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Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)

Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 193

Otherness and the Renewal of Freedom in Jarmusch’s Down by Law: A Levinasian and Arendtian Reading Mark Cauchi1 Down by Law (1986)—like many of Jim Jarmusch’s films—is seen by many viewers to be, at worst, enigmatic, and, at best, ‘edgy’ and ‘cool.’ In his review of the film, Roger Ebert acknowledges that, while the film offers special inside pleasures to those in the know about cinema, he nevertheless judges that it ‘depends too much’ on the device of following ‘three misfits and the oddballs they meet along the way’ rather than ‘trying to be about something’ (Ebert 1986). This feeling that the film lacks in substance perhaps explains why there is very little serious scholarly work devoted to Down by Law and to Jarmusch’s films in general.2

I confess to finding this assessment of Down by Law peculiar, as even a summary of the plot would give some indication of what it is about. After the opening sequence of the film, which consists of tracking shots of the streets and rivers in and around New Orleans where the film is set, we see in the second section of the film the parallel stories of the dead end lives of Jack (John Lurie) and Zack (Tom Waits). After they are framed for crimes they did not commit, they both end up imprisoned in the same cell in the New Orleans Parish Prison and proceed to engage in petty, competitive fighting. Eventually, an exuberant, friendly, and poetic Italian immigrant— Bob (Roberto Benigni)—arrives, whose sense of camaraderie moderates the tension between Jack and Zack before he discovers a way to escape. After escaping, the three wander the bayous of Lousiana until they miraculously stumble upon an Italian restaurant in the middle of nowhere, where Bob falls in love with its owner—Nicoletta (Nicoletta Braschi)—and Jack and Zack each go off separately on their own paths, slightly transformed by their encounter with Bob. In summary, then, Bob—the alien—is at home in America and liberates Jack and Zack from the prison of their alienated American lives. Down by Law would thus seem to be about—or so I want to argue—how the encounter with otherness renews or revitalizes freedom and identity, both at the individual level and at the collective level, and, as such, is also about America and its renewal.

We can take some encouragement for this interpretation from some of Jarmusch’s own comments: not about Down by Law (Jarmusch is notoriously resistant to commenting on his own films), but about poetry.

1 York University: [email protected] 2 While there are scholarly studies devoted to Jarmusch in many different languages (German, French, Spanish, and Polish), there are, to my knowledge, only two English scholarly books on him: Saurez (2007) and Rosenbaum (2000). There is also a dissertation on Jarmusch by Lawlor (1999).



Jarmusch has a long-standing interest in poetry that has informed many of his films, including, as we shall see, Down by Law.3 He says about this interest:

I admire poets more than any other artists; you can’t translate their work, it is bound up entirely with the character of their culture and language. Poetry is a very abstract thing, very tribal, because only the poet’s own tribe can appreciate the music of their language.... Problems of language make this planet so beautiful and strange. We all live on the same planet but can’t all talk to each other.... The problems of language are to me the most sad and beautiful thing. That we think things in different ways because the structures of our language are different is what makes everything interesting. (Hertzberg 2001, 78-79)

Poetry is presented here as exemplifying a general problem of our lives in the world. Poetry, like ourselves, inhabits an idiosyncratic language, so that the idiosyncrasies and idioms exploited by particular poems cannot be fully translated into another language. There always remains a certain untranslatability, a certain gap or distance in our relations to one another, a distance which makes us appear to each other—in Jarmusch’s terms—as ‘strange.’ This strangeness, Jarmusch says, is ‘sad and beautiful,’ a phrase that also happens to be part of Bob’s first line in Down by Law (‘It’s a sad and beautiful world’). Our strangeness to one another is sad because it inhibits the full disclosure to and mutual comprehension of one by the other and therefore is the source of misunderstanding, conflict, and potentially violence. But, on the other hand, this strangeness is ‘beautiful’ because it is the other’s strangeness—her difference from oneself—that makes her intriguing and worth engaging with. It is, as Jarmusch says, ‘what makes everything interesting,’ since there is no point in dialoguing with another who is a mirror-image of oneself.

It follows from the above conception of poetry that, if translation involves some untranslatability, then translation cannot be merely the straightforward transposition of one set of linguistic signifiers into another. Translation necessarily misses some of the idiosyncracies of the ‘original’ and adds idiosyncracies to the ‘original’. Translation is thus transformative, introducing some newness into both the original and what receives the original. The Jarmuschian view of poetry and translation, then, does not 3 As Saurez notes (2007, 7-8), prior to getting involved in cinema, Jarmusch wanted to be a poet and studied English at Columbia University. Many of his films incorporate poetry. In Dead Man (1995), the main character is named William Blake (after the English Romantic poet and painter), and the character Nobody (Gary Farmer) recites lines of Blake’s poetry. In Ghostdog (1999), quotations from the poetic 18th-century Japanese samurai text, The Hagakure, appear on the screen in regular intervals. Some critics read the title Broken Flowers (2005) as a reference to Baudelaire’s work, Les Fleurs du Mal.



fully endorse the view attributed to Frost that poetry is ‘that which gets lost in translation:’ for poetry, in Jarmusch’s view, is also that which gets created in translation. Translation is poiesis. Translating the untranslatable—bringing the other into oneself, othering oneself, or liberating oneself from the confines of oneself—makes identity new.

