#17
Post
by Mr Sausage » Mon Oct 28, 2013 11:37 am
I don't know if the film is a complex indictment of the political dimensions of samurai culture, or even of gender really. Everything is simplified, deliberately I would guess given the fable-like quality of the story. What interests me are the ambiguities.
It's interesting how Japanese ghosts are so much more physical than the ethereal western ghosts: they're beings who can assume corporeality enough to carry on a love affair. This is something I noticed in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's films, too, especially Retribution. The two ghosts, tho', resolve into a binary stereotypical of Japan: women as dragon-ladies and/or meek self-sacrificers. On the one hand, the ghosts are plainly images of predatory femaleness, feigning modesty and weakness but using sexuality, alcohol, and feral strength to trick and subdue men, to exploit male weakness. They represent a fear men would construct. But the daughter, at least, is also the meek self-sacrificer, sacrificing her soul to eternal damnation for a week of love--which is touching, no doubt, but on the rather extreme end of women who sacrifice themselves for men.
Here's where the odd ambiguities come in: the wife is immediately taken as a lover, but the mother is pushed aside. Our Samurai hero hardly seems to care about his mother, he's so consumed by lust for his dead wife (that he's technically a necrophile at this point doesn't disturb him much, either). But once the wife is gone, the mother quickly becomes the antagonist, taking up the conventional role of the ghost assaulting our hero. Not a figure of lust, the parent is first thrust into the background, then foregrounds herself with antagonism when the wife has left. So our Samurai hero, much like all the other samurai in the movie, is alternately lusting after and fighting with femaleness. Even a family reunion beyond the grave doesn't break this binary. I don't think this is meant as an allegory of the family, since the mother's antagonism doesn't start until after the daughter leaves. But it's interesting that the two women are parceled into these roles like that.
Our hero is ultimately undone, tho', by the very thing to which he owes his success, his samurai status. If he weren't a samurai, he would never have encountered the ghosts and never have been under bullying political pressure to destroy them. But unlike most fables, this is not intended ironically as the act that assured his fame and fortune is unheroic, yet realistic for all that. And the added fact that his conscription was compulsory removes the element of just retribution, since ambition plainly isn't involved--his status is accidental. In this case, far from ironic, his fate is tragic, the samurai culture having poisoned everything in the story it seems.
The film is a weird mixture of sex and death, with gender roles not being progressive but, oddly, not really regressive either despite the stereotyping. Female victimization is so potent it comes to encompass the victimizers, too. Yet the male who primarily suffers from this retribution, our hero, lost as much from the initial crime as anyone. So does this victimization consume guilty and innocent alike? Is our hero poisoned, unfairly, by an association he's not to blame for? Or is mixing sex and death so explicitly and with so little care for the problems just inevitably destructive, and his crime is really that of being consumed with lust?
I suppose I can't decide if this is a moral fable, a story of erotic fixation and dissolution, both, or what. Fine movie, tho'.
