A Dead Man Walking

William Blake was a walking dead man, just like everyone else. Unlike most others, our protagonist in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) has Nobody with him as he takes on this journey through the end of his life and into the spiritual realm. Nobody, a Native American, helps a dying William Blake make his way to the Pacific Ocean so he can have a proper send-off into the spiritual realm. This journey is a perilous one, with bounty hunters on the prowl hoping to bring Blake’s journey to a premature end. As Blake progresses, he sheds his meek, sheltered city sensibilities and begins to revert to the spiritual connection to the land of the natives before the profane machinery of western civilization took hold. Often referred to as a postmodern western and occasionally a psychedelic western, Blake sheds his civilized manors, but does not conform to the western cowboy trope. He is not some cowboy sheriff too big to fail, he’s already bleeding to death, his failure emerges in the first scene. Instead this is a man who becomes closer to the spiritual qualities of his world until he is fully acclimated into the spiritual world he enters at his death. This is a journey centered on acceptance of our mortality. As Nobody tells Blake, when he enters the next world, “This world will no longer concern you.” As Blake drifts away the final bounty hunter and Nobody shoot each other, leaving nothing left connecting Blake to this world, just as Nobody said. He passes on to the next ready for whatever it has for him. The idea of death fills him with dread at the beginning, but after experience much death, and experiencing the world these deaths occur within, Blake is able to relinquish all concerns on the present world, and accept his fate.

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