Jarmusch also makes clear in various interviews that this conception of poetry and translation informs his understanding of American culture and identity. America is a country, he says, ‘that doesn’t really have its own culture, and is made up of the people who inhabited it’ (Hertzberg, 2001, 86). Reflecting on his own personal background, he explains that, ‘I’m like a mongrel. My family is Czech, German, and Irish. So my family is all mixed up. And American culture is made up of those strange mixtures. That’s something that is very American’ (Hertzberg 2001, 86). These ‘strange mixtures’ at the heart of American culture explain, he hypothesizes, his relationship to European and world cinema. He confesses to being ‘drawn to European characters,’ to being more ‘influenced by the style of film directors from Europe or Japan,’ to being ‘exposed to some American directors through being in Europe,’ and therefore to being ‘in the middle of the Atlantic floating around somewhere when it comes to the themes’ in his films (Hertzberg 2001, 86). For these reasons, he discerns in himself—and holds up as a norm for young American directors—what he calls a ‘strange circular pattern’ wherein one leaves oneself, confronts another, and returns to oneself (Hertzberg 2001, 86). But the return to oneself in this pattern would not be simply the closing of a circle and the entrenchment of self. As he says of Godard and his reverse attempt to translate American cinema into French, Godard’s ‘misapplication’ or ‘misinterpretation’ (mistranslation) ‘brings something new’ (Hertzberg 2001, 86). In Jarmusch’s view, America is both renewed and brought closer to its essence through its encounters with alterity.

In what follows, then, I want to do two things. First, I want to articulate in more depth what this ‘strange circular pattern’ of renewal through otherness means, which I shall do through a discussion of Emmanuel Levinas on the relationship between freedom and otherness, and of Hannah Arendt on freedom as the capacity to introduce newness into the world. This conception of renewal through alterity will be contrasted throughout the essay with the concept of individualist negative freedom as it informs American culture, which I shall discuss primarily through Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, and Tocqueville. Second, I want simply to show how this strange circular pattern of renewal through otherness is present in Down by Law. Otherness and Renewal: Levinas and Arendt on Freedom Levinas’s philosophy of freedom is not typically given much emphasis by scholars. More commonly, his philosophy is read as offering a critique of an

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over-vaunted concern with freedom in modern philosophy and politics through his attention to the primacy of inter-subjective responsibility. That reading is certainly not incorrect, but it does fail to appreciate the nuance and breadth of the sense of freedom that Levinas actually develops. In fact, Levinas has two senses of freedom: the freedom of the ego independent of its relationship to others (what he sometimes calls ‘arbitrary freedom’), and the transformation of that freedom through the ego’s relationship to others (what he calls ‘invested freedom’ or ‘finite freedom’).4 The former freedom is the freedom one has to exert oneself in and on the world. One has the capacity and power to reduce things in the world to oneself, to make them one’s property, to master them, and thereby to sustain and maintain oneself (Levinas 1969, Sec. II, Pt. A). With this power, one does what one wants and needs, when one wants and needs to, giving to this freedom its sense of ‘arbitrariness.’ It is arbitrary because there is no real reason or motive for what one does or how one does it other than that it is what occurred to one to do; it could just as well not be done or be done differently.

To point out this arbitrariness is not necessarily to critique it, for egoist freedom is, according to Levinas, a fundamental part of our experience. Where problems arise, in his view, is in mistaking this partial view of freedom for the whole of it, which should include the second dimension of it mentioned above and which I will describe more fully in a moment. This mistaking of the part for the whole is precisely the core of his critique of modern philosophy and politics. The latter have oriented their systems around the freedom of the individual and therefore have run into the problem of how to conceive and govern society. As Hobbes and Locke argued, an unregulated society of self-interested individuals is necessarily a violent one (more violent, for Hobbes; less so, but still violent, for Locke). Thus, the paradoxical job modern government is forced to take on is to protect the freedom of the individual from the freedom of the (other) individual. The conception of freedom operating here is what Isaiah Berlin famously characterized as ‘negative liberty:’ freedom from constraint (by others) (1969, 122). The negative conception of freedom, Berlin argues, is and should be the one operative in both liberal and libertarian doctrines of freedom and, as we shall see in the next section, is one of the roots of the American vision of it. It is this model of freedom that Levinas’s second conception of freedom is intended to critique.

