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Dead Man, Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Miramax Films, May 10, 1996 (US)
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Crispin Glover, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Eugene Byrd, John Hurt, Robert Mitchum, Iggy Pop, and Gabriel Byrne
I read a story yesterday about four youths who were held at gunpoint and asked to kneel down. They obeyed. I am not capable of imagining their terror.
Nobody (Gary Farmer): Did you kill the white man who killed you?
William Blake (Johnny Depp): I’m not dead. Am I?
Each was promptly shot in the head, execution style. No apparent motive. The human demon. The crazed fear of mortality and powerlessness. An irrational need to stake one’s claim as hunter rather than hunted. Kids who were just beginning to sprout into their bodies and minds now dead in a morgue. They were everyone and they are no one.
William Blake: What is your name?
Nobody: My name is Nobody.
William Blake: Excuse me?
Nobody: My name is Exaybachay. He Who Talks Loud, Saying Nothing.
We are the hunted and we are the hunter. Our flesh burns and melts in the flames. Ashes and dust. We take our last wide-eyed breaths as we sink into the rising flood. Disease eats our bodies and minds. We are missing in earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes. We see headlights coming straight at us before we see nothing at all. We are old. Young. Our hearts give out. Our kidneys fail. Our heads are blown off into rivers of bloody bits and piles of dirty dead dreams. We jump off bridges and buildings in order to make it end sooner. We watch the news and somehow become immune to stories of murder and genocide as if we aren’t the ones being scalped by machetes. As if our homes aren’t the ones being torched with us tied up inside.
Nobody: You are being followed, William Blake.
William Blake: Are you sure? How do you know?
Nobody: Often the evil stench of white man precedes him.
We rape the land that we think we own. We rape our women and children. We go to mass and pray for our sins as we listen to a preacher who, as far as we know, has never touched our daughters or sons. We choose to believe in the inherent goodness in people because the alternative is unthinkable. And it is unthinkable.
We kill for food and we kill for sport. We kill out of boredom.
Train Fireman (Crispin Glover): Look …
they’re are shooting buffalo. Government says it killed a million of ‘em last year alone.
We are the buffalo. The endangered. We are already extinct.
-G
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