Self-Scoring as Neoliberal Self-Care in the Early Films of Jim Jarmusch

Situating Early Jarmusch: Music as Spell in the Disenchanted Neoliberal City

Neoliberalism has been interpreted to mean many things. In what follows, we take it to mostly mean the draconian economic and political solutions—imposed by corporate-friendly elites at the expense of the working class—to the crisis in capital accumulation of the 1970s.³ Below, it will also be important to understand it as a larger normative political rationality responsible for producing disciplined subjects who are accommodating to these solutions.⁴ But for now, we can see it as the austerity-heavy response to a period of declining growth during which shrinking corporate profits and tax revenues combined with soaring social expenditures, inflation, and unemployment to create fiscal crises around the world.

American cities were the first to bear the brunt of these trends. As factories closed down and relocated due to deindustrialization, they left voids in towns and took their jobs with them. Federal and state subsidies to cities also diminished during this time, as did the municipal tax base, which shrank as the post-war exodus of white residents from urban centers to the suburbs—encouraged by generous new federal subsidies and highways alike—continued. Mismanagement, together with near-sighted city planners and financial institutions eager to profit off of municipal debt, seemed to conspire to make it all worse.⁵

Despite the fact that the root cause of most of these trends was global in nature,⁶ opportunistic elites nonetheless placed the blame on the profligate spending of cities and the supposed coddling of their most vulnerable denizens: municipal workers, minorities, and the poor.⁷ Framed as a parasitic drain on diminishing city resources, they became convenient excuses to push through solutions that were hostile to the working class and entirely on the side of capital. Governing entities shifted their priorities away from the maintenance of public welfare and towards the accommodation of private business, all in the name of trickle-down tough love.⁸ As a result, public spending was gutted, social services were curtailed, and labor was disciplined, all as taxes and regulations were cut for the rich. What remained was an atomized and abandoned working class left to fend for itself. Infrastructure and amenities in low-income neighborhoods were left to crumble while the gutting of welfare and other public spending meant that the horizons of possibility and economic mobility were significantly curtailed. The very notion of the social and of the public itself would be called into question due to the decimation of the infrastructure that helped to sustain these ideas in the collective imaginary.

Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation (PV), Stranger Than Paradise (STP), and Mystery Train (MT), we argue, should be understood against this backdrop. All three films were shot in cities that could be considered paradigms of different chapters of this regressive neoliberal urbanism. PV and STP were shot in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s, respectively, just a few years after the city’s infamous fiscal crisis nearly caused it to go bankrupt. MT was shot in downtown Memphis in 1988, near the peak of the area’s decline. The Beale Street area would come to serve as a cautionary tale for the devastation of Black communities in particular due to the proto-neoliberal urban reforms implemented there. Throughout these films, exteriors and interiors alike—rubble-strewn streets, threadbare apartments, boarded up downtowns—evidence the consequences of these revanchist policies and reforms.

No less could be said about the films’ characters themselves. Drifting within disenchanted landscapes, Jarmusch’s characters are “perpetual foreigners”—disconnected, alienated, and left to wander just as their neighborhoods have been left to rot.⁹ To be sure, many of them are also actual foreigners. Yet in the context of our reading, tourists exist as much as metaphors for the general structural alienation and dislocation experienced by residents of these disinvested places. Existing only on the periphery of civic life, Jarmusch’s characters are no less alienated from the social production of these places, holding jobs in the underground economy (Allie steals cars, Eva steals cigarettes, Willie and his friend Eddie gamble) or engaged in precarious employment that is only a hair’s breadth from it (Eva is also a waitress). Together, they evoke the surplus population greatly enlarged by capitalism’s global downturn, forced to make do outside the official machinations of capital to which their cities are increasingly beholden.¹⁰

We find this sense of alienation from the social echoed in the characters’ personal lives. Distinctions between relationships of care vs. convenience remain unclear, as evidenced by Allie’s ambiguous relationship with his maybe-girlfriend and roommate, Eva’s ambivalent relationship with her cousin Willie, and in some ways even Mitzuko and Jun. When they talk, their conversations—if they can be called that—are plagued by a preponderance of silence and miscommunication.¹¹ In many cases, they are seemingly brought together by chance and economic necessity rather than agency and intention, suggesting the constraints on working-class subjects left adrift by the state.¹²

Lastly, the characters’ socioeconomic immobility parallels their seeming spatial immobility. Many of Jarmusch’s protagonists rarely leave their hotel rooms or apartment buildings—including travelers on trips. When they do go out, they remark on the unremarkable. “You come to someplace new and everything looks the same,” notes Eddie in STP. For Allie in PV, it’s a sentiment captured by the cynical notion of moving “from here to here.” And for Mitzuko and Jun, it’s evidenced in their debate about whether Memphis feels like its own place or is “just like Yokohama.” In the end, these comments speak to a gnawing sense of stasis as a form of hopelessness that is amplified by Jarmusch’s static, observational visual style.

In other words, these spatial restrictions suggest temporal ramifications. As inertial places that the characters keep returning to or failing to leave, dreary apartments and hotel rooms come to express the failure of time to deliver anything new. Juan A. Suárez notes the prevalence of what he calls “dead time” in Jarmusch—the “temporality of bodies that wait, ponder (it’s hard to know what), and get bored.”¹³ We would only add that waiting and boredom are partly symptoms of the political abandonment mentioned above, reducing time to a function of what atomized subjects can or can’t do outside any infrastructures of possibility.

