Dead Man Walking

(Tim Robbins, USA, 1995)

Every year there are movies that I avoid seeing for quite a while – because I suspect I’m going to really hate them. Either I expect that their content will be completely formulaic or clichéd, or I expect their style is going to be ultra-conventional, trying to manipulate me in ways I don’t like being manipulated.

Sometimes, when I finally get around to these movies, my worst suspicions are duly confirmed. But it is more energising for me when they turn out to be real surprises, films that turn on their head all the tired, conventional elements I expected to find. In 1995, 5his process happened to me with Fresh (1994). And it’s happened again in ‘96 with Dead Man Walking, the second film written and directed by actor Tim Robbins.

I basically imagined that Dead Man Walking was going to be a glorified telemovie about capital punishment – with paper-thin, emblematic characters mouthing arguments for and against the issue, while a patsy sits quivering in his cell, waiting for the verdict.

I saw the trailer, with its endless close-ups of Susan Sarandon as a nun and Sean Penn as the prisoner mumbling to each other across the prison grill, and its intercut, sepia-toned shock inserts of a murder in the woods, plus a Bruce Springsteen theme song – and, let me tell you, I was not exactly excited by the prospect of seeing the whole thing.

Well, I guess I have learned, one more time, not to trust trailers. Because Dead Man Walking is remarkable, and it’s directed with superb, classical control by Robbins. Much of the favourable discussion that has so far gone on around it has, quite understandably, focused on its carefully balanced approach to the issue of capital punishment. The debate about this inside the film drama is indeed subtle – a running debate that goes on not just in he characters words, but is also embodied in the complete texture of events, the looks, reactions and small revelations all the way down the line.

Dead Man Walking is not a mystery-thriller hinging on the guilt or innocence of a criminal, Matthew (Sean Penn). His complicity in a horrible crime of rape and murder is taken as a given; only the exact degree of his involvement is a minor matter of intrigue. Essentially, it’s about the morality of the state system taking a life in return for the young lives that have already been taken by the criminals – the beat, long ago, of Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936).

Nobody, not even Sister Helen (Susan Sarandon), wants Matthew free and out on the street. But they’d rather see him locked up for life than cruelly injected with death serum by an impersonal machine. All the same, the film allows one powerful, emotional argument in favour of capital punishment: and that’s (just as in Fury) the grief, rage and shattered lives of the parents of those murdered.

I focus my discussion on one particular aspect: not the capital punishment issue, but the relationship between Helen and Matthew, which I don’t think has been granted its full, confronting complexity in the majority of critical accounts I’ve read or heard.

I was completely surprised, on many levels, by Dead Man Walking – particularly after having so much disliked Tim Robbins’ previous directorial effort, Bob Roberts (1992). I’ve often criticised people who use the words politically correct as a mindless term of abuse; but even I found Bob Roberts to be the worst kind of smug PC movie, trying to flatter, at every turn, the preconceptions of its target, left-liberal audience.

Bob Roberts is based on a simple-minded dichotomy of Good versus Evil. The central character of this mockumentary exposé is a sinister, ultra-conservative politician (played by Robbins) on the election campaign trail. Virtually every scene includes some heroic spokesperson – poor, black, female, gay or some combination-platter thereof – wheeled in to loudly denounce the fascist Roberts. These brave characters are then suppressed by an evil, behind-the-scenes plot machination. There’s no irony, ambiguity or complexity in this agit-prop piece; we are clearly meant to cheer the oppressed and hiss the villains. And this in a movie supposedly out to criticise ideological manipulation and the mass media’s “manufacturing of consent”!

The contrast between Bob Roberts and Dead Man Walking is instructive. [Update: Robbins has directed only one other film since, Cradle Will Rock (1999).] The latter begins with Helen, a character who is not exactly left-liberal, but certainly impeccably Christian, honest, compassionate and bearably righteous. In a simple, unforced way, Helen is given to us (as in so many films) as an anchor, an untroubling identification-figure. We know instinctively that this is the kind of situation where a lead character is going to take us (the audience) by the hand, and lead us on a journey away from our known, quiet world across to some place else – some dark world, perhaps an underworld, where people behave differently and possess alien values.

