DEAD MAN (1995)
Director - Jim Jarmusch
The
movie we watched the first week is considered to be a “cult classic” in the
movie industry which was why I was very excited to see it. Jim Jarmusch isn´t
really my cup of tea, I always considered him to be a bit too “arty” for me, I
half hated, half loved his Cofee and
Cigrarettes series, but I was willing to give him another shot.
Before
the film started we were told that there would be references to William Blake.
I knew of course, who he was, but didn’t poses any relevant information about
him that could help me with understanding the movie better, so I was a bit
worried. Although throughout the movie there were a couple of shout outs to his
work, I didn’t feel like it was necessary for enjoying the movie as a whole
since the name of the famous poet served only as a part of a much bigger point.
The
movie started off very slowly, with virtually nothing happening in the first 15
minutes, but one of the very first lines in the movie “Why is it that the
landscape is moving, but the boat is still?”
is a line worthy to come back to at the end of this review.
When
William meets Thel, the beautiful rose-selling woman, I was worried that the
film would be an attempt of an arty western. Because westerns usually do have
that love triangle situation in them as well. That turned out not to be true
even when Thel´s fiancé entered the picture. Here I also laughed at the scene
when Bill discovers Thel´s revolver and asks her why she has it. She replies:
“This is America, everyone has guns.” Now, I´m not sure whether this was
intentional and that Jarmusch was really trying to expose the ridiculousness of
the 2nd amendment, but I found it pertinent.
After
Bill meets Nobody, the Indian, I started paying a bit more attention. The
wonderfully haunting soundtrack by Neil Young didn’t let me do anything else. While
Nobody is looking through Bill´s stuff he asks whether Bill has any tobacco, to
which he simply replies: “I don’t smoke”. This is the first of many instances
where we hear the memorable line, and just as Bill we don’t really think much
of the question. I really enjoyed the way the movie pictures the wilderness in
the times of the Frontier. You see how completely different it is to the Vinnetou movies, and I dare to say, more
accurate. Complete isolation, solely fighting to survive. I also found interesting,
that even though it seemed that Nobody healed Bill at first, we really see that
Bill is still dying. Get the joke? Nobody healed, but nobody actually healed
Bill. This play on words is visible in other scenes throughout the movie.
Nobody
is the only person in the movie to mistake Bill for William Blake, which
already sounds absurd since he is an Indian. He even cites a few lines of
Blake´s most famous poem Auguries of
Innocence. Nobody finds funny that Bill doesn’t know his own poetry and
tells him that "Your poetry will now be written in blood." And indeed
it will.
Throughout
the movie I felt that Nobody guiding Bill to death was a very familiar theme to
me. When I got back home, I googled whether there was any connection between
this movie and Dante´s Divine Comedy,
because the resemblance was obvious. And indeed, in 1827 William Blake had been
working on a new version of Dante´s book, so that might have been an
inspiration to Jarmusch as well. Another reference I discovered later at home
while reading the above mentioned Auguries
of Innocence was the line “The Lamb misused breeds Public Strife, And yet
forgives the Butchers knife”, which could possibly be why Johnny Depp was lying
next to that dead lamb in the movie.
The
cast was another thing that surprised me a lot in this movie. Although I have
never heard of Dead Man before, I
knew virtually every actor in it. Having so many brilliant actors (may John
Hurt rest in peace) even though most of them lasted only a couple of minutes
shows how well respected Jarmusch is.
We
get to hear the tobacco line on and on from each of the characters and the
reply didn´t change. William didn´t understand that they weren´t asking because
they fancied a fag, the were asking because tobacco was the currency in the
Wild West. This on-going joke served as a way to show the miscommunication that
the people had. It was just another of many things that showed, that Blake
didn’t belong in this world. He was a dead man from the beginning. Hence the
line from the train at the beginning.
All
in all, I would say that Jim Jarmusch continues not to be my “cup of tea”, but
I did enjoy this movie a little bit more than Cofee and Cigarettes. There were so many hidden references and
jokes, that I´m sure that if I watched it again, I´d find something more. And I
like that.
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