If war movies generally dwell on the physical manifestations of war, understandable given its nature, there is a subset of the genre that deal with the POW experience away from the battlefield — THE GREAT ESCAPE begins in a prisoner-of-war camp but belongs more in the prison-break genre. Because we are shown enemies co-existing in close quarters under an imbalance of power between the captors and the captives, the emphasis is more on the psychology of the conflict, not only between opposing nations/cultures but among the men of the same team trapped inside the same cage.
In combat, one side brutishly struggles for advantage over the other side, generally by killing as many enemy combatants as possible. Soldiers are faceless in the battlefield, mere shooting ducks, especially in modern warfare where most soldiers are felled by bullets and bombs from a distance. Besides, in order to fight like a soldier, a human killing machine, the last thing on a soldier’s mind is the humanity of the other side. And for all the bonding as brothers-in-arms in the same unit, most soldiers probably live by the rule, ‘better you than me’, Animal Mother’s exact words as he stares down at a dead comrade in FULL METAL JACKET.
The brutality of battle is horrific, but its simple logic is a kind of a saving grace. A soldier need not think. He needs to go by training, orders, and instinct and just fight like a man, or a beast. No one’s paying him to think, let alone feel anything other than the sports-game emotions of ‘we win, they lose’. In the rip-roaring melee of the battle scenes in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the only rule is kill or be killed. (Rather cleverly, Spielberg constructed the movie like a boot-camp. The first battle scene at Normandy explodes with such force that the audience is rendered ‘green’, unprepared for and shitting its pants over the visceral force of mayhem hitherto unequaled in cinema. It’s so powerful that it seems ‘anti-war’ and makes the audience wonders if it could take more of this. But step-by-step, as the G.I.’s gain equilibrium and footing, the violence, though horrific throughout the remainder of the movie, becomes more manageable at the emotional level. So, by the time another huge battle erupts at the movie’s end, we are no longer in a state of shock but one of admiration and respect as ‘our heroes’ gotta do what they must.)
Indeed, the prickliest moment in the movie is when the GI’s capture a German soldier and argue as to his fate, to regard him as a faceless enemy(not quite possible as he’s in their hands at their mercy) or a human being. Spare him or kill him(which could be construed as ‘murder’ or a ‘war crime’; as it happens, the decent Tom Hank character lets him go but, a ‘kraut’ being a ‘kraut’, he eventually rejoins with fellow ‘krauts’ and ironically ends up shooting the very man who’d spared his life; the moral logic of the scene is eerily like the Nazi attitude toward Jews, i.e. all Jews are bad and none should be spared because they are weasels and liars, and some may argue the fatal flaw of Anglo Civilization was going soft-and-mushy and giving Jews the benefit of the doubt, which Jews, like the ‘kraut’ captive, showed no appreciation of; fellow tribesman William Friedkin made a similar point about Arabs in THE RULES OF ENGAGMENT, i.e. it’s justified for the Zionist-directed US military to mow down any number of Ay-Rabs because all them ‘ragheads’, everyone from old man to a little girl, are liars, cutthroats, terrorists, and devil’s spawn; if such an attitude is warranted against a segment of humanity, especially in the eyes of Jews, the logic of ‘antisemitism’ seems just another variation, but of course, it’s intolerable only when directed at Jews and their allies, especially homos and Negroes).
Because of the inevitability and even necessity of human-to-human interaction than merely wanton slaughter, P.O.W. movies make for complex dramas, especially if the cultures and/or visions of enemy nations are strikingly different. In a prison camp, the captors must treat the very people they’d kill without second thought on the battlefield as human beings, and the prisoners must take orders from the very people they were trained and ordered to slaughter.
There is also an element of mutual respect and contempt. Respect in the sense that some degree of communication and even camaraderie may develop between the captor and captive(as between a master and a slave) but also contempt in the sense that the captors must house, feed, and guard the enemy soldiers(who may be deemed as cowards or weaklings who surrendered than fought to the last). Also, as the captives generally far outnumber the captors, whose only advantage is firepower, there’s a sense of unease on both sides. (In Gillo Pontecorvo’s KAPO, the Soviet and other prisoners manage to overwhelm the German prison guards, albeit at a high cost of life.)
In MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE matters are complicated due to the Japanese martial code that an honorable soldier does not surrender but chooses to die. To the Japanese, the Western P.O.Ws lack the spirit of the true warrior and patriot. They feel that the British and the Dutch surrendered to save their own hides. Such a contemptuous attitude is, however, confounded by the character of Jack Celliers(David Bowie) who claims to have surrendered not to save his own skin but the lives of other men.
Though MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE was hardly the first P.O.W. movie, it is perhaps the most psychological in its grappling with subjects and issues that war movies generally ignore or shy away from for their discomfiting or embarrassing nature. As such, it is less a genre movie with familiar ‘tropes’ but a challenging work of cultural psychoanalysis set in a prison camp in Indonesia during WWII. That said, the approach is less clinical than metaphysical, unfolding more like a fever dream than a session on a couch.
There is an uptightness about some of the main particulars in the movie, especially concerning the tensions between Captain Yonoi(Ryuichi Sakamoto) and Jack Celliers. Yonoi is dedicated to the purity of the Japanese warrior code(to which all else is subordinate or secondary), whereas Celliers is a man who seems partly to have embraced war as an escapism from private anguish. Both are driven to some extent by a guilt complex(and death wish, either of poetic death or personal redemption). Yonoi grieves the deaths of his comrades in a failed military rebellion, an attempted coup in the name of the Emperor of course, and harbors a certain shame that he hadn’t been one of them; therefore, he strives to be the perfect warrior with the purest spirit. He seems partly drawn from Yukio Mishima who was haunted by shame for not having died an honorable(and beautiful) death in the Pacific War, something he managed to avoid. (Though rejected by the recruiting board for his sickness and frailty, other accounts suggest he cunningly avoided being conscripted.) Celliers’ repressed shame(or guilt) is more of a personal(and familial) nature, something he’s nursed all his life without the knowledge of anyone, not even his brother, the one he’d wronged. He bears a private cross, for which he seeks atonement(and when it comes, only his friend Lawrence knows the deeper motivation of Celliers’ sacrifice).
Even though John Lawrence(Tom Conti) is the most prominent character in the film, the essential moral and spiritual conflict arises from the battle of wills between Yonoi and Celliers. Oddly enough, despite being of different nations, natures, and cultures(made starker by the war), Celliers and Yonoi cross paths to arrive at a synthesis, a deeper peace beneath the waves of violence. Paradoxically, peace often sets civilizations apart whereas war brings them together, even if in hatred, a kind of brotherhood of blood, not unlike the grudging camaraderie of boxers in the ring. MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE could have been titled, ‘Enemies: A Love Story’. Enemies naturally oppose one another, but opposites may reflect and reveal what the one cannot see within the self.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is an unusual work, not least because the themes of Christmas, usually associated with the snow and chill of winter, are played out in the hot humid jungles of Southeast Asia. Also, the two antagonist island nations, Japan and Britain, are fighting for domination of island territories that aren’t even theirs, further complicated by the fact that Indonesia belonged to the Dutch Empire before Imperial Japan swooped in to claim the entire territory.
In the global conflict, Britain is an ‘old’ seasoned empire with lots of experience, whereas Japan is a ‘young’ nascent empire, one that is rapidly expanding but short on expertise in governing vast territories of alien cultures.
