In Which Jim Jarmusch Stole From Everywhere

Way of the Samurai

by ETHAN PETERSON

"I still think of myself as an amateur filmmaker," Jim Jarmusch announces on Tuesday for the thousandth time. Minutes later, he mentions that he smoked cigarettes for most of his life. "I took a week to quit," he says. Equipped with Allen Carr's book about smoking, he took a week off from anything to purge himself of nicotine. Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom was his only panacea, he explains to a crowd gathered at the New York Film Festival. He describes the film and shows a piece of it, explaining that it is the most nihilistic movie ever made.

The first clip Jarmusch shows the audience is the bravura opening to Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss. It is maybe the best thing Fuller ever did and the opening sequence, where a prostitute good-naturedly batters her drunk pimp for the money she is owed, almost reminds me more of Jarmusch than Fuller. The only time Jarmusch mentions his own films during the evening is in passing, since this event is centered around his own influences in film. It emerges that Jarmusch worked or was friendly with an astonishing number of important directors over the course of his long career.

Jim Jarmusch was Nicholas Ray's assistant and lived in his apartment while the director was dying of lung cancer. Ray always told him to be a dillentante – someone who had many, varied interests. Some of the interests Jarmusch mentions to the audience are comparative literature and the naming of mushrooms. (You get the sense that Jarmusch did not simply name them.) He describes a talk he did in Washington D.C. where he interviewed Martin Scorsese; one talking slow as molasses and the other's mouth running a mile a minute.

Of course Jarmusch knew Fellini as well. He never mentions much about the man's films – Jarmusch draws a subtle distinction between directors who he was interested in as people because he saw them in much the same way he sees himself, and men who are brilliant artists from whom he can learn or take something. (His story about Fellini is how annoyed the director was to be driven to the set.) He shows the audience an incredible sequence from Dino Risi's Il Sorpasso, where two Italian men drive around an empty Rome, harassing motorists. He does not explain something I would have liked to know – what he finds so telling about a movie where two mismatched people are on a journey together.

His thoughts about John Boorman's Point Blank, his amazing version of the Robert Parker novel, are much more in depth. Every time he starts watching Point Blank, he says, he watches it from start to finish because it draws him again. ("It's the same with Goodfellas," he says.) Lee Marvin is just Jarmusch's type of actor: completely solid and nuanced, yet projecting a deep, underlying emotionality. Jarmusch describes the performances he saw during the semester abroad he spent in Paris not studying. At times Jarmusch seems to be straddling two different generations of film: he is between moments, a man who has seen almost too much. Maybe that's why Ray told him to take from everywhere.

Recently a friend of mine showed me a list of David Fincher's favorite movies. It was pretty rough and nothing was older. Jarmusch shows off a Buster Keaton sequence from 1924's The Navigator where he and Kathyrn McGuire search a boat for each other. I'm not entirely sure what Jarmusch likes about Keaton – perhaps the sense of the human being as merely another aspect of larger landscape? Jarmusch's new film, Paterson, stars Adam Driver as a bus driver in New Jersey.

My favorite of Jarmusch's films is easily Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. He shows off scenes from other "hitman movies", as he calls them, which inspired his version of the same. Melville's Le Samuraï is at the top of this list, and he explains how Melville came by his career and what he was hoping to achieve as an artist. Melville's obsessive nature paralleled the illness of his protagonist Jef Costello. Jarmusch pairs that clip with a section of Branded to Kill by Seijun Suzuki, where an assassin shoots his target from an impossible angle. Suzuki is still alive, he claims, and describes talking to Park Chan-Wook about the man. The audience nods appreciatively like a bunch of hipster idiots.

