Directed by Jim Jarmusch
It's Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and he's a wild man, so bug off.
In the opening of Stranger Than Paradise, we follow Eva, just landed in New York from Hungary, as she makes her way through the dingy streets of the Lower East Side in search of her cousin’s flat. She is not a tourist. As she walks, she takes a portable cassette tape player from her baggage and introduces us to her personal theme song and the signature track of the film, the voodoo blues vamp “I Put a Spell on You” by Screaming Jay Hawkins. Incidentally, Screaming Jay hails from Cleveland – the second, and much bleaker, location we follow Eva to in the film. The choice of this song and that it reappears throughout the film, however, is certainly not incidental. It’s not so much a soundtrack as it is another character or perhaps a sort of narrator providing a philosophical undertone.
As I watched, I was thinking about Jarmusch’s relationship to music as a filmmaker. With the help of Wikipedia, I discovered that the trio of actors in Stranger Than Paradise are also musicians. [jazz musician John Lurie, former Sonic Youth drummer-turned-actor Richard Edson, and Hungarian-born actress and violinist Eszter Balint] The casting of musicians as actors is not anomalous to Stranger Than Paradise. We see “wild man” Hawkins appear in the flesh in Jarmusch’s 1989 film Mystery Train. There’s Down By Law (1986) with Tom Waits and the musical ensemble of Coffee & Cigarettes (2003). He has a long history of working with musicians both as sonic spell casters and as actors. Jarmusch employs music like some filmmakers use lighting to create atmosphere, or as a backstory to underscore a way of life. He is clearly has a deep understanding of the way that music enriches our experiences – how it casts a spell on us.