Battles Without Honor and Humanity

 

I heard about Battles Without Honor and Humanity, a series of Japanese gangster cinema directed by Kinji Fukasaku, when I first encountered Anurag Kashyap's The Gangs of Wasseypur. Once I watched the first series of 5 movies (all made in 1973 and 1974), it is clear that Fukasaku's plotless/plot-light realism and handheld visual style inspired not only Kashyap but also Hong Kong gangster cinema, particularly The Young and Dangerous (古惑仔) series, directed by Andrew Lau, who went on to create the Inferno Affairs (无间道) trilogy that were "borrowed" by Martin Scorsese for The Departed. Welcome to the World Gangster Cinema, where borders do not exist. 

Even today, the Battles series look wonderfully fresh, innovative, and irresistible. Based on the memoir of a real-life yakuza, the movies are relentlessly unsentimental and journalistic. The style of choreographing and shooting street brawls and assassinations is still far more effective and visceral than the "shaky-cam" stuff by modern imitators. 

Any gangster movie made after 1972 owes something to Coppola's The Godfather. Fukasaku is no exception. The assassination scene in the fifth and last entry of the series, aptly titled Final Episode, clearly references the classic death of Sonny Corleone, with a twist. (Kashyap also paid homage to this scene in Wasseypur.) Meanwhile, the series eschew the lush family drama, Italian American style, of The Godfather and parades a large cast of characters who scheme and battle each other with nearly incomprehensible complexity. Fukasaku is much colder and more cynical about the nature of gangsters and, perhaps, humanity. The only ounce, no, gram of sympathy is reserved for a young thug or two at the bottom of the food chain, who gets himself killed pointlessly; the bosses get none. Each movie ends with a funeral. 

After the enormous success of Battles, both with critics and at the box office, Fukasaku made three more similar movies and quickly abandoned the genre to pursue other interests, no matter how much money the studio threw at him. I love him so much. 

Why Steven Pinker is So Annoying

Steven Pinker considers himself a progressive and seems irritated that many progressives consider him The World's Most Annoying Man. I have long counted myself in the latter camp. Still, this reaction is mostly a feeling, and I've had to spend some time thinking about my feelings before I can articulate why. Why is it that a seemingly "nice" man who insists upon "reason" and "data" and, I'll admit, facts, to illustrate that right now is the best of the time in human history, induces a feeling of contempt and disgust. 

The facts he iterates and reiterates is that, worldwide, armed conflicts and violent deaths and abject poverty are down, while life expectancy and the number of people in middle-class are up. The data no doubt accept these conclusions. What is unclear, however, is what he is fighting against. Who is his opponent? He vaguely points to the "general feeling of doom" or all the bad news in media. It smells fishy and disingenuous, especially when he is trying so hard to be slippery. 

Some faceless person: There is a global pandemic going on and US rate of excess death this year is up 20% over last year. (True)

Pinker: But deaths from war and famine and infectious diseases are lower than ever. (Also true)

When he is trying to argue optimism into everyone's head, I am reminded of Ned Flanders in The Simpsons. 

Where does this argument go wrong though? It is not easy to immediately pinpoint. 

Recently a horrendous incident made the rounds on Chinese internet. A good-looking young Tibetan woman living in Sichuan Province, 拉姆, was murdered by her husband. Her tragedy caused widespread outrage because it is a perfect example of how the society has failed her. Married at 19, her husband physically abused her. She bore two children, including a son, as her husband wanted, but the beating did not stop. She divorced him, and the court gave her husband full custody of both children. Having lost everything, the woman made a relatively good living with dignity and enormous hard work. Thanks to social media, she also became a 网红, an internet celebrity who gained thousands of fans who watched her webcast. Many have pointed out that she was the "perfect victim", ie, a "pure" victim, because she did nothing to "contribute" to her demise, as most other victims of domestic abuse are accused of. But being perfect was not enough to save her life. Her ex-husband poured gasoline on her and burned her to death. 

If presented with this incident and the public's reaction, I am sure Mr. Pinker would point out that, overall, women's economic and social conditions in 2020 are better than those in 1920 or 1820, and fewer women, or Chinese women, or rural Chinese women are suffering abuse by their husbands, families, and society. And he would be correct. So why does such a position seem disgusting, at least to me? 

Both correct and repulsive. It's a feeling worth examination. 

To this victim of her ex-husband, the local police who refused to protect her, a court that took away her children, and an utterly indifferent society, the argument of progress is irrelevant. In the long run the world indeed becomes better (maybe? depending on how long?), but, as Keynes pointed out, "In the long run we are all dead."

