If you were to stop for a moment, right in the midst of the frantic routine in which we are all swept along and overwhelmed, you would discover sounds and sights you had never noticed, and their beauty would pain you, precisely because they were there, at hand all along, but never brought to the light of consciousness. It is a secular, almost Zen-like epiphany, an invitation to decelerate and perceive the deeper layer of reality, that which escapes the logic of profit and speed.

Dead Man is exactly like that: it ignites and makes beauty blaze forth from everyday things that are framed askance, with an unprecedented visual segmentation, unleashing a wild lyricism. A lyricism that is not only visual, but also sonic, woven into the fabric of the film like a second skin. Neil Young's improvised and sparse soundtrack is a true scenic entity, an acidic and distorted electric guitar that scratches the soul of the landscape, transforming each shot into a wandering meditation, an ancestral lament that follows the slow and inevitable steps of the protagonist. It is not a mere accompaniment, but an inner voice, the echo of the desert and the subconscious, a hypnotic drone that drags the viewer into another dimension, where time and space expand and blur.

The story is that of William Blake, a small accountant from Cleveland who, in the late 19th century, travels to the city of Machine, on the far western frontier, where he has been promised a job. The protagonist's name is not coincidental, but an explicit and very powerful reference to the 18th-century British poet, mystic, and engraver, William Blake, the visionary of "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." It is an allusion that immediately elevates the film from a simple western to an allegorical parable, an initiatory journey into the soul and death. Our Blake, so meek and inept, is the perfect tabula rasa to embody the transition, the slow and inexorable purification through pain and loss, until he becomes a kind of "walking dead man," but also a soul destined for enlightenment.

Upon arriving in the city after a long train journey, he discovers that the company no longer needs him and is brusquely dismissed by the company owner John Dickinson, a sort of local strongman who controls the city's fate. Machine is the symbol of a brutal Western civilization, driven by pure greed and violence, a grotesque counterpoint to the spirituality Blake will discover on his journey. Disconsolate after spending all his savings on that journey, the man allows himself a drink at the Saloon and meets a prostitute. Charlie Dickinson, John's son, surprises them together and, madly in love with the woman, shoots William, who in turn kills him. This trigger, seemingly conventional for a western, is merely the pretext for a descent into the surreal.

Mortally wounded, Will escapes into the forest on horseback and is rescued by Nobody, an Indian cast out from his tribe for having endured deportation to Europe. Nobody, whose name is a powerful oxymoron, is not just a character, but an archetype: the shamanic Virgil guiding the wounded Dante through a dreamlike purgatory. His story of deportation and forced "civilization" is a raw and necessary denunciation of the cultural genocide suffered by Native Americans, a recurring and painful theme in the history of the West, here treated with rare dignity and melancholy. Nobody decides to help this strange man, who shares the name of his favorite poet, to escape from the bounty hunters, ruthless and often caricatured figures who populate this infernal landscape, metaphors for a society that devours itself. Their journey is a slow, inexorable procession towards the end, but also towards an unexpected transcendence. Jarmusch deconstructs and reassembles the western genre, transforming it into a nihilistic yet profoundly spiritual elegy, an "anti-western" that subverts every heroic cliché to explore the brutality of the frontier myth and the possibility of redemption through communion with nature and with death itself.

The use of a spectral black and white plunges the action into a fluffy basin filled with mist and cotton wool, nervous shots constantly cutting out the sky, characters imprisoned by their own ironic fate. This black and white is not merely a stylistic choice, but a true statement of intent. It evokes period photography, but at the same time elevates the narrative to a timeless, almost mythological level. By removing color, Robby Müller and Jarmusch force us to focus on textures, faces, expressions, on the interplay of light and shadow dancing among the trees, revealing a primordial and pure world, stripped of all superstructure. The claustrophobic shots, which often exclude the horizon, reinforce the sense of an inner journey, a compulsory path with no escape, where each step brings the protagonist not so much closer to a geographical destination as to a self-revelation. The characters, within this framework, seem moved by forces greater than themselves, puppets of a fate that Jarmusch paints with strokes of black humor and philosophical resignation.

The cinematography by Robby Müller is enchanting; he was a collaborator with Wim Wenders on a black and white gem like Kings of the Road, and also an architect of unique visual worlds for directors like Jim Jarmusch himself (Down by Law, Mystery Train) and Lars von Trier. Müller's work infuses a spiritual aura into the wild landscapes, almost a fusion of Nobody's pure mysticism and the stark severity of those woods. His ability to transform the landscape into a character, into a reflection of William Blake's tormented and purified soul, is masterful. The mist, the smoke, the play of light through the foliage are not mere atmospheric effects, but narrative elements that envelop and transcend the story, making Blake's journey not just a flight from bounty hunters, but a progressive immersion into the realm of the dead and the sacred. Dead Man is a small masterpiece of hallucinated poetry that is good for the eyes and the spirit, a hypnotic meditation on death as an inescapable companion and on nature as the ultimate temple.