Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Jan/Feb 2000Jim Jarmusch, USA, 1999
"Continue to spur a running horse." That's but one of the bits of wisdom to be gleaned from Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai, the volume of 18th century samurai philosophy that ethereal urban hitman Forest Whitaker keeps as his constant companion throughout Jim Jarmusch's like-minded, like-titled new film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. But it is not, surprisingly, one of the many passages from that volume which Jarmusch, fixing the philosophical mindset of Whitaker's contemporary snuff agent within the context of Japan's "strange" and "ancient" culture of death, painstakingly and recurrently quotes onscreen.
Or is it?
Recurrent quotes are the very substance of Ghost Dog, of both the film and its titular hero, Whitaker's curtly cornrowed assassinfor-hire. Photographed in the fecal-industrial environs of Jersey City, N.J., the film lifts a metal gate to reveal an ill-bent, sunblanched noirville where the empathic birdman of Melville's Le Samourai meets the butterfly-addled button-pusher of Suzuki's Branded to Kill for a battle of the book reports over Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and WE.B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folk. And within this crucible of hit-mania, Whitaker's titular hero - wistfully sympathizing with doomed Promethean seekers everywhere, longing to be "home away," like Shelley's creature, "into the darkness and distance" - exists as much in positive/negative relation to Jarmusch's last floating ghost, Johnny Depp's already-dead William Blake, as to his own unnerving career as the cuddlemaster behind Hope Floats.
"Every day when one's body and mind are at peace," Ghost Dog begins the film by reflecting, dropping anchor near the Dead,,Van's canoe, "one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows. rifles, spears, and swords and being carried away by surging waves. And every day without fail one should consider himself as (lead." The Mira"minimalized "last Western" that was Jarmusch's cowboy Kundun runs here still, but why not a further spur? Why not anoth@ er moment in the sun for Gary Farmer's trailside bonhomie? Resurrected in Ghost Dog but for an instant, the formerly named Nobody faces off against a pair of flabby@ winded Mafiosi - two wheezing butchers who might as well be Harvey and Bob - and promptly rechristens them "stupid fucking white men."
There are many stories within Ghost Dog, and Jarmusch rashomonically wants to tell - or retell - them all. The simplest of them is this: Ghost Dog lives alone in a rooftop aerie. kept company by a covey of carrier pigeons as he studies the nihilist koans of the Hagakure. Around him. the wind whistles with hiphop hybridity ("black Mafia mind De Niro") and moans with the -everything@s changing," time-todie fatalism of Pat Garrett and BillY the Kid, another film in which outmoded men are picked off like chickens buried to their necks in sand. Ghost Dog fancies himself the loyal retainer of a Mafia underboss named Louie, for reasons recalled in subtly conflicting flashbacks. Louie, in turn, belongs to a minor mot) faction lead by Ray Vargo (already-deadman Henry Silva, still pulling faces like slow taffy) and Sonny Valerio (Cliff Gorman, who infuses his Flavor Flav-loving copo with a wisp of his old Bo -is in the Band bitchiness.) Louie hires Ghost Dog to zap a "made man" who's been diddling Vargo's daughter, a zoned-out Betty too-looped-to-Boop. The job goes well until it goes wrong, and since we all know what happened to Alain Delon's Jef Costello, suffice it to say that much ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom ensues.
The further Jarmusch pushes his cinema toward philosophical extremes, arthouse ornamentation, and curdly utopianisms. the less he becomes a stranger to the paradox of high-mindedness and lowest common denominators. Here, in a strategy the. film's distributors, arch-marketers Artisan, surely embrace, Jarmusch seems determined for the street to know which way the wind blows. Hence the film's soundtrack, a drum-n-bleak scratchscape by the (kung fu flickinspired) Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, which further refracts the Jarmuschian pluralism evident ever since Rammellzee (the original street samurai) ghostdogged his way through Stranger than Paradise. And refracts it further still: when Lome attempts to explain his retainer's moniker to his mob bosses, they get it - from every angle. "Ghost Dog ... it's like the names those rappers use: Method Man, Snoop Doggy Dog, lee T" Sonny supposes. "Reminds me of Indians: Red Cloud, Black Elk...," Vargo vaguely agrees, their begins mooing. "Go get Sammy the Snake, Joe Rags, and Big Angie and tell them to...."
Everyone in Ghost Dog speaks the same language, even when they don't. Italian gangsters operate out of Chinese restaurants, perpetuating moral codes gleaned mainly from Fleischer Studios cartoons, while their progeny kill the time till Itchy and Scratchy comes on by sharing volumes of Akutagawa with bushido-conversant hitmen. Somewhere in the neighborhood., an ice cream vendor (Isaach de Bankole, with his own cine-history of handling birds) is babbling the day away, entirely en franCais, while a bibliophilic preteen wearing thread-dreads and a Bruce Lee patch readies herself to take up a warrior's fallen sword.
"It is bad," warns the Hagakure, "when one thing becomes two," and so, for all its ostensible diversity, Ghost Dog scarcely breaks from "the way." Jarmusch may brand his kill-thrills with the tang of a feminist future, but we're hardly to expect that the poetry of war will henceforth sing a sweeter song. A dead cop is a dead COP, even if her name tag refers to bandleader Carla Bley, just as a live capo is a live capo, even if she's swapped her Betty Boop frazzle for Bette Davis finery. Then again, maybe the old school ain't the new school after all. Leave it to Jarmusch to bury a crucial bone: that Betty Boop - in 1930's Dizzy Dishes - began her life as a dog. Maybe there's more than one bitch in Ghost Dog, who can break through the babble by refusing to bark.
Chuck Stephensi
My Research
