Dead Man

In a series of vivid, downbeat works, mainly in black-and-white, Jim Jarmusch has pictured the contemporary American urban landscape as an emotionally empty space peopled by strangers filled with boredom and latent anger. If this bleakness stops short of despair it is through Jarmusch's lightness of touch, his sense of the absurd, together with the beauty he finds in the banal and quotidian that is characteristically postmodern in its self-conscious emphemerality, though its aesthetic roots lie in Baudelaire and surrealism together with the contemplative cinema of Yasujiro Ozu. Although Jarmusch's characters generally fail to communicate, their failure is an endlessly postponed possibility, whose presence, in the manner of the deferred action of Freud's unconscious, can only be registered after the event, or more precisely, is registered through the fact that the event of communication is an exquisitely realized nonevent, a space where nothing really happens. In Dead Man, Jarmusch has refashioned the myth of the west according to his vision of the present, and in the representational shorthand that is afforded by recycling the Western he has anatomized the historical and metaphysical underpinnings of that vision.

Dead Man is the definitive western of a critical (as opposed to commercial) postmodernism, whose inspiration lies in a long tradition of western thought critical of the enlightenment, but centrally and most bodly, in the poetry of William Blake, for whom scientific culture spelled the death of the imagination. At the nominal center of the film is the figure of Blake