From the start of his career, Jarmusch has been traversing the territory of global culture. He’s not simply or exclusively an “American independent” but an astute connoisseur of cultural essentials that tend to escape boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, language, gender, and age, and he broaches a realm of experience and potential bonding that’s daily becoming more important to the quality of our everyday lives on the planet. Considering the fact that the bird in flight behind the credits of Ghost Dog claims no nationality, why should we? If nothing else, wherever we happen to be living and whatever language we speak, most of us are affected by the propaganda and manufactured upheavals of the same multicorporate conglomerates controlling our environment—which arguably makes the whole world kin more than what we know as “communism” or “democracy” ever has, or could. This is how and why Jarmusch’s multicultural viewpoint could be shared by someone like the late Abbas Kiarostami, who accompanied his very first film, Bread and Alley (1970), with Paul Desmond playing a Beatles song, and would later use Vivaldi and Louis Armstrong over Iranian landscapes with an equal lack of self-consciousness. Similarly, Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep—made three years ahead of Ghost Dog, with Maggie Cheung as herself playing a French thief in a remake of a silent serial—may have more to say about what Hong Kong and France have in common than about what makes them culturally disparate. Thanks to all our digital options, we basically are what we can share. So who we are is an essential part of what contemporary art can teach us, and over two decades after its release, Ghost Dog remains one of the most contemporary films that we have.

From the standpoint of today, given the elastic anonymity and community proliferation that define so much of cyberspace—only one of several contemporary arenas in which nationality seems an increasingly outdated mode of identification—it no longer seems so far-fetched that a young Black American man might reinvent himself as an ancient Japanese warrior (one premise of Ghost Dog), that a small-time Italian American crook and a Black American samurai might be “almost extinct” members of “different ancient tribes” who treat each other with respect (another premise), that a Black American samurai and a Black Haitian ice-cream vendor, each unfamiliar with the other’s language, can be best friends and communicate without any difficulty (still another), or that a slim paperback of Japanese stories in translation might be passed along with profit from a white mobster’s daughter (Tricia Vessey) to the Black samurai who rubs out her companion to a Black girl whom he meets on a park bench and then back to the daughter again.

It’s worth adding that computers don’t figure at all in Ghost Dog, a movie whose sense of high tech is basically restricted to cars with fancy CD players, guns with silencers, and cartoons on TV (exploited for various thematic rhyme effects), and whose sense of antiquity is inseparable from its feeling for the present cultural moment. The point is that all the movie’s characters are casually liberated and even defined by their everyday capacity to drift between cultures: one of the aging white gangsters (Cliff Gorman) loves hip-hop and raps along with it, and another (Henry Silva) responds to an enigmatic quotation about beheading from Hagakure by saying, “It’s poetry—the poetry of war.” For that matter, the same gang uses a Chinese restaurant as its clubhouse, although it’s far behind in paying rent.

For all the differences among Jarmusch, Kiarostami, and Assayas in relation to global culture, all three are or were easily misunderstood practitioners of DJ-like sampling, with all its possibilities and limitations. One can’t simply call global culture “good” or “bad” at this point in history, because it mixes together too many potential pluses and minuses—broadening the reach and meaning of traditions and at the same time flattening them, often to the point that one has to redefine them. How and why Frankenstein’s monster or a bear might resemble Ghost Dog is a question (not an answer) that we’re invited to ponder along with the film’s characters.

The functioning of a film or book or piece of music within global culture can’t be equated with its function as a piece of provincial, national, or folk art. Ghost Dog enjoyed successful runs in Japan and France, which may be partially explained by Jarmusch’s assurance in mixing and matching what he takes from the arty genre movies of both countries—in this case, from two very stylishly mannerist 1967 features, Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le samouraï—without ever compromising his own, equally mannerist artistic identity. (Irving Lerner’s minimalist 1958 noir and Zen thriller, Murder by Contract, a low-budget Hollywood effort, also seems quite relevant to what Ghost Dog is doing.) Jarmusch made a point of showing Ghost Dog to the once-prolific, then-unemployed, seventy-seven-year-old B-film maestro Suzuki, who responded, “I see you’ve taken some things from me, and when I make my next film, I’m going to take some things from you.” I’m still trying to figure out how fully this promise was carried out in Suzuki’s splendidly extravagant and immensely pleasurable Pistol Opera (2001)—a belated sequel of sorts to Branded to Kill—but the diverse uses of a wise young girl and an American character named Dr. Painless are particularly suggestive of an exchange between these two prescient global filmmakers, who, like Ghost Dog and Raymond, didn’t speak a word of each other’s language.

This piece is adapted from a review published in the Chicago Reader on March 17, 2000.