From the press release interview with Jarmusch:
Why William Blake, the poet?
"William Blake was an English visionary poet, painter, printer and inventor. His work was revolutionary, and he was imprisoned for his ideas. I can't honestly site a specific, concrete reason why he entered my script, except that while I was reading books by Native Americans on Native American thought, it struck me that many of Blake's ideas and writings sounded as though they could have come from the soul of a Native American. This is particularly true of Blake's PROVERBS FROM HELL which, along with other fragments of his poetry, are quoted by the character Nobody throughout the film."
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From an interview in Seconds magazine (1996):
"[William Blake] made an accidental entrance into the film right before I started writing it. The character wasn’t even named William Blake originally. I collected all my notes on the film and was about to write the script and I was reading all these books by American Indian people. Then I put all that stuff away and picked up William Blake, who I read a lot when I was younger but hadn’t read for awhile, and I was just struck by the connection in thought between a lot of the stuff I was reading and a lot of Blake’s work. He just walked into the film on his own. After the film was shot, I started seeing even more connections. If you’re interested in Blake, it’s woven in there pretty deeply. If you’re not, it doesn’t take away from the film."
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From: "Illuminations", by Jacob Levich, in Film Comment, (May-June 1996), p. 41:
"Someday the dense intertextual relationship between Dead Man and the works of William Blake (1757-1827) will be catnip for Ph.D. candidates. Even a casual aquiantance with Blake's writings and worldview should enhance one's viewing. The 'Songs of Innocence' and 'Songs of Experience' - widely available in paperback - are a good place to start. Meanwhile...
* John Scholfield (Hurt), the contemptuous head clerk of Dickinson Metal Works, bears the name of the soldier who vengefully accused Blake of sedition after the poet physically ejected him from his garden in 1803. (Blake held seditious views, but was aquitted of high treason at the subsequent trial.) Schofield appear, variously spelled, in Blake's greatest prophetic book 'Jerusalem' (1804) as the chief of the "terrible sons & daughters of Albion." Identified with the Biblical Adam, he represents an emergent type of Englishman, soulless, rationalist, and censorious.
* Thel Russell (Mili Avital), the reformed prostitute who offers Bill shelter in a room festooned with paper flowers, recalls the heroine of 'The Book of Thel' (1789), the first of Blake's prophetic works. The maiden Thel, whose name is derived from the Greek word for desire, is first glimpsed living in a state of aimless, pastoral bliss. She briefly enters the world of Experience (meaning, in this case, mature sexuality), then flees, horrified, back to the primal Vale of Har.
* The industrialist Dickinson (Mitchum) suggests the Satanic aspect of Blake's two great "portions of being," the Devouring (corporeal) and the Prolific (creative or spiritual). As 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' (1793) holds, "these two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence."
* Bill and Nobody both quote these well-known lines from 'Auguries of Innocence': "Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to Endless Night." The 'Auguries', epigrammatic verses unpublished in the poet's lifetime, contain the most famous expression of Blake's visionary aspirations: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower."
* In flashback, Nobody is seen reading "To the Queen" (1808), a short mystical verse about the awakening of the soul after its passage through the Door of Death.
* When Nobody rouses a sleeping Bill with the words "Don't let the sun burn a hole in your ass: rise now, and drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead," he's paraphrasing a "Proverb of Hell" usually interpreted as an adjuration to the artist not to be constrained by tradition and precedent.
* After the trading post missionary (Alfred Molina) prays for the extermination of the "heathens and Philistines" - meaning Indians - Nobody observes, "The Vision of Christ that thou dost see / Is my greatest Enemy." This is a direct quote from 'The Everlasting Gospel', a rhymed critique of institutionalized Christianity left unfinished at Blake's death."
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From "Dead Man" (BFI Modern Film Classics), by Jonathan Rosenbaum, pp. 74-76:
"Some of the Blake adages Nobody quotes - such as 'The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow' and 'Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead,' both from 'Proverbs of Hell' - sound like Native American sayings to Blake and to us, and conversely some of Nobody's own pronouncements sound like the poetry of Blake."
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"[I]t might be instructive to note a few of the things that Jarmusch, by his own testimony, didn't have in mind when he scripted Dead Man. Given that the character of Thel clearly derives from 'The Book of Thel', a fact confirmed by Jarmusch, it might seem obvious to some readers that Nobody's name was suggested by Nobodaddy - a Blakean figure identified by Northrop Frye as 'the ill-tempered old man in the sky that results from our efforts to visualize a First Cause'. But Jarmusch assured me that he was unaware of Nobodaddy, and that no such thought ever crossed his mind."
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"Yet as the point about Nobodaddy makes clear, it shouldn't be assumed that Jarmusch's use of Blake's poetry in Dead Man is informed by any consistent sort of literary scholarship. Jarmusch has noted in interviews that, although the film doesn't bother to mention it, Dead Man is set in the 1870s. Gregg Rickman has pointed out that [...] 'Auguries of Innocence', though written in the early nineteenth century, wasn't published during Blake's lifetime, and came to light only in 1866, which means that 'Nobody would have to be markedly well placed to have read [the poem] during his sojourn in England, datable to the 1850s.' But this is only to say that, like most literary works of distinction, Dead Man is derived more from one person's imagination than from any person's library."