Dawn of the dead: Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man

Dead Man

***** - a masterpiece

What the close of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man - arguably its most important sequence (and my favorite in the film) - reminds me most of is a cross between the endings of both Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The easy comparison to be made is the hallucinatory nature of the three - Jarmusch's pondering camera coupled with Neil Young's brooding score is certainly comparable to the insanity of Coppola's film, and somewhat to the otherworldliness of Kubrick's. The main comparison here remains detached from the stylisms of either, however.

Apocalypse Now, the most insane war film, shares an insanity with Jarmusch’s picture in the dramatic intensity in the closing sequences of both films. The violence and purposeless of the environment the characters inhabit in Coppola's film lead to an otherworldly sense of insanity, and moral corruption. That same insanity and corruption as a result violence, racism and purposelessness is just as highlighted in the close of Dead Man as it is in Apocalypse Now; the surface-level reasoning given for the hallucinatory tone is that the film's lead (played by Johnny Depp) has a severe loss of blood, as a result of a bullet wound. Just as Coppola’s film is a parody of the Vietnam war itself, Jarmusch's can easily be called a parody of America's obsession with violence - as Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, our lead gains in fame as he murders more and more.

While the look on violence is an essential part of the film, it isn’t the highlight of the film for me, which leads to the 2001 comparison. The end segment of Kubrick's film involves its lead, Dave, traveling into a different plane of existence, and the style of the film takes a distinct turn in a different, mysterious and ambiguous direction to underscore this. Depp's William Blake is similarly taken into a different plane of existence - although the difference here is that it is spiritual, unlike the physical plane that Dave travels through. What we see here, and what makes Dead Man so haunting and mysterious, is a complexity of spirituality that existed in America before Christianity and European thought covered the land.

Article Author: John Lars Ericson

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