Imperfect Everydays Beauty: Comfort Movies and the Healing of the Ordinary

Abstract

Arguing from everyday aesthetics, media stu-dies, and visual culture, this article investigates the aesthetic and therapeutic virtuality of movies focused on everydayness’ absorption in modest and mundane routines and rituals. Rather than providing alienated and solipsistic escapism or offering illusory and fanciful counter-narratives to the hyper-intensification of digital life, the examined films – Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson and Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days – are considered as comfort movies: as homely healing practices that, through low-arousal form and narrative predictability, sustain a sense of continuity and safety and enable processes of self-regulation and attunement with the prosaic rhythms of life. They exemplify for viewers a restorative normalcy and an embodied and embedded daily care and aesthetic labour that can be engaged in without effort or twists, but through the subtle recalibration of attention to things, places, beings, gestures, perceptions, states of mind, and moods, and through the weak artification, or imperfect “making special,” of working and domestic activities and daily routines.