I’ve grown suspicious of this model storyline. For starters, I’m not sure that I always want to be addressed, from the outset, as some decent, normal, stable, middling person who desperately needs the vicarious thrill of a trip into the Underworld that only a film can give me (novels and plays manage it far less well). I greatly dislike Leaving Las Vegas (1995), but I have to give that chaotic movie at least some credit for throwing viewers in at the deep end with a prostitute and an alcoholic, and forcing them to confront such tawdry, amoral realities directly, without a tour-guide or comfortable identification-figure. Another contemporaneous title that’s much better than Leaving Las Vegas, Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation (1995), also offers direct immersion in an outlaw lifestyle.

That’s quite different from those stories that take you gingerly into the underworld with a suitably safe leading-man or -woman. The Big Problem is that they are so often conservative, paranoid fantasies. They are fearful, suspicious, judgmental; they paint whatever underworld they wade into with Gothic colours, as if every unspeakable perversion and crime of the modern era has been hideously spawned there. It might sound like I’m describing horror movies or supernatural fantasies, like the 1987 Mickey Rourke vehicle Angel Heart (a good example of the process, if definitely not a good film). But, in fact, many films that express this fantasy are perfectly naturalistic or realistic, set in a contemporary, urban setting. Sometimes they even masquerade as comedies!

I’m thinking particularly of examples where middle-class people leave the sanctity of their comfy homes and the safely circumscribed zones of their districts to step over to the wild woods of the working class – where everyone seems to be a moronic hick, a psychotic rapist or a sociopathic serial killer. Many films – even good ones, like Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) – play out in this paranoid register. Or John Boorman’s queasy classic Deliverance (1972), where a bunch of affluent city guys get done over bad when they go for a holiday in the murky, dangerous forests and rapids of the American South.

It’s reached the stage where characters don’t have to travel even that far; sometimes, the very next suburb will do the trick quite nicely. In films posing as whimsical, lightweight fun-fests – let’s take, randomly, the Michael Keaton vehicle My Life (1993) – there’s a typical scene where the middle-class hero has to voyage to a rundown tenement on the seamy side of town for a massage from an Asian health specialist … and it’s as if this white-bread Everyman has gone into the veritable Heart of Darkness.

It’s been intriguing to observe, over the first half of the 1990s, the growing number of films devoted to what can be seen as a thoroughgoing demonisation of the working class, preeminent among them the social-issue rape drama The Accused (1988), Oliver Stone’s sensational Talk Radio (1988), the serial-killer shocker Kalifornia (1993) and John Schlesinger’s dreadful Eye for an Eye (1996). Penelope Spheeris’ proudly trashy comedy Black Sheep (1996) casts an intriguing shadow on this bunch, with its merry depiction of the “Washington woods”.

And I daresay there’s an echo of the popular-conservative movie fantasy in the feeding frenzy of Australian mass media in 1996 over the case of the Paxton family – which began, you may recall, with the camera of TV’s A Current Affair program journeying into a suburban home in St Albans (Melbourne) to discover the monstrous truth that some unemployed kids actually sleep past noon. [For a typically slanted update on this tale, see this UK Daily Mail report from 2018.]

But let’s get back to Sister Helen in Dead Man Walking. She’s received a letter from Matthew on Death Row, so she goes to visit him – simply because, as she often declares, he asked her. From that initial point, there are two distinct ways I feared the film could go. A completely schmaltzy tale about growing, emotional complicity and understanding, the mutual growth of these characters – even some kind of love story, with the thrill of an illicit erotic vibe between the nun and the bandit. Or, taking a completely different tack, the model, paranoiac tale already described, about the horror of a good, ordinary person confronting a working-class Hannibal Lecter: psychopath, mad genius, backwoods savage, whatever.

What’s terrific and surprising about Dead Man Walking is that it turns out to be neither a soppy story of love and redemption, nor a cautionary tale about society’s monsters. I really admire the way it negotiates both of these options, then suddenly swerves so as to avoid their pitfalls. For instance, there is something of a redemptive theme at work; Helen does bring Matthew to a point of honesty and recognition about what he has done, and she does manage to influence his behaviour in positive, Christian ways.

There is even a love theme, encapsulated in the tremendous scene where Helen tells Matthew that she will be the “face of love” for him. But the gestures of love that she offers him are ritual, ceremonial, not simply personal – it’s not as bald as two people from different sides of the tracks falling for each other. And Robbins is careful, quite early on, to exclude any erotic undertone or thrill from the relationship. Matthew actually tries, at one point, to prey on Helen’s latent sexual nature. She immediately susses out his manœuvre and snaps back, with palpable disdain: “Death is breathing down your neck, and you’re playing your little-man-on-the-make games. I’m not here for your amusement, Matthew. Show some respect”. That sorts him out quick smart – and us as well, if we happened to be hoping for that type of frisson.

