"Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night."
—William Blake, "Auguries Of Innocence"
To me, the quintessential Jim Jarmusch moment arrives about
halfway through his 1986 film Down By Law: Three prisoners (Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto
Benigni) escape from a Louisiana penitentiary and spend the subsequent hours fleeing
frantically through the forest and swamps, with lawmen and police dogs nipping
at their tails. As day turns to dusk, they finally come upon a tiny riverside
shack with a drearily recognizable interior: A cramped, 8-by-12' room with no
furnishings, save for a pair of wooden bunk beds on each side. All that effort
has moved them from one cell to another: "Man, this looks a little too
familiar," sighs Lurie. The heroes in Jarmusch's movies are
seekers—however reluctant many of them may be—but sometimes their
journeys seem like so much running in place. Only in a Jarmusch film could
winter in Cleveland and a beach in Florida look pretty much the same.
A similar air of inevitability hangs over Dead Man, Jarmusch's ambitious, fiercely
idiosyncratic 1995 Western, and the Blake poem quoted above (and in the film
itself) neatly suggests it. The William Blake in Dead Man—not the 18th- and 19th-century
poet, but the accountant Bill Blake from Cleveland, played by Johnny
Depp—never stood a chance from the moment he stepped onto a train heading
to the last stop in the West. It's all right there in the title: He's one of
the unfortunate ones born into Misery and Endless Night, and much of the film
is about his accepting his predetermined fate rather than fighting to change
it. As the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who wrote an entire book on the film,
amusingly put it in his review, "It may be the most protracted death scene in
movies; by comparison, Garbo's death in Camille is a quickie."
By contrast, Dead Man's death at the arthouse was a Harvey Weinstein-style
execution job. Jarmusch is the rare filmmaker who wields complete control over
his work; he not only has final cut, he owns the negative. So when a company
like Miramax comes calling, he's selling the distribution rights to a finished
film, and the content isn't up for negotiation unless Jarmusch can be
persuaded. After test screenings, Weinstein wanted the film recut; when
Jarmusch refused, the two had a falling-out, and the film was dumped into
theaters with a carelessness that bordered on contempt. (See also: future NCC
possibility Velvet Goldmine.) But as a Chicagoan, I'm proud to say that the film's cult
started here. Largely on the strength of Rosenbaum's advocacy—and over
Roger Ebert's one-and-a-half-star dismissal—Jarmusch's so-called "acid
Western" became a kind of local obsession, running nearly six months at the Music
Box Theater, mostly as a midnight movie.
Today, Dead Man seems to me Jarmusch's most substantial effort since Stranger
Than Paradise, and
one of his best expressions of the four-walled limitations of being human, even
in the lawless expanse of the West. Whereas traditional Westerns about the
migration to the Pacific emphasize freedom and possibility, Dead Man goes to great lengths to reveal the
death and destruction that went along with the pioneers' trailblazing,
particularly how it affected Native Americans. Never is that more potent than
in the early going, when every rifle-bearing yahoo on the train starts opening
fire as a herd of buffalo passes in front of the window. It looks like they're
killing for sport, but in fact, it's more insidious, part of a
government-endorsed campaign to marginalize the Indians by slaughtering their
livelihood. As ominous fellow traveler Crispin Glover notes, they "killed a
million of them last year alone."
One in a long line of Jarmusch's fish-out-of-water
characters, Bill Blake travels alone by train from Cleveland to the end of the
train line, an Industrial Age pit called Machine. Depp's dreamy features may
quicken the pulses of many, but Jarmusch turns it against him, reducing him to
a short, ineffectual, creamy-skinned naïf in a plaid suit and Poindexter
glasses. Late in the film, when a burly thug played by Billy Bob Thornton
admires Blake for his "soft hair" ("mine's like barn hay," he says), he seems
to be looking at Blake as if he were a woman. So as this odd man moseys into
the town of Machine, toward the billowing smoke of Dickinson's Metalworks, he
already feels like he's in imminent—if not immediate—danger.
Blake comes carrying a letter promising him a post as the
company's accountant, but he's rebuffed by the second-in-charge (John Hurt),
who tells him the position has already been filled. Blake tries to appeal to
Dickinson (played in a wonderfully demented guest turn by Robert Mitchum), who
greets him with a shotgun and a warning that "the only job you're going to get
here is pushing up daisies from a pine box." Having spent virtually all of his
money just getting to Machine, Blake barely has enough left to get drunk
outside the saloon, but his gentlemanly nature at least wins him some female
companionship for the night. Then his luck turns south again when the woman's
fiancé (Gabriel Byrne), who also happens to be Dickinson's son, finds the two
in bed together and whips out his pistol. The gunfight that follows leaves only
Blake alive, but with a mortal wound that will slowly (slowly, sloooowly)
wither him down until he finally passes on.
In the meantime, he's in much greater danger than he
realizes—at least, as great a danger as someone who's already a dead man possibly
can be. Dickinson has dispatched three bounty hunters, led by a glowering Lance
Henriksen, who is rumored to have "fucked his
parents, killed them, cooked them up, and ate them." And failing that, he's
also got a handsome reward out to any other gunslinger who happens across
Blake. Blake's only friend is a loner and outcast himself, an Indian named
Nobody (Gary Farmer) who believes Blake is actually the poet of the same name, and
leads him on a journey with an unknown destination, at least to Blake and the
audience.
Though they're ostensibly on the run, this journey is
entirely an existential one, because there's no escaping the inevitable.
Jarmusch deliberately frustrates the audience by never giving them a clear
sense of direction or purpose, or tracking where certain groups of characters
are in relation to one another. There's no talk of Blake hopping the train back
to Cleveland or reaching some safe place where he can start anew; he's a dead
man, after all, and the film details the process of him coming to terms with
death and going out with a measure of dignity and spiritual enlightenment. And
that's where Nobody comes in, to ease him gently from this world to the next.
Not that it's easy going. With everyone gunning for Blake's
head, the film becomes a succession of tense encounters and deliberately
awkward spasms of violence. Resisting the romanticized, slo-mo gunplay that's
become an anti-Western staple since Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Jarmusch stages the action in Dead
Man with the same
deadpan matter-of-factness that's long characterized his work. There's no
glamour or satisfaction in people shooting at each other; through Jarmusch's
lens, it looks ugly and pointless, and the fact that a trail of bodies pile up
in his hero's wake is treated with maximum irony. Here's a typically (and
hilariously) haphazard scene in which Blake accidentally lays claim to a few
more victims:
What gives Dead Man special resonance—and plenty of rewatch
value—is that it can be appreciated on several different levels at once:
for the stark surface wonders of Robby Müller's black-and-white cinematography
and Neil Young's rumbling guitar score; for its philosophically loaded journey
from life to death; for its boldly de-romanticized portrait of the American
West in transition, as it's reshaped by the pitiless forces of violence and
industry; and, finally, for its unusually sensitive and detailed acknowledgement
of Native American culture, which goes far beyond what even sympathetic
Westerns in the past had been able to muster. Jarmusch has never been the sort
of director with an "epic" vision, and he goes out of his way to avoid
gargantuan gestures here, but Dead Man is as close to a grand statement as he's made to
date, and one that offers endless food for thought on poetry, philosophy,
violence, cinema, and how the West was really won.
Coming Up:
Next week: Wet Hot American Summer
June 19: The Boondock Saints (with special guest Overnight)
June 27: Punch-Drunk Love
And in July, Camp Month (featuring Wild Things, Roadhouse, Manos: The Hands Of Fate vs. Troll 2, and Showgirls)