Dead Man: On the Horizon or In your Head
They would like you to believe in a world that is ‘flat’. No, it is not even such a wondrous idea as that of an immense intergalactic road-roller flattening our planet into a double-spread. No, it is not the idea of our planet floating thin and weightless in outer space ether like a discarded spectral love-letter blown by strong melancholy gusts of wind. They would just like you to believe that the world is an immense stretch of ‘flatness’. They have the hypothesis, the stats, the facts collected by skipping through time-zones in lounge rooms and board rooms and wouldn’t it be just easy to make sense of it all to see the world as plain and simple ‘flat’. Only so much better to assimilate you in the system, my dear. Only so much better put it all in neatly ordered rows and columns, my dear. Only so much better catch hold of you, my dear.
The world is not flat.
Yes, it is.
No, it isn’t
Well, you see you’re not getting what I’m saying here. The basic fundament…
(Bang Bang Bang)…..
Marketing Guru dies a painful, grisly, miserable death.
So like I was saying….
The world is not flat. Never was, never will be. Never believe what they tell you.
The man who believes in a flat world will always be afraid to fall off its edges.
***
Atleast we’re a generation who can feel the occasional pang of nostalgia. Not the nostalgia one feels in the space of a pop song or a scene from a movie but a greater nostalgia- that of a way of life, that of sand sifting between our toes, an intimate connection born out of experience and faded with time. The coming generations will have to make-do with a sense of heightened excitable d'©j' vu retro-packaged as collectibles or at best, a digital archive. A world that runs on quick-fixes and continuous addiction has no space for nostalgia.
In a way, Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Dead Man’ (1995) seeks to invoke this greater nostalgia, that of our intimate connection with the world around us that we seem to have all but lost in our plundering of the earth. An ancient mystical connection that roots us to the planet and makes it seem round and full and teeming with life. A connection that puts us as one with the universe.
‘Dead Man’ begins with a descent into hell. The roar of the train engine, metal against metal, cut trees fed to the furnace at its heart and black smoke rising from the chimney blocking out even the sky. Aboard the train is the protagonist, William Blake (Johnny Depp), accountant, orphan, clean shaven, neatly dressed, nervous, bored on his way to the end of the line to the town of ‘Machine’ where he has been offered a job. Occasionally, he glances out the window and we witness the changing landscape- from tree-filled mountains to a stark barren desert to broken wagons to the debris of a ravaged Indian settlement. Even his co-passengers turn more and more grotesque as the train chugs on and by the time the train is on its last lap, the compartment seems to be filled only with burly dirty men and their guns. The engine-driver (Crispin Glover) who we saw feed the furnace sits opposite him and almost like an angel/seer only with his face blackened with the soot of the machine begins to speculate/prophesize asking Blake to look out the window. “Doesn’t it remind you,” he says,” of when you were in boat and then later that night you were lying, looking up at the ceiling and the water in your head is not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself- why is it that the landscape is moving… but the boat is still?” A beautiful piece of dialogue- poetic, surreal, invoking a strange hypnotic image of man and nature delivered with the kind of otherworldly oddity that only Crispin Glover can summon. Soon gunshots are heard, Blake is startled as the men in his compartment grab their rifles and shoot out the window. The train has approached a herd of buffaloes. Plunder. Pillage. Rape of the earth. The Mother. Just for the sake of it. The soot-faced engine driver/seer calmly offers a statistic that over a million of them have been killed that year.
Fade to Black.
Titles begin to Neil Young’s lamenting, furious, trippy score.
The town of Machine- Abandon hope all ye enter. Dead-end town of all dead-end towns. A cesspool of the worst of humanity. Buffalo skulls decorate its walls, streets of slush, chimneys pouring out its innards into the air, men and women with only the hard glint of evil in their eyes. Blake enters the cavernous factory of Dickinson Metalworks from where he has received a letter of appointment where ugly, unruly machines dwarf the greasy men who work among them. He meets the sleazebag manager Mr. Scholfield (John Hurt) who informs Blake that his position has already been occupied. Blake decides to take up the matter with the boss Mr. Dickinson (the legendary Robert Mitchum in his last role ever) himself who turns out to be a batty gun-nut who effectively sends him packing.