As for the Gothic and paranoic possibilities of the story, Robbins is just as astute in his strategy of avoidance. At the start, Helen, before seeing Matthew for the first time, is told by a stern, rather unlovely priest that these Death Row prisoners will try to manipulate foolish innocents (such as her) anyway they can. Everyone else keeps filling her mind with ghastly images of the rape and murder for which Matthew has been convicted. At this setting-up stage, I expected the worst. But Matthew, as we soon discover, is an extraordinarily complex character, and Robbins presents him in a nuanced way.

On this point, I find myself in intense disagreement with some descriptions delivered by my fellow reviewers. Many have described Matthew as an utterly abominable racist, sexist, neo-Nazi figure – something on the order of the Antichrist. And these same reviews have understood the dramatic crux of the whole film to be: how does a nun manage to find the superhuman compassion within herself to help this monster? It seems that middle-class paranoia dies very hard – because Dead Man Walking, in my view, does not present Matthew as this type of monster.

Mind you, he is a confronting and unsettling figure. But Robbins tackles what is unique about this character head-on, without patronising condescension or suspicion. Watching it, I recalled a rich remark by the gifted French critic-filmmaker Pascal Kané [1946-2020], who suggested that there are two extremely insulting ways of depicting people who are in any way different from the norm. The first insult is to imply that those who are different are, finally, just the same as the rest of us – that, under the surface, they are entirely normal and harmless. That is the weak, humanist insult. The other way is to show the difference of others as something utterly other, alien and monstrous – that’s the racist, xenophobic, exclusionary insult.

Robbins avoids both reflexes. He doesn’t demonise Matthew – but doesn’t soften him, either. He allows Matthew to retain his strangeness, his darkness and menace, without turning him into a boogeyman.

Above all – and I think this is the great coup of the drama – Robbins shows clearly that Matthew is a complexly disturbed individual, that his psychological make-up is an unpredictable and unstable compromise formation between rational (conscious) and irrational (unconscious) forces, between external influences and internal energies. (One of my favourite quotations from Raymond Durgnat: “The individual existence as interface between social pressures around him, social pressures within him, and some primal energy from deep within himself”.)

Sure, we see Matthew on TV spouting on about the Master Race, and expressing to Helen horrifyingly racist and sexist viewpoints. But it would be altogether too generous to describe all this as Matthew’s consciously thought-out ideology, a deeply held system of beliefs and values.

As with several of the most captivating, off-centre characters in contemporary American cinema, such as the lost, confused but spirited souls in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (1996) or Tim Hunter’s dark teen movie River’s Edge (1986), Matthew’s capacity to believe his own utterances shifts wildly from one moment to the next. His racist outburst on TV, for instance, is a grossly miscalculated public performance of himself. When he later regrets it, he says, “I wish I hadn’t said all that shit … Keep my stupid mouth shut”. There’s something almost touching, certainly something comical, in his frazzled, everyday dimness.

There’s also an important scene where Helen, talking to Matthew through the prison grill, confronts his reflex, anti-black remarks. Basically, she outwits him. When he admits to a liking for Martin Luther King because “He put up a fight, wasn’t lazy”, she counters with “So, it’s lazy people you don’t like” – including lazy whites. At that point, Matthew, clearly feeling confused, defeated and vulnerable, plaintively requests: “Can we talk about something else?”

But I don’t want to suggest that Matthew is anything resembling a hero (not even a pathos-drenched victim-hero). Again, as on all points, the film actually confronts this possibility. At one stage, Helen pushes Matthew to read the Bible – and, in particular, about Jesus (because Helen is more a New Testament than an Old Testament gal). Jesus was a rebel, she tells him, standing up against the authorities, and he was hounded and crucified for speaking the Truth. Matthew pipes up: “Kind of like me, huh?” Helen is again quick to puncture that self-flattering delusion: “He changed the world with his love. You watched as two kids were murdered”.

Matthew is no hero, and certainly no modern Christ. But the unsentimental, devastating emotion that Robbins rings from the spectacle of this individual when he finally becomes the dead man walking to his sobering fate, and when he ceremoniously looks at last into Sister Helen’s face of love as the plangent song “The Long Road” by Eddie Vedder & Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan [died in 1997] plays – that’s a feeling you won’t forget in a hurry.

© Adrian Martin March 1996