Philosophers and sociologists often debate about the good of an individual versus the good of many, but they have rarely discussed the pain of an individual versus the pain of many. Perhaps, instinctively, everyone knows that the pain of a single person can never be understood through the pain of many. There may be a thing of "the common good," but there isn't a thing of "the common pain." Every person's pain is intense and intensely personal. It cannot be calculated with GDP, income per capita, or growth rate. 

Although each person feels his or her own pain in a most intimate and personal way, it is fortunate that humans can also feel each other's pain. As flawed and limited as our empathy inherently is, most people are able to be touched by and even share each other's suffering. This is why the case of 拉姆 caused so much outrage among Chinese netizens. She may be a single case, an anecdote, and a statistical blip in the 1.4 billion Chinese people or 7.6 billion humans on earth, but most people are able to feel some pain for her, and this empathetic pain and outrage in turn provoke a strong sense of justice, a strong wish to make life safer and better for all women, at least those who are still alive at the moment. 

What the fuck has 100 years of women's progress around the world done for her? 

Strangely enough, feeding people statistics, however true and correct, will not provoke the same strong emotions. If I were to tell you, say, 2586 women were murdered by their husbands in the Sichuan Province last year (I made up the number), which, according to rational commentators like Pinker, is theoretically bad and calls for something to be done, does it provoke any urge to do something, to change, and to help? (I don't need to quote Stalin on this, do I?) 

In fact, one could argue that much (perhaps most?) of the social progress in the past 50 to 100 years came from just this kind of natural outrage, indignation, and empathy for individual tragedies. A photo of a black boy being attacked by police dog in Alabama. A photo of a naked Vietnamese girl running down the road with soldiers behind her. A video of a black man being killed by a white policeman. A headshot of a battered woman. It is pain, perhaps more than joy, that forces us to realize our shared humanity.

Rationalists such as Pinker like to credit all social progress to science and technology and economic growth, as if scientific advances alone can inevitably and irresistibly push society into a more equal, fair, and just direction. They dismiss people's empathy and outrage for individual tragedies as biased, sensational, and irrational, when these are merely natural humanity. They never mention all the laws and rules and public opinions that have been instituted or changed by a mother's tear-stained face or a starving child's eyes. 

So one has to wonder: Does Steven Pinker feel my pain? 

I don't know whether Bill Clinton feels your pain or my pain (I very much doubt it but at least he bothers to pretend), but Pinker is giving all kinds of signals that he does not. 

Intergenerational Trauma

I heard this term last year in the context of the Oklahoma Massacre, but it resonated strongly after I recently had a chat with a Chinese friend who emigrated to Singapore. We are roughly the same age, grew up mostly in the 1980s, and have postgraduate degrees. We have had a fairly comfortable middle-class life with large chunks lived outside of China (me in the US and her in Europe and Singapore). And yet, there are family behavioral and psychological patterns that are detached from reality and eerily similar not only between the two of us but are widespread among Chinese immigrants of my generation --- the generation that are not directly affected by but nevertheless in the shadow of the traumatic years from the 1950s to 1976, when daily life was not normal for our parents. Numbers, documents, history accounts, and words cannot accurately describe the emotional experience of the generation(s) of Chinese people who lived through these years. Like soldiers who come home with PTSD, our parents rarely talked about it. Trauma defies language. And yet it is not unusual or unique among people around the world in history and in the present. I often wonder if people have to share an experience to understand each other --- truly and authentically understand and empathize. The answer is sometimes no and sometimes yes. The question remains whether and how much people are both together and separate, which perhaps is and will always be a paradox. (I feel like I should quote GK Chesterton here but cannot remember the source or the exact wording.)

Angry Women and Their Books (1)

James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)

I must begin this discussion with Alice Bradley Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. In particular, I recognized her anger in 2 of her stories --- Your Haploid Heart (1969) and The Screwfly Solution (1977). (Note: Spoilers of both stories below.)

Your Haploid Heart is the first Tiptree story I read. It puzzled me and tormented my mind. I knew the central conflict between the Esthaans and the Flenni, two manifestations of one species on the alien plant, is meant to refer to certain human qualities. I could feel it, but I could not figure out what it was.

All science fictions are allegories. All aliens are humans in disguise. Yes, even Arthur Clarke's gods.

In their misguided pursuit of becoming more human and more civilized, the Esthaans attempt to commit genocide of the Flenni, which is not really a genocide but rather "parricide, filicide ... perhaps suicide ..."

It was only after I read an article about the life and work of Alice Sheldon did I begin to understand. You see, she camouflaged her gender-related theme with descriptions of both "male" and "female" organisms in the strong and stocky Esthaans (the diploids) as well as the frail and beautiful Flenni (the haploids). Their codependence is established in that the Esthaans produce the Flenni in an asexual manner (while suggesting a certain disgust and fear of reproduction), and two Flenni (gametes) combine to give birth to Esthaans (but sex means death to them). Therefore, reading this story alone without context, it would be difficult to see that she was really talking about the perhaps-suicidal urge for men to destroy women.