What is not very surprising is that Jarmusch seems like a well-adjusted human being. Especially in his appreciations of Kiarostami and Kaurismäki, he is wonderful at talking about or to people in a way that preserves their humanity and places he himself no higher or lower in the hierarchy of the universe. All of Jarmusch's important films are by male directors, which is not really too unexpected given that the vast majority of his work explores different types and personifications of a disturbed masculinity. "I was lucky enough to spend time with Samuel Fuller," he says, "and after, he died, with his family." Whatever sadness there is in that statement he is properly detached from – the sense that the world is at arm's length, but at least it is no further.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Bring Honor To North Texas Psychology

Butter and Toast

by ETHAN PETERSON

Bull
creators Paul Attanasio & Phil McGraw
CBS

There is a great tradition in the performing arts of gaining or losing muscle for a particular role. De Niro, Clooney and Russell Crowe all put on about fifty pounds to look like a boxer and two CIA agents. What the point was of Phil McGraw finding a handsome actor (Michael Weatherly) to play him and then making him like a slovenly mess wearing those glasses and oversized sweaters, I'll never know. On Bull, Weatherly looks like he showed up at a Halloween Party dressed as Jonah Hill.

In 1990, McGraw was deep in thought about how he could use his PhD in psychology from the University of North Texas to accomplish his major life goal: making a shit ton of money. Bull is based on those heady years when he started CSI, a jury consulting company. Few of the techniques employed by Dr. Joseph Bull could feasibly have been utilized in 1990, since Dr. Bull's staff includes a hacker (daughter of the show's executive producer Paul Attanasio), a stylist hired away from Vogue, and an ex-police officer.

The hacker in question is named Cable McCrory, which should be indicative of the level of realism we are approaching in this depiction of Phil McGraw's life. Paul Attanasio is most famous for making a lot of money by torpedoing the show House into the ground. I'm genuinely sorry if you liked this show, but it was utter garbage completely carried by Hugh Laurie mugging in every scene and half the plots were identical. Also, it was misogynistic and gross, elements that would probably be a lot more faithful to Phil McGraw's real life in Texas than this Bull.

There are a few things you should know about Dr. Joseph Bull. During every episode of Bull, someone emphasizes how much pain he carries around with him, like his pathway to this questionably moral profession/manipulation of the integrity of the justice system was straight from an orphanage in the Sudan. I'm unclear on what pain Phil McGraw carries with him, the troubled childhood that caused him to ambush Britney Spears in a hospital room and hold a press conference and regularly humiliate people on television.

Most of focus in Bull concerns the good doctor's relationship with teenagers. Phil McGraw has always related best to children as subjects, since they are unlikely to question him. Many have never been bullied before, or in so splendid a fashion, and they are a lot more open to his particular brand of babble. McGraw gave up the practice of psychology long ago, if he ever was interested in it at all. He was always more concerned with the application of his training to the field of self-help, which is not only more lucrative, it is filled with charlatans even worse than McGraw himself.

None of this is what makes Bull so wretched. CBS seems to be using the same soft filter on all its dramas, giving the shows a generic, polished look that instead of obscuring the fact they are all shot on similar-looking sets, emphasizes the generic backgrounds and costumes. It is not necessary to have a big budget to make your show appear like it is actually taking place in a locale. I have no clue where Bull occurs: whenever they show local media coverage, an anchor shouts, "The city is captivated tonight by a major trial!" So I guess Bull lives in the city.

Even though Dr. Bull is consistently disrespectful to his clients in order to establish dominance, he abhors anyone else's lack of common decency. It is as if by being a villain he is the only one fully qualified to identify fellow shitheads. It genuinely seems to make him feel better than other people have less integrity than he does; it may be the only thing he can truly subsist on besides butter and toast.

