Paterson, the movie

Now that I can see why there's nothing wrong with political correctness, having in just over a week had so many demonstrations of its opposite, it's possible that I can also see that we've come to a time in this country when almost nobody's life is making them happy.

And so, feeling as if I was trapped in a Richard Serra Cor-ten sculpture that wasn't functioning as a work of art but was instead being used as a maximum-security prison, I escaped to a movie. 

I chose the matinee, a time when the escape hatch from day is open just enough to slip through and find another world.

There, the theatre lights dimmed and once the infernal coming attractions were over I was charmed, or becharmed, whatever the case might be when one sinks deeply into one's chair in a movie theatre on a late Wednesday afternoon, to watch a movie about poetry, a subject that resists definition by its very definition.

Perhaps being inside the fantastic darkness of the theatre was all I needed. Perhaps the thought of someone actually making a movie about a young poet who drives a bus for a living in a forlorn, hollowed-out American city in the east, writing poems by hand into a small notebook in his spare time, gave me the lift I was seeking. Or was it the thought of director Jim Jarmusch pitching the story to a producer, saying to the money people who were thinking of putting up the dough to make the movie, "the main action is of a poet writing his poems..."

Indeed, the making of a poem, in which you can see both the poet write the poem into his notebook, recite it as he's writing, and see what he's written printed on-screen, are the major action figures of the film. 

The first poem the poet in "Paterson" makes is about love, titled "Love Poem". The second has the word hmm in it, and who isn't a fool for the word hmm, who doesn't find the word hmm as funny and mystical as the word perhaps, if not more so. The word hmm is so American, while the word perhaps is so French. The third poem, "Poem", is about duality as far as I can tell, or the writing of a poem, the process as it were of writing a poem, if poetry is actually writing and if there is such a thing as process when it comes to writing poetry, a poem of being in both body and mind at once and transcending either one or the other, or both. 

"Paterson" is a movie you have to be patient with when you're watching it, patient enough to know that patience is a divine activity, just as you have to be patient when making a poem. It isn't really a movie about poetry at all; it's a movie about poems and what they mean to their makers.

The movie ends when it needs to and wants to, on a poem.