Dead Man: Jarmusch's Psychedelic Acid Western

Dead Man (1995) opens with a man on a train, and the train is the entire film in miniature. William Blake, an accountant from Cleveland in a checked suit and a bowler hat, sits looking out at America going past. The carriage empties of respectable people and fills with trappers. The landscape degrades from farmland to burnt stumps. Passengers start shooting buffalo through the windows. And a soot-covered fireman (Crispin Glover) sits down opposite and asks him, with no preamble whatsoever, why he has come out to a place like this, out here, in the middle of hell.

By the time the train stops, Jarmusch has already told you everything: this is a journey west into the industrial machine that ate a continent, and the man taking it is not going to survive it. What he does with the next two hours is one of the strangest, most beautiful things any American independent has managed.

What it is

Blake (Johnny Depp) arrives in the town of Machine to take a bookkeeping job at Dickinson Metalworks. Machine is a filthy, appalling place: mud, skulls, boilers, men doing unspeakable things in alleyways. The job has gone to somebody else. The owner, John Dickinson, is Robert Mitchum in his final film role — a huge, growling, stuffed-bear of a performance, delivered from behind a desk with a shotgun on it, and it is a magnificent way for a career like that to end.

Blake has no money and nowhere to go. That night, in an encounter I will leave alone, things go badly enough that he leaves Machine with a bullet in him and three bounty hunters on his trail: Cole Wilson (Lance Henriksen), Conway Twill (Michael Wincott) and Johnny “The Kid” Pickett (Eugene Byrd).

In the woods he is found by a large Native man called Nobody (Gary Farmer), who examines him, recognises the name, and concludes that this bleeding little clerk is the English poet William Blake, returned. Blake has never heard of William Blake. Nobody has read all of him. This misunderstanding is the engine of the rest of the film and one of the finest jokes in 1990s cinema, because Nobody proceeds to treat the accountant as a great visionary, and the accountant slowly, catastrophically obliges.

The supporting cast is a deep-cut collector’s dream — Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton and Jared Harris as three trappers; Alfred Molina at a trading post; John Hurt and Gabriel Byrne in Machine — and Jarmusch uses every one of them for a single scene and lets them go.

Why it works: three decisions that make the film

Robby Müller shot it in black and white, and the black is doing narrative work. Müller — Wenders’ cinematographer, later Von Trier’s — lights Dead Man so that the forest interiors are genuinely dark, with faces held in a narrow band of grey and everything beyond a few feet simply gone. The monochrome is heavy and slightly dirty, closer to soot than to silver. Then Jarmusch punctuates the film with fades to full black between scenes, dozens of them, each held a beat too long. Those blackouts are the structure. Every one is a small death, and by the halfway mark your body has learnt to brace for them.

Neil Young’s score was improvised to the picture. Young watched the finished cut and played electric guitar to it, live, mostly alone, and that take is what you hear. It means the score is genuinely reacting rather than illustrating — feedback swelling a half-second after a gesture, a note bending as somebody turns their head, long passages of nothing at all. Conventional scores smooth a film out. This one has ragged edges and hesitations, and it makes the picture feel like it is being dreamt in real time. It is one of the great marriages of music and image, and it happened because Jarmusch handed the film to a musician and left the room.

The violence is incompetent. Nobody in Dead Man can shoot properly. Guns are fired at close range and miss. Men are hit and take an unpleasantly long time about the rest of it. A killing is followed by a long, embarrassed silence rather than a cut. The classical western made gunplay into grammar — draw, fire, dissolve. Jarmusch strips out the grammar and leaves the physical fact, and the result is that every death in this film is faintly humiliating for everyone present. That is a moral position expressed entirely through staging.

Farmer’s Nobody is the performance that holds the film. He is funny, learned, sarcastic and completely uninterested in being anybody’s noble guide — a character with an actual backstory involving England, which the film delivers in one devastating monologue — and he is the reason Dead Man stands up as one of the few westerns where the Native characters are the intelligent ones.

The real ancestor

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a whole BFI book about this film and made “acid western” the standard term for it, and the lineage he traces is the right one: El Topo, Greaser’s Palace, Zachariah — the counterculture’s attempt to take the most American genre and dose it.

