“There he is again,” a very drunk character says after seeing a painting of Elvis Presley hanging on a hotel wall towards the end of Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, once again exhibiting the singer’s inescapable influence over the film and the city of Memphis. You could also have the same reaction to the way we seem unable to escape the long shadow Elvis has cast culturally, not to mention the continued abundance of TV shows or movies where Elvis is a passing character or his outsized life story is being told, as we’re now getting with Baz Luhrmann's Elvis. While 1989’s Mystery Train barely features Elvis as an actual character in the film, it is still one of the more subtly effective Elvis stories, as its Memphis setting and affinity for the city’s musical history makes it so that Elvis is both a literal and metaphorical ghost who haunts the film in a way that also feels connected to the way he haunts American culture at large.

You get the sense that Elvis is going to have a considerable influence on Mystery Train from its opening moments, and not just because the film is named after one of Presley’s early songs. We hear this very song play over the opening credits as two Japanese tourists Jun (Masatoshi Nagase) and Mitsuko (Youki Kudoh) are riding a train toward Memphis, discussing their plans for this pilgrimage. Mitsuko is excited to see Elvis landmarks like Sun Studios and Graceland, while Jun is more excited to see the city that originated Carl Perkins, who he argues is the better musician. They then get a brief, somewhat underwhelming tour of the very modest Sun Studios, where Elvis recorded his earliest songs, as did greats like Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Jun’s beloved Carl Perkins. After walking through a fairly desolate stretch of Memphis, they end up carrying on their “Elvis Presley/Carl Perkins” argument at a statue of Elvis in the middle of town before ending up at a seedy hotel, inhabited by a delightfully bickering hotel clerk and bellboy (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Cinqué Lee, respectively) where they spend the night.

The next two intertwined stories in the film take place over the course of the same day and night in Memphis, one of them being about an Italian woman named Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi), whose husband has just died. After a somewhat predatory weirdo at a diner tells her a story about picking up Elvis’s ghost hitchhiking one night, she ends up at the same hotel as Jun and Mitsuko. There she encounters Dee Dee (Elizabeth Bracco), a woman who has just broken up with her boyfriend, and the two women share a room together, which much like Jun and Mitsiko’s room, has a painting of Elvis hanging on the wall. When Dee Dee is asleep, Luisa sees an apparition appear, which appears to be Elvis, though the ghost quickly disappears after explaining that he must be in the wrong place.

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Image via Orion Classics

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The final story in the film centers on Dee Dee’s ex-boyfriend Johnny (Joe Strummer), who everybody keeps calling Elvis due to his pompadoured greaser look. He starts causing a ruckus at a local pool hall that we saw in the earlier stories, where Dee Dee’s brother has shown up to take Johnny home. However, Johnny shoots a liquor store owner and is forced to go on the lam, eventually hiding out in the same hotel as our other characters. The hotel room they stay in is much more dilapidated than the other two and features a painting of Elvis in his late “white suit” era, giving this chapter a kind of depraved finality that feels akin to Elvis’s final years before his death.

Though Mystery Train may seem fairly modest as the type of multipronged character-driven story that would later become commonplace in the ‘90s due to the influence of Pulp Fiction, it was actually a big step-up in the budget and production for Jarmusch. By this time, the director had established himself as one of the true mavericks of low-budget independent cinema in the blockbuster-obsessed ‘80s, and Mystery Train sees him expanding on the minimalism of his early films like Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law. While Stranger Than Paradise is memorable for its use of one integral song, “I Put A Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (who fittingly has a supporting role in Mystery Train), this later film's slightly bigger budget sees Jarmusch getting to take advantage of a bigger music licensing budget and in the process getting to indulge his inner music fan.

Jarmusch would prove that he's quite a bit more music-savvy than the average film director throughout his career, with his casting of rock stars like Iggy Pop or Tom Waits as supporting characters, as well as left-field choices to score his films, such as Neil Young’s electric guitar-laden score for the western Dead Man, or RZA’s beat-infused accompaniment to Ghost Dog: The Way of The Samurai. However, Mystery Train feels like the purest expression of Jarmusch’s music fandom, as there’s something very specific that he nails about the way in which a monumentally popular singer like Elvis has this all-encompassing presence in the minds of both fans and non-fans alike.

