Jarmusch in Your Hearing Aid

Some people with tinnitus experience phantom music. It's a sustained noise that occurs in one's inner ear which the brain tries to interpret as music. I've experienced, it's kinda trippy...an unending, improvisational riff that can sound like any instrument or musical genre. I've heard it as an electric guitar, a sax wail, bagpipes, singing...it's been metal, C&W, a Celtic jig, opera, acid, and more. If you sit back, relax, and just let it play it's not at all unpleasant. It induces a state that's a little light-headed, in a good way, a little meditative. Probably it has something to do with inner ear pressure – I had this happen when I took my first flight on a passenger jet.

Recently I've been discovering the cinema of Jim Jarmusch, beginning with Only Lovers Left Alive this past October. No thought on his films yet, I'm just letting them soak in...have seen all of his features but Stranger Than paradise and his Coffee and Cigarettes series. The only one I haven't enjoyed is Permanent Vacation which takes a long time to convey very little. Besides his fascination with cultural interplay, the standout theme I;m seeing is the transience of all things but art and fame.

His movies' moods are a little lightheaded (in a good way, a little meditative.

Jarmusch's film Dead Man opens with Johnny Depp on a train traveling the old American West. The director favors long, static takes and contemplative silences, and he sets the tone of each film with scenery of aging and dilapidated structures or the ruins of same. We get a sense of just how endless this journey is for Depp's character, and it will continue long after he has deboarded.

After some minutes, and electric guitar begins a subdued, aimless riff. My immediate thought was of how anachronistic the choice was, but after a moment it struck a chord with me (sorry): I thought, 'That's what Depp is hearing in his head! He has tinnitus!”

That was a month ago, and the thought was mostly a whimsical one. A few months ago I watched another Jarmusch protagonist on another spiritual journey in The Limits of Control, and again (and for the entirety of the film, similar to Dead Man) the films' original score employs the same kind of music, not quite subliminal, long improv riffs on a single chord. In both films, the music is exactly what people with tinnitus hear, in the same circumstances, and inducing the same airy state of mind/being.

I'm seriously wondering now whether this isn't intentional on Jim Jarmusch's part and whether he doesn't have tinnitus himself. Or is this something his fans already know? A quick internet search this afternoon turned up no hits. See, it occurred to me after the fact that this is exactly the kind of thing I would want to do with a movie were I a director...but if I did I'd be accused of copying Jarmusch, and rightly so.