The Edge
- Index
Dead Man
Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI Modern Classics, paperback, 96 pages
Review by Hassni Malik (2001)
In the USA the phrase ‘successful independent filmmaker’ has become a misleading one. All it now means is that a new filmmaker has succeeded in breaking into the mainstream by utilising the financial clout of alternate megacorps like Miramax. These bright young things eagerly give up final cut and ownership of the negatives, and in exchange become the new and marketable mainstream. Voilà!, ‘a successful independent filmmaker’ for your entertainment. Now go buy the merchandise.
Not so with Jim Jarmusch who has ploughed his own path by retaining all rights and final cut while making singularly beautiful films. Those films are very much
his films, but I suspect that they also represent the last glimmer of existentialist filmmaking that the mid-seventies spawned with Scorsese, Coppola, Malick and Friedkin (with
Cruising but nothing else). Sadly now everyone aims to make a quirky hit rather than films that alter the way you perceive the world. In this respect, as Rosenbaum suggests in this fine book, Jarmusch is a genuine outsider just as Nobody (played by Gary Farmer) and William Blake (Johnny Depp) are outsiders in
Dead Man.
Dead Man is a profoundly spiritual film in which Nobody, an Indian of mixed parentage and therefore an outcast from his tribe (racism even amongst those who should know better), leads the fatally wounded William Blake from this world into the next. Blake evolves spiritually from being an uptight, civilized, East coast accountant, to being a delirious man unshackled from logic. Jarmusch worked with native Americans to present a faithful retelling of the cultural contrasts between the white man and the native people; an altered way of seeing things in a depressingly blinkered world.
Rosenbaum presents a well argued case that Dead Man is as much a landmark western film as Jodorowksy’s
El Topo, in that it breaks with the simplistic posturing (white hats versus black hats) and sanitizing of history that plagues the genre, and opts for more surreal, gracefully spiritual visions. The ‘man alone’ of westerns is still there in this ethnically cleansed landscape (as James Ellroy recently said, America was built on slavery and genocide), but the wilderness has gone. Nobody and William Blake (and Jarmusch) are anachronisms in the new world.