Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

by Cindy Fuchs

Written and Directed by Jim Jarmusch
An Artisan release
Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

recommended

Jim Jarmusch’s new feature, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, is much like other Jim Jarmusch films: The pace is slightly slow, the characters slightly alien and alienated, the dialogue slightly offbeat, part poetry and part trash-talk.

Forest Whitaker plays Ghost Dog, samurai disciple, carrier pigeon keeper, and for 10 years the devoted retainer to an aging mafia foot soldier named Louie (John Tormey). When one of Ghost Dog’s contract murders goes wrong — the don’s daughter Louise (Tricia Vessey) is a witness — her father, Vargo (Henry Silva), decides that to save face, he must have the killer "neutralized." The rest of the film follows Ghost Dog’s calculated efforts to survive, as he takes out the gang members while attempting to maintain his ceremonious, mutually respectful relationship with Louie. Ghost Dog’s dilemma is both profound and ridiculous, produced by cultures colliding and coinciding. One of the film’s repeated jokes is his exquisite (and funny) samurai hit-style: He flips and spins his huge handguns so they whoosh with the impossible speed of a kung fu movie fighter, a device that manifests the movie’s heady hybrid sensibility, combining images from Hong Kong action, samurai, gangster and ’hood movies. Caught between eras and genres, Ghost Dog is radically displaced and infinitely adaptable, as skilled with ancient swordplay as with laser gun sights and electronic eavesdropping devices.

Living on a rooftop in a makeshift shack with his pigeons (his only means of communication with Louie), Ghost Dog studies the Hagakure, an 18th-century samurai code book, from which he periodically reads in voiceover. "The way of the samurai," he intones, "is found in death. Every day when one’s mind and body are at peace, one should meditate on being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease, committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail, one should consider himself as dead."

The overkill in this list of possibilities makes sense for Ghost Dog, a simultaneously representative and exceptional "young black urban male." To "consider oneself as dead" on a daily basis is, of course, a fact of life for him, a fact that, for all its deadpan humor, Ghost Dog treats with a deferential and pointed irony. The character’s melancholy and sense of kismet reflect those of his peers, the young men he sees freestyling on a park bench (not incidentally rapping about him, exalting his local legend), or the Bloods chilling on the sidewalk who nod with respect as he passes. Shot by frequent Jarmusch collaborator Robby Müller in long-take, deep-focus imagery, these scenes reveal street culture’s strata of intricacy and intimacy, at least as complex as those of ancient civilizations. Perhaps even more striking is the film’s lush, brooding hip-hop soundtrack. Composed and compiled by the RZA, the Wu-Tang Clan’s brilliant producer, the music is at once somber and celebratory, drawing deep connections among Method Man’s lyrics, reggae, free jazz, the sounds of traffic, weather or woodpeckers.

As Ghost Dog struggles to "make sense" of his impossible situation — in order to preserve himself and his master Louie, he is forced to murder Louie’s masters, which in turn forces Louie to take vengeance on him — the film shows that the codes governing his life and the gangsters’ are simultaneously principled and absurd. In other words, they are matters of faith, a means to define oneself amid chaos. And so, while the contract on Ghost Dog is specific, it also exemplifies the routine violence in the big city, the murders that are unsurprising functions of power and racism. Instructed to take out a "big black guy" on a rooftop, two of Vargo’s henchmen come upon another pigeon handler, a Kayuga Indian (called "Nobody" in the credits and played by Gary Farmer, who was Nobody in Jarmusch’s Dead Man), who calls them out when they shoot his birds: "Stupid fuckin’ white man!" Holding their huge weapons, the assassins are stunned by his outrage. Even as they retreat, however, they see their worldview vindicated in his apparent lunacy: "Puerto Rican, Indian, nigger, same thing!"

With this and other brief exchanges, Ghost Dog, like Dead Man, deconstructs myths and conventions, those long-standing cultural investments in prejudice, machismo, imperialism and self-righteousness. Again and again, the film catches characters (Louise, Vargo, various mobsters) watching cartoons which escalate in violence and explicitness, from Betty Boop to Felix the Cat to Itchy and Scratchy, who blow up the planet in order to destroy each other. Though no one in the film learns from these lessons, the audience can appreciate their resonance: Such brutality is hardly an urban, black, samurai or gangster problem; it’s global and perpetual, cosmic and commercial.

For all its grim commentary on the state of the world, Ghost Dog does offer hopefulness, embodied by its protagonist’s unexpected disciple, a neighborhood girl named Pearline (the engaging Camille Winbush). They meet as Ghost Dog sits on a park bench, engaged in a staring contest with a small dog. Intrigued, Pearline asks whether it’s true that he (Ghost Dog) speaks to no one. They soon learn that they share a passion for reading, in particular, The Wind in the Willows, Frankenstein and The Souls of Black Folk. He offers her the copy of Rashomon Louise gave him on the night of the shooting; Pearline agrees to read it and tell him what she thinks.

Pearline and Ghost Dog’s friendship develops alongside the rest of his adventures, but it serves as a kind of heartbeat for the movie, a reference to its filmic sources (including Kurosawa’s many samurai films and Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 Le Samouraï), in which the young student is a familiar trope, a means for Ghost Dog to pass on his knowledge and legacy. But there’s something more immediate at work here as well, which makes the film less a kitschy fable than a keen contemplation on contemporary experience, the obligation and contrition you likely feel every day. This doesn’t mean, however, that it misses the nuances of fable: It’s filled with tiny, reverberating moments, as when Ghost Dog paces down the street, passing the RZA, as "the Camouflage Samurai." They pause to acknowledge one another; RZA says, "Always see everything." And in return, Ghost Dog nods, "Positive embrace." Like the film, mystical, silly and fundamental.

See Sam Adams’ interview with Jim Jarmusch.