Fatiguing is probably the most accurate word to
describe this film directed and written by Jim Jarmusch, whose Black hero played by Forest
Whitaker, a high-tech
professional assassin working for mafiosi, dutifully follows the precepts of the
Hagakure--a seventeenth century Japanese treaty for samurai--and treats his
mafia boss, Louie (John Tormey), as a medieval lord to whom he has pledged his fealty (For the
benefit of the uninitiated, here are a few words on the subject of the Hagakure
from Zen and Japanese Culture [1938] by the great Buddhist scholar D.T.
Suzuki. Commenting on the relation between the code of the samurai and Zen
doctrines, Suzuki states that: "There is a document that was very much
talked about in connection with the Japanese military operations in China in the
1930's. It is known as the Hagakure, which literally means 'Hidden
under the Leaves,' for it is one of the virtues of the samurai not to display
himself, not to blow his horn, but to keep himself away from the public eye and
be doing good for his fellow beings. To the compilation of this book, which
consists of various notes, anecdotes, moral sayings, etc., a Zen monk had his
part to contribute. The work started in the middle part of the seventeenth
century under Nabeshima Naoshige, the feudal lord of Saga in the island of Kyūshū.")
When one of Ghost Dog's contracts goes awry, the mafia dons, a positively
decrepit lot, order his execution--an unwary move which arouses the wrath of
Ghost Dog, who then ploddingly eliminates his adversaries although sparing
Louie. An almost painfully slow moving film, Ghost Dog made me think at some
moments of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo on downers. Prospective viewers should be
forewarned: it may take the patience of a samurai to make it through Ghost
Dog.
Ghost Dog uses the framework of an action movie
to preach a multicultural sermon. Not only is the main character an African-American, but he lives in a neighborhood populated mainly by other people of
color, and his best friend is a Haitian who sells ice cream on the street. This
seems to me as valid a premise as any for making a film, but it has some rather
peculiar results in the end product. First of all, Jarmusch goes in for some of
the same heavy-handed ideological allegorizing that afflicts Boys Don't Cry. All
of the people of color who show up in the film--including Ghost Dog--are kind,
gentle characters who respect all beings, honor life, etc., while the whites
nearly without exception are thugs or sadistic killers. (Ghost Dog, by contrast,
only kills out of obligation to Louie, who has rescued the former when still a
youth from racist attackers, as a flashback informs the audience.) The film goes especially
far in this direction when Ghost Dog, driving back to town from a sojourn
to a mansion in the country where the mafiosi have holed up, encounters some
redneck hunters decked out in combat fatigues who have just downed a bear and
are gloating over their kill. After delivering a solemn lecture on the sacred
place accorded the bear among the Native Americans, Ghost Dog takes them all out
when one of these jerks uses a racist epithet and pulls out a shotgun with
murderous intent. Although I would certainly admit that white people have a lot
to make up for in their treatment not only of African-Americans but of anyone
with a dark skin in in the USA, this sort of allegorical settling of
scores--which reeks of the equally obnoxious and equally allegorical conclusion
to Easy Rider--hardly seems the answer.
In the second place,
this allegorization of races has disastrous consequences for the film's
stylistic coherence. Unlike Boys Don't Cry whose style is quite unified and
controlled, Ghost Dog is stylistically torn in two directions. The scenes with
white characters--and these are primarily mafiosi--are staged in an almost
Brechtian style, while the ones with Ghost Dog and his friends in a local park
have an intimate, low-key quality resembling cinéma vérité. I can get the
point that the white men act like robots--especially the gang boss Ray Vargo
(Henry Silva), who is
constantly photographed with an absolutely waxen dead look on his face, giving
him the appearance of an enormous, inertly stupid doll--and that the people of
color show the spontaneity anyone would expect of a sentient being. But this
opposition produces a gaping stylistic abyss Ghost Dog never succeeds in
bridging, nor am I sure it could be bridged without rethinking the entire
concept of the film. In Jarmusch's attempt to employ such an "estrangement
effect" in the movie, it
is not hard to detect the influence of Godard at work here, but in an undigested
form. Unlike Godard's characters,
Ghost Dog's are not world-weary Europeans but de facto nomads cut adrift in a
fragmented, centrifugal culture in which they are trying to create a viable
identity for themselves out of what the dominant white culture has discarded or
dispatched to the ash heap. Nor are there any cultural references in the film
which have the same kind of resonance as do the ones Godard liberally strews
through his early movies--and a work as deeply rooted in Japanese tradition as
Hagakure, arbitrarily transported into an American setting, can hardly
play the same role as the allusions to Homer and Hölderlin in Contempt. Moreover,
Jarmusch's attempts to overcome this problem by literally incorporating
the Hagakure into Ghost Dog with full screen quotations from the text
frequently inserted throughout the film not only further slows down an already leisurely paced
motion picture but drastically points up the difficulty of trying to forcibly
bring East and West together.
I wish I could like Ghost Dog more than I do,
since Jarmusch has a highly original vision to which he remains true from
beginning to end. In fact, seeing the film the day after having viewed High
Fidelity with its complacently conformist aesthetics, I almost wish I could rush
out and embrace it as a masterpiece. The difference between
Ghost Dog and High
Fidelity almost epitomizes the polarization of the American cinema today between
imaginative but often erratic works by directors like Jarmusch, Darren
Aronofsky,
Todd Solondz, or Todd
Haynes, on the one hand, and artistically banal,
dramatically shallow productions like High Fidelity or
American Beauty, on the other. Roland
Barthes, in a passage entitled "Blackmailing with Theory" ("La
chantage ŕ la theorie") in the little volume he put together on
himself for the collection Écrivains de toujours published by Seuil, commented
that there are certain experimental works of art that say in effect, "love
me, protect me, defend me, since I conform to the theory you advocate. Don't I
do what Artaud has done, what Cage has done?" And Barthes goes on to
answer: "But Artaud is not just the avant-garde--it's also writing.
Cage also has charm...." I don't wish Ghost Dog were
any less demanding or adventurous; I do wish it were leavened with some of the
humor and eccentricity of The Limey, or Erin Brockovich, or even
Fight Club. The film, which at times creates an oneiric visual
atmosphere akin to that of Boys Don't Cry--particularly at the
beginning, when Ghost Dog goes off on his first mission--is well photographed
by Robby Müller. Even more impressive is the sound design credited to Anthony
J. Ciccolini III and the extraordinary score by the RZA, available on a CD
from Amazon.com. Ghost Dog's
most powerful asset, however, is the magnificent, implacable mask of Forest
Whitaker, whose image dominates the movie like that of a great silent star.