It is here, in this milieu of stagnation and foreclosed hope, that self-scoring comes to play its crucial and highly instrumentalized role. Music, of course, also marks time and, as Adorno insists, does so in a potentially mollifying and liberatory—if ultimately illusory—way. He writes:

[Under capitalism,] people dread time, and so they invent a compensatory metaphysics of time because they blame time for the fact that in a reified world they no longer feel alive. This is what music talks them out of [. . .] assures a man that within the monotony of universal comparability there is still something particular.¹⁴

By “particular,” Adorno means experiences that offer hope because they have escaped the eternal sameness of the logic of the commodity. But the bar need not even be that high. In capitalist society, music, to be liberating, need only facilitate the mere belief that “something is happening at all”:

By its purely abstract form of a temporal art, i.e., by the qualitative change of its successive moments, it brings about something like the imago of becoming, an idea which even the most wretched form of music cannot lose, and of which a consciousness that craves experience will not let go.¹⁵

In a world devoid of promise where, as Eddie puts it, “everything looks just the same,” music’s mere production of difference over time is enough to serve as a balm.

But music is surely also important to these characters in the context of the social alienation and atomization described above. Music’s mere sonic reality, as Adorno notes in our epigraph, provides the “illusion of immediacy in the totally mediated world, of proximity between strangers, of warmth for those who come to feel the chill of the unmitigated struggle of all against all.”¹⁶ It does this in part by binding together other listeners—willing or not—in public settings through its imposition of the sense of a common aural and affective experience. It can also provide what Jacques Attali calls an “ersatz sociality” by encouraging listeners to connect, in the absence of real community, to the imagined communities they associate with musical commodities.¹⁷ Or it can serve as a kind of sonic companion itself, introjected by the subject as a cathected Other in which listeners recognize something of themselves.

All of these highly instrumentalized uses of music serve to not only lend an imaginary fullness to disenchanted experience, but also to actively manage that experience. In Michael Bull’s words, “in [music’s] de-routinisation of time lies both the unalloyed pleasure of listening but also the management or control of the user’s thoughts, feelings and observations as they manage both space and time.”¹⁸ This is, of course, a key function of film music itself, a point we return to later. For now, we emphasize that music for these characters is more than just an aesthetic distraction; it is an invaluable tool for actively managing the day-to-day realities of their socioeconomic and affective circumstances.

That Jarmusch himself accorded self-scored music this importance is suggested by the pride of place he gives it within both his films’ overall soundworlds and their narratives.¹⁹ Music overall—including traditional scoring—is used quite selectively in these films, meaning that when it is heard, it tends to stand out.²⁰ PV, STP, and MT also feature understated acting, an elliptical approach to narrative, and little in the way of clear communication between characters. All of these attributes create space for self-scored music to take on heightened importance, becoming a kind of direct address from the characters to one another and to the audience that provides invaluable information about their inner lives, feelings, and desires. To paraphrase John Sexton, sonic communication in Jarmusch is often privileged over semantic communication, as characters reach for music when words seem to fail.²¹

But if music in these films does more than simply stand in for words, then Eva in STP, together with her musical companion Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, might put it more simply: music casts a spell, and it does so to fill a void. Her song of choice, “I Put a Spell on You,” is thus paradigmatic for our purposes: it describes the function to which music is put by these characters while also enacting that function in various social spaces. The characters in Jarmusch’s other films will have their preferred musical spells as well, using them to enchant the disenchanted and facilitate ersatz forms of sociality within their own contingent circumstances. We turn now to close readings of the three films to see exactly how.

Fantasies of Mobility: Permanent Vacation

The first time we see Allie Parker in PV, he’s walking down a littered and empty NYC street going nowhere in particular. It is a desolate, lonely scene. Jarmusch emphasizes this emptiness by intercutting shots of people-filled streets from a livelier part of town as if to say that for Allie—for this neighborhood—things are different. Taking a can of canary yellow Krylon out of his back pocket, he puts it to use.

Allie, we learn from his subsequent voiceover, is a perennial drifter, always on the move. Yet when we see him next, he’s in a claustrophobic and meager apartment with a mattress on the floor. His roommate or girlfriend Leila—it’s tough to say which—is barefoot and barely dressed, cigarette in hand and feet propped by the window. It’s an image of inertia and stagnation that couldn’t contrast more with Allie’s prior wanderings and restlessness. They talk:

Leila:

Where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you since Thursday.

Allie:

Walking. Just walking around. I can’t seem to sleep at night. Not in this city.

Leila:

Doesn’t seem like you sleep at all.

Allie:

Well I have my dreams while I’m awake.

An awkward silence follows. Ambulance sirens drift through the window, providing an ironic soundtrack to this supposed dreamspace. And then, an impulsive act: Allie walks over to the record player, puts on Earl Bostic’s bebop barnburner “Up There in Orbit,” and dances wildly.

Figure 2.

Allie dances with his record player

We have to presume that Allie is desperate to move, desperate for mobility in both a figurative and literal sense. And from the abyss of an empty moment, he seeks out music as a cathartic way to fill that void and sustain those waking dreams. It is an imperfect solution, because the type of movement music offers is, as Adorno notes, only simulated. And yet as we learn from the voiceover, this is somehow fitting: all movement for Allie, a working-class kid who steals cars for a living, is movement that doesn’t really go anywhere.

That’s how things work for me. I go from this place, this person, to that place, to that person. And you know, it really doesn’t make all that much difference. [. . .] [The] people I’ve known are like a series of rooms, just like all the places where I’ve spent time. You walk in for the first time, curious about this new room—lamp, TV, whatever. And then after a while, the newness is gone, completely. And then there’s this kind of dread, [a] kind of creeping dread. [. . .] After a while something tells you, some voice speaks to you, and that’s it: time to split.

