At first I was laughing, thinking it was some kind of parody, but after watching a little bit, I was still laughing, but it had nothing to do with rhetorical tricks. There are many similarities between the killer and the ghost dog in this film, but the whole film is completely different. Compared to Ghost Dog's use of rooftop boaters, old mafia and old cartoons, and ice cream truck bosses and black ninjas for one movie to build an ironic minority group portrait, this kind of exhilaration is unexpected. One came up with the acknowledgment of "I need symbols, I already have them", and then the question was left behind.
Then, where should our minds turn? Or to put it another way: What does our mind need? Advance layer by layer, and finally get a climax and an answer? Jarmusch gave layers of advancement, but this layer of advancement was like a piece of clothing, just a cover. The presence of the musicians is the symbol (and the symbol also becomes routine because of the repetition), but killing the boss with the guitar strings is not. The use of guitar strings instead of Japanese swords is precisely to try to downplay the ritual and sacredness of "killing the capitalists".
The killer himself is completely neutral. And this film takes him as the point of attention, and leads the audience into this neutrality: the middle way from the body to the heart with repeated repetitions of calm, step-by-step, and not shocking the world. The killer kills because it's his job, extremely simple, and it doesn't make any difference to him whether it's working in the film's tireless symbol or in "reality." He is detached from the film, or in other words, his state is the ultimate state that many works (the best example is Jin Yong's martial arts) intend to embody. And Jarmusch moved this limit into the center of the film. To use a corny compliment, he "started where others ended."
For the characters in the film's story, Jarmusch still has his own attitude of praise and criticism, but this time he chose to keep a distance from his attitude. The irony of this film is different from the somewhat self-pitying and elegiac irony of Ghost Dog, but it is closer to Rorty's view: we hold such a concept by accident, but it does not prevent us from defending it to the death. Art, science, capitalists, are not always like this, nor can they last forever, the only thing that lasts is the human heart. What is the human heart? OK, this is what Jarmusch tried to tell us for 120 minutes.
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