Paterson- Was Kylo Ren Really a Bus Driver?

The Indy Movie Paterson showed up in our mailbox the day after watching Star Wars – The Last Jedi and imagine our surprise to see Kylo Ren, Jedi drop-out, master of the Dark Side and would be master of the Universe driving a bus and writing poetry in Paterson, New Jersey.  This quirky little film was on our watch list because it had been well reviewed and we had not had a chance to see it.  How refreshing to see an actor,Adam Driver, who can portray both ends of a very broad spectrum of ethical functioning.  I had actually been concerned by what I considered to be his semitic features in his role as Darth Vader’s heir apparent.  So it was with some relief that a quick Google search clarified that he was raised a choir boy and that his stepfather is a pastor.  According to Wikipedia, he was a bit of a terror as a kid, and he sold Fuller brushes after high school before joining the Marines and then ultimately ending up at Julliard to hone his acting chops.

In Paterson, he plays a local kid named for the town – Paterson – who now lives in a very plain house with his ditzy wife and walks to work each morning as a bus driver.  We are invited into his daily routine, waking with him each morning of the week as he awakens, without an alarm, and nuzzles his wife, who usually tells him about a dream in which he figures prominently.  We follow him through his day where he eaves drops on his rider’s conversations, has a beer after work at the local bar while walking the dog, and, in between, writes poems – poems about love and poems about driving a bus.  He writes his poems in a journal that he carries with him or keeps locked in his basement office – it is what his girlfriend calls his “secret notebook”. 

The film is filled with whimsical convergences to which we give meaning – his wife dreams that they might have twins – and the rest of the film is filled with his chance encounters with twins.  We are invited to wonder about twins and what they might mean – but we are given few clues.  Perhaps the encounter at the end of the film with a Japanese Poet is an encounter with Paterson’s twin?  Similarly, he encounters a gang of hoodlums who point out the value of his dog – and warn him about the potential of a dog napping – but he doesn’t seem to pay it any mind, other than to note, as he is loosely putting the dog’s leash around the pipe outside the bar that night that the dog should watch out for dognappers   - and we are left to wonder, vaguely, if he would welcome them.

The central convergence is between this man’s name and the city in which he lives – a city that has many famous son’s – the two most prominent being Abbott of Abbott and Costello fame – and William Carlos Williams – of poetry fame.  Is Paterson fated to be a poet?  Or is he called to it?  What is the nature of a poet?  Is a poet an observer?  Someone who is caught in the forces that move around him and describes them in pithy and dramatic ways so that others can experience them with him?  Is this what Shakespeare did?  Is this what my poet friend Phil does?

Meanwhile, the action in the film is almost all about the people around Paterson – he is a nearly inert observer – pained by but reluctantly supportive of his wife’s ambition to buy a guitar to become a country singer and more openly pleased when her cupcakes sell well at the local farmer’s market in what she is sure will be her other path to fame and fortune.  When the action centers on Paterson, his bus breaks down on a routine run, he is nearly derailed by it – efficiently evacuating his passengers, but flummoxed by the complications of calling in the incident to the central office. 

This movie is, then, a poem.  Austere, beautiful, each day a stanza, it tells in the arc of a week story of the life of a poet – and the meeting with the Japanese poet at the end of the movie helps to underscore that being a poet is who this man is.  However other poets may live, this man, a bus driver, lives in the way that he does and produces the poetry that he does as a result of living the poet’s life.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, this man’s emotional life is very near the surface.  He, like the actor who plays him, is an ex-marine (I assume it is Adam Driver’s marine portrait that graces his nightstand and lets us know that), and he uses his military skills when he needs to – when there is danger that calls them out.  He is also remarkably observant of his wife – and we observe her too – both her physical and ditzy beauty, but we also wryly realize with him that her dreams, while painful to his sensibilities, are an expression of hers – and that his love for her – as her love for him – is pure – it takes her into account, it does not discount her.

From this perspective, I think the film is suggesting that the life of a poet – or rather living as a poet writes – is a desired state – an aesthetic state – possible even in a place like Paterson where the natural beauty has been hemmed in by industrial necessity – the old factories crowd near the picturesque waterfalls that almost certainly once provided the power to run the mills whose presence leave it viewable only from a small park with a chain link fence that separates the viewer from what is to be seen.  And yet the beauty can be seen – not just dispassionately; Paterson’s waters run deep.  The poet loves his town, he loves his wife, and he loves his poetry.

I realize that in this writing I have left out the central dramatic moment.  I think it actually makes sense to do that.  It is a moment where the plausibility of the story is most highly tested.  It is the moment, I have written elsewhere, where the movie as dream is being stretched almost to the point of breaking – the storyteller’s need to clarify the importance of writing poetry – and of sharing it with the world – of sharing our perspective so that others can appreciate it, and, I think, so that we know that we aren’t alone – this is so important to tell and yet it is not part and parcel of the peaceful narrative that a moment of violence creeps in – and yet the movie is able to survive the moment – we are able to remain asleep and to come to grips with what needs to be known – that this writing is not just a pastime – it is not just part of who this man is – it is who he is.  He is not, essentially, a bus driver, or even a lover, though both of those are essential to his primary identity – the identity of being a poet.

Now this is, of course, through another lens, a fiction.  None of us can be reduced in this way.  But from the perspective of this movie – which is, I think, a highly aesthetic one – and the perspective of a dreamer – it is a way of characterizing the essential nature of a person.  Paterson’s power is to distill the universe into a series of poems – to describe the world as he experiences it, just as Kylo Ren’s power is the desire to rule the universe with an iron fist and to make it into what he would have it be.  The psychoanalyst’s power – to help a person gain perspective on a particular moment – to put it in place – to help him or her understand how this thought and this action have a particular context – that is much more like the power of the poet and the artist than it is like Kylo Ren’s.

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