Jarmusch: Permanent Vacation (1980)

It feels right that Jim Jarmusch shot the greatest vision of No Wave New York from the brink of unemployment. Released shortly after he dropped out of film school, Permanent Vacation is perhaps the definitive vision of the city as the nihilistic, negative, necrotic wasteland that the No Wavers set out to proclaim, in what doesn’t retrospectively feel like a subculture so much as an attempt to eviscerate everything about subculture that might be appropriated by the status quo. As befits such a vision, there’s virtually no character, story or even dialogue, just a series of spaces traversed by Allie (Chris Parker), Jarmusch’s surrogate, over what turn out to be his last few days in New York. Closer in spirit to Chantal Akerman’s News From Home than many of Jarmusch’s subsequent works, what unfolds is something of an angular, abrasive, art-damaged city symphony for the punk era, an atone-poem for a metropolis that still feels as if it’s living and breathing in black-and-white, leaching all the colour out of Jarmusch’s mise-en-scene in the process. While there’s something about the size and scope of the dereliction envisaged here that recalls the most chaotic, anarchic and abrasive noise experimentation of the era – virtually every abandoned alleyway, street and stairwell feels like an inchoate No Wave venue – there’s just as much sensitivity to the quietness at the heart of No Wave as well, which in Jarmusch’s hands become nothing less than an affirmation that New York can still tolerate great emptinesses, silences and loneliness of the kind that have formed the basis of his filmography ever since, even or especially when his films aren’t set in New York. In that sense, the film’s version of the present is as a kind of concatenation of the most sombre, silent and solitary moments of the urban past, whether in the neorealist dereliction Jarmusch brings to his mise-en-scene, the nods in the direction of The Naked City, or the perpetual sense of departure and final dockland sequence that makes this a late work of poetic realism as much as anything else. On the rare occasions when we venture outside studio-scaled space, we’re met with a bombed-out wasteland of yawning ruins and crazed veterans, as if memorialising those parts of New York untouched by gentrification as part of a genealogy of urban catastrophe were the closest thing No Wave could admit to a counter-cultural vision. On the one hand, as might be expected, that makes for a singularly bleak experience, but it also manages to open up the city to even the most impoverished gaze, which is perhaps why Jarmusch’s camera feels as if it is imprinting himself on it as much as drawing sustenance from it, converging cinema and graffiti into a series of macabre memento mori that segue post-punk into goth before your very eyes, backed by a brooding score that has more than a touch of the dissonant illbience of the soundscapes of Dead Man, Ghost Dog and even Only Lovers Left Alive. As a lengthy rumination on the Doppler Effect might suggest, it’s a film that often feels as if it’s left sound behind, which is not exactly to say that it’s silent – though it often is – but that it’s haunted by subterranean post-sonic gurgles, bells that always seem to be ringing somewhere on the very distant fringes of what still feels like a city of tenements, giving inchoate, intermittent voice to Allie’s dawning awareness that “the drift is going to take me.”