Last night I watched Permanent Vacation, the first film by Jim Jarmusch included on Criterion's Stranger Than Paradise disc. The date on the film says copyright 1980 but you'd be hard pressed to tell that by watching. People tend to forget those transitional periods in decades but Permanent Vacation looks like a product of the 1970s through and through.
For a while I mistakenly conflated the running time (75 minutes) with the year it was made, and you could make a pretty good case that this was a movie that reflected 1975 Manhattan. It wouldn't have shocked me at all if student filmmaker Jarmusch had caught some footage of Robert DeNiro driving around prepping for Taxi Driver. It feels like the same city and not some "new wave" influenced hybrid. In fact there are no punk kids or stupid hairdos or anything like that in this movie. Just some kid who's way too into Charlie Parker and the Beat writers.
Chris Parker plays Aloysius Christopher Parker, the proto-hipster beatnik guy who yammers half cocked philosophy via narration and spends 99% of the running time wandering around New York City, occasionally sitting down with people, talking some more, then getting up and leaving. Also, he steals a car at one point and sells it for $800*.
Normally I'd expect something that was a first feature from someone who (I'm guessing) recently graduated from film school (in this case, NYU) to be pretty pretentious and annoying, and I guess if you wanted to make that case for Permanent Vacation, you could. If I had to describe the movie it's a little bit like putting Slacker, Catcher in the Rye, and parts of Alice in Wonderland in a blender and pressing the button. It has the aimlessness of Slacker, the angst of Rye, and the strange encounters of Alice in equal parts.
Before visiting his mother in an institution, Allie goes to an abadoned building where he was born. He claims the "Chinese" bombed it in "the war", and first you think he's just being an ass but there's some crazy dude in the building that comes out and warns him about the airplanes. Jarmusch cleverly mixes in the sounds of bomber planes flying over and then Allie/Chris/Holden talks the dude down by telling him it's not bombers but American helicopters. Then he leaves and the guy goes back into the building.
There's a similarly strange moment where our hero is walking around a neighborhood I could've sworn was used in The Exterminator and finds a woman singing in spanish on a fire escape. When he asks her what she's saying, she screams at him to leave and she goes back to singing. Later he sits in the lobby of a movie theatre and hears a joke called "The Doppler Effect". It wouldn't make sense to tell it here so maybe you'll just have to rent it.
What's weird about that scene is the guy telling the joke is Frankie Faison, whose name I knew but I couldn't figure out why. Turns out he's done tons of stuff, including The Wire, My Blueberry Nights, Oz, Mother Night, Do The Right Thing, and C.H.U.D. He was also in all of the Hannibal Lecter movies, including Manhunter. You'd probably remember him as Barney, the dude that Clarice meets in Lecter's cell block and then again in Hannibal**. Anyway, when I saw the name during the opening credits, I recognized it immediately, which was strange***.
Usually I only recognize John Lurie's name in early Jarmusch movies. Of course, Lurie is in Permanent Vacation, just as he is in Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law. He plays "sax player". Mostly Permanent Vacation is a Chris "I couldn't find anything else you'd recognize" Parker movie. Honestly it can get a little old just watching this dude wander around because I didn't find him that interesting in the first place, but Jim Jarmusch finds plenty of ways to keep a virtually plotless story interesting with his eccentric flourishes.
Permanent Vacation is pretty well made for a first film. It's no Hedwig and the Angry Inch, although it does sometimes remind me of Erasherhead (part of that may be the music by Lurie and Jarmusch). I'm not going to rush to watch it again any time soon, but I certainly appreciate being able to see a talented director's first go at it. The film is an indication of what's to come for him, and you'll see elements of even his later films (Broken Flowers, Ghost Dog) in embryonic forms here.
Thanks, Criterion. That was a supplement well worth exploring, and something I might not have sought out on my own accord. Keep up the good work.
* The way it happens is pretty clever and if I ever found myself standing next to a mailbox with a running car nearby I'd be tempted to try it. Actually, it's the sort of thing that probably would only work in the bridge from 1970-1980 and the modern GPS would call the cops on me or kill the engine or something. Too bad.
** Okay, he's not in Hannibal Rising, so mabye I should qualify that with "Hannibal Lecter movies that count."
*** How's this for strange: Frankie Faison is also in The Exterminator 2.
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