In between my recent viewing/write-up of Seijun Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter and this afternoon's revisit of Yukio Mishima's idealized ode to sex and suicide, Patriotism, I've been spending most of my dedicated movie watching time with the recently released Eclipse Series set Kinoshita and World War II. That collection of five early films by Keisuke Kinoshita, one of Japan's most accomplished directors, was the subject of an episode of my Eclipse Viewer podcast that I record once a month with my friend Trevor Berrett. The Kinoshita films bring us squarely into the mindset of Japanese citizens during the critical years between 1943-46, when that nation faced the highly provoked and extremely aroused wrath of the Allied armies, following the attacks on Pearl Harbor and numerous other sites that were deemed by their imperialistic government to be either easy pickings or implacable foes deserving of swift and merciless destruction. Historical hindsight informs us now that, whatever the reasons were that the military command used to justify Japan's aggressive expansionist ambitions, the leaders were tragically mistaken to pursue a course of action that led to enormous destruction, death and suffering for millions of people whose concerns were not adequately considered in their decision-making process. Perhaps Japan was, by the early 1940s, backed into a corner, forced to choose between two or more hopeless, no-win options. I'm hardly enough of a historian to weigh in with an opinion on that matter. But it's unmistakably clear that the severe ethics of discipline, honor, unquestioning loyalty to the Emperor and the martial hierarchy that supported him had created a culture that was toxic for the majority of its citizens and had exhausted its legitimacy at some point between the beginning and the final ignominious end of the war.
That narrative arc is remarkably illustrated over the course of those five films directed by Kinoshita. And as it turns out, in one of those remarkable synchronistic coincidences that occur every so often as my chronological blogging project here and my various assignments over at CriterionCast.com overlap and provide context for each other, Patriotism is capable of serving as a perfect prelude or, as in my case, coda to the prolonged contemplation of Japan's wartime miseries. And this brief (thirty minutes) but shockingly memorable film serves to cast in even more dramatic relief the severe catharsis triggered by the shocking defeat and surrender after suffering incalculable losses on remote battlefields and sustained firebombings and nuclear attacks on their mainland.
The most exquisite, but ultimately maddening, quality of Patriotism that sticks most resoundingly with me, even more than the brutally convincing act of seppuku (more commonly known in the West as hara-kiri) so graphically portrayed on screen, is Mishima's powerful, idealized aesthetic - a profound sense of reverence to what ultimately turns out to be a pitiful waste of youthful strength, passion and potential. The circumstances that led a husband and wife to kill themselves immediately following a passionately tender erotic coupling are explained in a scroll that Mishima's gloved hands unfold at the beginning of the film. The man, a lieutenant, finds himself in a distressing circumstance of having to serve on the firing squad that is scheduled to execute his closest friends early the next morning. Their conspiracy to overthrow the current military leadership due to insufficient veneration for the emperor has horribly backfired, as the patriotic zeal that drove their plan has been unduly regarded as simply mutinous insubordination. Since he was never informed of his colleague's plan due to their protective concerns for him and his wife Reiko, the officer has not broken his vows of service. Despite his genuine innocence of any misdeed, he cannot endure his assignment of helping to put his friends to death. This admittedly horrible dilemma only offers one path of resolution, at least to his tormented sense of duty and honor: he must die in accordance with the most stringent application of the bushido code, and his wife must accompany him so that they may face together whatever ultimate fate awaits them beyond the grave.
Mishima uses this pretext, based on an infamous incident that took place in the winter of 1936, as the foundation for what amounts to a mostly static but remarkably suspenseful and forthright still-life ballet, unfolding with measured solemnity and awash in a baleful mingling of blood and tears. Much has been written about how Mishima, who was a celebrated novelist and cultural figure of iconoclastic status in various intellectual circles around the world at this time, eventually committed seppuku himself in another failed coup in the fall of 1970. I won't go into that aspect of the film here, since I'm trying to look at Patriotism more in its original context, but the Criterion package provides quite a bit of background on what made Mishima so unique. It helped me to understand, or at least to begin that process, some of the forces that drove him to realize his death-wish so realistically on celluloid, in the only film he ever directed, though he did do some movie acting before and after as he carefully cultivated his public persona as a prominent voice of disciplined rejection of the ethos of the new Japan and Western decadence.
As valuable as I find the essay by Tony Rayns, the interviews with the crew that helped Mishima clandestinely shoot Patriotism over the course of two days, and the author's own notes on how and why he made the film, what really makes this release so complete and compelling is the literary source from which it was adapted. Of course, that's Mishima's own short story, the precisely descriptive detail of which conveys, even more powerfully than the alarmingly beautiful cinematic images, just what a frenzy of emotions and sensations was coursing through the mind of this sadly troubled genius. Clearly, Mishima was possessed of enormous talent, insight and perceptive abilities. His skill at luring a reader or viewer into his tormented world is frighteningly seductive - fearsome at least to those of us who hold mental health and emotional stability as values worth defending and, if compromised, goals worth working toward. This is a brilliant, though harrowing work of art, even though I really don't buy his quote that "hara-kiri is a very positive, very proud way of death" that "sometimes makes you win." That's an expression of the same nihilism borne of priorities warped by trauma (both actual and presumed) that led Japan into a calamity that they would have been better off avoiding.
Here it is... watch with discretion!
Next: Zatoichi's Vengeance