The ancestor I would press on you instead is Monte Hellman. The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, both shot in 1965 in the Utah desert with Jack Nicholson and almost no money, are the true source. Hellman’s westerns are about people riding across enormous country toward a destination that turns out to mean nothing, in a landscape that will not comment, with dialogue that trails off, and they were made in complete indifference to what a western was supposed to deliver. Dead Man has the mysticism El Topo has, and it has Hellman’s structure: a journey that is not going anywhere, undertaken by people who cannot admit it. Watch The Shooting and the last hour of Dead Man becomes legible as something other than a whim.

The rest of the shelf: Ghost Dog is the same director doing the identical trick four years later with a different borrowed text — a man living by a book from another culture that he has read more carefully than anyone around him. Valhalla Rising is the acid-western structure transposed to the North Atlantic with the dialogue removed entirely. And A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is what the strand grew into once it stopped being American.

The case against

The film is slow in a way that is not always earned. Jarmusch’s fades-to-black are a superb device for the first forty minutes and a tic by the ninetieth. There are two or three trading-post scenes that exist because he had a good actor for the day and no better reason.

Depp is also a genuine problem for some viewers, and the objection is coherent: he plays Blake as a blank, drifting further into passivity as the film goes on, and if the passivity does not read as design it reads as an actor with nothing to do. I think it is design — the film is watching a man be replaced by a legend, and blankness is the correct instrument — though I would not pretend the reading is forced on you.

And the third act’s mysticism asks for a lot of goodwill. The film’s spiritual claims are entirely unfalsifiable and delivered with a straight face, and Jarmusch’s cool, deadpan surface gives you no purchase on how sincerely any of it is meant. That ambiguity is either the whole point or a hedge, depending on the day.

The verdict

Dead Man is the best film Jim Jarmusch has made and one of the two or three westerns of the last forty years that genuinely rethought the form. It took the genre’s founding fantasy — a man goes west and becomes himself — and ran it exactly as written, with the sole modification that the man is dying the entire time and the country he is crossing has already been strip-mined by the people who invented the fantasy. Mitchum’s presence seals it. The last thing the great faces of the classical western did on screen was preside over the genre’s own funeral, from behind a desk, in a metalworks.

Go for Müller’s blacks and Young’s guitar, both of which reward the loudest, darkest viewing you can manage. Stay for Gary Farmer, who deserved twenty years of leading roles and got this.

It streams on the arthouse services and has had excellent restorations on disc; the monochrome is worth the physical edition.

Spoilers below

The night Blake leaves Machine, he goes home with Thel Russell (Mili Avital), a former prostitute who now sells paper flowers. Her ex-fiancé Charlie Dickinson — Gabriel Byrne, and John Dickinson’s son — walks in, shoots at Blake, kills Thel with the same bullet, and is shot dead by Blake with her gun. The bullet that passed through Thel is now lodged next to Blake’s heart, too deep to remove. Nobody tells him this in the woods, in the film’s key line of dialogue: the white man is already a dead man, and everything that follows is the walk to the water.

That single fact reorganises the whole picture. Blake is being escorted west by a man who knows where the journey ends. The bounty hunters, Dickinson’s money, the wanted posters, the growing legend of William Blake the killer — all of it accumulates around a corpse that has not yet stopped moving, and the more famous he becomes, the deader he gets. Jarmusch’s joke is that this is exactly how the American frontier hero was manufactured in the first place.

Nobody’s own history is the film’s darkest passage. As a boy he was captured by soldiers, exhibited across England as a curiosity, taught to read, and given Blake’s poetry — and when he returned home nobody believed a word of it, which is how he got his name. Farmer plays it without a shred of self-pity and it recontextualises every wisecrack he has made up to that point.

The bounty hunters eat each other. Conway Twill talks himself to death; Cole Wilson, a cannibal who has by reputation done unspeakable things to his own parents, kills the others as bureaucratic housekeeping and keeps walking.

The ending is a funeral. Nobody dresses Blake, now barely conscious, in the ceremonial way and pushes him out to sea in a canoe, from a Makah village on the Pacific, to travel back to the place where all the spirits came from. Cole Wilson arrives on the shore at the same moment. He and Nobody shoot each other simultaneously and both go down. And the last thing William Blake sees, from the water, is the two of them lying dead on the beach — his killer and his guide, cancelled out — as the canoe drifts west, out past the pines, into the fade to black the film has been rehearsing for two hours.