Contemporary Hollywood: Dead Man. (1995) - Essay Example

The dead man is a western ic that has for years, been a of extensive critical and historical contemplation based on the uniquepalate it provides as well as inherent contradictions and inversions. A lot of debate has gone into whether the film can rightly be studied from a post-colonial theoretical framework; opposition has predominately been based on claims that the framework would be too extensive and vague to sufficiently capture a theoretically profound examination of the film. Additionally, it has been argued that the post-colonial theory is only applicable in situations where colonialism has actually took place in a formal sense such as the African and Indian British colonies. Nevertheless, this paper seeks to prove that by the context and the activities in the background of the film as well as intertexual evidence, the film qualifies postcolonial criticism. The overt allusion to Blake is popularly considered as the main inspiration for the film; however, it is assumed that Jarmusch tried to depict the American frontier through Blake’s poetry and his allusions to Dante. However, this essay will contend this claim and take the converse position that Jarmusch tried to render Blake using the western frontier region as his canvas thus necessitating. The extreme desperation, barbarism and evil, which bear a close resemblance but should by no means, are used as grounds to make universal judgment on the moral situation of the frontier region in the film’s time setting. Synopsis The plot revolves around the last few days of the life of William Blake (Johnny Depp), an accountant who rides a train from Ohio to Machine a frontier town where he had been promised a job in the metalwork factory. His parents had just died and dressed in an old-fashioned checked suit, he makes his way into the frontier tracing the footsteps of so many before him in an attempt to find and start a new life in the land of opportunity. The director provides foreshadow of the ill fate that eventually follows Blake around through the warning the trains fire-fighter gives Blake about the enterprise. In the long uncomfortable train ride, Blake is introduced to a new world of the frontier, which he finds quite shocking and is startled in his naivety by passengers engaging in government sanctioned shooting of buffaloes from the train window. When he arrives at Machine, he realizes that his job had been given to someone else and reacts angrily since he had spent all his money to get there. However, the man who had been his employer to be Jonny Dickson (Robert Mitchum) drives him away from the factory at gunpoint disregarding his protest. Thus, in a new town without money or any prospects for posterity, he meets up with the Thel Russell (Mili Avital) a prostitute turned paper flower seller and they end up at her place consummating their new found friendship. However, her former lover Charlie (Gabriel Bryant) catches them in bed and in a range tries to shoot him but only wounds him, albeit fatally and kills the girl who had thrown herself over him. Blake kills the aggressor and climbs out of the window in a daze, steals a horse and hares out of town, the dead man happens to be Dickson’s son enraged at his death, he hires three brutal killers to hunt down Blake and bring him back dead or alive. Like most of Jarmusch’s work, Dead Man is a decidedly unconventional narrative, it is characterized by several acts of random violence and as he flees, he runs into Nobody, an outcast Indian American who is obsessed with the apocalyptic poet William Blake and mistakenly assumes Blake is his reincarnation (Nieland, 2001). The Indian attempts to remove the bullet from Blake’s chest but says it is too close to the heart and to be removed and in essence, Blake was from the time of the first gunfight a dead man walking. For the most part, the film follows their progressively phantasmagoric westward odyssey through the frontier wilderness dodging death at every step pursued by a host of foes particularly the cannibalistic bounty hunter Cole who takes his job all too seriously (Buchanan, 2011). Slowly, Blake’s metamorphism from a simple accountant to a killer is self-evident as he keeps killing the men chasing him albeit in self-defence (Curley, 2008). After he is shot for the second time and his now almost certainly dying, Nobody takes him to the Makah village where he obtains a canoe for Blake’s burial in the traditional Indian way (Szaloky, 2001). The dying Blake is placed in a canoe and pushed out to sea and leaves behind him more carnage as Nobody and Cole kill each other at the shore, he floats out to the sea gazing up to the sky in the iconic image that has become the movies all time poster. Whether Blake the poet was a mystic or not is an issue that has provided fodder for scholastic and historic debate for years, his dark “prophesies” about America, which seemingly happened as the movie graphically demonstrates, were seen by some as true psychic prophecies. However, to