But ...

Eight years later, after her male cover was blow, she unleashed her concerns of men killing women in The Screwfly Solution, under a female pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon. It is perhaps the most gruesome story I have ever read, even though the violence occurs off-stage. The cause of this massacre might be bizarre and alien, but the ideology used to justify it (i.e., purifying humanity from the corrupting effects of women's seductive power) is eerily familiar.

I think most every woman who has walked this earth can feel a shiver down her spine when she reads this story, because the threat of death is both literal and figurative.

Women are killed by men since the dawn of human society through today. It's not science fiction, it's reality. It's so common that we don't even talk about it. At least, nobody talks about it with any visible anger or shame.

Sure, women kill men too, at a fraction of the prevalence. And perhaps we can argue that men kill men the most, which is also true, although I don't know how that helps.

Figuratively, it is the dominance of male thought as the default, human thought, while female thought as "the other" and the aberrant and deviant.

Nevertheless ...

What Alice Sheldon wanted to point out is that men killing women is a form of human self-destruction.

This reminds me of a real exchange I read about between Cixin Liu and a history professor. Cixin Liu is a Chinese science fiction writer who won the 2015 Hugo Award for his novel "The Three-Body Problem" and has a massive following among Chinese (mostly male) science fiction readers. In 2007, at some public event, Liu and Professor Xiaoyuan Jiang had a debate about culture and cannibalism. Liu pointed to a young woman who was hosting this event and said, if the 3 of us were the last ones left to carry on human civilization, and we have to eat someone to survive, would you eat her? (Note that he went straight to the question "Would you eat HER?") Jiang replied, of course not. Liu said, we live in an indifferent universe (an idea he no doubt "learned" from Clarke). If you don't eat her and survive, you would be responsible for losing all of this glorious culture, think Shakespeare, Goethe, Einstein ... You think I'm cruel, but I'm only rational.

I'll leave you to ponder the irony of Mr. Liu's rationality.

Primer

It is perhaps because a friend and I discussed the fear of death and dying this morning that I decided (finally) to rewatch this movie after over a decade. Even though I had read and watched a number of variations on the time-travel theme, I was very impressed by this little indie movie to remember it over the years. It's more interesting than the tropes and the done-to-death "solutions" to the fundamental paradoxes, for example, the reliance on coincidences and characters' unawareness in stories like "12 Monkeys". (I'm not saying "12 Monkeys" is bad, but I found it unsatisfying and tiresome, certainly not as clever as it thinks it is.)

Upon the second viewing, I am again impressed by Shane Carruth's courage to at least try to face the paradox of time travel. Of course, it inevitably breaks down as the lead characters' little scheme to prevent paradoxes breaks down later in the story. In general, his choice to let paradoxes happen and let history be rewritten in the way time travel happens in "Palimpsest" (a novella by Charles Stross) is audacious. Unfortunately he kind of lost control of the story and chickened out of the inevitable confrontations --- perhaps because of the lack of budget for special effects --- led to an ultimately disappointing ending.

The particular wrong turn in the script is the sudden appearance of the third, "failsafe" machine that pops up when the story is written into a corner, leading to the problem of when the initial timeline (which leads to the disastrous appearance a second Thomas Granger, Abe's girlfriend's father) ceases to exist. If this timeline is killed the moment Abe goes into the "failsafe" machine on another floor, Aaron would have no opportunity to try to beat him with his own trip.

The hastiness of this third machine and Aaron's previously-unestablished scheme of bringing a machine back, etc., are a lot of hand-waving that somewhat diminishes the story. Of course, the inherent paradoxical nature of time travel cannot be resolved, and this story always faces the unsolvable threat of "what if the original Abe or Aaron chooses not to go into the machine at 6 pm in the afternoon". Nevertheless, I am still a fan of this movie and Palimpsest for their creativity and courage to challenge cause and effect.

Recalling my discussion with the friend (who is, by the way, the least vain person I know), however, I realized that the emotional core of all the time-travel stories is regret and the unwillingness to accept ourselves for who we really are.

Goyokin (1969)

I watched Goyokin (trailer) twice a few weeks ago, and even now I am haunted by Tatsuya Nakadai's eyes. (He might have been even more haunting in Harakiri, but that's a different kind of impression.)

The plot relies heavily on familiar tropes in jidaigeki and samurai movies and requires little to no elaboration to fans of the genre. Maybe that is why Hideo Gosha, who co-wrote and directed this movie, remains quite obscure in the West. Steeped in the enormous scope of the action, the scenery, and the larger-than-life characters is an old-fashioned romanticism, presented with pure visual bravura.

