It’s hard to believe, but Jim Jarmusch’s film Mystery Train debuted at Cannes 25 years ago in the spring of 1989. The first of the director’s anthology films, Mystery is also the first film Jarmusch shot in color. The film features three separate but interconnected stories about foreigners who find themselves crossing paths at the dilapidated Arcade Hotel in Memphis, TN.

Here’s the Wiki…

Mystery Train is a 1989 independent anthology film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch and set in Memphis, Tennessee. The film comprises a triptych of stories involving foreign protagonists unfolding over the course of the same night. “Far From Yokohama” features a Japanese couple (played by Youki Kudoh and Masatoshi Nagase) on a blues pilgrimage, “A Ghost” focuses on an Italian widow (Nicoletta Braschi) stranded in the city overnight, and “Lost in Space” follows the misadventure of a newly single and unemployed Englishman (Joe Strummer) and his companions (Rick Aviles and Steve Buscemi). They are linked by a run-down flophouse overseen by a night clerk (played by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) and his dishevelled bellboy (Cinqué Lee), a scene featuring Elvis Presley’s “Blue Moon”,[3] and a gunshot.

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25 years ago, Robert Anton Wilson starred in this experimental, made for television film, Borders. The movie combines interviews and commentary by luminaries like Wilson and physicist Michio Kaku with early computer animation and a dramatized storyline about an idealistic scientist trying to do honest research in the belly of the defense industry beast.

This show is dated in the best possible sense: The animations are primitive and charming, and the idealistic scientist is played by a baby-faced Steve Buscemi. Some of the then-current events mentioned here might cause a bit of temporal whiplash, but it’s also interesting that many of the problems being addressed and questions being asked here are the same ones we continue to deal in today.

The film is about crossing borders of all kinds — spiritual, political, geographic. Can you imagine a better guide than Robert Anton Wilson? Here’s the film…

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