Poetry and War: Thoughts on Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)

 

“Forest Whitaker in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999).” IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165798/mediaviewer/rm4267680513/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2021.

The moment in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) that best captures the essence of the whole piece is the one where the titular Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) is in the process of sizing up a mob hideout from the woods with a scope. His plan seems to be to take out the leader of the operation, Ray Vargo (Henry Silva), from a distance, but his gaze drifts from the building and the men in front of it to locate a noisy woodpecker in the trees nearby. Looking down the scope of his lethal weapon, Ghost Dog watches the woodpecker going about its animal business. Later, when Vargo does arrive, Ghost Dog loses his opportunity to kill the man from a distance when another bird lands on his weapon. This is Ghost Dog—this violent film “distracted” by meditations on nature, nighttime cityscapes, the mundanity of human lives tinged with the fantastical (aggressively ordinary-looking characters juxtaposed with a man building a boat on the roof of his building), cartoons and cartoon violence, literature, and what Vargo terms “the poetry of war” of Hagakure, the supposed guide to the lifestyle and philosophy of the samurai that Ghost Dog lives by and recites throughout the film via voiceover in moments more contemplative and solemn than bloodthirsty or hardcore. John Wick, this is not, though both men do pull a large weapon case from a hidden compartment in their living spaces after the unforgivable murder of animals dear to them.

While the body count is large, there are long moments of quiet in the movie, where Ghost Dog speaks with Pearline (Camille Winbush), a young girl with a lunchbox full of books we can contrast against Ghost Dog’s case of weapons, for example. There’s a focus on sharing literature and thoughts about literature that ties the whole film together. Ghost Dog “borrows” a copy of Rashōmon from Vargo’s daughter Louise (Tricia Vessey) early in the film when she accidentally witnesses him taking care of his violent business. He reads the book and then passes it on to Pearline, who returns it to Ghost Dog just before his death at the hands of Louie (John Tormey), the mobster he serves and to whom he bequeaths the book, bringing it back into the orbit of Louise in her new capacity as the leader of the mob, a position from which she ordered the death of the man who killed her father and nearly destroyed his whole organization and to whom she once recommended the same book. This much-traded book ties the narrative together, and the movie also periodically has the aforementioned readings from Hagakure, the words of which are prominently displayed onscreen. Maybe Ghost Dog is more about poetry than war. There’s this interesting vibe that I got while watching the movie—a sense that what I was watching was a lot of people doing things they took no pleasure in but did anyway because of a code of conduct. Or maybe what pleasure they do take is from the sense of staying true to their chosen way of life rather than in the killing itself.

Take the initial murder of a mobster by Ghost Dog at the behest of the mob that then puts him on the organization’s hitlist because, whether “Handsome Frank” (Richard Portnow) was stepping way out of line making time with the boss’ daughter or not, he was a made man and his death has to be avenged. The violence that follows is perhaps oddly impersonal. There’s little glee to be found in it, even stylistically in the sense that the film’s violence is more realistic and mundane (not even exactly “grim”) than it is fantastical. It’s perfunctory, for all its occasional visual flourish. Similarly, Ghost Dog calmly follows his code to his death without deviation—He won’t kill the man he’s chosen to serve as a retainer even when he knows that that man will kill him because of his own code and since his own lord (or, now, lady) has decreed that it must be.

One of the mobsters, Vinny (Victor Argo), says at one point that at least Ghost Dog is letting them die like gangsters through this bloody conflict. While violence is an integral part of the situation and Vinny seems perversely pleased to be bleeding to death, he’s ultimately happy because he’s dying in a way befitting the code he’s chosen to guide his life rather than because of some fascination with the act of killing itself. If there’s nothing so formal as a Hagakure for Italian mob guys, at the very least there’s the notion of those who live by the sword dying by it. Rather than dying of old age (which seemed very likely to look at these guys), they get to go out in a way that legitimizes their identities as gangsters. The idea of antiquated codes or ages or the spirit of an age passing crops up periodically throughout the film, and it doesn’t take much thought to associate it at least in part with all those aging mob guy bodies. As much as they put up a front that suggests their business would have persisted without Ghost Dog’s bloody intervention, I’m not so certain. They’re chronically behind on their rent, if nothing else.

