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From Cineaste, Spring 1996. — J.R. wrote:Jim Jarmusch: Nobody says, “The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.” And when he and William Blake meet again toward the end of the film, he says, “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.”

Cineaste: The funny thing is, they sounded like Indian sayings in the film.

Jarmusch: Yeah, that was the intention. Blake just walked into the script right before I was starting to write it. There were a bunch of other quotes that didn’t get into the film that seemed very Native American: “Expect poison from the standing water.” “What is now proved was once only imagin’d.” “The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl that every thing was white.” And Nobody quotes from “The Everlasting Gospel” when they’re at the trading post: “The vision of Christ that thou dost see/Is my Vision’s Greatest Enemy.”

When William Blake criticized the Enlightenment understanding of Jesus, he did it, like everything else, with an imagination and excessiveness that has rarely been matched. In The Everlasting Gospel, Blake presents Jesus not as a moral theorizer or a prodigious philosopher, but as the very embodiment of the "poetic," as a supremely creative being above rigid dogma, above harsh logic, above even morality. Jesus explodes from the pages of Blake's poetry with a fierce apocalypticism far removed from the eminently rational Enlightenment Jesus. With Blake, Jesus becomes more than just a thinker or a moralizer, he becomes a symbol of being, of the vital and non-dualistic relationship between divinity and humanity.

Wikipedia wrote:In the United States, frontier was the term applied by scholars to the transition zone where explorers, pioneers and settlers were arriving. That is, as pioneers moved into the "frontier zone", they were changed significantly by the encounter.[4] Throughout American history, the expansion of settlement was largely from the east to the west, and thus the frontier is often identified with "the west". On the Pacific Coast, settlement moved eastward. In New England, it moved north. That is what Frederick Jackson Turner called "the significance of the frontier." For example, Turner argued that, in 1893, one change was that unlimited free land in this zone was available, and thus offered the psychological sense of unlimited opportunity. This, in turn, had many consequences such as optimism, future orientation, shedding of restraints due to land scarcity, and wastefulness of natural resources.

One example of Blake's disapproval of changes that happened in his time comes in his poem "London," from his work Songs of Experience. In "London," which has been described as summing up many implications of Songs of Experience, Blake describes the woes that the Industrial Revolution and the breaking of the common man's ties to the land have brought upon him (Mack 785). For instance, the narrator in "London" describes both the Thames and the city streets as "chartered," or controlled by commercial interests; he refers to "mind-forged manacles"; he relates that every man's face contains "Marks of weakness, marks of woe"; and he discusses the "every cry of every Man" and "every Infant's cry of fear." He connects marriage and death by referring to a "marriage hearse" and describes it as "blighted with plague." He also talks about "the hapless Soldier's sigh" and the "youthful Harlot's curse" and describes "blackening Churches" and palaces running with blood ("London").

"London" and many of Blake's other works dealing with a similar theme, particularly those from the Songs of Experience, strike a particular nerve for those who are living in a society where the cost of living compared with income is steadily increasing, where AIDS, Ebola, and other new and frightening diseases are becoming increasingly common, and where the public is becoming increasingly disillusioned about the reliability and trustworthiness of politicians. These works resonate for a generation which has to deal with exponentially increasing population problems and with rapidly increasing demands on our immigration facilities and resources. They strike a special chord with a nation that, due to the aforementioned problems, the rise of violent crime, and other considerations, is rapidly desensitizing itself to the "marks of weakness, marks of woe" that we are becoming accustomed to seeing on the faces of passers-by on the street.

In comparison to Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience Northrop Fry's distinction between the imagined states of innocence and experience is stated as thus:

world of innocence: unfallen world/ unified self/ integration with nature/ time in harmony with rhythm of human existence.

world of experience: fallen world/ fragmented divided self/ alienation from nature/ time as destructive, in opposition of human desire (Feldman).

This can be seen in �The Lamb,� and �The Chimney Sweeper;� from Songs of Innocence and in Songs of Experience �The Tyger,� and �The Chimney Sweeper,�.

Cineaste: The notion of what Nobody calls “passing through the mirror” seems to have a lot to do with the way the movie is structured: there’s the industrial town at the beginning and the Native American settlement at the end, the train ride and the boat ride…

Jarmusch: Yeah, and they do somehow connect with that abstract idea that Nobody has to pass Blake through this mirror of water and send him back to the spirit level of the world. But what was more fascinating to me is that these cultures coexisted only so briefly, and then the industrialized one eliminated the aboriginal culture. Those specific Northwest tribes existed for thousands of years and then they were wiped out in much less than a hundred years. They even used biological warfare, giving them infected blankets and all kinds of stuff — any way to get rid of them. And then they were gone. And it was such an incredibly rich culture.

I don’t really know of any fiction film where you see a Pacific Northwest culture. I know there’s the film The Land of the War Canoes made by Edward Curtis, the early twentieth-century photographer — he shot some Kwakiutl people, but it’s sort of a Nanook of the North deal where he used them pretty much as actors. But their culture was so rich because where they lived provided them with salmon, and they could smoke that and exist all winter long without having to hunt very much. Therefore they spent a lot of time developing their architecture, their carving, their mythology, and their incredibly elaborate ceremonies with these gigantic figures that would transform from one thing into another, with all kinds of optical illusions and tricks. That’s why the long house opens that way in Dead Man, when Nobody goes inside to talk to the elders of the tribe and eventually gets a sea canoe from them. It seems to open magically, but it’s based on a real system of pulleys that these tribes used.

Scholars and historians have varying opinions on whether Blake was a mystic. The Norton Anthology describes him as "an acknowledged mystic, [who] saw visions from the age of four" (Mack 783). Others have simply called him a visionary, a social critic of his time and a prophet of things to come. His criticisms were not only timely in his day, but are relevant today as well, something that American maverick filmmaker, Jim Jarmusch, wholeheartedly agrees with: "This was an English visionary poet, painter, printer and inventor. His work was revolutionary, and he was imprisoned for his ideas. I can't honestly cite a specific, concrete reason why he entered the script, except that while I was reading books by Native American Indians on Native American thought, it struck me that many of Blake's (the character) ideas and writings sounded particularly true of Blake's (the author) Proverbs From Hell, which, along with other fragments of poetry, are quoted by the character Nobody throughout the film. For Bill Blake, the journey of Dead Man represents life. For Nobody, the journey is a continuing ceremony whose purpose is to deliver Blake back to the spirit level of the world. To him, Blake's spirit has been misplaced and somehow returned to the physical realm. Nobody's non-Western perspective that life is an unending cycle is essential to the story of Dead Man". (Margetts).

Thel, played by Mili Avital, asks Blake to smell one of her flowers. He says it smells like paper. Here is Blake grounded in reality, trusting only in his senses. After sleeping together, Thel asks Blake if he has any tobacco. He replies that he doesn't smoke. Repeatedly, throughout the film, Blake is asked this question to which he always replies that he does not smoke, not knowing that his answer is inconsequential to the question. In the frontier West, tobacco was more valuable than money and could be traded for many things or offered in friendship. Many people carried tobacco, who did not smoke as a way of easing relations with other people.