The Dead Don’t Die (Well)
“Official poster for The Dead Don’t Die. ” Wikipedia , Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., uploaded 11 Jun. 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Don%27t_Die_(2019_film)#/media/File:The_Dead_Don't_Die.jpeg . Accessed 17 Oct. 2020. Paterson (2016) was actually the second film by director-writer Jim Jarmusch that I watched —The first was his 2019 horror-comedy The Dead Don’t Die , which I have always essentially thought of since first watching it as a zombie movie set in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon. It’s a very low-key off-kilter and absurd film, which would seem to make it recognizably Jarmusch-like. I think it’s a very funny movie, though not in a laugh-out-loud sort of way. Instead, the humor comes from the way that certain lines get repeated (“Was it a wild animal? … Or several wild animals?”) and the way that most characters are so disaffected and stoic for most of the film. There’s a clipped quality to almos...
