movie: Dead Man
Aug. 31st, 2003 08:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyWatched Dead Man last night with Mirrorthaw and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heres_luck. It's a weird, sad, surreal, strange movie, and it seems to have infested my head, with the able assistance of the first track on Kris Delmhorst's new album, Songs for a Hurricane, making my mood sad and surreal as well.
So I'm going to talk about Dead Man. Indiscriminate and total spoilers.
HL and I were trying last night to pin down just what it is that makes this movie so strange. I'm not sure we succeeded, but I'm going to start from one point we articulated, which is that this is shot like a silent film which just happens to have sound. (I'm not as enamored of Neil Young's fuzzed-out guitar as he and Jim Jarmusch are, but let that slide.) It's in black and white, and there are, as HL pointed out, a lot of shots of stillness. The dialogue tends heavily to the inconsequential, the nonsequiturial, and the tangential. It would be an interesting experiment to watch DM with the sound off and see how much difference it made.
So, black and white film, extraordinarily tranquil camera work, if that's the word I want, and all the trappings of a Western: the city kid who comes out west, the corrupt, dangerous, and incredibly skanky town of Machine, the saloon (with whores), the Hooker with a Heart of Gold, the evil boss, John Dickinson (played with off-the-cuff authority by Robert Mitchum), the bounty-hunters, the Faithful Indian Sidekick ... except that none of these elements fit into the story in any way that the genre conventions would lead one to expect. Machine, the Dickinson Metalworks, Dickinson, the HwaHoG: they're all a combination of red herring and singularly transparent plot justification. I'd guess 80 to 90 percent of the movie takes place in the wilderness, completely unidentifiable panoramas of trees and rocks, sometimes with snow, sometimes with a river. The plot it looks like we're going to get--kid from Cleveland comes to corrupt town, falls for HwaHoG, tangles with bossman's son, cleans up the town, defeats bossman, etc. etc.--gets completely and utterly derailed in maybe the fourth or fifth scene (not counting the long and utterly surreal prologue on the train), when Dickinson's son shoots both the HwaHoG and William Blake, the kid from Cleveland.
Except for some reason William Blake doesn't die. Or, perhaps more accurately, he's dead but it doesn't make any difference.
I have a science-fiction fan's mind; I spent most of the movie trying to figure out what happened in that moment, when Johnny Depp looks down, touches the bullet hole in his chest, and then scrambles madly out the window. My success in this endeavor was not what you might call notable. I still don't know whether my suspicion that Cole Wilson (the absolute bugfuck nuts, cannibal bounty hunter, played by Lance Henriksen) was also dead was right or not. The arrow he takes in the chest seems to bother him about as much as the bullet bothers Blake, but at the very end it looks fairly clear that he and Nobody kill each other (although even that we don't know for sure). And the movie is really not interested in this question. Blake is dead, and most of the movie is about the efforts of himself and Nobody to get him to the point, "the mirror of water," where his spirit can be released.
Nobody is the Native American who finds Blake after he flees Machine, and seems to be the only person who really understands what's going on--an understanding he does not share, either with Blake or the audience. I'd love to have someone who knows something about these things tell me if Nobody's regalia comes all from one tribal tradition, or if it's as much of a hybrid mishmash as he is himself. The story he tells Blake, about being captured by the English, displayed like an animal, sent to school in England, and finally escaping back West, resonates with a lot of the history between Native Americans and Europeans, and the movie neatly lampoons the "mystic Indian lore" schtick by having most of Nobody's most gnomic statements (which Blake categorizes exasperatedly as "Indian malarkey") be quotes from William Blake.
The plot drops out of the movie piece by piece as it proceeds. Once Dickinson has set all his pieces in motion, he vanishes along with the entire town of Machine. We leave them behind. The three bounty hunters become two, then one; every remnant of "civilization" Blake comes in contact with, he kills (three trappers, two marshals, one missionary). And when he regains contact with human society, briefly, in a scene paralleling his entrance into Machine, it's with a Indian tribe whose language he does not speak. Though benevolent, they are completely opaque to him. It is Nobody who speaks for him, Nobody who goes with the elders into the whatever-it-is (sweat lodge?) that parallels the Dickinson Metalworks. Because I do narrative and genre theory, and this is how I look at things, I would argue that there are two competing narratives in Dead Man: the "Western" narrative of the hero's quest, complete with descent to the underworld and triumphant, carnage-wreaking return; and the real narrative, which only Nobody understands and which may not be a "narrative" in the European sense at all. The "Western" spends most of the movie trying to get Blake back into its formulae (Dickinson tells the bounty-hunters he wants Blake brought back to him, dead or alive--a standard western cliché that has a nasty double-meaning here); it's no accident that immediately after Nobody launches Blake onto the "mirror of water" where he will find true death and peace, he kills and is killed by Cole Wilson in defending Blake's escape from the narrative.
