Last week I finally saw Pirates of the Caribbean, so now I'm working my way backward through the Johnny Depp oeuvre, though not very systematically. I watched Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man last night.

Depp's William Blake is only fully conscious for about twenty minutes of the film. The rest of the time, he's falling asleep to the rhythm of the train, suffering from his gunshot wounds, blacking out from hunger on a vision quest, or dying. It's a beautiful performance. The camera, too, closes like an eyelid at the end of each scene.

Apart from the gunshots, it doesn't really take anything much to put Blake under. Everything makes him reel. His swooning reaches its loveliest pitch when he blacks out in a village of Northwest Indians, his lids fluttering over the whites of his rolled-back eyes. And again when, for no obvious reason, he curls up to sleep beside a slaughtered fawn in the woods.

Although the film toys with providing viewers with the traditional satisfactions of righteous film violence--Blake becomes a "killer of white men," a killer of killers--its rhythms are off-kilter in comparison to the poetic slo-mo gun battles of Peckinpah or Woo or Tarantino (this comparison is from Jonathan Rosenbaum at Chicago Reader). Everything goes on too long--Blake never stops bleeding, there's always an extra beat or three while Blake lingers at the scenes of his killings.

It's not the first demystified Western, or even the first demystified Western to feature a passive hero--Warren Beatty in McCabe and Mrs. Miller was also fairly hapless. It's Depp's physical passivity that's so entrancing, all manner of dozing, fainting, staggering, bleeding, falling...

I meant to write something, months ago, about the hypnosign, in the manner of Deleuze's terminology in the Cinema books. But, whatever.