I think this is a very persuasive reading of the film, and agree that it's too straightforward to simply attribute all the tragic events to Hidetora's past cruelties.Mr Sausage wrote:There is a constant theme in the movie: those who try to create order out of chaos fall victim to chaos: Hidetora, Sue, Saburo, Kurogane, ect. I think this pattern is too large to be explained by Hidetora's hinted-at past cruelties. Nor does it conform to the morality of choice since we are not privy to his bad choices (and his good choices are meaningless). I find it makes more sense if you agree with Kyaomi and understand the cruelty and chaos of the characters to be the natural state of the world, a state that has been true long before Hidetora existed and will continue long afterwards. All human attempts to repair such a broken world are doomed to failure.
I'm not sure I agree that these cruelties are as 'taken for granted' as you suggest, as it seems to me they are spelt out quite clearly at various times by Hidetora himself, by Saburo, Kyoami, Kaede, Tsurumaru, and implicitly by Tsurumaru's burnt-out castle, which is perhaps the most symbolically important location in the film. Those past events are mentioned sufficiently often to make the Third Castle massacre come across (to me) as an illustration of the kind of thing Hidetora has inflicted on the world in the past, but to which he is now a horrified spectator.
And I do think that Saburo's death has a moral significance, in a way that Cordelia's doesn't. The death of an innocent son (or daughter) as punishment for the parent's crimes is a trope that is familiar from Greek tragedy: Creon's cruelty towards Antigone, Jason's towards Medea, or Theseus' to his own son (under the influence of Phaedra) are good examples. In those contexts, the punishment-via-offspring often comes across as divine vengeance upon sinful humanity, but in the case of Ran, I think Kurosawa makes it very clear that these events result directly from willed human action, and that no higher forces are involved. The senselessness of Cordelia's death is thrown into relief by Edmund's attempt to countermand his own order; in Ran, it's clear that Jiro has no such capacity for repentance, and in any case his whole enterprise is essentially dictated by Kaede. The death of Saburo isn't fate, it's just the fulfilment of a very human revenge plot, and one that Hidetora had unwittingly set in motion.
So while I agree with you that the 'chaos' we see unleashed in this film stems from something more generalised and pervasive than the crimes of a single war-lord, I disagree that it represents 'the natural state of the world'. It is, as Tango says, the natural (or at least current) state of humanity. Colin mentioned the moment when the sun-emblem on the back of Taro's shirt is exploded by a gunshot, and this is a very significant image: Taro is dressed in resplendent yellow because, as the head of the clan, he represents the golden 'sun'; but then that sun erupts with red blood (red being the colour of the more brutal Jiro). Jiro's emblem is a crescent moon, hinting at the transience of the other emblem's glory. Earlier I suggested an equivalence between the Ichimonji sun-emblem and the real sun, beating mercilessly down on the characters, but in fact I think the natural world itself is represented in a slightly more benign, or at least neutral, way in this film. In the massacre sequence, the sun appears to be looking down in sorrow on human cruelty, peering from behind the clouds as if it can hardly bear to look (reminds me of Lady Macbeth: 'nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark to cry "Hold, hold!"').
Hidetora is indeed just a symptom of a larger tendency, deeply embedded in human nature - but he isn't nature itself. When he first finds himself out in the wilderness, there is an almost comical distinction between the blazing sun that fills the frame in one shot, and the now rather tacky-looking golden emblem we see beside him in the one following. I think this suggests that the grand claims made by his emblem - 'the Ichimonji clan = the sun' - are exposed as the empty boasts of a merely human war-monger, who turns out to be just one among many (actual and potential) war-mongers.
(Incidentally, I wonder what we should make of Saburo's emblem, which I think is a half-moon. Perhaps a development of Jiro's crescent moon, a suggestion of renewal - the waxing after the waning? I know such sun / star / moon symbols and combinations are common, so perhaps Kurosawa was drawing on historical emblems here.)
I can understand why you see the film as nihilistic, and much of the time it does seem to suggest that even attempts at goodness are futile in a world like this one. But because I see it as focused on human cruelty, I also think it holds out a hope for redemption, if only implicitly. Perhaps the survival of Kyoami and Tango doesn't count for much... However, I do feel that in showing us this bleak portrait of human atrocities, the film is exhorting us (in quite a preachy way) to behave otherwise in our own time. It's saying that by committing to the path of violence and cruelty, as we so often do, we unleash a form of chaos so unstoppable that it will forestall any possibility of redemption.
colinr0380 wrote:Kagemusha feels like the key companion piece here in the way that in the journey of the thief chosen to double for the dead lord we experience a narrative from both the inside and the outside. We see the thief growing into his role and in some ways losing himself to the fantasy of belonging to a clan, especially in the relationship with the grandson. Then when the deception is uncovered he is ejected from that world and has to look on with the rest of the peasants at the final apocalyptic events of the play, shown in no uncertain terms that he was never a true part of the world despite his belated suicidal charge into battle waving the banner in the final scene of the film before being gunned down, his body pushed along with the flow of the river while the banner remains...
Kagemusha feels as if it deals with this aspect of advisors even more pointedly, to the extent of suggesting simultaneously that the Lord is both more than human, in that he holds all of the fates of his people in his hands, and relatively interchangeable! Ensuring the stability of the figurehead is more important than any particularly pro-active leader!
I just re-watched Kagemusha, and I have to say I find it much harder to interpret than Ran. Shingen seems infinitely more self-aware than Hidetora, and his confession at the start (when he admits that he banished his own father and murdered his own son) indicates that his cruelties have been cold-blooded and calculating, but designed to maintain stability and order, rather than the actions of a power-hungry megalomaniac. In other words, he's staving off the pervasive chaos that Mr Sausage emphasised above, though again here I think it's a very human-centred understanding of such chaos.Mr Sausage wrote:I think the nihilism of Kagemusha comes from the way it's revealed that these vast, ordering structures that give meaning and purpose to all the lives within them are built on fabrications. So long as one believes in the fabrication, ie. kingship (whether in a family member to whom it was passed down or a beggar posing as one), the whole structure can continue to function. But ultimately the structure, with all its attendant meaning, cannot be reduced down to some stable, inherent idea or principle. At the centre is a shadow; meanings and values are built on a shadow.
Indeed, Shingen's own cruelties are not only less appalling than Hidetora's (if Katsuyori is representative of the rest of the family, perhaps Shingen's treatment of his father and son were politically necessary actions...), but in fact seem designed to prevent further suffering and conflict. There's a similarly cold-blooded rationality at work in the killing of any witnesses to the death of Shingen in the palanquin, and the way the thief moves from railing at the lord's injustices to promoting his cause, even at the cost of his own life, suggests a valorisation of these methods, and a much less sentimental, much more hard-nosed point of view than we get in Ran.
The thief does turn out to be just as good a leader as the real Shingen was; I don't think this indicates that the leaders are interchangeable, but rather that Shingen's artful management techniques (adopted by his replacement) are effective. The thief makes a good 'mountain' because, like Shingen, he has something in him that enables him to embody that kind of strength; Katsuyori, occupying the same role, does a horrible job. As in Ran, we have a world that is always teetering on the edge of chaos. Such chaos can be withheld temporarily by a sensible ruler, but there will always be a Katsuyori waiting to step in and undo all that good work. Unlike in the later film, the problem here seems to be a lack of political wisdom, rather than a lack of compassion. But as I say, I find it quite a confusing film, and feel I may be missing some crucial part of its message, or over-simplifying that message.
