–William Blake, Gnomic Verses

DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch

FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Robert Mitchum, Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Mili Avatal, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT: Mild-mannered accountant Bill Blake heads west to take a job as an accountant in the wild town of Machine, but when he arrives he discovers the position has been filled and he is stuck on the frontier with no money or prospects.  Blake becomes a wanted man after he kills the son of the town tycoon in self defense.  Wounded, he flees to the wilderness where he’s befriended by an Indian named Nobody, who believes he is the poet William Blake.

BACKGROUND:

• William Blake, the namesake of Johnny Depp’s character in Dead Man, was a poet, painter and mystic who lived from 1757 to 1827. Best known for Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, he is considered one of the forerunners of English Romanticism.
• Jarmusch wrote the script with Depp and Farmer in mind for the leads.
• Elements of the finished script of Dead Man reportedly bear a striking similarity to “Zebulon,” an unpublished screenplay by novelist/screenwriter Rudy (Glen and Randa, Two-Lane Blacktop) Wurlitzer, which Jarmusch had read and discussed filming with the author. Wurlitzer later reworked the script into the novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.
• Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum coined the term “acid Western”—a category in which he also included The Shooting, Greaser’s Palace and El Topo—to describe Dead Man. Jarmusch himself called the film a “psychedelic Western.”
• Neil Young composed the harsh, starkly beautiful soundtrack by improvising on electric guitar while watching the final cut of the film.  The Dead Man soundtrack (buy) includes seven solo guitar tracks from Young, plus film dialogue and clips of Depp reciting William Blake’s poetry.
• Farmer speaks three Native American languages in the film: Blackfoot, Cree, and Makah (which he learned to speak phonetically).  None of the indigenous dialogue is subtitled.
• Jarmusch, who retains all the rights to his films, refused to make cuts to Dead Man requested by distributor Miramax; the director believed that the film was dumped on the market without sufficient promotion because of his reluctance to play along with the sudio.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Nobody peering through William Blake’s skin to his bare skull during his peyote session?  Iggy Pop in a prairie dress?  Those are memorable moments, but in a movie inspired by poetry, it’s the scene of wounded William Blake, his face red with warpaint, curling up on the forest floor with a dead deer that’s the most poetically haunting.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Dead Man is a lyrical and hypnotic film, with a subtle but potent and

Original trailer for Dead Man

lingering weirdness that the viewer must tease out.  It’s possible to view the movie merely as a directionless, quirky indie Western; but that would be to miss out on the mystical, dreamlike tinge of this journey into death.

COMMENTS: Dead Man begins on a locomotive as a naif accountant is traveling from Cleveland to a the western town of Machine to begin a new life. We see him on the train playing solitaire or reading a booklet on beekeeping. He looks up to survey his fellow passengers, who meet his glance with indifference. The train’s whistle blows as the scene fades to black, accompanied by twanging chords from Neil Young’s guitar (sounding like abstract, electrified snippets stolen from a Morricone score). The scene repeats and fades back in again and again, each time with the traveler glancing around the compartment to find his companions slowly changing: their dress becomes more rustic, their hair more unkempt; females become rare, firearms common; the indifference in the passengers eyes changes into quiet hostility.

Dead Man is the story of an innocent who becomes a refugee after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s a standard story, but the way Jarmusch tells it is strange indeed. This opening scene sets the rhythm for the movie: a series of slow pulses punctuated by fadeouts and anguished bursts from Young’s guitar, the setting slowly shifting from the civilized to the wild. With the continual fading out and fading back, it’s as if the movie itself is drifting in and out of consciousness; an appropriate motif, considering the protagonist is fatally wounded early on. The tale is a series of journeys: the journey to the wild west from the civilized east, Blake’s flight into the wilderness, his wanderings with his Indian companion Nobody in the forests of the Pacific northwest as he is hunted by bounty hunters, and his final canoe journey into the ocean. It’s also the journey of a man from innocence to experience and, more importantly, from life to death—or perhaps from death to afterlife.

Dead Man begs an allegorical reading, as powerfully as it resists one. Jarmusch sets up an obvious dichotomy between civilization and white men (generally bad) and nature and Indians (generally good) inside the mythic structure of a hero’s journey. The English poet and painter William Blake, who came out of the most “civilized” nation in the world but whose sensibility of mystical simplicity made him an outsider among his own people, is a bridge between the two worlds. The character William Blake, the accountant, whom Nobody insists is the dead poet, flees from white man’s civilization into the wild. With the aid of Nobody—himself is an outcast caught between the European and the native worlds—Blake is eventually accepted into the Indian culture, as he breaks with his own people by becoming “a killer of white men.” Ultimately, his destiny is to travel even farther west, father from civilization, all the way into the bosom of the Pacific.

