The Jim Jarmusch Resource Page

Transatlantic cruises of the samurai motif in Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog[1]

by Céline Murillo

Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999) and Melville’s Le Samouraï[2] (1967) are two films whose non-Japanese hero is considered as a samurai, either by himself or by the filmmaker. We will discuss the connections between the two films and link them to the original motif of the samurai as a hero in Japanese cinema. We will thus deal with Japanese films, their American and European remakes, as well as with European films which inspired Japanese filmmakers such as Kurosawa. This complex mirror phenomenon involves therefore several countries in a protracted process.

I From Japanese Origins to European transplant

1) Japanese origins and early exporting of the samurai

Samurai have actually existed in Japan from the ninth century to the end of the nineteenth century. Their ascent to power was due to the end of the monarchy and the establishment of a feudal government. But when the country was unified thanks to the Meiji restoration, the feudal system came to an end. The characteristics of the samurai started migrating inside Japan. The samurai turned into a myth as well as a literary motif.

The samurai had always been marked by their separation from the rest of the population as a cast, with specific morals which derived from an originally unwritten code called the Bushido[3], i.e. the way of the warrior. This code demanded total discipline, complete allegiance and even readiness to die for one’s master. According to Hagakure[4], “The Way of the Samurai is found in death”[5] and “If one were to say in a word what the condition of being a samurai is, its basis lies first in seriously devoting one's body and soul to his master”[6]. Samurai also had special skills such as archery and sword fighting. They alone were allowed to carry swords, and they sported a particular hairstyle.

The samurai ideal was strongly relied upon in order to educate the masses, because it was an essentially Japanese institution which conveyed strong values of loyalty that also applied to the emperor[7]. When extreme loyalty and courage were required in order to convince kamikaze soldiers to give their lives away, again the Bushido[8] was used.

The separateness and the stylisation of the outfit made it easier to turn the samurai into a motif. Moreover, the contradiction in the essence of the way of the samurai as expressed in Hagakure that can be summed up by devoting one’s life to death, is difficult to understand through the Western tradition of the ‘logos’. In the same way, how can we explain that a lot of the characters, in films, whom we call samurai, are in fact “ronins”, which means a samurai without  masters, since the word “samurai” means “vassal” or “retainer”. All these apparent contradictions are not a problem to the Zen scholar. The non-Japanese can only state the morals of a samurai, show the person, but cannot really understand. The samurai is, first and foremost, a fact.

The lack of logic and narration of the samurai type, its reduction to a fact leads us to think that the samurai can become a figure in the sense which Deleuze gives to the word[9]. For Deleuze, who follows Lyotard[10], the Figure is a means by which painting no longer needs representation, illustration and narration. To do so, the painting becomes “pure form, by abstraction” or “pure figural, by extraction or isolation”[11]. “Isolating, is the simplest means, necessary but yet not sufficient, to cut off representation, to break away from narration, to prevent illustration, to free the Figure, to stick to facts”.[12] The concept of isolation enables the Figure to be easily displaced as its context, geographical and historical, is irrelevant.

The exporting of the samurai figure began at the end of the nineteenth century, with the opening of Japan to foreign countries. Many books about the samurai were published. On the visual level, an 1871 cartoon published in Harper’s Weekly shows that the samurai became useful to deal with problems of politics and crime. According to the summary from the Library of Congress online catalogue the “Illustration shows Tammany politician Boss Tweed, New York City Mayor Oakey Hall and city comptroller Richard Connelly and cartoonist Thomas Nast dressed as samurai in a Japanese-style room. Nast is handing a daggar (sic) labeled. "resign" to Connelly, who is seated on a mat and gesturing that he wants none of it. The title continues: Tamani Tycooni invite Connolli to Hari-Kari. -- No-go-he.[13]

As far as France is concerned, some books were published but most of all two films were produced: Le châtiment du samouraï, et Au Japon, la coiffure d’un samouraï [14] (Pathé, 1910, 1911).

2) Japanese samurai films

On the other hand, Japan too was busy representing samurai. It did so on film as soon as technology allowed it. Japanese filmmakers studied Hollywood technique and used it in their films. According to Tadashi Iidzima “we must not forget that since an early date, Japanese film makers have learned their job through the American western”[15] In their work, they included influences such as No theatre, Kabuki or Bunraku (puppet theatre). According to Akira Kurosawa, in Japan “there is also a tendency to treat actors like puppets”[16]. Historical samurai stories such as Miyamoto Musashi and traditional ones such as Zato Ichi were turned into samurai films.