It would be easy to read this monologue somewhat apolitically, as a nihilistic embrace of, say, the restless, interminably unsatisfied movement of psychoanalytic desire. We could also see it as an indictment of commodity society and its false promissory allure. There are surely aspects of both at play. But we would do just as well to read Allie’s resigned ambling as an anesthetized embrace of the uprootedness that comes from having only limited access to social belonging in the first place. Drifting, in other words, as the condition of continually saying: nor does this place nor this place have a place for me.

PV, we have noted, takes place in the New York City of the 1970s fiscal crisis, the neoliberal response to which contributed greatly to this theft of the amenities of belonging from working-class communities. It was during this time that the CUNY system, for instance, which had provided free college to working-class students for over a century, began charging tuition, causing admissions to drop by a quarter. Almost 30% of the city’s district health clinics, which provided free primary care, were shuttered. Public transit fares were ultimately raised by over 70%. Sixteen public library branches closed or nearly closed. Expanded library hours at surviving branches, after school programs in public schools, and free museum admission were all cut. All told, between 1975 and 1981, the city reduced its public expenditures and public workforce alike by 20%.²²

The effect of these cuts was a reduction in the public places where working class residents could go and experience both care and community.²³ But there is also an extent to which the cuts were designed to take the city away from those residents altogether. In 1976, former NYC Housing and Development Administrator Roger Starr actually proposed to forcibly relocate residents not only to other neighborhoods, helping to consolidate people around surviving amenities, but to entirely different cities as well, all in the name of cutting costs. In both cases, it meant working class residents swallowing a bitter pill. “Essentially,” Starr wrote, “planned shrinkage is a recognition that the golden door to full participation in American life and the American economy is no longer to be found in New York.” But “better a thriving city of five million than a Calcutta of seven.”²⁴

Allie’s perpetual drifting, which does in fact lead him to leave New York at the end of PV, can be understood in this political context. His is movement that goes nowhere because it has nowhere to go, permanently shut off by the effects of public disinvestment from “full participation in American life.”²⁵ But it is also a distraction. “Better to think that you’re not alone when you’re drifting even though you are,” he states, “instead of just knowing that you’re alone all the time.” Given that Allie appears to have a romantic partner, we have to presume that what he means by loneliness has as much to do with a kind of municipal alienation as anything. By robbing residents of public places and services, neoliberal policy also robbed them of those nodes around which the very notion of a public could form. As a result, it destroyed the mirror in which they could see their interests reflected in the city, feel a sense of belonging to it, and understand it as theirs. Allie’s loneliness isn’t just interpersonal: it is civic.

What comes to the rescue as a cure for this disenchantment is, of course, music. Yet music for Allie doesn’t just provide a sonic medium for these fantasies of mobility; it actively constitutes them as well. Allie Parker is obsessed with bebop, mentioning in the opening voiceover that “if I ever have a son, he’ll be Charles Christopher Parker. Just like Charlie Parker.” Later on in the apartment, we watch Allie slick his hair back in the mirror, James Dean-style, affirming a kind of imaginary identification with jazz as a symbol of self-styled possibility, personal mobility, and cool. By dancing to “Up There in Orbit” on the record player, Allie steps into these fantasies in a more fully embodied way, inhabiting music’s “imago of becoming” to achieve the mobility he lacks elsewhere.²⁶

Allie is not alone in embracing music as respite from the alienating conditions of the neoliberal city. During one of his long walks, he encounters a seemingly mentally disturbed woman sitting out on her fire escape, lipstick smeared on her face and singing to herself. Her chosen soundtrack is the popular Mexican folk song “Cielito Lindo,” which is explicitly about the power of music to lift sunken spirits. The fire escape’s iron bars evoke a cage or prison, suggesting that the mentally ill are yet another part of a populace abandoned and rendered immobile by neoliberal austerity. And yet, even within these conditions, as long as she keeps singing she appears content. She becomes agitated and “mad” only when Allie interrupts her. The implication is that music is not only a means of keeping desire alive in the disenchanted city: it is implicated in its very sanity as well.²⁷

While “Up There in Orbit” and “Cielito Lindo” are songs characters use to fend off the madness of immobility, “Somewhere over the Rainbow” provides commentary on the conflation of music with hope and mobility in general. Imagining utopia as existing at a vague yet reachable distance, the song is first referenced as part of a joke a man tells Allie in a movie theater. In the joke, an avant-garde sax player moves to Europe in hopes of finding a more receptive audience for his music. When that doesn’t happen, he climbs up to a roof and contemplates jumping to his death, until the clouds open up and a beam of sunlight appears, inspiring him to play the song as an index of hope. But after forgetting the B part of the 32-bar form, he becomes distraught again and jumps, only for the doppler-shifting sounds of the approaching ambulance to evoke the forgotten melody.²⁸

More sirens, more disenchanted dreams. The alternating notes of the siren evoke more circularity, more back and forth movement that doesn’t actually go anywhere, eventually even leading to death. That Allie might have a similar fate is alluded to in the next scene, which finds him on a roof (“high above the chimney tops”) of his own, alternately sleeping, talking to himself, and peering over the edge. What sets this bleak scene into ironic relief is the Empire State Building, looming in the distance. Built in a single year during the Depression as a defiant symbol of hope and aspiration, and at the beginning of a decade that would see significant spending on the working class and the poor, the building suggests—rightly or wrongly—a radically different politics, distant from the neoliberal revanchism that defines Allie’s disinvested New York.²⁹ If the urban optimism of the building’s distant spire recalls the “way up high” of the utopia of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” it is a distance, the scene seems to say, that cannot be bridged. After all, there is no music on the roof. No street buskers to play, no record to put on, no sonic fantasies to suture that gap. As the scene ends, Allie turns in circles on the roof, arms out and eyes closed, tracing a dissonant geometry against the upward thrusting vectors of the Empire State Building’s optimistic modernism. More movement from “here to here.” The only solution is more drifting.