The second conception is one that is grounded in responsibility for the other. As we saw above, according to Levinas, the ego is able to reduce everything in the world to itself: everything, that is, except a fellow human being. The human being is such that it always eludes our powers to encompass it, whether in a gaze, concept, genus or anthropology. For

4 For Levinas’s discussions of freedom, see Levinas (1969), Sec. I, Pt. C, Chs. 1-2, and Sec. III, Pt. C, Ch. 1, as well as Levinas (1998), Ch. IV, sec. 6.



instance, in a conversation, one can never predict how the other will respond to anything one says. One certainly has the power to force oneself on the other, to jam one’s circle over his or her square, as it were, but that does not diminish the fact that he or she remains a square beneath the violence of one’s gesture. Indeed, violence precisely is this attempt by one to reduce the irreducibility of the other (Levinas 1969, 198-99). Because it is in relation to the other that one’s actions are now evaluated as violent or benevolent, one’s actions take on a significance and value they could not possess independently. By forcing one to become self-conscious and self-evaluating—to develop what Levinas variously calls ‘critique,’ ‘morality,’ and ‘bad conscience’—the encounter with the other in fact enables one to become truly self-determining, which mere freedom from constraint does not guarantee (1969, 84-85). It is thus the arrival of the other that alters one’s existence, giving to it a new significance. For Levinas, then, real freedom embodies this novelty of the advent of the other.

Levinas does not dwell on this sense of novelty that inheres in the notion of freedom, but it is the central feature of Hannah Arendt’s account of it. Arendt describes this novelty as ‘natality,’ because, for her, ‘being free and the capacity to begin something new [coincide]’ (2000, 456; tense altered). As she points out, most of what occurs in the material world is ‘automatically’ determined to exist by whatever preceding conditions obtain. This means that most of what comes to be in the world is, in a sense, drawn out of what already exists, so that it is not really new. On the contrary, it is, as she suggests, probable, explicable, and anticipatable, maintaining the status quo. To be free, on the other hand, means precisely not to be determined by the conditions of the world, and, therefore, not to be drawn out of it. This is why, for her, as for Levinas, freedom should be understood according to the logic of the theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Freedom involves the ‘abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality’ (Arendt 1978, 207). Because the free act is thus grounded in nothing and therefore not in the predictable chain of cause and effect, it is not predictable according to the natural or social conditions that obtain in the world. It is thus unpredictable and unexpected, and thereby inserts newness into the world. Seen from the perspective of the predictability of the world, ‘Every act,’ she says, ‘is a “miracle”—that is, something which could not be expected’ (Arendt 2000, 459).

Consistent with the picture of freedom painted by Levinas, for Arendt free acts are, additionally, only possible within what she calls the ‘web’ of interrelated human relationships. ‘Action,’ she writes, ‘is never possible in isolation’ (Arendt 1988, 188). Consequently, the notion that a human being can act alone, personified in the figure of the self-made man—a figure particularly common in the American imaginary, as we shall

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discuss in the next section—is a ‘superstition’ (Arendt 1988, 188). If we bring Levinas and Arendt together, therefore, we can say that freedom as the capacity to introduce newness into the world is tied to our relations to the otherness of the other. That is, the encounter with the other enables our freedom, enables our capacity to introduce newness in the world, and thereby can be said to renew our freedom. The Prison and the Road: America and Negative Freedom My argument about Down by Law, as I have already summarized it, is that it is about how the encounter with otherness renews freedom and the meaning of American identity. The film alludes to America and American identity in multiple ways: by setting the film in New Orleans, the New Worldness of America is highlighted, as are its foreign roots; by referencing the classic American literature of Whitman, Twain, and Frost; by making many allusions to classic American cinema (noir, escape films, and Westerns); by playing with the American character archetypes of the drifter, the hipster, and the cowboy; and then by highlighting all of that through a contrast with an Italian immigrant who is half-poet and half-clown.5

Besides these references, Down by Law makes its most substantial reference to the legacy of America through its use of the classic American motifs of the road and the prison. The second part of the film takes place in a prison, and while there Bob recites, in Italian, parts of Whitman’s poem ‘The Singer in Prison’. The third part—during which Bob recites in Italian Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’—involves the characters wandering through the bayous of Louisiana, charting their own paths like in many road stories, but then finding an actual road and, eventually, a fork in the road. In order to understand Down by Law, then, it is critical to understand the significance of these motifs in the American tradition. As we shall see, they are linked to two conflicting tendencies which have shaped the history and the idea of America: the desire for openness and freedom (the road) and the need for order and structure (the prison).

America was settled and founded by Europeans fleeing religious persecution. The New World was seen by these refugees as a place devoid of society. According to the Enlightenment mentality, the New World was natural, wild, a blank slate, and therefore free of social constraints. John Locke—who famously described the mind as a tabula rasa and who also exerted a profound influence on America’s ‘founding fathers’—wrote in his Second Treatise on Government that, ‘In the beginning all the world was

5 Benigni’s particular style of comedy in Down by Law and elsewhere seems inspired both by Dante (author of The Divine Comedy) and by the Italian theatre tradition of commedia dell’ arte, particularly the character of the Zanni. The Zanni, from which we get the English word zany, were poor immigrants who played the fool but who, like Shakespearean fools, often held insight into their circumstances. On Benigni’s relation to Dante, see Sisario (2009); on the Zanni, see Rudlin (1994).