The creation of the samurai motif in film begins with this Hollywood influence. For example, Akira Kurosawa “acknowledged early the seminal influence on his work of John Ford, although his films are more parallel to Ford’s than they are directly a result of Ford’s style and outlook”[17]. Kurosawa was able to completely digest, re-appropriate occidental, mainly Hollywood, filmmaking techniques, and yet, to create a style which was totally his own[18].

The original samurai films were not shown in Europe and America before the 1950s. The first two films to be shown were Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950) and Jigokumon (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953) also known as Hell’s Gate. Both films feature samurai. In Rashomon, a lady is attacked and molested under the eyes of her samurai husband, and in Hell’s Gate, a courageous samurai demands to his master the hand of a woman, whom he does not know to be married already. Even if they are not properly samurai films, they paved the way for the penetration of Japanese cinema in the West. 

3) American and European remakes of Japanese films

The penetration of Japanese cinema in the West often took the shape of a remake. Soon after they were shot, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1957) and Yojimbo (1960) were respectively remade into The Magnificent Seven (Preston Sturges, 1960) and Per un Pugno di Dollari (Sergio Leone, 1964). Noel Burch depicts Yojimbo as “a fusion of the latter-day chambara tradition with the Hollywood Western, which gave birth to that Cinecitta hybrid, the spaghetti Western.”[19] Indeed, the borrowings involve both samurai films and Hollywood Westerns. The adaptations are very close in terms of plot and feelings, but visually very different. The hero, in Western films, is never seen as a samurai, he remains a proper Western hero even if he retains enough traits to make him look like a samurai figure. For example, Clint Eastwood’s pragmatic behaviour, fighting abilities and lack of fear of death are quite consistent with the Code of the Samurai. Yet, Sergio Leone does not acknowledge in his title that he is borrowing from Yojimbo.

Secondly, the era represented in the Western is contemporary to the end of the samurai cast. At that time, the American West was not effectively governed by a central power; the laws passed in Washington never seemed to reach towns like Tombstone or Silver city, and “the sheriffs in the legend, […] former “bad men” or “outlaws”, [were] famous for their gun fighting dexterity and [were] hired for the sake of Law”[20]. Thus the situation in the American West, with a central power trying to extend on the entire territory of the country, was comparable to the end of the Tokugawa period and the beginning of the Meiji restoration.[21]

The borrowings existing between samurai films and Westerns point at the relevance of the samurai motif in a foreign environment. Indeed, feudalism is pertinent in different eras and countries. Using plots derived from samurai films shows this without being explicit about it.

4) Foreign samurai :. Melville’s Le Samouraï.

The samurai motif was more relevant than ever at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, the numerous publications concerning the samurai and the Japanese art of war also called the Bushido were timely as the period saw two world wars. European and American fighters were, if not a ruling class, at least described as a heroic one.

Moreover, the comparison between the samurai and the French Résistants was also appropriate, because it helped to name the legitimacy of the opponents to Vichy. The Résistants devoted themselves to their cause and were ready to die for it. Their ‘masters’ were Résistance chiefs such as Jean Moulin or General de Gaulle. L’Armée des ombres (1969) by Jean Pierre Melville shows loyalty at work in the Résistance milieu.

However when the same Melville, in 1967, had called his earlier film about a hired killer, Le Samouraï, he had already taken the borrowing process between samurai films and Western cinema into the semantic jungle of illegitimate legitimacy. He staged a non Japanese samurai in a non Japanese environment. If the reference to the samurai figure can be extended to L’Armée des ombres, it is significant that Melville had thought about this film a long time before it was actually shot[22].

Costello in Le Samouraï is called a samurai by the filmmaker. Indeed Melville acts as if he were baptizing his character by giving him a name that sounds like a nickname or a codename; for example in L’Armée, there is a character called “le bison”. Nevertheless, except for the director, nobody ever uses that name. Thus, it is Melville talking directly to the public. Since there is no obvious link between the hero and historical samurai, we have to take Melville’s word for it as a poet, or as an ‘auteur’, who sends us in search of elements that unveil the relation between the film and this motif.

