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IMDb :: Boards :: Dead Man (1995) :: Symbolism and Metaphors...Help?


The more I go into this movie, Dead Man, the more I understand that its shamanism parallels that of Marechera's short, episodic book, Black Sunlight.
Some precise parallels:

1. The extremely choppy, episodic nature of the filmic (Jarmusch) and written (Marechera) texts. This speaks to the way the mind sleeps, then wakes up and continues on its narrative. It's the shamanistic movement between the rational daytime awareness and irrational  sleep, a dialectic necessary to keep life going. This is faithful to the way we actually experience our lives: by going to sleep and the next day necessarily recreating the original narrative of the path on which we're bound. This pertains to the functions of our deep subjectivity and to natural bodily rhythms.

2. The encounters with extreme violence and death as a poignant and mesmerizing aspect of life. Society is changing order and there is violence all around. In Marechera's narrative anti-colonial riots, anarchy and war relentlessly assault the psyche as expressions of violence and resistance.

3. To be blind or without normal vision is represented as a different way of seeing more clearly. Lacking vision, one is dependent on the visceral senses. Instinct then predominates, after it has learned how to exert its intrinsic force. In Black Sunlight, Marie's blindness represents a shamanic way of seeing. Death presses in more viscerally, in that it reaches on through the faculty of smell, rather than knowledge or visual perception. In Dead Man, the Indian guide Nobody suggests that his charge would see better without spectacles. This turns out to be true, in that he can use his pistol more effectively without clear vision.

4. The episodes show nothing more than several consecutive plunges into a state of greater proximity to death, matched with a greater awareness of the immediacy, strangeness and fragility of life. This polarization of the distinctive elements of life, highlighted the contrasts between life and death, is a key feature of shamanistic doubling.

5. One moves from a world of logic and violence to a world of flowing organic unity. In the Jarmusch movie, one moves from a failed attempt to integrate with socially-defined reality in a town called Machine. Since one cannot become part of The Machine, one is compelled to die. In Marechera's novel, Chris joins with other social drop-outs at Devil's End. Jarmusch's protagonist, William Blake, meets his Indian protector, Nobody, only after receiving a bullet close to his heart. Thus, a shamanic wound sets the protagonist apart from the rest of society in each case. He starts to see reality differently, above all historical reality, through his wound.

6. In Jarmusch's film, Nobody gives Blake the initiatory drug, Peyote. After this, Blake sees the effects of the colonial war against the Indians all around him, but the violence cannot touch him as he is impermeable. In Black Sunlight, apocalyptic shamanic visions at the climax of the novel. They are later explained, as if denied, by the protagonist, who had become the double of himself, Christian, having taken "Chris' psychiatric drugs".

7. Marechera's protagonist is represented early in the book as a court jester, hanging upside down in a chicken-coup due to having offended the Great Chief. This is political satire, but is also a way of depicting the state of the uninitiated soul with his own superego. The author views himself as being condemned to be tortured and the source of this condemnation is political. The refrain of "stupid white man" expresses the political irony of Dead Man.

8. In Marechera's novel, the protagonist-author, reunited with himself finally, as one, ends up showing the whiteness of his bones by effectively releasing all the words out of his body through his wrists. Rain pours down as overabundant meaning. Everything is liquefied  This is indicative of shamanic ritual in facing death and finding unity with oneself through resignation. In Dead Man, Indians dress up Blake's dying body after he has been shot a second time, so that he can complete his journey on the other side of the mirror image of reality he has entered. This signifies that he can become one with himself again, on the surface of liquid (unconscious) (mental) processes.

9. Both texts suggest solutions to political and social problems (colonial domination and machine-like attitudes) by going more deeply into death. This is a means for detachment and shamanistic dissociation, by virtue of which, one sees historical reality more clearly.

10. In both texts, transgression of the normal social law is a result of accident, not deliberate. Blake's killing of a member of the Town of Machine (a mechanistic world) is an act of self-defense. In addition, his being framed for the murder of another member of the town gave him an outlaw identity that was incongruous with his inner attitude or intent. Marechera similarly shows how his protagonist becomes a revolutionary despite himself, because he has been driven mad by social norms. Shamanism is thus shown to be a state of primeval (but not historical) innocence, in the face of attributed social and political guilt.