Early in the movie, a bunch of the mobsters are down on a sidewalk while a kid in an upstairs apartment throws his toys at them, one of the men dutifully stooping to pick the projectiles up off the ground. These unimpressive guys who are members of a criminal organization that’s often heavily mythologized or stylized in media are getting berated and smacked in the head by a child. In the not-too-distant future, though, they’ll be circling the metaphorical wagons, guns drawn, in a fight to the death to protect their boss from a dangerous enemy who wants to kill them because the honor code of their crime “family” demands that they kill him. The bloodshed itself isn’t important; it’s the way that they can finally, truly fulfill their role through either killing or dying that matters. As I’ve already suggested, the violence of the film is almost perfunctory and is also without tension. I don’t think there’s ever any doubt communicated to the viewer regarding whether Ghost Dog can kill his would-be assailants, and in that regard it is very John Wick-like. In that other film, though, the pleasure is in seeing just how outmatched the antagonists are when they come up against the ultimate hitman. They’re also outmatched in Ghost Dog, but there’s not really any pleasure in their demise—aside from maybe a couple of deaths that are somewhat comedic.

Jarmusch peppers the film with snippets from cartoons, and these moments of explicit animated comedy contribute to the somewhat more slyly humorous tone of the rest of the movie since we come to associate the gangsters not so much with threats in smoky rooms or with awesome gunplay and more so come to think of them sitting with their guard down in front of little television sets playing bits of Betty Boop or Felix the Cat or even the fictional Itchy and Scratchy Show from The Simpsons. These cartoons act as comic relief but also as sources of foreshadowing and of thematic insight. The last of them, for instance, is the Itchy and Scratchy bit where they draw guns on each other and then draw progressively bigger and bigger guns until their weapons encircle the globe and the eventual gunshot propels Scratchy into space. There’s an obvious possible message to read into this little animated moment in the larger film as it sits at the end (within the limits of the story of the film, anyway) of the cycle of violence, Louie having finally put down Ghost Dog for the murders of nearly the entire Vargo crime family. Obviously, it speaks to how violence begets violence inevitably until violence overshadows everything. So, perhaps a code that requires inevitable violence is not such a good thing, regardless of what generation or part of the world it comes from. There’s ultimately not that much difference between a mobster and a samurai, Ghost Dog suggests. It’s interesting to me, also, how when Vinny is dying from a gunshot wound in a car and the car is pulled over by the police for speeding, his death actually comes immediately after killing that police officer (a woman) to try to get them back on the road. His violation of what seems to be part of his code, based on Louie’s reaction to the murder, almost seems to result in his death, creating the impression that breaking free of such a way of life, once you commit to the path, isn’t so easy.

There’s probably a meaningful piece to be written (that has possibly already been written) about Ghost Dog’s depiction of samurai. Does it valorize them or criticize them? As I noted above, there may be evidence of criticism within the film, though there’s no denying that the mixture Jarmusch has created here of ancient martial poeticism and modern gunplay and urban landscapes set to a soundtrack by RZA is also kind of cool. This isn’t a thread I’m qualified to intimately follow since I don’t have the historical or cultural familiarity to offer any kind of informed reading. All that I know is that the samurai as a figure and the Hagakure as a guide to their code are both fraught things.  For example, in the leadup to the release of the samurai-focused video game Ghost of Tsushima, I ran across some thoughts on Twitter by streamer, media critic, and translator Kazuma Hashimoto who discussed the problems he saw with the game’s depictions of samurai. Those thoughts were later formalized to an extent in the essay “Ghost of Tsushima, Kurosawa, and the Political Myth of the Samurai” for the website Polygon which discusses, among other things, the ties between the myth of the samurai as noble warriors and with nationalist sentiment in Japanese politics.

