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Coffee and Cigarettes 5 September 05

Section: article

Categories: Film / dvd

Jim Jarmusch is the token alternative filmmaker for the U.S. culture industry.

I only watched two and 3/4 of the short films in this group of short films, and the beginnings of some of the others. (I have also seen most of his other full–length films.) The film has been out for two years, and the reason I relented and rented the DVD now was because I felt like finally seeing the film with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, who I very much like.

Another reason I wanted to pay the two euros and 10 eurocents was because I saw that it included a "music video" of a song by Joe Strummer — who I also very much like. It was just an insult: uninteresting shots of various tables in cafes with, of course, coffee and cigarettes on them. I only watched about a minute.

He reportedly worked on the films "for years," according to someone who was interviewed about the project. I don’t know how anyone could live with this shallowness for years and not abandon it. Two plausible explanations are that this is all he can do and that he is absorbed into a milieu which gives him security and reinforces a certain stature he has been granted by the culture industry. Oh, another reason is because he can still make a living from this stuff.

He had small ideas which he turned into these small films, at least based on the two I watched in their entirety. (I watched the one with the “Italo-American” talking about cigarettes almost to the end: my god, such ethnic clichés, even if there are in fact people like that.)

Iggy Pop and Tom Waits

The small ideas in the Pop–Waits vignette:
instead of the reality of fiction, in a good film, he turns it around and presents a sort of reality as fiction in the sense that Pop and Waits portray themselves, but not exactly, and Waits spins off some tall tales on top of it all (boasting to be a doctor). Another small theme is, as they make gestures towards getting to know one another, comments are misconstrued and touch on their "insecurities" and defensiveness. Jarmusch had to essentially force a rationale for even using them in the short film (all the films are, of course, about smokers — Waits and Pop had in real life previously quit smoking) by letting them find a pack of cigarettes on the table which tempts them into trying "just one" again.

Steven Wright

Steven Wright is a brilliant comedian, you could call him a conceptual comedian which for me means, as with conceptual art, that the material essentially exists in our minds, in the — often poetic with some artists — dissonances and contradictions which cannot be resolved in our minds. The film with Wright was essentially based on a joke of his, or which could have been his, which normally would have taken about five or six seconds for him to tell: Jarmusch attempted to stretch this into a five or six minute film. I really think Jarmusch just doesn’t get it and that he can’t think of anything to make a film about. He knows that Wright is good and he latches on to his work, presumably thinking he is expanding on it in some way. The vignette/joke in question is Wright talking with someone (Roberto Benigni, more on him in a moment): Wright says he has to go to the dentist, his coffee–drinking and cigarette–smoking partner offers to go for him, and does so. Except that, here of course is where Begnini comes in, the partner has no mastery of English and that contrariety (going to the dentist for someone else) is associated with his limited competence in speaking English as a second language. Except that that doesn’t make any sense, unless he doesn’t really understand what the word "dentist" means, but from the context he does seem to understand, but even if he doesn’t understand the word, why would he offer to go somewhere for someone without knowing for what or where? Leading back with circular logic again to the cliché of associating limited competence in a second language with stupidity. The conceptual humor is long since gone hiking.

Stupidity

I don’t even know what stupidity is or means; behavior which is typically ascribed to stupidity can often be accounted for in other ways, such as trying to make a decision, and making a bad one, in an intimidating, unsupportive environment, or a lack of self-confidence traced back to a negligent childhood. The roots of the prevalent cliché and stereotype linking limited competence in a second language to stupidity, which seems stupid in itself, might be found in a socioeconomic necessity to demean and dehumanize immigrants who represent both a new and exploitable labor force as well as posing a threat to the now more established immigrant work force.

In Germany, for example, there is a so–called Turkish–German language that some people make fun of — a non-grammatical, broken German. But: second language speakers make grammatical mistakes sometimes, or a lot, and some mistakes are never ironed out, but when they truly live in the society for a while they won’t speak fundamentally incorrectly (like: I beer want) unless, surprise, they are in fact spoken to like that by some native speakers, which can in fact happen, thereby fulfilling the stereotype. I have heard it many, many times; for example on construction sites when a supervisor is speaking to foreign workers. And I am sure some workers even play along to appease and not pose a threat to their "superiors." This is not even to begin to mention the fact that an immigrant worker with a full time job and a family to feed simply doesn’t have the money, energy, time or privilege (showing up to evening class in working clothes?) to go to some sort of language class — but would certainly manage to aquire the competence necessary for the work that he or she understands if he or she were spoken to correctly and with respect by native speakers in the working environment.

