Dead Man is a Western psychedelic film about a journey into spiritual purgatory. It offers a surprisingly accurate cinematic depiction of Native American culture, identity, and spirituality. It challenges and reverses common misconceptions and stereotypes often found in film and literature. The concept of the “noble savage” is an ancient idea that portrays primitive people, like Native Americans, as lacking culture, which is a misconception.
In contrast, Jim Jarmusch figuratively explores this idea during the film’s creation, showing that these cultures are not “corrupted” or closer to “disorder” than to human civilization.
The film reverses the stereotype of Native Americans and American cultures in general. The most culturally and educationally significant character is Nobody, a Native American. The white settler and the protagonist, Blake, are both portrayed as ignorant. Blake’s poetry, which references William Blake, is never understood by anyone around him, showing that he fails to connect with his work and the world around him.
In Dead Man, the white settlers are depicted as savages, and the “Machine” city is shown as a harsh, inhuman environment. It is the white people who are killing, raping, and committing adultery, which contrasts with the idea of “savage aristocrats” and highlights the theme of spiritual purgatory.
Films, as well as literary and artistic works, do not change on their own; they evolve and influence one another. Dead Man stands apart from this pattern. Jarmusch reveals a shocking yet beautiful portrayal of cruelty and emotional power spanning more than two decades. The film tells the story of two outsiders—William Blake and Nobody—who journey into spiritual purgatory.
Blake travels from the city of Machine, a mid-nineteenth-century border town on the brink of the Industrial Revolution. He spends his savings on a train ticket from Cleveland, believing he has a job waiting for him at Dickinson Metalworks. However, upon arrival, Blake finds that someone else has already taken the position. The dry office manager mocks him while a self-inflated industrial giant hangs a life-size portrait of himself behind his desk.
The impoverished population scavenges for food and demands work, even resorting to shooting at gunpoint in the alleyways. Blake ends up in the bed of a weary paper florist, helplessly watching as his jealous girlfriend shoots a single bullet at the two of them. She dies, but Blake kills her with three shots after taking the gun. Badly wounded, he flees the house through an open window, no longer making rational decisions.
The Native American characters speak Cree, and the language used is both meticulous and accurate, along with the inclusion of traditional Native American clothing. Jarmusch reverses the “noble savage” trope by not giving a literal meaning to the Native language. He does not cater to a western white audience’s expectations, instead challenging their preconceived notions. Actively, Dead Man works to break away from the settler’s voyeuristic perspective.
In exchange, it offered a cultural escape for Native Americans. It is a Native American narrative told from a different perspective, involving fairy tales uniquely.
The representation of the Western universe feels like a new experience, defining new landscapes and opportunities for Blake, at least. The West is a wilderness, but it is full of violence and fear from the darker side of humanity. Death, angles, and weapons surround Blake, forcing him to use force in the wild—even when he falls in love with a local woman. After getting injured, he confuses himself and damages his memory while sharing his love for nature with someone who shares his name.
A Native American tells him many exciting stories, almost like they are approaching transcendentalism or spiritualism. He sees a dark, gloomy cloud in the future, and metal machines signal the death of nature. Speaking of nature’s death, Blake experiences himself as a mythical hero, learning about spiritual metaphysics and connecting spiritual life to the emptiness of the ego.
He decides to live closer to nature, preparing for his new identity in the wild.
Jarmusch was born in Ohio, a thriving but heavily fortified state with a steel economy and heavy manufacturing. While Blake went west, Jarmusch went east to study English literature at Columbia University, writing poetry with two of his teachers, Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro. He fell in love with cinema, returned to New York, enrolled in graduate film school, and made his first feature, Permanent Vacation, after Stranger Than Paradise.
Jarmusch defines cinematic style through flat humor, elliptical editing, and deliberate framing, setting his films apart from the test realism of American independent films. Dead Man describes the existential solitude of an individual alienated by the vast landscape. William Blake, wherever he goes, is like a monkey searching for a banana. The image of the frozen lake almost turning white in a blizzard seems like a preview of dense forests and empty clearings.
Blake would have left if he had not had Nobody as a guide, like a lost youth. The blackouts separating each sequence in black and white feel like a rhythmic verse of poetry, marking rising or falling notes.
