Episode 15 of the 2022 NHK taiga serials, The 13 Lords of Shogun, is quite possibly as shocking and riveting as The Red Wedding in A Song of Ice and Fire. I have often wondered about the unique political structure of historical Japan, and the complex relationship between the superiors and subordinates, such as those between the Emperor and Shogun and between the Shogun and his chief counselor. It is unlike the political system in China, in which the surest path to the height of power is to the Emperor's throne, with an entire apparatus supporting him, or the European system, in which kings must contend with both the Pope in Rome and the feudal lords.
It is absolutely fascinating how, throughout history, people struggle for power. While in each period and circumstance, the political and cultural structures may differ vastly, the insatiable desire for power and the necessity of using other people for one's own purpose are always the same. Blood must be spilled, and money must be spent; alliances must be made and broken; friends and families must be formed and betrayed. How does one man drive others to obey his orders and do his bidding? By any means necessary. But one person's will is always insufficient, and there has to be something in it for everyone, even if that something is quite intangible and perhaps deceptive. Even if only one man's name remains on top of a page in the history book, there were many people who used each other to get to where they were.
Written by the highly regarded Koki Mitani, the series are surprisingly clear-eyed and uncompromising (the occasional humor notwithstanding). It is not interested in making heroic myths or taking the side of whoever's point of view it's narrating from. There are no good guys or bad guys, only political and military expediency in a particular place and time. The characters do not have a hint of historical hindsight to allow them the luxury of posturing or moralizing their choices.
It is often claimed that the Japanese society was (and perhaps still is) rigidly hierarchical and people were somehow naturally loyal or obedient. Such simplistic theories can never withstand a closer look. There is a saying in Chinese that can be roughly translated as "Rules are dead but people are alive," which means that people both rely on rules/hierarchy and violate them all the time, depending on the circumstances. Theories and reality, words and behaviors, are never exactly the same.
Is there any filmmaker like Douglas Sirk? The point is not his subversiveness, for there are plenty of subversive artists, but rather how the viewer is never certain how he feels about the conventionality within his movies.
On the one hand, anyone can see that he pokes fun at stale cliches. There is irony in his treatment of familiar stories and tropes. On the other hand, he seems to genuinely embrace them and relish in the familiarity. When every other artist can't wait to display their originality and emphasize how unconventional they are, Sirk seems to enjoy toying with tropes and messing with our expectations. He could not toy with tropes without first loving them and understanding them inside out.
For example, the hero in "A Scandal in Paris", a man who calls himself Vidocq among other names (George Sanders), a life-long thief and con man who also happens to be dashing and irresistible to women, is in the end reformed by a young woman's love to become an upstanding citizen, even the police chief of Paris. Gee, how many times have we seen that story before, especially in 19th century romance novels. There is no realistic depiction of his "moral awakening" or psychological turning point. And yet, there are these little knowing jokes here and there, never calling attention to themselves, that wink and nudge at the audience, to suggest that no one should take these cliches seriously.
The real climax of this movie is not the obligatory confrontation and fights at the end but rather the scene between Vidocq and Therese (Signe Hasso), the aristocratic woman who converts him. Presented initially as shy and naive, she represents the archetypal "good woman" who usually changes the bad boy's mind with her purity and innocence or stimulating his protective instinct (yeah, I too know the tropes inside out). Here, however, she declares that she would become a thief and a criminal for him. "If I can't get you to join me on my side, I'll have to go over to your side," she says. Sure, we could consider this yet another trope: a woman swept up by her infatuation with a bad boy and willing to abandon her social standing for him. But it's not. Her glee and enthusiasm hint at a repressed desire for thrills and rebellion. It's no more than a hint but unmistakable if you pay attention.
In another familiar but ambiguous scene, Loretta (Carole Landis), the "bad woman" in contrast to Therese (again a conventional setup that feels slightly off), betrays her poor sop of a husband in a rendezvous with Vidocq. Her husband finds her and, in a rage, threatens to commit suicide, but instead he shoots her dead. One could of course argue that her death is just a silly plot device to get Vidocq out of a jam, which it is, but it can also be interpreted as the husband's inability to express his hatred for her except through violence and murder. Funny how that is eerily realistic but hardly ever described.
