Revisiting DEAD MAN: Jim Jarmusch’s Anti-Western Masterpiece

Dead Man – this metaphysical-psychedelic anti-western was for Jarmusch a clear evolution in thematic categories, while at the same time remaining stylistically consistent with his work.

It is desirable not to travel with a dead man.

The second half of the nineteenth century. A young man travels by train across America; this is William Blake, who has left his native Cleveland to take a job as an accountant in the town of Machine in the (wild) West of the country. Through the train windows Blake observes a landscape of half-charred skeletons of pioneer wagons, Indigenous settlements cut down to the last person and burned to bare earth, and trappers hunting bison.

Last year they already killed a million head! – informs the traveller a fireman smeared with soot. And he wonders why Blake has set out on a journey to hell itself, and upon hearing the destination, he says: Machine? That is the last station. And indeed: the town resembles hell on Earth. Even worse are Dickinson’s steel plants, where it turns out that the accountant vacancy has long been filled. Blake, who has spent his last money on the journey, wanders aimlessly through Machine and meets the beautiful Thel. After a blissful night in the girl’s room, her fiancé suddenly appears – Dickinson’s son, who kills Thel and wounds Blake in the chest, before dying himself at Blake’s hand.

Mortally wounded Blake escapes into the forest, where he encounters an Indigenous man named Nobody. Nobody is certain that his new acquaintance is the reincarnation of the English poet William Blake; meanwhile Dickinson sends three murderers after the fugitive: Cole Wilson, Conway Twill, and Johnny Pickett.

The eagle never lost as much time as when he submitted himself to the teachings of the crow.

Jim Jarmusch began work on Dead Man in the first half of the 1990s, not long after making the short film Coffee and Cigarettes III (1993). The artist created the character of William Blake with Johnny Depp in mind, while Nobody had from the beginning been intended for Gary Farmer – a Canadian actor of Indigenous descent (of the Cayuga people), whose role in Jonathan Wacks’s Powwow Highway (1989) had made a strong impression on Jarmusch.

While writing the screenplay in a wooden cabin in the Catskill Mountains, Jarmusch read extensively: not only the history of Native Americans, but also the works of William Blake (1757–1827) – the English poet, writer, painter, and mystic regarded as a precursor of Romanticism – and he was struck by how many of Blake’s sayings resembled Indigenous aphorisms. For this reason, fragments of Songs of Innocence, The Everlasting Gospel, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell found their way into the film. Another inspiration was the music of Neil Young, which Jarmusch listened to almost constantly while writing the screenplay for Dead Man.

To his delight, the musician agreed to compose the film’s soundtrack. Young recorded the soundtrack while watching the film in the studio and improvising on electric and acoustic guitars, organ, and piano [1]. This guy must have touched the darkest corners of his soul to compose such music [2] – Jarmusch later enthused.

The oval rocks from beneath the earth spoke through fire.

Dead Man proved to be the most difficult film to make in the director’s career: a small budget, the constant travel of the film crew between the states of Arizona, Nevada, California, and Oregon, the creation of a believable reality of the late nineteenth century (costumes, set design) and, at the same time, the care to ensure that no signs of twentieth-century civilization appeared in the frame, such as airplanes in the sky, high-voltage pylons, cars, asphalt roads, and so on.

A great ally of Jarmusch was the cinematographer Robby Müller, who brimmed with excellent, unconventional ideas. Robby and I really had a wonderful way of working, no storyboards, and a shot list only when it was really necessary. […] Robby relied on instinct and intuition – said the director. And he recalled how they deliberately avoided filming beautiful landscapes, focusing on less obvious ones. The film was shot on black-and-white stock because it allows for a certain abstraction in film through minimalism and the reduction of information [3].

It was also about the desire to reinforce the atmosphere. […] It is the story of a man who becomes increasingly distant from things close and familiar to him. And colours reduce the sense of alienation [4]. The creators wished to break away from the colourful palette of 1960s westerns – Dead Man was meant to resemble films from the 1940s, Kurosawa’s cinema, and Ansel Adams’s photographs.

Those things that are similar, in nature grow to be similar.

Dead Man premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 27 May 1995, where it met with a positive reaction from critics and audiences.

In order to reach a wider public, Jarmusch signed a distribution agreement with Miramax, but the studio’s president Harvey Weinstein tried to force changes in the film’s content to make it more attractive and palatable to the average viewer. This was offensive to me, and ultimately I was punished – because I did not do what Weinstein wanted, he did not distribute the film in an elegant manner – Jarmusch recounted. No wonder that Dead Man, released in cinemas in spring 1996, earned just over one million dollars.

It did not have good press in the USA either. Roger Ebert gave the film one and a half stars out of four, once again proving that he was one of the most overrated critics. A strange, slow, ungrateful film that gives more time to ponder its meaning than its sense – complained the helpless Ebert. Dead Man was received much better in Europe, as evidenced for example by Tomasz Jopkiewicz’s review in the monthly Film: This labyrinth of quotations, hints, and play with convention does not turn into a toy for erudites, nor into a vision imbued with falseness. […] Jarmusch succeeds in convincing us that much does indeed connect us with his characters [5].

You will not stop the clouds by building a ship.