Jarmusch in his inimitable elliptical way has set the stage- The Wild Wild West. Not the west you remember. Not your nostalgia for John Wayne. Forget John Wayne, Jarmusch’s take on the mythic landscape goes far beyond the blood soaked terrains of even the revisionist westerns of Leone and Peckinpah in terms of mercenary brutality. Jarmusch’s seems to say that for all the supposed ‘revisionism’ the movies only seemed to intentionally/unintentionally glorify macho bravado and ultra-violence, adding to the original white-man-All-American myth rather than offer a critique. Jarmusch however offers a glorious ‘even literal’ piss-take on not just the genre but on the landscape, myth, history and the inhabitants. Jarmusch envisions the west not in a sun beaten rugged landscape of cloud coral blue skies and red dust but in stolid deathly black and white where dirty men and women scrape a hellish sub-human living among muck, grease and smoke.
Dejected after being thrown out of Dickinson’s office, Blake wanders around in the bleak city of Machine where he has a chance encounter with a whore turned flower-girl (Mili Avital) who takes him back to her room. The fatal romance that unfolds in the room is the stuff of high poetry. IMDB mentions that Jarmusch was influenced for this scene by Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose‘ for the scene but it is the seminal influence of the Beat poets on him that is evident. The girl, Thel’s room is filled with roses. She offers him a rose and tells him that if she had money she would make roses of silk and sprinkle French perfume on them. She asks him to smell the rose. “It smells like paper,” he says. “It is paper,” she says. In the midst of hell, an ephemeral imaginary Eden blooms, a refuge. After making love, Thel and Blake lie on her bed where he discovers a gun under a pillow. “Because it’s America”, she says. A tall brooding stranger (Gabriel Byrne) enters the bedroom, apologizes and professes undying love for Thel even as she lies with Blake. Thel rebukes. The stranger pulls a gun and fires. The bullet enters her heart and passing through, enters Blake’s. Blake pulls a gun and fires clumsily- misses twice but the stranger doesn’t move. Perhaps he has no reason to live anymore. Blake gets him in the neck and he collapses. A poetic tour-de-force scene composed from the Beat’s heady notions of beauty, love and fatality- the flower girl making paper roses, promises of silk roses, a stranger brooding, killing and dying for unrequited love, a bullet passing from the heart of your beloved, taking her life and entering your own.
Blake staggers an escape only to black-out and wake up to find a big, bear-like Native American in full feathered glory leaning over him trying to extract the bullet with a knife. The Native American exasperatedly declares that the ‘white man’s metal’ has entered his heart and that any attempt to extract it will cut his heart and ‘set his spirit free’. He declares Blake a ‘dead man’. The Native American who has been abducted by white man as a child and raised in the city, calls himself ‘Nobody’ (Gary Farmer, scene stealer). His mixed parentage and his stories from across the ocean haven’t gone well with the tribes and Nobody has been left to wander the earth alone. He is a typical Jarmuschian character. The ‘other’ who is more refined, more enlightened and knows more about America than the self-confessed card-holding Americans. Only here, Jarmusch quietly turns the table from under your nose. He calls his Native American character ‘Nobody’- as pointed a satire as ever on the role given to these indigenous inhabitants in American history, myth and Hollywood and also the blatant heartlessness and brainlessness with which they were exterminated. Then with arch-subversion, he quietly sneaks in painstakingly accurate period detail and Native American in-jokes on the white Americans. If in case the point wouldn’t be comprehended, Jarmusch even gives Nobody a catch-phrase to keep repeating- Stupid fucking white man. Jarmusch cheekily explains this point of view. Describing his years in captivity, Nobody talks about how when he was shifted from place to place exhibited in cage, every town used to be populated with the same white men that occupied the other so in order to escape he decides to adopt their mannerisms so that they may finally lose interest.
On learning that the wounded stranger that he has run into is named ‘William Blake’, Nobody is ecstatic. He thinks him to be the poet Blake with whom he formed a great fascination during his time in the city but Blake, the accountant never really comprehends what he is talking about. To Nobody however, it all makes sense- “You’re a poet, a painter,” he says,” and now you’re a killer of white men.”
Meanwhile back in the town of ‘Machine’, old mad Dickinson is in rage. The brooding man killed in Thel’s room by Blake was his very own son but he seems more worried about the horse which the horse stole and escaped. He employs three of the meanest, most cold blooded mercenaries/legends of the west in the country to chase the son’s killer and the horse down- young and nasty Johnny ‘The Kid’ Pickett, motormouth Conway Twill (Michael Wincott) and the meanest and most legendary of them all, Cole Wilson (Lance Henriksen). Not satisfied with just that much he even puts up wanted posters all over the land. The bounty hunters set out and their journey is juxtaposed with one being made by Blake and Nobody.
