Music

Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man Airs Tonight On AUX TV at 9PM

by Allan Tong

In the mid-90s, director Jim Jarmusch collaborated with Neil Young on two films: Year of the Horse, a tour documentary of Young and his renown band Crazy Horse, and Dead Man, a brooding mystical drama starring Johnny Depp.

Depp stars as ordinary accountant William Blake who ventures from Cleveland into the untamed American west of the late-nineteenth century to look for work. Blake murders a man in self-defence then meets a mysterious Indian named Nobody (Canada’s Gary Farmer) who believes Depp is the dead English poet by the same name. Together they go down the rabbit hole and survive situations comic, dangerous and surreal. They encounter Robert Mitchum, Iggy Pop, Jared Harris and John Hurt who make memorable cameos. All the while, Blake is on the run from the law and slowly dying from his wounds.

Dead Man is gloriously filmed in black-and-white, and Young supplies a haunting soundtrack performed on a solo electric guitar. Full of plaintive melodies and feedback, Young’s score is worth the price of admission alone. However, those expecting an action film should keep in mind that this is a mood piece, drenched in atmosphere and metaphor. Dead Man is about the journey from this land to the underworld, about mortality and death. It remains one of Jarmusch’s greatest films.

Watch the film tonight at 9PM Rogers 107 on AUX Box Office.