However, for all their differences, what the two empires have in common, perhaps fostered by their island mentality, is a racial consciousness, a sense of uniqueness, separateness, and isolation despite the ambition to conquer and expand. Indeed, what stood out most about the British Empire was its emphasis on race, or the ‘isolation’ of British blood from those of the subject peoples. It was the feature most admired by Adolf Hitler who believed empires throughout history eventually fell as the result of the dominant race(usually Aryan) mixing with the subject(likely inferior) ones. In military and economic terms, the British Empire was the biggest the world had ever known, but in racial terms, the Brits remained very much an ‘island’ unto themselves. The Japanese in the 20th century, just getting started in the game of empire, had a similar attitude. (Of course, things are totally different in the Anglosphere today where Jewish Power has completely taken over. So, while it’s perfectly acceptable and even praiseworthy for Jews to emphasize and maintain their own bloodlines, it is usually taboo, especially for whites, to desire and encourage racial integrity of any kind. If anything, with Anglo hearts-and-minds having been totally colonized by Jewish Power, the new order promotes interracism, especially with blacks, as a matter of collective redemption for past ‘racism’. The most ‘racist’ civilization has become the most ‘anti-racist’ and suicidal one, even though, in regards to Jewishness and Zionism, it remains utterly ‘racist’, even to the point of supporting genocidal supremacism against whomever Jews target for destruction, which ironically includes the Anglos themselves whose fate is to be White Nakba.)
It’s a war between trespassers and aliens in a part of the world that has no understanding of them and their motives. In this regard, it has similarities with Wernor Herzog’s AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, perhaps the ultimate cultural-fish-out-of-water film. (One wonders if it might have partly influenced THE MISSION by Robert Bolt & Roland Joffe.)
There are two kinds of war movies: One where the characters defend the home turf against invaders/occupiers — Polish films about WWII perfectly fit this mold — and one where the characters fight in foreign land for empire, ideology, or adventure. The former(even in fantasies like RED DAWN) comes with greater moral clarity as we can sympathize with the defense of the motherland or fatherland(though it’s complicated when the defensive side provoked the hostilities in the first place, as in JAPAN’S LONGEST DAY and DOWNFALL). War movies set in foreign lands weave a more complex moral web due to elements of adventure, exoticism, culture clash, and the nihilism of doing the unthinkable on the home turf — you can’t blow up a beach town in the US to go surfing as Kilgore and company do in APOCALYPSE NOW.
If the foreign land is sufficiently alien from one’s own, the war experience becomes stranger yet. Americans could culturally better relate with German enemies in World War II than with South Vietnamese ‘allies’ in the Vietnam War.
Some of the saddest and most harrowing war movies are about soldiers dying far from home: German soldiers freezing to death in the final scene of STALINGRAD or the dazed and Japanese soldiers driven to hunger and madness in FIRES ON THE PLAIN.
On the other hand, a deeper sense of humanity could come by way of contact with an alien world, making one reappraise or better appreciate one’s own. A person is often comfortably situated and well-camouflaged in his own society with its time-honored rules; in contrast, against the backdrop of a different culture, his accepted ‘truths’ are challenged and call for clarification; he must struggle for the validation of his values in a world in which he is the alien or give them up as false in face of a greater truth.
In a way, a fish discovers its true fishiness only out of water. In a lake or sea, the fish, being in its own element, takes its reality for granted, even as a kind of universal reality. Out of water, the fish is confronted with the shocking limitations of its fishy nature. To survive, it must struggle back to the water, or it must evolve into something other than fishiness.
A similar logic applies to maturation in that children become adults only by stepping outside the comfort zones of home and family. Only in a world where one can no longer take one’s place in it for granted does one find one’s truer self. This is indeed the difference between the traditional Italian mama’s boy who is emotionally slower to leave one’s family & home and the Northern European male who is expected to accept independence in the larger community of strangers(who may in time become friends). The Northern European male relies more on law and responsibility whereas the Italian mama’s boy more on loyalty and dependence.
To an extent, there is a similar contrast between the more mature British and the schoolboy-like Japanese in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE. (Surely, one reason why the West arrived at a higher truth was by exploring worlds outside its own, which challenged and inspired the West to readjust and reformulate its limited concepts of realities and possibilities. The West became more adept at paradigm shifts in scientific, cultural, historical, and philosophical fields based on new discoveries and ways of thinking, whereas the rest of the world clung to their sacred assumptions of immutable truths. For example, China had smugly thought itself the center of the cosmos before the rude but instructive encounter with the West. Those with the greatest cultural arrogance came under the domination of those with the most curiosity, even respect, for other cultures; even though the British and the French never lacked for cultural pride and arrogance of their own, they had genuine interest in the achievements of other civilizations, much of which had been lost and was rediscovered only through the modern science of archaeology, ironically serving to inspire native cultural pride and struggle for independence.) In PLATOON, the protagonist arrives at a deeper moral truth in the jungles of Vietnam by mingling with soldiers of different classes and regional & racial backgrounds. His pat notions of right-and-wrong based on Apple Pie and God & Country are put to the test.
Then, war films set in foreign worlds can be illuminating as well as nostalgic. There is clearly the element of homesickness(or the lost dream of empire), but there is also the sense of having seen the larger world and come face to face with many more facets of humanity from the noblest to the most venal. And, few films achieved as much in this vein as MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, which is about soldiers of starkly different cultures displaced far from home but find a kind of spiritual home, if only fleeting, in a strange world. The story is set in some place in Indonesia, but the ground on which certain events unfold become almost hallowed, beyond the conventions of names and borders, or emotionally canonical to those involved. With (the relativity of)sickness, physical and mental/spiritual, as one of the main themes, the film’s atmosphere is feverish and hallucinatory, as if on a malarial journey into the mythic dimensions of the psyche.
What follows is a consideration of the film without much in the way of synopsis, so it might not make much sense to those who haven’t seen the film.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE takes place in Java, one of the main islands of Indonesia, the country that was the setting of another outstanding 1983 film, THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, which, by the way, deals with the socio-political problems of Indonesia itself, whereas MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is strictly about empire vs empire — we hardly notice the locals even in the background. (The country was also made famous, or infamous, through the documentary THE ACT OF KILLING.) Still, despite the absence of natives, the tropical setting is a living-breathing character in its own right(though the film, like THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, was not filmed in Indonesia). Even though Indonesia’s largest demographic group consists of Muslims, Buddhism and Hinduism have their place in history and culture as well. A chain of islands, large and small, made of up diverse ethnicities, tribes, and even races, it only became a ‘nation’, in the modern sense of the word, through Western imperialism, a process not uncommon throughout Africa, Middle East, and South Asia. In other words, the very concept of Indonesia as a ‘national’ entity emerged only under the ‘oppression’ of Dutch imperialism.
Indonesia is not a typical Muslim country, at least in the Western Imagination. If Muhammad was essentially a desert warrior and his religion became associated with aridity, purity, and fundamentalism, this cannot be said of Islam in Indonesia. (Christianity also began in the Middle East but became most associated with the cold North, or lots of snow. Despite Islam’s spread into vast expanses wholly unlike the deserts of Arabia, such as the jungle regions of Malaysia and Indonesia, the religion is still most associated with lots of sand.) Though there have been problems of extremism, the practice of Indonesian Islam is a more syncretized phenomenon. Separated physically and culturally far from its canonical places of origin, it blended more with local traditions, just like the Buddhism that reached Japan had changed considerably since its origins in northern India.
Indonesia has historically been a strange place, one of high civilization and the most abject primitivism, one of purist religions(such as Buddhism & Islam) and diverse local ‘pagan’ beliefs(closely associated with nature worship), and one of lush forests and grinding poverty(with some of the worst pollution in the world). Because of the vastness and the wide range of variations between one extreme and another, it’s one of the most fascinating places on earth, one of those countries that constitutes a universe of its own.
Today, Indonesia is the largest Muslim country by demographics and an important player in the world economy, and one need only consult a map to notice how scattered and divided the country is. To be sure, a handful of islands, especially Java and Sumatra, comprise the bulk of the population and political power, and if the country has held together thus far, it owes less to good governance than incompetence and indifference among those who’ve been left out of the game.
