James Pierson
English 555, Sp.2011
2/25/11
Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train: The Deconstruction of Several American Icons
The Japanese couple in “Far from Yokahama”, Mitzuko and Jun, seen in the first and most interesting part of Jim Jarmusch’s film Mystery Train, are remarkably open, polite and pleasant in spite of the harsh reality they see and hear on the first day and night of their pilgrimage to Memphis, Tennessee. Their quest is to see Elvis’ home, Graceland, and Sun Records Studio, the recording studio where Elvis and many others recorded the seminal musical tracks that would be the birth of what was to become rock-and-roll music. The pilgrims travelled thousands of miles, some of them on a slow train, searching for the remains of the legends of their heroes: Elvis and Carl Perkins. The film deconstructs iconic pieces of American pop culture. The Memphis of the film is a bleak landscape of one platform train stations, shuttered businesses and decaying movie theaters. The great American railroad, an important symbol in U.S. culture and history is seen in decay; and Elvis Presley is shown later in the film as lost, dazed and confused. .Mitzuko and Jun’s easy acceptance of the environment are ironic in light of what the film presents as the sad reality of Memphis in 1989.
The pilgrims see Elvis’ adopted hometown through young and fascinated eyes. They compare it to their hometown of Yokahama. The teenaged characters are symbolic of the global perception of the modern Japanese tourist and of modern Japanese culture as a whole. They are hardy, enthusiastic, resourceful and organized. The bag they share is so crammed that not another towel will fit inside; but it is so efficiently packed that Mitzuko easily finds the perfectly preserved plum in the suitcase. They share the job of carrying the front of the bag as they walk the shattered streets. Several times they skip-step in order to walk in cadence. The ingenious handle that they’ve rigged to carry their piece of luggage is made of bamboo. Like the pilgrims, the handle will bend but not break. They are fair and cooperative with each other and the few people we see them meet in the film. They carry no maps or guidebooks. Jun thinks that Memphis is two more days travel when it is really the next stop. Their only goal is to get to Graceland and Sun Records Studio.
After leaving the train station they wander the mostly deserted streets in search of Elvis’ home but instead run into the Sun recording studio. Jarmusch deconstructs an important icon of American culture by his treatment of Sam Phillip’s famous studio. It’s on a non-descript street and it is small and disappointing as a tourist destination. He further deconstructs the myth by having the guide give a rote, robotic, and un-emotional explanation of the history of the studio. It lessens the significance of the iconic place.
After leaving the studio and wandering the mean streets of Memphis, they choose the shabby, cheap Arcade Hotel because Mitzuko thinks it looks fun. They think it’s cool to be eighteen, in Memphis, and, “Far from Yokahama”.
But most viewers of the film won’t be as naïve and starry-eyed as our heroes. Jarmusch invites the viewers to see the dichotomy of common perceptions of America compared to the deconstructed reality that we see in this part of the film and the rest of Mystery Train. As the film opens we see a train station that is way past its better days, streets that are poverty stricken and businesses that are abandoned or seedy. This is far from the glamorized America that Americans and the rest of the world have come to expect from what has been presented about the U.S. through our popular culture.
Jarmusch also deconstructs an iconic part of American popular culture in his treatment of the train and the train station. Jun and Mitzuko ride into Memphis on the City of New Orleans, the only passenger train service left serving Memphis Central Station’s only platform. Approaching the station we see the first indication of the wasteland that the protagonists will inhabit for the remainder of the film. Through the window of the slowly moving train we see crushed cars stacked by the hundreds along the track. The Japanese couple have entered an environment where decay is the norm. Memphis Central Station, like most of the American passenger rail system, started its decline in the 1950’s. When I took a train trip from Union Station in Los Angeles to Florida on the Sunset Limited in 1960, train travel already seemed to me, a seven year-old, to be an old-fashioned, slow way to go across the country. I was used to transcontinental travel by car.