That journey from corrupting complexity into peaceful simplicity is the basic structure of Blake’s voyage, and it obviously suggests a spiritual journey. The title suggests that the trip is a postmortem one. Although there is no reason to doubt the literal story—that Blake comes to Machine, is shot, meets Nobody as he is fleeing white man’s justice, then eventually dies from his wounds—it’s possible, and thematically reasonable, to consider the idea that Blake actually is dead through much of the movie. It’s easy to suspect that Blake dies the first time he is shot: Nobody, who accepts the impossible as obvious, suggests as much with his chilling words when he first meets Blake: “did you kill the white man who killed you?” It’s even possible to see Blake as a dead man from the first minute he steps foot on the train. The locomotive fireman with his coal-blackened face and prophetic pronouncements suggests that the accountant is traveling to is Hell. Although specific spiritual lessons are difficult to divine from the tale, Blake’s entire journey from Machine to the ocean could be seen as the voyage of a dead soul from the gates of Hell through Purgatory to Paradise.

The mainstream film fanatic will find those vague, mystical speculations of less interest than Dead Man‘s once-in-a-lifetime, multi-generational cast. The film is headlined by Johnny Depp in that thrilling post-heartthrob period where he was taking every risky and offbeat role that came his way—and nailing them all. Character actor Gary Farmer lands the role of a lifetime as crusty medicine man Nobody; crusty character actor Lance Henriksen, who always seemed like he was born to play a heavy in a Western, gets his chance here. Dependable Michael Wincott provides welcome comic relief. Quirky Crispin Glover adds another weirdo to his repertoire with his illiterate, portentous railroad employee, who may be the brakeman on Charon’s locomotive. Cadaverous non-actor Iggy Pop adds a touch of novelty as a frontiersman in drag. Rising stars Gabriel Byrne (as a forlorn lover) and Billy Bob Thornton (a year before Sling Blade) contribute small but memorable parts. The great John Hurt leaves us wanting more in his near cameo role as middle-management at the Machine concern. All of this remarkable assembly contributes something without anyone hogging the spotlight, but most of the publicity centered around septuagenarian superstar Robert Mitchum, who commanded the two scenes he appeared in as a frontier tycoon. Delivering iconic genre lines like “the only job you’re goin’ to get is pushing up daisies from a pine box!,” a role as a villainous patriarch in a Western seems like the perfect capper to Mitchum’s storied career. It wasn’t quite his final role, but it should have been.

Due to the crowd of interesting thespians, it would be tempting to consider Dead Man as an actor’s movie, but Jarmusch’s idiosyncratic direction overwhelms everything. As usual with this director, the technical qualities of the film are superlative. The high contrast black and white cinematography (courtesy of Robby Müller) captures the grime and decay of the city as well as the luminous beauty of a white birch forest, and Young’s guitar score is as spare and forlorn as the Pacific wilderness. Jarmusch’s method of fading in and out of scenes adds a dreamlike feel, and his deliberate pacing suits the majestic material this time around, coming across as more solemn than slow. This Western features the most languid shootouts ever committed to film; characters calmly aim and reload their guns without fanfare, or stand by fatalistically waiting to be gunned down. Although the lack of music cues, closeups and other methods of dramatically highlighting violence make for a realistic depiction of combat, the casualness of the technique is so unexpected in a genre picture that it creates an unreal aura. And, as expected, Jarmusch fills his canvas with some of the quirkiest, strangest characters you’d ever hope to see in an oater, including not only a trio of blackly comic foresters and the poetry-spouting Nobody, but also a loquacious bounty hunter who carries a teddy bear, and another who’s the worst kind of cannibal.

On it’s release, Dead Man received mostly negative reviews. It was criticized as too slow and too pretentious, appearing to be thoughtful but actually delivering no ideas worth mentioning. Time has been kind to the movie, however, which has emerged as Jarmusch’s best work to date. In Dead Man, a measured journey into an odd, somber, dark and funny wilderness of the spirit, Jarmusch created a myth with staying power. Filled with poetic images like Johnny Depp reclining with a slaughtered fawn, Dead Man has proven a mysterious power to linger in the memory. It may never yield up its meaning, but that doesn’t make it empty.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…begins with a display of grotesquerie that is so sensational it sets up expectations that the movie might be the surreal last word on the Hollywood western and its mythic legacy. Those expectations, unfortunately, are not fulfilled. The film’s energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“A bizarre, funny, almost mystical take on the Western… an original and very weird account of the American wilderness.”–Geoff Anderson, Time Out Film Guide

OFFICIAL SITE:

