Word: blake
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...Dead Man," which is set "between 120 and 130 years ago," is the story of a meek accountant, William Blake (Johnny Depp), who leaves his fiancee and Cleveland for a job in the wild, wasted West. He finds the usual Western movie staples there, crossing the tyrannic mill owner (Robert Mitchum), sleeping with Thell (Mili Avital), the hooker with the heart of gold, and shooting her no-good lover Charlie(Gabriel Byrne) when guntoting Charlie finds the two of them in bed. From there, however, the Western idiom begins to unravel as our hero, with a bullet in his heart...
...Blake is befriended by a Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer), but Nobody is no one-dimensional Tonto. Educated in Eastern schools, Nobody is convinced that Blake is the reincarnation of the poet, engraver and self-dubbed prophet of the same name. The remainder of the film chronicles Blake's wanderings in the wilderness and his encounters with the various outlaws and deviants who live on the fringe of America. As he wanders, the stability of his identity is more and more challenged and he begins to reform his sense of self around his experiences in the woods...
Jarmusch told The Crimson that "Dead Man" most significantly alters the traditional Western rubric by presenting a main character who is passive. "Johnny's character starts out very mild-mannered, but he's such a blank piece of paper that people want to write all over it." For Jarmusch, Blake's defining moment is when, having been asked by two sheriffs in the woods if he is the outlaw William Blake, he responds, "Yes...Do you know my poetry?" In this moment, according to Jarmusch, Blake accedes to Nobody's assessment of him and "surrenders to his destiny...
...savage who must be eradicated...or the all-knowing sage...that must mix in completely with nature." The character Nobody seems to resemble the latter. He is both overly noble and gratingly mystic, even if his mysticism is related not to "nature" but to the writings of William Blake. Gary Farmer portrays Nobody with the kind of inscrutable poker-face we have come to expect from popular images of Native Americans...
...choice of the poet William Blake as a central reference for the script was serendipitous, according to Jarmusch, yet the cloying axioms of the self-obsessed Blake are not any less cloying when they appear here. Still, the work of a more verbally interesting poet could have potentially overloaded this tautly balanced film...