You are a painter, a poet, or a killer!

Dead Man tells the story of Blake's growth in human strength. But the irony is that his inner growth process is also his physical death process. In the film, the ignorant Blake steps into the bottomless abyss of fate. His feet were absorbed by the quicksand, sinking deeper and deeper; his flesh was gradually worn away, exhausted, and exhausted. However, while his body was dying, his inner strength was gradually being awakened. This is a power that has been dormant for a long time. Blake casts off the smiley face mask imposed on him by the "civilized world" and accepts his true self for the first and last time. Thus, the weak gentleman Blake became the poet and killer Blake; he used a gun as a pen and wrote poems with the blood of white people.

Both Blake's awakening and his eventual death are due to his coming to America's Wild West for an accounting job. Two civilizations collide in this wilderness: the subculture of the white settlers and the Indian civilization. The culture of the white settlers is a subculture of Western civilization. It inherits the core value of Western civilization: conquest. This conquest is reflected in the pioneers' suppression of the Indians and the plunder of nature. However, there are differences between the pioneer subculture and the mainstream Western culture. Western "civilization" represses violence, while the pioneer subculture worships violence first. The divergence stemmed from cultural choice: the pioneers who dared to come to the west were somewhat outlawed. When they form groups and form subcultures, the subcultures inevitably take on the outlaw character.

The opposite of the outlaw culture is the Indian civilization. Unlike Western civilization, what Indian civilization advocates is not conquest, but harmony and respect. For example, pioneers slaughtered bison at the encouragement of the government. In the end, this policy of slaughtering bison nearly led to the extinction of bison. The Indians also hunted and killed bison, but the Indians regarded cattle as sacred animals. They maintain a subtle mentality: I can fight you and kill you, but in my heart I respect you and even love you. This seemingly strange psychology also appears in Hemingway's book "The Old Man and the Sea": On the physical level, the old man fights with a huge marlin in an attempt to kill the marlin, but on a psychological level, the old man respects Malaysia Lin fish, regard it as a comrade-in-arms, that it is "more noble and more capable than human beings". This subtle psychology paints an overlooked possibility: maybe violence and love can coexist; I'm going to kill you, but I love you. Noboday is an Indian with that mentality. In a conversation with Blake, he talked about how he successfully passed the deer hunter's trial: "A little deer took pity on me and gave me her life." This kind of thinking and the Western-style "conquer" psychology is completely different. Although the means are also violent, Indian civilization adopts respect for the weak, while Western civilization tramples on the weak. If a Western way of thinking is adopted, what would a person who has successfully passed the deer hunting test say? I think it's probably: "I am very skilled at hunting deer, and I killed a deer."

To be continued.. :)

View more about Dead Man reviews