Dead Man – An archived version of Miramax’s original 1995 Dead Man page, with stills, sound clips, and links (many no longer active) to information on the American West and William Blake

IMDB LINK: Dead Man (1995)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Dead Man at “New York Trash” – A small but dense archive of Dead Man material, including cast bios, a short but very informative interview with Jarmusch, and movie and soundtrack clips

A Gun Up Your Ass: An Interview with Jim Jarmsuch – Dead Man champion Jonathan Rosenbaum’s detailed interview with Jarmusch for Cineaste magazine, conducted when the film was first released

The New Cult Canon: Dead Man – Scott Tobias initiates Dead Man into the A.V. Onion Club’s cult canon with a perceptive essay and two film clips

Critic’s Picks: ‘Dead Man’ – Video Library – The New York Times – Film critic A.O. Scott reassesses the “hallucinatory” Dead Man, calling it one of the best movies of the 1990s, in this three minute video review (Times critic Stephen Holden originally panned the film)

Blake & ‘Dead Man’ – A discussion of the film from a blog exploring the work of William Blake. Very insightful; it cites an earlier version of this review.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Dead Man – Johnathan Rosenbaum’s book length treatment of the film for the British Film Institute’s “Modern Classics” series, including a chapter on the “acid Western.”

DVD INFO: Miramax’s 2000 release (buy) offers up extras including cast and crew bios, a soundtrack-based music video from Neil Young, the theatrical trailer, and 16 minutes of unused footage. On April 12, 2011, Echo Bridge Home Entertainment released a bargain, bare-bones Dead Man DVD (buy) with no extras; the two cases look almost identical (confusingly, it’s the Echo Bridge release that features the Mirimax name on the cover), so customers should be careful to make sure they are getting the version they want. In the summer of 2011 Echo Bridge followed up the bargain DVD release with a bargain Blu-ray release (buy) which includes the special features from the original Miramax release. Considering that the Blu-ray costs only a couple more dollars than the DVD, it’s definitely the way to go if you have a player.
(This movie was nominated for review by “spalding,” who said “I always thought the film Dead man was a little strange and dark. the soundtrack was great, it was shot in black and white, and it had some odd moments.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT: A disturbed man is released from a mental institution and sent to live in a halfway

house.  While there, he traces back to his childhood to remember a troubled past and the tragic events that shaped his current mental instability.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: To compile a list of the weirdest movies ever made, one would be hard-pressed not to include Cronenberg’s entire oeuvre.  Here, the director eschews the “body horror” that encompassed much of his earlier films and focuses solely on the deterioration of the mind.  While this can be just as grotesque as horrors of the flesh, the journey can get so convoluted at times that the weirdness teeters on a fulcrum.  Eventually, the confusion weighs too heavy and topples the weirdness into mere befuddlement.

COMMENTS: A cinematic pet peeve of mine was surely tested with this movie.  Being American, I shouldn’t have to struggle listening to an English film (i.e., UK-Great Britain).  We speak the same tongue, albeit with some slight variances in words and phrases.  The cockney accents in this film can get so thick at times I considered reaching for the subtitle button on the remote.  To make matters worse, the film focuses on the character of Spider (Fiennes) who mumbles and spews gibberish as a means of communication.  Actually, most of his conversations are only with himself.  I loathe having to toggle the volume levels up and down.  I had to do this for the duration of the film.  Aside from this aggravation, Spider is not a bad film; nor is it a great one.

I loved the approach taken in the opening credits.  Various textiles and walls are displayed artistically with corrosion and chipped paint, each frame containing a pattern or form that is open to interpretation.  It is set up to resemble Rorschach inkblot tests used in the psychiatric field (I must be going mad myself because all I see in them are cool looking demons).  These opening credits are effective because they prepare the viewer for a movie that deals with an imbalanced mind.  What we perceive to be truth is certainly going to be skewed from the perspective of a protagonist with warped sensibilities.

Spider enters the picture slowly, exiting a train and returning onto the streets of  London.  Gone are the confines of the mental institution that trapped him for so many years; but that cage must have also been his safe and secure haven.  Now he is obviously uncomfortable and unsure of his surroundings.  The release from the asylum was probably against his will, or in the very least, premature.  The halfway house Spider ventures to next may be a slight step up from his previous residence, but that’s debatable.  It’s full of loonies and a Nurse Ratchet-like overseer.  At least the other lunatics seem somewhat cordial next to Spider.  He remains nearly mute, and when he does speak it’s in the indecipherable mumblings.  Usually, he sits hunched over, wrapped up in his four shirts and fractured memories of childhood.

