Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man

Abstract

Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is a modern myth. Like many ancient myths it seems to have the structure of a rite of passage analysed by van Gennep into three stages: separation, marginal existence and reintegration. Separation is precipitated by a traumatic event and the marginal state is characterized by extraordinary experiences and feats. However, Jarmusch's tale does not quite fit the ancient initiation pattern since the last stage, reintegration, is at least prima facie missing. This already undermines the social function of initiation and warps the significance of the myth. The modern town of “Machine”, where the marginal existence of Blake is sealed, looms in the background of the story of his final journey to the world of spirits whence he had come. But Blake cannot quite embrace the story in which he plays the protagonist. The story is cobbled together by the Native American called “Nobody.” Blake sceptically resigns himself to his fate. Why does Blake do this? Jarmusch manipulates the generic structure of the initiation tale in order to say something culturally significant about the possibility of living a meaningful life in a world dominated by the machine. In other words, he tells a modern myth. What does his tale say?

Keywords:

• Jim Jarmusch
• Walter Benjamin
• mythology
• Dead Man

Notes

The Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project scheme (DP0984748) supported Ross's research for this essay. The views expressed here are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the ARC. We would like to thank the editors for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay. Picture credits: Dead Man was produced by Pandora Filmproduktion, JVC Entertainment Networks, Newmarket Capital Group, and 12 Gauge Productions.

1 On the film's US release the critic Roger Ebert wrote:

Dead Man is a strange, slow, and unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning … Jim Jarmusch is trying to get at something here, and I don’t have a clue what it is. (Chicago Sun-Times 28 June 1996)

The film was entered in competition at Cannes in 1995.

2 For an account of the initial puzzled critical reaction to the film see Jonathan Rosenbaum's Dead Man (London: BFI, 2000) 7–10. There were exceptions. Thus Rosenbaum's book details his case that within Jarmusch's body of work the film is a breakthrough and a masterpiece. He coins the phrase “acid-Western” to describe it (49). Greil Marcus, who also has a positive evaluation of the film, comments that the film is without irony. See Jarmusch's response in the Tod Lipy Interview with Jarmusch (153–75) in Juan A. Suárez, Jim Jarmusch (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2007) 159–60.

3 Interview with Charlie Rose, The Greenroom, CBS TV 9 May 1996. Robby Müller's cinematography creates a beautiful visual palette of greys, whites and blacks.

4 In between the two was Jarmusch's Year of the Horse (1997), which followed Neil Young and his band Crazy Horse on tour, and arose out of the collaboration between Jarmusch and Young on Dead Man. In Dead Man Neil Young's haunting soundtrack is also an important tool of communication. In the interview with Rose, Jarmusch describes Young's music as having a “damaged” quality.

5 Can there be a “modern tale”? On this question, see W. Benjamin's “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935–1938, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002) 143–67. We will mention the main literary sources shortly and discuss Benjamin in more detail in section 4. It is worth noting that in Ghost Dog as well Jarmusch gives an explicit role to literature in the narrative and also, unlike in Dead Man, acknowledges a number of literary figures (Miguel de Cervantes, Mary Shelley, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Yamamoto Tsunetomo) under the category of “personal thanks” in the film's closing credits. In addition to these authors, the list of thanks includes the filmmakers Akira Karusawa, Seijun Suzuki, and Jean-Pierre Melville as well as the rappers’ collective, Wu-Tang Clan.

6 See T. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 259.

7 See J. Smith, Map is Not Territory (Leiden: Brill, 1978) 134–38.

8 Thel is named after William Blake's “Book of Thel.” William Blake: A Selection of Poems and Letters, introduced and edited by J. Bronowski (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) 87–93.

9 Jarmusch had originally included a scene in which Nobody, in reply to Blake's question “why are you helping me?,” answers “A bird told me.” When Blake is querulous, he responds, as though the question bores him:

A small bird with very bright blue feathers. I was following him in the forest hoping to acquire one of his indigo feathers. And then I lost him. And then I found him again, and he was sitting on your chest, tasting your blood. And then he looked at me, and then flew directly west, in a very straight line, his small beak red with your blood. (Cited in Rosenbaum 71–72)

10 Nobody cites this from William Blake's “Proverbs of Hell” (see William Blake 97).

11 The epigraph to the film – “It is better not to travel with a dead man” – is from the French surrealist poet Henri Michaux. See Michaux's “The Night of the Bulgarians” in A Certain Plume, Selected Writings: The Space Within, translated and introduced by Richard Ellman (New York: New Directions, 1968) 93–103 (101). Michaux's influence on the film is discussed in Suárez, Jim Jarmusch 106–11. As noted, lines from William Blake's poetry are cited throughout the film: first of all by Nobody, then by Blake who integrates some of the lines he learns from Nobody into the “poetry” of his killing of white men, and in one scene even by the bounty hunter Cole Wilson (Lance Henriksen). Cole's warning to his companion Johnny “The Kid” Pickett (Eugene Byrd) not to drink from standing water is a reference to Blake's “Expect poison from the standing water” from “Proverbs of Hell” (William Blake 97).

12 See J. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) especially 22–64.

13 See, for example, A. Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill, 1995). The religiously rooted doctrine justified the expansion of the United States across the North American continent as a destiny under God.

14 Lisabeth During pointed this out to us.

15 Nobody cites this line from William Blake's “The Everlasting Gospel” in answer to the Missionary (Alfred Molina) at the trading post who says on seeing Nobody: “May our Lord Jesus Christ wash this earth with His holy light and purge its darkest places from heathens and philistines” (see William Blake 75).

