DEAD MAN . THE BACKGROUND STORIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE TO AN ACTOR.
Famous Estonian researcher Redfox (from Tallinn) writes about the background stories relating to the movie Dead Man and much more!
The image of DEATH is world’s greatest, most universal mythology and therefore the greatest story that leads us, making us do and say and experience things differently than we would be doing it if we lived forever. It is not just the physical death of the body that scares and at the same time lures us. It is often the disappearance of everything familiar we’ve known in general. “Death “ of the soul for example: we can feel dead inside, feel as if we lost something, if a great tragedy, disappointment or shock hits us. Death of a culture, an era, a belief, a philosophy. Death of a civilization as we know it and call it by the fancy name progress.
We know that nothing in this world is or never will be a finished product, especially if that world means civilization and the time and place when it exists. Everything is a progress, a journey, or, if you will, the constant flow of yin and yang. The biggest mystery in the world is: what will happen when the world as we know it is gone, when time has moved on? That means: when it changes, passes on, or when we leave into the unknown ourselves. We will all die. Nations die OUT. Countries no longer exist. Cultures disappear. And eventually the world will end. This is the story that is guiding our moves, making us desperately trying to leave a trace in history as individuals, as nations and as the human kind. There is no chance that a person is not affected by the great fear of Death.
Why am I writing THIS, if all YOU want is to hear about Johnny Depp and his character William Blake in the movie “Dead Man”?
Johnny Depp, 45, is an actor. He plays the character of William Blake on the background of this story the scriptwriter and the director have created. He also has his own vision of the character based on the script and his knowledge of history, culture, philosophy etc. But there is this general background of all the mythologies and patterns of behaviour and I cannot help but think how much room does it leave for any interpretation.
Just HOW MUCH is an actor´s portrayal of a character really influenced by this? In THE Dead Man, how much Johnny Depp can there even be ?
I am going to tell you a little bit of the beliefs connected with Death and The Dead in different cultures. Since I myself am Estonian, I know that mythology best , but you´ll be surprised how much it is similar to the beliefs of Northern American Indians, Mayas and any universal beliefs, and how much some beliefs give the exact description of what is happening to William Blake in Dead Man.
Dead doesn’t mean gone.
Just because you are dead, you do not stop doing many things that you did in life. Walking. Breathing – only under the ground. Seeing. Seeing when dead is interesting, because old times Estonians believed a person has two sets of eyes: body-eyes (ihusilmad) and spirit-eyes (vaimusilmad). With spirit-eyes only a rare set of people can see in earthly life, except in dreams but everybody can see with spirit-eyes in the afterlife. Thus, you also see everything in different way. When you are alive, you saw the ideal world in your spirit eyes, the way you wished it would be. When you are dead, you only see the soul of everything in the real world – the way it is inside. It can be a lot uglier, darker than the dream world, or then lighter, better and more dream –like than you ever imagined. Spirit eyes are just as much unique as fingerprints.
Some Native American beliefs are astonishingly similar. A person has 2 souls: one, that travels freely in the spirit world and can come back whenever it means to, and the other, material soul. The latter usually dies at the same time as the body, but sometimes it lingers on for an undeterminable time and is connected with the body, until the last of this world´s air leaves the body.
Time stands still for the Dead.
That's the end of the line.
- Is it? - Yes.
It is in fact the world of the living that continues moving. In the world of the Dead, everything that had to change, changes just once and forever. The dead do not COME to visit - it is the changes in the world of the living that brings it closer to the land of dead, or takes it further away . Native Americans believe everything that has happened in the past, is not a distant memory, but it is still happening and keeps repeating itself. For many native people stories that go in circle are often connected with astronomical circle like the disappearing of the Sun or the moon during an eclipse being explained by a dog swallowing the moon goddess (Burma) or lord of the underground killing the sun god (Maya). So there is no wonder why for Native Americans time repeats itself in spirals, the past is parallel to present and future, and when an old story is told, it starts happening all over again.