Interestingly, Dead Man found approval among Native Americans – probably because Jarmusch was extremely meticulous in portraying their culture. For example, he deliberately did not translate or subtitle the dialogues in the Cree and Blackfoot languages – so that they would be understandable only to members of those ethnic groups.

The film also included several jokes understandable only to North American Indigenous people. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum rightly pointed out that Dead Man is one of the few films about Native Americans made by a white man that treat them with respect and fairness [6]. Particular applause was raised by the character of Nobody (played by a real Native American) – very far removed from cinematic stereotypes. I wanted to create the character of an Indigenous man who would be neither a) a savage who must be eliminated, a force of nature blocking the way of industrial progress, nor b) a noble innocent who knows everything and is yet another cliché.

I wanted him to be a complicated human being [7] – explained Jarmusch, and it must be honestly said that he fully succeeded in achieving this intention. Nobody is not only one of the most interesting characters in Dead Man, but also in the entire gallery of Jarmusch’s film universe, full as it is of memorable originals.

Do you have some tobacco?

The plot is essentially simple, and the metaphors and symbolism are clear. On the most basic level it is simply a film about death, or rather about dying, since Blake is dying throughout the entire film: his life is coming to an end before the eyes of the audience, who accompany him, just as Nobody does, on his final journey.

It is not impossible, moreover, that Blake died immediately after the accurate shot of his opponent, and what we see on the screen is his journey through the afterlife. Already in the first scenes Jarmusch shows how far his protagonist is moving away from home – and how wild, alien, and unknown is the place to which he is heading. Blake is completely lost in the Wild West – both literally and metaphorically: not only is he unable to find the way to Dickinson’s factory, but he also cannot find his place in life after spending his last savings on the trip to Machine.

Blake seems out of place among the trappers on the train, but he fits no better in the shabby town in which he lands. It is therefore natural that he forms a spiritual bond with Nobody, who is also an outsider: his parents came from different tribes, as a result of which he himself was of “impure” blood; as a child Nobody was captured by white men and taken to Europe as a wild man kept in a cage, and upon returning home he was mocked and rejected by his own people.

The talking stones lay for a long time in the sun.

This is also a story about the clash of two cultures, in which Jarmusch smuggled in themes such as the progressing industrialization of America in the second half of the nineteenth century, the genocide committed against Native Americans, and violence (there are as many as seventeen corpses here, and all die with a peculiar expression on their faces: a mixture of disbelief and dread).

Dead Man uses the conventions of the western, combining them with the road-movie typical of Jarmusch, but quickly turns them upside down. The film begins almost like a classical western: a young man sets out to the Wild West in search of fortune, but soon strange and unforeseen things begin to happen, and the destination turns out to be a dirty, nasty place populated by repulsive creatures, murderers, bandits, and merciless bureaucrats (the wonderful, Kafkaesque in spirit episode with the malicious clerks in Dickinson’s offices), and death is stripped of all glory and heroism. All this brings Jarmusch’s film close to the revisionist western, also known as the anti-western, in which genre patterns are inverted.

As the director himself said: The formula of the western served only as a starting point for our story. We wanted to make a film classically simple, and at the same time metaphorical. […] Westerns are the mythology of Americans, but they always say something about America [8].

– It is time for you to return to where you came from.
– Do you mean Cleveland?

If all this sounds heavy, it must be added that Dead Man sparkles with very dark and at the same time absurd humour – for the entire situation bears the marks of the tragic absurdity that befell the unfortunate accountant from Cleveland.

The banter between Blake and Nobody is amusing, with Nobody tossing out enigmatic sentences as if from his sleeve; Michael Wincott is amusing as the killer who never stops talking. There is a funny and at the same time frightening episode with Dickinson (the last role of Robert Mitchum!), who – puffing on a cigar – aims at Blake against the backdrop of a stuffed bear. One of the funniest scenes is the sequence featuring the trio of bandits (Iggy Pop, Jared Harris, and Billy Bob Thornton), who drink whisky, eat opossum stew, and quote the Bible.

The motif of tobacco sought by nearly everyone recurs like a mantra. Jarmusch also winks at lovers of pop culture, whether by naming characters after famous actors and musicians (Lee Marvin, Benmont Tench, and George Drakoulias), or by referencing films (Tonino Valerii’s My Name Is Nobody) and songs (James Brown’s Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing). All this – the wonderful cinematography, the electrifying music, the humour, the oneiric atmosphere, and the intelligent references woven into this moving meditation on dying – makes up a true masterpiece of the anti-western.

Hootka!

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[1] Zob. S. Chiose, Dead Man Talking, „The Globe and Mail”, 23/05/1996, p. C1.
[2] E. Ciapara, Poeta na prerii, „Film” #4, 04/1996, p. 53.
[3] E. Mazierska (red.), Jim Jarmusch, Warszawa 1992, p. 74.
[4] E. Ciapara, Poeta na…, op. cit., p. 53.
[5] T. Jopkiewicz, Skazani, „Film” #6, 06/1996, p. 68.
[6] J. Rosenbaum, Dead Man, London 2000, p. 4.
[7] J. Rosenbaum, A Gun Up Your Ass: An Interview with Jim Jarmusch, „Cineaste” vol. XXII, no. 2, 1996, p. 23.
[8] E. Ciapara, Poeta na…, op. cit., p. 53.