Perfect Days and Paterson: Slow-burn Cinema as an existentialist enquiry

The dignity of the unnoticed man

On the surface, a film which permits you to become a voyeur of a man cleaning toilets as the main plot point seems a pointless use of two hours, at best. But within Perfect Days (2023), directed by Wim Wenders, you find more than a point as you gain a new perspective by watching Hirayama customarily rising before dawn, folding his bedding, trimming his moustache, selecting a cassette tape, and driving through Tokyo to scrub public toilets with quasi-ritualistic precision. There’s no rags-to-riches arc. Just the spectacle of presence.

Likewise, in Paterson (2016), Jim Jarmusch follows a bus driver who writes poetry in a small New Jersey town that shares his name. Paterson wakes beside his partner, drives his route, scribbles lines in a notebook during lunch breaks, begrudgingly walks his dog, and drinks a single beer in the same bar each evening.

Neither man is framed as tragic as they treat their seven days a week cyclically. Neither is framed as aspirational in the glossy, aspirational-influencer sense. They exist somewhere far more unsettling to a culture obsessed with optics: they are content in their decisions to opt out of performance.

In 2026, you can’t browse a streaming platform without seeing a new banal ‘reality’ TV show; both of these films are antithetical to the manufactured drama which is scripted into the likes of Love is Blind, the Kardashians, and Selling Sunset as the characters navigate their trivial slights, small disappointments, a lost notebook, an awkward family visit, and other minor frictions that would barely register in a typical binge-worthy series. There’s a refusal to dramatise reality, allowing the characters’ reality to resonate with the viewer with a sense of realism; instead of stripping tension and weight from the scenes, the relatable moments become amplified as you become transfixed on how they’ll move aside the chains of chagrin.

Most of all, along with other slow-burn cinema titles, Paterson and Wonderful Days become an existential enquiry in themselves, asking, what remains when spectacle is stripped away?

The poetry of keeping things to yourself

Paterson writes what could generously be described as terrible poetry. It is earnestly pedestrian and almost adorably clumsy. You wait for his first poem about his favourite brand of matches to transpire into something profound; it never does, and it doesn’t matter. Maybe it would, if it weren’t evident that the act itself was sufficient.  

He never allows his poetry to bleed into the public domain, something that would baffle most creatives, given how everyone is pushed into turning creativity into monetisation or validation. When the notebook is destroyed by his dog, whose mostly silent expressions become a quintessential part of the dialogue, there’s a quiet devastation before he simply begins again, without raging against the universe as though the world exists to punish him, specifically him… we all know someone like that, don’t we?

Hirayama, too, keeps his interiority close. He photographs trees, capturing light flickering through leaves, shadows cast on walls. He develops the film himself. The images are not curated for public consumption; they are personal relics of presence.

In both films, the meaning within their creativity is deepened by containment. Which raises a question that feels almost heretical in the age of perpetual documentation: Is meaning diluted when it is broadcast? Does it become performance rather than experience?

Perhaps there is a sanctity in the unshared moment, a kind of existential privacy that allows feeling and meaning to mature without scrutiny or a grab at sycophancy.

Labour without humiliation

Both protagonists work jobs that contemporary culture tends to look down upon. Cleaning toilets. Driving a bus. Neither career appears in aspirational LinkedIn posts. Neither suggests upward mobility nor wealth accumulation. And yet neither man is presented as diminished.

Hirayama treats each toilet cubicle as a site of quiet craftsmanship. The camera lingers on his methods, on the precision of his movements. His labour has dignity because he grants it dignity. Paterson observes his passengers, overhears fragments of conversation with contented curiosity, and absorbs the town’s rhythms. His work funds his predictably quiet life; it does not define his worth.

The films refuse pity, and that refusal is crucial in a society that equates value with income and how many people like the post announcing your latest creative venture. It is vital to witness those who find fulfilment without applause; it feels quietly radical. They have foregone ego. They are not posturing. They are not scrambling for status. They are simply inhabiting their days away from the influence of influencers.

There is catharsis in that format that follows you beyond the roll of credits as you reconcile with how repetition can become soothing, rather than claustrophobically stifling in its monotony because the trivial has the potential to become poetically textured. Small triumphs, such as a shared smile or a finished poem, resonate because they are not inflated into spectacle.

It prompts an uncomfortable thought: how much of our own dissatisfaction stems from comparison, entitlement, jealousy or unrealistic expectations of how the world should operate to serve you, and your specific desires?

By engaging with the compulsion to present a curated, enviable self rather than live an embodied, mindful life, don’t we become the more deserving objects of pity?

Slow cinema as existential mirror

Both Wenders and Jarmusch trust their audience to sit with the stillness of long takes and minimalist dialogue. Days unfolding with only subtle variations. For restless viewers, this pacing can feel punishing, but for introspective minds, it is a gift.

The waterfall in Paterson becomes a site of contemplation. The sound of rushing water mirrors the flow of his thoughts. In Perfect Days, sunlight filtering through trees becomes almost sacramental. The camera observes Hirayama’s face in close-up as he smiles faintly, tears gathering during a drive, emotions flickering across a life that appears externally simple.

These films act as mirrors for those who are perpetually scanning for meaning in the margins. They suggest that fulfilment is not a grand crescendo but a series of micro-affirmations. A good cup of coffee. A well-cleaned surface. A poem drafted during a lunch break. A photograph of light caught just so.

Maybe we’ve got so caught up in ‘making’ meaning, we’ve forgotten how to simply notice it, when it’s right there, on the periphery of our routines.

Maybe we need to untether ourselves from the notion of achieving transcendence in a mythic ‘Power of Now’ sense, and like Paterson and Hirayama, just achieve presence and become transgressive to a culture addicted to acceleration.

If we were willing to relinquish ego, to abandon the exhausting theatre of self-promotion and pretend we’re not already fanning the flames of burnout, perhaps we would discover that happiness is not perpetual ecstasy or a highlight reel. It is a sequence of simple moments rendered meaningful by attention.

Perfect Days and Paterson offer no manifesto or viral monologue about purpose, just vignettes of two men who have quietly made peace with their reality. You know they haven’t conquered the world, but a more important observation is through the lens that reveals they haven’t been conquered by it either.