There is a certain symmetry at work in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE. Two great seafaring powers have clashed halfway around the world in a place alien to both. As to hegemonic rights, one could argue that the Japanese are Asians in a part of Asia or that Europeans are more qualified by experience. Though Indonesia was a Dutch colony, the main military engagements were between the Japanese and the British who then ruled much of the world. Even though the British had once vied for world domination with the Spanish, Dutch, and finally the French, the Western powers arrived at a kind of gentleman’s agreement to respect and even guard each other’s interests under general British dominance. Better to compete and cooperate than fight toward mutual destruction(which is what eventually happened when the Europeans ganged up on Germany). Meanwhile, Japan, a rising power in the first half of the 20th century, believed it was their destiny to ‘liberate’, ‘protect’ and rule Asia.
Given that both the Japanese and the British are foreigners in a distant land, it isn’t easy to ascertain the political morality of the situation. Westerners would have been hypocritical to complain about Japanese warmongering and invasion when they’d pioneered world domination, which eventually led to the forcible opening of feudal Japan to modernization(and then participation in the imperialist enterprise). One could even argue that the Westerners in Southeast Asia who came under Japanese rule merely got a taste of their own medicine, as did the French under German Occupation.
On the other hand, it should be common knowledge by now that the Japanese colonizers, in desperation, inexperience, and ultimately madness, committed unspeakable cruelties throughout their empire. Technologically inferior and materially disadvantaged, Japan’s only chance of fending off American advances was to exploit labor and resources to the fullest in Southeast Asia, leading to the enslavement and deaths of hundreds of thousands of lives, more than in the centuries under European rule.
Some Indonesians may wonder about the absence of Indonesian characters in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, but this is par for the course in most war movies. Most American movies about World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Iraq War have almost nothing to do with the locals or their troubles. It’s almost entirely about Americans, with Oliver Stone’s HEAVEN AND EARTH as one of the few exceptions. (Clint Eastwood’s LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA presented a counter-perspective from the Japanese side, but it too was mostly about fighting men. Generally, movies like THE BIG RED ONE and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN have token moments to remind us of the war’s impact on civilians. For a glimpse of the larger reality of war, one needs to search out films such as THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS, FORBIDDEN GAMES, PAISAN, and etc.)
Be that as it may, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is not a conventional war or P.O.W. film, even such notable ones as THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, STALAG 17, and KING RAT. (PATHS OF GLORY, like BREAKER MORANT, is an unusual kind of war prisoner film in that the soldiers are imprisoned by their own side.) It has certain genre elements, especially in the conflict between rigidity and flexibility, principles(no matter how misguided, unrealistic, or delusional) and pragmatism. Still, if STALAG 17, THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, and KING RAT are essentially dramatic, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is meditative and dreamlike, not least because its two ‘spiritual’ antagonists, Celliers and Yonoi, are like ships passing in the night. The drama that might have been materialized only at the end and briefly.
The thematic nucleus of the story involves the clash between Captain Yonoi’s commitment to the spirit OVER the body and Major Celliers’ commitment to the spirit FOR the body. Initially, it appears Yonoi the rigid disciplinarian is a man of iron-clad principles, whereas Major Celliers is a maverick prone to breaking rules. In the end, we learn Celliers is no less doggedly principled, albeit for reasons of his own. He may not be hard on others but is so on himself, indeed to an extreme degree, as if his private salvation depends on it.
THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, for all its excellence, belongs more or less in the Hollywood genre of the action epic. Intelligently written and realized, it nevertheless remains within middlebrow sensibility, which is to say it has enough food-for-thought for the sophisticates and enough excitement for the popcorn crowd. In contrast, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE was clearly conceived of as an ‘art film’, for lack of a better term, and it was made by a more mature and reflective Nagisa Oshima, once one of Japan’s most irascible radical and provocative directors of the 1960s and 1970s. At the very least, the films that made his reputation(or notoriety as, like Jean-Luc Godard and R.W. Fassbinder, he had plenty of detractors) — CRUEL STORY OF YOUTH, VIOLENCE AT NOON, DEATH BY HANGING, IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, and etc. — have value as social artifacts, but most of them haven’t dated well; they’re either too topical, polemical, or cartoonish in their satire. Personally, I prefer his more conventional narratives such as MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE and GOHATTO(aka TABOO).
Many of his earlier films are marred by willful rudeness, made worse by self-righteousness, resulting in something like enfant terrible puritanism, an awful combination. Imagine a spoiled brat throwing tantrums as part of a moral crusade. Many of his films are now relics of radical 60s agitation, hardly surprising as one of Oshima’s main inspirations was Jean-Luc Godard, many of whose films have also been totally forgotten.
Apparently, Oshima matured or wised up at some point to realize something so remarkable as MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, which isn’t merely leftist agitprop or avant-garde bleating for attention. Perhaps, Oshima saw himself in the character of Celliers, the misunderstood troublemaker. Celliers sometimes acts the ‘bad boy’, even prankster, but is really a noble(and tormented) soul, and Oshima, who made his reputation as the proto-punk of Japanese cinema, may have felt similarly in his role as a kind of modern-day shaman to awaken Japan’s soul from the doldrums of conformity, consumerism, and compliance with an unjust order(built on false memory). And in the character of Yonoi, there are shades of Yukio Mishima, the right-wing ‘bad boy’ provocateur who, despite the ideological clash with the the Left, also diagnosed something sick about post-war Japan built on the false edifices of ‘democracy’, ‘peace’, and ‘prosperity’.
There are interesting historical, thematic, and plot similarities between THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE. Both films take place in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in Southeast Asia. Both films pit the elitist man of high principles with a man of(or for) the people. And the meaning of heroism, personal sacrifice, and redemption weigh heavily in both films.
However, there is one key difference. In THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS, the primary dramatic conflict is between Col. Nicholson(Alec Guinness) and Shears(William Holden). Though Col. Nicholson initially butts heads with Col. Saito(Sessue Hayakawa), the former wins the test of wills, and the latter mostly fades from dramatic importance. (Of course, one could argue Nicholson’s triumph is delusional as, for all his sense of pride and dignity, he ends up doing exactly what the Japanese ordered, indeed even better. Imagine someone beating you in a game of nerves but then going the extra mile to do what you want of him.) The moral gravity of the movie derives from the tension between Nicholson’s ‘mad’ rationale for building a bridge for the Japanese(ironically on the sanest sounding principles) and Shears’ transformation from a self-centered cynic to a true believer on a British mission to destroy the bridge. Shears is no one’s idea of a hero, let alone a saint, and initially comes across as concerned only about numero uno. He isn’t big on ideals and loyalty, and his main concern is to make it out alive and enjoy life. Indeed, he is slyly blackmailed into ‘volunteering’ for the mission, but along the way, he becomes as committed as the others in blowing up the bridge. That becomes his redemption.
Nicholson, unlike Shears, is introduced as a man of inner strength and high principles; he’s an officer’s officer, much respected by his men who would go to hell and back for him(which suggests Anglo society was less about universal individualism but narrow individualism at the top and degrees of obedience below;
indeed, it’s telling that when Nicholson does embark on the project of bridge-building, almost none of the men protest). Unlike the plebeian and rather shameless Shears, he’s very much the product of the British elite culture.
That said, Nicholson has a fatal blind spot when it comes to order and duty. He’s so dedicated to the codes of duty & discipline and so determined to demonstrate(to the Japanese and posterity alike) the superiority of the British work ethic and workmanship that he fails to see the full implications of what he’s doing.
One may argue no British officer could be this ridiculous, and of course, THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS is a work of fiction, but there is a strange logic to Nicholson’s justification that makes the project oddly seductive, even noble. (For sure, the primacy of duty is alive and well in the West. When job-well-done is one’s highest priority, for whom you do it matters less than how well you do it. Notice how white folks continue in their job of making trains run on time even though their work is now in service to Jewish Supremacist Satanism.)