Isolation has been defined above as a visual characteristic of the ‘figure’, which explains why the reference to the samurai is explicit in Le Samouraï and only implicit in L’Armée des ombres. In L’Armée des ombres the characters act as a group, an organisation, they are rooted in the place, in the history. They are tied to the “there and then” of the film, even though Melville claims that he avoided realism as much as possible (“I had no intention of making a film about the Résistance. So with one exception –the German Occupation– I excluded all realism”[23]). What makes them resemble samurai is the mystic essence of their ideal[24] : the idea that their solitary death is not important, that all they have to do is obey their chiefs.

On the contrary, in Le Samouraï, which takes place just after the war, Jef Costello (Alain Delon), has no cause, no family, no friends; his clothes are stereotyped and make him invisible. He literally ‘does not belong’ in the modern, colloquial, sense: of the phrase “he has no taste at all for the usual human foibles (money, sex, food or drink…)”[25].What stands out is his deeds, i.e. the mere execution of the contract he has been paid for. The aloofness, the pragmatic distance with what is happening to him, resembles the ability of a samurai to face adverse conditions and to fight accordingly.

However, since he has no master, he is rather a ronin than a samurai. The ronin is the most common representation of the samurai in Japanese literature and film. Indeed if he were in the service of a master, the master would probably become the hero as is the case in Throne of Blood (Kurosawa, 1957). The loneliness of the ronin qualifies him aesthetically as a ‘figure’.

Just as the samurai skills had become useless at the end of the Tokugawa period and at the beginning of the Meiji restoration, so had the fighting skills of the French Resistance fighters after the end of Word War II: yet they retained their code of honour, and this is why Jef Costello seems to be one of them. As a solitary character using obsolete skills and an obsolete code of honour, he can be seen as a samurai figure.

Costello as a type is said to come from the character played by Alan Ladd. In This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942) a gangster film which was seen as one of the first noir film by French critics (indeed the name “Costello” reminds us of New-York mafia boss Frank Costello (1891-1973)). However, the latter has nothing to do with a samurai figure, since he forms all sorts of bonds with the other characters; his room is realistically messy and so is his outfit. Le Samouraï is seen as a remake of This Gun for Hire because the basic plots are similar, a contract that fails to come out as well as expected, and a hired killer who has to turn against his boss[26].

II From the Le Samouraï to Ghost Dog: stylistic transformations of the samurai motif

In the last stage of the evolution of the use of the samurai motif, where non-Japanese heroes are called samurai in non-Japanese environments, there is still a progression[27] between Melville’s film and Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog. Many scenes are common to both films, which show their similarity and their differences in terms of plot, iconicity and visual style.

In Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch uses the samurai motif to stage groups who are in a state of anomie[28]. The Italian mafia men belong to an “organisation” in which misbehaviour is sanctioned by murder. The derelict place where Ghost Dog, an afro-American killer, lives seems to be ruled by gangs of afro-American boys. In the city, gunshots never attract the police. It is up to the people who live there to defend themselves, like the old Asian man who kicks judo style the youngster who wants to steal his purchases[29]. In that environment where rules are lacking, where means to reach the cultural aims are no longer important, Ghost Dog adopts the Bushido, through Hagakure; and by doing so, reorganizes the ambient chaos under the structure of a feudal society.

Ghost Dog behaves like a true samurai, he has a daimyo, i.e. a master, he trains himself physically using a short and a long sword, and spiritually by meditating on his main book Hagakure and reading other works of literature. The film itself also quotes Japanese samurai films, such as Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950).

Jim Jarmusch acknowledges the influence of Melville’s Le Samouraï in Ghost Dog by thanking him in the ending credits. Jarmusch finds the detour by French cinema, that is already in love with American movies, necessary in order to go back to Japanese tradition and to Japanese films (and their Hollywood techniques). Melville validates Jarmusch’s creation of his Afro-American samurai.

Jarmusch’s film title, Ghost Dog, is eponymous of the character’s name. Every character who meets him uses it, and no other name is used by any other person. It triggers admiration: the homeboys in his neighbourhood salute him saying “knowledge to knowledge” and the boss of the Italian gang who hires him grants him shamanic power by relating him to Indian medicine man Black Elk[30]. For the under boss, Sony Valerio, Ghost Dog is a rapper’s name and rappers are “his favourite”. This nickname is justified by his invisibility as a killer, his belonging to the Afro-American rap community where “dog” is a positive qualifier, and by the presence of his totemic animal, a middle-sized dog who appears sitting wherever he goes.