Fantasies of Connectivity: Stranger Than Paradise

STP was released just a few years after PV, and New York City, still reeling from the austerity imposed after the 1970s fiscal crisis, is the setting for the first of the film’s three acts. We have already seen how Eva uses her tape player to self-score her walk to Willie’s apartment. As with Allie’s phonograph scene in PV, the implication here is that music is needed to complete or supplement her experience. But what, specifically, is Eva doing with her “Spell” in this ambulatory moment?

STP’s 1980s New York setting, together with Eva’s use of a portable tape deck, invite consideration of this question through the lens of boombox culture and urban noise policing. Boomboxes—in large part through their crucial role within hip-hop culture and prioritization of loudness—enabled disadvantaged urban subjects, particularly Black and brown men, to exert sonic agency over urban spaces disinvested via neoliberal reforms and instigate alternative forms of community by uniting listeners through a common aural experience.³⁰ The boombox’s potential to disrupt public space and transform social life was amplified due to its controversial status in 1980s New York City. The use of portable sound devices on public transportation had already been banned in the city’s 1972 Noise Code, which “inscribed mounting concerns about the use of portable consumer audio devices into law.”³¹ Under Ed Koch, New York’s mayor from 1978–89, the boombox became a racialized emblem for fights over urban space while the city continued to drastically cut public services and disinvest in Black neighborhoods. Escalated noise and other policing measures under Koch galvanized participants in local hip-hop scenes to take on a militant, even noisier posture in the face of continued community crackdowns.³²

Eva, of course, is neither a person of color nor male, and she wields a small mono cassette player rather than a bulky boombox. Yet given the New York context described above and the ubiquity of the boombox in 1980s popular culture, Eva’s usage of her portable device calls to mind how hip-hop communities used boomboxes to assert sonic agency and oppose hegemonic norms of social space while simultaneously using music to create alternative forms of belonging.³³ The choice of Hawkins’ “Spell” for Eva’s self-scoring is relevant in this regard, with its lyrical assertion that “you’re mine,” which is elaborated: “I don’t care / If you don’t want me / I’m yours right now.” Reading “you” as the hostile urban world in which Eva has arrived, her publicly sounded musical spell gestures, perhaps, towards her desire to create alternative forms of sociality in this place, to belong and have agency even though no possibility of either is readily apparent.

That Eva seeks specifically alternative forms of community is decidedly evident in her relationship with her cousin Willie, whose desire for cultural assimilation and cynical, depoliticized acceptance of his lot in life becomes a foil for Eva’s fantasies of a different kind of America. He watches football on a small TV in his apartment; Eva thinks “this game is really stupid.” Willie sustains himself on TV dinners; Eva is incredulous, telling him “it doesn’t even look like meat.” Willie gets Eva a dress because she “should dress like people dress here”; she covertly discards it, balancing Willie’s feelings with her desire to retain her own sartorial sensibility. Willie refuses to be spoken to in Hungarian; Eva speaks it spontaneously and with habitual ease. And finally, further indicating the enchanting potential that Hawkins’ song holds for Eva, Willie is not a fan of Screamin’ Jay, yet Eva repeatedly defends him as a “wild man.”

Eva’s description is supported by history: the opera-inspired blues and R&B artist was known for his shocking, intentionally bizarre live performances, which featured a cigarette-smoking skull, references to voodoo practices, and Hawkins routinely emerging from a coffin.³⁴ “Spell,” upon its 1956 release on Okeh, was initially banned due to its suggestive vocalization and had to be re-released featuring a “milder ending” for radio play.³⁵ Summing up his approach to his songs, Hawkins explained, “I don’t sing them, I destroy them.”³⁶ In embracing Hawkins, Eva is perhaps identifying with what she perceives as subversive aspects of his music and Blackness—in a manner similar to her possible identification with boombox culture—as a proxy for her own Otherness as a female from communist Hungary.³⁷ In this reading, Eva’s use of “Spell” functions to conspicuously communicate her affection for, and assert spatial agency in, an alternative America rooted in this Otherness.

Yet Eva also looks to the spell of self-scoring as a way of connecting with Willie, despite their differences. This never quite happens. Willie expresses his distaste for the song when he returns to find Eva dancing to it in the cramped interior of his apartment, and he does so once again when she puts it on in the car during a road trip to Florida. Later in Florida, a dejected Eva sits alone by the ocean, having been abandoned by Willie and Eddie. She looks longingly at her tape player sitting on the table in front of her, but this time she doesn’t play the song. All we hear is crashing waves. In this moment, it is as if Eva realizes that the spell of music hasn’t enchanted anything, hasn’t helped her connect or transcend her own isolation or immobility. In other words, the fact that Eva marks the moment of her abandonment not with more music but with silence confirms that it is community she hoped the spell would conjure all along.

