The Marvel Of Routine In Paterson
Put the word “routine” into a thesaurus, and you’ll be presented with dreary synonyms such as unremarkable, plain, and conventional. You might personally conjure adjectives such as ordinary, monotonous, and tedious, and happen to be someone who considers routine as appealing as a turd baguette.
And yet, routine could also be a synonym for human existence. We’re obliged to repeat the same processes day in day out, whether it’s the repetitive tasks of our job, emptying the infernal dishwasher, or mindlessly scrolling through Netflix like a member of the undead. Often, we complete our routines wishing we were doing something else; that some excitement might snatch us away before our final brain cell dissolves with a sad whimper.
In Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film Paterson, we witness an unconventional character who thinks and behaves in the opposite way. Paterson is a bus driver in the city of Paterson, New Jersey. He wakes up around 6:15am without the need of an alarm clock, kisses his wife Laura, eats cheerios, walks to work, drives his bus, eats dinner, walks their dog Marvin, has a beer at the local bar, and then goes home to sleep. You may consider Paterson’s existence to be a Sisyphean hell if not for his kindness, his calm demeanour, his enviable relationship with his wife, and the poetry he writes in the quiet moments of the day.
