DEAD MAN

DEAD MAN
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, and many big names in small roles
Year: 1995

Bumper: John Maurer

Could there be any more “fitting” film for The Black Boot to review than 1995’s film noir artsy cowboy flick Dead Man (excusing for the moment that our slogan is “writing alive”)? Figurative comparisons aside, the literal abundance of the black-boot-clad alone warrants this BB editor to don his wide-brimmed hat with a tobacco-spit smile. Add to this kudos the central rôle of poet William Blake (or his accidental imposter, anyways) and things begin to feel uncanny, even. Boot-laden literary sorts?? Suffice it to say (and excuse me in advance for doing so) that I watched this one in reverie ‘til the cows came home.

But “Artsy-Western”? Isn’t that an oxymoron, your raised eyebrow suggests. A peculiar affair, to be sure; unlikely bed-fellows, certainly. A genre of one, perhaps. But aren’t we all?—if we’re lucky, that is.

I had just finished reading Gogol’s Dead Souls (a gem of a novel, btw) and the focus on death had me in a morbid mood, I guess. And then I remembered that old friend of mine, Dead Man. So I stoked the fire, sent some smoke signals over to his Netflix ranch, and had him gallup on by for a cold brew or two to catch up on old times. We set some baked beans on the range and let our worn toes warm by the spitting flames. Both of these œuvres, incidentally, share a dry sense of humor (parched, almost) whose color spectrum leans heavily towards the darker hues. They also involve a conflicted hero who travels great distances through vast countryside. Beyond that, however, Gogol’s being set in early 19^th-century Russia, I won’t attempt to torture the comparison any further.

The movie stars none other than Johnny Depp, and yet how many people have even heard of it? Ironically, in answer to that question, Depp spends most of the duration following a character who goes by the nickname of “Nobody”—a self-fulfilling prophesy? Not exactly the box office success of Chocolat or Pirates of the Caribbean, to say the least; but perhaps on the order of a cult classic. To catapult it even higher, Neil Young provides the soundtrack. A pairing that rivals wine and cheese; or, more fitting, and perhaps even yummier: beanies and weenies. Where dialogue is scant—Depp’s character runs more than a little tongue-shy (though not gun-shy, have you)—and the focus turns to scenery (although nothing on the order of the nearly-mute Gus Van Sant-classic Gerry), Young strums a sonic backdrop of urgent solo electric guitar that drives the movie forward, sometimes with a gentle beckoning, sometimes with a whip.

Depp’s character finds himself ushered through scenarios and shoved into scandals like tumbleweed in a dust storm; or like a canoe floating aimlessly out to sea, until the waves literally carry him passively to his death—the title itself gives away the conclusion, so I’m not stealing anything in saying so (similar in that regard to Gabriel García Márquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold). Innocently seeking a job at the outset, and a boring yet respectable clerical position at that, he suddenly finds himself running from the law at no/little fault of his own and falls in with an opium-puffing Native American outcast named Xebeche (“He Who Talks Loud, Saying Nothing”) who swares Depp is the reincarnated, or actual?, English poet William Blake. The two wander across the then-largely-unpopulated American West with a trio of gruff, heartless bounty hunters snapping at their heels—one of them a cannibal—with instructions to return him dead or alive. Along the way, Bill Blake, an accountant from Cleveland painfully mixed up in the wrong place at the wrong time, imbibes the spirt of the bloke-Blake and learns to write poetry “in blood”.

Anyone who considers themselves more an observer than an actual player on the stage of life—a category many of us “aloof” writers and artists stereotypically fall into—this film illustrates how you may still find yourself thrown onto center stage one day, and with a target painted on your face. Many of the more Type “A” folks in the audience (and I encourage you to invite some, for your own cruel amusement) will squirm in their armchair yearning for Blake to take the reigns and wrangle his life from spiraling haphazardly into the grave, in which regard Depp plays a cowboy-Western anti-hero. And they will hate this movie. And miss the point, frankly. Because even the triple “A” among us are not above a good manhandling now and then at the hands of life and death’s merciless brigade. An appreciation for which—though daunting and seemingly pessimistic on the surface, like any inconvenient truth—can temper misplaced pride and inspire compassion.

Turned inside out (right side in?), the “dead man” can be considered a metaphor for the larger fate of the Native Americans themselves, who as an entire race were pursued and helplessly up-rooted by the arrival of the Stupid White Man and his lethal entourage of “guns, germs, and steel” (to borrow a phrase coined and popularized by author Jared Diamond)—the gravity of which is portrayed in somber tones throughout many parts of the movie. It is probably no coincidence, then, that Depp’s character, similarly caught in the quagmire of the wild west and its injustices, is taken in by Native Americans, and that Depp in real life is part Cherokee.

Unlike the typical shoot-’em-up cowboys-versus-Indians film of a bygone era, guns and gangsters are not glorified and there are no super-human heroes or lone rangers to save the day. There are no dramatic drawn-out death scenes where the victim is permitted to speak his final piece before exiting this life in the warm embrace of his loved ones. In contrast, much of that time period was gruesome and miserable, dirty and dishonest, lawless and life-threatening, quiet and conspicuously lacking in Hollywood-style action, despite what playthings we have subsequently molded from its legacy, like Navajo mud dolls. Though seasoned with humor and entertaining to watch, this tragicomic satire is also a sobering dose of reality regarding a key chapter in our history that some of us may still misguidedly pride ourselves on.

Grizzly? Yes, at times. But bear-ably so. And with bear-sized heart to help heal the claw marks. So, by all means, giddy-up and lasso this tumbleweed to the top of your Netflix totem pole with a hearty “yippee-ki-yay”!