The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jim Jarmusch · a film · 1999 · about 116 minutes · in English, with one part spoken in French · the one version, as released
Mode
Hit-man film grafted onto the samurai code and played in a minimal, deadpan, drifting manner; genre picture, comedy of obsolescence and elegy in one
Mythos
The retainer and his lord; the ronin whose master has failed him; the death embraced in advance; the messenger birds; the last of a tribe, doubled in the dying mob; the code that lives only as long as someone reads it
Phase
A few days in one city, from a pigeon’s flight to a roof to a last standoff, from a contract gone wrong to a killing upward and a death chosen with an empty gun
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 116 minutes, in English with one character speaking only French; photographed by Robby Müller, cut by Jay Rabinowitz, scored by RZA; passages of the Hagakure shown as text on black cards and read in the lead’s voice
Register
Cool, slow and deadpan; a solitary grace above a ruined place, broken by the broad comedy of old men in front of cartoons, and rising at the end to a quiet, cold elevation
Scale
One man, his lord, a council of old gangsters, a friend who speaks another language and a girl who reads, in one city over a few days
Governing Proposition
A hired killer who lives by an eighteenth-century Japanese manual serves, as his lord, the small-time mobster who once saved his life; when a contract goes wrong, the mobster’s own masters order the killer’s death, and the code obliges him to kill upward through all of them and to spare the one man he serves. The wager of the film is that a code is a text a person chooses to inhabit, that a ronin from a book and a council of old gangsters before their cartoons are two forms of one borrowed dignity in a culture that has stopped supplying any, and that a form cut by the book itself can make its audience read alongside the man who lives by it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in the air. A pigeon flies over an industrial city, across its roofs and broken streets, and comes down to a coop on a roof. Beneath the flight RZA’s score sets a hollow, tolling beat, sparse and looping. It is the film’s best height and it sets the register for everything after: a solitary grace above a ruined place. The man who keeps the birds lives beside the coop. He is called Ghost Dog, and he is a hired killer.
He serves one man. Louie, a small-time mobster, once saved his life, and Ghost Dog has taken him as his lord in the manner of a feudal retainer. The birds are his messengers to Louie. Ghost Dog takes cars at night with an electronic device and drives them slowly through the dark streets to the score, and on the roof at night he practises with a sword. The film watches these acts at their own pace and asks nothing of them but that they be done well.
Jim Jarmusch wrote and directed the film. Robby Müller photographed it, Jay Rabinowitz cut it, and RZA wrote the score. Forest Whitaker plays Ghost Dog and John Tormey plays Louie; Henry Silva plays the boss, Ray Vargo, Cliff Gorman his consigliere, Sonny Valerio, Tricia Vessey Vargo’s daughter, Louise, Isaach de Bankolé the ice cream vendor Raymond, and Camille Winbush the girl Pearline. The film was shown in competition at Cannes in May 1999 and released in the United States in March 2000. It runs about 116 minutes, and there is one version, the film as released.
Movement II
At intervals the story stops for a book. A passage of the Hagakure, the eighteenth-century manual of the samurai drawn from Yamamoto Tsunetomo, appears as text on a black card, and Whitaker’s voice reads it. The passages are not chapter heads. They are the voice by which Ghost Dog governs his acts, the law he has chosen, and the film puts its audience where he is: reading, and then watching what the reading obliges.
This is the film’s form, and it carries the film’s knowledge. Ghost Dog is a man who has made himself out of a book, a feudal ethic taken from the page and lived to the letter in a city that cannot recognise it. The form says what the story says: that a code is a text a person chooses to inhabit. Take away the cards and the film becomes a hit-man picture with a strange hero; with them, it is a film about reading, about what it is to live inside words that were written for another world.
The form runs into the plot. Books pass from hand to hand: Akutagawa’s Rashomon, lent to Ghost Dog by Louise and passed on by him to Pearline, and the Hagakure itself. The mobsters have their own scripture, and it is the cartoons they watch at every gathering, crude and violent, playing on screen while the old men talk. The film sets the two texts against each other without mockery of either. The cool, minimal manner sometimes holds the content at arm’s length rather than becoming it, but the design is plain and it bears the film.
Movement III
A contract goes wrong. Ghost Dog carries out a killing for Louie, but Vargo’s daughter, Louise, is in the room. The council of the Vargo family meets, old men behind on their rent, with a cartoon running on the screen, and decides that the killer must die. The masters of Ghost Dog’s lord have ordered his death.
