Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Dead Man
1995 · Jim Jarmusch · Dead Man on Sightlines
A man in a checkered suit sits by a train window going west. He has a letter in his pocket promising him a bookkeeping job. The soot-blackened fireman comes back from the engine, sits down across from him, and says something strange he cannot use. William Blake, accountant, of Cleveland, does not reply, does not get off, does not turn back. He looks out the window. The country gets worse.
Hold that image, because it is the opposite of what a Western is for.
The Western was the genre where what Deleuze calls the movement-image ran cleanest. That is his name for the ordinary contract of narrative cinema: a character perceives a situation, the situation presses on him, and he acts in a way that changes it. The land is vast and lawless; one man with a gun closes the gap. Continuity cutting exists so that the act arrives on time.
Jarmusch hands the gun to a bookkeeper who never wanted one. A killing happens almost by accident, Blake takes a bullet he will not survive, and from there every move he makes either fails or makes things worse. Deleuze has a precise name for this, and it is not a criticism: the crisis of the action-image, a character who perceives perfectly well and can no longer respond adequately to what he sees. Depp plays it as bewildered passivity, deliberately reactive, a naïf pulled through violence he barely understands. What he becomes instead of an agent is what Deleuze calls a voyant. A seer. Someone the film happens to.
The standard complaint in 1996 was that nothing happens and it takes forever. That is accurate, and it is why Deleuze is the right companion here: he explains what fills the hole when action stops resolving anything. Once Blake cannot act, the film has to be made out of something else. It is made of duration, sound, and the process of dying.
Watch how the scenes end. They do not cut and they do not dissolve. The image goes black, holds a beat, and comes up somewhere else, Jay Rabinowitz segmenting the journey into stations. Deleuze's word for a cut that joins two images across a gap instead of by continuity is the interstice, the irrational cut, the AND that belongs to neither shot. Usually you cannot see it. Jarmusch makes it visible: he puts a small darkness exactly where the causal link is supposed to be. Do that over and over and the story stops being a chain of consequences and becomes a series of arrivals, each one further from the living. The fades are a clock, and what they count is the wound.
Then there is Machine. Mud, coffins, animal skulls, a metalworks pumping smoke. Deleuze would call the town a derived milieu, the visible surface of what he names an originary world: not a place so much as a slope, where everything is appetite running downhill. Cole Wilson, the bounty hunter, eats the men he is paid to kill. The trappers in the woods are deranged. Blake's bullet is that same slope in miniature, an irreversible degradation no plot turn is going to reverse. This is the impulse-image, the world of raw drives under the social one, and the West is its perfect host, because the West was always being sold to us as regeneration.
Robby Müller shoots it in high-contrast black and white: inky forests, faces isolated in pools of light, things charged with the non-organic life Deleuze finds in expressionism. The debt is exact, and the film does not merely allude to it. The Night of the Hunter lit Robert Mitchum's face in that same chiaroscuro and staged its journey as a Blakean folk-fable, and Jarmusch hires Mitchum himself.
And then Nobody, who is the reason the film is great. He decides this dying accountant is the reincarnated English poet William Blake. He is wrong. He stays wrong, eruditely, for the rest of the picture, quoting the poems back at a man who has never read a line of them. The wrongness starts producing effects. Blake acquires a name, a story, and finally a death shaped to fit it. Deleuze calls this fabulation, or legending: a character caught in the act of inventing a story the real has not supplied. He ties it to cinema where, in his phrase, the people are missing, where the political cannot be spoken on behalf of a people because that people has been destroyed and has to be invented forward instead. The man doing the inventing here is called Nobody and is alone in a frontier of industry, disease and casual slaughter. His mistake is never corrected. It is developed, which is what Deleuze means by the powers of the false: a falsehood nobody bothers to disprove becomes the only truth on offer. Gary Farmer plays him as the most articulate, funniest, most modern consciousness in the film. "Stupid fucking white man." The silent sidekick of a hundred Westerns turns out to be the one who can read.