Fantasies of Transcendence: Mystery Train

MT revisits the themes of alienated experience and urban decline we found in PV and STP, this time in a decidedly desolate Memphis.³⁸ More specifically, MT expresses this decline through the particular guise of imperiled musical culture. Tracking shots reveal vacant downtown streets lined with dilapidated buildings, including former bastions of music-making such as Stax Records. As the film’s intertwined stories unfold, we seem to encounter Elvis everywhere yet emptied of meaning, while the city’s Southern soul legends are hiding in plain sight, present yet forgotten. In short, this Memphis is full of ghosts—literal, recorded, imagined—of a not-so-distant musical history straining to be more than a haunting absence in the face of tumultuous urban reforms.³⁹

With the architectural and cultural markers of the city’s musical history in a state of decay, it is no surprise that many of MT’s characters struggle to connect with or feel at home in Memphis.⁴⁰ Yet they nonetheless seek that connection through music. “Far From Yokohama,” the first of MT’s three acts, begins with a key example.

We open on a Memphis-bound train, whistle blaring and rails clattering. Japanese tourists Mitzuko and Jun sit together, wearing headphones attached to a Walkman. They gesturally argue over which tape to put on next: Carl Perkins or Elvis? This debate becomes a recurring bit, as Mitzuko’s one-note Elvis obsession continually clashes with Jun’s more wide-ranging interests in Sun Studios and its stars. Mitzuko’s choice wins, the tape goes in, and Elvis’s “Mystery Train” begins chugging along. It’s a telling moment: Mitzuko and Jun have put on a song about a train while riding a train; the train they’re on isn’t enough. They need music—in particular, a song like “Mystery Train,” steeped in the long vernacular tradition of romanticizing the rails—to elevate it and their journey to Memphis to another level. What they seek isn’t reality but transcendence.

Figure 3.

Mitzuko and Jun listen to their Walkman

The image cuts between opening credits, exterior shots of the moving train, and interior shots of Mitzuko and Jun as the track continues. In their headphones, Elvis’s gliding, optimistic delivery seemingly ignores that “the long black train got my baby and gone,” affectively leaning instead on the assertion that “it never will again.” Yet transcendence on the real train proves elusive. Despite the optimism and willful romance that music lends to their experience, Mitzuko and Jun eventually become restless and bored, exhibiting a tension between myth-driven expectation and lacking reality that persists throughout the film.

More than merely establishing them as fans, this opening suggests that they are on a pop pilgrimage to Memphis, seeking “some affective experience of spiritual significance, personal transformation, and transcendence of the mundane.”⁴¹ But what musical fantasy are Mitzuko and Jun—presumably of working-class origins, given their single jam-packed suitcase—hoping to live through their pilgrimage? MT provides no clear response to this question, but the answer is certainly tied to Elvis, and in particular the “classically American” story of Elvis in the Sun Studio years: “poor country boy makes good in the city.”⁴² As Greil Marcus writes of Elvis’s blues: “The music is clean, straight, open, and free. That’s what these sides are all about: finding space in the church of the worn-out and overfamiliar; finding a way to feel free in that space and finding the voice to put that feeling across.”⁴³ In short, Elvis’s rise models the bootstraps logic of the American Dream in which hard work and belief in oneself lead to upward mobility and freedom.

Of course, in the case of Elvis, “finding a way to feel free” also had racial implications, coming at the expense of Black musicians whose music he appropriated. In 1989, the year MT came out, Public Enemy went so far as to call his economically and culturally gainful exploitation of Black music “straight up racist.” Yet the dominant contemporary perception of Elvis encapsulated in “Fight the Power” belies the more complex, less persistently hostile reception of Elvis in the early years of his fame. In an article tracing historical shifts in the dominant public reception of Elvis, Michael T. Bertrand writes that

Elvis symbolized a generation of southerners that reached adolescence in the late 1940s and early 50s. He, like his peers, viewed race differently than did many of his predecessors. His was a generation that arguably began to appreciate African American culture on its own terms, signaling a significant transition in the history of the South. That the shift failed to produce a permanent or comprehensive racial rapprochement does not negate the transition itself.⁴⁴

MT, we suggest, negotiates this more complex and ambivalent assessment of Elvis’s racial politics, allowing for a reading of Elvis as embodying a socioeconomic as much as racial fantasy for Mitzuko and Jun: just as Elvis found freedom and upward economic mobility in his refusal of cultural limits, including racialized ones, so too might Mitzuko and Jun find a transcendent if vicarious sense of freedom as working-class East Asians inhabiting the world of Elvis himself.

As the film continues, however, it becomes clear that late 1980s Memphis—ravaged by policies that left the city’s musical past in literal ruins—cannot offer up this transcendence. In its earlier decades, Memphis had been a bustling center of musical activity, featuring, among other things, innovative recording studios like Sun and Stax and an important blues tradition that dated from the 1920s.⁴⁵ Yet these accolades could not forestall the decline encouraged by proto-neoliberal policies of urban renewal that befell Memphis following World War II: rising car ownership, suburban expansion, growth in city land area unmatched by population increase, the razing of surrounding neighborhoods, and declining retail in the downtown area as a whole.⁴⁶ Further, in the 1960s, a major sanitation workers’ strike, race uprisings, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. contributed to the impression of an unsafe downtown.⁴⁷ While attempts to revitalize Beale Street began in the 1970s, a countervailing austerity mindset ensured that, well into the 1980s, many of the lots cleared for redevelopment remained empty, storefronts previously housing Black-owned businesses were left vacant, and sites associated with Memphis’s musical legacy were left in ghostly disrepair.⁴⁸ All of this led to the Memphis of MT: a city markedly empty of people, historical memory, and shared meaning.