Roberto Benigni

Which brings me again to Roberto Benigni and his career. From what I have seen of him, in films and on television, he makes a career out of exploiting this stereotype. He isn’t just cute in his perpetually broken English (whether it is a put on or not), it is fused with a numbing stupidity and that is part of his, for some, entertainment factor. He doesn’t just make endearing grammatical errors, he acts stupid, as in the Jarmusch short film, turning conceptual humor into demeaning stereotyping (for example, I can’t imagine Wright ever using an accent to convey part of one of his jokes.).

Oscar stamp of approval for Benigni

I also think of that terrible film Benigni made about the Third Reich with which he in turn ingratiated himself with the U.S. culture industry. The film, Life is Beautiful, was about a man trying to deceive his son about their fate in a concentration camp. (Interestingly, I just did a search for sites on the film, photos and clips, and one after the other I landed on 404.html [not found] pages, even an official Miramax page.) It is true that the overwhelming horror of that fate was enough in itself to kill, and the circumstances themselves did kill (even without forced labor and gas), but the idea of the film was that he tricked his son into believing that it was all a game so it wouldn’t affect him. Not to imply that children should be arbitrarily confronted with all very adult horrors — that is not the point. In the context of the film, the child was presented as a kind of puppet, a blank, without his own perception and intelligence — a Pinochio to Benigni’s Geppetto. [After writing that last sentence I checked the Wikipedia page on Pinochio: interestingly, it states that Benigni did in fact make a live action film of Pinochio in 2002.) Of course in reality children have a clear perception and grasp of the truth around them, even if it is not something they can articulate in "adult" terms. The pretension of the film was to show his compassion in hiding the truth of their fate in the concentration camp from his young son — but the essence of the content was, for me, more about a massive act of adult denial of children’s sentience.

Benigni’s father was in fact in a concentration camp; but Benigni was born in 1952, not during the war, reinforcing the possibility that the denial in the film has more to do with Benigni, as a child, a sentient and conscious one, and his relationship to a father certainly traumitized by his experiences, rather than a father’s compassionate relationship to his son. In that light, I hypothesize that the film had more to do with Benigni’s childhood reality and and his need to hide the truth of it from his traumatized father, the truth of feelings and his unmet needs for love and protection. A need for a father who would protect him, instead of him having to protect his father. Just a hypothesis.

A Court Jester

Benigni seems to play the fool in his roles, and in life unfortunately, but in fact he is nearly the opposite of the typical fool, as in the court jester. The latter is disarming and self-deprecating, appealing to the vanity and self-absorbtion of the king, but above all superior in his insight and intelligence. He is superior to the audience: his king, the court. By seemingly demeaning himself, the jester should enhance the king’s superiority and at the same time give him council by exposing to him his flaws and errors in ways that his court could only do at the risk of their life. The audience, us, is privy to how the all–powerful king is manipulated and we never feel contempt for or superior to the court fool. His humor lies in how his behavior is imbued with insight vis–a–vis the conceits of the king.

Benigni’s "fool" simply exploits a cultural prejudice. He ties it into a mind-numbing knot. The prejudice itself is where the stupidity lies, and making use of it, as in Benigni’s routines and how Jarmusch used them in his films, speaks only of the shallowness of the creators.

He is hardly the only person to fake or use how he speaks towards careerist ends; Henry Kissinger fakes his accent. He was born in Germany and emigrated to the U.S. when he was 15, but nevertheless his accent is affected. He has an older brother who speaks flawless mid–westen American English, a farmer I believe. If anything, the brother, who was older when he emigrated, would be more likely to have an accent. Anyway, his accent is affected, using our cultural association with the German accent to inspire authority and superiority.

Not to compare Benigni to Kissinger, the latter is a monster of history and Benigni is just annoying. And not even as annoying as people who speak loudly into their cell phones while on trains or in cafes, fluently or not.

Title: Coffee and Cigarettes

Directed by: Jim Jarmusch

Written by: Jim Jarmusch

Starring: Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright…

Year: 2003

  • Title: Coffee and Cigarettes