Amblings in the Ambient - Jarmusch's "Dead Man" as Wandering Genre Picture

Ever since reading of Canadian director Chris Nash labelling his In a Violent Nature an "ambient slasher"—and ever since watching In a Violent Nature—I’ve recalibrated my thinking around what films can be, what they can achieve, and how we can interact with them. How might a film qualify as “ambient”? And are there other films befitting that descriptor?

To mull over this concept, we might first consider the word in a context we are more familiar with: music. Whereas non-ambient music endeavours to guide you with rhythms and familiar song structures (verses, builds, choruses, refrains, etc.), ambient music crafts what feel more like "spaces", spaces constituted of tones, atmospheres, and textures. If there is structuring to be found in an ambient composition, it functions less as a guide for the listener than as a suggested framework. To me, ambient music is music that allows your mind to go wandering.

A couple months ago, I watched Carson Lund's Eephus and Bruno Dumont's L'humanité, and an idea of “ambient genre cinema” sort of clicked for me. Like In a Violent Nature, Eephus and L’humanité both house the structuring of familiar genre indicators--in the case of Eephus, those of the sports movie, and in the case of L'humanité, those of the small-town murder mystery--and both films take unhurried, “wandering”-sort of approaches to narrative. These films also emphasize atmospheres, environs, and moods over plot development, and are notably bereft of traditional scores.

Shortly after considering these two films, my friend's family announced they were doing some spring cleaning, and offered me a chance to look through their DVD collection before it was donated to the Salvation Army. Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film, Dead Man, was amongst the films I rescued, and it has since also become a film I would position as ambient.

Like the films previously mentioned, Jarmusch’s revisionist western offers you genre icons to help you get your footing. Johnny Depp's William Blake is the black-hatted “outlaw” that rolls into a godless town in the West with plans of establishing some sort of order--in his case, taking up a position as accountant at the town metal forge. But like in Eastwood's postmodern Western Unforgiven, this familiar plan is immediately derailed: Blake is turned away from the forge at gunpoint. He falls in with a sultry town prostitute--another genre indicator--and this lands him in some recognizable drama. But this drama takes a violent turn and sends Blake stumbling out into the wilderness with a piece of "white man's metal" next to his heart, effectively a walking "dead man."

Blake’s ambling composes the majority of Jarmusch's film, and takes us outside, into the “ether” of what could be called a traditional Western. Dead Man is the "side quest," if you will--Red Dead Redemption if you eschewed the main plot in favour of the “stranger missions” (I have never played this game, so take this comparison with a grain of salt). There is an overarching and recognizably Western plot that factors in, that of Blake being framed for murder and him being pursued by three hired killers, but this feels like a subplot in the scheme of things. For most of the runtime, Blake navigates the forests--rendered in stark black and white by Robby Müller--with the help of Nobody (Gary Farmer), an indigenous man who intends to deliver Blake to his death.

But Nobody's intentions are not malicious. Nobody sees Blake as a reincarnation of William Blake, the revered poet/painter/illustrator, and believes he can help this reincarnation "pass back through the mirror," into the realm of the spirits. The grounds they traverse are thus both physical and metaphysical, Nobody urging Blake towards both self-discovery and a connection with the natural world. There is an end point to the wandering, a point “B”, but what is more important to our duo is the transmogrifying that takes place as a result of the wandering.

The philosophical and poetic preoccupations in the story make Dead Man inherently cerebral-feeling. The narrative operates less so by cause-and-effect logic or emotional logic than by an idea logic, and as a result feels less beholden to rhythm and rigidity. Instead, the film kind of flows “neurally”. Jarmusch described the work as a "Psychedelic Western", and I think this too speaks to the spirit of free association by which events and images proceed.

This also speaks to the ambient quality I've been conceptualizing. The ambient, like the psychedelic, invites an expansion of consciousness. Ambient can suggest less-defined, and so it requires the mind expand to fill in the gaps, try to make sense of what it can discern amidst the vapours of information. When watching Dead Man, your mind must expand beyond what is made apparent in the narrative, must go in search through the nebulas of allusions and more direct references. For example, by linking Depp’s Blake to the real-life William Blake and Nobody to the Piikáni and Apsáalooke peoples, we might consider the schools of thought with regards to immanence and transcendence.

Dead Man is also ambient in the more literal sense. The film is slower paced, which gives it a more "leisurely" tone, and it is spaced out with scant dialogue and continual fades to black, which fills it with more blankness and "dead air." When it comes to the sound design, Jarmusch and co. work to envelop us with the forest environ, highlighting sounds of bird calls and the wind rustling the trees.

And then there’s Neil Young's minimalist guitar score, which consists of the recorded sessions of Young playing "live-to-film." In Ben Ratliff’s Criterion essay on Young’s work, we are given insight on the rock legend’s unique approach to the scoring process, which involved Young positioning himself amidst twenty or so screens and solo-jamming in response to what he observed in the film. "Crucially, when choosing how to situate himself in relation to the film, he did not replicate the orientation of a moviegoer—facing forward, toward the image, on a single plane. Instead, he created an environment." This methodology reflects Blake’s position as a man lost in the woods, recoiling at and reckoning with that which he encounters. It results in a score that is reactive more than it is directive. In other words, the guitarwork doesn't work to direct you to a feeling; rather, it calls out at what it witnesses, striking chords that are improvisational, instinctual, and amorphous. Because it is not tethered to an emotional topography, it urges us to find the neural pathways that terraform our own metaphysical headspace.

Both a point A and a point B exist in Dead Man—they have to, every film must begin and end—but Jarmusch’s filmmaking is not concerned with hooking us on the straight line between the two. In Ghost Dog, Jarmusch’s take on the crime/gangster genre, less time is devoted to Ghost Dog conducting his hits than is devoted to him going about his routines, collecting his supplies, having ice cream with his friend, and his reading of the Hagakure. These decisions help us better understand the why and the how of Ghost Dog’s moves, rather than his moves themselves. Similarly, Dead Man is less about death—the end point—than it is about how the mind might ready itself for death, and how the person might behave in a pre-death state.

There is a liminality and a haziness to Jarmusch’s picture, and this all feeds into the “ambient” I’ve been discussing. Dead Man is an expression of ambient “space” and undefined shapes before it is an expression of a story with clear exposition. This is because Jarmusch wants to urge you towards your own readings of the concepts at play before you attempt any sort of plot summary. After all, the themes of the film--death, the afterlife, and reincarnation--are grand, intimidating, and often inconceivable themes--why not open them up as vistas for the audience to explore?