“CARPE DIEM IN BLACK AND WHITE: Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers” (by Camelia Elias)
One of the perennial discussions of the concept of the fragment and fragmentary forms revolves around the status of the fragment and the fragmentary in relation to a presupposed whole. Is the fragment a remnant of something broken? Something that has been detached from a unitary form, or a whole? Is the fragmentary that which fragments? Does it have agency? If we disregard these philosophical questions, we can have a look at regular domestic drama especially as represented in the media. We often say: their marriage broke, and it was his fault. He left the nucleus of his unit, usually composed of a wife and a set of two kids, each with a different gender, for a figment, or a fragment of his imagination, usually a blond bombshell. So the heart is broken (of the victimized wife) and the mind is confused (of the treacherous husband) – there is often a fragment of remorse in the act of leaving where the one who fragments the relationship is concerned. We find fragments of this sort everywhere, and films have been known to embed in their visual representations such aspects of realist narrative not only thematically but also formally. In fact, particularly in film, the fragment sells. In this context, one of the reasons for the fragment’s success is its negative energy. The more there is a hacking of relationships, and the more painful and dramatic the separation, the more our emotions heighten and we go with the flow. There is something cathartic about the fragment, and it goes really well for the viewer or the spectator if he or she gets to see the perpetrator of fragmentation punished.
In this paper, I’m interested in how fragmentary representations of bad, malicious, and evil relations relate to moral tales, and what happens to the aesthetics of the fragment when morality is embedded into it. The bastard had it coming, we say at the end of the drama. Then we go home and enjoy the illusion of our own wholeness. But all this happens at the level of content. Where form is concerned the story of the fragment is told differently by the producers of fragmentary tales. For the viewers, such fragmentary tales occasionally achieve a cult status. Fragmentation and the fragment are good. The fragment is aesthetic. It keeps detail in play with other forms.
Fragmentation is thus positively valorized. The more of it there is the more we can enjoy the benefits of realizing that there is more to life and love than moral tales. One need only look at various works of film theory dealing not so much with conventional Hollywood tales, but with what has been considered a breakthrough in film techniques. When Russian film theorists began to experiment with editing through montage and discontinuity in the 20s, everyone agreed that that was a good thing. For instance, there is no book on film theory that doubts the significance of fragmentation for moviemaking ever since fragmentation was taken into consideration at that time. Taking their cue from the language and practice of industrialism on its rise in the 20s and 30s such filmmakers as Eisenstein and Kuleshov borrowed the “assembly line” poetics in their methods. The aim was however to create unity of form out of seeming chaos and disorienting pictures. Poststructuralists today identify these concerns with fragmentation that modernist filmmakers had with the modernists’ anxiety induced by the fear of war and the fear of what was to replace old paradigms of thinking. In his Film Theory: An Introduction, Robert Stam makes this thought clear. Thus he says:
The montage theorists were also, in a sense, structuralists avant la lettre in that they saw the filmic shot as being without intrinsic meaning prior to its placement within a montage structure. The shot gained meaning, in other words, only relationally, as part of a larger system. In film, as in language, to paraphrase Saussure, “there were only differences”. For the practically minded Kuleshov, founder of the world’s first film school, the art of cinema consisted in strategically managing the spectator’s cognitive and visual processes through the analytic segmentation of the partial views. What distinguishes the cinema from the other arts, for Kuleshov, is montage’s capacity to organize disjointed fragments into meaningful, rhythmical sequence […] It was film technique, rather than “reality,” then, that generated spectatorial emotion. (Stam, 2000: 38-39)
Insofar as filmmakers today still employ and rely on ideas of fragmentation formulated in the 20s, I want to look at how variations of moral tales that aim for unity of effect are cast as ambiguous in the hands of film directors that prefer a minimalistic ‘modular’ and fragmenting structure for their films to epic forms. My example is contemporary filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and his film Broken Flowers (2005).
As the tile indicates there is breakage in the narrative of an aging Don Juan who upon receiving an anonymous letter from an unidentified woman that informs him of his having a son he never knew he had embarks on a quest journey that takes him across the country. This latter day American Don Juan, here named Don Johnston, played by Bill Murray, sets out to find out who of the women he nailed in his youth might be the mother of his son. He remembers five of them, one dead. So he goes visiting.