In a way, Nicholson appears to have a historical than a political sensibility. When we survey ancient ruins, do we think about the politics of the bygone period or marvel at the ingenuity and effort that went into building them? In his own eccentric way, Nicholson isn’t merely a man of minutiae but of vision, contemplating time on a grand scale that transcends the rises and falls of empires, perhaps even his own.
A man of contradictions, he inspires and pushes his men to build the bridge for the most practical reasons; it’s good for their discipline, their mental and physical health. He’s also driven by ego; it’s not enough that his will(hierarchical than rebellious, it must be noted) prevailed over Col. Saito’s authority; he has to show that he was 100% correct on just about everything.
However, the bridge also represents something beyond ego, something beyond even the imperial ambitions of the British and the Japanese; it may serve as a kind of timeless monument to man’s ingenuity and determination in the middle of a jungle world populated with primitive locals and monkeys — THE MOSQUITO COAST has a similar character played by Harrison Ford. He’s not raving mad like Aguirre(of Werner Herzog’s film), but he is moved by the power of dreams. He is a tight-buttoned visionary.
It all comes to a head when Nicholson sees the lowly Shears sacrificing his life for the mission, realizes his folly, and seeks redemption for his blind-sided treachery. Ultimately as a soldier, his duty is to serve the team, not ‘time’. Even though the ‘good’ or at least ‘better’ guys do manage to blow up the bridge, the closing words, “Madness! Madness!” belong to Major Clipton, who comes across as the most sane, balanced, and decent but also, in some ways, the most ineffective, because a sane man in an insane world is like a fish out of water. Major Clipton’s counterpart in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is Col. John Lawrence played by Tom Conti. Both Clipton and Lawrence represent the humanist striving for common sense and basic decency. They represent mankind as its best but also at its most foolhardy as the full measure of humanity cannot be understood through good will alone. Madness inflames but also illuminates, and if Celliers prevails over Yonoi in the battle of wills, it’s because he possesses a madness to match Yonoi’s.
If THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS’s main conflict is between the American hustler Shears and the British elitist Nicholson — Shears isn’t exactly the ‘commoner’ type as he’s crafty and resourceful in having things go his way, i.e. being a ‘winner’ — , the main rivals in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE are Captain Yonoi(Ryuichi Sakamoto) and Major Jack Celliers(David Bowie). Interestingly enough, both gained fame as experimental composers straddling the borders between pop and the avant-garde. Also, both have been noted for their sexual ambiguity, which adds to MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE as Yonoi is clearly a repressed homo. Yonoi's complicated feelings(desire and shame of that very desire) about Jack Celliers has similarities to the homoeroticism in BECKET. On the one hand, Yonoi feels that he has found in Celliers a perfect embodiment of everything he admires most, but the (homo)sexual undercurrents of this fascination threatens to expose him and undermine his prestige in the imperial system that has little tolerance for personal indulgence and softness toward the enemy.
As the story progresses, the rift grows wider, which is especially painful for Yonoi who’s afflicted with a sexual and spiritual obsession with Celliers. Yonoi, unable to turn Celliers into a homo lover, wants to own him as a spiritual partner in a shared aesthetic, a vision of beauty. Even though Celliers’ will collides with Yonoi’s authority, his real beef isn’t with Yonoi but with himself: He feels himself as the worst enemy over what happened between him and his humpback brother. Indeed, Yonoi is at best a mere afterthought in Celliers’ mind.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is essentially a tale of Christian-Humanism, and as such, its concept of redemption is deeper than that of THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS, whose main concerns are political and social, with a shade of the psychological. Colonel Nicholson, for the social good of his men, made a grievous political mistake. Shears, initially self-centered and opportunistic, meets a noble death as a hero.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE has a warped spiritualist element lacking in THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS and most war films, all the more so as a clear divide between good and evil is absent. Its mood is somewhat similar to Kon Ichikawa’s spiritualist-humanist BURMESE HARP, another P.O.W film set in Southeast Asia, in this case, Japanese imprisoned by the Allies; in the film, a Japanese soldier turns to spiritual salvation to tend for the souls of his fallen comrades.
The hero of BURMESE HARP turns to Buddhism as solace from the horrors of war, and the Eastern religion is presented as a clear, if not the, answer, in a world riven with crises. The film could serve as a recruiting tool for Buddhism, much like TOP GUN for the US Air Force.
Things get trickier in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE. There is indeed a ‘spiritual’ battle between the quasi-fascist Yonoi and the Christo-Humanist Celliers, but the dynamics are far more personal, eccentric, and ‘existential’. For all of Yonoi’s devotion to spiritual purity, his fascination with Celliers is largely (homo)sexual. For someone who’s committed to the Japanese nationalist ideology of Yamato bloodlines, he has a rather odd hankering for a blond white guy(though not of the crude and vulgar variety exhibited by the sadistic Turkish officer in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA). It gets even more perplexing because Yonoi is actually a very intelligent and well-educated man who has studied and lived outside Japan. He’s not some closed-minded provincial hick but someone with genuine respect for other cultures and peoples, especially for the great powers of the West, which he deems ‘honorable’.
He is party to a superiorist identity and ideology but, like so many of his compatriots, haunted by feelings of inferiority vis-a-vis the West that has the advantage in land, manpower, resources, and technology — beauty is also a factor in Yonoi’s ultra-homo-sensitivity concerning aesthetic matters.
Japan’s expansion across Asia was to reverse its situation with the West. Precisely because Japanese were materially disadvantaged against the West(and lacked manpower in China), there was a greater emphasis on the FIGHTING SPIRIT as compensation, though Japan drew from its highly aestheticized and spiritualized warrior traditions.
Yonoi is, at once, profoundly Japanese and confusedly universalist. He is no slouch and, if anything, extremely hard on himself on matters of purity and devotion, but he expects non-Japanese to respect and follow his lead. He projects a particularist Japanese concept of the ‘spirit’ onto Western P.O.W.s who are not only completely alien to Japanese ideals(made radical under militarist rule) but barely able to stand on their own two feet. In Yonoi’s mental universe, it’s as if everyone could turn ‘Japanese’, at least on the ‘spiritual’ level, if they put their minds to it. He expects everyone to overcome his sickness and get his act together in service to the Japanese empire.
And yet, as Celliers comes to demonstrate(in front of everyone), Yonoi cannot overcome his own confused but powerful passions, which could be construed as sick(or homo-erotic lust for some white guy) or sacred(or a poet’s recognition of beauty and superiority). In the final confrontation when Celliers kisses Yonoi, the latter cannot overcome his ‘spiritual-sensual’ turmoil about the blond Brit. He finds himself unable to muster the strength to kill Celliers(who’s making a fool of him in front of the Japanese and Europeans alike) and collapses like a girl kissed by her dream beau. For all his talk of godlike control over one’s body and soul, Yonoi is no less a prisoner of his limitations, however rare and peculiar they may be. Though Celliers is destroyed physically, he is the one who triumphs spiritually over Yonoi.
Even so, there are several layers of meaning, or more than meets the eye. Celliers doesn’t come across as a religious man, at least in the technical sense. He grew up attending churches(as was the cultural norm) and all but seems a worldly person. Thus, his spiritual redemption is more personal(or philosophically ‘existential’) than religious. Though his life is sacrificed for the fellow POWs(and perhaps even for Yonoi’s sake), his main motivation is a deeply private burden of guilt in regards to his younger brother. His compatriots surely see his capital punishment as most unjust, but Celliers may have nursed a death wish for just such a moment, an opportunity to atone for an inner scar that never healed.
Consider the striking symmetries and stark contrasts in the film. Both Japan and Britain are island nations. During World War II, both were striving to expand or maintain control over vast territories as imperial powers. Both nations have long been defined by a rigid class/caste system. Though Britain democratized and liberalized, its class hierarchy remained very much intact well into the early 1960s. Also, form and manners have been of great importance in both cultures(though much less so in the UK since the late 60s). And though Meiji reforms and modernization disbanded the samurai caste and liberalized and opened up Japanese society, including the military, to all classes, Japan, even today, is marked by a sense of place and duty. And both civilizations have been infused with a transcendent faith: Christianity or Buddhism.
