Dead Man (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Demetra J. MacBride; directed and written by Jim Jarmusch; cinematography by Robby Müller; edited by Jay Rabinowitz; production design by Robert Ziembicki; music by Neil Young; starring Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Mili Avital, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Jared Harris, Crispin Glover, Eugene Byrd, Michelle Thrush, Mark Bringelson, Jimmie Ray Weeks, Gabriel Byrne, John Hurt, Alfred Molina, and Robert Mitchum. 4K UHD + Blu-ray, Blu-ray, or DVD, B&W, 121 min., 1995. A Criterion Collection release.

No movie genre has racked up more corpses than the Western, and while the showdowns and face-offs may be strung out for suspense, the violence itself tends to be quick and final. Although killings of this kind happen frequently in Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 masterpiece Dead Man, the demise that gives the film its name is very different—it’s a passing in slow motion, commencing near the start of the story and proceeding along its mournful path until the last shots of the last scene. The picture takes on many topics, some of them explicit, such as the lawlessness of the frontier and the habitual savagery of white colonialism in the Old West, and some of them implicit, such as the wrenching changes brought by “progress” and the value of poetry in environments where bookishness is vanishingly rare. But its fundamental concern is the unfathomable mystery of mortality, and every aspect of the film, from Robby Müller’s magisterial black-and-white cinematography to Neil Young’s hauntingly spectral music, keeps this at the center of attention even when the gradually dying protagonist, played by Johnny Depp in a marvelously restrained and unmannered performance, occasionally leaves the screen. At once an action movie with little action and a road movie with few roads, this is the Revisionist Western at its atmospheric and philosophical best, as the new 4K UHD + Blu-ray combo edition from the Criterion Collection amply demonstrates.

The main character is one William Blake, and although he’s the namesake of the towering Romantic poet, he’s a far less noteworthy individual—a humble accountant from Cleveland, on his way to a Western town called Machine, where a metalworks outfit has offered him a job. As his train rumbles westward, genteel-looking female passengers are replaced by rough-looking galoots who shoot at buffaloes through the windows, giving a foretaste of the untamed environment he’s about to enter. The town doesn’t look very welcoming either—it could have come from an early David Lynch picture—and the new job turns out to be nonexistent, as insolent clerk John Scholfield (John Hurt) and narcissistic boss John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum in one of his last appearances) quickly let him know.

Rejected and alone, William takes refuge with a down-and-out young woman named Thel (Mili Avital) whose recently spurned lover, Charlie (Gabriel Byrne), promptly shows up and shoots her. The bullet passes through Thel and wounds William’s chest, whereupon he grabs a gun, kills Charlie, and rides off into the night. His long process of dying has begun. Or perhaps he is already dead, and the events that follow take place in “something like bardo or purgatory,” as critic Amy Taubin speculates in the Criterion booklet essay. He could even be the poet William Blake reincarnated, as his new companion, a good-natured Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer), seems to believe, even though our William Blake has never heard of the other William Blake and knows nothing of poetry. Most of Dead Man follows these two as they travel ever farther to the Northwest. The stages of their journey are marked on William’s body, as when Nobody paints a ceremonial design on his face, and punctuated by evocative events, as when William mingles the blood of a dead fawn with the blood on his injured chest. Along the way they’re pursued by lawmen and bounty hunters—turns out the jealous boyfriend William shot was the son of the metalworks owner, who’s bent on revenge—and slowed by William’s declining condition as the bullet in his torso wreaks worsening damage. Their destination is a Native American village near the sea, where Nobody places William in a canoe that will carry him “back through the mirror” and into whatever afterlife may await.

William’s ignorance of Blake’s poetry is a great surprise to Nobody, who reveres the poet’s memory and quotes his verses from memory. The key lines he recites come from “Auguries of Innocence,” written in the early 1800s and published in 1863, not long before the film’s own 1870s period:

Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night.

We can’t know for certain if William’s night will be endless, but sweet delight has never been in the cards for him. Jarmusch explains the seemingly incongruous presence of Romantic poesy in the rough-and-tumble Old West in a Criterion extra where he addresses questions sent in by admirers of the movie. While reading a lot of Native American writing in preparation for the screenplay, he says, he picked up a Blake volume for a change of pace and found that these very different texts “cross-pollinated each other in a mysterious way.” And so they do, just as the electronic twang of Young’s music ideally complements the picture’s primitive, backwoodsy ambience. No film by Jarmusch is more successful in weaving multiple aesthetic and thematic layers into a unified and resonant whole, and in the Criterion Q&A he enumerates some of its main concerns, mentioning “the cycle of life, nature, the Industrial Revolution, violence, fame and infamy, Indigenous cultures in North America, and traveling and moving through various landscapes.” That’s only a partial list, and even antiquity adds to the blend. Nobody gets his name from the episode in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus outsmarts the cyclops Polyphemus by identifying himself as “nobody,” although the gentle Nobody in Dead Man has no trace of the ancient monster’s malignity. (Jarmusch must also have thought of Tonino Valerii’s spaghetti western My Name Is Nobody from 1973.) Anachronisms abound in this movie, and the chronological anomalies add to its enigmatic allure.

