The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jim Jarmusch · a film in black and white · 1995 · about 121 minutes · music by Neil Young
Mode
Western turned into a passage of the dead; deadpan comedy, chase and elegy in one
Mythos
The soul’s journey to the land of the dead, with a guide called Nobody; the visionary poet whose name becomes a vocation of killing
Phase
One journey west, from a train to the town of Machine, through a forest of encounters, to a village on the coast and a canoe set out to sea
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 121 minutes, in English with passages in Cree and Blackfoot; Robby Müller’s photography, Jay Rabinowitz’s cutting, an electric guitar score by Neil Young
Register
Deadpan, in which the comic and the deathly are one tone; sudden, clumsy violence; long fades to black; the guitar as weather
Scale
One man’s dying, carried across a continent’s frontier to its western sea
Governing Proposition
An accountant from Cleveland rides west to a job, kills a man in a night that is not his doing, and, with a bullet lodged by his heart, is led through the forest to the Pacific by a Native man who takes him for the dead English poet whose name he carries. The wager of the film is that the American West was an industry of killing, that a man can be made into what each story needs, and that a western can be told as the passage of a soul to the land of the dead, one fade at a time.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in motion. William Blake, an accountant from Cleveland, played by Johnny Depp, rides a train west in a check suit and spectacles. He sleeps and wakes, and each time he wakes the carriage has changed: the city men who boarded with him give way, fade by fade, to trappers. Then the fireman, played by Crispin Glover, comes and sits across from him, his face black from the engine, and speaks to him of the boat and the water. The passengers rise and shoot buffalo from the windows. A dread is set that the film will keep.
The film’s chief formal fact is already in place. Scenes end, very often, in fades to black, and the next begins somewhere new, without passage. The train ride is a descent by stages, and each stage is cut off by darkness. It is the rhythm of a man drifting in and out of sleep, and it will become the rhythm of a man drifting in and out of life. The audience, like Blake, wakes each time into a place it did not see itself reach.
Jim Jarmusch wrote and directed the film. Robby Müller photographed it in black and white, Jay Rabinowitz cut it, and Neil Young made its score, an electric guitar largely improvised against the cut picture. It runs about 121 minutes. It was shown in competition at Cannes in May 1995 and released in the United States by Miramax in 1996. The cut scored is that one, the film as released.
Movement II
The line ends at a town called Machine, and at the end of its street stands Dickinson Metal Works. Blake has come for a post as an accountant. In the office the manager, played by John Hurt, receives him, and the owner, John Dickinson, played by Robert Mitchum in his last screen role, meets him with a shotgun. There is no place here for a clerk from Cleveland, and the town makes that plain.
That night he goes home with Thel Russell, played by Mili Avital. Charlie Dickinson, played by Gabriel Byrne, comes in on them. Shots are fired, Thel dies, Charlie dies by Blake’s hand, and a bullet is lodged by Blake’s heart. He flees. Nothing he has done was his intention. The accident has made him a killer, and the rest of the film is the time it takes him to die.
Dickinson sends three hired killers after him: Cole Wilson, played by Lance Henriksen, Conway Twill, played by Michael Wincott, and Johnny Pickett, called the Kid, played by Eugene Byrd. Bounty posters go up with Blake’s name on them. The West has an economy, and it is made of the metal works, the reward and the gun; it has found a use for the accountant before he has found one for himself.
Movement III
In the forest he is found by Nobody, played by Gary Farmer, a Native man educated in England who has read the poems of William Blake. Told the accountant’s name, he takes him for the poet. To Nobody he is the dead Englishman come back, and already dead in any case: the bullet is still in him, and Nobody will guide him to the edge of the water, where he can cross.
The name sets a joke as old as the Odyssey, a guide called Nobody, inside a cosmology the film treats with care. Nobody recites the poet to him, and one line stands for the whole journey: “born to endless night”. The film takes the poet’s myth of a visionary afterlife and lays it on a frightened clerk, and the clerk does not understand a word. Gary Farmer gives Nobody a gravity, an irony and a patience that make him the one who knows, and the white man the one who misunderstands.
The guide gives the clerk a vocation. The pistol, Nobody tells him, will “replace your tongue”, and from then on it does. The West reads his name onto bounty posters as a gunman, Nobody reads it as a poet, and the man between the two readings becomes what each story needs. That is the second thing the film discloses, beside the first: an identity made by misreading.
Movement IV
The middle of the film is a run of encounters in the forest, each ended by a fade. Three trappers at a campfire, played by Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton and Jared Harris, make a grotesque comedy that is always on the edge of killing, and ends in it. Marshals come for the reward. The hired killers keep their own track through the same woods, and Cole Wilson among them is a cannibal who crushes a dead marshal’s head under his boot. The comedy is flat by design, and the violence is sudden, clumsy and without heroism.