When left alone in his room he scribbles in a journal he keeps hidden under a rug.  Spider’s schizophrenia is apparent, and the more we watch his body language and behavior, his obsessive compulsive disorder becomes more evident.  The layers of clothing; the disgusting yellowed fingers from chain smoking; the puzzles he pieces together; the crazy handwriting scrawled in his journal (completely unreadable to anyone but himself): all of this indicates a man unhinged, but methodical enough to keep some kind of familiar coherence to hold his frayed existence together.

Spider’s journal contains random thoughts that come rushing back to him concerning his childhood.  The memories play out on screen while the adult Spider lurks somewhere in the background; a strange sight to see, if only because many us have yearned at some point to have this “ghost of Christmas past” capability.  He peers through kitchen windows or sulks in corners of the room.  All the while he recites word-for-word each thing his mother (Richardson) said, and his own 10-year-old reply.  For this purpose his memory serves him well and does not yet seem distorted.  There is an obvious admiration for his mother seen, both in the adult and adolescent Spider.  Kudos to the casting of the young child actor (Bradley Hall), as the adult and child’s eyes look eerily similar.  Whenever the father (Byrne) enters the room, fear overcomes the child, and the adult Spider can be seen backing away from him.

Without giving away too much meat of the story, what unravels in flashbacks is a supposed affair between his plumber father and a floozy at the local pub.  After the sordid affair is discovered by Spider’s mother, the father kills and buries her.  Oddly, Spider’s father never acknowledges her disappearance and fully carries on his life with the drunken bimbo.  When young Spider finally accuses his father of murder, the father becomes enraged and insists the boy is daft and his mother is just fine.

Herein lies the problem with the film and the subject matter of schizophrenia.  The viewer is almost constantly unclear of what is reality and what is imagined.  In this psychologically complex film, entire events go unanswered.  Characters become other characters.  At one point Spider himself asks, “Who are you”?  Richardson deftly assumes three different roles on her own.  Are Spider’s accusations of betrayal and eventual murder directed towards his father justified?  The enigmatic reveal at the end of the film makes it seem the father is innocent of those claims.  Yet, because we are dealing with a cracked psyche, we are never certain what really happened.

All of the performances are convincing turns and realistic portrayals.  Even with Fiennes’ sometimes hard to follow yammerings, he does a fine job.  This is essentially a twisted character study, and Fiennes pulls it off admirably on appearance and body language alone.  As always, Cronengerg’s eye is keen.  The dingy set designs and dreary atmosphere are what appealed to me the most.  One of the most shocking aspect is the lack of violence and gore usually found in Cronenberg movies.  Only one scene of blood, and it is minuscule at best!  I’ll sum it up this way… is Spider weird?  Yes.  Are there better movies covering the subject of schizophrenia which are weirder, yet more centered and coherent?  Absolutely.  Spider weaves a tangled web that ultimately becomes impenetrable, but the intricacy of webs always elicits fascination.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“More poetic than clinical in its approach to schizophrenia, suffused with existential dread, this evocation of psychological torment is both sensationally grim and exquisitely realized. This case history is rigorously hallucinated—a vision of ecstatic, lysergic shabbiness that can find a terrible, formal beauty in its protagonist’s haggard posture or the wretched stains on a flophouse wall.”–J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Ken Russell

FEATURING: Natasha Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Myriam Cyr, Timothy Spall

PLOT: Romantic poet Percy Shelley takes his lover, Mary, and her stepsister Claire to visit Lord Byron and his biographer, Dr. Polidori, at the poet’s sprawling Swiss estate.  The fivesome spend the evening playing games and drinking laudanum, until the topic of conversation turns to ghost stories.  They decide to hold a seance to materialize their worst fear, with unanticipated success: or, are they just having a group hallucination?

BACKGROUND:

• The meeting in the film between Percy Shelley, Byron, Mary Godwin Shelley, Dr. Polidori and Claire Clairmont did take place, though the party actually spent the entire summer of 1816 together, not just a single night.  Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin) did conceive the idea for her novel Frankenstein there, after Byron suggested that each member of the party write their own supernatural tale.  Many other details of the character’s backstories are accurate: Byron did impregnate Claire, and Mary did bear a stillborn child by Percy.
• The story of Frankenstein‘s genesis was mentioned in the prologue to The Bride of Frankenstein, and similar stories of the meeting between Byron and the Shelleys were told in the movies The Haunted Summer (1988) and Rowing in the Wind (1988).
• The painting which hangs over the mantelpiece in the guest bedroom, which is recreated in live action in a dream sequence, in is based on John Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare.”
• The movie was the first major feature produced by a division of Virgin Media (known for producing and distributing their pop music).  Many of the technical crew had a music video background.  Virgin shut down its motion picture production and distribution operations after 1990.
• Julian Sands came to Gothic fresh off a prominent role in Merchant-Ivory’s Oscar-winning A Room with a View.  After this role he wound up specializing in horror films like Warlock (1989) and its sequels.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Breasts with eyes.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  After setting up its premise, Gothic becomes a series of

Trailer for Gothic

phantasmagorical set pieces that allow Ken Russell to indulge his penchant for perverse visuals and excessive Freudian symbolism.