In 1946 under the stranglehold of the Hays Code, even the most nihilistic movies have to tack on a reassuring ending. No killer is allowed to go free. No adulterer could live happily ever after. And yet the way the code is carried out here is so cynical and twisted that the audience might not derive the correct moral lesson.
The world is filled with men eager to prove how clever they are, but one who is extremely clever but barely lets it show is a rarity.
The first half of Don Quixote ended in a brawl, very much reminiscent of a farce in a climactic scene. In fact, there is quite a bit of drama elements in the novel. In particular, the middle part of the novel consists of several loosely connected romantic plots, and the characters of these stories all converge at the inn to resolve these love entanglements. Only one of the interloping stories, presented as a written manuscript about a love triangle in Florence, is not connected with the characters in the narrative.
One could therefore argue that Cervantes was in fact a dramatist/playwright at heart. He probably started writing the novel because of a lack of success in playwriting and stuffed the novel with plays and stories rotting in his drawers.
The romantic plots in Don Quixote have been largely ignored now, despite their bulk in the novel. Critics focus entirely on the scattered parts of Don Quixote's ironic adventures and failures. The trials and tribulations of Cardenio and Lucinda, Dorotea and Don Fernando, the captive and the Moorish woman, and various other happy and sad lovers are rarely mentioned, as they are so detached from Don Quixote's story. I think it's a shame. Dorotea is a very interesting and well-drawn character, even if there are some elements in her story that may feel disturbing to modern readers. She is intelligent, resourceful, courageous, and charming that reminds me of Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Given the limitation of the era and the authors, Dorotea and Portia cannot be assigned a better end than a pretty questionable marriage, which cannot be helped.
At least in the first half of the novel, Cervantes does not have a lot of sympathy for Don Quixote. This is reflected in not only the shepherd boy's complaint but also the endless fights that he initiated with others and gets roundly pounded in consequence. The writing mixes some pretty brutal violence with laughter, which might have been a fad on stage at that time. In the more peaceful and heavily policed modern era, brawls no longer seem so hilarious, but we still like to watch simulated violence on screen, including me.
At some point in the first 20-ish chapters, the author must have realized that inventing a series of fights Don Quixote gets into and loses are unsustainable, if he wants to avoid the tropes of an invincible knight errant or legendary hero. There is a reason that heroes in legends always beat whoever and whatever they combat. Legends that recorded reality must have been very short and long lost in the tide of time.
After an absolutely hilarious episode of Don Quixote taking penance in the mountains with some X-rated jokes (can't even pass American movie censorship today), the novel takes a turn from episodic adventures of one characters to a collection of stories within a story. It seems like a cheap trick to stuff the pages when one runs out of ideas. The stories of two characters (Cardenio and Dorotea) linked by one villain are kind of clever, but the episode of "two friends in Florence" seems to be a blatant page-stuffer.
In this segment, which I have not finished, Don Quixote recedes to the background, I guess until the author can uncover another dimension to his madness. Sancho Panza continues to provide most of the witticism in contrast to the hat of "ignorant peasant" he wears. I am particularly fascinated by the way this character is painted and all the contradictions he embodies.
A particularly poignant point was made in the chapter where the innkeeper confesses, to the priest's exasperation, that he too takes the knight errant books as real --- just not applicable to his time. Here the author is displaying the gradient of perception in tales outside of our daily lives: from Don Quixote who believes every word of chivalry in his immediate world, to the innkeeper who believes the tales as true history, to the priest who knows the stories are made up but the grandiose anecdotes about a true war hero. Then there is Sancho, who knows reality in what he witnesses but is taken in by his master's promises of governorship and riches --- primarily because he is illiterate. One has to wonder, then, whether he would have done better or worse compared with Don Quixote or the innkeeper if he could read.
That Cervantes was examining the questions of "what is real" and "how do I know" in 1605 suggest that fake news and its subscribers are not a modern phenomenon. Humans are not innately able to discern the truth from fiction. Truth cannot be easily attained by our brain and abilities, despite technological advances we have made. We are, by nature, a species of make-believe.
It is possible that, later in the novel or in the second part of the novel (written and published a few years after the first part), the author began to identify with Don Quixote, leading the readers/commentators to do the same. It is apparent to me, however, that it is not so in the beginning.