The council is the film’s other tribe. Its members quote their rules while they break them, and the film plays them as broad comedy: the aged soldiers, a gangster who raps, Woody Woodpecker on a mob boss’s screen. The comedy is not a holiday from the subject. These are men ruled by an obsolete code, as Ghost Dog is, and the deadpan treats both with the same affectionate distance, so that the gravity of the one and the slapstick of the other obey one law of decline. Where the comedy plays only as comedy the law slips, and the supporting playing is sometimes merely broad.
His birds are slaughtered on the roof, and the hunt is no longer a matter of messages. It sends Ghost Dog upward. The code obliges him now to kill the men who ordered his death, every one of them, and to spare only Louie, his lord. From here the film is a reckoning, carried out at the same unhurried pace as everything before it.
Movement IV
Ghost Dog has one friend. Raymond sells ice cream from a truck and speaks only French; Ghost Dog speaks only English. Neither understands the other’s language, and each understands the other. On a rooftop they watch a man building a boat on another roof, and they agree about it, each in his own tongue. The film finds in this something true about affinity across race and language in an American city, and finds it through image and sound as much as through words.
He has a second companion in Pearline, a girl who reads. They talk about books; he passes her Rashomon, with its question of whose story is true. The bond of a man and a child who share books is one of the orders the film holds, beside the friendship across tongues, the decline of the city and its old mafia, and the birds and the bear in which the natural order is glimpsed. Each is touched lightly. The family, labour and the state are present only as sketches, and the compass is that of one man over a few days in one city.
The middle of the film collects. The cartoons, the ice cream truck, the hunters and the dead bear, a second car taken, the man with his boat: several episodes earn their place by rhyme, but the manner admits some that could go without loss to the argument, and the hunters say again what the slaughter of the birds has said. The tempo sags here. RZA appears on the street in camouflage, a fellow samurai; the drift is a chosen tempo, and it is also the place where the film is least required.
Movement V
Ghost Dog kills upward. He attacks the Vargo house and works through the men who ordered his death; one killing is made through a sink pipe, taken from Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill. These set pieces are staged with more cool than invention. Then only Louie is left. In the final standoff Ghost Dog faces him with his own pistol empty, because the code forbids him to kill his lord. Louie fires, and Ghost Dog falls while Pearline watches. The death has been accepted in advance, as the book requires, and the end follows from everything before it.
The book outlives him. It goes on in other hands, Pearline’s among them, and the myth the film has built is shown as transmission: a code lives only as long as someone reads it. The archetype of the loyal servant has borne the plot from the first scene, doubled in the dying mob, and it is assembled partly from citation, from Melville’s Le Samouraï (8.2), from Suzuki and from the Hagakure on screen. The graft was the film’s risk in 1999: an art-house director’s genre picture, a Black samurai hero, a manual read over a hip-hop score. Some reviewers took it for pastiche. Each part was known, and the director’s manner was established by Stranger Than Paradise and Dead Man (8.2); the fusion was new.
Twenty-seven years on, the film survives whole in its one version, revived in repertory and held in circulation, its score reissued and heard on its own, though its surface of pagers, car electronics and late 1990s hip-hop is fixed to its decade more than most. Its pressure on the field is real and local: RZA’s later scoring and the crossing of hip-hop and Japanese martial myth stand in its line, though part of that line was the Wu-Tang Clan’s own, founded on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (8.0). It stands at 7.5 with Fincher’s The Killer, a hit-man film of tighter making and thinner myth. What holds it below the tier above is a middle that drifts, a disclosure held at irony, a sublime kept in a minor key and a reach that stayed within a cult; what holds it in its tier is a myth built and a form that reads.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required. A retainer is bound to the man who saved his life; a contract goes wrong because the boss’s daughter is in the room; the boss and his council order the retainer’s death; and the code obliges him to kill upward through all of them except his lord. The last scene follows from everything: he walks into Louie’s gun with his own pistol empty. The subtractive test bites in the middle. The cartoons, the ice cream truck, the hunters and the dead bear, a second car taken, a man building a boat on a roof: several earn their place by rhyme, but the collecting manner admits episodes that could go, and the hunters restate what the slaughter of the birds has said. The drift is a chosen tempo, not slackness; not all of it is required.