COMMENTS: For better and worse, Gothic‘s hallucinatory structure allows director Ken Russell to jettison narrative coherence and focus on what interests him: filling his frame as full of images of knights with giant pointy phalluses, stripteasing Turkish automatons, self-stigmatizing masochists, all-seeing bosoms, and naked girls covered in muck chewing on rats as he can think of. This is a very bad thing if you go into Gothic looking for some insight into the creative processes of Romantic poets and novelists, and potentially a very good thing if you just like to see Russell going hog wild, shamelessly playing out his psychedelic sex fantasies with typical campiness against a luxurious, decadent background.

The loose story of Gothic has the five literary revelers drinking laudanum, telling ghost stories, and holding seances. They secret themselves away inside the mansion with its cavernous rooms draped with velvet curtains, hung with oil paintings and lit by fireplaces and candelabras, far away from the conventional world, until the villa itself becomes a prison for them, with a host of waking nightmares and paranoid delusions as their cellmates. Supposedly they physically manifest some sort of monster or monsters through their meddling in the occult, but their demonic adversary remains vague and shadowy. The main conflicts are between the characters, and in particular between the Sadean Lord Byron and the his guests. The poet amuses himself by jabbing verbal knives directly into his guests’ insecurities. In between visions, the partiers fights amongst themselves and screech hard-to-take-seriously lines such as “…like God, we have created. And perhaps God, like us, wants to destroy his creatures before they destroy their creator.”

There isn’t much plot to organize the goings-on, but there are strong characters and characterizations to keep us grounded. Though Gothic plays fast and loose with historical accuracy for its own ends, Steven Volk’s screenplay is intricately researched andfull of tiny biographical details that pump blood to these pale aristocratic visages, from references to Mary’s miscarriage to Byron’s clubfoot to Claire’s singing voice. The characters, each of whom harbors a hidden fear or shameful secret, take the place of events in driving the story; learning about their individual psychologies and relationships to each other is what keeps our interest in the spaces between episodes of delirious depravity.

Lord Byron is the dominating character, and Gabriel Byrne dives into character with Mephistophelian glee. Pale as a ghost and devious as a crocodile, dressed to the nines with a rapier wit his main accessory, Byron is a character who begs to be overacted, and Byrne delivers in sinister spades. He acts as the host and principal instigator, feeding his guests drugs, demanding they play his mind games so long as they are guests in his house, sowing discord and generally leading the party into damnation. He loves only his literary peer Shelley, though much of the time his touchy-feely interest seems more erotic than poetic. Polidori, his biographer “with no biography of his own,” serves as his primary verbal punching bag. He treats Claire as a sexual plaything, with all the romantic tenderness of a frat boy at a kegger. (Twice, the two perform love scenes with a thin sheet of fabric between them, obscuring her face). He is hostile towards Mary, who he sees as a rival for Shelley’s attention. He sows doubts in her mind about Shelley’s devotion to her, but he does show Mary the respect of a worthy adversary by attempting to frighten her, rather than simply dismissing her as he does Polidori and Claire. No character is capable of getting the better of Byron—though Polidori tries by playing on his irrational fear of leeches—but Byron may be capable of getting the better of himself; the only time he appears vulnerable and ridiculous is when he is acting out an odd fetish involving a Roman mask with a servant girl.

Miriam Cyr’s Claire is the least developed character; at times, she seems there only for nudity’s sake. She spends much of the movie in a swoon. She throws herself at Byron, gratifying his ego, but seems blissfully unaware of his lack of serious intentions towards her. The intellectual lightweight of the group, she makes her presence felt by howling occasionally. Polidori largely ignores her, Mary has little to say to her, and she doesn’t interact much with Shelley, though there are rumors of an improper relations between the two. Claire is a thankless role, but Cyr gives her all, even when her big topless scene is upstaged by an eye-popping special effect.

Dr. Polidori, the unaccompanied male, is the fifth wheel. As the loner and outcast of the party, he’s given the chance to exhibit odd and geeky behavior, drinking from a glass full of leeches and banging his hand repeatedly against a nail in the wall. He also inexplicably loses his hair halfway through the movie. The least mentally stable of the group, he’s not so secretly in lust with the contemptuous Byron, jealous of Shelley, not much interested in the ladies, and tortured by his homosexual urges. Timothy Spall makes the most of his opportunities for overwrought hysterics as he’s driven insane by jealously, inadequacy and suicidal thoughts, playing the weirdo amongst the weirdos.

