Essential Cinema : On the Necessity of Film Canons (9780801895142) by Rosenbaum Jonathan

Author:Rosenbaum, Jonathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr
Published: 2004-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

International Sampler

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Jim Jarmusch’s seventh narrative feature, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, may be a failure, if only because most of its characters are never developed far enough beyond their mythic profiles to live independently of them. But if it is, it’s such an exciting, prescient, moving, and noble failure that I wouldn’t care to swap it for even three or four modest successes.

Compared with a masterpiece like its controversial predecessor, the 1995 Dead Man, Ghost Dog seems designed to get Jarmusch out of the art-house ghetto, at least in this country, and into something closer to the mainstream. It’s full of familiar elements reconfigured in unfamiliar ways: Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), whose life was once saved by Louie, a New Jersey hoodlum, becomes Louie’s samurai hit man, communicating with him exclusively via homing pigeons. When something goes wrong during a hit, Louie’s gang decides to wipe out Ghost Dog, who retaliates in order to defend himself.

Like Dead Man, Ghost Dog is far more ambitious than any of Jarmusch’s earlier works. Both films still bear traces of his origins as a New York minimalist, but Jarmusch has introduced historical references—a sense of antiquity and tradition treated with genuine gravity and an expanded sense of time to match his well-developed sense of geographical space—that have opened up his imagination and extended his thematic and affective range well beyond that of his first five features.

Some of this sense of history comes through literary references. There were brief references in some of the earlier films, such as those to Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales in Mystery Train, but the references in Dead Man and Ghost Dog are crucial. The key texts in Ghost Dog are Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (an eighteenth-century warrior text), Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Rashomon and Other Stories (an early-twentieth-century collection), Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century Frankenstein, and an undated French book about bears. These books are as important as the quotations from William Blake’s poetry in Dead Man, because they offer various kinds of life lessons and because, in one way or another, they’re shared by two or more characters and thus become touchstones. Moreover, with the exception of the Akutagawa collection, which circulates the most, all of them can be regarded as books about the movie’s title hero. Indeed, Hagakure serves as Ghost Dog’s Bible and is quoted in the film in extended intertitles no less than thirteen times; the first twelve passages are read aloud by Ghost Dog, who’s offscreen, and the final passage is read aloud by Pearline, a little girl he meets in a park.

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,”

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