This is a paper that I gave at the 2004 Virginia Humanities Conference in Bridgewater. It is a nascent project that grew out of my course Cultural Theory at the Movies, and is on-going.
in progress: please do not smite or percolate without
permission
Ghost Modernism
by Ben Chappell
The title character of Jim Jarmusch’s 1999 film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is an anti-hero who stands out even on a cultural landscape that is crowded with them. Subtly played by Forrest Whitaker, Ghost Dog is an African American professional assassin who earns his meager living performing hits for an Italian crime family and lives in strict adherence to the feudal-period code of the samurai, which he learns from a translation of the 18th century text Hagakure by Tsunetono Yamamoto. Jarmusch’s study of this character is typically minimalist, contemplative, and sometimes funny, but all the time laced through with a contemporary grit thanks to the setting in an unnamed but recognizably devastated urban core and to the musical score by hip-hop producer the RZA.
Academic criticism of Ghost Dog has been scant, which I find surprising for reasons that will become clear in this paper. What theoretically informed discussion is available on the film at least sometimes falls into what I will call the trap of periodizing. Jarmusch is well recognized as a postmodernist auteur of American cinema, and so it is easy for academic critics to connect his work with a well-rehearsed litany of postmodern aesthetic characteristics. Thus Ryoko Otomo notes the “postmodern eclecticism” of Ghost Dog. For Otomo, the film exemplifies what Fredric Jameson considered to be the quintessential postmodern form, the blank parody. In contrast with the modernist posture of critique, postmodern blank parody is seen as critically bankrupt, sacrificing any power for social comment in its embrace of style over substance. Otomo writes:
Parodies have by definition a sting to mock an original seriousness. Postmodern blank parodies are on the other hand somehow without a sting, because for them the meaning of the original has already collapsed and therefore there remains only the form of the original, or its particular style without a content. (Otomo http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/9/samurai.html#4)
Like Jameson, Otomo notes the apparent loss of history in postmodernist representation: she situates Ghost Dog in terms of a relationship between the modern west and real, historical Japan, placing the uncanniness of Ghost Dog’s pseudo-Samurai lifeway within the actual and fictive context of a North American commercial culture that is saturated with Japanese products, yet to which Japan remains “Other.”
[Otomo’s project is actual more complex and nuanced than I can demonstrate here, but still, I think she and Jameson do share this periodizing perspective.]
The reason I consider all this lumping-together of “the postmodern” as a trap is at least twofold: first, to critique the apparent ahistorical superficiality in postmodernist culture is often to miss the point of cultural texts that are primarily metacritical. That is, Andy Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” (which Jameson finds to be decidedly less historical an image than Van Gogh’s painting of boots) is less about the subject or referent of the image than it is about art itself as an object of critique. This perspective views postmodernism as an extension and elaboration of the modernist critical posture, not as its opposite. Furthermore, aesthetic postmodernism is not a signal that all modernist critical interventions are null and void—in fact I will argue today that a particularly modernist perspective on Ghost Dog reveals the richness of its social critique, which works more as a meta-parody than a blank one): like Ghost Dog himself, we can find this perspective by turning to the past, what for this conference is considered “the modernist period,” and the work of Walter Benjamin..]
The theoretical tool that Benjamin contributes to a reading of Ghost Dog is his understanding of allegory. While allegory was considered by many of his contemporaries to be a form inferior to symbol, Benjamin argued that the baroque excesses of allegory effected a kind of immanently critical posture toward capitalist modernity. By mimicking the arbitrary juxtaposition of sign and meaning that is epitomized by commodity fetishism, yet by foregrounding the fact of authorship, that such a connection is constructed, allegory becomes a sort of parody that is far from lacking in its sting.
I want to argue that Ghost Dog’s unusual way of life—his code—operates in an allegorical manner, turning modernity back on itself in a critical gesture. This would imply that, however postmodernist it is, Jarmusch’s film is potentially more than an aestheticized indulgence. A critical encounter between Jarmusch and Benjamin also has implications beyond the specific film, though, since Ghost Dog reminds us of other, real-world examples of allegorical signification in everyday life. If identity can be constructed as an allegory, than perhaps there is more significance than we realize to be found in the subjugated genres of style that make up everyday life for people at society’s margins.
