Americans used to seek space: specifically big, unencumbered vistas where politics was a rumor and cloud formations were the developing news. Then, right around 1850, urbanity started to creep up on manifest destiny. Sure, you could still Donner Party your way into the new frontier, but anybody with means was picking out a nice brownstone and developing lingering resentments over easement issues. Decades whizzed by. Cars became a thing. But despite the advancement of American civilization, there remained in some vestigial pocket of the national psyche the yearning for a heaping pile of the unknown, preferably with a slightly haunting soundtrack.

This is certainly true for the work of Jim Jarmusch, whose achingly slow cinema isn't "about" anything in the same way that driving around aimlessly isn't "about" a destination: you will, of Sure, you could still Donner Party your way into the new frontier, but anybody with means was picking out a nice brownstone and developing lingering resentments over easement issues.course, eventually wind up somewhere, but it's the spaces in between that are worth consideration, especially when the only real company is the exposed nerve of your earthly existence. His cinematic rhythm enables you, even if you're Bill Murray, to really examine that existentialism. Why is Murray standing on a porch in his mid-fifties in an unfamiliar county, while an angry ex tries to find her weapon? Well, good question. Most of us rarely find ourselves where we expected we would be, and Jarmusch's work is frequently about that sense of dislocation: Your life is not your own, but you're still living it anyway. And how good a job are you doing? Impossible to say, really.

At least, this seems to be the takeaway from Broken Flowers, Jarmusch's 2005 film starring Bill Murray as a Don Juan who receives a letter from an anonymous lover, claiming he fathered a son with her twenty years previously. Poked and prodded by his surprisingly energetic pot-smoking neighbor, Don reluctantly sets out on a journey to visit each of the women from that time in his life. Some of the women have children; others are seemingly childless, but none of them cops to writing him the letter. Having made his fortune in the it's the spaces in between that are worth consideration, especially when the only real company is the exposed nerve of your earthly existence.vague field of "computers," Don seems to live his life at a comfortable remove, occasionally coming into contact with people, but never really holding them close. It is Don's visit to his rural ex, played by Tilda Swinton, in which the kind of low-grade, transitory nature of his existence is unavoidably framed by a wooden front porch. Structurally, the porch is the interstitial zone between indoors and out, and Murray has been dallying along this boundary for his entire life; neither alone nor intimate, Murray has never entirely come in from the cold, and likely never will. This is reinforced when, friendless, awkward, uncertain of why he even bothered to show up, Don confronts the simmering Swinton, whose "What the fuck do you want, Donny?" is the high point of their reunion. One gets the feeling that this is the exact situation that Don has tried to avoid all his life, yet ironically, his own choices have brought him here anyway. He has reached the core of his existence, and it is hostile and empty. Later, he wakes up with a black eye in his rental car in a field, and the film shifts into a meditative mode. Is the letter a hoax? Is he really connected to anyone? Does it take the bond of blood to make a family?

This same setting, with a less intact varnish, is used to cap off season five of The Sopranos, where soulful mob boss Tony Soprano must gun down his beloved cousin Tony Blundetto, played by Steve Buscemi. Blundetto is hiding out in a cabin in the woods, waiting for a potentially lethal spat of family politics to cool down, and expecting to leave for Italy as soon as the tension dissipates. However, in the same way that Don must confront the unpleasant center of his untethered, dispassionate existence, so must Blundetto face down decades of taking what he wanted, when, without any particular regard for inter-family politics. Both Don and Blundetto are in a self-designed limbo; the porch, as a particularly American interstitial space, is the portal to their own tailored reckonings. In Blundetto's case, the easily exploited edges of late-stage American capitalism have enabled him to live the life of an autodidactic tyrant. His strong family ties have kept him emotionally solid, but his criminal nature has kept him ethically empty. His contradictory love of chaos and his love of family is again represented by this porch. Blundetto can't really inhabit either world permanently, and so he the porch, as a particularly American interstitial space, is the portal to their own tailored reckonings.meets his end on the termite-ridden floorboards of this interstitial zone. Of course, both sequences owe a great deal to the infamous porch from The Searchers, which with its raggedly wooden trusses and columns has become a kind of cinematic keystone for stories about confronting one's destiny. 

While Jarmusch's work is often described as being quasi-European, this sense of meaningful meaninglessness is, I think, uniquely American. Jarmusch is not afraid of space in a way that is refreshing. He lets his films breathe, in the sense that he will frame a seemingly unchanging scene, such as a bellhop's desk in Memphis, or a train car in Spain, or the living room of a barely animated middle-aged computer tycoon, and hold it until every last millimeter of emotion has been fully released. As a viewer, you are forced to experience the full force and gradually diminishing exhalation of feeling. While for some this can be excruciating, for others it is a welcome break from the constant clamor for "answers." In a way, this is exactly how The Sopranos leaves things as well; the by-now infamous "cliffhanger" ending of the series, which riled audiences back in 2007, is about embracing the uncertainty of the moment, the slightly queasy sensation of understanding that your life does not have a pat, three-act structure. To be human, and more specifically, to be a boundary-disparaging American, is to be relentlessly reminded that life is often most fully experienced in the spaces in between.