The word “samurai” appears in the subtitle, as a cryptic comment on the identity of the main character. The hero is defined from the very first sequence by his reading a book called The Way of the Samurai. The title and the subtitle do not consider the character as a samurai but link him to a way, in the sense of a path. “The way” can refer to the spiritual and pragmatic path that a true samurai follows or to the path leading one to become a true samurai. The film is concerned by a quest, a constant succession of ordeals, by a dynamic process as opposed to a static notion.

Ghost Dog says he follows a code, a synonym for “way”. He also tells his master, Louie, that he is his ‘retainer’ which is the English translation of the word ‘samurai’. Ghost Dog is thus defined as a samurai by the film-title, by himself, and by Louie who explains that Ghost Dog is indebted to him[31].

In Ghost Dog, the rules are expressed through quotations from Hagakure. The quotes appear on black screens and are heard in Forest Whitaker’s voice over: Ghost Dog’s voice (Forest Whitaker’s) fuses with Hagakure. Indeed the character’s behaviour is consistent with the quotes. In the diegetic world he states several rules. He tells Louie “I’m your retainer” and “I follow a code”, or he tells Raymond “A samurai must always remain loyal to his master”.

Jim Jarmusch does not opt for Melville’s posture of the demiurgic auteur. The title and the subtitle perform a cross-fertilization between rap and samurai traditions which is justified by the contents of the film.

1) Invisibility

Ghost Dog seems to take his name from an uncanny ability to act as invisibly as a ghost. This quality derives from Costello’s invisibility in The Samouraï. In the car theft sequences, Costello is invisible for the other characters in the diegesis, but perfectly visible for the spectator. Costello is made invisible because he acts in a simple inconspicuous way. Costello steals two cars, which is made easy because their owners have left them open. In broad daylight, he starts the cars by trying several keys from a large ring. The method is extremely simple, but seems magical in its simplicity.

In the same way, Ghost Dog is perfectly visible for the spectator but the characters who brush by him do not notice him. For example, he walks along a sidewalk when somebody who is putting away rubbish bins comes very close to him. Due to the two dimensions of the screen Ghost Dog and the man touch each other. The spectator is the only one who perceives the presence of Ghost Dog[32]. Before stealing cars, Ghost Dog’s walk gives an impression of uncanny stealth thanks to jump cuts. He also uses an electronic device that works with baffling plainness and efficiency and can be compared to a magic wand. The white gloves Ghost Dog wears corroborate the comparison with the wand. This magical alliance with technology does not preclude his ability to seize the occasion in pure simplicity and pragmatism as Costello does. Ghost Dog steals the third car merely by entering it and driving away since it was left with the keys on and the engine running. Ghost Dog’s invisibility is not different from Costello’s, but is further developed thanks to purely visual features.

The breach in invisibility will grip the mechanism that Costello and Ghost Dog have organised for their lives. When Costello kills Martey, he is seen, face-to-face, by the pianist of the club. She is able to identify him, which will lead to his arrest and subsequent elimination. In Ghost Dog, a young woman, the boss’ daughter, is present when he shoots Handsome Frank, the rules of the gang demand that Ghost Dog be killed. Even if they are able to maintain their composure, i.e., obey their personal codes, the presence of a witness during the killing sends them to their death. The tragic argument is very similar in both films.

Invisibility qualifies both killers and its lack is tragic for them. Along their tragic path, the heroes live the lives they had planned, taking care of their pets, walking the city, performing retaliation and eventually being murdered. In each common point, we will see how Ghost Dog builds on Le Samouraï.

2) Birds

Both films begin with birds: in Le Samouraï Costello has a bullfinch, which lives in a rather tall cage, standing on a small round table in the middle of Costello’s vast and shabby room. In this structure en abîme, the bullfinch and its cage repeat the condition of Costello and his room. At the very beginning of the film, the extremely protracted still shot contains only two signs of living creatures, the cigarette smoke and the periodic whistle of the bird. The bird stands exactly in the middle of this opening frame whereas Costello is de-centred, lying on the left hand-side of the frame. When he gets up, he strokes the cage with a wad of torn bank notes – a gesture of affection that includes the most crucial part of his life: his job as a killer.

