THE DEAD DON’T DIE Revisited: Loose Patchwork of Banalities

Centerville in the United States. The present day, although time in this provincial little town stopped in the 1970s. No one, however, is calling for any technical novelties. The big world successfully avoids shabby Centerville, whose existence is probably known only to its inhabitants. Everything slowly, at a snail’s pace, somewhere on the margins of history, without purpose and heading nowhere. The Dead Don’t Die.

More than one person would confidently say that this is exactly, precisely what a real backwater looks like. On local television, news about Earth’s pole reversal alternates with hot news about one missing kitten. Urgent matters and more urgent matters. Stay alert and keep your finger on the pulse. If there is a breakthrough in the search, we will inform you immediately!

The inhabitants are a set of individuals and characters, to put it gently, stereotypical. In the roadside restaurant, familiar farmers sit at the bar. Steve Buscemi in a red cap with the indiscreet slogan Make America White Again and the even-tempered Danny Glover. Racism is racism, and friendship is friendship. Behind the counter, the waitresses gossip, and the main topic of conversation is the new resident, the mysterious Zelda (Tilda Swinton): the owner of the funeral home, speaking crooked English, in love with Asian culture, and worshipping Buddha. In these surroundings, that is something truly unheard of.

We get to know the whole community from the perspective of three police officers: Cliff (Bill Murray), Ronald Peterson (Adam Driver), and Mindy Morrison (Chlöé Sevigny). Uniforms do not make them heroes or individuals who stand out in any way. They are the same phlegmatics as all other residents.

The investigation currently underway concerns a missing hen. The accusation falls on the local vagabond (Tom Waits) living in the woods. It could have been a fox as well. This is probably the most shocking event in the town in decades. Time in Centerville has stood still not only symbolically; that is also a fact.

The hands of clocks suddenly do not move an inch, the batteries in phones are completely dead, the day seems to have no end. After dark, the moon will be shrouded in a mystical, purple streak, and from the graves the dead will begin to emerge one after another. The human resources of Centerville are quite a nice dinner, which is worth washing down with… coffee. Jarmusch does not surprise here.

Jim Jarmusch in The Dead Don’t Die immerses himself in the pop-cultural image of the American province. The sluggishness and clumsiness of the police officers may resemble that known from Fargo, and the landscape and stillness may connect with Three Billboards…. The comparisons, unfortunately, begin and end at the level of aesthetic stylization. The earlier films are productions of completely different quality.

For Jarmusch, the people – their quirks and habits – the locations (the bar, the police station, the gas station), the specific rhythm of the day, are the image of second-gear America copied and already shaped by cinema. Jarmusch neither sheds new light on it nor renews it. It is a collage of familiar shots, props, and characters. The director opts for the status quo, which is to be turned upside down by an unexpected zombie invasion.

Everything, however, is reduced to comedy and joke, functioning only on the level of a special effect (and a display of the makeup artists): not fully utilized and lacking more solid foundations. Of course, it arouses curiosity and generates questions (all the more so because in the finale one absurdity chases another), but Jarmusch probably did not think at all that the viewer could find answers to them. What remains for us, then, is only the spoof of genres and play with form.

The Dead Don’t Die is nothing more than a collection of quotations. Mixed in a cauldron of references and allusions. It is a postmodern pastiche and unfortunately a postmodern mush. If self-referentiality appears, it does so in the most obvious, even trivial execution. If Jarmusch paraphrases a genre or series (the western, samurai cinema, Star Wars), he reaches for what floats on the very surface and is the most obvious. As if the winks to the viewer themselves and their accumulation were supposed to constitute value. Unfortunately, this results in a scriptwriting laziness.

Jim Jarmusch is much more interested in micro-scenes, short dialogues, sharp retorts, and sketches than in the protagonists. The Dead Don’t Die is a patchwork of scenes, loosely and accidentally connected into one story. It is a collection of miniatures and ideas deprived of punchlines. Cinema about the peripheries shaped from banalities.