others he was just a social critic who just described the situations as he imagined it would be. Nevertheless, his criticism transcend his time and have proven relevant centuries after his death, Jim Jarmush, the movie’s director, claims he was inspired by Blake who he viewed as a visionary and a creator of revolutionary works who was persecuted for ideas way ahead of his time. Most scholars are in agreement that the film is a surrealistic work and the director was clearly inspired by the famous English poet and painter William Blake. In his book America- a prophecy in 1793, it is evident that he imagined America was the beginning of a new world heralding freedom and a promise of the emancipation of the repressed society in England and most of Europe. Conversely, his parallel William Blake of the movie rides a train into the America dream that was rapidly degenerating into becoming a nightmare. At the time of his death in 1827, the port had been working on a series of works based on Dante’s book the divine comedy, which was a depiction of the hellish afterlife. This hellish description was closer to the life Blake encountered in the movies as he was led through the decadent and dangerous American wilderness. In essence, the movie’s title implies that Blake is already dead to start with and quintessentially in his afterlife. Therein, in a parallel with Dante’s antagonist, Blake is led through purgatory by his self-styled spirit guide Nobody just as Virgil led Dante. Throughout the film, there are numerous allusions to Blake’s work and these vary in subtlety and symbolic meaning. The most overt is the antagonist’s name and the Blake’s poetry finds several parallels as the Blake travels in a world paralleling the purgatory in a land where the dead bury the dead (Nieland, 2001). The allusion to Auguries of innocence is evinced in the encounter where Blake finds a dear freshly killed by his pursuers and lies next to it before painting his face with its blood and commencing with his journey through the purgatory that America had become for him. The allusion and influence Blake on Jarmusch as he created the film is not up for debate based on the overt symbolisms, direct quotations and allusions as well as the his own testimony. However, the extent to which Blake’s bleak prophesies can be said to be true of the actual context in which the film was based has been subject to debate. Really, was the frontier that bad? One must ask. Proponents claim that the film depicts reality but to some extent, from an objective perspective, one cannot help but question the level of embellishment. Admittedly, the industrialist and agrarian settlers subjected the Indians to massive suffering in the form of displacement enslavement and mass murder; Nobody is without doubt an archetype of the sadistic and exploitative extremes visited upon Native Americans by the white men. However, it is also possible that Jarmusch was carries away in an attempt to represent the hopelessness and misery that Blake so easily imparts in words but which takes a great deal of graphic violence and scenes of heart wrenching despair to reflect in film. Critics have described the film as eschewing the romantic notions that other Westerns have embodied to present a favourable and heroic picture of the frontier. In as much as this is concerned it is it is indeed true that the movie depicts a severe and brutally honest albeit exaggerated picture of the lawless and morally decadent west. Nonetheless, Jarmusch is still a romantic in his own way, but his love affair (so to speak) is not with novel notions of heroism and glory but with the poetry of Blake. As aforementioned, he uses the film to embody the misery and desperation Blake was echoing from his poetry and allusions of Dante’s forlorn works. Ultimately, any attempt to render a combination of Dante and Blake must needs have a diminishing effect on the morality and hope of the underlying context as well as exponentially increase the extent and scope of evil. Therefore, one may contend to say that the hopelessness, inhumanity self -destruction and are not solely inspired by the situation in the American frontier but on the contrary the context has been restructured so it can present a canvass dark enough for the underlying themes in Blake’s writing could be plausibly rendered on screen. Cultural historians will likely agree that the western as a film genre is one of the most enduring and generic engagements with the history of America. According to J Hoberman, archetypical vehicle America used to self-express and anyone desiring to engage in a radical or fundamentally encompassing critic of the American concept, the western provides the most natural genre on which such can be formulated (Hoberman, 1991). It follows then that since the western engenders that precise ideology, it needs must be deconstructed and inverted against itself in order for it to be deployed for the self-same critique. This is essentially what Jarmusch attempts in the film dead man (Imboden, 