America,’ thereby drawing a connection between the Enlightenment political concept of the state of nature and the condition of America (Locke 1980, Ch. V, 29). The Americas were not actually a blank slate, of course, as there were aboriginal populations on the land. But these peoples were variously interpreted by Europeans as, at worst, sub-human, or, at best, uncivilized, but, either way, as simply part of the natural world. Establishing New Englands, Frances, Spains, and Zions was not perceived by most as an act of violence but was simply a civilizing process of imposing order on disorder, of taming the wild.6 Thus, the notion of taming the wild or settling the land contains within it the dual and conflicting ideas—of constraint (taming, settling) and freedom (the wild, the land)—that will structure the American imaginary.

With the two impulses of freedom and constraint going so far back in the American tradition, we can see why the figures of the road and the prison became so predominant.7 We find the image of the road linked to freedom in one way or another in, among other places, Thoreau’s famous lecture on ‘Walking’; in many of Whitman’s poems, including perhaps his greatest poems, ‘Song of Myself’ and ‘Song of the Open Road’, and in his statement of his poetics, ‘A Backward Glance O’er Travel’ed Roads’; in the most famous essays of William James, ‘The Will to Believe’ and ‘Dilemmas of Determinism’; in Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’; in Jack Kerouac’s best-known novel, On the Road, and, more recently, in Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road; repeatedly in the essays, sermons, and books of Martin Luther King Jr.; in a slightly different way in the association between freedom and the automobile, and thereby in the iconography of roads like Highway 61 or Route 66; by extension, in the Mississippi River of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and in the significance of the railroad and especially the underground railroad.

The prison plays an equally significant role in the American tradition. A prison is a constraint of freedom, and, moreover, is something imposed by society. One of the reasons why cowboys are such an important icon in the American imaginary is because cowboys challenge what prisons stand for. The cowboy is outside the law, which makes him dangerous and threatening to social norms. But precisely because the cowboy is outside the law, he is free and therefore something of an ideal. It is significant that in American cinema many of the major genres involve prisons and criminals: Westerns, escape films, films noirs, and gangster films. In these films, we are captivated by the outlaw and sometimes even hope that he will not be imprisoned. In hip-hop, because of the fact that a great many black young males are incarcerated, prison is a common image where it signifies, 6 Jarmusch will take up the foundational violence of America in his film Dead Man and, in a slightly different manner, in Ghost Dog; on this point, see Rosenbaum (2000). 7 For a more detailed study of the motif of the road in America, see Sherrill (2000); on the prison, see Smith (2009).



paradoxically, as a kind of badge of one’s freedom; since time in prison proves one did not follow the rules or accept hegemony.

What this fixation on the conflict between the road and the prison, freedom and social constraint, reveals about the American imaginary is that it imagines freedom in a negative manner as freedom from constraint. This understanding of freedom goes back to Hobbes, who states that liberty’s ‘proper signification’ is ‘the absence of externall Impediments’ (Hobbes 1991, Ch. XIV, 91). And even though, as Hobbes recognized, one gives up one’s natural right to exercise this freedom when one enters the social contract, he is clear that there are areas of life in society where one is left unrestrained by government and so, in those areas, remains free. It is this conception of freedom that Locke takes over and bequeaths to America’s ‘founding fathers’. Granted, his distinction between ‘natural liberty’—which is the freedom to do whatever one wants, and ‘the liberty of man, in society,’ in which we only abide by laws to which we have consented (Locke 1980, Ch. IV, 17)—takes a step toward the Rousseauean and Kantian notion of positive freedom, in which one is properly free only when one is self-determined. Despite this important innovation, however, freedom for Locke is still ultimately conceived negatively: freedom is, he writes, ‘the liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not’ (Locke 1980, Ch. IV, 17).

I stress the prominence of this negative conception of freedom within the American imaginary because what goes along with it, conceptually and in practice, is an individualist conception of freedom. According to it, one is free when one is not being constrained by anything or anyone other than oneself. Locke writes that freedom in society is ‘not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man’ (Locke 1980, Ch. IV, 17). When a community and a tradition places such emphasis on the negativity of freedom, it becomes easy to forget that social institutions can facilitate freedom and easy to equate social institutions with unfreedom (as we see presently in the success of the Tea Party). The paradigmatic figure of freedom then becomes the lone man—and such figures are most often men—someone who does not play by others’s rules, someone unrestrained by commitments and obligations, someone who lives as if he does not need anyone and as if no one relies on him.

When Alexis de Tocqueville went to America in the 1830s, on commission by the government of France to write a report on the American prison system, he recognized in the young Republic precisely this drift from negative freedom to individualism. In Democracy in America (1839), he astutely observes the central place that individualism and self-interest have in the American psyche and as a driver of American creativity, but he also presciently warned about the risks that went along with these if they were left unchecked by any social virtues:



No power on earth can prevent increasing equality

[either] from turning men’s minds to look for the useful or [from] disposing each citizen to get wrapped up in himself.

One must therefore expect that private interest will more than ever become the chief if not the only driving force behind all behaviour. But we have yet to see how each man will interpret his private interest.

