Posted: 04/24/2000

Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai

(2000)

by Yancey Strickler

Jarmusch’s latest film is a tribute to an ancient philosophical way of life and a hybrid of that existence juxatoposed with contemporary hip-hop lifestyles.

Forest Whitaker controls his body the way a DJ does a record—spinning, shifting, and mutating from samurai hit man to shy introvert, all to the dynamic internal beat of Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. The setting of the film, an anonymous city lovingly captured by director Jim Jarmusch, controls this beat, an urban heart pumping smog, crime, and industrial despair to a rhythmic pulse. This rhythm controls Ghost Dog, who reacts to its movement and its foul breath with a quiet acceptance. Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai is not a story of an assassin, but of an ancient creature, the honorable samurai, doing his best to survive in an inhospitable environment.

To survive, Ghost Dog becomes a paradox, a simultaneous existence of equal parts identification and alienation. His only connection with the world outside of his rooftop shanty is through the archaic method of the carrier pigeon. All communication with his employers, a group of hapless mobsters, is handled in this way. In an age filled with the troubling possibilities of instant contact, the pigeons are an important gesture for Ghost Dog, a reflection of his attitude and being. Upon learning of the carrier pigeons an elderly mob boss exclaims, “But they’re extinct!” The old ways of Ghost Dog are extinct. His need for a code of honor and allegiance is akin to the last coelacanth clinging to the depths of the ocean, preserving its existence through intense isolation.

Simple camera techniques reflect the sense of Ghost Dog living in the wrong time and wrong place. Several times the camera fixates on a spot where action has just taken place, holding up to thirty seconds, forcing the audience to stare at a brick wall or a stereo for what seems an eternity. The cinematography reinforces this idea of a man who has stayed too long, who should have died or changed long ago. The effect is breathtaking and unsettling.

Ghost Dog seeks solace on his rooftop, moments of comfort being ones of complete alienation. He practices his sword technique while his pigeons flutter around him. He has conversations with his best friend, an ice cream vendor who only speaks French. Jarmusch shows the solution for an increasingly dehumanizing world as being a combination of isolation and nostalgia. Ghost Dog spends much of his time reading Rashomon, a collection of Japanese folk and morality tales, as well as Code of the Samurai. In the excerpts from this handbook that periodically appear on screen, the audience is treated to Ghost Dog’s internal logic, that of restrained action based on a fiercely stringent code of ethics.

Action, and not language, is where the heart of the film lies. Ghost Dog’s first dialogue is not until a half an hour into the film. When Ghost Dog does speak, it says very little, only echoing what seems apparent from his facial gestures. The language barrier with his best friend becomes important here once again. Ghost Dog is not so much a film as a fractured poem, a freestyle rap where not all lines rhyme, nor do they need to. The world is changing, as mobster Louie says repeatedly, and the language of the film exemplifies this. Ideas are not exchanged in words or syllables, but in sounds and beats, a language of experience.

Many times the most important thing to be heard in the film is not the dialogue, but the score created by Wu-Tang Clan mastermind, the RZA. The collection of screeching horns and skittering beats sound like Stan Getz recording on a deteriorating turnpike. Towards the end of the film we see Ghost Dog walking underneath a graffiti covered bridge as a trumpet, hopelessly out of tune, breaks the silence. Jarmusch has no need to explicate the plight of Ghost Dog any more than this. The music says more than any typical explanation could offer.

This film is a reflection of a hip-hop world where appropriation is accepted, a way of life. There is no irony in Ghost Dog reading samurai handbooks, taking teachings centuries old and placing them in contemporary urban America. Survival seems to be the key to Ghost Dog’s life, an instinctual nature moving his body slowly and smoothly like a bear hungry for a pot of honey.

Possibly the best and most indescribable scene in the film occurs when Raymond, the French ice-cream vendor, conveys to Ghost Dog that there is something he must see. The two men go atop the roof of an apartment and walk to the edge, staring across the alleyway to the structure next door. There sits a half finished boat with an old man nailing boards along the stern, making it himself. The camera lingers, letting the audience understand the full gravity of a man constructing a boat, on top of a building, in the middle of a city. Both Ghost Dog and Raymond remark, in their own tongues, that it is the most beautiful thing they have ever seen.

The startling prospect of this boat demonstrates the reaction that other characters in the film have towards Ghost Dog, a man they never could have imagined possible. Where Ghost Dog sees beauty, however, the mob bosses see deception and fear, a black man they cannot understand. Ghost Dog sees this old man and his boat and recognizes himself, the futility of the entire process. His mindset comes from a world four hundred years old, yet he possesses utopian notions of high modernism—he wants to see this wasteland of a world change. The old man on the roof feels like Noah, waiting for a flood that may never come. Ghost Dog is right there with him waiting, hoping, and holding on for a future that will echo the past.

Yancey Strickler is a writer and artist who lives on the East Coast.

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