Alone, Blake comes on a fawn that has been shot and lies beside it. He touches its wound, and then his own. The image is quiet and it rises: the man and the animal are two creatures of the forest dying of the same thing, and for a moment the film’s comedy is set aside. Neil Young’s guitar runs under the forest passages like weather, distorted chords that are less a score than the air the dying man moves through.
At a trading post a missionary, played by Alfred Molina, keeps a store in the wilderness, and the commerce there is in death. The film’s account of the West is complete here: an industry whose parts are the metal works, the reward, the store and the gun, in which extermination is not an accident of the economy but its working. Blake, who came to keep accounts, has been entered in them.
Movement V
Nobody brings him at last to a Makah village on the Pacific coast. The passage through it is long and lateral, among carved houses and tall poles, in smoke and grey light, and Blake, weakening, passes through it toward the shore. The village is staged with care, and it is grand: the end of the West is not a town or a fort but the shore of another people’s world, and the edge of the water.
There Nobody sets him in a canoe, laid out for the crossing, and pushes it out from the shore. On the shore two men shoot each other down, and the passage ends without its last gunfight being Blake’s. The canoe is drawn out into open sea, and the film ends not with a death shown but with a departure across water. Every episode was a stage of dying; this is the last, and it is a crossing rather than a showdown.
On this desk the film stands at 8.2, a tenth below Paris, Texas (8.3), the other slow American journey Müller photographed, and two tenths below Unforgiven (8.4), the decade’s other western that turns on killing. It was poorly received in much of the American press on release, and its standing has risen in the thirty-one years since. What it has made is a western told as a passage of the dead, fade by fade, in which the gunman is a clerk who cannot shoot and the guide is the one who knows.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is a dying, and the film’s slowness is required by it: a bullet lodges by Blake’s heart in the first act, and the rest is the time it takes him to die. Most stations are required: the train into the machine, Machine and its owner with the shotgun, the night with Thel that makes him a killer, Nobody the guide, the trading post, the village and the crossing. What holds the axis here is the episodic middle. The trappers’ campfire and parts of the hired killers’ parallel track are comic set pieces that sharpen tone more than they advance the passage, and a share of either could go without loss. The fades make each episode a bead on one string, which keeps looseness from becoming assembly.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Two disclosures can be stated, and they hold. The first: the West shown as an industry of killing, its working parts the metal works, the bounty poster, the trading post and passengers shooting buffalo from a train window, so that extermination is the economy, not its accident. The second: an identity made by misreading. Nobody takes the accountant for the English poet, the West takes him for a gunman, and the man becomes what each story needs, his name read into a vocation of killing. Both are carried by image and sound as much as by statement and count in full. Held below the gate because the second is more conceit than condition, and much of the film’s power is a mood of passage rather than a stated meaning.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The film rises often, and coldly. The opening on the train, passengers changing from city men to trappers at each fade while the fireman’s blackened face speaks of the boat and the water, sets a dread the film keeps. Blake lying beside a shot fawn, touching its wound and then his own, is a quietly elevated image. The forest under Neil Young’s distorted chords lifts again and again: the guitar is less a score than weather. The passage through the Makah village, among carved houses and tall poles, is grand, and the last shots, the canoe drawn out from shore into open sea, close the film at height. Held from the top by the deliberate flatness of much of the comedy, which lowers frequency more than peak.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. The story is a soul’s passage to the land of the dead: the train the first ferry, Machine the world of iron, Nobody the guide who names Blake already dead and leads him to the edge of the water, the canoe the last crossing. Every episode is a further stage of dying, and the end is not a death shown but a departure across water. Nobody’s name sets an Odyssean joke, the guide called Nobody, inside an indigenous cosmology the film treats with care. The poet’s myth is laid beside it, his “endless night” become the accountant’s. And it stays particular: a frightened clerk in spectacles and a check suit. It meets the gate exactly, because the death journey bears the weight and the poet’s name does not.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The departure is real: a western whose gunman is an accountant who cannot shoot, whose guide is a Native man educated in England who quotes Blake, whose violence is sudden, clumsy and unheroic, and whose movement west is a journey into death. The stake was real too: black and white, a star in a part with almost no agency, a slow tempo, and a poor reception in much of the American press on release. Held below the gate because the ground had been opened. Monte Hellman’s westerns, El Topo and the counter-cultural western of around 1970 had already turned the genre toward the metaphysical and the absurd, and Jarmusch’s own deadpan manner was proven by his earlier films. A large turn, on ground partly cleared.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. The fades to black are its knowledge of a consciousness slipping in and out: each scene ends as Blake’s awareness ends, and the audience, like him, wakes into a new place without passage. The black and white strips the West of its postcard colour and makes forest and village one ashen world between living and dead. The tempo of a man bleeding out is the film’s clock; a conventional chase cut would turn a dying into an adventure. Neil Young’s score, laid against the picture, is a voice the film cannot be told without. Held from the top because the comic episodes are formally looser than the death they frame: there the form contains rather than knows.