If citizens, attaining equality, were to remain ignorant and coarse [i.e., not educated into virtue, as he explains earlier in the chapter], it would be difficult to foresee any limit to the stupid excesses into which their selfishness might lead them, and no one could foretell into what shameful troubles they might plunge themselves for fear of sacrificing some of their own well-being for the prosperity of their fellow men. (Tocqueville 1969, 528)

Jack: ‘As far as I’m concerned, you don’t even exist.’ Zack: ‘Well, you don’t exist either.’ I have already given some indication of the nature of the two main American characters in Down by Law: Jack and Zack. Jack is a small-time pimp, extremely concerned about his self-image. He walks with an affected strut, has cool hand gestures, wears flashy duds, and talks with the latest slang: all signs of his self-consciously displayed individuality. He often speaks of himself in a delusional self-important manner: to Gig—aka Fatso (Rockets Redglare)—who is in fact deceiving Jack for the second time, Jack says that Gig knows that he (Jack) is ‘gonna be big’ and wants in on his success; after escaping from prison and having a fight with Zack, Jack is walking alone in the forest talking to himself and says, ‘Man, my thing was cool, boy, you know. I had my things goin’.’ The fact of the matter is that he is a rather unsuccessful pimp with little to show for himself, as Bobbie (Billie Neal), one of his prostitutes/lovers, incisively points out to him. In a remarkable speech, she tells him that he is ‘always blowin’ it,’ ‘fuckin’ up today;’ that he ‘doesn’t understand any kind of people,’ including women, which a pimp is ‘at least supposed to understand;’ that he is not a good pimp (‘if you was a good pimp...’); and that he is ‘lost inside all them plans.’ Making the speech even more poignant is the fact that she makes it while Jack is gluttonously counting money that he made from Bobbie and the other women he exploits, underscoring that many of his relationships to others are monetary and instrumental. Lacking real bonds with others, his freedom is paradoxically a prison.

Zack’s story is very similar. He is a radio DJ who works at small stations, drifting from job to job. He is non-committal to his work and to his girlfriend, Laurette (Ellen Barkin). As in Jack’s case, his relationship to



women reveals much about his character, showing him to be an egoist with little connection to others. During their fight in the second part of the film, Laurette observes through sobs that ‘you don’t take care of me. Or want me. Or want to make any kind of commitment to me.’ His emotional aloofness is clearly reflected in his body language, which is often slouched forward and turned away from whomever he is engaged with, literally giving them the cold shoulder. Even though his job requires that he banter a lot, outside of work he is taciturn and is reluctant to share details about his life, highlighting the falseness of his persona. Like Jack, he, too, cares about being cool: he clearly takes some pleasure in being a minor celebrity; he is always grooming his hair; during his fight with Laurette, he cares more about his metal-tipped shoes than about the end of their relationship. Like Jack, he seems to confuse freedom from others with freedom.

To an objective third party, then, Jack and Zack are clearly very similar. It is for this reason that Bob at first has difficulty keeping their names apart, comically calling Jack ‘Zack’ and Zack ‘Jack,’ even pronouncing their names through his Italian accent almost indistinguishably as ‘Djack’ and ‘Dzack.’ Unsurprisingly, they do not notice their own similarity: when Zack draws attention specifically to the parallel in their legal problems (‘I was set up too. Just like you’), Jack responds by asserting a much broader difference: ‘I am not just like you, whatever you say.’ As the film proceeds, they will increasingly insist on their difference, something captured most poignantly in their repeated fights and their pursuing opposite but essentially parallel paths at the end of the film (about which more later).8 But this insistence only serves to heighten our sense of their fundamental similarity. As in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, when two parties oppose each other, their pushing on and off of each other reveals that they are, in fact, co-dependently bound to each other.9 Again, negative freedom is constraining.

The film suggests that unfreedom results from individualist freedom by having the narrative of Jack’s and Zack’s individualist behaviour lead to prison. Now, significantly, it is not their actual behaviour which lands them in prison, since they have both been set up under false pretences. Rather—as in Whitman’s poem, ‘The Singer in Prison’—their imprisonment is primarily spiritual or existential, the prison serving as metaphor or fable, comparable to Bob’s remark about his falling in love with Nicoletta (Nicoletta Braschi): it is ‘like in a book for children.’ This sense of the unreality and non-literality of the prison is suggested well by Zack, who wistfully says of the prison early in his imprisonment, ‘The walls don’t exist. The floor doesn’t exist. This prison’s not here. These bunks aren’t

8 Lawler (1999) captures well the self-interest and mutual indifference which plague Jack and Zack. See also Thiltges (2002). 9 See Hegel (1977), Ch. IV, sec. A, §185-86.



here. The bars aren’t here. None of this is really here. None of this is really here at all.’ But just because the prison functions as a metaphor in the realm of the imaginary, it does not mean, however, they are not truly imprisoned, even if their real prison is not the actual prison. After they have escaped from prison, the cabin in which they take shelter for the night resembles their former prison cell, Zack remarking that it ‘looks a little too familiar.’ The scene is a humorous reminder for the viewer that, even though they have escaped the bricks-and-mortar prison, they have not escaped the real prison, which is the existential prison of their lives. ‘How do you say in English: when the man go out of the prison, running away?’ I have proposed that Down by Law is about how the encounter with otherness renews identity and freedom. Thus far, we have seen that Jack and Zack, idiomatically attached to the old American ideal of individualist negative freedom, have ended up unfree. As I want to show now, it is the character of the Italian immigrant, Bob, who reveals in his otherness and in his exemplary openness to otherness a way out of their imprisonment.10 This liberation should not be construed as an escape from America, but as a translation, transformation, and renewal of it.

