| Noah Frazier |
Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, May 16th, through Sunday, May 18th, as a collaboration with the Cult Film Collective. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
The beginnings and ends of movies often function as microcosms of the whole, enclosing the film’s central ideas within a few shots. Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai opens on a silhouette of a pigeon flying across a dark blue sky. After softly mumbling through the background of the opening credits, composer RZA’s cool, moody hip-hop score enters in full. Then, a shot looking down at the city, smoothly moving over building after building: the world from the pigeon’s eyes. Director Jim Jarmusch alternates between these two perspectives, the pigeon being watched and the pigeon watching, through the opening credits. The bird finally lands on a rooftop coop, and Jarmusch cuts the score out and settles the camera for a few moments of gentle cooing. The camera pushes past the pigeon coop and towards a window with a closed shade. The window dissolves away, almost as an invasion of privacy, and we see Forest Whitaker reading from the Hagakure, a philosophy book that outlines the way of the samurai. Whitaker’s effortlessly calm and strong narration begins with an excerpt from the book: “The Way of the Samurai is found in death.” The camera cuts without judgement around his apartment as the narration continues—we see guns with silencers attached, a candlelit vigil next to the pigeon coop, a makeshift bookshelf, a picture of a girl against a backdrop of newspapers, and a statue of a samurai.
Through these simple sequences, the film begins to draw the audience to its central questions: whether we are observers, watching pigeons in the sky, peeping through a man’s closed window; or if we are empathizers, who can see what the bird sees, and live through another man’s eyes.
I am tempted to just continue describing every single shot, moment, and feeling captured by Jarmusch in his urban samurai masterpiece, but I’ve learned from some recent dates that reciting an entire movie without interruption might not be as stimulating a form of communication as I thought it was. Nevertheless, I refuse to shut up about Ghost Dog.
Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai feels more and more important to me as American culture continues to grapple with its relationship to multiculturalism. When I see people feeling lost on the lines between appreciation and appropriation, unsure of when to observe and listen versus when to participate and speak, or confused on what it means to live authentically while society becomes increasingly culturally complex, I think about Ghost Dog. Ghost Dog is a movie written and directed by a white guy, about a black guy who is obsessed with ancient Japanese philosophy, who gets tangled with Italian mobsters. It’d be easy to imagine a version of this movie that trips over itself with all these cultures at play, but Jarmusch utilizes this mish-mash of worldviews to explore how a person might live in such a complicated setting. To me, the film presents a very straightforward model of philosophy that centers around living with deep sincerity. Ghost Dog is not an evangelical film; it does not ask the viewer to take the philosophies of the Hagakure and live them out. The character of Ghost Dog is aspirational not because of his beliefs themselves, which the audience can take or leave, but because of his level of commitment to those beliefs. The film makes the viewer reflect on philosophy itself—what it means to have a belief, to know or not know where your beliefs come from, to see how they affect or don’t affect your behavior, and how they interact with other beliefs in society.
A lot of people will refer to Ghost Dog as a “vibes movie,” which is a term that can sometimes feel like a backhanded compliment. Oh, the movie didn’t make sense? No, no it’s a vibes movie. Dialogue is dumb and the plot makes you fall asleep? Quintessential vibes movie. Director doesn’t have anything to say, but there’s one shot with a little neon in it? Bro, the viiiiiiibes. And here’s the thing: the “vibes movie” crowd is not entirely wrong. Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai is overflowing with vibes. Let me remind you, the title of this film is Ghost Dog, colon, Way of the Samurai. It’s a title that reads like the coolest version of one of those jumbled-word fridge magnet poems. Forest Whitaker carries a sword. The soundtrack is original music by a member of the Wu-Tang Clan. Mobsters chain smoke and drive old muscle cars. The film is undeniably cool. But the presence of style doesn’t cause an absence of substance. In fact, Ghost Dog’s aesthetics succeed not because of isolated “coolness” or quality, but because they are deeply bonded together with the themes of the movie from beginning to end. The film uses aesthetics to emphasize its themes of voyeurism + outsiderness, and to establish and later subvert the audience’s expectations of the film’s characters and plot.