Blake and Nobody seem to follow an uncertain drift, to almost sail with the wind. They come across a freaky group of three pioneers or rather grotesque caricatures of pioneers as portrayed by the very decadent looking trio of Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton and Jared Harris. In a scene that spells out DESECRATION, Iggy Pop plays the lady Salvatore ‘Sally’ who we find reading a repulsively violent version of the Goldilocks tale while cooking a dinner made of possum and beans before saying amen with an even more violent story out of the Bible. Thronton plays her companion, the hairy Big George and Harris, the ruffian Benmont Tench. Almost as if to test out whether it is indeed poet-painter William Blake who has come back to earth to exterminate the wicked, Nobody sends Blake into the freaky group. Soon George and Benmont fight to claim him as their own and the scuffle turns bloody and Blake makes his second kill, again a sloppy one while Nobody does away with the other two. “This instrument shall replace your tongue,” says Nobody to Blake refering to the gun,” Your poetry will now be written in blood”
Soon enough Blake comes across two reward chasing bald marshal twins by the name of Lee and Marvin and for the first time with swagger and smoothness he dispenses them off with a bullet each. He murmurs poetry after the bloodbath and here with the absurdity and wit that can only be described as a Jarmuschian in-joke he gives big to Tarantino and the likes. Blake hardly comprehends his role and the words he has just spouted. From his own point-of-view it’s a hollow act of murder and the words ‘some are born to endless night’ is just a ruse to infuse some fake ‘cool’ to the whole affair. But instead to view the scene from Nobody, the proverbial ‘other’s’ point-of-view makes sense. From his point-of-view it is a scene not of violence but one of mystic undercurrents, one where a poet-painter has risen from the dead or rather returned from the land of the spirits to gun down the oppressors. For the first time, one is distinctly aware of Jarmusch’s brilliant ploy. It is here one realizes the mysterious way in which the film addresses its audience. One can comprehend why it was so reviled by most of the critics at the time of its release but embraced by the Native Americans. Jarmusch’s exposes the sham of the white-man’s history, his myth and his narrative and overpowers it with the ancient enigmatic beauty of that of the natives’. The ‘dead men’, spiritually and quite literally, are all white.
Convinced of his prophecy, Nobody anoints Blake in a peyote ceremony and leaves him on his own. Wandering along, Blake comes across a dead faun, like him, shot through the heart. Blake brushes his fingers against the wound, then brushes the same finger against his own heart and anoints himself with the blood. Nature is invoked. The trees, the sky, the great ineffable force at the center of the universe. The mysticism at the heart of the film washes over all other concerns. Blake lies alongside the faun and the world begins to spin around him, inside him and all is at peace. All is one.
The film has been famously described as ‘acid western’/’peyote western’. Critics have noted how the film picked up from its less successful spiritual predecessors like Easy Rider and The Last Movie which once tried to put the western through the psychedelic kaleidoscope. And while I haven’t seen much of those but what I have noticed in most psychedelic cinema is that the trip is rendered superficially. Colors, editing… when you are not high or sometimes even when you are, it all seems a bit too manufactured to be a trip. But Jarmusch relies less on the technique and more on the poetic notions of the way the scene plays out. Truth, Love, Beauty, Freedom- La Boheme, The Beatific, the Romantics. All of it underscored by Neil Young’s brilliant score. It overpowers you. Like the best of trips, all you can do is go along.
Blake once again runs into Nobody and they resume their journey and they soon reach a Christian mission headed by a blatantly racist priest (Alfred Molina) that while stocking supplies and ammunition blessed by the archbishop also gives out infected blankets to the natives (a fact). A shootout ensues and Blake is wounded yet again. Nobody puts him into a canoe and the canoe sails quietly down the river.
All through the film, Nobody and Blake’s journey is juxtaposed with the chase given to them by the three bounty hunters. Cole Wilson, the great legend first shoots ‘The Kid’ in the back dismissing him as nothing more than a Navajo mud toy and then later also kills motormouth ‘’ and eats him. Cole Wilson is an ace gunslinger, wears what looks almost like a soldier’s uniform, a shamble of a once handsome profile and a legend- a man of the west. What he also did is that- ‘he killed his parents, fucked them and ate them’. Once again, Jarmusch absolutely desecrates an all-American icon. He portrays him as an extreme mercenary- a cannibal, less than human. The juxtaposition of the two journeys first yields no particular purpose later as Nobody and Blake drift down, calm, unperturbed even as the latter slips towards death and as Wilson follows with singular desperation, his purpose only a cold-blooded kill and money, Jarmusch once again draws a contrast between the native and the white and the ancient and the modern.