The warnings and the messengers of Death.
- You're just as likely to find your own grave.
- The only job you're gonna get in here is pushin' up daisies from a pine box.
-Oh, watch it. It's loaded.
- Here's white man's metal next to your heart.
I tried to cut it out, but it's too deep inside.
A knife would cut your heart instead...
and release the spirit from within.
- What if they kill me? - Nobody will observe.
There is a banchee – type of character called marras. It is the messenger of death. When skin is scratched, it is ruined skin, it´ll never grow back the way it was before. Estonians call the scratched skin “marrastus” – skin that is destined to die. When a person is wounded, like stabbed or shot, the scratch on his skin is just deeper. A wounded person would in the old days have been destined to die, so he was practically a lost cause, a dead man for everybody who saw him. Marras can besides a “banchee” mean a person who is a victim of unnecessary sacrifice, only made to please the spirit of Death. But often the marras stays with the dieing person, watching his blood drip, howling, and mumbling randomly. Do you see the resemblance Dead Man?
The change inside personality after dying.
You were a poet and a painter.
And now, you are a killer of white men.
It's so strange that you don't remember any of your poetry.
The Dead are not the same lovely individuals as they were in life. It is as if a new personality could be and is written above the old one, which makes the dead act in a drastically different way than they used to before. You might have known someone in life as a kind, understanding person and the other as a greedy, violent one, but Death turns everything upside down. This could be the result of the world of dead itself being “upside down”. The Estonian word for the land of dead is “manala” (maa= land, ala= downwards). If we would grab the edges of this world and flip it around, everything would be upside down, and that is what the land of dead means. Usually hostile, rarely friendly, the dead try and take people along with them, and often visit their earthly family with that thought.
For native Americans there were three worlds: life, afterlife and spirit world in between. That middle world is accessible to both the dead and living (among the last mostly shamans, healers and holy people). But in many cases it was also believed that the world of the dead is upside down, rivers run in the opposite direction, rain falls up and people act, talk and experience their surroundings differently.
It's time for you to leave now, William Blake.
Time for you to go back to where you came from.
You mean Cleveland?
Back to the place where all the spirits came from...
and where all the spirits return.
This world will no longer concern you.
In other cases the spirit world was actually considered to be the original, and it is in fact the world of the living which was in the beginning of times brought to the ground or turned around. Death takes people back to their original birthplace, where they meet those who have always lived in it. The spirits know al lot about the living, the living know hardly anything at all – neither of themselves nor the spirits. There are some things the living just cannot see.
I said the dead would still breath under the ground. In Estonian to breath = hingama, which creates the word hing= soul. If the dead stop breathing under the ground, they lose their soul. That is what really triggers the change for the worse. Hing (soul) was also believed to carry all the person´s memories, so when the soul gets lost, your memories get lost – gone with a single last breath. The dead then no longer remember who they were, who they loved or hated. They are cleared from all their life experiences, they start all over, and it makes them angry, confused, suspicious.
Indians believed that some people are hostile spirits from the underworld disguised as people, and sometimes a persons original good nature was in the shadow of the spirit taking over him. Those people were believed to wear masks, and there were ceremonies that used two –layered masks, which opened during a certain dance ritual and showed what is under the upper layer. The upper mask was either black or white, depending on whether the nature of the spirit was good or evil. It was hardly ever just one or the other, because the habit of hiding our true nature is too deep in us, people, the real and fake have grown together. And we really can´t often make the difference between good or bad.
For the ancient mayas, however, the dead could not have been very hostile, because they were buried right under the floor of the living room ( which was made of dirt, so it was easy). The dead were advisors to the living. They were considered not dead, but “sleeping” or un-dead until the very last piece of their bones had turned to dust. The land of dead , however, was not inhabited by the dead, but Death lords (gods). Surprise, surprise – it was also upside down compared with the land of the living. And coming back to life from there was possible when one threw himself in the river of blood (this was not a disgusting, horrific, repulsing blood river, but the Blood of Life.) One of the Hero Twins was known to have come back to life through that river. And it was Blood that gave the Dead man strength to go on however long it was necessary.
