Yes, I am sure it was meant to be both funny and serious. I laughed and laughed, too.
I asked to see how is this board's opinion, since this movie means a lot to me and it also deals with Native Americans.
I also did some more checking later.
The main native caracter is ofcourse ficitonal and sort of "caricature", but the movie's and director's attitude towards Indians seem to be very fair and favourable and devoid of simple stereotypes. And as I checked - the background was also well researched.
Jarmusch answer about the tribal membership of the main caracter "Nobody":
"Which tribe does Nobody come from, and what language does he speak?
The character of Nobody is of mixed blood - he is half Blood and half Blackfoot. These tribe s are considered "Plains Indians," from the great plains of the northern and central parts of the western half of North America. Nobody, however, is an unusual character - he is also a linguist who, in the course of the story, speaks Blackfoot, Cree, Makah and English. "
And a very interesting and informative excerpt from an in depth review of the Jonathan Rosenbaum's book on Dead man by Fiona A. Villella :
"However, another important reason Rosenbaum argues for the poor reception of Dead man by American critics and the public, in contrast to his previous films, is the film's "direct political overtones and implications", consequently seeing it as a "deal-breaker" with white audiences. (17) From here, Rosenbaum launches into an integral discussion of the film's politics that will no doubt influence any future discussion on the film. This section begins with the following key passage:
I would define the political and ideological singularity of Dead man in two ways: that is the first Western made by a white film-maker that assumes as well as addresses Native American spectators, and that it offers one of the ugliest portrayals of white American capitalism to be found in American movies. On the surface, the former distinction may appear to be a modest or incidental difference, but I believe it to be a profound and far- reaching one that affects practically everything else one might say about the film, morally and politically as well as historically. (18)
This strong, solid argument is one of the most definitive I have read on the film, and it functions for Rosenbaum as the "linchpin" of his study. (18) It also exemplifies his ability to conceptualise what is fundamentally significant about a particular film and to express it in the clearest of terms. Rosenbaum elaborates this passage further by arguing how Jarmusch has proposed a "redefinition of the film audience" since the beginning of his career, essentially by inserting "foreign" characters and their points of view into the narrative. (18-19)
Since the 1970s, the idea of representing the "other" within an apparatus whose mechanisms were argued to be ideologically inscribed has implied that avant-garde cinema was the space for "oppositional" voices. Rosenbaum expertly sidesteps this theoretical quagmire by referencing the work of Native American scholars concerned with Native American representation in cinema who treat Dead man "with a great deal of respect" and then by suggesting that "the issue may finally be more a matter of ethics than one of politics - a question, indeed, of simple politesse more than political correctness" (23-25). And Rosenbaum shows that Jarmusch's ethics lie in his manner of addressing Native Americans as members of the audience via a detailed and authentic portrayal of Native American culture (from the continued reference to "tobacco" to the combination of dialects to the "authentic" recreation of a Makah village to the apparently common experience of exiling Native Americans who had travelled beyond their villages) and American history (the slaughter of buffalos and the use of infected blankets). In one of the most eloquent sentences of the book, Rosenbaum astutely identifies Jarmusch's deep sensitivity toward the genocide that founded the nation of America, and which accounts for the film's eerie melancholy:
If America (...) is haunted by the genocide that presided over its conquest, one thing that makes Dead man a haunted film is a sense of this enormity crawling around its edges, informed every moment and every gesture, without ever quite taking centre stage. (21)"