The final segment of the movie is possibly the most enigmatic of all. Typical of Jarmusch, the movie seems to double back on itself like a cinematic Mobius strip. Nobody leads Blake to an Indian settlement where Blake breathing the last few of his breath shifts between the conscious and unconscious, his vision and memory meshing together in a blur that in some ways recalls his strange adventures of the last few days and in some ways, seem to signify some kind of an apocalypse. His time in the land of the living is done with. He is tied onto a ceremonial canoe laden with gifts that he will require in the great crossing over back into the spirit world. Jarmusch offers no easy redemption for Blake. A constant thread through the movie was Nobody asking for tobacco and Blake replying that he doesn’t smoke. Finally, there is tobacco, a holy substance of the natives, on the boat and when Nobody points it out to Blake, the latter still replies that he doesn’t smoke. But as the canoe is pushed into the sea and the climactic shoot-out takes place between Wilson and Nobody on the far-away shore, one realizes, perhaps it doesn’t really matter. Just a canoe bobbing with the waves.
All life is extinguished and all that remains is the boundless sea and the boundless sky, and further into the horizon just a long, single empty stretch where it becomes difficult to explain which is which.
Beguiling. Mysterious. Who knows where lays the centre of the Universe? Who knows where lays the edge? Who knows where lays the beginning? Who can foretell the end? The final image- if it was a Herzog film it would have been the apocalypse but with Jarmusch there is something greater… a mystery at the heart of it all. And even if it were possible, I definitely wouldn’t want to ask him what it was all about. Quite like I wouldn’t want to ask poet-mystic-hallucinogen-experimenter Henri Machaux to explain the aphorism of his with which the movie begins:
“It is not preferable to travel with a dead man.”
which somehow leads us to think of Nietzsche who declared
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? ”
***
Godard liked to declare that ‘cinema is dead’ that it began to die the moment it was born. He believed that cinema could have achieved greater things had it not been harnessed and streamlined in the way it was. Frequently and in many different ways, he called for all cinema to be burnt and believed that from the ashes would rise great art. ‘Dead Man’ reminded me of that.
(Shelby Lee Adams photographs courtesy Shelby Lee Adams blog, Edward Burtynsky photos by Ten Shillings, Blake and Munch by Wikipedia, Poster by Movieposter, Native American images Edward Curtis by If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,
There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, painter and his muse by a journey round my skull)
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
(gets up amongst a stunned audience and applauds as the lights begin to turn on slowly)
Fantastic.
tsutpen is cool. makes things easier.
Nobody & Blake it is, but the fun was Depp getting to munch in the post-sex-who-kills-who-and-why-confusion. Depp can’t get a better scene to deliver, and add all the rye air and Jarmusch, and you will love to narrate the scene over and over, like it once happened in your dream, or some B&W film that you unintentionally saw.
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Funny how I picked it once in an old rental where the cover told a different story as usual, of denim and westerns. I saw it and saw it, to squeeze the meaning out of the greys. Long time coming.
My Blakian Year…nice.
Nice article
-
“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 sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.”
I’m a huge fan of works of “William Blake”,
So when I was watching this film, Reference of Blake was sweet shock,
Johny Depp is perfect in the role,
With the hypnotic music by “Neil Young”.
_
@Tushar… thanks man. Anyways, I am pushing for a screening of Jarmusch. Hopefully it all works out real soon. Maybe we could do a ‘chicks with dicks’ thing as an intro.. i got some ideas on that.. will talk to you when we catch up
@Shimpi.. also check out Machaux.. i need to know more about him but he’s not available in the way i’d like him to be.. but this sounds very very interesting…
http://www.littlebluelight.com/lblphp/quotes.php?ikey=19
@Sid,
thanks, I’m checking that site right now!
Nice. I ll pick Ira/Era whatever way that works.
Maahi mainu nahhi kannaa pyaar…Jai Raja. Jai Bencho.
where are you mr siddarth?????
He ll be back soon, Nitin. :-)