Ghost Dog: By the Book

Whitaker’s Ghost Dog, seen in electrifying motion on his rooftop practicing his whirling katana moves and punching exercises, embodies the elegant metaphysical scriptures and strictures found in the book. The character’s lines of scripted dialogue barely add up in word count to two passages from Hagakure, meaning that Whitaker has to deploy those bewitching eyes to sell us on Ghost Dog’s deep poetic fancy for such oblique passages as this: “There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to all things.” This recitation serves as a premonition for the resolve Ghost Dog will soon display in rushing headlong and gun-strong into wetting up his opponents.

Being that the samurai way is “the way of death,” the film’s plotting quickly sets up Ghost Dog as a doomed figure through no fault of his own—well, aside from his adherence to an ancient code that has made him a loyal subject to a Mafia underboss who has employed him for several years to commit hits on, we imagine, other mafiosi.

Ghost Dog’s urban exterior locations, mostly shot in Jersey City, New Jersey, are also redolent of Jarmusch’s clear eighties romance with the boondocks parts of Brooklyn and Queens that few Manhattanites were privy to in 1999—desolate and depopulating areas that were fast on their way to becoming postindustrial, pregentrification ghost towns. The mobsters’ homes, nestled in Queens-like neighborhoods, represent the last stand of New York’s federal-prosecutorial-wiretap-decimated mob culture. Like Ghost Dog, the mafiosi are fading relics of old ways headed for history’s dustbin, regardless of the assassin’s intervention accelerating the inexorable outcome of their destiny charts.

Jarmusch’s selection of RZA to compose the score has a musical logic and a metadimensional aspect as well; the Wu-Tang Clan leader’s ardor for Asian action films was itself mythical by the late nineties, as was his integration of Shaolin-monk Zen and philosophies more familiar to his community via the Nation of Islam breakaway sect known as the Five Percent Nation. The dark, trance-inducing funk of RZA’s signature sound lines up evocatively with the scenes where an introspective but homicidally guided Ghost Dog is portrayed driving in a nocturnal, outer-borough-esque world of ominous, somnambulistic stillness and overarching dread.

I remember seeing Ghost Dog on opening weekend at a Times Square theater where some of the audience seemed old enough to have been regulars in the area during its B-movie heyday, when RZA saw every martial-arts extravaganza produced by Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers that he could on the Deuce. There was a smattering of boos when the lights came up; to this day I don’t know whether that was a rejection of the film as a whole or of the disturbing aspects of the ending scene. Ghost Dog is seen to have made two neighborhood friends in the story—Isaach De Bankolé’s monolingual (French-only) ice-cream-truck owner, Raymond, and Pearline (Camille Winbush), a curious and wise-beyond-her-childhood-years moppet who shares Ghost Dog’s love for books, including Frankenstein, which they both like better than the movie, and Rashomon and Other Stories, which Ghost Dog lends to her, requesting to hear her opinion when she’s done. In one of the few nods to a Hollywood cliché, let alone a Hollywood racial cliché, you’ll find in any Jarmusch film, Ghost Dog’s denouement shows a noble Black man sacrificing himself for a white man. Only this time the act occurs in front of two people—Raymond and Pearline—who not only don’t know how to react but also are depicted as verklempt and uncertain of how to feel about his vicious and ponderous killing while it’s happening right before their eyes. You’re also given to wonder how the murder happens in the same hood where we discover Ghost Dog is known and respected by a roughneck, Wu Tang–ish cipher of rappers who hang out near the scene. Not even Whitaker’s revelatory peepers seem able to make sense of it all for Ghost Dog in the troubling end.