The first thing one observes about Bob in the film is his comedic and poetic misuse of the English language. I will say more about this point shortly, but the sheer outrageousness of his English (‘Good evening. Buzz off to everybody. Oh, thank you, buzz off to you too’), coupled with the loudness of his voice and the thickness of his accent, is enough to announce him as capital-O Other. The mocking response to him by the Americans in the film indicates that he is being received by them that way. In the final section of the film—when, in the middle of nowhere, Bob miraculously meets and falls in love with Nicoletta in Luigi’s Tintop, an Italian restaurant incongruously located on a road in the Louisiana bayous—Zack exclaims upon seeing them through a window boisterously eating a lavish dinner, ‘Holy Toledo! Can you believe this? He’s from outer space.’

Beyond the obvious fact of Bob’s literal foreignness, however, the more substantial sense of his otherness consists in the fact that, unlike Jack and Zack, he is himself open to otherness. This is evident in multiple ways. In interacting with others, he is earnest, friendly, polite, respectful, and forgiving, often referring to Jack and Zack as ‘my friends,’ even after they have mistreated him. He has a childlike quality to him: full of curiosity, playfulness, and exuberance. Yet, despite this childlikeness, he is neither a child nor childish. He has mature, sophisticated relationships to others. Even though he falls in love rather miraculously, he nevertheless falls in real love

10 Surprisingly, not many film critics notice this about Down By Law. For one who does, see Villella (2001).



and commits himself fully to his beloved. When he and Nicoletta dance near the end of the film, he unselfconsciously abandons himself to the dance, giving himself over to her completely, unembarrassed in front of the cynical gazes of Jack and Zack.11 Similarly, he has a mature relationship to his family: loving them but acknowledging their limitations. His mother, he says with some pathos, is a ‘very strange mother,’ his father ‘very strong’ but ‘afraid’ of the rabbit and one wonders if not of other things as well. Finally, his maturity is revealed most dramatically in his acknowledging solemnly that he is a cheater and has killed a man, but that he is not a ‘criminal’ and that he remains a ‘good egg.’ His nuanced moral compass allows him to discern more than black and white assessments of himself and others. Bob is thus very aware of the difficulties involved in being in relationships to others. Despite this awareness, he does not lock himself inside himself or lock others out, but instead—illustrating Levinas’s idea that ‘the subject is a host’—opens himself to the outside and hospitably invites others in (Levinas 1969, 299).

We can demonstrate most clearly these two dimensions of Bob’s alterity—his being other and his being responsive to the other—by focusing on his relationship to the English language. First, however, recall that, for Jarmusch, a language embodies the untranslatable idiosyncrasies of a community, so that any act of translation between two language communities—like an Arendtian action—alters and introduces new meaning. This process of translation and alteration, Jarmusch believes—where ‘strange mixtures’ of foreigners produce new meanings and new cultural expressions—is the very heart of American culture. Jarmusch was not the first to make this observation. Tocqueville had, with his foreigner’s eye, already noticed it in the early Nineteenth Century. Pertinent to our present study, he tried to explain this phenomenon by linking the novelty and vitality of English in America to the prominence there of freedom and democracy. In a chapter from Democracy in America on ‘How American Democracy has Modified the English Language’, he draws attention to the connection between freedom and American English by contrasting it with language in an aristocracy:

The language of an aristocracy ought to be as at rest as are all its other institutions. But few new words are needed, as few new things are made; and even when something new is made, people are at pains to describe it in familiar words whose meaning is fixed by tradition....

But the continual restlessness of a democracy leads to endless change of language as of all else. In the general stir of intellectual competition a great many new ideas take

11 Cf. Carmichael (1994), 226.



shape; old ideas get lost or take new forms or are perhaps subdivided with an infinite variety of nuances....

It is easy to tell where democratic nations will find their new words and how they will shape them. ... Democratic people’s willingly borrow from living languages rather than from dead ones, for there is continual communication between them, and peoples of different nations gladly copy one another as they daily grow more like one another. (Tocqueville 1969, 478-79)

Notwithstanding what Tocqueville says here about the vibrancy of language in democracy and its link to the ‘continual communication’ with ‘people’s of different nations,’ we should also not forget his warning from earlier that self-interest may inhibit democracy. For, if we bring the two claims together, it would seem to suggest that self-interest can also inhibit the vitality of language and the appreciation for it. Thus, the earlier contrast between freedom and self-interest would seem to parallel a new contrast we can establish between (1) the vibrancy of democratic language, in which new meanings, new nuances, new words and the interactions and translations of foreign nations continuously modify the language, and (2) what we might call self-interested language, in which there is little openness to genuinely new meanings. Moreover, these two parallel distinctions would seem to offer an apt description of the respective difference between Bob’s relationship to English and Jack’s and Zack’s relationships to it, as we shall see.

