.
  The characters also seem to work as figures of speech. We don’t learn much about them, just enough to catch their present function. Bus driver Donnie lists a paragraph of the tribulations that define his life. We get a glimpse into the bartender’s uneven marriage. The Japanese poetry-lover is a walking paean to poetry but a total enigma otherwise.
  Paterson’s Laura is his muse, as another Laura was to Petrarch. But she’s not the passive lady of the muse tradition. She is intensely committed to her black-and-white interior design and fashion theory. She respects Paterson’s poetry and presciently urges him to make a second copy, for posterity. She craves her own fame and fortune as country singer and/or cupcake-maker. In her ambition and craving for recognition she’s Paterson’s antithesis. We don’t see them having sex, but we do see their daily physical intimacy and love. That’s the poetic face of the marriage. 
We don’t know much more about Paterson either. The marine photo on his bedstead tells us he was a decorated hero. That explains his efficient take-down of the gun threat in the bar. But it deepens our sense of his life as a bus driver. He’ s still a uniformed public servant but in a more normal, modest and social circumstance. The ribbons show he was a hero at war. The bar take-down attests to his courage and efficiency now. But he achieves a different kind of heroism in his life of transit poet. When he assumes the responsibility of staying with the young girl until her mother returns, he’s the model citizen. His reward: the kindred spirit gives him the prize of a splendid little poem and shares his love of Emily Dickinson. When the loss of his poems might tempt him to abandon that impulse, his faith in his art and in himself is restored by the encounter with the Japanese Williams fan. That carrying on is also heroism.  
Then there’s the dog. A lot of attention is spent upon Marvin (persuasively portrayed by Nellie). A dog is a dog is a dog. Until it isn’t. For dognappers a prized English bulldog can mean fast big bucks. For a man it can be an excuse for a nightly walk and the opportunity to visit the bar. To a woman it can be the child substitute. To the director it can provide the cheap cuteness or sentiment for a cutaway from the characters, or a set-up for a possible dramatic plot-twist, that disturbs the viewer even if it doesn’t happen.
  Marvin in particular is characterized as a living responsive presence in the family, growling at every physical exchange between his pets (aka masters). He’s also very well trained and obedient, as when he stays sat and still at Paterson’s demand. But that control proves severely limited. Marvin’s daily routine, when he’s on his own, is to run outside and knock-over the mailbox, which Paterson later has to straighten up. In his climactic rebellion Marvin destroys Paterson’s only copy of his poems. 
So this dog embodies our hope or delusion of control over the indomitably uncontrollable. That’s what poetry does too, give us a formal construction through which to explore and harness the uncontrollable facts and mysteries of life and fate. As prose narrows and defines our immediate environs, poetry opens out and unleashes the beyond. The poetry here has largely abandoned the strictures of rhyme, but it preserves the intensity and structure of rhythm and the constant eye for a wider meaning. The light beyond the bulb. 
Paterson is both an exaltation of poetry and — in its discovery amid prosaic material circumstance — its demystification. This is a joy to apprehend.

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