A TIMELY REMINDER WHY I LOVE DEAD MAN

I was a cinema usher in 1995, for the Prince Charles Cinema in London, which back then was a scuzzier version of the one that exists today, and sold tickets for two pounds. It was supposed to be a summer job after I’d left university, but I stayed there for four years. I should have skipped university altogether and gone straight to the cinema – it was more fun, more creative, and infinitely more educational.

We practically lived there. Our days and nights would be spent watching films, annoying customers, giving free tickets to hot girls, avoiding the psychotic tramps who hung around nearby (one of them was called Nosebiter, because he bit someone’s nose off), and having after hours lock-ins when the customers had gone, watching what we wanted and drinking and sleeping wherever we passed out. We loved it there and we took our jobs seriously. The Prince Charles is an arthouse/second-run cinema, and we didn’t take it for granted that it had more of a punk aesthetic than our Leicester Square neighbours, whose staff had to wear humiliating little red blazers and watch the same terrible films four times a day. I’m a cinema fascist, and it still amazes me today that in most cinemas, the ushers come in for about 20 minutes then bugger off to do whatever else they do. We used to stay in the auditorium for the duration of each film, sitting at the back soaking up the films while watching the audience like hawks, ensuring that they didn’t talk or smoke or wank (I only caught someone doing the latter once, and he vacated the premises quickly and quietly. He didn’t mean any harm, but he was disturbing the lady next to him, so he had to go).

We found syringes on the carpet under the seats, had to clean up bird shit from the outside poster frames, and consistently argued with the Chinatown restaurant staff who consistently blocked our fire exits with bin-liners full of stinking, rotting food. And it was worth it all because in those four years I must have seen hundreds of films that I might never have heard of or got round to seeing otherwise. One of them was Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. I became instantly obsessed – I’d never seen anything like it, and still haven’t. Set in the dying days of the Old West, it’s so dreamy and surreal that when you watch it you feel like you’re melting. It’s proper escapism, and not the 2012 apocalypse fetish, who-cares-how-shit-the-film-is brand of escapism, but in the sense that it envelopes you in its universe entirely.

Johnnny Depp comes to town for an accountancy job, sleeps with the wrong woman, inadvertently gets her killed, and spends the rest of the film on the run, protected by a Native American while a trio of bounty hunters trail him. It’s a beautiful film, one of those rare instances where every aspect is perfect. Depp gives a sublime performance (this was back when he played characters with actual human qualities), and the best supporting cast ever includes Robert Mitchum (in his last role), John Hurt, Gabriel Byrne, Crispin Glover, Alfred Molina, Iggy Pop (in drag), Billy Bob Thornton, Michael Wincott, and a cannibalistic Lance Henriksen. The black and white cinematography is breathtaking – one of the reasons Jarmusch filmed it as such was because he wanted it to look more like a Kurosawa film than a dusty old Western. And Neil Young’s stark electric guitar score is amazing, as much responsible for the film’s atmosphere as the visuals: Dead Man sounds as good as it looks.

A Jarmusch season of sorts (it also includes films that have inspired him, from Buster Keaton to Wim Wenders), begins this Friday at London’s ICA, and runs up to Christmas (details: http://www.ica.org.uk/Jarmusch%20in%20Context+22863.twl). I never really got to grips with 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise, which kicks things off on Friday, but its 1986 follow-up Down By Law is great, with Tom Waits, John Lurie and Roberto Benigni as three bickering misfit losers who find themselves locked up together and escape into Louisiana swampland. I can’t vouch for Jarmusch’s latest, The Limits Of Control, which I haven’t seen, but it’s really all about Dead Man. They’re showing it three times. Go and see it big. It’s real cinema.