The Class of 1999: 'Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai'
Jim Jarmusch's sly spoof of action movies is all about cultural evolution and amalgamation.
1999 was a historically-great year for film and dramatic narrative as a whole. I’m using my 2024 to look back at, reconsider, and celebrate these stories as they all celebrate their 25th anniversaries. I recently re-reviewed The Virgin Suicides; next up on the docket is Run Lola Run. But first… it’s time for…
Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai - written & directed by Jim Jarmusch - May 19, 1999
Predictably, more than a few of 1999’s many great films have some level of interest in the impending arrival of a new century - perhaps none more so than Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, which never says anything literal about the time at which it was made or set.
On its surface, Ghost Dog is a muted spoof of macho action movies (just as Jarmusch’s Dead Man and The Dead Don’t Die are ostensibly a western and a zombie movie, respectively), full of small flourishes that are consistently silly, ironic, aloof, and self-aware (born in 1953, Jarmusch is technically a Baby Boomer… but his vibe is 99% Gen X).
But Ghost Dog’s subtext is all about change. Specifically, Ghost Dog is about cultural change, how the lines of cultural and racial identities have become increasingly blurred, and finding a balance between the new ways and the old.
Ghost Dog’s titular protagonist is played by Forest Whitaker. Years ago, a mobster named Louie (John Tormey) saved Ghost Dog from (presumably racist) White guys who jumped him in an alley; an avid devotee of Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s 18th century “book of the samurai,” Hagakure, Ghost Dog now considers himself Louie’s “retainer,” and thus works as Louie’s hitman.
Louie sends Ghost Dog on a hit, not knowing that his commendatore’s daughter, Louise (Tricia Vessey), will be present to witness it. Her father, Ray Vargo (the great Henry Silva), isn’t too happy about this. Vargo, his right hand, Sonny Valerio (Cliff Gorman), and a character credited only as ‘Old Consigliere’ (Gene Ruffini) order Louie to put Ghost Dog down. But Ghost Dog isn’t all that easy to find: he only communicates with Louie via carrier pigeon.
While the mafia is running around the city executing any Black man with a rooftop pigeon coop they come across (kind of like the NYPD), Ghost Dog is befriending a precocious little girl, Pearline (Camille Winbush), and hanging out with his best friend, Raymond (Jarmusch regular Isaach De Bankolé), an an ice cream vendor named who only speaks French.
The mobsters then make a horrible blunder we know they will come to regret: they find Ghost Dog’s pigeon coop while he’s out with Raymond, and they kill all the pigeons, save for one, who wasn’t home at the time (fifteen years before Chad Stahelski murdered Keanu Reeves’ dog in John Wick, Jim Jarmusch slaughtered Forest Whitaker’s pigeons in Ghost Dog).
Naturally, this infuriates Ghost Dog, who subsequently wipes out seemingly every member of their family save for Louie, to whom he remains eternally loyal.
Despite this, Louie comes looking to avenge his fallen compadres. Louie makes it seem as though he and Ghost Dog are going to have a good old fashioned duel, but then he shoots Ghost Dog before Ghost Dog has even had the chance to unholster his gun - which, it turns out, wasn’t even loaded anyway (again, no shortage of subtext here).
In the final scene, we see Pearline, at home with her mom, reading Ghost Dog’s final gift to her: his copy of Hagakure. Just as the movie has previously included quotes from that tome narrated by Ghost Dog, it now includes one narrated by Pearline - the implication being that Ghost Dog and his code of honor will live on through her.
Again: if you’ve never seen Ghost Dog, that plot description probably sounds like the most-interesting possible version of a DTV movie starring David Bradley. The difference is that David Bradley movies aren’t trying to be funny, which Ghost Dog is: the characters are farcical, the dialogue often wittingly lousy, the plot contrivances purposefully illogical.
Even the way Jarmusch and cinematographer Robby Müller shoot the picture is funny. Jarmusch uses camera movement very sparingly, and his lighting is mostly naturalistic. This is the opposite aesthetic of modern action movies, which move the camera as much as possible and uses tons and tons and tons of quick edits, to both artificially stimulate the audience and make dumb stuff seem less-dumb. When you take those things away and just keep the deeply-stupid, faux-tough-guy dialogue, you wind up with something that is just blatantly silly.
Ghost Dog is more than just a subdued lampoon, though; even while it’s having fun being goofy, every ounce of Ghost Dog’s being observes, wrestles with, and engages in cultural fusion.
