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Patterson's Intertextuality
Milo 2022-04-19 09:02:11
After the last "Broken Flower" was selected as the top ten of the year in 2005, Jarmusch was selected again 12 years later, like a reincarnation. "Patterson" is Jarmusch's film dedicated to poetry, and a poem dedicated to film. Just like the "twin" intention he frequently emphasizes in his films, "Patterson" does a good job in the correlation between texts. Paterson is not only the name of the movie, the name of the hero, the name of the city, but more importantly, it is a poem written by the modern American poet William Carlos Williams based in Paterson, New Jersey, from the title to the movie – character – space – Mutual mapping between poems. The driver, played by actor Adam Driver, also really got his bus driver's license. At the end of the film, Japanese tourists from afar come to Paterson in pursuit of William's poems. The Japanese tourist is played by Masahiro Nagase, who starred in Jarmusch's 1989 work "Mystery Train," in which he still plays a tourist who comes to Memphis in pursuit of Elvis' music. The poems written by Paterson in the film come from the contemporary American poet Ron Padgett, who created four new works for the film, while the poem written by the little girl in the film was written by Jarmusch himself. In addition, the black man rapping in the laundromat is from the hip-hop group Wu Tang Clan, which also featured characters in Jarmusch's 1999 film "Ghost Dogs." The complaining young couple on the bus is a pair of young actors who play lovers in Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom". When Paterson's notebook was destroyed at the end of the film, he said "They were only words written on water", which was taken from the epitaph "Here lies one whose name was written on water" by the famous British poet Ye Ci.
Extended Reading
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Everett: Well it's like they always say. "Sun still rises every mornin' and sets every evenin'." Always another day. Right?
Paterson: Yeah. So far.
Everett: So far?
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Japanese Poet: Excuse me?
Japanese Poet: ah-ha