Hell
As the film begins, William Blake sits on a train heading West. A coal shoveler sits across down from Blake, and begins to interrogate him. He speaks harshly of the landscape, comparing to Hell, and questions why Blake would ever move to such conditions. The coal shoveler's face is covered in dirt, accentuating the whiteness of his eyes. He appears like a demon himself. Just as his rant begins to peak, the train shudders and stops. The passengers on the train begin to shoot guns from the windows of the train, hunting buffalo below. The coal shoveler tells Blake that the government encourages such shooting. It is a harsh and jarring image, that effectively establishes the tone of Dead Man.
The City of Machine
Blake arrives in the town of Machine, the end of the railway line. He walks slowly through the town and the imagery is displayed vividly. It is a hazy, frightening town. Bones of cattle hang on the wall. Men carry caskets into a shopfront. Hunters covered in fur carry guns and pelts. A couple fornicate in alleyway and when Blake looks towards them, the man points a gun at him. The locals stare at Blake warily. At the end of the main street, Blake enters the factory. It is loud with the clank of metal and is obscured by thick smoke. It is, as the coal shoveler suggested, the embodiment of Hell. The scene does a masterful job at depicting the haggard, unsavory life of the early Western American settlement, the life that would soon become Blake's
The Native American Settlement
After Blake has been shot for a second time, he is taken by Nobody to a Native American settlement on the river. Delirious, he staggers through the streets, propped up by Nobody's grasp. There is a longhouse with a façade of traditional spiritual artwork. There are the bones of hunted animals, and totem poles loom above. Members of the tribe, adorned in fur and feathers, stare at Blake as he trudges past. It is almost a mirror image of the city of Machine though entirely different in presentation. In this sense, it juxtaposes the settler to the colonized. The film offers a perspective to both the settler and the colonize, and deftly demonstrates how Blake acts, or fails to act, in both settings.
The Soundtrack
Though not an image in the visual sense, the film soundtrack is an essential aspect of its sensorial scape. Composed by Neil Young, the soundtrack contains only a single electric guitar equipped with heavy reverb. The sounds are sparse and reserved, and do not so much play through the film but beside it. Employed along panning scenes of the forest, or the river on which Blake travels, the soundtrack gives true dimension to the desolation of the early American west. At once, Young's soundtrack highlights the infernal horror that is Machine, or the beauty that is the wilderness. For this reason, the soundtrack must be viewed as an integral image of the film itself.
The Burial Ship
As Blake grows weak from the second bullet, Nobody packs him into a canoe and takes him towards the ocean. In a traditional Native American ritual specific to the peoples of the Pacific Northwest, Blake was to die and be sent out into the open ocean on the canoe. The image is arrestingly beautiful. Blake appears calm and comfortable for the first time in the film. He appears to have let the earthly realm escape him, and to have transcended to the spiritual plane promised by Nobody. He dies and is taken into the current, free from the violence and turmoil that plagued his life in the West.