What does remain of musical memory in MT is a conspicuous proliferation of gaudy, commercialized Elvises.⁴⁹ In the film’s second act, Elvis even appears as a disoriented ghost, perhaps suggesting a disconnect between the supposedly immortal King and his clearly mortal city. Meanwhile, legendary Black musicians like Rufus Thomas (in a cameo at the Memphis train station) and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (as the Arcade Hotel Night Clerk) appear as more metaphorical ghosts who, in going unrecognized by Mitzuko and Jun, demonstrate that “soul music was not part of the Memphis music tourism equation.”⁵⁰

These (non-)encounters contribute to a striking portrait of a city with absence at its core. Elvis is an absence due to his hollowing overexposure, becoming a kitschy distraction from urban realities that belie the optimism of his bootstraps myth. Southern soul musicians are an absence due to their underexposure, represented mostly by forgotten faces and the ruins of their former institutional homes such as Stax Records.⁵¹ Yet all were victims of the zero-sum game of touristic urban renewal efforts that, by the late 1980s, had sacrificed so much of Memphis’s inspirational cultural heritage to privatization and profit.

This is the truth of the city that primes Mitzuko and Jun for a transcendent experience but can only deliver disillusionment. Their visit to Sun Studio is simultaneously over- and underwhelming. Walking through empty streets, they drift past derelict landmarks like the recently shuttered Lamar Theater, its facade barely whispering of past sociality. It’s unclear whether they ever make it to Graceland—a glaring uncertainty given that it was a main point of their pilgrimage. Eventually, Jun suggests that perhaps they haven’t traveled anywhere at all. Sitting quasi-piously in the shadow of the Elvis statue on Beale Street, he follows up on an earlier comment from Mitzuko: “Memphis does look like Yokohama. Just more space.” Mitzuko counters: “This doesn’t look anything like Yokohama. This is America. And the city of Elvis.” As the memorialized King looks down on them, Mitzuko can’t quite admit that, like Allie in PV, they might have only managed to go from “here to here.”

Stagnation persists. With echoes of Eva in STP traveling to New York only to be stuck in Willie’s cramped apartment, Mitzuko and Jun spend the majority of their remaining time in Memphis cooped up in a room at the run-down Arcade Hotel. The mythologized freedom and mobility of Elvis isn’t to be found here. But perhaps this is something else self-scoring can fix. In the early morning hours following a night of awkward sex, they switch on the radio as if hoping for some musical enchantment to counteract their lackluster experiences. Yet what should come on but one of Elvis’s most ghostly recordings: the reverb-drenched “Blue Moon” (1956). Had Mitzuko and Jun’s pop pilgrimage been more unambiguously successful, this might have seemed a profound if coincidental moment that affirmed the transcendent potential of their pilgrimage. Instead, “Blue Moon” is merely a reminder of the absence that haunts this disinvested place.

Self-Scoring, “Responsibilization,” and Neoliberal Subjectivity

We have now seen how characters in Jarmusch’s early films self-score in an effort to supplement day-to-day life and manage their alienating experiences of the post-industrial city. Up to this point, we have mainly treated these characters as victims of political circumstance who engage musical media as a means of obtaining a kind of social connection or belonging where those things cannot otherwise be found. Yet in order to come to a fuller understanding of self-scoring in this historico-political milieu, we need to also consider the ways that this relationship between subject and musical technology is in part produced by neoliberalism itself—how the instrumentalized use of music is prefigured by the very political rationality it is intended to overcome.

Neoliberalism is not only a policy strategy for restoring profits for the ruling class; it is also a way of “remaking state, society, and subject” alike in ways that are accommodating to that strategy and allow for its perpetuation.⁵² This is neoliberalism as conceived in part by Foucault, for whom such a remaking is accomplished via the dissemination of normative political realities—the subordination of everything to the market, the reduction of human beings to forms of capital, etc.—through the soft power of institutions, out of sight and mind.⁵³

We could see both Jarmusch’s alienated subjects and the musical media they embrace as implicated in this coercive neoliberal remaking via two related processes. The first is the conversion of politically produced social problems into problems meant for individuals to solve using market solutions.⁵⁴ The lack of public amenities in Allie’s New York, for instance, would be such a social problem, while his resort to musical media as a source of imagined mobility would represent his market solution. The second is the disciplining of individuals into subjects who willingly seek out those solutions in their capacity as consumers, coming to see those acts of consumption as important expressions of identity. This is represented by the jazz-obsessed Allie’s instinctive, almost instantaneous turn to the record player to self-soothe. We can understand this latter process as one of “responsibilization”—essentially, the devolution of responsibility for various aspects of well-being from the state and onto citizens, who come to understand this burden as normal and natural.⁵⁵ What is commonly embraced today as “self-care” is an example of precisely this kind of normalized burden willingly assumed by responsibilized subjects, who come to see the related consumption as an essential way of defining their unique identity and place in the world.

We argue that self-scoring as depicted in Jarmusch in many ways resembles self-care in this neoliberal sense. To Allie’s turn to his record player, we can add Eva’s use of her tape deck and Mitzuko and Jun’s use of their Walkman as examples. These sound reproduction technologies are ultimately what enable music to be accessed in moments of need, and in the codependent, care-oriented ways that we’ve been describing. In other words, the technology of music media is implicated in the apparatus that reproduces neoliberal subjects and social relations. Rather than understanding these technologies as politically neutral, developing independently from social relations and existing as convenient things that just happen to be there for alienated subjects to use in ameliorative ways,⁵⁶ we must—to paraphrase Andrew Feenberg—see these seemingly autonomous technological developments as always masking social requirements.⁵⁷ Responsibilized neoliberal subjects and the technologies they use are two sides of the same coin, completing each other. We need only think of Eva in STP, connected at the hip to her tape deck, to understand this codependent relationship.

