Films
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In his movie Mean Streets (1973), Martin Scorsese refers to Blake's poem "The Tyger" when a young pet tiger makes Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro take refuge atop a couch, paralleling the grit and innocence of life in the city.
A variation on a verse from Blake's America a Prophecy appears in Ridley Scott's science fiction film Blade Runner (1982), spoken by Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer). This has been interpreted as a way of linking Batty to Blake's mythic regenerative hero Orc.
1988's "Bull Durham" includes a scene showing Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon arguing over a line ("the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom") from Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."
In Jim Jarmusch's 1995 western Dead Man, the central character, played by Johnny Depp, is named William Blake and allusions to Blake's poetry appear thematically as well as explicitly. A native American, called "Nobody", saves William Blake's life, and actually thinks that the person whose life he has saved is, in fact, William Blake the poet.
Blake or his work has also featured in other American independent films since 2000. Hal Hartley’s The New Math(s) (2000), in which two students fight with their teacher over the solution to a complex mathematical equation, takes as its inspiration Blake’s The Book of Thel, with music by the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Similarly, Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (2005), which is loosely based on the final hours of Kurt Cobain, has a central character called Blake. The Blakean allusions are subtle throughout the film and include Hildegard Westerkamp’s "Doors of Perception" soundscape, itself a response to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. At the end of the film, having committed suicide, Blake’s soul ascends from his body in a scene that directly references the illustrations to Robert Blair's The Grave, which was illustrated by Blake in 1808.
The film versions of the novel Red Dragon, Manhunter (1986) and Red Dragon (2002), include images of Blake's "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun". In the first film the character played by Tom Noonan sports a tattoo on his chest based on Blake's image of the dragon hovering over the woman. The second film has the character (played by Ralph Fiennes) display a stylised version of the dragon tattooed on his back.
Blake's work resides in the background of Peter Care's 2002 film The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys; a copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was a gift from an orphan boy's father and a central symbol in this film about boys who narrate their lives through comic book characters they create and draw. Blake's poem "The Garden of Love" is quoted in a scene in The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), directed by Ken Loach.
The image of V escaping the fire at Larkhill in the Wachowski brothers's V for Vendetta (2006) is very similar to Blake's images of Orc from the Illuminated Works (cf. Urizen plate 16; America plate 12), and an almost exact reproduction of plate 5 (V, had Blake used Roman numerals to number his plates) of "The Gates of Paradise," titled "Fire."
Read more about this topic: William Blake In Popular Culture
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