Within the fictive world of Ghost Dog, there is a running commentary on the nature of signification, and more generally, on systems of meaning. Louie, Ghost Dog’s employer, repeatedly laments that “Nothing makes sense anymore,” and “Things are changing all around us.” In particular, Ghost Dog’s chosen way of life and work is highlighted as uncanny, if not bizarre: he works for Louie as a “retainer,” asking to be paid only annually on the first day of Autumn. He lives in an austere shack atop the roof of a high-rise apartment building, where he practices martial arts and meditation, and communicates with Louie only via homing pigeon. His particular interest in Japan is colored by the passing remarks of two different characters that “Ancient Japan was a pretty weird place.” The strangeness of Ghost Dog’s code is highlighted in a scene in which Louie explains their arrangement to his bosses. Seizing on his name, they interpret Ghost Dog’s ways as exotic characteristics of “Others” in a conversation that is by turns racist and not a little romanticizing. Yet we learn that their own “code,” which for them is second nature, is no less arbitrary.
[CLIP: 08:31:27]
[reset: 07:22:53]
For all the strangeness of Ghost Dog’s juxtaposing “ancient wisdom” from a “pretty weird place” with his immediate context, the Mafia is not immune to a compromised modern condition. For these are post-lapsarian gangsters. They are seen to be under constant pressure from landlords to pay the rent, and each time we visit a Mafioso’s home, there is a for sale sign out front. When Ghost Dog’s relationship with the organization goes sour, the thugs sent to kill him are almost too winded to shoot by the time they climb the stairs to the roof. Even children mouth off to these mobsters. Thus their own truncated power shows one way that “things don’t make sense any more.”
Benjamin identified the distinguishing character of allegory with uncharacteristic economy in his work The Origin of German Tragic Drama: “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world…” (175). Erika Fischer-Lichte points out that such a characterization points towards Benjamin’s linguistic theory. In the essay “On Language as such and the Language of Man” Benjamin distinguishes between two kinds of language: the authentic ur-language, which he terms “Adamic” in reference to Adam of the Garden of Eden, shares an essential identity with the “expressable nature” of the things it describes. In this original language, names share an identity with who and what things are in a relationship that is more perfect and direct than anything we can imagine as “symbolic.”
This mystical ur-language functions rhetorically to demonstrate everything that real, historical language is not. Thus post-lapsarian language, the language of man, is characterized by an artificial relationship between a name and the thing it calls. To live in the domain of the historical is to use a fallen language.
For Benjamin allegory formally suggested a sophisticated knowledge of this: it is because of the fallenness of language that “anything can stand for anything else.” Allegory’s use and reliance upon captions and labels to explain what was being represented was the supreme expression of this arbitrariness, and a constant reminder of the fictive nature of the allegorical sign: we cannot encounter the allegorical without being reminded that it is authored, and not natural (F-L). The critical charge of this semiotic self-consciousness lay in its contrast to those signs which we are accustomed to reading as natural.
[Duerer example: an excess of signification, and the label tells us it represents “Melancholia.”]
The marked strangeness of Ghost Dog’s code is contrasted with the Mafia’s, no less than with the way of the modern world. Yet we find that Ghost Dog’s is also an honorable way, for one requirement of a samurai retainer is absolute devotion to his employer. Ghost Dog follows this rule to his own demise after Louie is forced to choose sides when the family decides that Ghost Dog has served his purpose and must be eliminated. Louie’s choice is laid out by his boss in statement of the self-serving code of the family: “better him than you, right Louie?” Ghost Dog later expresses his commitment in an inversion of the statement, when Louie warns him that the family is after him: “Better me than you, Louie.”
At first, Louie and Ghost Dog’s relationship is based on sharing this altruistic honor. We learn in a flashback that they first meet when Louie intervenes when he finds Ghost Dog being beaten by street toughs. The way Louie relates the story to his bosses, one of the attackers turned his gun on Louie, who shot him, thereby saving Ghost Dog inadvertently and earning his devotion. Later we learn, from Ghost Dog’s perspective, that Louie was never threatened by the mugger, but shot him to save Ghost Dog’s life alone. This display of selfless honor causes Ghost Dog to remark to a friend that he and Louie are “from different, ancient tribes. Now we’re both almost extinct.” Yet when the confrontation comes between Ghost Dog’s ancient ways and the mafia, Louie chooses to obey his own master, and ultimately kills Ghost Dog.
