By the middle of the 1990s, two Westerns had won Best Picture in three years. That was a big deal, because the genre had been more or less dormant since Heaven’s Gate cratered at the box office in 1980. The successes of Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven came a few years after Costner starred in Silverado and Eastwood tested the waters by directing and starring in Pale Rider, two 1985 films that set the stage for the leading men to dazzle audiences and Academy voters with much grander follow-ups.
Both also tried to address the racist and violent legacy of heroism in Western films, remaking the genre for a new, sophisticated era of Hollywood filmmaking. The ‘90s uptick in revisionist Westerns developed alongside the growth of American independent cinema, and the intersection of these two booms is Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, now available in 4K thanks to the Criterion Collection. In it, accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) survives a gunshot and is guided through the haunted American frontier by an outcast Native American (Gary Farmer) who believes that his charge is the reincarnation of the William Blake, the classic Romantic-era English poet.
