Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0012482, Fri, 24 Mar 2006 14:46:33 -0500

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Re: [Fwd: Re: [NABOKV-L] Broken Flowers]
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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 -----
From: Nabokv-L
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2006 1:51 PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] [Fwd: Re: [NABOKV-L] Broken Flowers]




-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Broken Flowers
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 12:47:04 -0500
From: Charles Nicol <cnicol@isugw.indstate.edu>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU

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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