On Twitter and in the essay, Kazuma Hashimoto makes the argument that the historical samurai were not noble warriors and that their code of conduct and their pristine image have been polished to a useful sheen over the years for political purposes. When Western media, like Ghost of Tsushima, comes along and uncritically replicates those images and interpretations for an international audience, it just further cements those lies as truth in the public consciousness, and those lies aren’t just annoyingly ahistorical; they’re still politically useful: “The samurai as a concept, versus who the samurai actually were, has become so deeply intertwined with Japanese imperialist beliefs that it has become difficult to separate the two. This is where cultural and historical understanding are important when approaching the mythology of the samurai as replicated in the West.” How Ghost Dog interacts with this dynamic is a question I can’t really answer since I don’t feel comfortable making that judgment. Maybe that problematic position is represented a bit by how Ghost Dog passes his copy of Hagakure onto Pearline just before his death.

The book is treated like poetry in the movie, but it’s also a guide to the politicized, sanitized code of the samurai. Maybe it’s not for nothing that Pearline picks up Ghost Dog’s gun after his death and tries to kill his killer, and the only thing that stops her from immediately continuing the cycle of violence is the fact that the weapon isn’t loaded. In the end, she’s engrossed in the book in her kitchen. Ghost Dog told her she didn’t need to read it right away, but she’s absorbed. Will she appreciate it only as poetry, or will it—and her fond memories of the man who gifted it to her—twist the rest of her life? What the code of the samurai actually means to Ghost Dog is a question the movie doesn’t answer. The narrative is ultimately a simple one, and while it is very focused on character moments, it is not so interested in character motivation. We find out why Ghost Dog became his lord’s retainer but not when or why he decided to model his life on that of the samurai. Did it come before or after his choice to become a hitman? Before or after Louie saved his life and he felt that he needed to repay that debt somehow? There’s a sort of chicken-and-the-egg situation here—Did Ghost Dog take to the code to add legitimacy and order to the life he was already living, or did it actively shape his life? And are we as the audience meant to see that influence as a good thing or a bad thing? The film doesn’t owe us answers—and certainly not a moral—but it’s worth thinking about what Ghost Dog communicates about the nature of the samurai because it’s part of a larger conversation with real world implications.

Also very obviously loaded with real world implication are the film’s engagements with race. This is another topic I can’t speak comprehensively or authoritatively about since I am white. There is explicitly racist language used in the film, especially when the mobsters are first hearing about Ghost Dog from Louie, and there’s also an especially interesting confrontation some mob guys have on a roof when they’re looking for Ghost Dog but encounter someone else instead—a man whose ethnicity they can’t identify but who says he’s Cayuga, Native American (played by Gary Farmer). The mobsters argue over whether they should shoot him or not (since he’s big and sort of brown, like their target) but ultimately just insult and threaten him and kill one of his pigeons before leaving. All of the couple of scenes with the mobsters on rooftops looking for Ghost Dog are rendered sort of ridiculous by just how utterly uncool the men look as they go about enforcing Vargo’s will. Mostly, they just look old and out of shape, and their guns look ridiculous in their hands. When they do ransack Ghost Dog’s place and kill his pigeons, we don’t see them do it, and that’s probably for the best. While Ghost Dog certainly has comedic elements, I don’t know that anyone could take the dramatic narrative at all seriously if we had to watch these guys who just look like somebody’s middle-aged dad or their badly-dressed grandpa trying to shoot pigeons and tear up books. They just don’t have any sort of physically imposing presence as a group.