Yet, there are also profound differences. By mid-century, Britain had been in the imperialist and colonial game for centuries whereas Japan only joined the club in the late 19th century. The social and political transformations in Britain happened ‘organically’ in stages, whereas Japan was dragged overnight into fast-evolving modernity after centuries of isolation and stasis. (Japan not only had to catch up but keep up with accelerating changes in the West. It was like suddenly going from medievalism to modernism without the developmental phases in between.) Despite the emphasis on social discipline and order, the British had also been defined by individuality if not exactly individualism in the modern sense, i.e. individual worth proven by wit or excellence was allowed a degree of autonomy(like with the eponymous hero of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA whose eccentricities and even defiance of orders come to be acknowledged as having useful merit). Also, the pro-active aspect of Protestant Christianity not only imbued a sense of individual conscience(one of the themes of CHARIOTS OF FIRE) but ensured social reforms and missions around the world(that sometimes opposed certain aspects of the imperialist enterprise).
Profoundly karmic, Buddhism has been a passive spirituality that disdains ‘saving the world’ as a misguided attachment to an illusion called ‘reality’. In Christianity(at least in the modern Western incarnation), one not only draws inward but outward for salvation. In Buddhism, one ‘hibernates’ into monasticism as a resounding rejection of the world. As such Buddhism was more tolerable than Christianity to the traditional samurai order. Though Buddhism’s innate pacifism may have been anathema to the warrior caste, it remained a personal than a social credo. (On the other hand, centuries of Christian faith certainly didn’t prevent the West from being martial and aggressive, and if anything, it often served as a moral justification for West’s expanding hegemony. A recent example of this was the Christian Right’s overwhelming support of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Ann Coulter, though not of the Christian Right, even joked that the neo-crusaders should force Iraqis to Jesus at the point of a rifle.)
Because of Christian social/moral activism and the West’s long experience of ruling over indigenous natives, it was true enough that the British by the 20th century had become seasoned interlocutors with the natives, certainly more than the taciturn Japanese could ever hope to be. Though British manners were reserved, conversation remained a lively part of the culture as long it was within proper bounds, whereas less said the better among the Japanese, especially between members of different social stations or cultures.
If Christianity softened British attitudes somewhat toward the natives, extensive trial-and-error led to improved use of carrots and sticks. And though proper form was at the center of British culture, a degree of impropriety could be tolerated, even admired, if redeemed with wit, one tool availed to all classes. A sharp instrument, even a social inferior could parlay and pierce with flashing brilliance without undue disruption of decorum, akin to pulling the tablecloth without moving the items. The British not only cared for superior status but superior talent, and wit was admired whomever it came from, and thus, even a lower-class member could shine with wit used masterly like a rapier than a blunt instrument of unruly barbarians. It was one way to stave off boredom in polite society. Also, a way to convey displeasure without loss of composure. And an intimation that the hierarchy, for all its snobbery, operated on sportsmanship, handing points on wit to anyone regardless of station. One cannot underestimate the importance of wit in British society as it cultivated an alternative concept of aristocracy, which increasingly became problematic with Jews beating Anglos in wit. If the traditional concept of aristocracy was about lineage and title, the competing one was of natural aristocracy, that of rare individuals who, regardless of their background, exhibited exceptional qualities of the mind, of which wit was the quickest indicator.
Japanese, like the British, were obsessed with proper form and manners, developing refined protocols and rules of behavior, but wit was a matter between equals or intimates, not something a superior would waste on an inferior and certainly not something an inferior would dare wield against a superior, at least if he didn’t want his head chopped off.
Thanks to Christianity, a natural-aristocratic appreciation of quality, and extensive experience with exploration, trade, and conquest, the British attained a degree of empathy for their non-British subjects. As long as their natives acknowledged British dominance, the Brits took a live-and-let-live attitude towards them.
British Imperialism was somewhat odd for being, at once, more enlightened/tolerant AND more intolerant/prejudiced than other forms of European imperialism. While the other great imperialist powers — the Spanish, Portuguese, and the French — also insisted on white rule and domination, they weren’t so averse to racially intermingling and even mixing with the nonwhites. French-Canadians even enacted a policy of race-mixing with the Indians(as preferable to downright genocide or prolonged tribal race wars between reds and whites), and the Spanish extensively racially mixed with the ‘Indians’ of South and Central Americas. There was far less mixing between Anglos and natives(or other races) in places like the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Paradoxically, it was precisely the British insistence on racial separation(or at least distance) that allowed for greater cultural tolerance. As the British believed in the preservation of racial integrity, it only made sense that nonwhites should live amongst their own kind with their own cultures(though they could surely learn a thing or two from the more advanced British). Even though the British regarded their role as promethean, the bringer of light to a dim-lit world(or a dark one in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa), they hardly entertained the notion that nonwhites would ever reach the civilizational level of the West.
Given the British elite’s haughty(and even contemptuous) attitudes towards the lower classes and the Irish potatoheads, it was undoubtedly skeptical about nonwhites ever rising to the level of the West. Still, it was believed that nonwhites could only gain under the guidance and tutelage of the whites, especially the Brits.
British civilization/empire was built on a contradiction that, for a time at least, supplied the positive and negative charges for its historical project.
One key element of this contradiction was the movement toward progress, liberty, enlightenment, tolerance, universalism, and individuality while the other element was a deep abiding love of the queen, order, hierarchy, racial pride, God & Country, and fish-and-chips. The greatness resulted from the friction of the two dispositions. Had the empire merely sought power and order, it could have gone the way of Imperial Russia or the Spanish Empire. The imperial momentum owed to unflagging progress in politics, enterprise, education, and science/technology. No wonder Adam Smith and Charles Darwin were British than Spanish or Portuguese.
On the other hand, empire building requires loyalty, unity, order, martial spirit, and mythos of identity. The British loved law and liberty but also their lords and lore. The two proclivities collaborated in the expansion of the British Empire, but the contradictions became ever more problematic as the prestige couldn’t fully deliver on the promise(among the lower classes, far-flung subjects, and disgruntled members of the elite), with the American Independence a harbinger of things to come around the globe. Given the heavy investment in the imperial narrative of the great civilizer to audiences both at home and abroad, it was becoming a harder sell that all were fair and free within the empire.
The British grew increasingly apprehensive about the contradiction between supremacist empire-building and egalitarian truth-justice-liberty-spreading as, more the empire grew, more the people, British idealists and nonwhite subjects alike, noticed, especially as the empire wasn’t merely demanding submission but selling inspiration with the promise of uplift for the natives.
The British were clearly unwilling to bestow complete equality unto the ‘wogs’ and the like, especially as the motherland itself was rife with class distinctions, and this could only agitate the westernized non-British subjects who began to smell a rat. Mohandas Gandhi was at one time a proud representative of the British Empire. It was as if the British offered help with one hand while smacking you with the other.
Furthermore, many non-British subjects not only resented British rule but rejected modernity itself as either threatening or confounding. While the more advanced peoples, such as the Chinese in Hong Kong & Singapore and the merchant elites of India, eagerly took advantage of the new opportunities, many nonwhites around the world found modern freedoms to be either disruptive, disorienting, or downright profane(especially among the Muslims and Hindu fundamentalists).
In our time, for all the Sub-Saharan African song-and-dance about ‘democracy’ and ‘progress’, mainly for more handouts from the West, the subcontinent is still into primitivism, tribalism, and superstitions(though it must be said the average black African probably has a sounder sense of what a woman is than the current globo-homo tranny-wanny West does). But then, ultra-modern Singapore, even at this late stage, voices trepidations about the Western Way as the only way and proposes a set of ‘Asian cultural values’ for the East. Even in the West, there was a divergence between Anglo individuality and Continental community(be it socialist, folkish, and/or clannish).