2005). Martin Gurr postulates that the dead man should be examined through from a post-colonial conceptual framework since it employs a multiplicity of post-colonial concepts (197). Notwithstanding the question of why one would want to read a western made by an American as a post-colonial text, this is a pardonable objection bearing in mind most of the world post-colonial work has been by previously colonized communities. Nevertheless, post-colonialism is not exclusively reserved for cases of post ex factor imperial domination; in the dead man, one finds an assortment of interwoven themes that address critical colonial issues. The slaughtering and alienation of thousands of the indigenous population by the pioneers is and for instance allows one to take the liberty of treating initial occupation of America as a colonial experience. The notion has nonetheless being harshly criticized for its expansive latitude ergo, vagueness since unlike other colonial theoretical positions (Ashcroft, Gareth and Helen, 1989). However, in as much as one in interested in demonstrating the cultural response to the aftermath of the American settlement predating the setting of the film, it is still remains a suitable school of thought. Gurr proposes that the dead man be read as a post-colonial western that applies one of the post-colonial theoretical strategies of transformation or writing back and thus inverting against itself. This way, one can contemplate the dead man as transformative rewriting on numerous levels making it a parody of retrospective literary and filmic works. The intersexuality that inevitably arises from critical reading of the film can be traced back to several other works not limited to Blake’s overt allusion. Take David Conrad’s “heart of darkness” for instance, e the dead man represents a journey into the wilderness as a journey to seek the self and rediscover their soul (Gurr, 2006). Both texts depict a journey that drives the characters toward the limits of their various cultural and conscious realms, in dead man, Blake is essentially dead as he makes the journey to machine although he doesn’t know it yet. He transcends the convectional consciousness in his “walking dead” existence and this is further evinced in his vision quest, the cultural limits are similarly pushed past their limits as we witness the quest of a culturally delineated Indian man seeking to give a poet from different culture the send of that befits and Indian. The irony of Nobody’s ambition is further underpinned by the fact that Blake does not understands most of what he intends for him to and just follows him out of an instinct to escape his pursuers (Moliterno, 2001). The final image from the dead man of Blake drifting out to the sea in canoes resonant with Marlow Journey up the Congo and the connection based on heart of darkness as a Post-colonial narrative is undeniable. The post-colonial inversion of cultural superiority that plays in the dead man are also echoes the context in Defoe’s Robison Crusoe where the westerner is depicted outside their natural environment in the wilderness. The dead man can parallel Robinson Crusoe in that Nobody would take the apart of the native Friday, while Blake models Crusoe; nonetheless the roles are significantly inverted since in the dead man, the native is the more refined and culture both in the ways of the decadent west and those of his community (Gurr, 2006). The white man is seen as more of a savage and ignoramus , this depiction does not just include Blake although he sufficiently personify it by his ignorance in most matters ranging from the mere usage of a gun, sex and the resounding irony of his famous namesake all which the Indian is aware of. The rest of the whites are brutal and evidently incapable of applying any problem solving that does not involves violence, the portrayal of Cole as a cannibal is symbolic of uncivilized barbarians, which is the brush the white man is painted with in most of the film. This inversion of traditional superiority roles, is repeatedly depicted by Nobody’s swearing “stupid fucking white man” The ultimate portrayal of white men is that of savage and morally unscrupulous. Moreover, even the village priest attempts to murder Blake, and they engender the very description traditional postcolonial writer used to exaggerate the level of savagery among the uncivilized savage sin India and Africa. The discourse on the validity of the post-colonial theoretical framework for the film has ranged among literary circle since the movie was first released and owing to the conviction of both sides, it is unlikely to result into a consensus. However, from Nobody’s Narrative of his life after capture by the English, several themes arise that quintessentially and strategically open the film to this framework. In a monologue that lasts almost three minutes, he describes his capture by Englishmen who attacked him with rifles and shipped him of to England. He was locked in a cage and taken around like a zoo animal to for shows and in