William Blake, Gunslinger

Honestly, I’m not a fan of westerns but
with the remake of
3:10 to Yuma burning up the digicam-ed file-swapping
torrents out there, I thought it might be a good idea to provide
a look at a western that constructs a very convincing portrayal of
the old west. In the most recent edition of
The Yellow Sign I referenced the 1995 film

‘Dead Man’ as one of my favorite westerns. It’s certainly the only western I’ve watched more than a dozen times.

In fact, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched this film. This film is like Pilgrim’s Progress on peyote, set in the formative days of the United States, and the visual elements combined with Neil Young’s understated but emotionally charged soundtrack hold my interest from start to finish with every successive viewing. I’ve seen it at least thirty times, and probably more. So it’s with some reservations that I approach reviewing this film, in part because I’ve viewed it so many times that I’m no longer
certain what the film is actually about…

Sure, the first time or second time I watched this movie, I was pretty certain I could explain what I’d seen. A mild-mannered
accountant named William Blake(Johnny Depp) takes a train out west to start a new life working for a Mr. Dickinson(Robert Mitchum in his final role) at this dark, satanic-looking
mill in the town of Machine. Upon arrival he discovers the position he believed awaited him at mill has been filled, despite the letter
he’d received assuring him of employment. Destitute and without a clear idea of where to go, he enters a saloon and spends his
last few coins on a small bottle of alcohol. Leaving the saloon, a fight breaks out and he comes to the rescue of a flower girl named Thel.

After several scenes of intimacy and discussion of paper flowers vs. ones made of cloth, William finds himself trapped between the
innocence of Thel and the murderous rage of her former lover Charlie Dickinson, son of the very man who had denied him employment earlier that day.
In the ensuing gunfight, Thel throws herself into the path of a bullet meant for Blake, dying in the process. Blake kills Charlie and discovers that
the bullet has passed through Thel’s now life-less body, and is lodged in his chest. He escapes into the woods on the back of Charlie’s horse.

The next morning, Blake
awakens to Nobody(
Gary Farmer) carving away at his chest with a hunting knife. Terrified, (and lets be honest, if you were to wake up with someone standing
over you carving into your chest with a hunting knife, you’d be pretty freaked out as well), William Blake pulls away and demands to know what Nobody think’s he’s doing.
Meanwhile, Mr. Dickinson has discovered his son’s death and the theft of the horse, and has hired three bounty hunters to retrieve William Blake, dead or alive.

This is pretty archetypal stuff on the surface, a wanted man lost in the American West, with a greedy corporate baron pulling the strings of law enforcement while
the man wrongfully pursued discovers strength of character in the face of the inevitable. And the film itself, shot entirely in black and white with long, slow, beautiful
shots punctuated by fades in and out of black, only serves to further emphasize the drama. Violence, when it happens, has an immediacy to it that
forces the characters involved to deal with the grisly aftermath. There’s no glorification of violence, instead there’s a consistent and unwavering attention to
the aftermath of violence, and with it a startling re-framing of the myth of the gunslinger. The bounty hunter is revealed to be more than a simple gun for hire, becoming ultimately portrayed as a barbaric force divorced from the taboos of society. As William Blake and Nobody travel together, encountering the
chaos that the forces of industrialization, religion, and settlers have brought to the frontier, the world that Jim Jarmusch has brought into existence feels less and less like a fiction and more like a rebuttal of the entire genre of the ‘Western.’

That’s what I’d have said about the film after watching it twice. Having now viewed this film more than thirty times, I get another reading off of it entirely. William Blake is received as just another washed-up city slicker by the people of Machine, and as he flees into the wilderness the only individual who acknowledges his name-sake is the outsider Nobody. In fact, throughout the film as we watch and wait for the inevitable death of William Blake, it is Nobody’s story which takes central stage. Nobody, who has seen more of the world than Blake and who is educated enough to know that stones can speak, who believes Blake to be the reincarnation of the famous poet, and who’s adoption and education in Europe from which he’d escaped has led to his unique outsider stance in the land of his birth. It is not the supposedly civilized white people who recognize the name William Blake as anything but outlaw, while Nobody, ‘He who talks loud, says nothing,’ recites passages from “Auguries of Innocence.”

With the last viewing of this film I’ve reached another conclusion. It is not William Blake who is the dead man, nor is he even the main character. Instead, it is Nobody who is dead to his tribes and cut off of the culture which had educated him, and it is William Blake who travels with a dead man. Or at least, that’s my most recent conclusion…. I’m sure if I watch it again, I’ll come up with something else. Check it out:

Dead Man