Mitzuko hears the echo of the American passenger train culture as she yells into the walls of the decaying, almost empty Central Station. Trains played an important part in American popular culture. Trains were essential in the opening of the West. The myth of the American cowboy was about driving cattle herds across unfenced land to railheads like Dodge City, Kansas. The first important motion picture made was “The Great Train Robbery”. Robert Johnson, the Delta bluesman, recorded “Love in Vain” in 1937. In the song his anguished emotions and intellect are symbolized by the departing train carrying his love away from him. “When the train it left the station, two lights on behind/ Well, the blue light was my blues and the red light was my mind/ All my love’s in vain.” But when Jun and Mitzuko arrive at Memphis Central Station, like Elvis, the era of the great train as part of American culture are long dead. The lumbering City of New Orleans and Memphis Central Station are very different from the bullet trains and modern train station that our heroes are used to. The ever-optimistic Mitzuko sees the condition of the railroad and the loiterers in the station as part of the charm of the trip. Jun is not impressed. He’s cool to the environment.
The glamorization of American culture grew rapidly after World War II. The U.S. emerged from the war as a military, economic, political and cultural superpower. In 1945 the U.S. was seen by many outside the U.S. as liberators and economic saviors. America supported the rebuilding of their former enemies: Japan and Germany. We were becoming better off economically after many years of the depression and W.W. II. The rest of the world saw the U.S. as a prosperous, vibrant place.
U.S. artists continued to export American culture around the world in the post-war years. Hollywood movies continued to be the lingua franca of the world. Jazz and then rock –and- roll were American inventions that were exported internationally and consumed locally. The rest of the world and we saw and heard a stylized, sweetened version of America. American media presented our country as a place where if you were talented enough and worked hard enough you could go from rags to riches. The story of Elvis fit perfectly into our and the rest of the world‘s perception of America.
The poor, Mississippi bred, mother loving Elvis was twenty when he recorded the song “Mystery Train” at Sun Records Studio in 1955. It was the last song he recorded for Sun Records before R.C.A. Records bought his contract from Sam Phillips for $35,000. The song is a hybrid of country and blues. (The lyrics that Sam Phillips and Junior Parker lifted from a 1930 song by the Carter Family are in a blues format and the instrumentation and arrangement come from country roots.) Elvis, like Charlie Chaplin forty year before, arrived at the infancy of his genre. What had been a dangerous, dirty music as performed by Howlin’ Wolf, Little Richard and Muddy Waters became acceptable as sung by Elvis.
It is vital to remember that Elvis was the first young Southern white to sing rock ‘n’ roll, something he copied from no one but made up on the spot; and to know that even though other singers would have come up with a white version of the new black music acceptable to teenage America, of all who did emerge in Elvis’ wake, none sang as powerfully, or with more than a touch of his magic. (Marcus 141)
He and rockabilly were becoming popular together. Elvis and the new music that would become rock-and-roll were becoming an American cultural phenomenon. “Elvis Presley’s very first Tennessee singles- dramatize what it means to be an American; what it means, what it’s worth, what the stakes of life in America might be.” (Marcus 4) He represented youth, beauty and sex. His confident, swaggering attitude was a metaphor for how we and the world viewed Americans and Americanness. Part of his sex appeal came from the fact that he was so masculine. In his mostly horrible films (that I loved as a pre-teen) he could use his dukes if he had to and was capable of getting as many girls as he could handle. His combination of voice, performance and looks made him a world-wide phenomenon.
In “The Ghost” part of Mystery Train director/writer Jarmusch again deconstructs “…a supreme figure in American life [who] brooks no real comparison.” (Marcus 120) We see a bumbling, mumbling, confused Elvis who doesn’t know where he is or why he has been brought to a room in the Arcade Hotel. Greil Marcus wrote in 1975, two years before Elvis’ death, that after Elvis left Sun Records for R.C.A. and Hollywood his performances were uninspired throwaways that never again matched the performances he did for Sun Records for two years in 1953 until 1955. “There is a way in which virtually his whole career has been a throwaway, straight from that time when he knew he had it made and that the future was his.” (125) The “mystery train” of the film’s title is the train that took the real Elvis of the Sun sessions and brought back the throwaway Elvis of “Love Me Tender” and “Kid Galahad”; and the addled, sweaty, and inebriated Elvis who shortly before his death couldn’t remember the words to his songs.
Bibliography
Marcus, Greil Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n” Roll Music Dutton, N.Y. 1975
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