The sound is authored the same way the identity is. Neil Young watched the assembled film projected in a studio and improvised to it on electric guitar, closer to silent-era accompaniment than to scoring. Feedback, decay, string noise. It swells and recedes with the picture without underlining a single beat of it, so music and image stand side by side instead of one serving the other. Altman had laid Leonard Cohen's existing songs over a finished cut of McCabe & Mrs. Miller; Peckinpah made Dylan both player and composer on Pat Garrett. Jarmusch's refinement is to put the performer in the room with the finished film. Around the guitar: wind, water, fire, the din of Machine, long stretches with almost no dialogue. Pure optical and sound situations, where all anyone can do, on screen and in the seat, is look and listen.
The checkered clown suit gives way to face paint. The body becomes the film's real subject, carrying the duration the plot no longer carries, and at the end the movement passes out of the man entirely. He is carried, by horse, by Nobody, by water, toward the ocean. In the classical Western the hero moves across the land. Here the land moves through him.
The acid Western was there for Jarmusch to take. El Topo built the hallucinatory frontier as a mystical death-quest with a spirit guide; Greaser's Palace made that allegory deadpan and absurd; Monte Hellman's The Shooting had already stripped the genre to an elliptical death-journey with near-passive protagonists and withheld motive. What Jarmusch added was rigor. He proved you could remove the Western's whole grammar of consequence and have the genre still standing and still aching. The debt runs forward. Ghost Dog brings Farmer back and hands the finished film to RZA. The Assassination of Jesse James and The Proposition let Nick Cave and Warren Ellis perform a score instead of composing to cue. Slow West reruns the naïf shepherded toward an inevitable death, and Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff and First Cow keep the machine-against-wilderness ethic along with the guide whose knowledge the settlers cannot read.
The epigraph warns that it is preferable not to travel with a dead man. The film ignores its own advice for two hours and finds, in the company, most of what it has. Watch the next conventional Western and notice how hard it works to keep you believing that a man firing a gun settles anything. Then come back to this one and ask the question it leaves open: how much of Nobody's mistake was a mistake?
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The gunfighter is an accountant who never wanted a gun; a killing leaves Blake mortally wounded and on the run, and Depp plays him in 'a register of bewildered passivity... deliberately reactive,' unable to respond adequately to anything he sees.
- the seer (voyant) — Blake is 'a naïf drawn helplessly through violence he barely understands,' escorted rather than acting — the journey happens to him from the train onward.
- pure optical and sound situations — 'Long passages with sparse dialogue' over natural ambience — wind, water, fire, the mechanical din of Machine — with Young's guitar 'swelling and receding' so that looking and listening replace acting.
- the interstice / irrational cut — Jay Rabinowitz's defining device: scenes end by fading completely to black and then fading up, 'segmenting the narrative into discrete tableaux separated by small deaths' rather than cutting or dissolving.
- impulse-image — Machine as 'a mire of mud, industry, and menace — animal skulls, coffins, a metalworks belching smoke,' with Cole Wilson the cannibal bounty hunter and the deranged trappers as pure appetite.
- originary world — The proto-industrial frontier town is the derived milieu whose surface opens onto a savage world of drives: 'the West here is not a space of regeneration but of industry, disease, and casual slaughter.'
- line of slope (entropy/degradation) — The mortal wound governs the film's shape — an unhurried, accretive structure in which Blake 'is passing incrementally out of the world,' irreversibly, no act available to stop it.
- expressionism — Müller's high-contrast monochrome: 'bright skies and inky forests, faces isolated in pools of light,' giving the frontier a spectral, already-historical charge — the same chiaroscuro that lit Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter.
- fabulation (legending) — Nobody 'mistakes him for the reincarnated English poet and appoints himself guide,' quoting Blake's poetry back at him and preparing him for death — a story invented forward, not discovered.
- powers of the false — The misrecognition is never corrected but developed: the poet's namesake and 'the gun that miscasts him as a killer' make Blake into the figure he is falsely called, until he dies as one.
- the people are missing — The film's colonial frontier of industry, disease and slaughter, with the sole articulate Native consciousness named Nobody — solitary, erudite, the film's moral center rather than a silent sidekick.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Costuming charts the passage: the checkered 'clown' suit of the tenderfoot accountant gives way, under Nobody's tutelage, to face paint and the trappings of a man being prepared for death.
- movement of world — As Blake weakens he stops moving and is moved — carried toward the water 'and the passage out of this world' while the film drifts from realism toward the oneiric.
- dead time (temps mort) — 'The pacing is deliberately slow and accretive,' with stations of silence and landscape that advance no action — the stretch many first viewers found alienating and admirers read as the point.