Mr Sausage wrote:All that's left is for Kyoami to vent his despair about the arbitrary cruelty of the world. We're left with an image of a blind man lost on a cliff, awaiting the sister and guide who'll never come, his last remaining consolation a scroll that he drops down the cliff face.
This is obviously an incredibly bleak film, but I’m not sure I agree that it’s a nihilistic one. What’s missing from the above summary is Tango’s response, which spells out quite clearly, and even rather clunkily, that Kyoami is wrong. These evils have not been inflicted by the gods, or by any non-human force, but by Hidetora himself. Colin and Drucker mention the issue of his past atrocities, and this is central to what the film is about. As Tango points out, the suffering they are going through is the logical consequence of people’s tendency to choose evil over good. Importantly, this is an observation about how things happen to be now – it is not a statement about how things will always inevitably be. The virtue and wisdom displayed by Tango, Kyoami, Saburo, Fujimaki, and even Kurogane, might in theory make for a better, fairer world, but the horrors already committed cannot simply be undone or forgotten. Their consequences have to play out to the bitter end.
Mr Sausage wrote:There is no reason for Saburo to've been killed, for Lady Sue to've been executed, for Hidetora to've died of grief. Everything had been righted by human agency and the values of family, honour, and love asserted. The structure was moving from order, to chaos, to order again. But it all crumbles, and crumbles without meaning.
It seems to me that all of these things, and worse, do happen for a very good reason. Hidetora has spent the entirety of his long life slaughtering everyone who stands in his way, burning castles, gouging children’s eyes out, and generally committing every sort of treachery and cruelty under the sun. At the start of the film, Hidetora refers to his war crimes rather vaguely, but Saburo spells it out for him. He cannot reasonably he himself has brought them up to be merciless war-mongers. The business of this film is to chart the various ways in which Hidetora’s reign of terror returns to haunt him at the moment when he decides he wants to live peacefully. It would be morally obscene for him to ride off happily into the sunset at the end of the film.
This might seem perverse, but it would also be obscene, in a sense, if the innocents did not pay for Hidetora’s crimes. Lady Sué doesn’t deserve to die, but Lady Kaede has to have her revenge: that this revenge consumes the lives of good people as well as wiping out the corrupt Ichimonji clan is a measure of that clan’s corruption, not of Lady Kaede’s injustice. For all her force of personality, she is essentially just another link in the chain of cause and effect. Hidetora slaughtered her family, so she slaughters his – all of them, without exception – because that, the film suggests, is how evil works. It doesn’t just return to plague those who committed it, but claims countless innocent bystanders too. It cannot simply be forgiven (as it is by Lady Sué); Kaede’s acts of revenge are made to seem inevitable and even necessary. Hidetora himself shows some awareness of this when he implores Sué to hate him and attack him; in a way, the film itself seems to agree that there is something unnatural, and ultimately ineffectual, about Sué’s inert, forgiving outlook. The film’s own point of view is ferociously dark, but it isn’t nihilism because it’s informed by a kind of moral logic.
The use of natural imagery feeds into this idea. You mentioned the way that natural landscapes make the human figures look small and powerless, and that’s very true. The first shot of the film is of four soldiers facing north, east, south and west, and as the credits go by we see various other soldiers in similarly formal, ordered stations. But they look uneasy, and Takemitsu’s brooding score has a disquieting effect; behind this outward show of order, chaos is lurking and waiting to erupt. The final shot of the title sequence shows the soldiers marginalised at the right of the frame, dwarfed by the rolling hills, whereas the first shot had shown them in a more central, dominant position.
Then chaos does indeed erupt, less in the form of the boars being hunted, than in the form of Hidetora himself riding with his bow drawn: we cut from this image to the title of the film, which I understand roughly means ‘chaos’, and this suggests an association between the two ideas. Hunting – especially this kind of hunting – is always on some level about exercising control over the natural world, but here it also suggests the violence from which the chain of tragic events will spring. Hidetora will move from hunting animals to being a hunted animal himself; from the perpetrator of chaos to its victim; from the sun (the emblem of his clan), blazing down mercilessly on all beneath him, to an old man exposed to the elements, including the sun itself (with no Saburo around to shade him from it). Colin mentioned the shots of sky during the Third Castle Massacre, and at many points Kurosawa uses the sun as an image of pitiless, implacable nature, unmoved by humanity’s suffering. That would seem to support Kyoami’s perspective on life, but I think the film is maintaining an association between Hidetora and the sun. The unchecked, abusive power he has exercised his whole life continues to operate without him, beyond him: he has unleashed it on the world and cannot make it stop.
I admit I have a harder time arguing that the final moments of the film are not nihilistic. You can imagine how this might have gone differently, in the style of
Rashomon: we could have seen Tsurumaru, alone among the ruins of his castle, clinging to the image of the Buddha, suggesting that he might now find some consolation in this, as his sister did. After Tango’s comments about the gods weeping over human cruelty, it might make sense for the film to propose faith as a source of comfort. But that would have been a betrayal of what Tsurumaru embodies. He has said before that he is incapable of the forgiveness his sister practices, and there’s no reason for that to change now. One might speculate that if Hidetora had not gouged his eyes out, he would probably have ended up like Lade Kaede, waging (probably more overt) war on the Ichimonji clan – which of course is why his eyes were gouged out.