I have the feeling that there are parts of the pattern in this movie that I simply missed. I can recognize the broad allegory of industrial vs. pastoral world, white men vs. Indians ("stupid fucking white man," as Nobody calls Blake repeatedly), but the nature of Blake's trajectory through this allegorical landscape still has me baffled. Which perhaps is the point--this is an extraordinarily existentialist movie. Things happen because they happen. Characters encounter each other randomly in the wilderness without any great sense of surprise. The flat, patient presentation makes it very difficult to sort out which details are important and leaves one with the unsettling feeling that they're all important, even if some of them are important to stories we don't know and aren't going to be told--and even if those stories themselves are just another flat and inscrutable detail in this strange and dreamy tapestry.
Blake is an Everyman in his terrible plaid suit; the only background we get for him establishes that he is alone in the world, and most of what we know of him we get in the few scenes before he dies, where he is revealed to be courteous and naïve: an accountant from Cleveland. He is clearly in over his head in Machine, and the abandonment of that conventional plot arc is actually something of a relief, despite the narrative anxiety it creates.
Nobody calls bullets "white man's metal," which somehow for me ties back to the sequence in the prologue when the flea-bitten train passengers open the windows and start shooting buffalo from the movie train. Also Dickinson's rifle and Cole Wilson shooting The Kid in the back of the head and the incredibly bizarre scene with the trappers, where the word "Philistine" gets thrown around like a signifier searching for a signified. I can see that the white men in this movie are the Philistines (and they are white men; there are only two female speaking parts: Thel (the HwaHoG) and the young woman listed in the credits as "Nobody's girlfriend"), but I don't know why. Nor why we get the biblical language from a cross-dressed trapper in one scene and a missionary in another. (Nor do I know exactly what those trappers were planning to do with Blake, and I'm not sure I want to. The line between sexual predation and literal predation--with its echo of Cole Wilson eating Conway Twill--seems very very sketchy here.)
Perhaps Blake and I share the same problem in not knowing enough about the real William Blake's poetry. I'm sure Nobody would tell me so.
heres_luck. It's a weird, sad, surreal, strange movie, and it seems to have infested my head, with the able assistance of the first track on Kris Delmhorst's new album, Songs for a Hurricane, making my mood sad and surreal as well.So I'm going to talk about Dead Man. Indiscriminate and total spoilers.
HL and I were trying last night to pin down just what it is that makes this movie so strange. I'm not sure we succeeded, but I'm going to start from one point we articulated, which is that this is shot like a silent film which just happens to have sound. (I'm not as enamored of Neil Young's fuzzed-out guitar as he and Jim Jarmusch are, but let that slide.) It's in black and white, and there are, as HL pointed out, a lot of shots of stillness. The dialogue tends heavily to the inconsequential, the nonsequiturial, and the tangential. It would be an interesting experiment to watch DM with the sound off and see how much difference it made.
So, black and white film, extraordinarily tranquil camera work, if that's the word I want, and all the trappings of a Western: the city kid who comes out west, the corrupt, dangerous, and incredibly skanky town of Machine, the saloon (with whores), the Hooker with a Heart of Gold, the evil boss, John Dickinson (played with off-the-cuff authority by Robert Mitchum), the bounty-hunters, the Faithful Indian Sidekick ... except that none of these elements fit into the story in any way that the genre conventions would lead one to expect. Machine, the Dickinson Metalworks, Dickinson, the HwaHoG: they're all a combination of red herring and singularly transparent plot justification. I'd guess 80 to 90 percent of the movie takes place in the wilderness, completely unidentifiable panoramas of trees and rocks, sometimes with snow, sometimes with a river. The plot it looks like we're going to get--kid from Cleveland comes to corrupt town, falls for HwaHoG, tangles with bossman's son, cleans up the town, defeats bossman, etc. etc.--gets completely and utterly derailed in maybe the fourth or fifth scene (not counting the long and utterly surreal prologue on the train), when Dickinson's son shoots both the HwaHoG and William Blake, the kid from Cleveland.
Except for some reason William Blake doesn't die. Or, perhaps more accurately, he's dead but it doesn't make any difference.
