Sherry Chandler

in honor of our newest National Historic Landmark:

…Agony, agony, dream, ferment, and dream.
This is the world, my friend, agony, agony.
Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,
war passes by in tears, followed by a million gray rats,
the rich give their mistresses
small illuminated dying things,
and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.

— from Federico Garcia Lorca “Ode to Walt Whitman”

Mainstream success and Oscar nominations don’t seem to have robbed Johnny Depp of his quirky genius or his ability to deadpan the most outrageous stuff while charming you with his gamin face, his androgynous black eyes. So far, his remake of “El Mariachi” notwithstanding, he shows no signs of wanting to bulk up and channel Bruce Willis, though I see he’s falling into the sequel trap with “Pirates of the Carribbean 3.”

Whatever his future, however, I will always treasure his strange performances in cultish and independent films like “Cry Baby” and “Benny and Joon.” Peter Jackson may give you expensively computer-enhanced elves. Depp personifies the fey in sweet and dangerous mode.

“Dead Man” may be the strangest movie Depp ever made. Released in 1995, this black and white movie, written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, runs through the Kafka-esque into Native American myth and a kind of 1960s Don Juan mysticism and a Mike Finkish exaggeration. That may not sound like much of a recommendation, but strong performance by Depp and Gary Farmer, a Canadian actor of Native American heritage, with support from Lance Henrikson, John Hurt, Billy Bob Thornton (as a really bent fur trapper), and Robert Mitchum in one of his last film roles. The whole thing is driven by a metallic guitar solo score performed by Neil Young. Oh, and I need to mention that it’s a comedy, sort of.

Depp is William Blake, a mild-mannered accountant from Cleveland travelling west in a plaid suit and eyeglasses to claim a job at the Dickinson Metal Works. Arriving at the town of Machine, Blake finds his job already taken and is driven from the factory at the point of owner’s (Robert Mitchum) gun. He spends his last coin on a bottle of rotgut and behaves chivalrously to a whore turned flower girl (her flowers are paper). He and the girl are caught in flagrante by the factory owner’s son who shoots them both with a single bullet. The girl is dead, Blake mortally wounded.

He escapes on a pinto pony that also belongs to the factory owner. In the wild, he is discovered and ministered to by Nobody (Gary Farmer), an outcast Indian who was captured as a boy and taken to England as an exhibit. Educated in English schools, he discovers William Blake whose words are “powerful. They spoke to me.” So here’s the setup — a dying William Blake and an outcast Indian whose life was saved by a long-dead William Blake.

The rest of the movie is a sort of vision quest in which Nobody takes William Blake on a journey into death and a sort of negative Manifest Destiny during which Blake slowly sheds all vestiges of civilization – his eyeglasses, his plaid suit – and identifies more and more with the dying natural world around him. Meanwhile, he is pursued by everything the factory owner can throw at him: law men, bounty hunters, and most dangerous, a trio of hired killers.

As with any successful work of art, there’s a lot going on in “Dead Man” that can’t be tied up in a neat little package labelled message. It is a violent and graphic movie. As William Blake journeys further and further into death (West), the vestiges of European civilization become more and more depraved. Nobody seems to view this reincarnation of William Blake as a spirit of vengeance – his gun becomes his poetry and he uses it to shoot white men. At the same time, Nobody sees it as his mission to return Blake to the spirit world he came from. The visuals are as delirious as William Blake and Young’s over-amped electric guitar growls and screams and gets into your very nerves.

“Dead Man” is true, in its way, to Blake’s poetry. After all, Blake was a visionary and a revolutionary. “Dead Man” is more like poetry than something inspiring and sentimental, like “The Dead Poet Society.” I recommend it.