Always See Everything: The Subterranean
Order
Ghost Dog is not alone in his struggle to impose an order on modernity through commitment to a code. We witness a number of encounters with other marginal figures who live according to their own codes, which, like Benjamin’s allegory and feudal-age wisdom, are devalued genres. Thus we get the sense that beneath the surface of the city moves a kind of subterranean network of samurais.
[CLIP 07:22:53]
In addition to the commitment and honor required by the code, Ghost Dog’s way directs his and our attention to “matters of small concern.” In an apparent non-sequitur to the plot, Ghost Dog meets a character which the credits call only “Samurai in camouflage.” Played by the film’s composer, the RZA, this character greets Ghost Dog with a Saturday matinee version of a Kung Fu salute, saying something that sounds like “Ghost Dog: Power and equality,” to which Ghost Dog responds with the admonition “Always see everything, my brother.” To see the unseen is one attribute that Ghost Dog draws from his namesake and familiar, a stray pit bull who appears in several different scenes. According to folklore, dogs have an uncanny sensitivity to the unseen, an ability to see ghosts.
While an admonition to “see everything” could come across as banal, seeing is crucial to the distinction between Ghost Dog’s code and that of the mafia—or rather, it is the ability to “see everything” that the Mafiosi have lost, though their leader Ray Vargo retains a vestige of vision. In the film, many of the visions that only the enlightened see come in the form of cartoons, which play as background noise on the gangsters’ television sets. They often present parallels with “real world” developments: after hearing from Louie that his hitman communicates with pigeons, for example, we see Betty Boop training homing pigeons.
When the conflict between Ghost Dog and the mob develops, the cartoons take on a prophetic tinge, as cartoon situations are played out in real life—we see a character shooting a rifle through the elastic plumbing of his enemy’s house, and Ghost Dog soon assassinates one of the mobsters through a drain pipe. Ghost Dog’s admonition to the camouflage samurai suggests that he sees the cartoons—does he take tips from them on how to destroy his enemies? Perhaps, but what is more certain is that if the Mafiosi were paying attention to the blaring televisions, they would glimpse their own impending doom. None do, except Ray Vargo, the family boss. He is transfixed by the silly cartoons and stares at them over an open book, the valued genre to which he “should” owe his attention. When Vargo dies and the mantle of the family passes to his daughter, she too has a chance to glean wisdom from cartoons, when she views the cat and mouse Itchy and Scratchy engaging in an arms race in which successively bigger revolvers eventually destroy the world. Rather than accepting the cartoon as a sign of the ultimate futility of the family’s code, she switches off the set.
Benjamin’s insights provide potential answers to reviewers such as Louis Gerber, who finds that Ghost Dog amounts to “bizarre and amusing elements [that] do not build up to a coherent film,” or Xan Brooks, for whom the film is a narcissistic, aesthetic exercise in which “the trip is more satisfying than the destination.” Both of these critiques would seem to reproduce the assumption that what is missing from Jarmusch’s postmodernist work is a guiding theme or central idea which lends it coherence: perhaps the difference between montage and pastiche. Seeing the film as a meditation on allegory suggests that this apparent lack of coherence is itself a central subject.
Yet viewers like Brooks continue to question why the particular combination of urban America and the code of the Samurai should be effected: what is the reason that Ghost Dog chooses this particular identity to make some kind of sense in the face of “all that is solid” melting “into air”? The film itself, or its marketers, are not above providing an answer: “Live by the code. Die by the code” adorns the DVD case, downplaying the arbitrary nature of Ghost Dog’s identity to emphasize his commitment to the “ancient wisdom.” This is reinforced at times in the film itself. In one lethal confrontation, Ghost Dog’s enemy protests “This ain’t no ancient culture,” to which Ghost Dog replies “Sometimes it is.” Such a nostalgic turn to the past is standard Hollywood fare, likely repeated in Tom Cruise’s more recent samurai film (though I have not seen it).
Yet we have no real reason to believe that the actual samurai’s code produced violence any more righteous, moral, or honorable than does the code of organized crime. But in light of Benjamin, again, such references to the past draw meaning from their relationship to the present. Jarmusch himself suggests a way that Ghost Dog’s code could be something other than a facile resort to “ancient wisdom,” alluding in an interview to Don Quixote
[in addition to this reference in the interview, Jarmusch includes Cervantes under “personal thanks” in the credits].
When Don Quixote turned to “ancient books” for wisdom, the result was madness. Yet Ghost Dog allows us to imagine that it is precisely a kind of madness, which in the mad context of modernity obtains the character of wisdom.