Boat takes the dead…. Over the mirror of waters
Originating in the Scandinavian traditions, boat burials, or, in the inlands, boat – shaped stone graves, were very common in Estonia ever since iron age to almost the end of Middle Ages. It had little to nothing to do with sailors and fishermen though, but rather with a boat being a symbol of the shamanistic Spirit Boat. A person was never alone in that boat, he always had spirits that accompanied him to the land of dead, told him stories of what is to become.
The Dead man, true enough, was alone in the boat on his final journey. Or was he? How many souls did he take with him? One, two, three, four, five….I lost count.
The Dead and the gossip.
They know. They bloody know just about exactly what is happening in the world of the living, and they have long serious discussions about it – that´s right. Information of the life above ground is like the dead People´s yellow journalism. We are just plain idiots to those in the actual spirit world. They know us better then we know our own butt and that is all I am going to say about this. Oh, the gossip.
THE MOVIE.
Where you headed?
I don't know.
In Dead Man, it seems, the journey or the nature of The Dead is used as a code to present many complex narratives in a more common and universal form. There has been suggested one of the main narratives behind the movie was the American history and it´s collision with native Americans and their cultural beliefs and needs. The other narrative might be the the vanishing of the “real”, old European culture with it´s heroes and achievements. Those two narratives are like texts written closely upon each other so neither of them can be quite separated from the other. To take us through those two, not so commonly comprehensible narratives is the story of a wounded man going through a transformation. He is the dead man, scratched, destined to leave the world as he knows it behind and go somewhere he doesn´t even know the way to. During that a whole new (old) world opens to him. Nobody says to him: you have always been William Blake (a.k.a. the representative of the true, original European culture, who finds himself again in the Land of Dead). And his old, fake, culturally acquired self pretty soon becomes unimportant, there is no memory left of it. The environment around William Blake is already the beginning of the journey, from the very moment he steps off the train. It is the middle world and it starts to have an effect on him even before he is wounded – in the train. But after that the traits of his personality turn upside down: till now he has been a relatively modest accountant, it doesn´t really matter to anyone if he even exists. And it is funny how, after being shot, AFTER being destined to die, he becomes meaningful. Significant. Feared. A spirit much more than man, but still alive enough to physically interfere with real events in real surroundings. I´t it like that with all that we are about to lose, that it becomes significant all of a sudden?
I am tempted to speculate around the character of Nobody, who makes me much more curious. But I know I promised something else.
How much Johnny Depp is there? As shallow as it sounds, his appearance is all that is needed. A slim, faintly figure on the sight of a fat Indian with spectacles – there can not be a bigger contrast. There is such a thick, multi-layered background, there is cinematography and music that scratches your soul, there are the stories and mythologies and if you are watching this movie for the first time you cannot make out a single clear thought, despite the images themselves being minimal and pure. But you see Johnny, and maybe it is his claimed Indian heritage, that makes him fit in to this mixture so well. You SEE a dead man, because, I am sorry, John Christopher the II but you looked sh***y at that time outside of movies. You looked like you were on your way to meet the seven lords of the underground of the ancient maya. And despite that, you gave the exact amount of yourself that was needed, maybe you weren´t capable of giving more, or maybe it was some fine diplomacy that a person like me doesn´t understand. But I know, how difficult it is when the picture is almost done and you are asked to add just one tiny dot of paint, and you know you can ruin it by adding too much. It felt like a banchee had scratched you, you were really, really dying and it was painful and beautiful, A spirit more than a Man, Back in His original home. And it was the only spot of paint that finished the picture.
© Redfox/Tallinn, 2006
Summary