Release date: May 26, 1995
Director and playwright: Jim Jarmusch
Genre: Western
Lead artists: Johnny Depp (William Blake), Avital (Thel Russell), Gary Farmer (Nobady), Lance Henriksen (Cole Wilson), Michael Wincott (Conway Twill), and John Hurt (John Scholfield).
Synopsis:
Bill Blake comes to the town of Machine to work in a factory as an accountant; but unfortunately he has arrived only a month late due to the death of his parents and handling their funerals, so he loses his job. The next night he arrives in town, Bill is confronted by a peddler girl and is invited to spend the night with her, but the girl’s ex-boyfriend (son of the owner of Machine’s Metal Works Company) arrives and Bill leaves. he is forced to kill him as in self-defense and he himself was wounded. He ran away and wakes up in the morning to find Nadie, who is an English-literate Indian; he calls William Blake the dead man because he is named after a dead English poet and also has a bullet in his chest. They begin a journey to escape their persecution(s), on the way they face different surprises and adventures; these events transform William Blake into a cold-blooded murderer of men for his own survival. He makes an extermination camp which results in his death.
Setting:
Time: the film is set at the end of the 19th century,
Place: on the extreme western frontier of America.
Gender: Western, Drama
“It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.” It’s a quote from Henri Michaux that the movie opens with, so it’s initially obvious that the audience is going to see a completely metaphorical movie. William Blake (1757-1827), English poet, painter, and printmaker, who created an unusual form of illustrated verse; his poetry, inspired by mystical vision, is among the most original, lyrical and prophetic in the language is the name of the main character and Nobody, which I think may be a metaphor for the most recognized work of American playwright Arthur Miller , death of a seller (1949) which tells the story of a traveling salesman, Willy Loman, who experiences frustration and failure reflecting on his life, in a scene where Charley (Loman’s friend) talks about the salesman’s grave which begins with “nobody dast to blame this man. You don’t get it: Willy was a salesman…” is the name of the second man. Both are metaphors searching and fighting for their identities: Blake has lost his relatives and heads west in search of a place where he can igniting a new life Although it is stated in the final scripts that it is a fictional story and that no one should be considered as a real character, Willy Blake (the dead man) largely represents former president Andrew Jackson, who was orphaned as he is. Billy and a dead man as he also had a bullet in his chest.
film technique:
Dead Man is projected in black and white, which in itself represents the sad mood of the story; It also shows that all the main characters in the play are white and good or black and villains, there is no gray main character in the story. In 1995, a black and white film can also be considered as a dehabitualization and deconstruction after a long time of color films (from the 1940s and 50s). Dead Man is full of violence and that’s why it got an R rating, it conveys a complete sense of bitterness and fear in 19th century America.
The film’s music is outstanding; written and performed by Neil Young on electric guitar, it did only what black and white people did or had been done in black and white.
Game figures (in place of speech)
The train appears to move backwards, which could be intended to bring the audience to the desired time in the western territories of 19th century America. Leaving by train, Billy Blake understood that people in that land “talk daggers” to the innocent; but like Shakespeare’s Hamlet long ago, they speak and verse in gun. From the street to the bed and from hate to love everyone should have guns “because it’s America.” Industrialization also added fuel to the brutality fire as the locomotive engineer did in the opening scenes. Another notion to consider is tobacco, a healing herb for the Indians that has become a smoking herb for the whites.
Conclusion
Dead Man speaks and shows nothing but a dead value of humanity. He shows that in the so-called modern civilized West even a pinto is more valuable than a man (even a white one). Jarmusch’s cinema always shows social problems and issues as seen in his other works such as: stranger than paradise (1984), Under the law (1986), mystery train (1989), night on earth (1992), Coffee and cigarettes: somewhere in California (1993), Horse’s year (1997) and The Butterfly Man (2005).