Anyway, from its long dealings with nonwhite peoples, the British formulated an effective system of carrots and sticks, one that was caring and stern, affectionate but aloof. Though proudly and unmistakably British, they could empathize, even emote, with other cultures and manipulate their folks to serve interests deemed to be beneficial to both parties. Despite the unequal power structure, there was a degree of mutuality in the way the subjects were governed. The relationship rested on something more than force and favors; the natives were made to feel inspired in their service to such an enlightened and beneficent empire. The new boss wasn’t just another reiteration of the old boss but something completely different. Like the New Romans except, whereas Romans spread civilization through slavery, the British did so by abolishing it. The British Empire shone a light to a dark and diverse world, but the ownership of the light had to be white(except when Germans entered the stage as competitors), in which case the empire called on the darkies to stand with it against the bad whites of the dark light, the Teutons. By the values of the Current Year, the British, for all their propagation of Enlightenment values and practices, could be deemed worse than the Romans who were, at the very least, not so ‘racist’ despite their brutality. How do we square the fact that the most progressive and transformative force in the modern world was also the most race-conscious or race-ist? The Brits of the period would have hardly noted an anomaly in this as they took it for granted that they were of a special race with a mission to rule(and rule well and fairly), but it’s incomprehensible in the current climate that denounces ‘racism’ as the worst of all sins, something so evil it couldn’t have done any good.
The Japanese, as late-comers, emulated Western imperialism but were pressed for time given Japan’s limited natural resources and deteriorating diplomatic relations with the Anglosphere. If Anglos and the French had gradually come to tolerate and even accommodate one another since their growing dominance in the late 18th century, Japan, like Italy and Germany, was a late-comer that eagerly(or desperately) sought to grab whatever was left on the imperial game-board. Japanese brutality increased under pressure from the imperialist West, the threat from Russia, and the slow but sure rise of China under a measure of national unity under the KMT. An example of such desperation is when Captain Yonoi orders all the men, even bedridden prisoners of war, to assemble outside.
There was another reason why the Japanese were less cut out for the business of imperialism. As a people, they were more earnest than ironic, thus less adept at dealing with unfamiliar or alien situations. Besides, as Lawrence says in quiet despair, the Japanese are an ‘anxious’ people whose every thought and value is a prisoner of their highly regimented culture. Even though every people are bound by their own rules and conventions, some cultures tend to be more rigid and neurotic than others. In the West, especially the Anglo-West, there has been a dichotomy between the cultural self and the personal self(though not for some time as it’s hard to think of a world as stupid as the Anglosphere in the past thirty or forty years). It was a general characteristic of the modern West, especially with the rise of modernity. A reasonably well-educated Frenchman could be French with other Frenchmen but also slip into the role of the man-of-the-world with Americans, Russians, Italians, and nonwhites, especially those with a modicum of Western influence. French in France but also a man of the world. The imperial Japanese had never developed a sense of the personal or individual self, at least not to the extent that the West did. Their identity, pride, values, and sense of honor were deeply ingrained in Japanese-ness(and became more so under militarist rule that emphasized Japan’s distinct mission against the West, though also against Russia and China). One’s sense of worth was inseparable from the approval of the community, more accurately the hierarchy. It was an anxiety-ridden world of constantly peeking over one’s shoulder and peering into one’s jittery heart, but it worked well enough for the Japanese in Japan with its very unique and enclosed culture.
But, ruling over other peoples and cultures was a different matter, and it got even more problematic when Japan, especially in Southeast Asia, briefly became masters over the whites who’d established themselves in Asia as the new masters. Contra the Japanese, the imperial British could utilize their sense of individualism and universalism apart from their Britishness(which, by the way, was also a highly diplomatic amalgam of ethnicities). They could be distinctly British at home and with fellow Britishers, but ‘understanding’ and ‘respectful’ with outsiders in the roles of explorers, thinkers, and artists with either their ambitions or fascinations with the non-Western world. That the West failed to come under the prolonged hegemony of any single empire since Roman times probably contributed to the development of more diplomatic and adaptive attitudes toward outsiders.
The Japanese could be polite and cooperative with other peoples, as has been the case with global Japanese business following the Pacific War, but they were less adept at ruling over non-Japanese. Ruling over foreigners required an artful balance of carrots and sticks, as well as a subtle science of threats and concessions to prevent the conflict from ever bubbling to the surface.
The Japanese conceived of power mainly in terms of giving orders and taking orders, with little in between for agency, initiative, and compromise. A Japanese person was lower than A and higher than B, bowing to A and being bowed to by B. In Japan, even with the sudden erosion of tradition due to modernization, the pecking order was understood by most Japanese. Even as the politics changed, attitudes remained much the same. With foreigners it was a different story. In the case of the lesser powers, or the rest of Asia, the pecking order had to be established with Japanese on top, even though things got complicated because, even as the Japanese sought domination over other Asians, they also competed with the West(and Russia/Soviet Union) for their hearts-and-minds. Europeans and Americans, as the new masters of Asia but also partners to Japan as an ‘honorary white power’, further complicated matters for the Japanese.
In general, the Japanese view of foreigners was as a people to be ruled(like the Manchurians, Koreans, or Indonesians) or a people to be ruled under(like the neo-shogun General MacArthur and his crew as the conquering army over Japan.)
A keener sense of empathy and irony had made the British more adept at assessing situations on several levels. Though the Japanese were no strangers to subtlety and refinement in arts and manners, they were allergic to irony with its slyly subversive implications, a problem that the British themselves were well-aware of but somehow managed in order to sustain a culture of respectability and manners, at least until the decade following World War II.
The Japanese, due to reasons ranging from experience(or lack thereof) to genetics, had a more difficult time getting along with the outside world in the age of empire. They understood the binary of domination or submission but not the gray areas so crucial to running an empire in the Age of Enlightenment. Outside Japan, they either sought to totally dominate or totally submit to(and assimilate into) the Other(which partly explains why the people of Japanese origin in the US and Latin America have virtually nothing in common with the Japanese in Japan). Granted, most Americans of European backgrounds have also lost their sense of ethno-historical/cultural roots, but (1) New World cultures, both North and South American, are extensions of the West and (2), as whites cultivated an identity based on individuality, they still retain a semblance of self-worth and agency even without particular cultural attachments.
The cultural differences between the Japanese and the British empires are essential to understanding MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE. In thematic terms, it’s somehow befitting that MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is set in hot humid Indonesia, an island(or islands) like Japan and Britain. Japan and Britain, both nations in the temperate zone(though Japan is famous for its humidity), are caught up in the clash not only of empires but civilizations in the film, though there are also signs of mini-clashes within each system and within each soul. It’s not only about Japan vs Britain but about new Japan vs old Japan and Western supremacism vs Western humanism, as well as contradictions within one’s own heart between duty to nation and duty to conscience, between political will and personal desire, between the life-principle and the death-principle. Ironies abound. Even though the Japanese in the film represent imperial overreach while the two main British characters, Lawrence and Celliers, represent humanism, the Japanese learned empire-building from the Europeans, not least the British. And given the ever-evolving moral contradictions within its national character, one senses the British empire would have been doomed even without the challenge from Japan(and the like).
In contrast to Britain and Japan, Indonesia, despite pockets of Hindu and Islamic civilizations and centuries of Dutch rule, comes across as a tropical backwater in the film. As in THE THIN RED LINE, major powers from the northern zone not only bleed each other dry in the tropics but undergo a kind of spiritual conversion. Though MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is essentially humanist and Christian(at odds with Japanese neo-Shinto paganism), its aura, not least due to the trancelike score by Ryuichi Sakamoto that incorporates Indonesian musical instruments and motifs, conveys an exotic hybrid of the spiritual and the sensual. It’s like moral awakening by way of sedation into a dream. Call it a tropical malady, by the way the title of a film that defies all categories by the Thai director aptly named Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
What water was to Andrei Tarkovsky, the tropics have been for many Western artists, and of course, Oshima was very much a Westernized artist. The tropics serve as an agent that absorbs and reshapes our fixed categories of truth and reality. In Tarkovsky’s films, all things return to and are recycled by sacred nature, the primary agent of which is water with its baptismal power over man and matter. Not surprisingly, Tarkovsky’s adaptation of SOLARIS couldn’t resist the watery symbolism of an ocean-planet that molds human consciousness into tangible forms.
