Movies

William Blake (Johnny Depp), an accountant from Cleveland, travels to the West Coast of the United States, to the edge of civilization where the railroad ends and the town of Machine begins. He is supposed to start a job there. However, his endeavor proves futile when he learns from Mr. Dickinson (Robert Mitchum), the owner of Dickinson's Metal Works, that the position has already been filled. Later that day, Blake kills Dickinson’s son in self-defense. Badly wounded, he escapes into the wilderness. There, he is found by Nobody (Gary Farmer), a Native American who sees Blake as the reincarnation of the English poet William Blake. Nobody helps Blake flee from bounty hunters and hopes to get him to the northwestern coast, from where Blake can be sent back to the land of spirits.

Dead Man, the sixth feature film and third black-and-white film by Jim Jarmusch, represented a new genre departure for the director and screenwriter, one of the key figures of American independent cinema. This time, Jarmusch turned to the Western, a foundational genre in the creation of the myth of America’s origins. Positioned between the acid western and revisionist western subgenres, the film allowed Jarmusch to demythologize the genre by portraying the expansion into the "Wild" West — the process of "civilizing" the territory — as a journey toward death. This journey is primarily spiritual, but also physical, stripped of all heroism and rendered merely consumerist. This is reflected in the relationship between the main characters, Depp and Farmer, whose roles as "host" and "stranger" are inverted.

The monochrome cinematography of Robby Müller, a longtime collaborator of Jim Jarmusch as well as Wim Wenders, Barbet Schroeder, and Lars von Trier, features an apocalyptic landscape filled with ominous yet spontaneous guitar sounds by Neil Young. This makes the film an exceptionally original work, even within Jarmusch's own body of work.