INTERVIEW WITH A DEAD MAN

How do you make a "postmodern" Western? You start, if director Jim Jarmusch is any guide, by throwing out the term "postmodern." You also make the plot and dialogue incidental, while giving such elements as setting and soundtrack full narrative weight. In a recent interview with The Crimson, Jarmusch described his latest Miramax release, "Dead Man," as an "acid Western," a term perhaps appropriate to a film which takes the Western idiom and stretches it to its most surreal limits.

"Dead Man," which is set "between 120 and 130 years ago," is the story of a meek accountant, William Blake (Johnny Depp), who leaves his fiancee and Cleveland for a job in the wild, wasted West. He finds the usual Western movie staples there, crossing the tyrannic mill owner (Robert Mitchum), sleeping with Thell (Mili Avital), the hooker with the heart of gold, and shooting her no-good lover Charlie(Gabriel Byrne) when guntoting Charlie finds the two of them in bed. From there, however, the Western idiom begins to unravel as our hero, with a bullet in his heart, disappears into the wilderness to hide from the posse sent after him.

Blake is befriended by a Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer), but Nobody is no one-dimensional Tonto. Educated in Eastern schools, Nobody is convinced that Blake is the reincarnation of the poet, engraver and self-dubbed prophet of the same name. The remainder of the film chronicles Blake's wanderings in the wilderness and his encounters with the various outlaws and deviants who live on the fringe of America. As he wanders, the stability of his identity is more and more challenged and he begins to reform his sense of self around his experiences in the woods.

Jarmusch told The Crimson that "Dead Man" most significantly alters the traditional Western rubric by presenting a main character who is passive. "Johnny's character starts out very mild-mannered, but he's such a blank piece of paper that people want to write all over it." For Jarmusch, Blake's defining moment is when, having been asked by two sheriffs in the woods if he is the outlaw William Blake, he responds, "Yes...Do you know my poetry?" In this moment, according to Jarmusch, Blake accedes to Nobody's assessment of him and "surrenders to his destiny."

In addition to its passive main character, "Dead Man" subverts the Western genre by relying on visual and sound effects, rather than plot events, to chart the progress of the character. The film is shot in black and white, an effect which "was built into the story from the moment I started imagining it," says Jarmusch. "A guy goes into a world that becomes very unfamiliar to him and the black and white allowed that kind of eerie, unfamiliar quality to be maintained." The use of black and white was necessary to further dismantle the Western rubric because "the color values of Westerns have become so familiar to us, and I needed the black and white to have less of that information."

The cinematography in "Dead Man" is mesmerizing. Under Jarmusch's direction, the western wilderness plays itself out in gray forms emerging from a bleached-out screen or disappearing into a white mist. Through such a lens, a mountain is as immaterial as a stick of kindling, a laketop as impenetrable as a cliff's face. The film is handled episodically, with a full fade to black between scenes. These pauses in the narrative slow the film down and thwart the efforts of audience members to gauge the pace or predict the plot. The moments of blankness, which Jarmusch describes as "respiration," also serve to showcase Neil Young's virtuoso soundtrack. Young has created a raw, wiry sonic complement to the film, as compelling as the visual elements and the plot. Jarmusch described Young's goal as creating a "melody" to go along with the rhythm of the movie itself. Relying predominantly on guitar with very little accompaniment, Young's composition is like the voice of another character, eloquently commenting on the story and perhaps upstaging the actors themselves.

Ironically, "Dead Man" is so strong in terms of style and sound that the script ends up being the weakest part of the film. Though Jarmusch intended the Native American character to break the two stereotypes of either "the savage who must be eradicated...or the all-knowing sage...that must mix in completely with nature." The character Nobody seems to resemble the latter. He is both overly noble and gratingly mystic, even if his mysticism is related not to "nature" but to the writings of William Blake. Gary Farmer portrays Nobody with the kind of inscrutable poker-face we have come to expect from popular images of Native Americans.

The choice of the poet William Blake as a central reference for the script was serendipitous, according to Jarmusch, yet the cloying axioms of the self-obsessed Blake are not any less cloying when they appear here. Still, the work of a more verbally interesting poet could have potentially overloaded this tautly balanced film.

Depp handles his "blank page" role well, his face as untroubled as a statue's despite the violence he sees. Scenes are intentionally stolen one after the other by cameo players such as John Hurt, Alfred Molina, Crispin Glover and Iggy Pop as the inexplicable transvestite/cannibal Salvatore "Sally" Jenko. In "Dead Man," these unlikely cameos provide a solid, convincing foundation on which the larger drama plays itself out.

"Dead Man" is a strangely compelling creation--unconventionally paced, vaguely plotted, preoccupied with elements of sound and image which would be background in other films. That all this material can be plumbed from the rather sterile idiom of the Western is a major achievement for Jarmusch, and an intense, sensual experience for the audience. While the William Blake theme is somewhat inconclusively handled, it does create a literary feel to the work which increases its intellectual potency. This is also true of the epigram from Henri Michaux which opens the film and gives it its title: "It is preferable not to travel with a dead man." Jarmusch explains this quote with an intriguing vagueness characteristic of his films: "I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to mean...I'd like to have it on my gravestone."