Director: Jim Jarmusch, Writer: Jim Jarmusch, Date: May 10, 1996 (USA) Genre: Drama/Western, Awards: Two Awards and 5 Nominations Filming Locations: Applegate River, Oregon, USA, Company: Pandora Filmproduction
Lead Actors: Johnny Depp (William Blake), Gary Farmer (No One), Crispin Glover (Train Fireman), Robert Mitchum (John Dickinson), Gabriel Byrne (Charlie Dickinson), Lance Henriksen (Cole Wilson), Michael Wincott (Conway Twill ), Eugene Byrd Johnny (The Kid) Pickett.

Jim Jarmusch is a noted American filmmaker who began his career in 1980 with PERMANENT VACATION. Before his death, he directed numerous films and a continuing series of short films. He says that the openness of the Western form and its inseparable connection to “America” ​​is why he makes the dead man in Western movie form.

Dead man is the story of a traveler from Cleveland to the western frontier of America in the second half of the 19th century. William Blake (Johnny Deep), a gentleman, moves to the town of Machine, a small town in the west, where he has been promised a job. In the first moments of his journey he meets passengers who open fire on a herd of buffalo, all of them carrying weapons and shooting and killing with ease. The only ordinary conversation Blake experiences during his trip is with a firefighter (Crispin Glover) who can’t even read. Blake is shocked when he arrives in an exotic city, outlawed, uncivilized, dirty and raped. When he goes to Melta Works, the office manager turns him down because of his lateness, but it doesn’t seem like the date and job guarantee are important to them. John Dickinson, the boss, speaks with the language of arms. With no job, no money and no hope in an armed city, he gets acquainted with a girl who seems different from the others. They meet as kinder spirits, but the girl is killed by her ex-lover, Dickinson’s son, when she is in bed with Blake. Blake kills the man with the girl’s gun in self-defense. He runs away from the city and on the outskirts he meets a strange Native American who calls himself “Nobody”. He believes Blake to be the dead English poet who died in 1827. He embarks on a spiritual journey inspired by actual Blake poems.
Notably, in a key scene, Nobody asks Blake, “Did you kill the white man who killed you?” Bill replies, “I’m not dead.”

First of all Nobody teaches him “you will learn to use your weapons instead of words, your poetry will now be written in blood”. She soon learns to cope with the condition she has never faced before. Contrary to his personality, he becomes a hunter and killer, but does not completely change into a Western American. His eyes are open to humanity. He and Nobody kill all the people who want to catch him; he kills the great George Drakulious (Billy Bob Thompson), Salvator Jenko (Iggy Pop), Benmont Tench (Jarred Harris), and a few other people. By the end of the movie, Blake has traveled far beyond all places, perhaps he is traveling to his death.

The film contains a continuous contradiction: the contrast between the civilized east and the wild west. Paradox of Blake’s spiritual journey in search of his final destination that changes his personality to a brutal murderer, the crude Native American man who does not believe in any identity for himself but thinks, experiences the spiritual journey, believes in the poem and has a sense of respect. to the poet, Thel (Mili Avital) the girl who keeps a gun in her bed and betrays her lover, has a pure and sensitive spirit, Conway Twill (Michael Wincott) one of the most skilled assassins in the city has a doll and sleeps with that.

On the technical side, the black and white filming reminds of the primitive atmosphere of the 19th century, it gives the feeling of nostalgia and loneliness of both Dead Man and Nobody, of all the people who live together but live in fear, fear of their own language, language of GUN. On the other hand, during the film, the black and white space gives the massage of DEATH, the great mystery of which there is no specific color to visualize it. So black and white is another contradiction.

Dead Man is composed by Neil Young; the film’s instrumental soundtrack, which is mostly electric guitar, occasionally switches to pump organ, detuned piano, and acoustic guitar. It’s a weird soundtrack that’s fit for a western movie. Totally, it’s a different western movie and it’s not an easy movie to understand.