May 10, 1996

I don’t remember it seeming weird at the time for Jim Jarmusch to do a western. It just felt natural, somehow, for him to move the deadpan absurdity, casual pace and odd characterization of his previous five indie features into a different time period and genre template. The combination gives DEAD MAN an aura of existential contemplation that seems to me to have made it soar above the other Jarmusch films in the film buff popular imagination, or at least bring him to a different crowd.

It’s the story of William Blake (Johnny Depp between DON JUAN DEMARCO and NICK OF TIME), not the poet, but a Cleveland accountant who’s never heard of the poet when he takes the risk of going west for a job at Dickinson’s Metalworks in the town of Machine. He received an offer by post from one John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum in not quite his last film, though he died in ’97), but things will not work out for William as hoped.

This movie is deliberately slow, but not really a slow burn. More of a steady warmth. As if testing the mettle of the viewer upfront it begins with five and a half minutes of wordless train riding, with all the passengers glancing at each other, periodic fade outs marking the passage of time between mundane activities ranging from napping to reading a publication about beekeeping. The first character to speak is a soot-covered Crispin Glover (RUBIN AND ED) who quizzes William, learns his destination, and (correctly) scoffs at the idea of him finding a job at the end of the line, when all he’s likely to find is a grave. Then everybody else on the train gets out their guns to fire out the windows at buffalo.

His arrival for the job is a gauntlet of awkwardness as he’s told by the factory business manager John Scholfield (John Hurt, EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES) that he’s a month too late for the job, laughed at by the other accountants and threatened with a shotgun by Mr. Dickinson. I think the length of the train ride scene is important for compounding that humiliation. All that traveling for this.

Blake is a hapless tourist, a timid, incapable dork, cartoonishly passive and out of his element. Everyone and everywhere is hostile as he stumbles stupidly into an inhospitable world, wearing his plaid suit, carrying his suitcase, flinching at stray gunshots. He’s good at standing there taking it, but nothing else. I can relate to that feeling that I don’t know what I’m doing but everyone else seems to, yet I still wanted to yell at him to get his shit together.

Since everybody else is such an asshole his innocence stands out as an endearing quality, at least to one person. When he’s shocked by some guys at a saloon pushing a paper-flower-merchant named Thel (Mili Avital, STARGATE) into the mud and horse shit and calling her a whore he seems kind of gallant even though he barely even helps her up. She asks him to walk her home and they end up sleeping together. The lucky sonofagun.

Or so it seems until Thel’s ex-boyfriend Charlie (Gabriel Byrne right after THE USUAL SUSPECTS) comes in and sees them in bed together. I love how William tries to opt out of the uncomfortable confrontation by cowering behind a sheet. Not sure that’s gonna help with anything, buddy.

Charlie is heartbroken but willing to concede, even apologizes for intruding as he turns to leave, but Thel has to go and say, “Well I never loved you anyway,” leading to one of the less glamorous gunfights in cinematic history. Charlie shoots, Thel jumps in front of William, dying on top of him, William reaches for the gun she keeps under her pillow and shoots Charlie dead in the neck, but only after missing twice, and only because he stands there in shock the whole time. Then William realizes the first bullet went through Thel into his chest, but didn’t quite reach his heart, and he scurries out the window, comically falling off the roof and dropping all of his things.

He comes to in the day time when a Native American loner who calls himself Nobody (Gary Farmer following DEMON KNIGHT) is trying to cut the “white man’s metal” out of him. Then it becomes a buddy movie for a while. Early in their relationship William says, “Why don’t we, uh… maybe we should… what should we do?” That fits with his general state of helplessness, but also – good for him, recognizing that he’s the sidekick in this duo. He earns the nickname “stupid fucking white man.”

We learn of Nobody’s harrowing kidnapping by white people, being toured around the world and exhibited in a cage, eventually escaping from a residential school, but his people thought he made it all up, so now he wanders. But because of those experiences he knows the name William Blake and can even recite his poetry.

Coincidentally, it turns out, Charlie was Dickinson’s son, and William is blamed for shooting both him and Thel. Dickinson hires “the finest killers of men and Injuns in this here half of the world,” Cole Wilson (Lance Henriksen right after THE QUICK AND THE DEAD), Conway Twill (Michael Wincott between THE CROW and STRANGE DAYS) and Johnny “The Kid” Pickett (Eugene Byrd, later in THE SUBSTITUTE 2: SCHOOL’S OUT and 8 MILE) to bring him back alive or dead “though I reckon dead would be easier.” Obviously a western with Henriksen and Wincott together is gonna be a good time, but the key ingredient is Byrd with his reactions when Twill takes him aside to warn him that Wilson once killed, fucked, cooked and ate his own parents.

“Both of ‘em?”

In the Jarmusch tradition (but also the western tradition, sort of) we saunter around meeting different oddballs. William and Nobody also encounter some trappers named Salvatore “Sally” Jenko (Iggy Pop, TANK GIRL), Benmont Tench (Jared Harris, NATURAL BORN KILLERS) and Big George Drakoulias (Billy Bob Thornton in the year between his short film Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade and his breakthrough feature SLING BLADE). Yes, Thornton is really funny in a small part just like he was a little earlier in ON DEADLY GROUND.

A dumb, nerdy thing that occurred to me while watching: we have John Hurt from ALIEN, we have Lance Henriksen from ALIENS, we have Michael Wincott who will be in ALIEN RESURRECTION. Damn, why didn’t we get Charles Dance to represent ALIEN 3? Or Charles S. Dutton would work. (This part is a stretch but I want to mention for the record that Michelle Thrush, who’s in one scene as Nobody’s girlfriend, was later in PREY, which is arguably in the ALIEN universe.)