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Three decades of return are evidence. The allusions to Blake repay knowledge of the poems, from Thel’s name to the visionary afterlife. The Native detail repays knowledge of the cultures it draws on, and critics have returned to it on that ground. The comedy of misnaming and the account of capital give separate rereadings. There is a monograph by Jonathan Rosenbaum in the BFI series and a steady literature on the western and on Native representation. Formal depth is real: the fades and the rhythm change meaning on return. Held a step lower because the yield, though steady, comes from a narrower base of meaning than the deepest films, and much of the return is to texture rather than to matter that does not run out.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Released in 1995, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the film reorganises the western’s relation to its Native figure, the guide as the one who knows and the white hero as the one who misunderstands, and to death, the genre’s ending made a crossing rather than a showdown. Beside the decade’s commercial and revisionist westerns it is a singular object. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is a lasting cult and critical film, named in later talk of the acid western and of slow cinema, and its Native characters are cited; but it did not redirect the mainstream, and its influence is diffuse rather than traceable in a line of works. Reach is what holds the axis here.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole in one cut, and restoration is repair. It has been in circulation for about thirty-one years, in revival screenings, on home video and in a modern restoration, and its reputation has risen since a cool reception, which is survival demonstrated past the conditions of its making. The surface is not fixed to its moment: black and white and a period setting keep it from dating, though Depp’s star presence of the mid 1990s is part of its draw. Presence is real but not the widest: a cult and art house film, not a common inheritance. Thirty-one years are credited for what they have shown, and the gate is met exactly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the medium is high and load-bearing. Robby Müller’s black and white is exact: the deep grey of the forest, the hard light on the street of Machine, the smoke of the village. Jay Rabinowitz’s cutting holds the long fades at a constant pulse, so the rhythm of the whole is governed. The casting is a feat of control, a run of single-scene performances by Robert Mitchum, John Hurt, Crispin Glover and Alfred Molina, each pitched to one deadpan key, and Gary Farmer’s Nobody carries the film with a gravity that never tips into the stereotype of the guide. Neil Young’s improvised score is right. The costs: loose staging in some comic scenes, a passivity in Depp that at times thins the centre, and gun violence shot flat that is sometimes only flat.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs most of it: a deadpan register in which the comic and the deathly are one tone, and every encounter ends in sudden, absurd violence. Take the two most distant elements, the trappers’ grotesque campfire and the elegy of the crossing from the Makah village. Both obey the law, because the comedy is always on the edge of killing and the elegy is never solemn. The strain is in the parallel track. Cole Wilson’s cannibalism and his boot on a dead marshal’s head stretch the register toward the grotesque, and the cartoon of the three hired killers sits a little apart from the passage of Blake and Nobody, under physics not wholly the same. The range the law covers is wide, and that is credited.
Score: 8.2 / 10
For a two-hour film it holds much in one structure: a single consciousness dying; capital and industry in Dickinson, his metal works and the accountant’s job itself; the state’s violence in bounty and marshal; the destruction of Native nations; Native cultures from the plains to the Pacific coast; poetry and its misreading; the sacred passage of the dead; and the natural order of forest, animal and sea. These are joined through the journey rather than listed. What holds the axis here is what is absent: the family, labour in its daily shape and any social life beyond the encounter. The world is seen in stations, not in duration, and the figure describes that reach.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep, The Imperishable and The Made at 8.5. A soul’s passage to the land of the dead built into every stage of the plot, with a guide called Nobody and a canoe for the last crossing; three decades of survival past a cool reception, in one whole cut; and a command of black and white, cutting and deadpan casting that governs the rhythm of the whole.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 7.8. An episodic middle whose comic set pieces could lose a share without loss; a force that reorganised the western’s Native figure and its ending, with a reach that stayed cult and diffuse; and a world seen in stations, with no family, no daily labour and no social life beyond the encounter. Above them, The Bottomless Well at 8.1, a steady yield from a narrower base of meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.5, The Living Form at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable meet the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Swerve at 8.3 falls two tenths short, The Unconcealment at 8.2 three tenths short and Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 seven tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.2 from a sum of 98.5, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Dead Man as released, about 121 minutes, in black and white, the cut shown in competition at Cannes in May 1995 and released in the United States by Miramax in 1996, from the train to the canoe: written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, photographed by Robby Müller, edited by Jay Rabinowitz, with music by Neil Young. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The film is judged in English, with its passages in Cree and Blackfoot as part of the object. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and only in the shortest lines; the rest of the speech is described. Restorations are counted as repair and are not judged as versions. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of scenes and of fades, whether any other version exists, how the Native passages are subtitled, a missionary’s words about the blankets he sells, Nobody’s own word for the sea, the label and year of the modern restoration, the year of the monograph, the terms of the American release, and whether Native advisers worked on the Makah village.