The character of Ghost Dog has depth and specificity that you might not expect from a film about a hit-man. His worldview is fully realized from his first moment on screen, and each scene deepens the audience’s understanding of, and fascination with, his character. He strongly connects with the Eastern philosophy of his samurai book. The excerpts we hear from the book center around death meditations, awareness of the present moment, and seeing unity within one’s self and within one’s world. We only see one short flashback scene of Ghost Dog’s backstory, where in his youth he is assaulted by white teenagers. The violent act is presented as completely random. Jarmusch depicts Ghost Dog’s vigilant commitment to his personal sense of meaning and order as an act of defiance against the world he lives in, which picks on people senselessly and severely.
The world of Ghost Dog feels as if it is split in half. On one side, you have the gentle world of the community. Ghost Dog forms improbable friendships with a Haitian entrepreneur and a schoolgirl over ice cream cones and children’s books. Ghost Dog might not fully be able to occupy this world, but he knows his place in it and doesn’t seem to resent his outsider status. On the other side, you have the city’s underworld of crime. Sleazy men in back rooms, casually tossing around f-bombs and racial slurs. Every interaction is filled with prejudice and fear. They are men who recite a code of ethics to each other, while none of them abide by it. The movie plays up the comedic ridiculousness of the idiotic, small-minded men who run the underworld, but also shows the dire consequences of their bigotry. To connect it to the first shot, they are men who cannot see from the pigeon’s view. Jarmusch drives this point home in a scene where the mobsters shoot a pigeon in a violent confrontation that only happens due to their racial prejudice. Jarmusch sympathetically captures the image of the dead bird brought into the world of guns against its will (a shot that is echoed in the final moments of the film). The bird is a piece of nature interrupted by contrived conflicts and violence caused by men without a code. In contrast, Ghost Dog is a man in perfect step with his nature, who knows his exact place in each of the two worlds of the film. It might bring him loneliness at times, it might bring him trouble at times, but his life is honest—and honesty is the only way a man finds peace.
The film presents a battle between a life of aestheticism, shown through the shallow members of the mob, and a life of ethics, shown through Whitaker’s titular character. And the interesting part of this battle is that the ethical side is not trying to overcome the aesthetic. The ethical seeks to find harmony with the aesthetic, even while the aesthetic attempts to attack and undermine it. Every piece of characterization throughout the film reveals more and more about each side of this war. Where Ghost Dog lives in the moment, the mob avoids it at all costs. Ghost Dog takes time to notice when a bird lands on the end of his gun’s scope. It is not an interruption to him, it is happening and that means it is worthwhile and okay. On the other hand, the mob consumes TV mindlessly through nearly every scene. They never allow the moment to come to them. Where Ghost Dog speaks with purpose, they argue pointlessly; where Ghost Dog shows respect for the world around him, they show disregard. Every choice the movie makes drills home the core philosophy of the film.
To me, Ghost Dog is a movie about belief, nature, and honesty. It depicts lives of dissonance contrasted against a life of harmony. Lives of egoism against a life of empathy. It shows how the people dedicated to hierarchy create a society where those at peace with their place in the world get sucked in and spat out of an overarching system of violence. How cynicism pushes sincerity to isolated places, so it can swallow up and destroy it. How the world values words over actions, and hypocrisy over consistency. Yet despite all of that, it also shows how we can still find a way to lead lives of sincerity and awareness, and if we do, how it gives others the courage to live with the same manner.
There is an abundance of thematic branches that Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai invites its viewers to explore. Great films reward reflection, and Jarmusch’s straightforward storytelling and thematic layout offer a still pool for the viewer to see themselves in. It’s a movie that has resonated deeper and deeper with me on every watch, and there’s so many more scenes and ideas that I could write about, endlessly. Ghost Dog is Jarmusch at his best, weaving the conversational, philosophical style that he brought to the 90s indie boom into a fully realized world of genre filmmaking. You can walk into the theater for the style, but you’ll walk out with so much more.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon
Great read Noah. Fun