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

Nieland, Justus

doi:10.1353/ncr.2003.0058

Cited by 28 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…40 A slightly different, but sympathetic, reading has argued that Dead Man, in its deliberate unsettling of the Western archive, performs ''creative archival violence,'' not from outside, but from within the archive itself. 41 In relation to the western's legal archive, I would agree. As expected, this film does provide an affirmation of a legal order in its final scenes.…”

Section: De-territorializing the West/ernmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘ ‘Passing through the Mirror’’: Dead Man, Legal Pluralism and the De-territorialization of the West

Buchanan

2010

Law, Culture & the Humanities

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The failures of Western law in its encounter with indigenous legal orders have been well documented, but alternative modes of negotiating the encounter remain under-explored in legal scholarship. The present article addresses this lacuna. It proceeds from the premise that the journey towards a different conceptualization of law might be fruitfully re-routed through the affect-laden realm of embodied experience -the experience of watching the subversive antiwestern film Dead Man. Section II explains and develops a Deleuzian approach to law and film which involves thinking about film as ''event.'' Section III considers Dead Man's relation to the western genre and its implications for how we think about law's founding on the frontier. Finally, the article explores the concept of ''becoming'' through a consideration of the relationship between the onscreen journey of the character Bill Blake and the radical worldview of his poetic namesake.

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Section: De-territorializing the West/ernmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘ ‘Passing through the Mirror’’: Dead Man, Legal Pluralism and the De-territorialization of the West

Buchanan

2010

Law, Culture & the Humanities

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“…13 The presentation of an accountant-cum-serial-killer poet by the name of William Blake in Dead Man thus prompts urgent questions concerning the relationship between writing and shooting and, by extension, between art and politics (cf. Nieland 2001). Dead Man gives a clear and polemical answer to the question of what it would have meant for somebody to be a 'Prophet against Empire' in 1870s North America.…”

Section: Selling Paper Flowers In Hellmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stranger on a Train: William Blake and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man – Media and Violence, Poetry and Politics

Schelkle¹

2010

Zeitschrift Für Anglistik Und Amerikanistik

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In his Illuminated Books, William Blake developed a distinct artistic media practice. This practice is inseparable from Blake's media theoretical reflections which anticipate those of Marshall McLuhan in their insistence that 'the medium is the message.' Jim Jarmusch's film Dead Man (1995), a reworking of the Western genre and perhaps the most original of the many contemporary works of popular culture which reference Blake, takes up Blake's and McLuhan's thoughts by focusing on the violence trains, guns, watches, and factories wrought upon 1870s North America. This aspect of the film ties in with Blake's trenchant critique of industrial capitalism and its effects on human beings. Blake's status as a 'Prophet against Empire' is then taken up and related to Jarmusch's Blake becoming a 'Killer of white men,' which raises urgent questions about the relationship between art and politics. Finally, the character of Thel Russell, who sells paper flowers in the film, is shown to incarnate Blake's views on the power of the imagination and to resonate with his experience as an artist.

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“…Several scholars analysed it in terms of genre, discussing, among other things, revisionism, reflection on the traumatic past, Native American history and culture, and the expansion of the West (Rickman 1998;Rosenbaum 2000;Kollin 2000;Hall 2001;Nieland 2001;Bromley 2001;Pelzer 2002;Buchanan 2011). Nieland, for example, examined 'the film's complicated relationship to America's historical archive -a record structured by conflict, hybridity, and violence' (Nieland 2001, 171).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘I wouldn’t trust no words written down on no piece of paper’: Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Jacques Derrida and the Critique of Logocentrism

Kazakeviciute

2019

JOMEC Journal

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In this article, I propose a reading of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995) in light of Jacques Derrida's observations on the axiological binary opposition of speech and writing. I argue that the relationship between the two is artistically explored in the opening scene where the accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) meets the fireman (Crispin Glover) on the train to the town of Machine. I interpret Depp's protagonist as the representative of writing and Glover's fireman as the representative of speech. Demonstrating how the attributes that, through the long history of Western metaphysics, have been ascribed to writing are manifested by the main character of the film, I analyse a subtle personification of the written word on screen. I contend that Dead Man is a deconstructive text not only because it deconstructs the genre of the Western and the narrative of the West but also in the sense that it offers a critique of logocentrism and Western metaphysics. Contributor Note Evelina Kazakeviciute is a PhD student in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC) at Cardiff University. Her thesis is entitled 'The Poststructuralist Conception of Communication as Reflected in Jim Jarmusch's Films'. She is the Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Film and Visual Culture Research (IFVCR) Network and an editor of JOMEC Journal. Her areas of interest are communication theory, the philosophy of communication, poststructuralism, and film.

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

Cited by 28 publications

References 18 publications

‘ ‘Passing through the Mirror’’: Dead Man, Legal Pluralism and the De-territorialization of the West

‘ ‘Passing through the Mirror’’: Dead Man, Legal Pluralism and the De-territorialization of the West

Stranger on a Train: William Blake and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man – Media and Violence, Poetry and Politics

‘I wouldn’t trust no words written down on no piece of paper’: Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Jacques Derrida and the Critique of Logocentrism

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