As a reader of poetry, Bob has a poet’s ear for the nuances and resources of language. He is sensitive to the meanings of words and expressions, taking great delight in discovering their meanings and workings, studiously jotting down his discoveries, and experimenting with their uses in different contexts. However, coming to English from the outside and therefore being engaged in the process of mutual translation between the Italian and the American idioms, he inevitably and unexpectedly alters the meanings of the English words and expressions he uses. This alteration is most evident in his brilliant and hilarious use of clichés and sayings. It is significant that he uses clichés, because clichés are expressions whose origins are usually unknown by most users of the language. They are habitual, dead expressions, but Bob’s otherness gives them new life.

Consider Bob’s use of the children’s rhyme, ‘I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream.’ It arises in response to Jack’s mock-crowd-cheer (‘ahhhh’) after winning a round of cards. Jack informs Bob, who has never heard this sound, that the ‘ahhhh’ is screaming, which jogs Bob’s memory of the rhyme. Jack thinks nothing of his words, whereas Bob, highly attentive to language, hears a connection and thus finds and creates



an opportunity for something new to happen. As Bob begins to recite the rhyme repeatedly, as if he were actually trying to teach Jack and Zack how to appreciate it, it is clear that he loves the cleverness and playfulness of it. Repeating the expression over and over, he is joined by Jack and Zack (who begin to loosen up), so that the rhyme begins to acquire an incantatory feel. Slowly, the three are joined by the other inmates on the cellblock, all of them eventually shouting the rhyme, at which point the children’s rhyme has been transformed into a jubilant and defiant cry for freedom. Just like the singer in Whitman’s ‘The Singer in Prison’, which Bob had recited only a few scenes earlier, he has momentarily liberated Jack and Zack from the prison of their souls, giving them a glimpse of freedom.12

Given this scene, and all of the other translations/transformations of dead language that Bob performs in the film, it is unsurprising that it is Bob who discovers a way out of the prison. In the context of our analysis, this escape should be interpreted not an escape from the American tradition—given that it is made through translating and altering elements of the tradition—but as an escape within it. It is within America that an opening is created. A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads Down by Law ends by staging, with a twist, Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’. In the poem, a person is faced with a fork in the road and must make a choice about which path to choose and proceeds to offer a series of reasons for the choice made. The poem concludes with the famous line: ‘I took the road less travelled by and that has made all the difference.’ This line fuels the popular reading of the poem as being about blazing one’s own trail, not following the crowd: the good American value of individualist negative freedom. In this reading, the poem would seem to embody the ethos of Jack and Zack. Indeed, when they reach the fork in the road at the end of the film, Jack says to Zack, ‘Look, man, don’t matter to me [which road I take]. You go whichever way you want, right? And I’ll go the other way.’

However, a more careful reading of the poem reveals that what is going on in it is not so simple, for the reasons which the speaker offers in defence of the choice turn out to be mutually conflicting.13 Here is a summary of the reasons: we are told, first, that one path is as good as the other; second, that it is better than the other because its grass is less worn; third, that the grass of the two paths is equally worn; fourth, that the grass is 12 This scene should be read with two others. First, the scene where Bob draws a window on the cell wall and asks Jack whether it is proper to say in English that one looks ‘at the window’ or ‘out the window,’ to which Jack patronizingly responds, ‘at the window,’ while Bob mutters in Italian, ‘Guardo a traverse a finestra’ (‘I look out the window’). The second is when Bob repeatedly refers to Whitman’s book Leaves of Grass as Leaves of Glass. 13 I do not quote the poem here, but it is widely available on the Internet.



actually not visible; fifth, that the speaker will return to the other road another day; then, sixth, probably not; finally, the poem reaches its crescendo in the famous ending about the ‘road less travelled’ making ‘all the difference.’ This last claim is especially problematic for two reasons. First, we have seen (in reason four) that, since the grass is not visible, there is no way to see which path was more or less worn than the other and therefore no way to know if the road less travelled was, in fact, taken. Second, the notion of the road less travelled making the difference is a counterfactual (what if I took the other path?). Because counterfactuals cannot be proven, there is no way to know what difference the path taken has made. It is likely (but not certain) our speaker’s life would be different if he or she made a different choice, but different in what way and to what extent is necessarily unknowable. Thus, the defence the speaker offers for taking the road less travelled is highly fallacious.

