could make cities like lower Manhattan, New Orleans, Memphis, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki look like such dead, abandoned, and depressing places!
Where was Down By Law filmed? After Zach gets kicked out, he looks like he's in the French Quarter and nobody around! And in Night on Earth? Except for the New York City sequence, the rest of them made the cities look abandoned. NO! Paris and Rome are not dead at 4 a.m.!
Jim Jarmusch's distinct style always takes him through suburbs or factory neighbourhoods where people don't usually walk around in large masses at 4am. When his characters are strolling or driving around, it's always showing slightly decadent areas (dead, abandoned, depressing, as you put it). He seems to pick these places deliberately because they suit his aesthetics. Even the Native American village in Dead Man is nothing like (stereotypical) NA settlements seen in other films. Weirdly enough, these scenes always make me want to go for a drive.
In Night on Earth he spends very little time around known tourist attractions (some only shown from afar) and then heads out to areas that would logicically be empty so early in the morning. I can at least state that the portrayal of Helsinki, from my experience, is correct.
In Down by Law, we only see that one corner of a residential building in NO, in a terrible shape, for some minutes. It's completely plausible that it's one of the "unimportant" streets that don't have just people hanging around. I mean I was in London earlier this year and during business hours Fleet Street is full of locals and tourists, hundreds (?) passing by; the parallel street by the Thames has less of both, but still enough people, but the streets that connect these two are almost empty. In London in rush hour in close proximity to many tourist attractions. Empty. Also while Covent Garden was full of people in the evening, the south bank of Thames, full of life during the day, was very lonely (not abandoned) at night, and we're talking 11pm, not 3am.
As for Memphis, I read a review of Mystery Train a while ago by a guy who claimed to be from Memphis and he said it depicts the 80's decadence of a once prosperous neighbourhood quite well.
TL;DR: I find the cities in the films beautiful & the depiction, AFAIK, is not that far off as you claim.
New Orleans and Helsinki are flat out dumps.
shareNew Orleans I totally believe, but I thought Helsinki would be a city on the level of Stockholm, Bern, Zurich, and the like. Or any Scandanavian city
shareHey, the city centre is pretty cool and even though the suburbs on the edges of the city can be a bit blocky I like it here.
And objectively we're cleaner than some Swedish or Russian cities. Can't say anything about New Orleans though