The bullfinch is a metaphor of Costello, but there is also a metonymic relation. After he has been shot in the arm by one of Olivier Rey’s henchmen, Costello comes home, dresses the wound and feeds the bird. When he leaves he also checks on the bird. The attention he pays to the bird proves crucial when he is endangered. When policemen enter Costello’s room to wiretap it, the bullfinch jumps and whistles in its cage.[33] More than the agitation of the bird, it is the close ups on the cage that shows its relevance. Moreover, a police officer turns his torchlight directly on the cage as on a suspect. The sense of frailty, entrapment and panic, expressed by the agitation of the bird in the blinding light, is bad omen for us spectators, who, thanks to the establishing metaphor, anticipate the danger for Costello.

When Costello gets home, he starts dialling a number, but stops short and walks to the cage. Apparently, there is nothing amiss with the bird. Yet, Costello starts searching the flat for hidden microphones and finds them. Costello is able to decipher invisible signs as if the bird was an extension of him.

In Ghost Dog, the bird has been magnified and multiplied. Instead of one small bullfinch, we have a whole flock of pigeons. For Costello, the bullfinch works as a feeler; it links Costello to his room. The pigeons are also a means of communication for Ghost Dog, since they carry his messages. Instead of re-centring him to his room, the pigeons link Ghost Dog to a vast area surrounding him including the sky. Training them to fly together and to obey his signals is a recreation for him. This activity belongs to the American tradition of pigeon breeding that is represented in the Betty Boop cartoon “Training Pigeons” quoted in Ghost Dog[34]or in Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), where pigeon breeding shows that the hero is a caring American citizen.

The potent link between Ghost Dog and his shack and coop is evidenced by the destruction of these by the gangsters who want to destroy Ghost Dog himself. In the corresponding quote from Hagakure, “when a samurai’s head is suddenly cut off…”, the dead pigeons are a metaphor for the samurai’s severed head. However, the spatial relation between the bullfinch’s cage and Costello’s flat widely differ from the one that exists between the coop and Ghost Dog’s shack. In Le Samouraï a small bullfinch was enclosed in a cage that was large for him, but small compared to the flat in which this same cage was enclosed. In Ghost Dog, the coop is set next to the shack and their volumes are similar. The space inside the coop is entirely taken up by the pigeons, in the same way the shack is filled up with useful and decorative objects and is inhabited by the bulky presence of Ghost Dog.

The birds are metaphors and extensions of the heroes. The bullfinch belongs to an intimate space and tends to contract the space around Costello to his own flat. The smallness of the bird exemplifies the paradoxical emptiness of this space. In Ghost Dog the birds enlarge the space around the main character giving him access to the entire town and even the sky. They even link him to the “big picture” of American history and traditions.

Many other features suggest the cross-fertilization between Le Samouraï and Ghost Dog, which in scope of this article can only be briefly summed up. The representation of space derives from the representation of birds. It is vast but labyrinthine for Costello, and continuous and expanding for Ghost Dog. The groups opposing both killers vary in the same way. The division and the convolutions[35] in the forces opposing Costello prevent his escape. Although in Ghost Dog, there is only one manageable gang made of a limited number of people, Ghost Dog does not want to avoid death because of the moral debt he has. The final sequences differ in the fact that Le Samouraï, combines tragic knowledge of one’s death with dramatic tension, whereas in Ghost Dog the knowledge goes deeper, up to the acceptance of one’s fate as illustrated by the emphasis on duration and the absence of a crucial closing point.

The technical influence of Hollywood on Japanese filmmaking that led to remakes of Japanese films, finally led in turn to the creation of samurai in non-Japanese environments, which implied its massive uprooting and aesthetic and poetic, if not ‘poïetic’, transformation into a Deleuzian “figure”. When used by Melville in his authorial gesture, it is barely more than a sketch. Jarmusch uses the freedom given by Melville’s samurai figure and refills it with historical material such as Hagakure or plot material such as Rashomon. Pared to the bone in Melville’s work, the samurai motif gives birth to complexity, emptiness and centripetal forces that lend the movie a dramatic force of its own. Ghost Dog reworks the themes and motifs from Le Samouraï, by simplifying them and enlarging them through repetition. Both films take advantage of the samurai motif at several levels, as it enables them to conceptualize ‘anomie’ into feudalism in an oblique but legitimized way. Moreover, on the level of the plot, the samurai motif justifies a hybridizing of concepts that are generally separated, dramatic and tragic for Le Samouraï, epic and tragic for Ghost Dog.

.