Jim Jarmusch's hip, urban, comic jags arose from the same East Village-New York University explosion that nurtured the relentlessly contemporary films of Susan Seidelman and Spike Lee. His recurring motif is one of narrative as an inevitable byproduct of cultural collision. Jarmusch offers lowlife reflections of post-modernist communication and miscommunication between characters sealed off from one another, their only connection the many-tentacled pop trash culture of America.

In 1971, Jarmusch enrolled at Columbia University in the English literature program. A few months before graduation,