Julian Sands plays Shelley as a naif poet, so easily enraptured by nature that he traipses out naked onto the slick rooftop in a thunderstorm to commune with the lightning. A good and faithful lover to Mary, his admiration for Byron’s skill with a line of verse causes him deliberately overlook his comrade’s evil. He’s also the guy at the party who can’t hold his laudanum, developing the shakes early on and dissolving into a quivering puddle of fear. The eternal quaver in Sands’ voice can get annoying, but it’s a memorable characterization, and the decent but flighty Shelley is a necessary contrast to the conniving Byron. (As a side note, with his curly blond locks and Apollonian good looks, Sands looks more than a little like Jan in Malpertuis, another weird movie with an ensemble of decadent aristocrats trapped in a spooky old mansion).

Natasha Richardson’s Mary is the most normal member of the assembly, the character we identify with. In some ways, she serves as the standard Gothic horror heroine in a white nightgown, harassed by demonic forces until she pulls herself together and banishes Evil. But Richardson’s performance as the beacon of sanity amidst the madness is richer than that. She has a sorrowful backstory that she handles with a quiet stoic dignity, and overall she is quite affecting and grounds the film. After all, this is Mary’s story: she is the one who takes something from this mad night, in the form of the idea for Frankenstein.

Thematically, the movie is confused. The supposed revelation is that Mary’s stillborn child, and her desire to “resurrect” him, was the real impetus behind the character of Frankenstein and his monster. That’s not a very satisfying literary interpretation; it hardly elucidates the novel’s major theme of the hubris of science. Gothic discourses a lot about creation: there’s the literal creation of the evil force through seance, the main characters are poets who are driven to create, there are important subplots involving the creation of human life through sex, and there is the constant background that the film is about the concept for Frankenstein, a novel about the forbidden creation of life. In a moment of group hysteria, the entire party obsesses that they are becoming like gods, and losing control of their creations. But there’s no real exploration of creativity in the movie; the idea of the madness of creation here simply a romanticized ideal, atmosphere, ultimately no more important to the movie than a gout of blood or a heaving bosom.

Though Russell usually throws out some bit of philosophy in his movies, he’s hardly a deep thinker, and can in fact appear to be an embarrassingly shallow one who hides his lack of ideas behind a sheen of ironic exaggeration; you can never be sure he means to be taken seriously. But Russell is also a fine stylist who creates memorable images and whose shameless devotion to excess can be, quite frankly, tremendous fun. The title of the movie, which refers to a literary style and not to a plot element, should give us a hint that the film intends to evoke a genre rather than tell a story. Some of the recurring motifs of Gothic literature are castles or mansions, decay, demonic (and Byronic) figures, skulls, stormy nights, dreams and portents, and romantic love, all of which make cameos in the movie Gothic. The hallmarks of Gothic literature are the exploration of terror and other extreme emotions, melodrama that can rise to the level of self-parody, and the elevation of atmosphere and mysterious emotion above all else. In this respect, it looks as if Ken Russell has always been Gothic at heart, and the moody, deliberately clichéd, insulated, and wondrous Gothic may be the world he was born to conjure.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A weird exercise in bizarre excess by Ken Russell… seems more appropriate for the spaced-out Sixties, in which this kind of psychedelic excess hadn’t yet become so overexposed, so overdone, and I must say… so boring.”–Roger Ebert, “At the Movies” (contemporaneous)

“Russell, the man who gave the phrase ‘too much’ new meaning, outdoes himself.”–Desson Howe, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

“Russell applies his trademark excess to this surreal, experimental examination of the creative dementia which shaped Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein… The raging Romantics are also given to lengthy discourse on the nature of fear and the fine line between creative genius and insanity; by the film’s end, viewers may find themselves wondering the same thing about the director.”–Cavet Binion, All Movie Guide (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Gothic (1986)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Gothic – At the Movies – New York Times piece about the movie with quotes from co-star Julian Sands.

Gothic Horror – composer Thomas Dolby describes his experiences working on the Gothic soundtrack, including some unflattering and humorous anecdotes about director Russell.

Gothic B-movie review – semi-comic reader review by “Fautso” from badmovies.org.  The entry contains stills, soundbites and a 30 second movie clip.

