‘Ghost Dog’ screens at Webster Dec. 8
By K. Curtis Lyle
For St. Louis American
Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of The Samurai marks an almost epochal event in the history of modern cinema. It’s a quiet epoch, though. It’s as though what Amiri Baraka once called “the intelligence of cities” reached its final and authentic portrayal. This is real living that arises from grit, arrogance, and will wedded to spiritual intellect, generosity and coolness of gesture.
Jarmusch directs with rhythm, cadence and tempo. Forest Whitaker fixes the piece, giving it stability, a name and a memorable face. The RZA lets it fly by creating the carpet upon which everything rides: the music!
The story begins as a classic gangster tale. An honorable man finds his expectations for himself and the world are at odds with things as they appears to be. Living by a rigid and ancient code – the way of the Samurai – Ghost Dog, a contract killer for the mob, meditates and acts on the paradox of his own life. How can a good man do terrible things? Why do we admire him so? Is it because he acts upon his own contradictions? Is it because he accepts the consequences of his actions? Is it because he recognizes the limited possibilities of humanity and at the same time makes something glorious of it all?
Jarmusch sets the film up episodically with quotations from The Book of Samurai, which was written by a real Samurai in the 1750s at the end of his life. Here is where the RZA, resident genius behind the Wu-Tang Clan, begins to dominate the proceedings.
The Wu-Tang Clan was founded upon the social, artisitic and political principles of a group of Chinese monks called Shaolin. Their name and philosophy, mostly identified through the expression of their martial arts prowess, have become popular fodder for movies, graphic novels and American male teenage fantasies. Bruce Lee, the ultimate popularizer of martial arts in the West, was trained as a Shaolin monk.
The RZA has taken Shaolin philosophy, melded it with black urban myth and street culture, and created a music that has the potency of all things deep, dark, rich and ancestral.
In his score you find Indonesian gamelan orchestral combinations of instrument and voice, those chants mixed with the rumbling exhaust of a Lexus S400, cries from the holds of slave ships, the smell of wild aloes from West Africa and the scratching vinyl of the DJ suddenly becoming the rippling digital interruptions that astronomers pick up as they search the stars. Jarmusch has called the RZA “the Thelonious Monk of hip-hop.” The RZA uses all accents, all voices, all regions. And it all works, so besutifully.
Ghost Dog is an ancient whose world is passing away. The gangsters are old-school and are losing their respect, power and economic dominance to a flood of immigrants and a culture that no longer values their brand of authenticity, which is based on brute force.
This unites them. Ghost Dog is dying, but he is animated by the sound of the new world; it’s like his last great high. Even one of the gangsters gets off on the music. For a moment, he forgets his prejudices and fears, and the last time we see him alive he’s doing a cripple dance, rubbing his ass with baby powder and singing along with Flava Flav.
Long live the RZA. Long live the music.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai will screen at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 8 at the Winifred Moore Auditorium as part of the Webster University Film Series’ ongoing Jarmusch retrospective. For more information or directions, visit www.webster.edu/filmseries.
