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    Lee - Life after death, or death as life? Dead Man, postmodernism, and ontology - JCRT 3.2

    Life after death, or death as life? Dead Man, postmodernism, and ontology

    C. Jason Lee
    University of Central Lancashire

    The question of the meaning of human existence in the totality of Being, this fundamental question of philosophy, gains its true and practical importance through man’s total discovery of death."[1] Only through death does life take on significance but, for many, the very fact of death removes the significance of life altogether. For Baudrillard “death is meaningless, civilised life as such is meaningless”.[2] He writes that ‘ours is a culture of death’ and contemporary culture is formed out of an attempt to dissociate life and death. The dead have been excluded, unlike in the ‘primitive’ mind where the dead are part of the social, as in the Jarmusch film Dead Man (1996) Baudrillard’s division of life and death can be questioned for not only does one involve the other but they can occur simultaneously in the same being as the fake William Blake shows in Dead Man. Baudrillard writes the repression of death in contemporary society leads to the repressive socialisation of life.[3] The debate surrounding screen violence continues unabated, male violence along with female beauty being the most revered elements in American culture.[4] In the majority of feature films male protagonists, other than in rare exceptions such as Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), are shown to be in control of death. In the film to be analysed here, despite the protagonist being a male killer, his control over his own death and that of others is questioned, as is death itself.

    > The psychotherapists are caught up in contemporary culture and are forced to be a part of it. Commercial industrialism promised Western man a paradise on earth, described in great detail by the Hollywood Myth that replaced the paradise in heaven of the Christian myth. And now psychology must replace them both with the myth of paradise through self-knowledge.[5]

    Here, this psychology of self-knowledge is ‘self-deception’ but utopia and dystopia exist concurrently and paradox rules. There are parallels with Eastern philosophy and the film as a whole challenges ‘Western’ notions of the real, and the importance of reason. The character William Blake confirms the idea that the primary want of the human race is immortality. However, on a conscious level this is not his motive, as he wanders from place to place, his continual meetings with and departures from ‘Nobody,’ being seemingly random, his desire being merely to find some food, the desire for tobacco being uncannily presented as the main desire of Nobody and many of the other characters. It appears that he is now staying alive and shooting those that approach him due to the influence of Nobody and he chooses the identity Nobody which has given him that of a revolutionary poet over that which he has previously built for himself, a subservient accountant. His new identity drives him on to attain greater mortality, not necessarily immortality.

    > the activity of perception which it involves is real (the cinema is not a phantasy), but the perceived is not really the object, it is the shade, its phantom, its double, its replica in a new kind of mirror.[6]

    Nietzsche saw art as redemption via illusion[7] and these representations of death can lead to redemption, something that in Dead Man takes on a new significance with the image of an icon made from the head of a sheriff and sticks, commented on by one of the paid killers before he crushes the head below his foot like a melon. This defacing of the corpse shows Cole’s total hatred of the law but it evokes such horror in his colleague, Conway, revealing that ‘the corpse may have more authority, than any other political body’.[8] This fascination with the artistic use of corpses of animals and humans was commented on as early as Aristotle.[9]

    > In Lacanian teaching representation and the death drive are connected by a fundamental link. All perceptions and thoughts are, according to Lacan, representations constituted around originary loses such that loss itself takes on a central, even centering function in life.[10]

    Maraux’s quotation relates to Blake travelling with himself as a dead man, even before he is wounded. The philosophical notion that death is with us all from birth is exemplified plus the fact that his parents have both recently ‘passed on’, as he puts it, and his fianc’e has left him, are losses which indicate he is carrying the burden of many forms of death. Thus, while the quotation could be referring to the later situation of Nobody, who accompanies Blake, it also refers to himself. Heidegger’s dilemma of understanding Being out of being, is solved in the film through the death of others. Blake confirms his value through his killing and he gives value to others as if, with Sartre, there is the belief in consciousness as a consequence of the existence of these objects.[11]

    The real and fake William Blake - Dead Man_: An Examen Of Unconsciousness_ [12]

    > ‘Real’ reality can not be apprehended as it is: an infinite, equally existent number of discrete and ever-changing entities and events. To see the universe in those terms might be accurate, but would be impossible to absorb, and meaningless in human terms… information about reality has been presented to and by the human species in forms of narrative fiction known as History, Law, Religion, Epic Poetry, the Novel, the Drama, and the statements of politicians and journalists. In one sense, everything is fiction; in another fiction is reality.[13]

    The question is, does it matter if this Blake is not the ‘real’ William Blake? That is, Blake is who Nobody wants him to be, his identity is made up by another which one can argue is the case for everyone, people becoming who they are through relationships.

    Notes

    C. Jason Lee teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. Recent publications included The Day Elvis Died and God’s Potato Peeler.

