Margot St. Clair

Dead Man

Certainly belatedly, I was first introduced to the work of Jim Jarmusch with Broken Flowers, not even a year ago. My reaction to that film was very mixed. Add that to Netflix’s insistence on saying things like, “Only Jim Jarmusch could make a film like this,” and I was a bit skeptical when I popped Dead Man into the DVD player last night. But Dead Man was amazing. It certainly contained the ponderousness of Broken Flowers, but there was a surprising drive behind Dead Man and a message that was lacking in the former film.

I have recently discovered a love of westerns, through films like McCabe and Mrs. Miller and books like Lonesome Dove, so Dead Man seemed just a continuation in this blossoming affair. What was surprising was its seeming reluctance to make itself a western; the movie seemed to follow the trajectory of William Blake’s realization that he was acting out a western story. This was tantalizing, and it caused the viewer to discover the film seemingly along with the film itself. I think this was due at least in part to Johnny Depp’s amazing portrayal of his character. He showed the great otherness of the easterner in the west - the fact that he could not understand this culture or what it required of a man. The viewer has the same relationship with the western. It is a foreign culture that we study through these films; it is never something that we can relate to through our past experiences.

The black and white format of the film, of course, reinforced this. In certain scenes Jarmusch made the viewer acutely aware of this with camera tricks. There is an amazing scene where Blake believes he is seeing things in the dark, and three Native Americans in war paint appear to him in the shadows of the trees. Jarmusch carries this off remarkably, and the viewer’s eyes must adjust to the scene as if she too is looking for something in the dark. The characters come out of the background in the way that you find a camouflaged bug in nature movies. It was a fantastic and ingenuitive use of the medium.

The scene with the trappers, played by Billy Bob Thornton, Iggy Pop, and Jared Harris was also marvelous. The speed of the film was slowed down, jarring the viewer from her complacence in the story. The group represented a kind of deformed family unit, with Iggy Pop playing a cross-dresser who plays the female among the men. Besides being hilarious, it also showed how distant the western and its players are from contemporary American society, yet at the same time, how similar in their insistence that anything goes. This idea is reinforced by an interview with Jarmusch, by Jonathan Rosenbaum for Cineaste, (which can be viewed in its totality here)

“Cineaste: In the Sixties and Seventies, there was an attempt at a sort of makeshift genre that might be called the Acid Western, associated with people like Monte Hellman, Dennis Hopper, Jim McBride, and Rudy Wurlitzer, as well as movies like "Greaser's Palace"; Alex Cox tapped into something similar in the Eighties with "Walker."

Jarmusch: Yeah. And I think when Blake encounters the trappers [Iggy Pop, Jared Harris and Billy Bob Thornton], it's the same thing. It' s like here is a trace element of the family unit that has gotten so perverted out here, because these guys live out in the fuckin' nowhere. Yet there's some slight thread of a family unit that they' ve adapted between themselves—which is absurd on one level, but on another level it's exactly what you're saying. They're way out there.
I don't know if you can hear it, but when Iggy's trying to load his shotgun, he's complaining, "I cooked, I cleaned. . ." Incidentally, I recently came across this interesting Sam Peckinpah quote: "The Western is a universal frame within which it's possible to comment on today." Of course, I only saw this quote after I made the film.”

In his introduction to this interview, Rosenbaum also makes a very intriguing claim about the violence in the film. He says,

“Perhaps the film's most courageous defiance of commercial conventions is a response to the current cinema of violence that is so unsettling that audiences generally can't decide whether to wince or laugh. Every time someone fires a gun at someone else in this film, the gesture is awkward, unheroic, pathetic; it's an act that leaves a mess and is deprived of any pretense at existential purity, creating a sense of embarrassment and overall discomfort in the viewer that is the reverse of what ensues from the highly estheticized forms of violence that have become de rigueur in commercial Hollywood ever since the heyday of Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah, and which have recently been revitalized by Tarantino, among others.”

I think this is spot on. This “defiance of commercial convention” draws us deeper into the film, because we can sympathize with Blake’s awkwardness with a firearm, and it’s a great commentary on the ambiguity we have with the culture of violence that most movies represents.

Lastly, Jarmusch’s choice of soundtrack was genius, and not just because I love Neil Young. The brooding electric guitar that accompanied the fade-ins and outs of each scene was haunting, and oddly appropriate. Obviously this is anachronistic, but if there is a sound created to accompany the events of this film, Neil’s guitar is it.

posted by Margot St. Clair @ 12:07 PM