Consider how before the confrontation with the Cayuga man the two mob guys stop at the top of the stairs to catch their breath. These are the guys that are supposed to kill Ghost Dog—who’s taller, younger, and stronger, as well as better-equipped. They just seem completely out of their element. There’s the one especially aged member of Vargo’s inner circle who gleefully joins in the racist mocking of Ghost Dog early in the film and who later dies from what seems to be a heart attack at the mere sight of “the fucking bird man.” Their whole organization seems to fit into the equivalent of a country church social hall and is entirely composed of the old and the aging. You almost get the sense that their particular mob family could have died of old age in the not-too-distant future if Ghost Dog didn’t kill them first. To me, the portrait the film paints of the men’s unremarkable physicality and overall incompetence dovetails with their sporadic racism to sort of comment on said racism. These guys are all but falling apart in almost every way, the movie seems to suggest, so isn’t their racism just another way in which they’re broken down and ridiculous? If they die feeling like real gangsters, maybe that’s rewarding them too much.

Then there’s the scene where Ghost Dog swaps out his more casual attire for a suit and then swaps license plates with a white family parked nearby… while said family picnics in the background, apparently completely unaware. It’s like Ghost Dog is invisible in this moment, which makes a kind of sense when viewed from this race-focused perspective. Usually, I think we expect a sort of hyper-visibility experienced by marginalized people in the United States and especially by Black men, but one interpretation of this scene could be that Ghost Dog doesn’t even warrant noticing because of his race. And all this doesn’t even touch the encounter Ghost Dog has after killing Vargo when he meets a pair of white hunters, who have killed a rare black bear just because they can, that turns racist and then violent. The hunters draw an explicit connection between the bear and the man when the discussion of the rarity of the animal turns to the rarity of people like Ghost Dog in the area as one of the men goes to the bed of the truck for a gun, prompting violence from Ghost Dog. It’s the nasty inverse of the more thoughtful and friendly earlier scene where Ghost Dog’s friend, Raymond, the French-speaking ice cream man (Isaach de Bankolé), compares the hitman to a bear. The incident with the hunters is meant as a cathartic moment for the audience, though it’s clearly a fantasy shown to a world where systemic inequality inflicts more violence on marginalized bodies every day than can be revenged by a mystical hitman. Undoubtedly, there’s something much more grounded in the real-world experiences of racism in the United States to be said about Ghost Dog, whether positive or negative.

In tackling the samurai myth and in the depiction of racism (or at least racists), Jarmusch is taking on a lot in this movie, and while there are risks associated with reaching, I was pleasantly surprised by just how much Ghost Dog being Black actually does seem to matter in the film. It’s not necessarily important to the main plot, but it shows up a good bit in the smaller moments and in the texture of the film. As I established at the beginning of this piece, it’s ultimately those small moments—and that texture—that matter. Ghost Dog quotes from Hagakure at one point about the importance of small things (and of treating large or important things as unimportant), and that feels like a good summation of the whole picture and maybe of Jarmusch’s driving creative impulse in his work that I’ve seen. I’m not going to say Ghost Dog doesn’t want to be a movie about a hitman or doesn’t care about being a movie about a hitman: It’s just a movie about a hitman that carves out its own identity by choosing to sideline the bloodshed for periods of time to see the city from a pigeon’s perspective or talk about Frankenstein or watch a man build a boat on his roof or listen to two people converse who can’t understand each other’s language but are still best friends and understand one another anyway. It’s just about exactly the sort of hitman movie you might expect from Jim Jarmusch, knowing his interests and his sense of humor. The war is definitely in the there—see the pretty cool assassination Ghost Dog pulls off through a sink drain of all things—but so is the poetry.

If I look ahead to Paterson in 2016, the way that the passages from Hagakure are presented here reminds me very much of the presentation of Paterson’s poetry in that other movie. The ways that Forrest Whitaker, Camille Winbush, and Adam Driver read or think (aloud) the words are strikingly similar. Even if the real way of the samurai is flawed and violent, Jarmusch would still like you to stop and appreciate the poeticism of its idealized self. Whether that can actually be done without also valorizing the problematic and political components of that idealized self is still a question worth asking.