Dead Man

Interview, May, 1996 by Graham Fuller

"Many a green isle needs must be/In the deep wide sea of misery," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1818, suggesting that, if life is one great big Waterworld, a little respite goes a long way. He was right, of course, although I've sighted few green isles so far in the deep wide sea of misery that constitutes 1996's American movie lineup. One I have seen is Dead Man, the most mature film yet by writer/director Jim Jarmusch. Another is Christopher Munch's shimmering Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day, which played at this year's Sundance Film Festival and in New York's New Directors/New Films program. Each of these black-and-white films is a vision of the West that breaks with the mythic stereotype, but in entirely different ways.

It's not Shelley, but another leading light of English Romanticism, William Blake, who is Dead Man's muse. Blake lends his name to the film's protagonist, a checkered-suited greenhorn from Cleveland, played with studied vacancy by Johnny Depp. Early in the movie, this Bill Blake gets off a train somewhere out West sometime in the late nineteenth century to take an accountancy job at a steelworks. Bill knows something's wrong with this landscape when he spies a prostitute performing oral sex on a customer in an alleyway; we know it, too, because the western has always been a genteel - even repressed - genre, not given to sexual display. This "throwaway" shot sets a tone of incongruity that Jarmusch sustains throughout the film.

During his interview, Bill is bawled out by the shotgun-wielding industrialist (Robert Mitchum, whose voice comes from somewhere deeper than hell these days) and wanders out by the plant's belching furnaces - William Blake's "dark satanic mills" here transposed from England to "the New Jerusalem" of the American frontier. He then solaces a pretty, buxom flower seller when she's thrown out of a saloon. Their ensuing tryst - this movie's "green isle" - causes her former lover (Gabriel Byrne), the industrialist's lovelorn son, to shoot her in the heart. The bullet pierces Bill, too, and he shoots the man dead and rides off on his horse. Unemotional frontier justice is suited to Jarmusch's customary deadpan, although in its nightmare lyricism Dead Man evokes Eraser-head-era David Lynch.

Bill collapses in the wilderness and wakes to find a corpulent Indian, Nobody (Gary Farmer), with a raggedy headdress and a personal mantra - "stupid fucking white man" - trying to dig the bullet out of his chest. When Nobody realizes his patient is named William Blake, he believes he has stumbled upon the poet and engraver himself, and they go on a rambling odyssey with three bounty hunters in pursuit. Slaughter, cannibalism, and random shootings proliferate as the movie spirals into a dreamlike finale with Bill tripping through a smallpox-threatened Indian settlement as if in slow motion. The sequence is as hallucinatory as the last movement of Apocalypse Now.

What's astonishing about Dead Man is its use of surrealism to give an impression of intense realism. When Mitchum hires the bounty hunters to catch the man who killed his son, he issues his orders to a stuffed grizzly bear in his office. Later, the deadliest of them (Lance Henrikson) dines on a human hand. Both scenes are in keeping with Jarmusch's conception of the West as a locus of madness and disorder: Indeed, because everything's wrong with this picture, everything's right with it. Yet many of cinematographer Robby Muller's images capture the dank, squalid "reality" of the West seen in frontier photos: burned-out Indian encampments, murdered bodies left to rot on the prairie, the swarthy, hunted faces of the white riffraff who "settled" this country.

This is a West, really, of living death, although death itself is posited as a mystical state - the transcendent Nothingness Bill is heading to with Nobody as his guide. Jarmusch says, in the Dead Man production notes, that "while I was reading books by Native Americans on Native American thought, it struck me that many of Blake's ideas and writings sounded as though they could have come from the soul of a Native American." Accordingly, Jarmusch ambitiously conflates a Blakean vision of Paradise Lost with a Native American-style vision of the destruction of Indian culture as experienced by a callow white man. The miracle is that he pulls it off. Just as his Down by Law (1986) depicted the Deep South's anomie via a comic picaresque, Dead Man shows the decline of the West, but this time there's no fairy-tale ending.

Whereas the great Hollywood westerns were nostalgic for a time and place that didn't exist, Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day is nostalgic for a time and a place that did - but that is no less elusive. The story, such as it is, traces the forlorn attempts of a young half-Chinese-American man (Peter Alexander) - as dreamily self-absorbed as Dead Man's Bill - to rescue the seventy-eight-mile Yosemite Valley Railroad line from extinction in 1945. In his endeavors, he teams up with a curmudgeonly conductor (Michael Stipe) - who falls silently in love with him - and the railroad's dying former proprietor (Henry Gibson). He also has a doomed affair with a Native American park ranger (Jeri Arredondo) who equates his entrepreneurship with that of the robber barons' exploitation of the thousands of Chinese-American laborers who laid down the nation's railroads - and many of their lives in the process.