Given that the poem is so clearly representing fallacious reasoning about freedom of choice, it is tempting to read it as simply suspicious of freedom of choice. Whether this interpretation is ultimately correct or not is not our job here to decide. But this reading does help us to make sense of Bob’s assessment of the poem when, after reciting the poem in the prison-like cabin they find in the bayous, he says with a stern face that Frost is a ‘very cynical man.’ This reading would seem to suggest that, while Bob sees some parallel between the lives of Jack and Zack and the cynical reasoning represented in the poem, he does not ultimately take the position, which he seems to ascribe to the poem, that freedom is not possible. That is, Bob would regard as equally problematic the negative freedom of Jack and Zack and the cynical critique of freedom that he reads in(to) the poem.

Rejecting both of these positions, Bob offers a third alternative. His position is perhaps best exemplified in his taking up residence with Nicoletta in Luigi’s Tintop on the road in the middle of nowhere. The negative freedom embodied in Jack and Zack—like the movement of the negative analyzed by Hegel—requires that one restlessly keep moving: not because one has given oneself reason to move (a positive movement), but because of a fundamental dissatisfaction with (a negation of) the here and now. Negative freedom, we see here, is conceptually tied to negative infinity, and, as Hegel writes of the negative infinite, ‘If we suppose we can liberate ourselves from the finite by stepping out into that infinitude, this is in fact only a liberation through flight. And the person who flees is not yet free, for in fleeing, he is still determined by the very thing from which he is fleeing’ (1991, 150). Bob, on the other hand, finds freedom by staying put (‘I have finded my new home’), not in such a way that he is confined in his place or reduced to sameness (as Levinas would put it), but by being other to the place in which he stands and being responsible for others in that place. He makes the place where he stands (his ‘home’) new by bringing alterity to it and by opening it up to yet other others. Not only does his



freedom involve a relationship to Nicoletta, but as Jack and Zack each wander alone into the sunset of their negative freedom (typical in the endings of Westerns), Bob continues to invite them back: ‘Wisha you were here,’ he shouts after them, and ‘Don’ta forgeta to write.’ In hospitably making space for the other, Bob’s ‘new home’ is a microcosm of the possibilities, the newness, represented by the macrocosms (or novacosms) of New Orleans and the New World.

In the end, Bob’s otherness and openness to otherness has transformed his new home and his new compatriots. This transformation is most apparent in the fact that Jack and Zack appear at the end of the film to be ever so slightly changed. Yes, they still each want to go where the other does not, but the tension between them has softened a little: their teasing of each other has become somewhat playful and perhaps even mildly affectionate, and they cooperate when, in their penultimate gesture to each other, they exchange jackets. These are not huge changes, granted, but they are existentially realistic openings.

Thus, Down by Law is not so much a paean to outsider characters who have taken the road less travelled by others (as it is often characterized by critics), as much as it is about the centrality of alterity to the vitality of freedom in America. It depicts a freedom that is found not in escaping from others but in our bonds with them. In this way, Down by Law echoes the spirit of Whitman’s poem, ‘Song of the Open Road’, which, after beginning with,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose,

acknowledges that,

Still here I carry my old delicious burdens, I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me where I go,

and then concludes:

Camerado, I give you my hand! I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live? (Whitman 2004)



Bibliography

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Arendt, Hannah (2000) ‘What is Freedom?’ The Portable Hannah Arendt. Peter Baehr, ed. New York: Penguin Books, 438 – 461.

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Carmichael, Thomas (1994) ‘Postmodernism and American Cultural Difference: Dispatches, Mystery Train, and The Art of Japanese Management.’ boundary 2, v. 21, n. 1: 220 – 232.

Ebert, Roger (1986) Review of Down by Law, Oct. 3. [www.rogerebert.com]. Accessed 12 September 2012

Hegel, G. W. F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit. A. V. Miller, trans. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1991) The Encyclopaedia Logic. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

Hertzberg, Ludvig, ed. (2001) Jim Jarmusch: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Hobbes, Thomas (1991) Leviathan. Richard Tuck, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lawler, Colin (1999) Jim Jarmusch: A Postmodern Interpretation. Thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology. [http://jimjarmusch.tripod.com/lawlor.html]. Accessed 12 September 2012.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1969) Totality and Infinity. Alphonso Lingis, trans. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

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Saurez, Juan A. (2007) Jim Jarmusch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.



Sherrill, Rowland A. (2000) Road-Book America: Contemporary Culture and the New Picaresque. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

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Tocqueville, Alexis de (1969) Democracy in America. George Lawrence, trans. J. P. Mayer, ed. New York: Harper Perennial.

Villella, Fiona A. (2001) ‘Lost in Paradise: the Cinema of Jim Jarmusch.’ Screening the Past Dec. 1, 2001. [http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/]. Accessed 12 September 2012

Whitman, Walt (2004) Leaves of Grass [deathbed edition]. New York: Bantam Books.



Filmography

Jarmusch, Jim (1984) Stranger Than Paradise. USA / West Germany.

Jarmusch, Jim (1986) Down By Law. USA.

Jarmusch, Jim (1995) Dead Man. USA / Germany / Japan.

Jarmusch, Jim (1999) Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. France / Germany / USA / Japan.

Jarmusch, Jim (2005) Broken Flowers. USA / France.

Documents

363-2305-2-PB