The narrative draws heavily on the myth of Don Juan, who after having scored a host of women has to pay for his sins. But while the narrative also draws on all sorts of other representations of Don Juanism, from intertextual references to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and thus relies on a plot development that follows a traditional linear trajectory that has sin and fall in focus, in Jarmusch’s rendition the story ends with an open and undecided scene. I want to argue, however, that while Jarmusch makes recourse to all the elements of aesthetic fragmentation, he embeds a moral tale within the film which clashes with the poetics of the fragment as such. The fragment, particularly as we find it defined in poststructuralist studies, has a performative quality to it rather than just being a remnant. In its performative poetics the fragment escapes definition insofar as, more often than not, it is impossible to determine where it begins and where it ends. The poetics of the fragment is thus best understood in terms of its function, which is to say that we see the fragment as an act: an act of writing, an act of literature, and act of filmmaking (Elias 2004).
By the same token the fragmentary, insofar as it deals with that which remains outside wholeness, can be said to designate a neutral state. One of the best poststructuralist theorists on the fragment, Maurice Blanchot, has formulated the relation between the fragment and the fragmentary thus:
The fragmentary expresses itself best, perhaps, in a language that does not recognize it. Fragmentary: meaning neither the fragment, part of a whole, nor the fragmentary in itself. The aphorism, the proverb, maxim, citation, thoughts, themes—verbal cells in being further removed than the infinitely continuous discourse whose content is “its own continuity”, continuity that is assured of itself only in giving itself as circular and, by this turn, submitting itself to the preliminary of a return whose law is outside, which outside is outside the law. (Blanchot, 1992: 43)
Being outside of the law points to a logic of neutrality. This thinking of the fragment without the fragment, as it were, is something that filmmakers such as Jarmusch have been exploring.
Broken Flowers poses an interesting challenge in its dealing with continuing the line of narratives that invite an ethical assessment of relationships – even when there is no resolution in any of the five tales that are embedded in the larger framework of the structure of the film. This challenge formulates itself in the implicit question: to what extent can we think of morality without morality in the very act of thinking?
Among the many positive reviews of Jarmusch’s film, there are few that manage to identify the problem with morality as it is mediated by symbolic representations that have been overtly circulated in the media, particularly the myth of Don Juan. Here is what Robert Fulford has to say in his “The Jagged Edges” written for The National Post (August 30, 2005) on the beginning of the movie:
Murray’s character is watching The Private Life of Don Juan, a 1934 melodrama by Alexander Korda. We don’t learn much about that film from Broken Flowers, but Jarmusch knows his admirers will look it up as soon as they get home. So we have now learned that Korda’s story ends with the collapse of Don Juan’s erotic career, his public disgrace and his retirement from the ranks of sexual overachievers. We also know the movie failed, partly because the situation of the star, Douglas Fairbanks, resembled Don Juan’s. Fairbanks had become famous playing young daredevils, but in 1934 he was 51, overweight, somewhat bald and only five years away from his fatal heart attack. Disappointment, humiliation, the deterioration that accompanies ageing: Those were Korda’s themes, and on this occasion they are Jarmusch’s too. Murray, given the evocative name of Don Johnston, becomes the latest embodiment of the Don Juan myth, which has served Mozart, Moliere, Balzac, Goldoni, Byron and George Bernard Shaw (and that’s the short list). The shape it takes here makes an odd comment on current movies. Jarmusch may be the king of the independents, but on this outing he can be as heavy-handed as an old MGM warhorse.
This rather demanding intertextuality – demanding in the sense that finding out all the finer details for the possible interpretation of Jarmusch’s film requires some time on the internet – is to Fulford a waste of time. As far as Fulford is concerned, there are just too many unnecessary intertextual fragments in the film for what in his opinion are two unambiguously clear, and also rather lame, messages:
