Dead Man

Dead Man

A Review: 5/10

Dead Man, the 1995 film directed by Jim Jarmusch, is essentially a classic Western made more palatable to the 90s by a trendy admixture of decadence. The underlying myth, the fundamental ideology has not changed. It in no way challenges the traditional narrative, or acknowledges that narrative as problematic.

Our white male center of the universe (Johnny Depp) travels West towards his manifest destiny of badassitude, helped along the way by a harmless Native American born specifically to nurse a white individual back to health all the while professing a comic hatred of white men in general. The mental dissonance of heroizing an individual white man while disparaging white men in general is not acknowledge in the film because in Jarmusch’s world white history is something which can be transcended, sloughed off by a sufficiently charismatic individual, such as Johnny Depp.

This is a common aspect of white American mythologies. Sure, white people as a collective have done such and such terrible things, but the individual white man is different, is not implicated, is not bound or constrained by race because he is the artist of himself, the product of a mythological journey whereby he transcends his own origins.

Dead Man is the story of a man shedding his own history, moving from the particular and the culpable (a cityfied accountant from Cleveland) to the universal, which transcends questions of guilt and origin.

It is not a poorly made film. It’s a well-made, well-acted and well-shot film. It is really just the narrative, the fundamental assumptions of the film that bother me.

The director Jim Jarmusch was present at the screening, which took place on the campus of a wealth public university. At the Q&A afterwards educated people gushed. The moderator called it his favorite film of all time. Jarmusch, a competent anecdote teller, told stories about the eccentricity of various geniuses he had the honor of working with. The overall fawning was just slightly sickening.