2012 Tarkovsky Prize 3rd Place: Midori Chen

DOWN BY LAW

By Midori Chen

Machismo plays a heavy part in American culture, the image of “The True Man” being a gruff, detached “cool” guy. Those who conform to this archetype are careless with their loved ones, writing off all consequences with a “Whatever, man.” They are players who cannot settle into a stable relationship, refusing to talk about emotionally-charged topics, even degenerating to groundless accusations and irrational mockery. Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law observes the outcome of those who surrender themselves to this ideal, as three men’s jailbreak lead their lives in different directions– or rather, in the directions they were each intended towards in the first place.

The “cool guy” personas are played by Jack, a disc jockey, and Zack, a pimp. They are both set up for the crimes that land them in the same New Orleans jail cell. They cannot stand each other; their alpha male personalities clash in the confined space as they each try to out perform the other. The only time they get along is when a new guy is tossed in their cell—an Italian named Bob—who is so utterly awkward and “uncool” that he provides Jack and Zach with something in common: how much he annoys them. Since exasperation is one of the few emotions “cool guys” can show, the two do so in abundance. However, Bob’s status rises when he gives Jack and Zach information on how to escape, and the three do, temporarily overjoyed in freedom and take the time to simply bask in their camaraderie. The thought of freedom releases Jack and Zach from their self-imposed prison of solitude and dispassion, as the three skip down a dank sewer, hooting and hollering together in glee. This is the only moment in which the two actually escape both the literal and figurative jail.

Once outside discord is quick to rise. It isn’t long before Jack and Zach are storming away from each other and leaving Bob behind to woefully recall his family, without shame, as Jack and Zach grumble in-macho-persona about the unfair circumstances of their arrest and each other’s idiocy. Once they become cold and starved, Jack and Zach are quick to return, waddling back to Bob’s warm fire, where they thaw under Bob’s improvised meal and affability.

The movie comes to a climax as Bob finds true love in a stranger: an Italian woman living alone in the Louisiana bayou. As Bob is unafraid to express his true sentiments, the woman instantly warms to him, leaving Jack and Zach, literally, outside in the cold waiting for Bob to rob the house of its food (as per the tradition of manly men). The woman’s hospitality allows the two men in for a glimpse at the new lovers’ open vulnerability with each other, as demonstrated in Bob and the woman’s slow dance, jolting and unrehearsed yet relentless, because they are willing to try for each other.

Jack and Zach, the apparent main characters, are now cast to the unfocused sidelines, crippled by their incapability to break out of their personas. As Jack and Zach take their leave in the final scene of the movie, they engage in a brief, teasing goodbye with each other, allowing no room for sentimentality or further investment in their characters beyond amusement and pity. They leave in opposite directions down plain dirt roads, backs to each other, backs to the warm house and genuine life Bob is building for himself. It leaves the audience sighing in exasperation, shaking their heads as they wonder, when will these boys grow up?

2012 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place: Abigail Schott-Rosenfield

DOWN BY LAW: What Jack and Zack Don’t Have

by Abigail Schott-Rosenfield

Down By Law is not your conventional action-packed jailbreak film. The convicts’ getaway is understated: we have no idea even how, exactly, they escaped, because the film cuts from the moment the three emerge from their cell to their running full-tilt through some underground passageway. The movie centers not on the moment when the three convicts escape, but on the differences in the ways they live.

The film begins with a montage of New Orleans, backed by Waits’ music. Included in this montage are shots of Jack and Zack returning to their homes after a night out. The shots are strikingly similar. In each, the man walks into a bedroom to an apparently sleeping woman with her back to him. As the man sits down of the bed and begins to remove his clothes, the woman’s eyes flick open—she has been pretending. Roberto (Bob), the third character, is not included in this beginning, which serves to set up the fundamental similarity between Jack and Zack and the foreignness of Bob. Zack and Jack’s rhyming names emphasize their sameness, while Roberto is alien in name, speech, and what he’s in jail for (while Jack and Zack are both framed for crimes they didn’t commit, Bob confesses to having accidentally killed a man).

The first time we meet Bob, he appears seemingly out of nowhere, greeting an inebriated Zack cordially. Zack responds with a mumbled “Buzz off.” Roberto, ever willing to believe the best of everyone (and ever attempting to add new English words to his vocabulary) thinks this is a form of salutation he’s never heard, and, comically, disappears from the screen repeating it—ah, hello, buzz off, buzz off to you to—as if registering it in his internal dictionary.

This first impression of Bob’s humorous, good-natured, childlike cluelessness is the polar opposite of the first impressions of Zack and Jack. Within the first scenes, Jack completely ignores his prostitute’s lengthy monologue, while Zack refuses to respond as his girlfriend berates him for his irresponsibility, throwing various possessions around the room. Bob, on the other hand, walks up to a perfect stranger merely to say hello—and takes the opportunity to learn (so he thinks) to communicate more effectively. Bob has what his fellow escapees don’t: he takes joy in communication, the foundation of healthy relationships and of life.

The final, most striking expression of the difference between Zack and Jack’s and Bob’s ways of life comes in the scene in which Bob dances with his brand-new fiancé, Nicoletta. Within minutes of meeting this woman, he agrees to marry her, is willing to give his large heart to her entirely. As a classic romantic song plays, they are completely absorbed in their dance and in one another. Jack and Zack are excluded from the scene. They sit at the table, apart. They smile, but they are as foreign to the world of simple love as Roberto is to their commitment to being lone wolves, attached to no one.

We sense that they will never be able to enter Bob’s world. Though Bob has given them a second chance by showing them the escape route, befriending them, making sure they don’t tear each other to pieces on the way to freedom, they can never be like him. Roberto stays with the love of his life; Jack and Zack cross the border to Texas and whatever will befall them there. As the movie concludes and they stand at a crossroads, about to part, Zack holds out a hand for Jack. Jack reaches to take it, but Zack pulls away, grinning, at the last second. They laugh. Then they walk down the separate roads. They will probably never meet again. They are as alone as they were when the film began.