The genius question that Bull asks potential jurors, the one that gives him a personality baseline for his privacy violations into their lives is this: Where do you get a cold? The intimation is that Dr. Bull himself cannot answer this question, or that he never bothers to get one unless it is professionally helpful for him to be a bit under the weather. Dressed in terrible sweaters and wearing glasses that clearly do not fit his face at all, Bull seems incredibly uncomfortable in his own skin.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which The Only People Concerned Know Nothing

Bad People

by ETHAN PETERSON

The Good Place
creator Michael Schur
NBC

There is a moment in NBC's new sitcom The Good Place where Ted Danson lists a bunch of things which are good and bad, and the numerical positive or negative value he has assigned to each. The first positive thing he shows is "eating a sandwich" and the first negative thing he shows is "buys a trashy magazine." That is the initial troubling sign that the people behind The Good Place have as little idea what it means to be a good person as the show's central character, Eleanor (Kristen Bell).

Kristen Bell is undoubtedly a good person, since you would have to be extremely virtuous to marry or even have sex once with Dax Shepard. (His face looks like the protagonist of Ratatouille.) Then she brought joy to so many young people by voicing that girl in Frozen who was absolutely boy crazy until her sexuality was thawed by leaving the chaste castle in which her parents kept her.

Maybe the creators of The Good Place could have just asked Kristen Bell what it means to be good. Everyone in this version of heaven has dedicated their lives to helping others, except for her soulmate Chidi (William Jackson Harper). Chidi speaks French, although it is translated as English to Eleanor since she does not understand the French language. Chidi was a professor of ethics and moral philosophy, although evidently he was so terrible at academia that he has to remind himself of the basics by reading Kant:

The idea of training Eleanor to be good is repulsive to Chidi, which I suppose also makes him a sort of bad person. Even though Eleanor is the only white person except for a pair of homosexuals who, somewhat inappropriately, enjoy picking up trash (this was not thought out well), she never makes notice of it. Her soulmate is from Senegal, her next-door neighbors are from different parts of Asia and Europe, and Ted Danson is really the only other genuinely white person there. 

The Good Place becomes a weird hymn to white privilege, since Eleanor is transported to these environs without any actual virtue: so it must just be because of her skin color, and maybe her general complexion and appeal. Bell's handsome looks are no longer childlike, and she has become very expressive and soulful as she matures into her thirties. So far, few of her acting opportunities have utilized this new dimension, and The Good Place mainly writes jokes for her that revolve around her not being able to curse.

Sometimes we flash back to Eleanor's live in Phoenix, Arizona. You see, Hollywood writers look down on Arizona because it is nearby and thus an easy target. In Phoenix, Eleanor sold a nasal product that was composed of chalk, even though the FDA would never allow such a thing. This makes Eleanor's real life just as fanciful as her afterlife — it is a clue that you should not think about The Good Place too seriously. Creator Michael Schur emphasizes this when he recently stated in an interview that he started researching religion but gave up because it was too hard and cut into his golf time.

It is not enough that people like Schur not believe in God or any religious concepts: they cannot even be bothered to find out where they come for. Just as valid, they think, is whatever concept for the afterlife that come up with offhand during a pitch meeting. Well, atheists should be allowed their ideas too: what Schur and company have up with is basically hell — an unfunny mess of cliches, jokes stolen from Albert Brooks and physical comedy involving Ted Danson licking the sweat from his armpits. Who would willingly watch such a thing?

The aspect of The Good Place that is most insulting to its viewers is that it has no conception of how racist its ideas even are. The ethnic characters that surround Kristen Bell's Eleanor have no agency or will of their own: they simply exist to make her feel worse or better as the episode demands. The only time these empty shells ever show the slightest bit of agency is when Tahani (Jameela Jamil) decides that she and her Buddhist husband should try to cheer Ted Danson up. Why would he be sad? Danson has more hair now that he did twenty years ago.

Even Bell is afforded nothing but a basic perplexity. She becomes unsympathetic so quickly — she has no other function except to drink and enjoy her time in this new world. She is essentially uncurious and she avoids love or caring as if it these emotions were anathema to her new existence. She and her neighbors cannot be destroyed or harmed by anything in this new place, and yet they run around screaming when they see a group of giraffes stampeding down their streets. The only thing worse than a bad deed is a bad idea.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.