16 See K.M. Dugan, The Vision Quest of the Plains Indians (Lewiston: Mellen, 1985).

17 See J. Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2008) 122: “Martyrdom evolved as an extreme form of a lifestyle based on the law of living (and dying) ‘in quotations.’”

18 See, for example, H.L. Harrod, Renewing the World: Plains Indian Religion and Morality (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1987) 26–37, 66–92; and Dugan, The Vision Quest of the Plains Indians.

19 Compare R. Debray, God: An Itinerary (London: Verso, 2004) 38–45.

20 See Ch. Malamoud, Le Jumeau solaire (Paris: Seuil, 2002).

21 See, for example, F. Graf, Eleusis und die orphische Dichtung Athens in vorhellenischer Zeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974); and A. Henrichs, “Human Sacrifice in Greek Religion: Three Case Studies” in Le Sacrifice dans l’antiquité, eds. J. Rudhardt and O. Reverdin (Geneva: Hardt, 1981).

22 See S. Lévi, La Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brāhma[ndot] as (Paris: Leroux, 1898).

23 “This is the reason why one should not eat from this victim; for it is a human as image (puru ṣ o hi sa pratimayā)” (Kau ṣ ītaki Brāhma [ndot] a 10.3).

24 Compare Dugan, The Vision Quest of the Plains Indians 168–70.

25 See A. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage [1909] (London: Routledge, 2004).

26 The sacer in Roman religious and legal lore was “devoted to but as yet not accepted by death” (Versnel, “Self-Sacrifice, Compensation, Anonymous Gods” in Le Sacrifice dans l’antiquité 156–58). The act of devotio could take the form of hurling oneself into a chasm or the sea, the two characteristic conduits to the nether world. It could also be accomplished by riding into enemy ranks on the battlefield, as did the Roman consul Decius in 340 BC in his act of self-sacrifice against the allied Latins. “Legend has it that the troops commanded by Decius were losing ground and defeat was imminent, when suddenly Decius required the pontifex maximus to lead him in prayer and pronounce the formula by which the general devoted his own life and that of the enemies to the gods of the netherworld” (ibid. 139). It is always to the gods of the underworld that the consecratus surrenders himself (cf. ibid. 150–51).

27 See W. Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1979) 1–34 (33).

28 Compare Kafka, “On Parables” in The Complete Short Stories (London: Mandarin, 1994). Parable loses its saving power once it becomes “only a parable.”

29 Compare Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper, 1969) §204:

Die Begründung aber, die Rechtfertigung der Evidenz kommt zu eindem Ende; – das Ende aber ist nicht daß uns gewisse Sätze unmittelbar als wahr einleuchten, also eine Art Sehen unsrerseits, sondern unser Handeln, welches am Grunde des Sprachspiels liegt. [Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; – but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.]

and idem, Philosophical Investigations (London: Blackwell, 2001) §325:

Was die Menschen als Rechtfertigung gelten lassen – zeigt, wie sie denken und leben. [What people accept as a justification – shows how they think and live.]

and §326:

Wir erwarten dies und werden von dem überrascht; aber die Kette der Gründe hat ein Ende. [We expect this, and are surprised at that. But the chain of reasons has an end.]

30 Compare Robert Musil's depiction of the modern “soul” in The Man without Qualities, trans. S. Wilkins and B. Pike (London: Picador, 1997):

There is always something ghostly about living constantly in a well-ordered state. You cannot step into the street or drink a glass of water or get on a streetcar without touching the balanced levers of a gigantic apparatus of laws and interrelations, setting them in motion or letting them maintain you in your peaceful existence, etc. [165–66] … Yet however understandable and self-contained everything seems, this is accompanied by an obscure feeling that it is only half the story. Something is not quite in balance, and a person presses forward, like a tightrope walker, in order not to sway and fall. And as he presses on through life and leaves life lived behind, the life ahead and the life already lived form a wall, and his path in the end resembles the path of a woodworm: no matter how it corkscrews forward or even backward, it always leaves an empty space behind it. And this horrible feeling of a blind, cutoff space behind the fullness of everything, this half that is always missing even when everything is a whole, this is what eventually makes one perceive what one calls the soul. (196)

31 See H. Blumenberg, Work on Myth (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1985) 3–112; and O. Marquard, Farewell to Matters of Principle (New York: Oxford UP, 1989) 89, 92–105.

32 “Every Night and every Morn / Some to Misery are Born. / Every Morn and every Night / Some are Born to sweet delight. / Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to Endless Night” (William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” in William Blake 71).

33 See, for example, A. Marriott and C.K. Rachlin, Plains Indian Mythology (New York: Crowell, 1975).

34 We borrow the term from H. Blumenberg's Work on Myth 144. See n. 40 below.

35 Benjamin, “The Storyteller” 145.

36 Ibid. 146.

37 Ibid. 162.

38 Musil, The Man without Qualities 274.

39 Ibid.

40 Blumenberg thinks that this dependency on stories or “myths” is the way humans compensate for their “instinct deficiency” in a hostile environment. See his Work on Myth 144. The anthropological function of myth is the formation of an “ecological niche” or “habitat” that helps human beings to render familiar and “manageable” an otherwise hostile environment. For a discussion of Blumenberg on these points see A. Ross, “Moral Metaphorics, or Kant after Blumenberg,” Thesis Eleven 104.1 (2011): 40–58.

41 See Blumenberg, Work on Myth 59–112.