Retro Review: Dead Man

I hadn't actually planned on watching all of Dead Man yesterday; the Cap'n had been backing up some videos and stumbled across a copy of Jim Jarmusch's 1995 western, and when I put the movie on, I found I couldn't turn it off. Jarmusch's sparse, black and white photography and minimalist camerawork had me transfixed, unable to turn away.

Dead Man, like Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner, is a film that operates in a dream-like state; I've seen all three many times, and while the narratives are all reasonably straightforward, they have a hypnotic effect that renders me incapable of remembering the story until I watch them again. For the life of me I couldn't remember the progression of Dead Man's story. Only moments, images stuck with me: Crispin Glover covered in coal soot, Lance Henriksen's cannibal bounty hunter, Iggy Pop wearing a dress, and Johnny Depp painting his face with the blood of a dead fawn.

Bill Blake (Depp) leaves Cleveland, Ohio and heads west by train to Machine, where he's promised an accounting job at Dickinson Metal Works. Informed by Dickinson's assistant, John Scofield (John Hurt) that the position was filled a month before he arrived, Blake demands to see John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum), which is met with disaster when the old man threatens to kill him on sight. Broke and with no work, Blake meets Thel Russell (Mili Avital), who left her life as a prostitute to sell imitation roses, but their romance is cut short when Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) returns to kill Thel, his former lover. Charlie kills Thel, and in the process shoots Blake near the heart, before Blake kills him and escapes. Unbeknownst to Blake, Charlie is Dickinson's son, and the old man hires three outlaws - Cole Wilson (Lance Henrikson), Conway Twill (Michael Wincott), and Jimmy "The Kid" Pickett (Eugene Byrd) to track down Blake and the horse he stole. The injured Blake awakens to find Nobody (Gary Farmer), an outcast Native American, trying to dig out the "white man's metal" next to his heart, but when Nobody discovers Blake's real name, he sets out to return the lost soul to the spirit realm.

Dead Man is a film of facsimiles, of imitations and "almost there"'s: Nobody mistakes Bill Blake for the spirit of poet William Blake, although Bill has no notion of his namesake. Blake wanders home with Thel Russell, who sells paper roses. Nobody is a mixed-blood Native, captured by white men and taken to England. Despite his escape, his heritage is denied by his tribe, and he is left to wander the desert, alternately imitating and mocking the "stupid white man." Blake, who arrives in town wearing a "clown suit" from Cleveland, doesn't seem to fit in anywhere - Depp's appearance is reminiscent of his role in 1993's Benny and Joon.

The hypnotic effect is a result of Dead Man's episodic lapses; despite the fact that the story is a simple "pursuit" film, Jarmusch and editor Jay Rabonwitz made the decision to fade out after every scene, effectively creating a series of dreamlike vignettes, starting with Blake's train ride from Cleveland to Machine - itself half-dream, half shifting reality, and closing with the Train Fireman (Crispin Glover)'s stream of consciousness warning against going "all the way out here to hell." The lapses in narrative, coupled with Neil Young's ethereal (if repetitive) score, result in an experiential, rather than linear, tone.

Nobody (a character whose name is almost certainly borrowed from Tonino Valerii's 1973 spaghetti western) has most of Jarmusch's directorial flourishes: his flashbacks fade to white (how appropriate) with images surrounded by a hazy iris. When he takes peyote midway through the film, Nobody sees Blake with a skeleton superimposed over his face (perhaps a too literal image for the film). Gary Farmer does manage to transition Nobody's role from off-kilter comedic to sage-like smoothly, which helps smooth over Dead Man's few, but obvious, thematic touches.

I'd also forgotten how funny Dead Man is, and not simply because of Nobody's insistence on calling Blake a "stupid fucking white man." As is the case in most of Jarmusch's body of work, the comedy comes from character quirks or awkward situations; the way that John Dickinson admonishes Wilson, Twill, and Pickett like errant school children, or the way they behave like petulant truants waiting in the Principal's office before Dickinson arrives. The bounty hunters, who are not accustomed to working together, are a mismatch from the outset: Conway Twill talks to much and sleeps with a teddy bear; Cole Wilson barely talks at all, but is prone to random, brutal acts of violence; and Jimmy "The Kid" Pickett is trapped in the middle, unable to fully grasp how out of his league he is.

The film teeters on the brink of self-parody during a sequence involving Blake and three trappers: Big George (Billy Bob Thornton), Benmont Tench (Jared Harris) and "Sally" Jenko (Iggy Pop), who eat beans and talk of philistines, then argue amongst themselves who gets to kill Blake, the interloper, before Nobody swoops in for the rescue. That Thornton actually utters the line "Well, I guess nobody gets you" before Nobody kills him, is almost too on the nose, but Dead Man recovers by resorting (as it often does) to a violent conclusion.

There are a handful of recurring themes in Dead Man: the conflict between Christianity and Native spirituality (particularly in a late confrontation between Nobody and a trader played by Alfred Molina), mistaken identity, running gags involving tobacco and beans, Blake's encounters with sexuality appearing increasingly bestial, of innocence corrupted, and miscommunication between allies. This is excluding the numerous references to William Blake in the film, both direct and implied.

I must have seen Dead Man for the first time in high school, almost assuredly on video. I have vague recollections of the film (dubbed an "acid western") not being received well, but can only find one truly negative review from the period: a one-and-a-half star review by Roger Ebert that might be the basis for my conception (although knowing the News and Observer, which nothing is ever "good enough" for, that was no doubt also a pan).

Revisiting the film, beyond the fact that I could not wander away from Jarmusch (and cinematographer Robby Müller)'s black and white photography, I find that I enjoyed Dead Man more than I have at any of the various points I've spent with the film in the ensuing sixteen years. While it doesn't have the intangible joy of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, or the laconic wit of Down By Law, or even the emotional resonance of Broken Flowers, Dead Man is certainly head and shoulders above the obvious, show-off-y The Limits of Control, and more cohesive than Mystery Train, Night on Earth, or Coffee and Cigarettes. Dead Man may never be clear where it's going (if it is, in fact, going anywhere), but the trip makes up for its ambiguous destination.