Traveling With a Dead Man (1995)
Alex
At the end of the line, a new life begins. Cinema often uses the too-convenient event of death to raise the plot’s stakes to a sufficient level of suspense for the audience, showing all the different ways a protagonist reaches “the end of the line.” Dead Man transcends this by doubling down on it, by default of not pretending to be anything but a one track journey to death. The first event of the film is William Blake reaching the end of the line, and this heralds (judging by his completely subservient demeanor) the first real adventure of his life. Life doesn’t begin for William Blake until the death of his purpose, the death of his orderly life.
Integration of all the moving parts, i.e. harmony, is one trait of good art. Absolutely everything in Dead Man is heading west. The first scene is a train heading west, the last scene is a boat heading into the Pacific Ocean. The underlying myth itself goes west (manifest destiny). The beginning of the running time is the movie’s “rising sun in the east,” which takes the audience and the characters both to the westernmost point of the world by the time the credits roll. A spontaneous harmony, a spontaneous poetry emerges when you have such a simple and solid underlying structure for all the film’s freely moving parts to refer to. The free and spontaneous dance of these scenes, with their slice-of-life focus on details of scenery, motion and costume, are made profound by always being in reference to the central meaning-object (the journey west, in this case).
“To die would be a great adventure!” proclaims Peter Pan in Hook, and from the perspective of an audience watching a movie, death is experienced in this way. The death of the characters on the screen signals the transformation of the audience from identification with fictional characters, to a (hopefully) expanded perspective of their own personal lives. Death of the protagonist, or the failure of values in a tragedy, can be read as the artistic medium conforming to physical demands: the story has to end in a couple hours, the curtains have to fall, so the emotional story subconsciously reflects this. Death itself is perhaps nothing more than this change of scenery: a transformation of the soul, bringing an end, not to experience, but to the method of living one has grown used to.
Jade
This is a song of innocence becoming experience. Agnes Varda said that “If we opened up people we’d find landscapes.” As William Blake moves further and further West, he opens up to himself, revealing and becoming more of himself, and the landscapes he moves through become stranger and more vast. When Blake reaches the redwoods, I am at once at home and mystified. Few places are quite like the huge, dense, mystical redwoods. The sprawling ferns enchant the scene, and the tree-filtered light glows with a subtle sparkle on the shoulders of our heroes in their death march. For William Blake they are a corridor to the next world. For me they have always been the hallway that leads to the Pacific. As a Californian I have grown up with the sensation of coming in at the end of things. “You can’t go further West than this,” I think. Yet the character of William Blake does; he must “pass through the mirror at the place where the sea meets the sky.”
This image of Nobody and the Makah people curiously and tenderly sending Blake along toward his fate is in contrast to the image we usually get of the relationship between native people and white people. I am reminded of The End of the Trail by Fraser. The artist describes his own piece as “an Indian which represented his race reaching the end of the trail, at the edge of the Pacific.” Jarmusch reverses this stereotype; now it is the native people guiding a white man to sea, and doing so not with violence but with mystic wisdom. Unlike the defeated, emaciated Indian in Fraser’s sculpture, Nobody is always hearty, even rotund. He is a jolly fellow we are always pleased to encounter again. He leads Blake into beautiful spaces, filled with the art of this lost civilization. When compared with the hellish town of Machine, the Makah village is a heaven, with all its divine mysteries. Jarmusch succeeds in bringing to life all these objects and images I have only ever seen, lying like dusty cadavers, in the halls of museums.