I consider myself a legit fan of the genre after watching nearly 80 jidaigeki movies and several TV series, mostly from its golden age of the 1960s and 70s. In these movies, we are often treated with sophisticated cinematography that captures the deadly beauty of sword-fights, from the forbidding grassland in Samurai Rebellion (Masaki Kobayashi) to the house of shadows and nightmares in The Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okamoto). Of all these entries, however, Goyokin has the most gorgeous and unforgettable scenes, shot obviously on location. It was unparalleled when it came out, and I very much doubt we will ever see anything like it again.

It is a shame that I have been unable to find a remastered or high-resolution version of this movie with English subtitles (Chinese subtitles would do, but they don't seem to exist either). This gem should be seen on the big screen.

The Love Triangle in Miller's Crossing

Someone astutely pointed out that this movie is defined by two love triangles: The Dane--Mink--Bernie and Tom--Leo--Verna triangles. It is made abundantly clear that the first triangle is sexual, or, homosexual. How about the second?

Many years ago, when I was a relatively new fan of Raymond Chandler's novels, someone who is far more well versed in film (than I am now and will ever be) casually mentioned that Tom is gay and is in love with Leo.

Rewatching Miller's Crossing (you know I'm either bored or old, or both, when I have started re-watching stuff), I'm not so sure. That Tom loves Leo more than he loves Verna (if at all) is made abundantly clear, but, if Coen brothers had a clear idea about the nature of Tom's feelings, well, they did not succeed in presenting it on screen.

Tom's love for Leo, which is clearly "insufficiently" reciprocated, could very well be Oedipal rather than sexual. The only clarity is in his possessiveness.

Does Tom care about Verna at all? The movie's answer is apparently "no." Putting aside Tom's repeated pleas that Leo should give up Bernie to Casper, Tom decided to personally and directly stab Verna in the back at least twice: When Verna told him where Bernie was hiding, he immediately gave that information to Casper, which would have led to Bernie's execution if it had not been for a twist. Near the end of the movie, Verna intercepted Tom outside his door and accused him of killing Bernie. Tom did not deny it, not because he was feeling chivalrous or anything, but rather that he really was going to kill Bernie in the next scene.

Throughout the movie, Verna is a parallel character to Casper. In the same way he uses Casper's misplaced sense of honesty and ethics to manipulate him, Tom uses her misunderstanding of himself to manipulate her for his own purpose, which is, always and only, to protect Leo. She thinks Tom loves her and utters various witty classic femme fatale lines to sad comic effects. This display reminds me of "Gilda," in which the love between the two male characters is even more explicit, although the extraneous female character somehow became iconic. How ironic.

I am inclined to chalk up Tom's love for Leo as more Oedipal than sexual. Nevertheless, over the years, I have come to learn that Raymond Chandler was indeed gay. So who the hell knows.

The Blemish

In the very last few minutes of the last episode of the 1972-73 TV series Nemuri Kyoshiro, the lead actor of Kyoshiro, Tamura Masakazu, appeared in modern costume as himself and walked around Kyoto for a few brief scenes. In these shots, a dark spot the size of a dime, is clearly visible on his right cheek. It gave me a shock.

Why such a shock? Perhaps because the blemish had been covered with makeup throughout the series. Well, that is not entirely true. In a number of scenes, when the directors almost casually allowed Tamura Masakazu's right side to take up the whole screen, the spot was in fact faintly visible. However, my brain refused to acknowledge it. After all, Tamura Masakazu is renowned for his beauty in Japanese audience throughout his long career from the 1960s to the early 2000s. In the dozens of TV series and movies he starred, there was never a hint of this spot on his face. He might have had it bleached at some point, or it went away on its own. And yet, here it is on his nearly-perfect face, captured on film, in open air.

Below is a shot in the Nemuri Kyoshiro series with period costume and full makeup.

I don't know why it has such a strong and lasting effect on me, to see that ... thing ... on his face the first time. In some ways, it reminds me of the portrait of Dorian Gray, except it is the reverse.

This is not the only example. Facial scars on an actor, particular a leading man or woman, has been a source of some fascination to me. For example, Sammo Hung and Sofia Helin (The Bridge) both have scars around their mouths.

There is something moving about such display of one's flaws, especially in contrast to the otherwise beautiful (or at least adorable, in Sammo's case) context. The emotional impact of such a face, at least on me, can be far stronger than perfection.

Nemuri Kyoshiro is the defining role for Tamura Masakazu. The strange mix of both aloofness and vulnerability more or less remained in many of his later roles. Even some of the more comic roles could not be entirely free of this slightly intimidating distance. That blemish overturned something fundamental, oh I don't know, maybe in my mind.