these actions we see allusions of translocation, alienation and dehumanization which are among themes that overtly resonate with the English occupation of most of their colonies. Their colonial subjects were treated as lesser creatures based on their race and exploited, as a result, many cultures were fragmented and the natives lost touch with their indigenous roots. They were dissimilated and alienated in that they could not be accepted by either the colonialist or their own people and according to Nobody, that is how he became his name. Of all the atrocities occasioned on to him the most extreme metonym of colonial occupation is the fact that he is imprisoned in a cage and this symbolizes typical colonial behaviour of not only taking away individuals and community’s freedom" (Ashcroft, 2001). Post-colonial theory however encompasses and necessarily must take cognizance that colonialism despite its ruthless and often inhuman imputations often results in certain benefits for its victims most common and important being western education. Nobody is unambiguously the most educated and refined individual in the film and as much as one may want to imagine that his intelligence is inherent, there is no question that the education he received form his captors in England is what makes him a significant character in the film. Retrospectively, many romanticists’ novelist and filmmakers portrayed the Wild West as a place for self-discovery and renewal, a place where one finds their values and the meaning of life. This was in line with the presumption that America was after all the new world and land of opportunities, however Jarmusch breaks through the scene with a severe dose of reality. The frontier was no longer reminiscent of the land of opportunity; instead, it was a graveyard for broken dreams. People did not come here and find themselves, they lost their sense of purpose morality and ultimately like the films doomed protagonist, their lives. As opposed to depicting America’s industrial and agrarian progress heroically like many feel good romances, the representation Jarmusch offers is menacing and painfully true of the decadent and unequal modern America in the Wild West. The western movement is depicted not as redemption but revenge, hopelessness, death, the film shows evidence of careful and multidimensional research on the Native American life, and this is juxtaposed with the destructive and uncultured depiction of whiteness with sobering results. Masculine violence in most movies is often seen as a force for good especially when the hero use force or cunning to trounce over a cruel villain and the ending is at lead happy or even meaningful. However; according to Kitses and Rickman (1999), the dead man evades every attempt to affix any positive meaning to the plot, every attempt of redemption or meaningful progress fails. Thel is unable to escape the town and both Blake and Nobody lose the villains end up dead and so do the lawmen. At the end of the day, the several Indian villages lie in flames while it could be argued that Nobody’s spiritual quest was fulfilled, it was likely never appreciated. From the onset Blake had no idea what it was all about and died without understanding or appreciating the significance of his supposed spiritual transcendence which nobody was mistakenly helping him to under the misconception that he was the English poets, reincarnation. References Ashcroft, B, 2001, Post-Colonial Transformations. London: Routledge. Ashcroft, B, Gareth G and Helen T, 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Studies. London: Routledge. Buchanan, R.M. 2011, "' 'Passing through the Mirror'': Dead Man, Legal Pluralism and the De-territorialization of the West", Law, Culture and the Humanities, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 289-309. Curley, M, A., 2008, "Dead Men Don't Lie: Sacred Texts In Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man And Ghost Dog: Way Of The Samurai." Journal Of Religion And Film 12.2 Gurr, M, 2006, The 'Native' Cites Back: Post-Colonial Theory and the Politics of Jim Jarmusch's Western Dead Man. Anglistentag Halle: Proceedings, ed. Sabine Volk-Birke & Julia Lippert. Trier: WVT, 2007, 191-202. Hoberman, J, 1991 "How the Western Was Lost", in: Kitses and Rickmann (1999), 85-92. Imboden, R, 2005, The Dark Creative Passage: A Derridean Journey From The Literary Text To Film. Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT), 2005. Kitses, J and Rickman G, 1999. The Western Reader. New York: Limelight Editions. Moliterno, G. 2001. Dead Man: Senses Of Cinema An Online Film Journal Devoted To The Serious And Eclectic Discussion Of Cinema 14.(2001): Nieland, J, 2001, “Graphic Violence: Native Americans And The Western Americans In Dead Man." CR: The New Centennial Review 1.2 : 171-200. Szaloky, M, 2001, "A Tale N/Nobody Can Tell: The Return Of A Repressed Western History In Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man." Westerns: Films through History. 47-69. New York, NY: Routledge. Read More