Jim Jarmusch poked holes in the hero worship of Elvis with Mystery Train
On Elvis Presley’s birthday, we dive into a film preoccupied with The King, his music, and his influences.
Photo: The Criterion Collection
Released in November 1989, Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train is seen as the final installment in the deadpan, hard-luck trilogy he began with 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise and continued with 1986’s Down By Law. It’s a journey Jarmusch started with actor-musician John Lurie, who not only starred in Paradise and Law, but also composed their scores. (He also appeared in and did music for Jarmusch’s 1980 debut Permanent Vacation.) Mystery Train—a three-chapter anthology of pre-Tarantino pulp fiction—marked Lurie’s last time scoring for Jarmusch. Set in Memphis, it’s certainly the most musical of Jarmusch’s ’80s indie operas. The filmmaker once again gathers an ensemble cast of cult musicians, offbeat character actors, and international special guests to play lost souls wandering around this crazy land. Along with Lurie’s bluesy compositions (which accompany scenes of characters walking through the more urban parts of Memphis), the Mystery Train soundtrack also includes oldies-but-goodies from soul and rock artists who spent some career-launching time in the home of the blues and birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll.
But since this film is called Mystery Train, it must first start off with The King. Elvis Presley’s star-making, rockabilly rendition of Junior Parker’s blues song “Mystery Train” is heard as the film introduces Mitsuko (Youki Kudoh) and Jun (Masatoshi Nagase), the protagonists of the triptych’s first story, “Far From Yokohama.” These Japanese teenagers are first seen on a train, listening to the tune on a Walkman. They’re on a pilgrimage to visit Sun Studios, Graceland, and other Elvis landmarks in Bluff City.
Talk of Elvis Aaron Presley is never too far away in Mystery Train. Mitsuko can’t stop gushing about him. (Her hepcat boyfriend, on the other hand, prefers Carl Perkins.) In the second story, appropriately titled “A Ghost,” a skeevy con man (Tom Noonan) tries to get money out of a visiting Italian widow (Nicoletta Braschi) by telling her a tale involving Presley and a keepsake that the icon allegedly gave him to pass along to her. The final installment, “Lost In Space,” features English punk royalty Joe Strummer as Johnny, a snotty, heartbroken, recently fired British greaser (nicknamed “Elvis” by his co-workers) who ropes in both his friend (comedian Rick Aviles) and his brother-in-law (a very young Steve Buscemi) for a night of robbery, gunshots, and excessive drinking.
At some point, Elvis himself serenades many of these characters. His dreamy rendition of the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart standard “Blue Moon,” which Elvis recorded at Sun Studio in 1954, plays on the radio in three crucial scenes. (Tom Waits provides the voice of the easygoing DJ who spins it.) Mitsuko and Jun listen to it after a bit of lovemaking at a rundown hotel. The widow, who’s on the same floor, also hears it when a certain gold lamé suit-wearing apparition visits her room. And Johnny and his pals/accomplices are listening to it in their getaway truck, as they drunkenly drive around town. Roy Orbison’s “A Cat Called Domino,” which was also recorded at Sun, plays before “Blue Moon.” In arranging the tracks, Jarmusch plays some back-to-back, recorded-in-Memphis tunes by baritone country rockers who could hit a high note whenever the occasion called for it.
While Elvis figuratively and literally haunts Mystery Train, Jarmusch also throws in tunes from other Memphis legends for some on-the-nose needle drops. When Mitsuko and Jun get their hotel room, Tennessee-born bluesman Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time” is playing on the lobby radio. In another scene, that same radio is blasting “Soul Finger,” from Memphis funk heroes The Bar-Kays, as the night clerk (proto-shock rocker Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) and bellboy (Cinqué Lee, Spike’s brother) bicker over who’s gonna eat the Japanese plum Mitsuko left as a tip.
The Bar-Kays aren’t the only Stax Records alumni on the soundtrack. Screwball soul great Rufus Thomas, who has a brief cameo as a light-seeking cigar smoker, appears again vocally, when Johnny plays “The Memphis Train” on a dive-bar jukebox. Later on, the jukebox aptly hits Johnny with Otis Redding’s “Pain In My Heart,” the Allen Touissant-penned title track from Redding’s debut 1964 album, recorded for Stax’s Volt Records.
By including these soul stars of color, Jarmusch lets it be known, in his Elvis-centric film, that Presley wasn’t the only Memphis resident who turned out iconic bangers. And considering that the original “Mystery Train” by Junior Parker plays over the end credits, Jarmusch acknowledges what so many historians, critics, and Black folk have been saying for years: If it wasn’t for these talents, we wouldn’t be talking about Presley in the first place.
By making a movie about a questionably beloved American icon, set in a town that wide-eyed tourists treat with wonder and awe but that its struggling residents would love to escape, Jarmusch threw one last, dark-humored jab at Reagan-era America before entering the ’90s. Mystery Train presents Memphis as a musical microcosm of the country during that era, when we failed to see the decay and disintegration going on around us because we were too preoccupied with mythologizing some old white superstar from the past.