Score: 7.4 / 10
What the film opens is a condition, not only a mood: men who live by codes their worlds no longer hold. Ghost Dog has taken a feudal ethic from a book and lives it to the letter in a city that cannot recognise it. The mafia he serves is a council of old men behind on their rent, watching cartoons, quoting their rules while they break them. The two codes face each other, and both are shown as borrowed dignity in a culture that has stopped supplying any. The friendship of Ghost Dog and Raymond, each speaking only his own language and each understanding, finds something true about affinity across race and tongue, through image and sound as much as words. Held here because much of what the film knows stays at the level of irony and cool: a meaning glimpsed more than a meaning worked out.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Elevation comes often, and low. The opening is the film’s best height and sets its register: a pigeon’s flight over the city and down to a roof, with RZA’s hollow, tolling beats beneath it, a solitary grace above a ruined place. Ghost Dog’s sword practice on the roof at night, the slow glide of the cars he takes through dark streets to the score, and the final standoff, where Louie fires and Ghost Dog falls with his gun empty while Pearline watches, rise to a quiet, cold elevation. The chosen key is deadpan, and the comedy of the mobsters lets the air out by design. The sublime here is real and frequent in a minor mode, and it rarely reaches terror or transport.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Here the film builds rather than evokes. The retainer and the lord, the ronin whose master has failed him, the death embraced in advance, the messenger birds, the last of a tribe: the archetype of the loyal servant is the structure that bears the plot, since every turn follows from the obligation Ghost Dog has taken on. The film doubles it. The mobsters too are an old tribe dying out, and the two orders of fealty mirror each other, so the myth is the engine of a gangster film, not its ornament. At the end the book goes on in other hands, Pearline’s among them, and the myth is shown as transmission: a code lives only as long as someone reads it. Held below the top because the archetype is assembled partly by citation, from Melville, from Suzuki and from the Hagakure on screen, so that construction and allusion are entwined.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The departure is the graft itself: a hit-man film inherited from Melville and the Japanese gangster cinema, set among Italian American mobsters, carried by a hip-hop score and a Black lead who lives by an eighteenth-century Japanese manual, all in a minimalist, comic, drifting style. In 1999 that combination was not a proven path. A genre picture made by an art-house director, with RZA writing the score and the Hagakure read aloud over it, risked looking like pastiche or affectation, and some reviewers found it so. The stake was real but bounded: each component was known, and the director’s manner was already established by Stranger Than Paradise and Dead Man. A real swerve rather than an accent, short of the reorganisation that Citizen Kane or Breathless placed.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The form is reading. The film is cut by passages of a book shown as text and spoken by its reader, and its story is about a man who has made himself out of a book. The cards are not chapter heads but the voice by which Ghost Dog governs his acts, and the film asks its audience to read alongside him. The books passed from hand to hand, Akutagawa’s Rashomon and the Hagakure itself, carry the same form into the plot; the cartoons the mobsters watch are their scripture, crude and violent, and the form sets it against his. Remove the cards and the doubled screens and the film loses its knowledge that a code is a text a person chooses to inhabit. Held below the top because the cool, minimal manner sometimes contains the content rather than becoming it.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Twenty-seven years of return have kept the film yielding at a moderate depth. It is studied in writing on borrowing between films, on Black and Asian crossings in American culture, on its director’s later manner and on the hip-hop film score, and it rewards a second viewing through its rhymes: cartoons that foreshadow what follows, the Rashomon thread with its question of whose story is true, the two dying tribes. The evidence of sustained return is real but narrower than for the films in the tier above, and much of what a return yields is the same pleasure of pattern rather than new meaning. Demonstrated, but within a cult more than a canon.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Released in 1999, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force is moderate: the film reorganised a few possibilities at once, a hip-hop composer scoring an art film as a full collaborator, the samurai code carried into a Black American hero, the gangster genre played as a melancholy comedy of obsolescence. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: RZA’s later film scoring and a hip-hop samurai strain in animation and music stand in its line, and the film helped make the crossing of hip-hop and Japanese martial myth a recognised idiom; but how much they owe it is unsettled, and part of that line belongs to the Wu-Tang Clan’s own earlier samurai mythology. Within its decade it did not redirect the field as Pulp Fiction (8.3) or Chungking Express (7.8) did. A solid but local pressure.