DVD INFO:  Gothic has been poorly distributed on video, possibly due to the fact that it’s original distributor, Virgin, decided to get out of the movie distribution business.  Gothic was a mom n’ pop video store VHS favorite for a while, but has suffered on DVD.  The original Artisan/Lionsgate 2002 edition, which is still available (buy), contained no special features, and to make matters worse the movie was presented in pan-and-scan fullscreen. At the time of this writing, Artisan/Lionsgate is offering the film for online rental/download for a very reasonable $2.99 (buy/rent ), which may be a viable alternative considering the lackluster nature of the DVD.

Somehow, the rights to Gothic were either sold for a song, or Virgin decided not to enforce their copyright. A French company called Synergy Archives is selling DVD-R copies of the movie that have been described as of unacceptable quality. Mill Creek, a company that specializes in releasing public-domain movies in bargain “50 packs” acquired the rights for the movie for their “Chilling Classics 50-pack” (buy). Although the picture quality is doubtlessly bad and the presentation full-frame (widescreen is not a word in Mill Creek’s lexicon), there are several other interesting low budget films included in this bargain collection, such as Peter Jackson‘s Bad Taste, Roger Corman‘s A Bucket of Blood, Dario Argento’s Deep Red, the surreal Mexican cheapie Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon, and the certified weird Horrors of Spider Island. Since there are no high-quality versions of the film out there, Mill Creek may be the best road to take.

As one of the Best Weird Movies Ever Made, and one made by a director with a cult following, the lack of a decent video release for Gothic is confounding. Gothic often plays on the cable channel FearNet, so there’s still an audience for the movie. We are left scratching our heads as to why there is no proper DVD version on the market.

[(This movie was nominated for review by reader “DamienBfromBLOK .” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)]

DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch

FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Robert Mitchum, Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Mili Avatal, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT:  Mild-mannered accountant Bill Blake heads west, becomes a wanted man after he

shoots a man in self defense, and, wounded, flees to the wilderness where he’s befriended by an Indian named Nobody who believes he is the poet William Blake.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Dead Man is a lyrical and hypnotic film, and one that comes about as achingly close to making the List on the first pass as is possible.  The quality of the movie is no obstacle to its making the List, but the weirdness, while there, is subtle and must be teased out by the viewer.  There is a mystical and dreamlike tinge to Blake’s journey into death, but the strangeness is almost entirely tonal; Jarmusch’s artiness aside, it’s possible to view the movie as a rather straightforward, if quirky, indie Western.

COMMENTS:  Dead Man begins on a locomotive as a naif accountant is traveling from Cleveland to a the western town of Machine to begin a new life.  We see him on the train playing solitaire or reading a booklet on beekeeping.  He looks up to survey at his fellow passengers, who meet his glance with indifference.  The train’s whistle blows as the scene fades to black, accompanied by twanging chords from Neil Young’s guitar (sounding like abstract, electrified snippets stolen from a Morricone score).  The scene repeats and fades back in again and again, each time with the traveler glancing around the compartment to find his companions slowly changing: their dress becomes more rustic, their hair longer and more unkempt; female passengers become less frequent, firearms more common; the indifference in their eyes turns into quiet hostility.

Dead Man tells the story of an innocent who becomes a refugee after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It’s a standard story, but the way Jarmusch tells can be strange indeed.  This opening scene sets the rhythm for the movie: it proceeds in a series of slow pulses punctuated by fadeouts and anguished bursts from Young’s guitar, and it slowly shifts locale from the civilized to the wild.  The continual fading out and fading back in makes it seem like the movie is drifting in and out of consciousness; after it’s protagonist is fatally wounded, early on, this is a particularly appropriate motif.  The tale is a series of journeys: the journey to the wild west from the civilized east, Blake’s flight into the wilderness, his wanderings with his Indian companion Nobody in the forests of the Pacific northwest as he is hunted by bounty hunters, and his final canoe journey into the ocean.  It’s also the journey of a man from innocence to experience and, more importantly, from life to death, or perhaps from death to afterlife.

Dead Man begs an allegorical reading, as powerfully as it resists one.  Jarmusch sets up an obvious dichotomy between civilization and white men (generally bad) and nature and Indians (generally good) inside the mythic structure of a hero’s journey.  The English poet and painter William Blake, who came out of the most “civilized” nation in the world but whose sensibility of mystical simplicity made him an outsider among his own people, represents a sort of a bridge between the two worlds.  The character William Blake, the accountant, whom Nobody insists is the dead poet, flees from white man’s civilization into the wild.  With the aid of Nobody—himself is an outcast caught between the European and the native worlds—Blake is eventually accepted into the Indian culture, as he breaks with his own people by becoming “a killer of white men.”  Ultimately, his destiny is to travel even farther west, father from civilization, all the way into the bosom of the Pacific.