The train trip that opens Dead Man was shot in a studio, but most of the picture was filmed on location and in sequence, chronicling the long wilderness trek as it unfolds. Jarmusch and Müller could easily have shot it in color—many of the production stills included on the Criterion disc are in gorgeous color—but Jarmusch insisted on black-and-white cinematography, even though this reduced the budget by rubbing some investors the wrong way. “We wanted the film to look magical,” he says in the Q&A, discussing the “oblique strategy” that determined its visual qualities. “When we found [a setting] that was really striking…we’d turn our backs and look in the other direction, so that rather than the majestic mountains in the background we’d find a small, interesting tree, a dried riverbed. We looked away from what we feared would be clichés.”

Another defining characteristic is the use of blackouts to separate the sequences of the story, which happens so often that you’re frequently gazing at sheer darkness. This is highly appropriate in a movie about death and dying, and for Taubin the scenes come to resemble verses of a poem or cuts on an album, each rhythmically emphasized by one of Young’s expressive riffs (improvised in a makeshift studio seen in a Criterion extra about the score). The blackout tactic dates back to Jarmusch’s first important picture, Stranger Than Paradise (1984), and it reflects a deeply embedded element in his creative personality. Discussing this in the Q&A, he cites the Japanese character mu carved on the headstone of Yosujiro Ozu, one of his heroes, and says it stands for “the space between things,” a concept that has always fascinated him, “whether in music or dialogue or physically.” Dead Man is replete with gaps between episodes, images, and words, and the narrative takes place in a liminal zone where the space between life and its absence is as pivotal as it is ambiguous. This film is a contemplation of mu on the margins of Western history.

Another of Jarmusch’s signatures is a fondness for recurring words, tropes, and patterns, a predilection as apparent here as in such rigorously constructed films as The Limits of Control (2009) and the recent Father Mother Sister Brother (2025). There are multiple cases of doubling in Dead Man, some whimsical, as when a pair of William’s pursuers display lookalike bald heads, and some grotesque, as when cannibalism comes into a couple of scenes or when the bounty hunters played by Lance Henriksen (the feral one), Michael Wincott (the loquacious one), and Eugene Byrd (the young one) are mirrored by a bean-eating trio played by Billy Bob Thornton, Jared Harris, and Iggy Pop, the latter inexplicably bedizened in a dress. However visionary and quixotic it is on one level, Dead Man is formally refined and structurally systematic throughout.

Revisionist Westerns have an honorable lineage, and Jarmusch spends part of the Q&A identifying Dead Man as an effort to correct the sins of typical Hollywood products, including some by the great John Ford, who was known to confuse different tribes and have people speaking the wrong languages. Likening traditional depictions of Native Americans to portrayals of primitives or extinct animals, Jarmusch declares his intention to “subvert” the old conventions by bringing renewed accuracy and respectfulness to the genre. Farmer’s witty, sensitive performance is an enormous asset here, as was his service as a knowledgeable adviser on the production, although he disagreed with Jarmusch on some points along the way—arguing, for instance, that Nobody should remain alive at the end, since Farmer personally believes that the meek shall inherit the earth. (A praiseworthy sentiment, to be sure, but Jarmusch won that round.) In a Criterion video interview, Farmer opines on the contrasting worldviews of Indians and whites, saying that whereas Native people have “always believed in a dream world, in the unknown,” whites in general “don’t trust the unknown. They’ve got to know everything, but…they don’t really know.” He also notes the scarcity of good movie parts for Native American actors and wryly notes that saying “stupid fucking white men” over and over in Dead Man probably hasn’t helped his career.

Dead Man looks absolutely superb in its 4K rendition and almost as terrific on the Blu-ray disc. My one complaint about this edition is the disappointing audio commentary by Robert Ziembicki, the production designer, and Drew Kunin, the sound mixer. Although they have pertinent things to say, their track is billed as “selected-scene audio commentary,” which just means their remarks are regularly interrupted by long stretches of silence, a kind of “space between things” I could have done without. (The current Criterion release of John Cassavetes’s 1974 A Woman Under the Influence also suffers from a below-par commentary track, so I hope this isn’t the beginning of a trend.) But what matters most is the picture’s unquestionable brilliance and the manifest excellence of Criterion’s digital transfer, which captures Müller’s nuanced images with a crispness that borders on the miraculous. The entire movie borders on the miraculous, for that matter. Miramax wanted to re-edit it before its initial release, and when Jarmusch refused, the distributor did its best to smother the film in its cradle. Today its enduring merits are more obvious than ever. Dead Man lives.

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