Jarmusch’s understanding of Dead Man is the presence of spiritual purgatory, pointing to the awareness and journey of religious colonialism. During the American occupation, religious figures like the Jesuits accompanied expeditions and tried to change the people they found. In their view, and in their attempt to save the lost souls of “savage lords,” Dead Man saves William Blake’s soul.
No man leads him to spiritual transcendence, in line with the Native American worldview. In his search for vision, Blake reaches peace with his environment and exists outside the Western paradigm. Dead Man, set entirely outside the typical framework of colonial endeavors, is itself a rare achievement. William Blake was an American accountant and English poet from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Blake’s ecstatic poetry is pretty unusual. He’s a spiritual figure who rejects traditional religion in favor of alternative spirituality. Nobody frequently quotes him throughout the film because a free spirit and free mind can escape the confines of forced Western culture and find a place in Native American society.
In many interviews, Jarmusch mentions that he took a break from studying Native American texts to reread Blake, the American Beat artist, and the profound mysticism in his work. Blake was also a printer by trade, which gave him the ability to publish his work whenever he wanted. He maintained his independence by owning his printing press and keeping the darker side of the themes intact.
When Dead Man was finished, Jarmusch acquired the distribution rights but had to re-edit the film. Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein was so upset by Jarmusch’s refusal to change the film that he tried to sabotage its release by limiting press screenings and refusing to support the film for awards. However, Dead Man eventually became one of the top American films of the decade. Jarmusch sees a connection between Native American writing and Blake’s poetry, which sparks Nobody’s backstory and the film’s delirious narrative.
As a child, Nobody was kidnapped by white traders and put into a circus show during a trip to Europe. He learned English and fell in love with Blake’s poetry. He believes he is Blake’s samsara, even though Blake has never heard of him. Nobody finds it strange that Blake does not recognize even his most famous lines. Still, he believes that Blake’s poetry comes out of the barrel of a gun.
As they travel across the Southwest through California’s redwood forests up the West Coast, bounty hunters are on their trail.
It is Dickinson’s son who shot and killed Blake to fulfill his father’s desire for revenge. Most of the hapless, crazy assassins who come after Blake and Nobody are quickly killed, but the infamous cannibal, Cole Wilson, is relentless. In the end, everyone dies after Nobody negotiates with the Makah tribe to the northwest. The totem hut, looking like an outpost of a dying civilization, is where they take Blake into a canoe and carry him to a place beyond the horizon, a new level of existence where no one will ever call him back.
For Blake, this world no longer matters. There is a brief cut to Nobody and Cole, both shooting each other dead. Dead Man plays with liminality, the space between two stable phases. In anthropological terms, Blake, the titular Dead Man, is in the liminal space between life and death. The living world, with a bullet in his heart, has freed him from human form.
Dead Man is an experience of liminality, ending with the character’s death at the end of the story. Similarly, Nobody occupies a position between Native American and Westernized identities, experiencing rejection from both his family and tribe. Jarmusch highlights this liminal space, marking the human experience as one between life and death, where expertise remains in a constant period of transition and change.
Dead Man is a short story that symbolizes Native American depictions of fleeting victories over existence and nihilism. Robby Müller, the film’s cinematographer, creates a world of pure gray, reflecting the complexity of life, which is not entirely good or bad. However, in between, it also captures the natural beauty and awe of the world at every turn.
The transcendent Blake, squatting beside a child pierced by an arrow, touches the wound until he feels it, rubbing his hand in the blood seeping from his own body. The last sound he hears is a moving portrait, a lyricist representing nothing more than a sheep and a bell.
References
- Blake, W. (1794). Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Printed for the author.
- Deloria, V. (2003). God is Red: A Native View of Religion. Fulcrum Publishing.
- Jarmusch, J. (Director). (1995). Dead Man [Film]. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment.
- Koch, K., & Shapiro, D. (Eds.). (1990). The Poetry of Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro. New York University Press.
- Müller, R. (Cinematographer). (1995). Dead Man [Film]. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment.
- Vizenor, G. (1994). The Trickster of Modern Native American Literature. University of Oklahoma Press.
- Weinstein, H. (Producer). (1995). Dead Man [Film]. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment.