But what more specifically can we say about the ambivalent work done by musical commodities in this political situation? If music can facilitate fantasies of mobility, connectivity, and transcendence, then how might it also paradoxically reinforce the politics those fantasies are meant to overcome?

The Marxist critic Raymond Williams’ notion of “mobile privatization” provides a useful starting point. Developed in the 1970s as a way of critiquing theories of technological determinism, the concept was meant to show how television, radio, automobiles, and other technologies devoted to providing consumers with a sense of real and virtual mobility came about just as capitalism was isolating workers into private domestic spaces increasingly cut off from the public sphere.⁵⁸ Providing more than just “virtual compensation” for these developments,⁵⁹ this increasingly portable technology—as itself a product of late capitalist social relations⁶⁰—also helped accommodate subjects to the period's politics of domestication and privatization by reinforcing a sense of bourgeois-individualistic independence from and indifference to the messy contingencies of the public sphere.⁶¹ When we recall that the public sphere in the period we have been discussing is also increasingly a space of widespread disinvestment and neglect, we can easily see how mobile privatization can also enable responsibilization; the virtual mobility offered by technology as a compensation for social problems also helps subjects self-discipline themselves into beings who see themselves as no longer dependent on, and with no expectations of, the public realm at all.⁶²

To what extent can we say that Jarmusch’s films capture neoliberal subjectivities of this sort? We can begin by noting that the marketing of portable tape players began in earnest in the late 1970s, capped off by the release of the Sony Walkman in 1979, making these products very much of the early neoliberal era and thus somewhat indissociable from its politics. By featuring the record player, tape recorder, and Walkman respectively, PV, STP, and MT depict a progression of increasing musical portability that enables increasingly privatized, personalized modes of listening that potentially lead to what Schloss and Boyer describe as “a retreat into a private soundscape at the expense of civic engagement and a shared acoustic experience.”⁶³ Alternately, we might see this progression more dialectically by way of Williams, with the record player bringing music into the private home; the portable tape recorder allowing listeners to take that domesticated music back out into public; and the Walkman, which required headphones, allowing the enjoyment of music to be, in a sense, public and private all at once. This last development in particular must be seen as one co-constructed or at least valorized by neoliberal rationality in that the Walkman was explicitly marketed as the inward-turned alternative to the boombox’s supposed sonic assault on public space. This made it a politicized tool in the larger, often racially coded project of privatizing formerly public experiences of all kinds.⁶⁴

But even if these devices cannot entirely be disentangled from neoliberal rationality, can we say the same about the way Jarmusch’s characters use them? More concretely: does their media technology enable a depoliticized turn away from the disenchanted public sphere and towards highly individualistic and atomized forms of self-actualization, or is it used to create the possibility of new publics and modes of social belonging?⁶⁵ In a general sense, Allie, Eva, Mitzuko, and Jun do tend to play music by way of their various devices for reasons that could loosely be described as self-care, and in ways that are potentially atomizing and anti-social. In MT, for example, Mitzuko and Jun, confronted with the slow and tedious reality of train travel in the US (particularly as compared to Japan), attempt to escape via their Walkman onto the fantasized mystery train of Elvis. We could imagine the Walkman here having an anesthetizing function, allowing the characters to shut out what is disagreeable about an underfunded, publicly shared reality and replace it with the sonic stuff of private fantasy, and in a way that could be said to be depoliticized.

Yet on closer look, Jarmusch’s films present a more nuanced picture than this. We can begin to understand how via what has been called “sociation by consumption.” As Wolfgang Streeck has written, the 1970s and 1980s were a time when traditional family structures and communities were rapidly losing their authority, allowing markets to fill the resulting social vacuum. The consumption of commodities could signal or facilitate the alignment with new communities, both real and imagined, albeit those that were more tenuous in nature due to being “monological rather than dialogical in nature, voluntary rather than obligatory, individual rather than collective.”⁶⁶ As such, sociation by consumption was in every way aligned with the strategies of social atomization associated with neoliberal governance; the turn away from traditional communities and towards markets could also be a turn away from a politicized public sphere and towards depoliticized forms of self-care. And yet these market-based mediations could also serve as a means to a different end, enabling the imagining and facilitation of new and potentially more politicized forms of connection in real life.

We could easily see Eva in STP, for example, as someone whose ties with a traditional community—namely, the linguistic and cultural community represented by her Hungarian aunt—have begun to loosen and be replaced by an imagined community mediated by markets and popular culture. In her case, that imagined community is an alternative America embodied by the music of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. In a sense, then, Eva’s self-scoring is a market-based solution to the fragmentation of the social. Yet whereas the ersatz form of sociality Streeck describes is a weaker, more inwardly turned and imagined one, things are more complicated with Eva. As we have argued, Eva’s use of the tape deck, echoing contemporaneous uses of the boombox, is in many ways a direct appeal to physical community. If the sociality it facilitates is partly imagined, it is also partly real; she plays her music publicly, after all, if not explicitly for the public. If she does so in part to bolster private fantasies about her own empowerment as an immigrant on the streets of the New World, it is an empowerment that, unlike the atomized subjectivity of neoliberalism, never denies its dependence on very real others. This is confirmed by the scene on the beach, described above, in which an abandoned Eva chooses to sit in silence rather than seek some sort of fantasized refuge in her musical spell. It is because real connections and community remain elusive, the scene seems to say, that the spell has failed.

MT welcomes a similar interpretation. In the opening scene, the Walkman enables a turn away from the “dead time” of boredom and social disenchantment and towards the private realm of fantasy. Yet Mitzuko and Jun also defy the Walkman’s socially determined function of reinforcing the inner sanctum of bourgeois interiority by listening to it together, and only after agreeing on which music fantasy—Elvis or Carl Perkins?—will be operative.⁶⁷ The escape music provides is a socially negotiated one. What is important here is shared experience mediated by music, not merely the instrumental management of individual emotional lives.