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Image via Orion Classics

There’s a scene in Jun and Mitsuko's hotel room where Mitsuko is showing off a binder she’s made full of cut-out photos, comparing the similarities of Elvis’s face to that of Buddha, the Statue of Liberty, and Madonna. It evokes a certain kind of fandom that only someone as mythic as Elvis can illicit, and is the type of thing you could draw a line from to the modern over-analyzing of pop stars done in the post-internet age on forums, blogs, and social media. Simultaneously, for every famous pop star whose music and image the public is inundated with, there are always the “too cool for school” music fans that Jun is more or less a stand-in for, constantly arguing that a more obscure artist like Carl Perkins is actually better than Elvis. Jarmusch clearly has some affinity for this type of music fan, since when asked in a Q&A special feature done for Mystery Train’s Criterion release, he admitted to being “a Carl Perkins man”. And yet, he’s still willing to point out the absurdity in Jun’s anti-Elvis sentiment, since he’s insisting on Carl Perkins’s greatness while staring at a statue of Elvis, though it's hard to say if anyone will ever build such a monument to Perkins.

Mystery Train also taps into this rarely explored idea that there are certain dead musicians whose cultural influence is so massive that they seem to haunt the cities they’re synonymous with. It’s an idea that feels especially true for outsiders who become fascinated with a certain city’s music scene, as Jarmusch had actually never been to Memphis when he came up with the idea for Mystery Train. However, he was clearly enamored with its rich musical history that included not only Elvis and the other Sun Records artists, but also the great R&B and soul artists that recorded at Stax Records during the ‘60s and ‘70s. It’s perhaps not the state of mind of the typical Memphis resident, but if you’re a music fan living in a city that doesn’t have much of a reputation otherwise, the musicians of its past can feel like inseparable parts of living there, whether you like it or not. I personally can’t speak to Memphis in this regard, but growing up in Seattle in the wake of grunge often made Kurt Cobain feel like a mythic, all-encompassing cultural figure that haunted the streets of my hometown not unlike the way Elvis haunts his in Mystery Train.

Speaking of, the way cinematographer Robbie Müller shoots the streets of Memphis in Mystery Train also feels like it's wrestling with the city's past while depicting where it was in the late ‘80s. The Memphis that Elvis’ stardom was born into was a bustling intersection of hillbilly and Black culture, and perhaps was the only place in the U.S. that could’ve birthed Elvis’s sound, a potent cross between R&B, blues, and country. Though in Mystery Train, you get the sense that the days of Beale Street serving as an epicenter of music are far behind it. We see our characters walking by abandoned buildings and flickering neon signs, while a recurring visual motif is the sight of run-down theaters with blank marquees, giving the sense that these palaces used to be the sight of energetic musical performances and have now been abandoned. While the movie’s modest nature avoids such grandiose sentiments, it very much feels like the characters are walking through a city that’s become a graveyard lamenting the city’s — and by extension, America’s — Elvis-infused heyday in the ‘50s, but has now been reduced to a shadow of its former self.

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Image via Orion Classics

Mystery Train also occasionally comments on the race relations in Memphis and gets at some oft-discussed issues surrounding the way Elvis benefited from being able to take Black music and mold it into something palatable for white audiences. The most overt acknowledgment of this aspect of Elvis’s legacy happens when Joe Strummer’s Johnny asks why there are Elvis `paintings in each hotel room when they’re in a mostly Black part of town in a hotel where all the employees are Black, to which his friend Will (Rick Aviles) responds that it’s because white people own the hotel.

Mystery Train also sees a nice tribute in the form of casting two musicians who were contemporaries of Elvis with just as much charisma but were constrained by the racial limitations of their times — Rufus Thomas and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Though, in a way, they get the last laugh, since it’s probably safe to say that by appearing in Mystery Train they got to be in a better movie than any of the ones Elvis made during his misguided acting career. You also get a nice tribute to the R&B and blues musicians that Elvis aped from in the fact that the film closes with the original version of “Mystery Train," written and recorded by bluesman Junior Parker.

As much as Mystery Train tries to poke holes in the man, the myth, the legend that is Elvis, he is still inescapable as a figure in Memphis and every corner of the world outside it. He’s a figure that exists both in the micro (in scrapbooks and conversations between fans) and in the macro (in decadent Hollywood biopics and armies of Las Vegas impersonators). While Mystery Train and its various ruminations on The King lie somewhere more in the former, it still gets at the larger impact that a figure like Elvis has on so many people and how all those different relationships with the man can converge, even when it’s just a few people trying to get through one lousy night in a dingy hotel in Memphis.