Dead Man
With Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Eugene Byrd, Mili Avital, Gabriel Byrne, John Hurt, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Jared Harris, Jimmie Ray Weeks, Mark Bringelson, Michelle Thrush, Alfred Molina, Robert Mitchum, and Crispin Glover.
The first of many violent episodes in the film, this one sets the tone for Jarmusch’s distinctive, unnerving handling of violence. (“Why do you have this?” Blake asks Thel, fingering her gun before her former lover turns up. “‘Cause this is America,” she explains.) Every time someone fires a gun in this movie, both the gesture and its result are awkward, unheroic, even downright pitiful; it’s a messy act devoid of any pretense of stylishness or existential purity, creating a sense of discomfort and embarrassment in the viewer usually expressed in laughter. In this respect, it’s the reverse of the expressionist forms of violence taken for granted in commercial moviemaking ever since Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch, and recently granted a second life by De Palma, Woo, and Tarantino, among others: Jarmusch refuses to respect or valorize bloodshed. The film is no less honest about the allure of murderers in our culture; as Blake is gradually transformed into a cold-blooded killer, he takes on some of the “legendary” aura of a media star.
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There are several ways to categorize Jim Jarmusch’s six features to date. There are three in color (Permanent Vacation, Mystery Train, and Night on Earth), and three in black and white (Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Dead Man); clearly the second group is superior. Some have solitary heroes (Permanent Vacation and Dead Man), and some have clusters of heroes (the other four); the choice between these groups is much harder, because the first includes both Jarmusch’s thinnest and richest work–an apprentice piece and a masterpiece, both about solitude–and the second gives us another sort of movie altogether, minimalist entertainments in a theme-and-variations form.
With the help of unabashed Sundance and Miramax supporters like the New York Times’s Janet Maslin–journalists eager to promote film as a business over film as an art, and therefore ready to place the future of cinema in the hands of producers rather than artists–the popular model for so-called American independence has now passed from Jarmusch’s freedom to Tarantino’s servitude. Take a look at the mostly negative American reviews of Dead Man and you’ll see Maslin is far from alone in this bias. Mainstream reviewers nowadays judge even big-budget commercial fare by the same rule-book prescriptions: though Jim Carrey is presumably powerful enough now to make some artistic choices of his own, he’s expected to adhere to the guidelines established in Ace Ventura and The Mask and not take any disturbing risks, as he does in The Cable Guy. (Though in this case the public already seems well ahead of the New York Times and Variety.)
Despite their formal ingenuity and diverse charms, Mystery Train and Night on Earth both indicated that Jarmusch was digging something of a rut for himself as a minimalist entertainer and hip, downtown-Manhattan mannerist. Though these films weren’t by any means devoid of thematic interest–for starters, both are preoccupied with death, anticipating Dead Man–they carried out their limited game plans a little too neatly. One felt Jarmusch was capable of more but hadn’t yet found the nerve to risk losing his constituency by pursuing it. Now that he’s found the nerve, it’s easier to see why he hesitated before making Dead Man–a project he’s been mulling over for years. Though he’s decisively turned a corner with this film and created his most accomplished and important work to date (as a friend remarked, extending the film’s references to the visionary poet Blake, this is plainly Jarmusch’s Songs of Experience), it’s clear he can no longer count on the critical support in this country that was there for him as a laid-back entertainer.
Near where the charter’d Thames
