Jim Jarmusch has long been interested in communication. Not exactly in how we communicate but the space that exists when people from different backgrounds interface. In his early work, the director used this plane as the axis for much of his humor. Both Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law featured European characters trying to make sense of America through broken English. Yet Jarmusch isn’t making jokes at the expense of his characters. In fact, there is a sort of sweetness there.
Take for example, Dead Man, Jarmusch’s 1995 Western that features Johnny Depp being led through a brutal landscape by Nobody (Gary Farmer), a Native American guide of sorts who believes his charge is the reincarnation of the poet William Blake. Both of the men speak English, but the way Nobody understands the world is vastly different than the way Blake perceives it. It’s that search for common ground, a mutual understanding of sorts, that drives many of Jarmusch’s characters.
The same sort of interplay drives Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jarmusch’s 1999 follow-up to Dead Man. In this genre mash-up that shifts from samurai flick to gangster movie, Forest Whitaker plays the eponymous character, a Black hit man who lives in a rooftop shack in a city that resembles New York. Ghost Dog doesn’t own a cell phone and no one knows where he lives. Instead, he communicates with the Mafia (for whom he performs hits) via messages attached to the pigeons he raises. When we first met Ghost Dog he is reading Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s spiritual handbook for samurai. He takes these teachings to heart as Jarmusch interrupts the film 14 times to superimpose elements of the code Ghost Dog follows, each teaching appearing and disintegrating like a koan on the screen. It is a riddle of sorts. How is Jarmusch tying this specific lesson to what we’re seeing? Since Ghost Dog is a man of few words, these moments allow us to understand how he perceives the world.
Following a misunderstanding with his Mafia bosses, Ghost Dog eventually becomes a target himself. The Mob truly has no idea where to find him, though. He only communicates with Louie (John Torney), a low-level hood who once saved pre-Samurai Ghost Dog from a beating. Ghost Dog has since bound himself to Louie, swearing himself as the Mafioso’s retainer. Louie doesn’t really seem to care about the Hagakure. He just likes Ghost Dog’s discretion and efficacy when it comes to whacking people.
Jarmusch’s playful use of miscommunication comes in to play when we meet Ghost Dog’s only friend: a Haitian ice cream truck owner named Raymond (Isaach De Bankolé), who can only speak French. Even though Ghost Dog and Raymond don’t share a common tongue, they actually understand one another better than they believe. In a sly joke, Ghost Dog often echoes in English whatever Raymond says in subtitled French. Instead, they are able to appreciate life’s beauty and mystery despite being able to speak.
There is also a communication breakdown between Ghost Dog and the mobsters in the movie. When mythologized by Hollywood, the men of the Cosa Nostra live and die by a strict code. In Jarmusch’s film, the mobsters are often played for laughs. They are undisciplined and crass, very different from the ascetic Ghost Dog. These aren’t rich and powerful men. They are in arrears for rent and long-past their prime. They are men who know their time has passed, but are too afraid to communicate it.
Richly shot by Robby Müller and featuring an evocative score by the RZA, Ghost Dog picks up the discussion about the space between life and death that Jarmusch began in Dead Man. The Hagakure that Samurai must be ready to welcome death at every turn and like Depp’s Blake, Ghost Dog seems to wander in that liminal space that exists between these poles. It is one of the director’s coolest features, in an oeuvre featuring some of the slickest characters ever. We may not need to understand everything we see, but that’s exactly the point.
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