But I think his blindness is primarily symbolic. Like the charred ruins he’s wandering around in, his empty eye sockets are another measure of Hidetora’s cruelty, another indelible monument to past violence; and of course, the absence of his sister is yet another sign of this, since her death has been brought about by Lade Kaede in response to Hidetora’s killing of
her family. When Tsurumaru stumbles and drops the image off the cliff, I think the film is saying that religious faith cannot save us if we are this cruel to each other, that there comes a point where the gods can’t do anything but look on and weep – as this film does.
The more redemptive ending I suggested above would have been dishonest. Lost in the treacherous terrain of a burnt castle, teetering on the edge of a cliff, with no one to help him, Tsurumaru is completely fucked; what help could the image of the Buddha be to him now? But to reiterate, what we’re meant to take away from this (I think) is that Tsurumaru is in this position because of willed human cruelty. The film warns us that such cruelty can have consequences so devastating that no amount of kindness and forgiveness can compensate for them.
colinr0380 wrote:I've never been able to make it through that massacre scene, piling on masses of individual moments from biggest to smallest, from armies clashing to noble sacrifices to handmaidens committing suicide, until the castle is literally crying with a river of blood, without shedding a tear or two.
Beautifully put, and I agree this is an astonishing sequence. Sometimes, when I haven’t watched the film for a while, I worry that the massacre might be overly aestheticised, but then I see it again... It’s genuinely horrible to watch, and even Takemitsu’s beautiful music gets the tone just right, lamenting over the violence without becoming misty-eyed and cloying about it.
One point I disagree with you on is the ‘noble sacrifices’ bit. What I love about this sequence is that there is no sense of heroism or glory in the deaths of the attendants and handmaidens. The women aren’t making a conscious moral choice to stand in the way of those bullets to save their master, they’re just doing what they’ve been trained and ordered to do, and you can see they don’t want to die, even as they commit seppuku. The warriors scrabble desperately against impossible odds, and again there is real fear in their eyes as they get mown down one after the other. Jiro says each of them is worth a thousand men, but we see nothing of this heroic ideal during this battle – notice the attendant who hurls his spent rifle at the approaching troops before dashing back into the castle.
The moment before this when one of them, riddled with arrows, announces the disaster to Hidetora, is one of my favourites: the Criterion edition translates his final line as ‘Hell is upon us’, which may be accurate but is horribly awkward compared to the rendition I’m used to from earlier versions, ‘We are truly in Hell’. The timing of his collapse, Hidetora’s horrified recoil against the stairs, and the start of the long music cue that follows, is perfectly judged. And of course, the old man’s exit from the burning castle is one of the most magnificent sequences in all cinema, on a par with the best bits of
Cabiria,
Intolerance and
Die Nibelungen. Words cannot express how much I love that shot from behind the flight of stairs when the smoke billows down, the empty scabbard drops into view, and Hidetora’s feet slowly descend towards the Hell that awaits him.
domino harvey wrote:Lear wants to be flattered and punishes his most favored daughter for refusing to participate on the grounds that she believes her love should be self-evident. Here the objection is that the Lear figure's dividing plan is a bad plan. Okay, not huge or interesting dramatic stakes there, and it completely colors this film's Cordelia figure in a less interesting fashion. And it just goes on like that, with the bare bones of the plot present but the aspects which make it matter absent.
I agree with you and Michael Kerpan that this film (like
Throne of Blood) really doesn’t work as a Shakespeare adaptation. It takes so little from the play that it might as well be called an adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth (who wrote the first extant version of this story), and even when it does draw on specific details from Shakespeare’s text, Kurosawa’s version always comes across as banal. However, the changes made to the play do raise some really interesting questions.
In Shakespeare’s play, we first meet Lear when he’s become old and foolish, and the lack of any clear back-story makes it hard (for me) to get a handle on what is at stake in that opening scene. Has he been a good, responsible ruler until now, and is this a play about the potential dangers of a head of state growing old and senile (as opposed to the dangers of childish rulers, dramatised in some of Shakespeare’s earlier plays)? Later, Regan comments that Lear ‘hath ever but slenderly known himself’; the fool tells him that he should not have been old before he had been wise; Lear himself, brought face to face with the deprivations that afflict his subjects, says ‘I have ta’en too little care of this’. So the play gradually suggests that Lear was a somewhat foolish, irresponsible king all along – a sort of Richard II who survived into old age – and is therefore about what happens to such a ruler when he becomes too old and weak to maintain his superficial, illusory authority.
Even once I get to grips with the play on this level, though, I always find myself preoccupied with a lot of other questions. If Lear loves Cordelia more than the other daughters, how is he not already familiar with her blunt, honest style of speech? If the other daughters are so good at seducing him with their flattery, why hasn’t he always loved them more? If he really has always been this foolish, what do Cordelia and Kent love about him? I feel rather sorry for Goneril and Regan: they’re the un-loved elder daughters who have to jump through hoops to win their father’s approval, and Cordelia is the self-satisfied ‘favourite’ who can afford to take her father’s love for granted, and assumes that he takes hers for granted too. (Frances Barber and Monica Dolan did a good job of conveying the evil sisters’ frustration in the film of the RSC production from a few years ago.)
