DEATH: JIM JARMUSCH's DEAD MAN (1994)

Dead Man is set in America during the 1870s. It relates the tale of William Blake, a white middle-class accountant from Cleveland in Ohio, who travels westward to the fictional town of Machine in order to take up a financial post in Dickinson Metal Works. When he arrives at his destination, he finds that the job he was promised has already been filled. Alone (Blake has recently been orphaned and his fiancée ‘changed her mind’) and destitute (he spends his last few coins on a tiny bottle of whiskey) in a strange town, he befriends an ex-prostitute named Thel and accompanies her back to her room. During a scene of implied intimacy between Blake and Thel, her former lover Charlie (Dickinson's son) bursts into their room and tries to shoot Blake, but accidentally kills Thel as she tries to shield Blake from the bullet. Despite Thel's courageous manoeuvre, the bullet passes through her and lodges deeply in Blake's chest next to his heart, thus wounding him fatally. Blake shoots clumsily at Charlie and kills him on his third attempt. After this, he falls backwards out of Thel's bedroom window and escapes from Machine on Dickinson's treasured pinto horse. Some time later, Blake is found in the forest by Nobody, a plains American Indian of mixed blood and an outcast from his own tribe, who tries to remove the bullet from Blake's chest, to no avail. Nobody pronounces Blake to be a dead man and, upon discovering his name, takes him to be the eponymous English visionary poet. Nobody decides to guide Blake back to the land of the spirits from which he came; from this point onwards, the film becomes a spiritual quest. Meanwhile, Dickinson has discovered the murders of Charlie and Thel and has named Blake as the assailant. He sends three nefarious bounty hunters out to find Blake in exchange for a substantial reward. In spite of promising the three bounty hunters ‘exclusivity’ on Blake's life, he also employs two marshals to find him and distributes an abundance of posters that describe Blake as a very dangerous and wanted man.