394 - Dead Man, United States, 1995. Dir. Jim Jarmusch.

Monday, January 29, 2018

394 - Dead Man, United States, 1995.  Dir. Jim Jarmusch.

William Blake is a Wanted man.

Nobody quotes his poetry.

Nobody helps him.  Nurses him.  Mends him.

Nobody stands beside him and guides him.

Nobody protects him.

And ultimately, Nobody sends him home in his final canoe.  To the place from which he has come.

No, not Cleveland.

But back to the place where all the spirits come from, and where all the spirits return.

William Blake begins as an accountant.

But Mr. Dickinson in Machine has given his job away.  Or at least his associate John Scholfield has given it away.

So William Blake insists on speaking with Mr. Dickinson.

That is a mistake.

John Dickinson, played by seventy-eight-year old, long-white-haired legend Robert Mitchum, speaks to a towering stuffed bear in his office beneath a painted portrait of himself.

Then he speaks to William Blake while holding a rifle to his face.

William Blake concedes the point.  He gives up his claim to the job for which he spent his life-savings to travel to Machine.

He does not know what he will do.

He exits the building.

He runs into a girl selling paper flowers.  Literally runs into her.  Knocks her into the street.  Into the mud.

Note that her name is Thel.  Between the well-known and frequently assigned works The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence and Experience, the real Blake wrote The Book of Thel.

She takes him home.

And that is when his real trouble begins.

And where what happens happens.  That causes him to be a Wanted man.

William Blake nearly dies more than half a dozen times.

Thank goodness for Nobody.


Dead Man is Jim Jarmusch's most philosophical and complex movie we have seen so far.

It takes place in the 19th-century and asks questions about the ways people of disparate cultures and points of view navigate life on the frontier.

It is literate and symbolic and evocative.

And may be its own kind of America a Prophecy.