1. You just never know how people will turn out […]
2. An erotic life pursued thoughtlessly could well make you feel kind of sad.
There is, however, an odd contrast at work throughout the movie. As the narrative unfolds through sparse dialogue, we are meant to think of Don’s women as old flames, though seen from his perspective it is quite clear that he entertains no thoughts about these women at all. I particularly like the suggestion that the male protagonist thinks nothing of his past women. This interesting male perspective is however depicted against the background of a painful to watch women’s world. When Don goes to visit the 4 women, we find that they completely embody types: a hot but brainless blond widow, a hippy gone conventional and sterile, a lawyer gone weird, lesbian, and animal shrink, and a tormented and mad as hell biker. While Don is depicted as devoid of emotion, the women are full of it. Fraught with spent passions – in a male’s gaze women are always that – they all seem to have suffered negative consequences after their break from Don; in fact, they are all damaged in some way. In contrast, Don is merely apathetic, and lives a passionless, but not an unreflective life – in a male’s gaze men are always capable of cool reasoning.
And this is the point where one is tempted to say that Jarmusch’s moral tale doesn’t work. On a general level, the movie works because the roles are played exquisitely by very fine actors, but the implicit moral notion that if men don’t treat their women nicely they should be punished is not only out-dated but also problematic insofar as it seems to be out of step with the fragment, both at the level of form and content. Although we clearly get the message in a totalizing form, as Fulford points out, none of the 5 stories – of basically what happened to 5 women in the course of two decades – ends in any conclusive way. The only constant is that change is the constant. The women have changed, and so has Don. Content-wise the moral of the story is that one must get on with the story of one’s life, such as it is, and for better or worse. Thus in terms of content, there is an unmotivated blending of apathy, futility, and cynicism at the expense of form. More precisely, the movie recasts women in their age-old roles as victims – even when they are not. The movie also presupposes that what women want from men is the age-old form of total commitment – even when they don’t. The movie assumes that we are entertained by identifying with the universal human predicament (more male than female) of getting old and impotent – when we are not. As the viewer’s emotional capacity is more engaged rather than his or her cognitive capability, one tends to dislike the fact that Don, towards the end of the movie, is made to suggest that any man would or should or ought to get soft in his knees when he has the chance to mirror himself in a younger self. As he has lunch with someone he thinks is his son, he thus offers him a possibility to consider a human value in the form of a philosophical insight: carpe diem. However, against the background of what we have just witnessed, such deadpan advice – the past is gone, the future is unknown, seize the day – doesn’t work. As the young man runs into the future, and the women are left to stick to and deal with the past, Don alone is condemned to enact his dictum by seeing his own present presént itself to him as a kind of a ‘between-acts’ time. He ends up seeing every 19 year old that passes him by as a potential son. The irony is that the Carpe Diem philosophy is generally understood as a totalizing idea leading the person who follows it to a harmonious and continuous life. But the Carpe Diem philosophy is, actually, the perfect philosophy for a Don Juan insofar as it leads no further than the next conquest. It is also a perfect fragment as it fragments the present off from all other times.
If we stay with the level of the content here, for a while longer, as that is the level which engages most the aim to create a unified narrative even as it unfolds itself against the background of unfinished business (or stories), we may grant Jarmusch a point when he suggests that whether one has children or not, they are not going to make a difference for the way in which one lives and dies. The more disturbing question, however, where the unproblematic propagation of the Don Juan myth is concerned is this: why does he have to suggest that when women grow old they turn weird and vengeful – punishing men by disclosing that their sons are not theirs or that they had some whom they didn’t tell them about, or that they aborted them because they could – men in their old age become intriguingly philosophical, and thus resourceful for the entire human race? The contextual Carpe diem here does not include women. On the other hand, and in spite of what the intention of the director might have been, such a portrayal of women works better on the formal level, especially when one considers the performative aspect of the fragment. Insofar as the underlying message is that Don ditched his women for their ‘fragmenting’ capability – women fragment whereas men unify, and this is seen particularly in the initial shots when we see Don stoically resigning himself in the face of his current girlfriend’s desire for separation – the representation of women as stereotypes becomes necessary. If the fragment fragments, and if women embody the fragment, then women by definition must be reduced to parts. Which is exactly what happens. These parts, however, go on to enforce a male dominated philosophy.