For other artists, the tropics represented the world of ever-growing, ever-decaying, and ever-rejuvenating mystery in which the deepest and darkest truths of nature(and by extension human nature) lurked. If in arid and/or cold regions the problem was the scarcity of life, in the tropics it was the over-abundance. (The Hindu concept of reincarnation probably owed something to tropical India’s ceaseless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth before one’s eyes and abuzz in one’s ears. By contrast, in the arid regions of the Near East, the other major source of great religions, the dead simply dried up or turned into dust under the hot sun as a reminder of the permanence of death. In the tropics of India, however, one could almost sense death and decay being recycled into birth and life. The key ‘philospiritual’ difference between Judaism/Christianity/Islam and Hinduism/Buddhism is that the former seeks permanent life through bloodlines or in the afterlife whereas the latter seeks permanent death or extinction. The curse in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions is death. According to Hinduism/Buddhism, the real problem is eternal rebirth. One cannot remain dead because the ever-migrating soul enters yet another body in perpetuation of the living hell that is ‘reality’. If Christians worry that life is too short, Buddhists worry that it is too long, that is through endless reincarnations. So, what Buddhists seek is a kind of permanent death as opposed to a permanent life.)
It’s no wonder that many counterculture types of the 1960s looked to Eastern Mysticism, especially of India, as guide and inspiration to a new way of ‘being’, supposedly a more harmonious approach to life than the (hyper)active modes of thinking and believing that came to dominate the West, i.e. the thing isn’t to control or conquer the world but to be ‘one’ with it.
There were other reasons for the growing fascination with the tropics. For one, even though communism sprung from the cold north, it gained a new romanticism as the key ‘anti-imperialist’ struggles of the 60s took place in the tropical zone(now called the ‘Global South’), Cuba and Bolivia with Fidel Castro & Che Guevara and Vietnam with Ho Chi Minh. The jungle metaphor of civilization being devoured by nature became reversed and romanticized, with civilization standing not for progress but for corruption and the jungle standing for authenticity than savagery.
Then, on the ‘Zen-Fascist’ side of things, John Milius imagined his revision of Kurtz gaining deeper truth in the tropics of Cambodia in APOCALYPSE NOW. The tropics had a way of both attracting and repelling Western curiosity and imagination. There was the lush flora and fauna, strange religions and cults(from high culture Hinduism to colorful animism), and maybe some exotic half-naked women to boot. But there was also the challenging climate, insects and diseases, poverty and cruelty. What’s nice on the eyes isn’t always to the flesh. It’s no different in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE.
The four principal characters of MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE are John Lawrence(Tom Conti), Jack Celliers(David Bowie), Captain Yonoi(Ryuichi Sakamoto), and Sgt. Hara(Takeshi Kitano). Other characters of some significance are Cellier’s younger brother, a crippled dwarf with a lovely voice; Captain Hicksley, a pompous and somewhat insufferable British camp commander; Kanemoto(a Korean guard accused of committing sodomy on Dutch prisoner of war); and DeJong(the presumably buggered fellow).
Tom Conti’s Lawrence is a good soldier, a patriot who dutifully serves his country. He’s also something of a liberal-humanist, for lack of a better term. He is, in many ways, the best of men. He’s full of empathy and has a good heart. He doesn’t obsess over status, class, or nationality, though he’s no pacifist either. He obviously believes duty to the country and the righteousness of its cause(relatively speaking, what with Nazi Germany and Militarist Japan on the other side), but he strives for better understanding between the Japanese and the British. As someone who’d spent time in Japan, he speaks the language, respects the culture and the people, and hopes for less enmity between the two sides in the POW camp. He is a man of considerable intelligence, compassion, and good-will, and for this reason, he knows politics and conscience can’t always be aligned, that there is no absolute good and absolute bad, that even as he believes the Japanese are wrong, the British aren’t necessarily right.
He’s also devoid of the kind of egotism or power-trip mentality so rife in the office ranks of the military. He embodies both the nobility and the deficiency of humanism. Through sincere good will, he serves as a bridge, not only between the British and the Japanese but among men in general. But, even his remarkable patience has its breaking point. In a key moment, he uncharacteristically loses self-control and blows up at the Japanese for their ‘crazy gods’ and cruel irrationality. In his goodness, we sense some of the contradictions of postwar liberalism that, at once, insisted both on universal human rights and an understanding of different cultures with values at odds with ‘rational’ concepts developed in the West. Yet, despite his frustration and rage, he remains and survives as a good man whose wish to understand and respect other men and earn their respect in turn does bear some fruit. It’s hardly surprising that it is Lawrence that both Captain Yonoi and Sergeant Hara request to see before their executions. Tom Conti is wonderful as Lawrence.
David Bowie’s Jack Celliers is a noble soul nursing a deep self-inflicted wound that refuses to heal. Blessed with good looks(though some may feel Bowie was too odd to be handsome), intelligence, courage, and character, he was clearly destined for great things from a young age. His little brother, a hunchback, suffers from stunted growth, though the deformity isn’t very noticeable under the clothes. But the kid sure can sing. In a flashback, the younger brother is targeted by a bunch of local boys miffed with his derisive laughter at their awkward singing at a church service, and Jack takes them on while his brother escapes. When the younger brother comes back(with an adult) to find the beaten-up Jack, the latter reprimands him for returning instead of running home. It’s an odd relationship between the brothers as both are afflicted with rare conditions, beauty and deformity.
There are two things going on here. On the one hand, Jack is angry that the little brother jeopardized his well-being by coming back. It is frustration borne of sympathy. But, Jack’s pride cannot abide anyone having caught him in a pitiable state. He hates losing and doesn’t want to be seen lying half-conscious on the ground. (This is psychologically significant insofar as Jack finally loses this egotistical streak near the end of the film in accepting the fate of being buried up to his neck in front of the whole camp. He loses the shame of defeat, though it could be interpreted as an exhibitionism of spiritual victory.) Jack Celliers has heart enough to take pity on others but cannot stomach being an object of pity himself, a strange kind of moral pride. Sympathy implies hierarchy, with the sympathetic being in the advantageous position of expending pity on the less fortunate, the sympathized. Thus, even as the sympathetic may lend a helping hand to the sympathized, a barrier stands between them. This contradiction anticipates what happens between the brothers later on. In a way, Jack could have ordered his little brother to run home from the bullies because a subconscious part of him felt ashamed of being blood-related to such a misshapen weakling. Even so, Celliers as a boy is loving and protective of his brother. He comes across as someone who would go to any length to protect his brother. (Granted, the brother is no angel, as evinced in his derisive laughter at the boys who couldn’t sing in the church. His advantage, which is singing, could be cause for haughtiness towards those less gifted.)
The most important flashback and the key to Celliers’ psyche is what happens later in youth. Jack attends a posh boarding school where he’s highly regarded as crème de la crème. Popular and much admired, he has become rather self-conscious of his privileged position among his peers. Problem is his younger brother is to start school as a freshman, and Jack is horrified that his classmates might find out about his deformity. As a young boy, Jack was inseparable from his younger brother, of whom he was protective and perhaps defensive. But at the boarding school, he has apparently developed a new sense of self unburdened by brotherly obligation. You don’t choose your family members but you do choose your friends, and he has become friends with the ‘best of the best’ at the school. (One might say he sort of comes to feel about his younger brother the way Pip does about his brother-in-law Joe in Charles Dickens’ GREAT EXPECTATIONS.) Jack doesn’t want to be associated with anything less than perfect, and when his younger brother is outed as defective at a hazing ritual, Jack remains in the shadows and does nothing. Though he knew what happened, he pretends not to know and tells his brother that he’d been busy doing lab work. Most likely, his brother suspected Jack wasn’t telling the truth but pretended otherwise as well.