I know these are all vague, subjective questions, and they hint at some of the complexities and ambiguities that make this such a rewarding play to study and teach. I bring them up here because I think Kurosawa tries to address some of them in
Ran, though on the whole he ends up raising more questions than he answers.
Now, the Lear-figure has a clear back-story from the beginning: whereas Lear has always been a rash and foolish and king, and is now an old one too, Hidetora has not been rash and foolish so much as genocidal. When Shakespeare’s play works well in performance, it’s usually because the actors succeed in getting us to sympathise with Lear because of his vulnerability – his ranting and cursing need to be pathetic as well as abusive, and this is something I’ve seen Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen do very well. (The part can be played less sympathetically, of course, as by Paul Scofield in Peter Brook’s film – but that’s an exceptional case.) Tatsuya Nakadai gives a magnificent performance in
Ran, and at times he achieves pathos through his haunting facial expressions: many, many times throughout the film, Kurosawa just allows Nakadai’s (heavily made up) face to do the work, and it really looks like the face of a man who is staring into Hell, so much so that it’s impossible not to empathise with his pain. But there’s also an obvious problem here, which is that it’s much harder to empathise with an old man whose war crimes are catching up with him than it is to empathise with one whose worst fault has been a lack of wisdom. Lear, even at his cruellest, is unable to embody the ‘dragon’ he considers himself to be, and cannot give real weight to his comical threats:
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall - I will do such things -
What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.
When Hidetora runs for his sword to kill Tango, Kyoami seems to think he will really do it; and when he orders the peasants’ villages to be burnt, there is (disturbingly, but intentionally I think) no suggestion that this order is recalled.
Hidetora’s back-story clarifies something that Shakespeare left a little vague, namely the cause of the tragic events we see in the film: this isn’t just happening because the king grew old and foolish, this is Hidetora reaping what he has spent the last fifty years sowing. But this also makes a complete mess of the king’s relationships with those who remain faithful to him. Some find Cordelia’s forgiveness of her father hard to understand, even though all she has to forgive is the rash, transient anger of a weak old man. The best bit of Shakespeare’s play, and one of the most poignant moments in all of his work, is when Lear and Cordelia are reconciled:
LEAR
I know you do not love me, for your sisters
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.
You have some cause; they have not.
CORDELIA
No cause, no cause.
I think she’s referring partly to her sisters (agreeing with Lear), but mainly to herself. For all the problems I have with the dynamics between Lear and his three daughters, this moment makes all that seem irrelevant. Is there a simpler, more powerful expression of forgiveness anywhere in literature?
Kurosawa repeats this scene in
Ran: Hidetora doesn’t believe that Saburo could love or forgive him; Saburo insists that he harbours no ill-feeling towards his father. The moment leaves me cold and sceptical every time. In the opening scene, Saburo was not expressing un-varnished love for his father (as Cordelia was), he was bluntly reminding him of his crimes and warning him that they would have consequences. And indeed, given Saburo’s moral wisdom on that point, it’s hard to see how he could love or respect his father, or how he could fit into this clan at all. Hasn’t he been implicated in at least some of this violence? The same goes for Kyoami and Tango: the former, like Saburo, diverges from his Shakespearean equivalent in that he rebukes his master not just for folly but for mass slaughter, but this means that the unstinting loyalty of both these characters is harder to admire, or feel moved by. Kent sticks around because his master is the kind of man who will eventually say, ‘I have ta’en too little care of this’; if Lear had started burning down villages, I’m not sure he would have remained so loyal.
The most charitable explanation is that Saburo, Kyoami and Tango know all about Hidetora’s crimes but, out of an ingrained, unconditional sense of loyalty, still want him to be able to have a peaceful retirement – for the good of Hidetora, not (it seems) for the good of the realm. It’s hard to root for them on this point, and as I suggested above this does mean that Saburo’s death is a lot less senseless than Cordelia’s. It is a punishment for Hidetora, but also, perhaps, a necessary cleansing of this inherently corrupt clan. (Saburo himself is distanced from the massacre his troops inflict on those of Jiro, but the film signals this battle as another sad chapter in the history of the Ichimonji family; despite Fujimaki’s cheering, this is not simply a victory of good over evil.)
Overall, I’m not sure
King Lear was a helpful model for Kurosawa on this film. If anything, it feels more like a sequel to Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine the Great, in which the psychotic warlord never got around to murdering his one peace-loving son, and never died of a fever himself, but grew into old age and decided he wanted to ‘go straight’. Kurosawa wants to say something about war, but I don’t think that’s what Shakespeare’s play is really about.
Drucker wrote:One question: early on, when Tango first re-encounters the King, he lies, saying that Saburo had instructed him to monitor the King, when it reality it was his idea all along. Was this to begin the start of forgiveness between Saburo and his father? Was there something else going on here that I missed?
That sounds like a small continuity error to me. Well-spotted; I have to say I’ve never noticed it!