As Don gets philosophical in his attempt to ultimately grasp what the meaning of life is, he shifts allegiance and positions: the promiscuous Don Juan has turned into none other than the wise Solomon. The lack of enthusiasm which characterizes Don’s encounters with his earlier girlfriends enforces the atmosphere rendered in the Ecclesiastes: this too shall pass. There is here an interesting tension between the intended continuity in the biblical message of wisdom, ‘whatever you do, you’re still going to die’ and the fragmenting female power which has the potential to undo the world created for them by Jarmusch. As Jarmusch forces women’s potentiality through, Don’s world revolves around a middle space in which he is neither a father, nor not a father. Neither having a son, nor being sonless. What fragments the movie at this point is Jarmusch’s tampering with the law of the excluded middle. This interpretation is prompted by the fact that it is never made quite clear in the film whether Don’s girlfriend, Sherry, to tease him, sends Don the pink letter that he receives, so that he may snap out of his apathy and start assuming some responsibility in their relationship. Nor is it clear whether Don’s friend Winston, corresponding to the Leporello figure in Mozart’s opera, is not in cahoots with Sherry. If Jarmusch follows Mozart’s plot, then, this possibility is more likely than it is unlikely – in Mozart the subplot that involves some cunning twists and thinking is vital to the unfolding of the moral tale. Thus on a formal level, what Jarmusch achieves by instituting a state of fragmentation and ambiguity is a situation when Don is made to think of women without women in it, in his thinking that is. If Jarmusch plays his irony card here, one must grant him the brilliancy of his genius: if there is anything that disturbs the moralists, then, it must be the situation when one can be both/and, moral and immoral at the same time; simultaneously concerned and non-concerned, sentimental and pragmatic. In his recent study of Jim Jarmusch’s films, Juan Suaréz makes a similar point:
Jarmusch’s fondness of composite forms has been read against his fascination with Japanese cinema – especially with Kenji Mizoguchi, whose films occasionally takes the form of collections of stories. But a case may also be made for its similarity to some aesthetic procedures in Jarmusch’s immediate environment, where fragmentation and modularity are symptomatic of what contemporary philosophers were defining as the erosion of the great meta-recits of modernity and the concomitant need to refocus attention on the micrological and molecular, on punctual strategies and events. Also minimal are the blank affect and distended temporality of the film. Most scenes are devoted to inaction: to characters sitting around, listening to music or half-engaged in saggy, desultory exchange. These scenes are filled with “dead-time” – moments that do not propel the action forward, nor add information about characters (Suárez, 2007: 31)
The point here is that while the characters may emerge as rather flat, the “highly regulated game” (Suarez) of find and seek – son seeks father, father seeks potential mother – is mediated by fragmentary signs, such as the color pink which constitutes a leitmotif, leading men into temptation. While men fall, they don’t find anything.
The anticipation of a totalizing narrative out of a fragmentary form works in this film counter-intuitively: does Don get punished for his sins? Not really. Are women the victims? Not really. As Don is condemned to see signs in overabundance everywhere – which he is bound to misread because they are so many – the women are shown to be the better formalists – they are not into interpreting Don’s actions and their consequences. They create situations. Thus the fragmentary game in Broken Flowers invites the viewer to consider morality from a feminist perspective, where precisely the law of the excluded middle is explored more fully. In such a perspective, and within such a framework, one might infer that if the movie has a moral then it must be this one: that not all women that get ditched by Don Juans suffer from life-long mental affliction. Some blonde bimbos do become rocket scientists. Some brunettes do stick to Oscar Wilde’s dictum where some men’s intelligence is concerned: “Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable” (Wilde, 2004: 24).
References:
Blanchot, Maurice (1992) The Step Not Beyond. Trans. Lycette Nelson. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Elias, Camelia (2004) The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre. Bern: Peter Lang.
Derrida, Jacques (2000) Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Stanford U Press
Fulford, Robert (2005) Review of Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. “The Jagged Edges of Broken Flowers: Deadpan can only go so far before it’s dead boring”. The National Post. August 30, 2005.
Jarmusch, Jim (2005) Broken Flowers. DVD release: August 2006. Universal: Universal Studios
Stam, Robert (2000) Film Theory: An introduction. Cornwall: Blackwell Publishing.
Suárez, Juan A. (2007) Jim Jarmusch (Contemporary Film Directors). University of Illinois Press.
Wilde, Oscar (2004) The Decay of Lying. Kessinger Publishing.
