I love this movie. I’ve thought about it from a lot of different angles, but what I always come back to is that Dead Man has an irreducible quality that makes it more than the sum of the parts that I can identify. The quest of the hero, William Blake, has a “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” quality to it – imaginative and phantasmagorical but with at least a toe in a reality I can recognize but not understand.
There’s the obvious Western movie aspect of Dead Man, and the film fits that genre. Loner William Blake is out on a voyage, and he moves through a country of saloons, gunslingers, powerful businessmen, ambushes, sheriffs, bad guys and Indians. And as the ineffective accountant journeys, he comes of age as a man. It’s right out of John Ford.
But the West Blake finds isn’t in Ford’s Westerns. The trio of bad-guy/bounty hunters tailing Blake includes a black man, killed early, and a reticent cannibal who eats his remaining, more talkative reward seeker. A trio of trappers includes cross-dressing “Sally” Jenko, who regales his companions with graphic descriptions of how Roman emperors tortured Christians; his two big companions fight over who will have the right to rape Blake first, but all three of the trappers end up dead. Blake dines on Sally’s beans and possum.
Dead Man’s Indians have far more complexity and history than the Indians in a typical Western, too. More than the typical Indian guide to the white man, Nobody, is the dominant one of the pair. Nobody saves Blake’s life while steering him through life in the West. This Indian sidekick has a Western education, likes the work of the British poet William Blake, and has even been to Europe as a poster child Native Savage. Dead Man also delivers a striking portrayal of a Northwest Indian village. Jarmush shows the village as a walled fortress with tall, painted walls and large totems, and it has an interior like the casbah of a North African city. The nuance and sophistication of Native American culture comes through clearly in the film.
But there is much more than the Western theme going on in Dead Man. As he journeys though the West, William Blake is also journeying from innocence to experience, citing verses from Blake’s Songs as he goes along. Naïve and tentative at the beginning of the film, the film’s Blake has become capable with a pistol by the end and has learned how to evaluate the risks he faces. He goes from accidental gun-slinger at the hotel to hesitant shooter with the trappers to sophisticated defender of himself and Nobody at the trader/missionary’s post.
There’s also an overlay of language change as Blake moves on this character arc. Early on, Blake voyages to Machine, trusting the words in the letter that promise him a job. In the introductory train sequence, Blake’s fellow passengers dress in more and more rustic clothes as the train moves West until everyone’s in buckskin and slaughtering buffalo out the window. Meanwhile, the train Fireman tries to warn Blake to be cautious, but Blake can’t understand the man’s words; the two clearly have different ideas of what words are and how to use them. Blake is similarly confused by Nobody’s language, partly because of the Indian’s abstract language but partly because Blake still doesn’t understand the West he’s in. Nobody tells Blake that he’ll soon speak with his gun, and Blake soon does so to the two sheriffs who are seeking the reward on Blake’s head. “Have you read my poetry?” Blake asks them before shooting them. By the end of Dead Man, Blake is speaking the nonsense he couldn’t understand at the beginning.
The visual beauty of Dead Man is also important to the film. I noticed time and again the tiny depth of field here that is typical of early black-and-white photography, and especially typical of that out West. The focus would be on Depp’s eye, for example, while the rest of his face was slightly blurry. And the rich black-and-white of the film has a 19th century feel. Often, too, the composition of the shots has a still-photo aesthetic, sometimes so stylized as to take you out of the movie in appreciation of how the image looks.Such self-consciousness is a big part of the aesthetic of the film. In addition to the occasional over-the-top images and the cross-dressing trapper, Dead Man has the most Caucasian Indian you’ll see in Gary Farmer’s Nobody. Robert Mitchum’s long monologue with his back to the camera makes you aware of the camera, and the intercutting of the train wheels with the passengers’ changing dress highlights the filmic in Dead Man. And there is Neil Young’s eerie, interpretive, intrusive, improvised soundtrack throughout. Artifice is integral to the film.
What all this leads to, in the words of Roger Ebert’s infamous review, I don’t know. But I was mesmerized and touched by Dead Man. I don’t what I thought as William Blake was pushed off in his funerary canoe and his right-hand man and arch nemesis killed each other in the background, but it was a feeling of wonder. The significance of Blake’s voyage is just out of my reach. I can see a lot of parts in this film and many levels of significance, but all these elements ultimately lead to something bigger than the sum of the parts. Beauty, perhaps.