So far, I am surprised by the amount of violence in the novel. I guess it is intended to mimic/spoof the Arthurian romance that it makes fun of? It is not quite accurate to say that Don Quixote "gets into fights" with other people and, more often than not, gets beaten up. Rather, he is the instigator in almost all of the incidents. That he ends up worse off, because the opponents often outnumber him, is a separate matter. In the first episode before Sancho Panza joins his quest, he cracks the heads of a couple of unsuspecting guys who were just trying to water their mules. In a later quest, he kills seven sheep on the road. I guess the fact that he initiates the acts of violence does not matter a lot to commentators because a) we are told he is crazy, and b) he gets beaten up as a consequence. Nevertheless, I want to make a note of it. Rather than interpreting the series of incidents as idealism being crushed by reality, I see the novel more as an exploration of cause and effect, initiation of action and uncontrollable consequences.
Another observation is how much sex drives the violence. In most but not all of the episodes so far, his sexual desire is the motivation or trigger. This is particularly explicit at the inn where an Asturian maid is on her way to another man but grabbed and groped by Don Quixote instead. This follows the curious episode in which his horse Rosinante got in trouble for doing pretty much the same thing. It is hard to blame it on the fantasy of chivalry, except that the fantasy of chivalry contains a lot of sexual desire cloaked in violence and an honor code.
One could argue that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are two aspects of one person. The former represents an artificial and wishful view of the world through the lens of romantic fiction --- or any kind of fiction, including but not limited to honor codes and morality. The latter is at least an attempt to see the world (including cause and effect, initiation of action and consequences, as noted above) as it truly is. That Sancho serves Don Quixote rather than the other way around, is an interesting premise.
Do you think I am going to discuss how the depiction of naked female bodies (and the lack of male ones) in this classic anime reflects patriarchy's objectification of women? The answer is no. I have free time to write blog posts, but not that much free time to write about things that too many people already see and know. Surely, you know the original manga, created by Shirow Masamune, was published in a seinen magazine (seinen: young adult men) in the early 1990s? Naked boooooobs is par for the course. I have no objections in this context. People should be allowed to have their booooooobs.
No, there are other gender-related elements in Ghost in the Shell, written and directed by Mamoru Oshii, based on the original manga. Here I just want to point out one curious thing in the gender presentation of the self-aware artificial intelligence, an entity known as either the puppet master or Project 2501.
In the 1995 movie, the puppet master (a ghost without a shell) is driven by Section 6 into a female robotic body (a shell, with boobs of course) and "captured" for destruction, but it is referred to by the human characters as "he" and voiced by a male actor (Iemasa Kayumi). Later in the climactic scene, the puppet master talks Major Kusanagi into mating (connecting) with it to produce a new generation of AIs that live inside Major (or maybe just in the interweb), and Major agrees. (Note that in the manga sequel, Major did go on to spawn a number of "selves", which can be interpreted as baby AIs.)
Let's review. At first, the AI enters and controls a naked female body with an empty brain, it speaks in a male voice and is referred to with the male pronoun, and later it has a cyber intercourse with a female character. Few, if anyone, would question such a premise, even if the scene of a female half-body speaks with a male voice is incongruent (above). Nevertheless, Oshii was obviously not unaware of the gender mismatch, because in this scene he had the (fully clothed) human male characters comment that "we refer to the puppet master as 'him' for convenience, but we don't know whether it is a man or a woman."
That the puppet master was originally imagined or, more precisely, assumed to be male is corroborated by the symbolism of the cyber intercourse scene. The puppet master explains to Major that it wants to reproduce with another entity of its kind to introduce diversification into its own "genetic" material, and it has chosen Major. It is clearly uninterested in Batou or any other man (more precisely, male cyborg) in the world. In fact, the puppet master has been stalking Major in the web for a while, which is why Major had a vague feeling of not being entirely herself in earlier scenes. Thus, the story is on some level about mating/reproduction. Of course, just like the Prometheus series by Ridley Scott, the author assumes that the self/subject (the storyteller and the audience's point of view) is male, who seeks a female body/object to complete the baby-making mission, because he can't do it by himself. The entire chain of logic is so instinctive and deeply embedded in our culture (nearly all cultures in the modern world?) that everyone barely registers its meaning.
(Unlike Skynet, the AI is not interested in world domination. It just wants ... babies, which is kind of funny, because the human urge for babies is driven by our fear of mortality.)
