Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Some viewers have been irritated by all these quotations, and there’s no question that each of them stops the story dead in its tracks–paradoxically, at the same time it offers interpretive commentary on what’s going on. The quotes remind me of a rather obscure fantasy tale of the 40s by Lewis Padgett (the most frequent pen name of Henry Kuttner), “Compliments of the Author,” which is about a magical 50-page book that offers all-purpose instructions to the owner on each page about how to resolve various dilemmas–“Werewolves can’t climb oak trees,” “He’s bluffing,” “Try the windshield,” “Deny everything,” “Aim at his eye”; the relevant page number appears magically on the cover each time it’s needed, a total of ten times per owner. (Needless to say, the 50th page and last directive is “The End,” which echoes the last quotation from Hagakure in Ghost Dog: “The end is important in all things.”) The 13 quotations from Hagakure offered over the course of Ghost Dog suggest a similar metaphysical conceit–meeting a desire for discipline and purity, a need to reduce uncertainty by limiting all understanding to a single book outlining a single way of life.
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I should add that computers don’t figure at all in Ghost Dog, a movie whose sense of high tech is basically restricted to cars with fancy CD players, guns with silencers, and animated cartoons on TV, and whose sense of antiquity is inseparable from its feeling for the present cultural moment. The point is that all the movie’s characters are casually liberated and even defined by their capacity to drift between cultures: one of the aging white gangsters (Cliff Gorman) loves rap and chants along with it, and another (Henry Silva) responds to an enigmatic quotation about beheading from Hagakure by saying, “It’s poetry–the poetry of war.”
Jarmusch was juggling references of this sort, along with equally sharp music and literary references, long before anybody had heard of Quentin Tarantino–who has subsequently bypassed Jarmusch as the favorite standard-bearer for American independents, though he neither owns the negatives of his pictures nor has final cut on them, unlike Jarmusch. Generational and promotional styles obviously played some role in this supplanting, and it’s fascinating to ponder the degree to which Ghost Dog can be read, even obliquely, as Jarmusch’s gentlemanly response to Tarantino–a distinct possibility since it’s Jarmusch’s first movie about hit men, a Tarantino staple.
The movie’s fascination with Ghost Dog never gives the character enough of a back story to make us believe in him as something more than a cultural premise–which, for that matter, is just about all that Alain Delon was in Melville’s Le samourai. Jarmusch daringly uses Whitaker for the most part as a hulking silent presence, going about his business in purposeful and dedicated mime, but whenever the movie requires the character to be something more than a mythic icon, we don’t know quite what to make of him. We get two slightly different versions of the flashback showing Ghost Dog’s first encounter with Louie, but that doesn’t suffice to make this movie a Rashomon. And though he and Louie view their final confrontation as a scene from a movie–“This is the final shootout scene”; “Yeah, it is”–this doesn’t suffice to make it believable, even in the highly circumscribed terms established by this movie. Nonetheless, the cultural feelings inspired by these two prototypes are stirred, and the tenderness between these and other icons somehow survives the awkward clutter.