    ’ 2002 Ethan Frome. All rights reserved.
    Updated .
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    1. Jacques Choron, Death and Western Thought, trans. Ilsa Barea (London: Collier Books, 1963), p. 27. ↩︎

    2. Max Weber, quoted by Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton (London: Sage, 1993), p. 163 ↩︎

    3. Weber., pp. 127,147,131,130,133. ↩︎

    4. Elizabeth Wurtzel, ‘Murder in the doll’s house’, The Guardian Weekend, May 9 1998, p. 16. ↩︎

    5. Baudrillard, p. 271. ↩︎

    6. Christian Metz, p. 44. ↩︎

    7. In his earlier work The Birth of Tragedy, . Later, he changed his view, believing that there were more virtues than just those of the aesthetic. See Hollingdale in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 32. ↩︎

    8. Goodwin, p. 9. ↩︎

    9. Goodwin., p. 7. ↩︎

    10. Ragland., p. 80. ↩︎

    11. John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 497. ↩︎

    12. This section is titled thus, as opposed to ‘an examen of consciousness’ (a spiritual exercise taught by the Jesuits), as often the film is presented as an examination of myths stemming from the unconscious. ↩︎

    13. Joan Rockwell, Fact in Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. viii. ↩︎

    14. Wurtzel, p. 16 ↩︎

    15. Choron, p. 25. ↩︎

    16. Kent Jones, review of Dead Man, Cineaste, vol. 22, no. 2, 1996, p. 45. ↩︎

    17. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), p. 12. ↩︎

    18. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 287. ↩︎

    19. Becker, p. 14. ↩︎

    20. Becker., p. 181. ↩︎

    21. Becker., p. 27. ↩︎

    22. Becker p. 57. ↩︎

    23. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 175. ↩︎

    24. Choron, p. 43. ↩︎

    25. R.J. Hollingdale in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 23. ↩︎

    26. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen, eds., Death and Representation (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 11. ↩︎

    27. Choron, p. 33. ↩︎

    28. Goodwin, p. 12. ↩︎

    29. This is confirmed by a consideration of the recent introduction of cardboard coffins and cut-price funerals. ↩︎

    30. Ellie Ragland, ‘Lacan, the Death Drive, and the Dream of the Burning Child’, in Goodwin, p. 86. ↩︎

    31. Goodwin, p, 15. ↩︎

    32. Ken Dowden, The Uses of Greek Mythology (Routledge, London: 1992), pp. 22-38. ↩︎

    33. Dowden, pp. 22-38. ↩︎

    34. Dowden, pp. 22-38. ↩︎

    35. Ben Thompson, p. 41. ↩︎

    36. Thompson, p. 41. ↩︎

    37. Dyer, p. 25. ↩︎

    38. Ragland, p. 86. ↩︎

    39. Ragland, p. 86. ↩︎

    40. C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology. Its Theory and Practice (The Tavistock Lectures) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, first delivered 1935), p. 187. ↩︎

    41. H.H. Price, ‘Survival and the Idea of ‘Another World’’, in Language, Metaphysics and Death, ed. John Donnelly (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), p. 300. ↩︎

    42. Roderick M. Chisholm, ‘On the Observability of the Self’, Ibid., p. 204. ↩︎

    43. Eric Matthews, Twentieth Century French Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 58-84. ↩︎

    44. Documented by, amongst others, Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (London: Fontana Press, 1993). ↩︎

    45. Ragland, p. 95. ↩︎

    46. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p. 5. ↩︎

    47. William Blake, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto, (London: B.T. Batsford, 1965), p. 21. ↩︎

    48. One critic has referred to the film in general as ‘like overdosing on Mogadon’. Ryan Gilbey, review of Dead Man, Premiere, vol. 4, no. 6, July 1996, p. 15. ↩︎

    49. Paul Roubiczek, quoted by Paul Edwards in ‘Existentialism and Death’, in Language, Metaphysics and Death, p. 73. ↩︎

    50. Baudrillard, p. 133. ↩︎

    51. William Blake, ‘The Voice of the Devil’, in William Blake, ed. by Vivian de Sola Pinto (London: B.T. Batsford, 1965), p. 98. ↩︎

    52. His speech impediment is not as severe as Elmer Fudd’s, but he has a type of sincerity and innocence identical to many children’s cartoon characters of this ilk. ↩︎

    53. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 43. ↩︎

    54. Passmore, p. 493. ↩︎

    55. See Malise Ruthven, The Divine Supermarket. Shopping for God in America (London: Vintage, 1991), pp. 255-277. ↩︎

    56. Rosenbaum, p. 23. That is, other than in early Edward Curtis films. ↩︎

    57. As in the ‘civilised world’. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 133. ↩︎

    58. Baudrillard, p. 161. ↩︎

    59. Baudrillard, p. 161. ↩︎