Mystery Train

The King and I

Suzanne Scott on Mystery Train

Empty streets littered with broken-down pick-up trucks, vacant lots clogged with overgrown weeds, interiors notable only for their peeling wallpaper and dingy textiles, landmarks that hardly appear to be worth marking to the naked eye—this is Jim Jarmusch’s Memphis, a ghost town where the residence of its most notable ghost, the gloriously gaudy Graceland, always looms offscreen, unreachable by the lowdown inhabitants of Mystery Train. Elvis Aaron Presley permeates each filmic short story in Jarmusch’s overlapping triad, sometimes directly, other times indirectly, but his presence is far more than simple connective tissue. In a film that ruminates on the status of the Other in American society (whether they be Japanese tourists, an Italian stranded for a lone night, or a British immigrant dissatisfied with the American dream), Elvis is the ultimate accepted Other, concurrently revered for his difference and claimed as our own. As Elvis is framed as an idol, a specter and a doppelganger in turn, his rule over the Memphis outside of Graceland’s gates (and America at large) is examined in subtle and often bittersweet detail by Jarmusch until at last the myth is secondary to our interaction with that myth and how those interactions form our identity.

Just as Graceland stands as a solitary diamond in the surrounding urban rough, Jarmusch punctuates dingy landscapes and low-class signifiers with dazzling flashes of red—a suitcase, a smear of lipstick, a pimp-worthy three-piece suit, and so on—giving the impression of a failed attempt to grab a bit of Elvis’s glamour and try it on for size, only to inevitably discover that it looks cartoonish out of context. Elvis’s very aesthetic—the greaser pompadour, the Southern drawl—peppers Jarmusch’s otherwise sparse frames, painting and pictures often hanging as defacto crucifixes on the walls, looking down on the film’s characters with doleful, doting eyes. Even staring up from a scrapbook of American iconography cobbled together by a Japanese tourist, juxtaposed side by side with the likes of Madonna and the Statue of Liberty, Elvis remains a phenomenon rather than a person.

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