As noted by Greg Tate, the entire film is itself an amalgamation of multiple genres, each of which is traditionally associated with a different culture:
“Ghost Dog allows Jarmusch the classic cineaste and consummate postmodernist to expand upon [his] genre sampling and remixing… Jarmusch uses Ghost Dog to up his game and rifle through three genres of which he’s enamored at once: samurai, Italian American gangster, and blaxploitation.”
I would add westerns to that list: the final showdown between Ghost Dog and Louie isn’t just photographed like a like a classic Hollywood shootout, but Ghost Dog even says, “What is this, Louie? High Noon?”
The multicultural blending is also evident in the characters themselves. there’s Sonny Valerio’s self-professed love of Flavor Flav. Sonny proves his bona fides by rapping passages from Public Enemy’s “Cold Lampin’ With Flavor” in two separate scenes, one of which also includes him dancing along with the track.
Furthermore, while Raymond doesn’t speak English, Ghost Dog doesn’t speak French: another one of the movie’s many wry running gags is that Ghost Dog and Raymond are constantly saying the same thing to one another without realizing it (e.g., Ghost Dog (in English) says, “I gotta go. I got some business to take care of,” and then Raymond (in French) replies, “I don’t know what he said, but I guess he’s gotta go. Must have some business to take care of.”). And not only that, but there’s a scene where Ghost Dog and Raymond go to observe a guy building a boat on his roof, and when Raymond shouts down to him in French, he responds in Spanish, which neither Ghost Dog nor Raymond speak.
Then there’s the movie’s score: it’s by RZA, producer and co-founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, the legendary hip-hop group that is legendarily obsessed with Asian martial arts cinema (RZA also has a cameo in Ghost Dog; he went on to direct, co-write, co-score, and co-star in his own martial arts movie, The Man with the Iron Fists, in 2012).
But the most obvious example is, of course, Ghost Dog himself. Not only is Hagakure his Bible… and not only do he, Louise, and Pearline all share a single copy of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short story collection, Rashomon1… but he holsters his gun as though it were a samurai sword (another good running gag) and engages in practice exercises with an actual samurai sword.
Jarmusch showcases these cultural cocktails as natural, inevitable occurrences, and voids coding them in terms so simple as “bad” or “good.” Valerio knows about hip-hop and Ray Vargo is an ignorant bigot and they both die; Ghost Dog’s acceptance of all cultures doesn’t save his life. Almost every antagonist in the movie is a flagrantly-racist old White guy, but some of them cling to to tradition (a dying gangster: “He’s sending us out in the old way, like real fuckin’ gangsters.”), and others, eh, not so much (a redneck hunter: “This ain’t no ancient culture here, mister.”).
Ghost Dog himself explicitly acknowledges the tension between things old and new, taking an objective stance on the subject just before his final tête-à-tête with Louie: “We’re from different ancient tribes, and now we’re both almost extinct. But sometimes, you gotta stick with the ancient, old-school ways.” He welcomes his death. Indeed, one of the more notable Hagakure excerpts Ghost Dog reads is all about the acceptance of one’s own inexorable demise:
“The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily… And every day, without fail, one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai.”
Things change; death is inescapable. It’s sad, but it’s also an organic happening and, in the case of evolution, a natural step.
Twenty-five years after its debut at Cannes, Ghost Dog, like Alexander Payne’s Election, seems almost oracular. Technology has shrunk the world, and while we’re more sensitive now to cultural misappropriation, we’re also increasingly moving past the point of anything being truly “regional.” Because everyone everywhere can so easily communicate and share with everyone everywhere else, we have engaged in a meshing of cultures. 25 years ago, Ghost Dog had to gift Pearline Hagakure, but today, she’d be able to get it at the click of a button on her tablet; a sexagenarian who enjoys Public Enemy seemed funny in 1999, but the number of sexagenarians who enjoy Public Enemy is only going to increase in the coming years (Flavor Flav himself is now 65).
Jarmusch knew that this process would continue in the 21st century (even if he couldn’t possibly have foreseen the speed it would be lent by social media). He saw the benefits and the necessity of this evolution, but he also acknowledged that it meant some people, good and bad alike, would soon be obsolete.
The Class of 1999
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon takes its name and wraparound plot from the title story in this collection. But the story within the collection which the film actually most resembles is in “In a Grove,” which is the one Pearline and Ghost Dog not-coincidentally happen to favor. I don’t know if this is actually relevant to anything; I just think it’s interesting!