Night on Earth -- Jim Jarmusch

When all “significance” melts away and life suddenly comes down to just being somewhere (Gleiberman).  Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, his fourth commercially released feature that only took him about a week to write, links five different cities around the world inside of five different taxicabs at the same time in the middle of the night with five different mini-episodes.  Jarmusch masters comedy of the oblique in this film that leaves you with many unanswered questions,

at the end, we have learned no great lessons and arrived at no thrilling conclusions, but we have shared the community of the night, when people are unbuttoned and vulnerable – more ready to speak about what’s really on their minds (Ebert).

His films are not intended to appeal to mainstream filmgoers, but they have become known for trying to stay away from a traditional narrative structure, lacking clear plot progression and they focus more on mood and character development.  Night on Earth explores disconnected characters and their relationships through a series of off-the-wall duets giving the impression that they all may have more in common than you may have originally thought.

     The film begins in Los Angeles where an elegant Hollywood casting agent, Victoria, takes a taxicab home from the airport driven by a young, tough, chain-smoking tomboy, Corky; the complete opposite of Victoria.  “Victoria is so high-powered that you might think her capable of raising Mars with the cordless telephone she uses” (Canby) yet she is inspired by Corky’s no-nonsense outlook on life that she offers her a job as an actress that she, to our surprise, declined so she could pursue her dream of becoming a mechanic.

            We, then, rewind a little in time as we switch to a new location, New York. A rowdy, amusing man, YoYo, is desperately trying to get a taxicab that will take him from Manhattan back home to Brooklyn.  He finally gets a cab with a suspiciously smiling eager East German refugee, Helmet, who turns out has yet to learn to properly drive.  YoYo, eventually, convinces Helmet to let him take the wheel.  Helmet is a delighted, amusing passenger who, we learned, was once a circus clown after YoYo called him “a clown.”  “Absolutely nothing about these two characters connect, yet in their very recognition of that fact they attain a fleeting bond” (Gleiberman).  Eventually they come across and pick up YoYo’s highly opinionated sister-in-law, Angela which resulted in a hilarious and liberating combination of YoYo, Helmet and Angela.  However, after they reach their destination Helmet is back behind the wheel no idea where he is.

In Paris a young, handsome cabbie’s night is not going very well after fighting with and kicking out two arrogant diplomats which was somewhat amusing.  Jarmusch said he “chose to use color and play off areas of the city that were colorful” (LoBrutto) which seemed to be more prominent after picking up a blind Frenchwoman.

The truth is that the sight of her sightless eyes, freely rolling in their sockets, is as unnerving to the audience as it is to him.  His questions are direct, without guile, when he brings up the subject of sex and what it must be like to make love with someone one cannot see. Even here she somehow manages to squelch him.  The night ends as badly as it began (Canby)

as the young, Ivory Coast driver gets into an accident right after dropping off the Frenchwoman.

            In Rome, Jarmusch did the opposite with color then he did in Paris, he “kept it all almost monotone and earth tone – yellows and browns.  That was designed in, and that was [his] way to follow through and make each scene distinctive” (LoBrutto). At any rate, the sarcastic, talkative and goofy Roman cab driver picks up a tired, old Priest who was not pleased when the driver decided to give his confession in the cab.  The hilarious, sexual and somewhat inappropriate confession, that you never find out if it is true or not, ends up killing the Priest.  Meanwhile, in Helsinki, our last destination, four drunks whose “physical state has finally attained an awfulness that matches your life choices” (Canby) decided to be responsible by getting a cab ride home.  However this may be “the saddest, almost unbearably sad [episode], as the driver hears what a bad day one of his passengers has had, and then tops him” (Ebert).

Jarmusch basically emptied the streets making the all the cities look lonely and cold.  He determined the cities in Night on Earth largely based on the actors and actresses he wanted to work with.  Now, when it comes to the taxicabs, one of the reasons he chose cabs is because he figured there would be a great deal of control.

The cab itself is the world temporarily shared.  It’s also a distinctive cocoon (each taxi in the film has its own special purr or knock) from which one of the parties will emerge if not changed, then at least shaken up, or, in one case, no more sure where he is than when he got into the cab (Canby).

Jarmusch just loved the idea of the forced situation of two people in a car who don’t know each other.  With some help from Tom Waits’ music he created a lonely, elegiac, romantic mood; “as much as jazz does, Night on Earth transforms the commonplace into something haunting, mysterious and newly true” (Canby) where he, basically, had the actor’s captive.

Though it may seem like insignificant randomness it’s actually those throwaway observations that Jarmusch orchestrates with microscopic detail making his films difficult to summarize as well as something that you cannot watch just once.  Night on Earth seems always to keep the alien’s distance, as if part of its mind remained forever fixed in outer space (Canby) not interested in making each segment in a short story with an obvious conclusion.  There are no zingers at the end.  [Jarmusch is] more concerned with character [and] with the relationship that forms (Ebert).

His use of characters may seem stereotypical and cliché at first but as you get to know each and every character their behavior begins to grow increasingly more abstract as our understanding of their existence and our relationship with them broadens.  [The] cosmic title may lead you to expect a spiritual overview of the state of the world, but the joke is that these cabbies and their passengers all speak a universal language of disconnectedness (Gleiberman).  Yet Jarmusch creates the feeling of being connected through being disconnected.  [In his] worldwide feeling of kinship, we will hear Spanish, German, French, Italian, Finnish and even a little Latin (Ebert).  [Jarmusch] seems to see his characters through a telescope (Canby) as he transforms the ordinarily mundane conversations into engaging episodes all having their own personality.

It’s as if the minds of these night people are affected by all the dreams and nightmares that surround them…his characters seem divorced from the ordinary society of their cities; they’re loners and floaters.  We sense they have more in common with one another than with the daytime inhabitants of their cities.  And their cabs, hurtling through the deserted streets, are like couriers on a mission to nowhere (Ebert).

Yet maybe it just comes down to just being somewhere, enjoying life. Jarmusch is an intriguing contradiction: an avant-garde entertainer, a downtown aesthete with one foot (well, okay, a few toes) in show biz…The fragmentary exchanges and subliminal missed connections that most moviemakers leave out—for Jarmusch, are about the only things worth putting in (Gleiberman).

Works Cited

Canby, Vincent. "Night on Earth (1991) Review/Film Festival; Urban Life Seen from a Taxi Seat." New York Times [New York] 4 Oct. 1991, Movies: n. pag. New York Times. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.

Ebert, Roger. "Night on Earth." RogerEbert.com. N.p., 8 Mar. 1992. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.

Gleiberman, Owen. "Night on Earth." Entertainment Weekly 17 Jan. 2015: n. pag. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.

"Jim Jarmusch - Part Two." Guardian 20 Dec. 1999, Movies: n. pag. The Guardian. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.

LoBrutto, Vincent. "Principal Photography: Interviews with Feature Film Cinematographers." The Jim Jarmusch Resource Page. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.

"Night on Earth." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Nov. 2014. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.

"Night on Earth (1991)." IMDB. Amazon.com, n.d. Web. 8 Apr. 2015.

O'Brien, Glenn. "Jim Jarmusch." Interview Magazine: n. pag. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.