And is it kinda weird that they have both Wincott from THE CROW and Pop from THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS? I mean I’m pretty sure Jarmusch was familiar with The Stooges already but I like to think he sat around watching THE CROW movies coming up with casting ideas.

I’ve read DEAD MAN described as an “acid western” and an “anti-western.” To me it’s probly more the former. I don’t think it’s necessarily commenting on the values of westerns (like, say, HOSTILES does), other than its strong choice to make the co-lead a Native American who’s a real character and doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes, negative or positive. It’s riffing on westerns and doing it in Jarmusch’s own quirky way, but it’s not in opposition to them, I don’t think.

For the most part it’s not this type of movie, but there’s one genuinely badass moment. When they find a gun, Nobody tells William, “That weapon will replace your tongue. You will learn to speak through it, and your poetry will now be written with blood.”

Later, when a marshal asks him, “Are you William Blake?” he says, “Yes I am. Do you know my poetry?” before shooting him.

I mean, that’s some cold shit! I guess the twist on it is that as he falls over the marshal fires his own gun into his confused partner and then they’re both dead. And by the way the marshals’ names are Lee (Mark Bringelson, THE LAWNMOWER MAN) and Marvin (Jimmie Ray Weeks, THE ABYSS).

William goes through a transformation, picking up a fur coat from the mountain men, lightning bolt face paint from Nobody, learning to shoot, ending up using that skill. But it’s not the origin story for some legendary gunfighter like Depp’s character in ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO. He is slowly dying. He ends up passive again, lying in a canoe as Nobody carries him to whichever afterlife he wants to interpret it as. When he squints at Nobody entering a totem-pole-decorated longhouse it’s shot objectively, but we can imagine what he thinks he’s seeing in his delirium.

I liked this movie when I first saw it. Now I love it. I love the style, of course: the high contrast black and white cinematography by Robby Müller (TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.), the score by Neil Young that’s almost entirely echoey, bluesy guitar improvised while watching the movie. The main theme reminds me of “California Dreamin’.” I’m not sure if that’s on purpose, but it fits.

I remembered what it looked like, what it sounded like, but I forgot that it feels like the other Jarmusch movies. It’s funny, but with atmosphere, and rumination. I love the way his canoe ride at the end mirrors his train ride at the beginning (foreshadowed in Glover’s dialogue). Maybe the afterlife will turn out better for him than the accounting job. Probly not though, with this guy’s luck.

I never knew this until the only western expert I know, David Lambert, wrote a Bluesky thread about it…

While Dead Man is a unique take on the Western, its basic premise (protagonist gets shot in the heart, is considered a dead man, gets chased by lawmen/bounty hunters & in the end floats out to the ocean in a canoe to die) was lifted from Rudy Wurlitzer's late 70s script Zebulon:

— Westerns & the Old West (@davidlambertart.bsky.social) 2026-01-20T06:29:16.504Z

…but Jarmusch apparently took the idea of a guy shot near the heart, running from the law and floating to his death in a canoe from an unproduced script called ZEBULON that Rudy Wurlitzer (GLEN AND RANDA, TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID, WALKER, MALONE, LITTLE BUDDHA) wrote for Sam Peckinpah in the ‘70s. Many other directors tried to have a crack at it over the years, including Jarmusch, who wanted it to star Tom Waits. (I thought it was weird he wasn’t in this.) According to Wurlitzer “we each had a different point of view of what the script was going to be and we went our separate ways” but “I was surprised when he lifted some important themes from the script for his film DEAD MAN.”

The thread notes that John Lurie also accuses Jarmusch of copying some of DEAD MAN from a script Lurie wrote that would’ve had Robert Begnini “traveling across a surreal Western landscape with a Native American.”

I think two things are probly true: 1) using these ideas without credit or permission was shitty and indefensible and 2) the other versions would’ve been totally different from DEAD MAN. Luckily Wurlitzer was able to turn his into a 2007 book called The Drop Edge of Yonder. But I don’t think Wurlitzer or Lurie were ever friends with Jarmusch again.

This is honestly the first time I’ve heard bad things about Jarmusch, and I love his movies too much to dismiss him on that basis, but I would recommend caution if you’re ever his friend showing him your screenplays!

In theaters DEAD MAN made just over a million dollars on a $9 million budget (way less than ORIGINAL GANGSTAS!, and the reviews at the time were pretty mixed. It did get four Independent Spirit Award nominations, it won Best Non-European Film at the European Film Awards, and Gary Farmer won best actor at the American Indian Film Festival. I think its reputation grew pretty quickly and I do believe it would still have a small cult reputation even if it wasn’t in the Criterion Collection (though Depp’s later life choices may endanger that).

Jarmusch has alot of ongoing collaborations with actors, so it’s kinda weird that he never worked with Depp again, or for that matter some of the supporting players like Glover or Thornton. Farmer did reunite with him in GHOST DOG (playing Nobody and using his catchphrase “Stupid fucking white man”!), and Pop was in COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (2003) and THE DEAD DON’T DIE (2019), not to mention Jarmusch directed a documentary about The Stooges called GIMME DANGER. And of course Jarmusch’s followup to this was YEAR OF THE HORSE, a documentary about Neil Young and Crazy Horse. I guess in some ways the spirit of DEAD MAN was able to linger.