My sense of Jarmusch's title, beyond that of
various rephrasing of "Broken Flowers," was the popular Victorian sentiment,
voiced at least once in a poem, was the idea that 'flowers that rot
smell far worse than weeds.' And this homely homily is something I think even
the nineteen-year-old poet Nabokov would have scorned.
It is immediately after the departure of his last
pink-dressed girl friend, that Don receives the pink note referring to an
unknown son. If it were not for the reality this note acquires
through the excitement it arouses in his neighbor, a part time writer of
detective genre pulps, I would interpret the it as a figment of Don's
imagination -- a sort of harbinger of his own mortality which he might likely
feel at the departure of what may be the last of his chances at renewing himself
in the form of some new little Don or Donette.
Keep your eye of the successive revisits Jarmusch
gives of the vase of pink flowers gradually rotting away.
In any case, Don's detective-buff neighbor
arranges the adventure on the road (it would be unlikely, from what we
have seen of Don Oblomov, formerly Don Juan, that he could arrange and
carry out such a journey on his own. And Don's first discovery, played
delicately, is of a nineteen-ish boy on the airport shuttle. Don spends more
time trying to get a glimpse of this boy than he does eavesdropping on the
chatter of the high school girls. A switch to the paternal? Or is Don Juan on
his way to a death in Venice?
It is after this that Don has his consternating
meeting with Lolita. A very good point, raised by one of the contributors
here, is that the last old girl friend Don meets
will live in exactly the circumstances in which Humbert finally finds his
pale, pregnant, eyeglasses-wearing, and still hopelessly lovable Lo. But
between these bookends, I must say that I can
find little relation to the work of Nabokov in the rest of the film. And the
final girlfriend could as easily be a product of Jarmusch's (not sure myself if
Jarmusch was the writer) imagination.
So. I guess I do not think that Jarmusch meant
"Flowers" as a non-stop homage to VN and his other works. VN wrote a lot
about love, the fleeting past, the time-transparency of dreams, recurring
elements in nature. But so do many writers, in there various ways, and so do
screenwriters and directors. Particularly directors who claim as favorites
the novels that Jarmusch lists.
Andrew Brown
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2006 1:51
PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] [Fwd: Re: [NABOKV-L]
Broken Flowers]
-------- Original Message --------
I
think that any cinephile would think as the title "Broken Flowers" as a
reference to D.W. Griffith's 1919 classic silent film "Broken Blossoms." As I
remember (not from 1919 but from some time ago), the main characters are a
sensitive Chinaman (in Chinatown) and a young Caucasion woman (but I don't
remember how young).
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