Reflections from a Young Movie-goer
The Western is an
interesting genre. Using the cowboy era, a relatively short span of
American history, the Western has managed to mythologise the rugged
individualism that sits at the core of American ideology. They are,
in some sense, the fairy tales of the US, their macho heroes are not
characters so much as ideals. And in the best of the classic
Westerns, this ideal is opened up and scrutinized on a deeper level.
Take, for instance, John Wayne's character in John Ford's The
Searchers (1956), he is the image of rough, American masculinity,
fearlessly pursuing his kidnapped niece across a dangerous,
unforgiving landscape. But at the same time he is psychologically
scarred, a veteran of the Civil War (having fought for the
Confederacy), and on his quest he is as much driven by feelings of
hatred for the Native Americans than by love for his niece.
The Western not only
has the power to construct the American ideal, but also to
deconstruct it. Ford doesn't necessarily condone Ethan's (Wayne's
character) actions and motivations, but simply puts them up on screen
for the audience to view from an apathetic distance. This apathy
makes the Western increasingly existential, its process of
deconstruction and introspection more self aware. Against an
unpopulated and belittling backdrop, and alongside the various
struggles and atrocities that accompany the growing pains of a
nation, the Western's of today are a vastly more political and
philosophical affair. Take for instance Quentin Tarantino's Django
Unchained (2012). As a film-maker, Tarantino deals mostly with
already established filmic types and ideas, and nowhere is this more
evident than in Django,
taking staples of the Western and putting them into new
configurations; the liberated slave becomes a cowboy. But whereas the
intentions of Django
are more political, films like Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man
(1995) are philosophical.
In
Dead Man, Johnny Depp
plays William Blake an accountant who journeys by train westward to
the small town of "Machine" following the promise of a job
at a metal works. Upon arrival, he finds the job has been given to
someone else and he is driven out at gunpoint by the company's owner,
John Dickinson (played by Robert Mitchum). With no prospects and very
little cash left, Blake goes home with a former prostitute who sells
paper flowers. In the morning, her ex-boyfriend surprises them in bed
and, aiming for Blake, accidentally shoots her. While he is shocked,
Blake nervously reaches for a gun and shoots him, missing twice
before finally hitting him. Blake realises the bullet that killed the
woman is deeply embedded in his chest (thus making him a Dead
Man).The ex-boyfriend turns out to be John Dickinson's son, who
dispatches three bounty hunters to track him down and bring him back
dead or alive. While on the run, Blake meets a stoic Native American
called Nobody who believes that he is the famous poet of the same
name. What follows is a film that is all at once dark, gritty,
hilarious, slow and incredibly dreamlike. Depp starts out looking
more like Buster Keaton, but after he is confronted with his own
mortality he slowly undergoes a transformation into something a lot
more like Clint Eastwood's man with no name.
Like
Tarantino, Jarmusch draws heavily from culture. Rather than just pop
culture and filmic types, though, he expands this to include culture
itself, and draws two or more together in various ways to create
authentic, new experiences. This is most apparent in films like Ghost
Dog: Way of the Samurai (1999),
which fuses Japanese philosophy with a Hip Hop soundtrack to
construct a new American cultural formation on film. In the case of
Dead Man, though,
Jarmusch takes Native American spiritualism and applies it to the
filmic elements of the Western. The result is something that blends
poetry and existentialism, meaningless death with fate. This is to
put it simply, though, the film is rather more a melting pot of ideas
and references which puts mood and inventiveness before plot and
characters. As a result, it can appear increasingly jagged around the
edges at times, feeling either daring and new, or overblown and vapid
(or even both, for that matter). The vignette structure, fading to
black after each scene, alleviates this somewhat by making the film
seem more like a set of dreamlike fragments.
In
comparison to the polished prose of John M. Maclean's Slow
West (2015), Dead Man
is pure poetry. Neil Young's
spare, electric guitar soundtrack is repetitive, sometimes irritating
in its recycling of sounds, but it feels almost like a mantra,
collapsing the events of the film into a single, discordant memory,
like a dream had the moment before awakening. The film's ending could
easily loop back to the beginning, and play in an infinite cycle.
This is the essence of the film's Native American spiritualism,
thoughtfully meditating against an absurdist backdrop of death and
deadpan humour. Alongside this is a plethora of Blakean imagery,
riffing on the themes of innocence and experience, apparent in Depp's
transformation and a scene in which he lies down next to a dead fawn.
Here the American frontier is not a place of growth and prosperity,
but death and decay. Life in this strange, deadly land can best be
understood through the outlook of Nobody.
Jarmusch
utilises a high sense of artifice, particularly in the town of
Machine, not only to amplify the film's dreaminess, but also as
cultural reference points for the audience. Drawing attention to
these stereotypes, the film is much more effective in conveying its
philosophy. The rugged individual is no longer the upright, American
ideal, but an amoral, nameless cultural hybrid faced with his own
mortality. Justice and honour aren't so important as an animalistic
awareness of the chaos of being. Reason has no place in the West,
neither on the vast plains nor the unruly frontier towns. The Western
and its myths might have been dissected and scrutinised many times
before, but Dead Man
manages to do it to far more interesting effect.
It
meanders, providing hits and misses along the way, but there's no
doubt that the audience is left with a series of thought-provoking,
poetic images that will resurface in the mind many days later. The
cast and their performances are both exact, Gary Farmer's Nobody is
endlessly expressive and enigmatic, while Depp is the exact reverse,
stony-faced yet transparent, together they provide a highly watchable
and compelling on screen duo. In his utilisation of the Western genre
and its tropes, Jarmusch has confronted not just political ideas
about the US, but philosophical ones about the very nature of being.
This might seem a grandiose way of putting it, but the power of the
dreamlike storytelling simply speaks on a more human level than those
it shares a genre with. It might delight and dazzle some, others will
be left aggravated and baffled, but surely if anything this is an
immunisation against mediocrity, film's deadliest disease.
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