I have a science-fiction fan's mind; I spent most of the movie trying to figure out what happened in that moment, when Johnny Depp looks down, touches the bullet hole in his chest, and then scrambles madly out the window. My success in this endeavor was not what you might call notable. I still don't know whether my suspicion that Cole Wilson (the absolute bugfuck nuts, cannibal bounty hunter, played by Lance Henriksen) was also dead was right or not. The arrow he takes in the chest seems to bother him about as much as the bullet bothers Blake, but at the very end it looks fairly clear that he and Nobody kill each other (although even that we don't know for sure). And the movie is really not interested in this question. Blake is dead, and most of the movie is about the efforts of himself and Nobody to get him to the point, "the mirror of water," where his spirit can be released.
Nobody is the Native American who finds Blake after he flees Machine, and seems to be the only person who really understands what's going on--an understanding he does not share, either with Blake or the audience. I'd love to have someone who knows something about these things tell me if Nobody's regalia comes all from one tribal tradition, or if it's as much of a hybrid mishmash as he is himself. The story he tells Blake, about being captured by the English, displayed like an animal, sent to school in England, and finally escaping back West, resonates with a lot of the history between Native Americans and Europeans, and the movie neatly lampoons the "mystic Indian lore" schtick by having most of Nobody's most gnomic statements (which Blake categorizes exasperatedly as "Indian malarkey") be quotes from William Blake.
The plot drops out of the movie piece by piece as it proceeds. Once Dickinson has set all his pieces in motion, he vanishes along with the entire town of Machine. We leave them behind. The three bounty hunters become two, then one; every remnant of "civilization" Blake comes in contact with, he kills (three trappers, two marshals, one missionary). And when he regains contact with human society, briefly, in a scene paralleling his entrance into Machine, it's with a Indian tribe whose language he does not speak. Though benevolent, they are completely opaque to him. It is Nobody who speaks for him, Nobody who goes with the elders into the whatever-it-is (sweat lodge?) that parallels the Dickinson Metalworks. Because I do narrative and genre theory, and this is how I look at things, I would argue that there are two competing narratives in Dead Man: the "Western" narrative of the hero's quest, complete with descent to the underworld and triumphant, carnage-wreaking return; and the real narrative, which only Nobody understands and which may not be a "narrative" in the European sense at all. The "Western" spends most of the movie trying to get Blake back into its formulae (Dickinson tells the bounty-hunters he wants Blake brought back to him, dead or alive--a standard western cliché that has a nasty double-meaning here); it's no accident that immediately after Nobody launches Blake onto the "mirror of water" where he will find true death and peace, he kills and is killed by Cole Wilson in defending Blake's escape from the narrative.
I have the feeling that there are parts of the pattern in this movie that I simply missed. I can recognize the broad allegory of industrial vs. pastoral world, white men vs. Indians ("stupid fucking white man," as Nobody calls Blake repeatedly), but the nature of Blake's trajectory through this allegorical landscape still has me baffled. Which perhaps is the point--this is an extraordinarily existentialist movie. Things happen because they happen. Characters encounter each other randomly in the wilderness without any great sense of surprise. The flat, patient presentation makes it very difficult to sort out which details are important and leaves one with the unsettling feeling that they're all important, even if some of them are important to stories we don't know and aren't going to be told--and even if those stories themselves are just another flat and inscrutable detail in this strange and dreamy tapestry.
Blake is an Everyman in his terrible plaid suit; the only background we get for him establishes that he is alone in the world, and most of what we know of him we get in the few scenes before he dies, where he is revealed to be courteous and naïve: an accountant from Cleveland. He is clearly in over his head in Machine, and the abandonment of that conventional plot arc is actually something of a relief, despite the narrative anxiety it creates.
Nobody calls bullets "white man's metal," which somehow for me ties back to the sequence in the prologue when the flea-bitten train passengers open the windows and start shooting buffalo from the movie train. Also Dickinson's rifle and Cole Wilson shooting The Kid in the back of the head and the incredibly bizarre scene with the trappers, where the word "Philistine" gets thrown around like a signifier searching for a signified. I can see that the white men in this movie are the Philistines (and they are white men; there are only two female speaking parts: Thel (the HwaHoG) and the young woman listed in the credits as "Nobody's girlfriend"), but I don't know why. Nor why we get the biblical language from a cross-dressed trapper in one scene and a missionary in another. (Nor do I know exactly what those trappers were planning to do with Blake, and I'm not sure I want to. The line between sexual predation and literal predation--with its echo of Cole Wilson eating Conway Twill--seems very very sketchy here.)
Perhaps Blake and I share the same problem in not knowing enough about the real William Blake's poetry. I'm sure Nobody would tell me so.
