written and directed by Jim Jarmusch
I enjoyed it.
Something else I’ve watched recently: some of the content from Wholphin, that DVD from McSweeney’s.
Ghost Dog was like Broken Flowers (and therefore, I extrapolate, like all the other Jim Jarmusch movies I’ve yet to see) in that it attempted some quizzical blend of seriousness and silliness. It attempted a recognizably similar blend. McSweeney’s & Co., particularly represented in my mind by the content and presentation of Wholphin, is also all about the blend (or the middle ground) between the serious and the frivolous, but theirs has a somewhat different flavor. Still, it seemed like they have something in common. They both are implicitly saying that being serious is not necessarily a serious business, or that being frivolous is not itself frivolous. This may be an ancient literary/philosophical notion but it seems at least in these two incarnations somehow very contemporary; both Jim Jarmusch and McSweeney’s get mileage out of the fact that this attitude makes them appear youthful and fresh. Jarmusch seems to me someone who is more or less honestly going about exploring his fascination with this attitude, whereas McSweeney’s, at least to me, represents the self-regarding use of this attitude as posture (or, depending on what kind of cynic you are, the commodification of the attitude). Miranda July, who has a short piece on the Wholphin DVD, courts annoyance by being so flagrantly fixated on her own serio-frivolous breeziness, but flagrancy is generally a sign of sincerity. There were scenes in Ghost Dog that were so shameless in their pursuit of being “peculiarly silly” that I knew he wasn’t doing it for the glory. McSweeney’s (and some – if not all – of Wholphin) irritates me because it plays the seriousness-of-comedy cards from so close to its chest; it’s so cagey/deadpan about its performance of an attitude that ostensibly is founded on a relaxed opennness to the real mysteries of life. How can I believe in (or be moved by) your simple, childlike wonder at the world when you’re so obviously so hyper-conscious and calculating about self-presentation? Well at least that was my problem with Dave Eggers. Or was before I stopped reading what he wrote.
This is what the term “faux-naif” should refer to. Unfortunately I think it means something closer to “playing dumb.”
During Ghost Dog – and I guess maybe this speaks to some kind of failing on the part of Ghost Dog, but maybe not – I was thinking about how this attitude, like I said, gets credit for being youthful and fresh, a spiritual antidote to our numb assumptions about the world… but maybe it’s as regressive as the stuffed-shirts would say. Childlike wonder and childlike incomprehension are more or less the same thing. I think often about how the things that filled me with strange impressions as a child are now things that make sense to me; a book that has lost its aura of mystery has gained its meaning. That’s not a bad tradeoff. Doesn’t the world offer us enough opportunities for wonder (death, consciousness, and so forth) that we don’t need to be so nostalgic-desperate about the whiff of mystery that clings to things when we don’t yet understand them? If Miranda July and friends are simply saying that we must never forget that we are fallible and that we may understand less than we think, I wholeheartedly endorse that message. But there seems like some kind of sentimentalism about confusion; that it wasn’t the openness and lack of prejudice but the actual bewilderment of childhood that needs to be shown respect. I mean, I certainly enjoy the trip, when that’s what art offers, which is often! – but once we start insinuating that it’s an actual good; in fact, that maybe even the wisdom of not-understanding is a wisdom that goes beyond the wisdom of understanding – then I start to want some reassurance that this is wisdom and not just a form of immaturity.
On to these thoughts the movie juxtaposed Samurai wisdom (I was going to say “Zen,” but I know that would betray a gross ignorance of distinctions between schools of classical Japanese philosophy), which also sanctifies (what’s a word that means “makes seem wise”?) the embrace of mystery as mystery and sadly (but superior-ly) shakes its head at the idea that the world is knowable. But again, isn’t mystery the domain of children? Certainly in many ways, in the cosmic sense, we are indeed all children – but why deny ourselves the rights and responsibilities of adulthood with regard to understanding, say, interpersonal relationships (, Miranda?) or the self (, Jim?) Isn’t there a way to acknowledge our shortcomings and inconsistencies, to be aware of our lack of understanding without aggrandizing mystery as beautiful and complete? Why is it wrong to see mystery as a challenge? This suddenly reminds me of my irritation when I saw Jules et Jim – is life really as poetry? Are you sure? And if the point is not that life is this way, if the poetry is a tool for us to bring back to life from another sort of place, why cast poetry in life’s image at all? I already asked this here once before. Still haven’t finished Mimesis, but I’m working on it.
I don’t know, this isn’t at all my long-term attitude but the devil’s advocate in my brain was gnawing out a tunnel in this direction last night, anyway. It’s actually a little hard for me to write it now, by the light of the next day, because these ideas don’t have as much inherent appeal to me at this point. But look, I got it down anyway.
I sort of want to dismiss all of the above, now, to show where I “really” stand, but I think that argument is an easier one to make – at least it seems that way to me because I’m naturally drawn to it – and anyway, it’s annoying for you to have to read something and then read the opposite of it, and annoying for me to write it.
Yeah, that’s really going to be it for Ghost Dog. Oh, but I will say this: Miller’s Crossing, which also takes gangster genre stuff in a moody philosophical direction, is more genuinely thoughtful and much less childlike. The main thing that Ghost Dog had that Miller’s Crossing didn’t was the element of Samurai codes and, in a related vein, hip-hop. The solemnity in both cases seemed sort of borrowed rather than presented, but that was the point. But maybe that’s also a limitation.
Okay, some more about the actual movie. I liked the music by RZA – or as I like to call him, THE RZA. Of course, this is one of those cases where the choice of composer was more of the point than any particular thing the composer did for the movie itself. Good mood-music instinct on Jarmusch’s part. I was reminded of a similarly apt atmosphere-creating choice of that pre-existing music for Amélie. Then he goes and actually shows Ghost Dog putting on mood music, which I was less into. Mood music can have a profound effect but it isn’t all that profound a concept. In fact it’s kind of embarrassing to show it; it’s a kind of self-manipulation, but the movie didn’t seem to see it that way. I guess meditation is also self-manipulation. Jim Jarmusch (and Ghost Dog) probably see mood-music self-prescription as being more like meditation than willful submission to a romantic illusion. It’s so hard to figure out where to draw these lines!
This movie was one of those custom-designed vehicles for the vibe of a certain actor as perceived by a certain director. The whole movie was kind of like a frame of concentric Forest Whitaker outlines lovingly traced around Forest Whitaker himself, just like Punch-Drunk Love was a weird sort of frame fondly built around a particular impression of Adam Sandler, and of course like all those Bill Murray movies that reveal the parts of themselves that certain people like to project on to Bill Murray.