Graphic Violence: Native Americans and the Western Archive in Dead Man

Abstract

JIM JARMUSCH'S HAUNTING WESTERN, DEAD MAN (1996), SET IN THE 1870S, opens with an extended pre-credit sequence that inaugurates the film's complicated relationship to America's historical archive—a record structured by conflict, hybridity, and violence. Cleveland accountant William Blake, a foppishly clad Johnny Depp, sits uncomfortably on a train headed west to the town of Machine, where he has accepted a job as an accountant at Dickinson's Metal Works. In a long series of quick blackout scenes, Jarmusch crosscuts insistently between the ominous chugging of the locomotive's wheels (conventionally, Hollywood shorthand for historical progress and Western expansion) and the interior of Blake's cabin. Inside, as the journey progresses, the changing passengers around Blake grow increasingly threatening, disheveled, and barbaric; outside, the landscape Blake observes becomes increasingly foreign. Near the end of the sequence, the train's soot-faced fireman (Crispin Glover) seats himself opposite Blake and volunteers this bizarre monologue: "Look out the window. And doesn't it remind you of when you're in the boat, and then later that night you're lying, looking up at the ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the [End Page 171] landscape, and you think to yourself, 'Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?'" 1 While oddly prophetic of the film's closing scene, which places a dying Blake in a boat to witness an historical tableaux of inter-cultural conflict, the boiler-man's dreamy rant also implies how past and present blur together, experiences transfer over time and space, and memories work as stratified temporalities, what Henri Bergson once called "sheets of the past." As such, this speech indexes the psychic mechanisms through which events (both being "in the boat" and "in the train" in this case) are experienced, archived, and recollected. Like contemporary theoretical debates about trauma, the boiler-man's trippy associative chain troubles any clean distinctions between feeling and experience, affect and event. Indeed, Dead Man can be understood as an examination—both thematic and formal—of the ethical implications of such time/space confusions for any attempts, including Jarmusch's own, to set historical, cultural, and indeed generic records straight.