Well, I guess this is about objectification of women after all, ie, as an object used in reproduction.
But not so fast!
In the 2008 "Ghost in the Shell, 2.0," which includes some new 3D animation and re-edited background music, the puppet master is re-dubbed in a female voice.
I realized this when I rewatched the DVD of 2.0. I was switching between the English and Japanese soundtracks and found it strange that the English version had a male voice but the Japanese version a female voice. Usually the English dub would never make such a drastic change from the original version. After a little digging, I found that the English dub was created for the 1995 version and no one even realized that the puppet master was re-dubbed in 2.0.
This had to be a deliberate change. I looked up the credits for both the 1995 original movie and the 2008 version 2.0. It appears that no other characters were re-dubbed except the puppet master. It was neither an accident nor pressure from the "woke mob" that the voice changed gender. Other than Oshii himself, who would or could do this?
Now the above-referenced scene with the female robot body seems more natural. As I watched a female voice inviting Major to have a baby with her---I mean "it", a totally different feeling started to rise in the air.
On a side note, I have been wondering whether male cyborg bodies in this world have all the male sex organs. Even a blind person can see that Batou has been carrying a torch for Major for years, but he is a character that is discarded by the author in this "romantic" triangle. However, can you still have sexual feelings with a mechanical body?
I first watched "Mysteries of Lisbon" at least 5 years ago and immediately bought it on Google Play, but I did not rewatch it until now, which is fortuitous, as I have only recently learned about Kenji Mizoguchi's mastery of mise-en-scene while watching his "47 Ronin." Raul Ruiz's camera movement feels similar but with its own contemplative rhythm. There are a few places of panning back and forth that suggest a sense of magic or, perhaps more accurately, memory and dream, such as a character appearing in a previously empty space.
I must admit to an irrational partiality for 19th century Romantic novels, a genre to which the 1854 novel of the same name belong. Even though I know nothing whatsoever about Portuguese literature and culture, it feels extremely reminiscent of all the British and French epics I read in adolescence. Just like the food one ingests in childhood will become one's permanent favorite taste, the stories one gobbles up with a side of youthful hormones stay with one forever. It's the comfort food that reminds us of home.
The plot is saturated with the kind of passion, heartbreak, scandals, and improbable entanglement typical of the Romantic melodrama. No doubt the novel by Camilo Castelo Bronco, which has not been translated to English as far as I can find, is as sensationalist and overwrought as the works of Alexandre Dumas (pere). However, the movie does something more with the material --- It both immerses us in this stiff aristocratic world and takes us out of it by several cinematic devices. For example, the foldable cardboard theater carried to the end of the world by the main character, Joao/Pedro da Silva, reminds us from time to time that we are watching a staged drama. The visual layering of characters and space in many scenes heightens the separation of the storyteller and the listener. The layering is also applied to scenes in which an audience exists inside the frame as eaves-dropping but anonymous servants or monks. Ruiz seems to be constantly reminding us about the artificiality of drama and our role as the recipient of a narrative.
During the years after having watched the 4.5-hour-long movie for the first time, I could barely remember any of the characters or subplots, but the images of lush woods and crumbling mansions, as well as the sense of longing and decay, always stayed with me. Some scenes are awash in a golden glow of nostalgia, while other scenes are soaked in chilled green and blue. Plot is no longer necessary to convey the vibration of mood.
In a duel scene near the end, which reminds me of the picturesque scenes in Barry Lyndon (but not so self-consciously screaming "look at me!"), the camera lingers after all the principal characters have left, and a bystander entirely outside of the plot sits down and, for a brief moment, becomes the center of his own drama. Like all the other mysteries of the movie, it fascinates me. We have seen this man pacing in the background throughout the duel, but our attention is captured by the fate of the characters inside the story and barely notices his existence ... until the end. It suggests that anyone's life may contain some romance like that of Joao, his mother Angela de Lima, Father Dinis, or anyone else in the story, and perhaps anyone of us can turn our life story into melodrama by enacting it on theater, cardboard or otherwise.
The soundtrack is fantastic and perfect for the dreamy and melancholy mood of the movie (unlike the Vivaldi used in the trailer). Unfortunately I have not been able to find it online anywhere --- perhaps have to search in Portuguese.
