Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...make a "postmodern" Western? You start, if director Jim Jarmusch is any guide, by throwing out the term "postmodern." You also make the plot and dialogue incidental, while giving such elements as setting and soundtrack full narrative weight. In a recent interview with The Crimson, Jarmusch described his latest Miramax release, "Dead Man," as an "acid Western," a term perhaps appropriate to a film which takes the Western idiom and stretches it to its most surreal limits...
...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...
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...
...addition to its passive main character, "Dead Man" subverts the Western genre by relying on visual and sound effects, rather than plot events, to chart the progress of the character. The film is shot in black and white, an effect which "was built into the story from the moment I started imagining it," says Jarmusch. "A guy goes into a world that becomes very unfamiliar to him and the black and white allowed that kind of eerie, unfamiliar quality to be maintained." The use of black and white was necessary to further dismantle the Western rubric because "the color values...
...horrifying TV images of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising. Hoping to capitalize on the reserves of sympathy she created with her eulogy, Ben Artzi-Pelossof paints a humane picture of Israel and its people. She repeatedly explains her and her friends' desire for peace, their integration into Western culture (MTV and McDonald's pop up frequently), their intimate experiences with war and the army and their respect for democracy. By the same token, she demonizes Yigal Amir and the religious fanaticism which produced him as a cancer in the midst of a generally well-meaning population: "[The assassin] was just...