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Survival is weighed over twenty-seven years, from 1999. The film survives whole as released: there is one version, with nothing lost and nothing replaced. Its presence is continuous but of a cult rather than the widest kind: it circulates on disc and on streaming, returns in repertory, and its score has been reissued and is widely heard on its own. Two charges hold the figure where it is. The presence is narrower than that of the films most widely kept, and the surface is fixed to its moment more than most, late 1990s hip-hop, pagers, car electronics, an idiom of the mafia in decline from that decade. Against that, its pigeons, its rooftops and its code have outlived the surface well.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. Command of the medium is sure and, in places, bears the weight. Robby Müller’s photography gives the city a night grain and the rooftops a light that make Ghost Dog’s solitude visible. Jay Rabinowitz’s cutting keeps the drifting tempo legible and times the deadpan. RZA’s score, sparse and looping, is one of the best uses of hip-hop production as film music, and it carries the film’s mood and pace. Forest Whitaker’s performance, a large stillness and a soft voice, is the film’s centre. The costs: the supporting mob playing is deliberately broad and sometimes merely broad, the middle sags in tempo, and some set pieces, the attack on the Vargo house, a killing through a sink pipe taken from Suzuki, are staged with more cool than invention.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the grave samurai voice over the black cards and the slapstick of the mobsters, the aged soldiers, the gangster who raps, the cartoons on every screen. The film largely holds them under one law. Both are men ruled by obsolete codes, and the deadpan treats each with the same affectionate distance, so that comedy and gravity are one physics of decline. The range is wide, from a child’s reading to a rooftop death to Woody Woodpecker on a mob boss’s screen, and the law holds through it more often than not. It slips where the comedy plays only as comedy and the code’s gravity is lost for a scene, and the ending borrows part of its weight from the voice rather than earning it all by the action.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The orders held: a single consciousness living by a chosen law; a friendship across tongue and race; the city’s decline and the failing economy of an aged mafia; the bond of a man and a child who share books; the natural order, glimpsed in the birds and the bear; the inheritance of a culture’s ethic by a stranger to it. They are integrated through the code rather than listed, which lifts the axis above a register of themes. What holds it lowest of the twelve is that each order is touched lightly, and that the family, labour and the state are present only as sketches. A film of one man’s few days in one city holds a modest compass, and the axis credits what is held.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.4, then The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, and The Swerve, The Living Form and The Made at 7.7. A film that survives whole in its one version after twenty-seven years, its score heard on its own; the loyal retainer as the structure that bears the plot, doubled in a dying mob and handed on as a book; a graft of Melville, the samurai code and hip-hop that was not a proven path; a form cut by the book its hero lives by; and a making carried by Müller’s night, RZA’s score and Whitaker’s stillness.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: a consciousness, a friendship across tongues, a city and its failing mafia, a man and a child who share books, integrated through the code but each touched lightly, with the family, labour and the state as sketches. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.0, a real reorganisation of a few possibilities with a reach that stayed narrow and is partly RZA’s own; then The Sublime at 7.3, elevation frequent in a minor mode and rarely more; and The Inevitable at 7.4, a required spine with a middle that admits what could go.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.7, The Made at 7.7, The Inner Law at 7.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.4, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, The Swerve at 7.7, The Unconcealment at 7.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.0 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at Pressure on Tradition, 7.0, The Sublime, 7.3, The Inevitable, 7.4, The Unconcealment, 7.4, and The Bottomless Well, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.5, from a sum of 90.1, in the band of Tier III, five tenths short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and well short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the Necessity Cap would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai as released, about 116 minutes, the one version of the film, shown in competition at Cannes in May 1999 and released in the United States in March 2000, from the pigeon’s first flight to the final standoff: written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, photographed by Robby Müller, edited by Jay Rabinowitz, with music by RZA. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The film is judged in English, with Raymond’s French as part of the object. Its design and principal scenes are known well, its minor dialogue less well, and no line of dialogue is quoted; the passages of the Hagakure shown on its cards are described, not quoted. The Hagakure and Akutagawa’s Rashomon are named as books within the film and are not part of the work scored. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the production companies, the translation of the Hagakure the film uses, the number and order of its passages, the places where the film was shot, shot counts and the share of the running time given to the voice, who receives the book at the end and in what order, and how far later works in animation and music acknowledge a debt to the film.