Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)
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]
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).
2
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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.
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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.
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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 selfevaluating—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).
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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).
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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:
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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
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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-crowdcheer (‘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
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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.
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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 prisonlike 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
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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)
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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.
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