We must draw a slightly more ambivalent conclusion about PV. In the early scene with the record player, Allie puts on music amid an uncomfortable silence after failing to connect with Leila, keeping his back to her as he dances in a way that would suggest a retreat from interpersonal negotiation into escapist fantasy. While it is perhaps the fantasized mobility offered by that private musical experience that gives Allie the agency to overcome the inertia of disenchantment, continue his metonymic drift, and leave rather than accommodate himself to a broken New York, his self-scoring remains on the level of the imaginary, of an almost nihilistically aesthetic self-fashioning in the image of jazz that remains largely shut off from mediation by others. That this self-fashioning has nothing less than existential implications is reflected in the story told to Allie about the suicidal saxophone player: so important is the maintenance of the musically defined self-image that losing access to it leads to death.

Yet in the end, if these films differ in the degree to which acts of self-scoring as self-care end up being mediated by others, they all nonetheless offer striking depictions of a kind of codependent relationship that exists between at least nominally responsibilized working-class subjects, confronted with a foreclosed sense of hope in the neoliberal city, and the compensatory fantasies enabled by portable music technologies that help to structure and perpetuate their desire.

Paths for Future Research: Self-Scoring, Musical Connection, and the Audience

We have been exploring self-scoring in Jarmusch as an act undertaken by characters to musically enhance the narrative screen that is their real lives, mediating different forms of sociality amid the socio-political circumstances described. In closing, we want to briefly consider self-scoring’s additional role of providing a soundtrack for the films as such, a role that can’t help but implicate another entity with whom these characters might musically connect: the audience.

Consider again the opening walking scene of STP. The camera is static as Eva enters the shot, stops, takes out her tape player, and exits the frame. Yet compellingly, shortly after she plays her music and following a fade to black, the camera begins to move, tracking her down the street. It is as though Eva’s music is what activates us as voyeurs, implicates us in her desire for belonging, and moves us through the scene with her. Recalling the lyrics of “Spell” once again but this time interpreting “you” (“I put a spell on you”) not as the city but as the film’s audience: she puts a spell on us to make us even more voyeuristically hers.

This ability of music to breach the perceived boundaries of the diegesis recalls Robynn Stilwell’s description of metadiegetic music’s ability to perform a kind of “direct address, threatening to breach the fourth wall that is the screen.”⁶⁸ Yet here, that intimacy with the spectator isn’t accomplished by metadiegetic means.⁶⁹ Instead, it works through a number of factors related to Eva’s diegetic self-scoring. The lyrics of the song, which concern the casting of a spell, essentially describe the incantatory breaching of a boundary, one that might as well exist between characters and audience. Furthermore, the “spell” could also be said to refer to the power of film sound in general to provide a sense of boundary-crossing immediacy; to paraphrase Michel Chion, sounds enrich the two-dimensional image with a sense of spatialized presence that—however illusory—can facilitate the audience’s perception of their closeness to the profilmic events.⁷⁰ Finally, the aforementioned camera movement seemingly initiated by self-scoring has the effect of cementing all of this together, simulating the effects of Eva’s musical spell being cast beyond the fourth wall of the screen.

This effect is subtly heightened by music’s changing function in the scene. Eva’s music is clearly diegetic here, played from her tape player and heard alongside other sounds with visualized sources, such as her footsteps. Yet after a few seconds, the footsteps fade entirely, changing the music’s spatial signature in a way that invites us to also hear a change in its function, and one with subtle implications for the audience-as-musical-addressee. We might say that this change of spatial signature helps it to take on a connotative or narrational role (akin to traditional scoring) even as it remains part of the diegesis, solidifying the sense that the song isn’t just a fact of the narrative but also something that narrates, that sets the general terms for how we will understand Eva’s fantasies and desires going forward.⁷¹ In terms of the audience now entrained on Eva’s musical message, the shift simulates an introjection of the music in the form of something that now more ambiently and subconsciously structures its perception of her. The spectator is beckoned across the fourth wall by Eva’s musical spell only to be held there by its internalization in the form of a shared musical imaginary.

Yet self-scored music also has implications for the audience in a more general sense. This has to do with the illusory sense of immediacy that is conveyed when characters in the narrative provide a score for themselves, seeming to circumvent the musical mediation more typically imposed upon them by traditional Hollywood scoring. There is an extent, in other words, to which self-scoring appears to be scoring from the inside out. Though these remain directorial choices, by narratively giving musical agency to his characters, Jarmusch offers up musical moments that feel more immediate, allowing his characters to cast more powerful spells on the audience than traditional scoring might have otherwise allowed.

The possibilities of a particularly empathetic form of audience-character intimacy here via self-scoring are only amplified when we consider a certain meta element at play in these films. What the alienated, adrift characters seek in reaching for music is perhaps not so different from what spectators seek in a film: a kind of meaning-making and connection amid the underwhelming realities of everyday life, if not an outright escape from those things. Yet the spectator of Jarmusch must be content with films that, in many ways, are not so much escapes themselves as they are about the limited ability of art to adequately provide or sustain those escapes, if only in the instrumentalized sense of self-care we have been exploring. By supplying much of the music through self-scoring, these films largely eschew the use of music as a more disembodied and manipulative guarantor of that escape—music as what Adorno and Eisler called film’s ideological “cement”—in order to instead be about our historically situated attempts to use it as such, whether in trains, hotel rooms, apartments, or streets.⁷²