That journey from corrupting complexity into peaceful simplicity is the basic structure of Blake’s voyage, and it obviously suggests a spiritual journey.  The title suggests that the trip is a postmortem one.  Although there is no reason to doubt the literal story—that Blake comes to Machine, is shot, meets Nobody as he is fleeing white man’s justice, then eventually dies from his wounds—it’s possible, and thematically reasonable, to consider the idea that Blake is actually dead through much of the movie.  It’s easy to suspect that Blake dies the first time he is shot: Nobody, who often accepts the impossible as real, suggests as much with his chilling words when he first meets Blake: “did you kill the white man who killed you?”  It’s even possible to see Blake as a dead man from the first minute he steps foot on the train.  The locomotive fireman with his coal-blackened face and oddly prophetic pronouncements suggests that the town of Machine the accountant is traveling to is Hell.  Although specific spiritual lessons are difficult to divine from the tale, Blake’s entire journey from Machine to the ocean could be seen as the voyage of a dead soul from the gates of Hell through Purgatory to Paradise.

The mainstream film fanatic will find those vague, mystical speculations of less interest than Dead Man‘s once-in-a-lifetime, multi-generational cast.  The film is headlined by Johnny Depp in that thrilling post-heartthrob period where he was taking every risky and offbeat role that came his way—and nailing them all.  Character actor Gary Farmer lands the role of a lifetime as crusty medicine man Nobody; fellow character actor Lance Henriksen, who always seemed like he was born to play a heavy in a Western, gets his chance here.  Dependable Michael Wincott provides welcome comic relief.  Quirky Crispin Glover adds another weirdo to his repertoire with his illiterate, portentous railroad employee, who may be the brakeman on Charon’s locomotive.  Cadaverous non-actor Iggy Pop adds a touch of novelty as a frontiersman in drag.  Rising stars Gabriel Byrne (as a forlorn lover) and Billy Bob Thornton (a year before Sling Blade) contribute small but memorable parts.  The great John Hurt leaves us wanting more in his near cameo role as middle-management at the Machine concern.  All of this remarkable assembly contributes something without anyone hogging the spotlight, but the most of the publicity centered around septuagenarian superstar Robert Mitchum, who commanded the two scenes he appeared in as a frontier tycoon.   Delivering iconic genre lines like  “the only job you’re goin’ to get is pushing up daisies from a pine box!,” a role as a villainous patriarch in a Western seems like the perfect capper to Mitchum’s storied career.  It wasn’t quite his final role, but it should have been.

Due to the crowd of interesting thespians, it would be tempting to consider Dead Man as an actor’s movie, but, for better or worse, Jarmusch’s idiosyncratic direction overwhelms everything.  As usual with this director, the technical qualities of the film are superlative.  The high contrast black and white cinematography (courtesy of Robby Müller) captures the grime and decay of the city as well as the luminous beauty of a white birch forest, and Young’s guitar score is as spare and forlorn as the Pacific wilderness.  Jarmusch’s method of fading in and out of scenes adds a dreamlike feel, and his deliberate pacing suits the majestic material this time around, coming across as more solemn than slow.  This Western features the most languid shootouts ever committed to film; characters calmly aim and reload their guns without fanfare, or stand fatalistically waiting to be gunned down.  Although the lack of music cues, closeups and other methods of dramatically highlighting violence is probably a realistic depiction of combat, the casualness of the technique is so unexpected in a genre picture that it creates an almost unreal aura.  And, as expected, Jarmusch fills his canvas with some of the quirkiest, strangest characters you’d ever hope to see in an oater, including not only a trio of blackly comic foresters and the poetry-spouting Nobody, but also a loquacious bounty hunter who carries a teddy bear, and another one who’s the worst kind of cannibal.

On it’s release, Dead Man received mostly negative reviews.  It was criticized as too slow and too pretentious, appearing to be thoughtful but actually delivering no ideas worth mentioning.  Time has been kind to the movie, however, which has emerged as Jarmusch’s best work to date.  In Dead Man, a measured journey into an odd, somber, dark and funny wilderness of the spirot, Jarmusch created a myth with staying power.  Filled with poetic images like Johnny Depp reclining with a slaughtered fawn, Dead Man has proven a mysterious power to linger in the memory.  It may never yield up its meaning, but that doesn’t make it empty.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…begins with a display of grotesquerie that is so sensational it sets up expectations that the movie might be the surreal last word on the Hollywood western and its mythic legacy.  Those expectations, unfortunately, are not fulfilled.  The film’s energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“A bizarre, funny, almost mystical take on the Western… an original and very weird account of the American wilderness.”–Geoff Anderson, Time Out Film Guide