“My name is Nobody.”
Although ostensibly a western and thus set in the 1800’s, the film is also a postmodern example of pastiche, which is to say that allusion and reference works both ways on the space-time continuum. Call them in-jokes or pop culture references or whatever, the allusive quality of the script of this film is such that it exists both within and without the confines of its generic specificity. A typical case in point is this line. While it seems perfectly coherent within the logic of the film since it is spoken by a character named Nobody, it also has a life outside that logic: it is a pop culture reference to an earlier example of the postmodern revisionist western title, not coincidentally, My Name is Nobody.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.”
The main character of the film is named William Blake, a name he shares with a legendary British mystic/poet artist. But he is not actually playing that William Blake, unless Nobody is right and he is the reincarnation of the poet. Which he probably isn’t. But whether yea or nay, it would hardly do to go throughout all the trouble of naming your character William Blake without incorporation some of his literary work. And, dutifully, multiple scenes reference the poetry of Blake. This particular line of a dialogue is a direct quote which was later appropriate by writer Aldous Huxley for the title of a book which was even later appropriate by Jim Morrison and others adopting part of it for the name of a new band they were forming: The Doors. Connectivity is everything in postmodern pastiche; without it, everything falls apart from the sheer weight of trying to hold it all together without context.
“Look out the window. And doesn't this remind you of when you were in the boat, and then later than night, you were lying, looking up at the ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, 1Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?’"
These are the opening lines of the film. And if they sound particularly poet or an exercise in philosophical abstraction, that’s because they are. A film that goes through the trouble of naming its protagonist William Blake is also to be expected, on assumes, to be made a writer or director obsessed with the verse of Blake. And here is the thing one needs to know about this particular poet: he isn’t easy. Blake writes the kind of poetry that makes some people really despise poetry. Yes, he’s one of those poets. On the other hand, this means he is also the kind of poet that creates obsessive devotion capable of stimulating the sort of artistic mindset that leads one to spend years writing dissertations—or making a movie—that extol the power of his aesthetic.