And that would have been that… except that this incident eats away at Jack’s soul all his life. Even though the brothers presumably went on with their lives as if everything was hunky dory, the fact that the younger brother no longer sang thereafter suggests he lost his faith in life and, more hurtful to Jack, his trust in his older brother. This gnawing sense of guilt, all the more painful for he never confessed nor apologized to his brother, shapes his destiny as a soldier and then ultimately leads him to martyrdom.
At one point, Celliers says to Lawrence that when the war began, he embraced it with ecstasy as a kind of escape from himself. There are echoes of Strelnikov in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO who plunges into the Great War for a similar reason, a kind of escape from himself. And, Adolf Hitler and many others like him also sought escapism from their confused and frustrated lives by taking up arms in pursuit of glory and heroism. But, in the end, one cannot escape from oneself. Many gained no conscience from World War I, and Celliers cannot lose his conscience in World War II. More often than not, one cannot escape from one’s nature, be it good or bad.
We learn Celliers chose to become a P.O.W because the Japanese threatened to kill the natives if he didn’t surrender. Celliers, as if atoning for haughty elitism, apparently found it impossible to allow other men to be sacrificed in his stead. He’s come to personalize elitism with the sins of betrayal, cowardice, and inhumanity because of the incident with his brother.
This doesn’t make him a raving egalitarian, but the personal has become political for him. He fights for the British Empire but in his own way. In his eccentricity and individuality, he is somewhat like the famed Lawrence of Arabia. He has to do it his way. Still, if T. E. Lawrence was driven by love of adventure and egotism, Celliers sees his own ego as the greatest enemy.
It is a deep personal wound, and the only person he confides(or confesses) his secret to is John Lawrence, someone he genuinely admires and trusts, and only because one of them will likely face the firing squad the next day.
Ironically, despite his humanitarian convictions, Celliers cannot help being what he is, a member of the superior breed. Even in service to his compatriots — stealing food for them and ultimately sacrificing his own life on their behalf — is carried out with an air of pride, even contempt. There’s a beautiful soul in him somewhere, but he’s not an easy man to get close to. He seems cool and distant in his own bubble even as he tries to live for others. Willem Dafoe’s character in Oliver Stone is somewhat similar, also a Christ-like figure too intelligent and contemplative for the brutal binaries of combat with its kill-or-die dynamics and friend-versus-foe dichotomy. Still, Dafoe’s character is one of the guys whereas Celliers is always a man apart, even among his countrymen.
If the amiable Lawrence can get along with just about anyone(fellow soldiers of any rank, the haughty Captain Yonoi, the gruff Sergeant Hara, and etc.), Celliers always finds himself standing before an invisible wall between himself and others. Even as he has dispensed with deeply entrenched sense of superiority, he stands out as a man of rare intelligence and character. In this, he’s somewhat like the hero of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA who, try as he might to be ‘Arab’ or just another good soldier, can’t help being much more. Celliers is condemned to be superior, just like a beautiful woman, even in her rejection of the ‘beauty myth’, stands apart for her looks.
This is partly due to his nature but also due to his biography. He has a love/hate thing with mankind. Love in the sense that he sympathizes with the weak, vulnerable, and humiliated, like his own brother; but there’s also hatred as inhumanity is the flipside of humanity. People taunted his younger brother at the boarding school, and Celliers did nothing out of fear and shame(of being associated with a gimpy brother). One wonders, if he didn’t have such a brother, would he have been self-satisfied in his snobbery? To what extent is a man’s conscience an expression of his nature and/or his training? Would Celliers have come to the same moral-spiritual realization on his own without a gimp-brother, or was his familial bond essential to the evolution of his values, a rather depressing implication that goodness sometimes can only come by the way of badness. What Celliers wants to take back the most, what he wishes had never happened, the incident concerning his brother at school, may have been crucial in shaping him into what he is(somewhat in the manner of LORD JIM). It’s as if man, lacking in innate wisdom, may find heaven only through the gates of hell. Celliers is naturally exceptional, the kind of person who’s predisposed to feel above the rest of humanity, the mediocrities and failures, the far-from-perfect, but he cannot feel at ease with such an attitude because of his affection for his younger brother(and the guilt associated with it). For the sake of inner peace and social success, he could have left his brother behind in memory and thought, but his other natural attribute, decency and depth of feeling, won’t allow it. To outside observers without knowledge of his life story, Cellier’s sacrificial act would appear as an expression of his radiant nobility when, in truth, it is as much self-punishment-as-redemption for a personal betrayal. His essential virtue grew out of existential angst.
His repressed disdain for humanity is balanced by his loathing of the self. As Jesus said, “Those who haven’t sinned, cast the first stone.” Celliers is one to judge but himself most of all. It’s as if his personal mission in life is to seek redemption by standing for the powerless against the powerful. He stands up for the Western P.O.W.s against the Japanese, but one can imagine him standing up for the victims of the British as well. In one scene, he explains to Lawrence that he welcomed the war as a reprieve from his personal torments(presumably related to his younger brother), but, far from serving as a distraction, it only magnified his unresolved issues that came to inform and shape his actions, leading him to his final fate, something he couldn’t have foreseen but accepts as the most logical conclusion of his search.
In the camp, the one person he can relate to is Lawrence, a man of intelligence, curiosity, and empathy. In some ways, Celliers and Lawrence seem equals in their decency and perhaps in intelligence as well. The difference is Lawrence is comfortably snug in his being, whereas Celliers is ill-suited in his superiority-complex. For all of his talents and obvious smarts, others regard Lawrence as a nice guy and pleasant fellow, a designation he is perfectly content with. In contrast, Celliers was born with or cultivated a sense of being special and, furthermore, was expected to be a man of superior qualities, an idea that he is equally attracted to and repulsed by.
Celliers, brutalized by the Japanese after being captured, hasn’t much love for the slanty-eyed buggers. But, he harbors no deep-seated hatred for them either. He knows brutality and violence are part of the human condition.
After being startled awake by Hara, Celliers derisively says, ‘what a funny face’, but then mutters, ‘beautiful eyes though’. It’s as though he can stare into people’s souls and glimpsed, if only fleetingly, something in the beastly Hara that is human after all.
Self-aware to the point of neuroticism, Celliers lives in a world of thoughts and memories, measuring his present in relation to his past deeds and future dues. In the simplest moral sense, Celliers could be characterized as a man who was tempted by the notion of the Nietzschean superman but embraced a kind of Christian-humanism. David Bowie’s performance certainly imbues Celliers with eccentricity and a smoldering intensity, though some may wonder if he was sufficiently beautiful, someone who appears as a demigod to Yonoi the crypto-homo.
Captain Yonoi is the symmetrical opposite of Celliers. He too is a member of the superior breed, socially and naturally. He’s intelligent, handsome, thoughtful, highly principled, and even idealistic(in his own fashion). Yonoi tries to be fair-minded with the POWs. He tries to be an ‘honorable man’ and regards other men, even foreigners, as honorable men(or at least as men capable of honor). He’s also Western-educated and speaks ‘Engrish’.
But, there are three things about him that complicate matters greatly. His admiration of the West also fuels his sense of personal and cultural inferiority. As a proud Japanese, an honorable officer, and a member of the elite among the Yamato race, he is, at once, fascinated and frustrated(and infuriated)by the beauty and the power of the West. Like so many of his countrymen in that period(and perhaps even today), Yonoi’s vision of Japan’s future paradoxically entails emulating the West ever more to reject the West. It is a love/hate complex, a fascination with what one considers to be a mortal enemy.
There was a similar dynamic in the white man’s fascination with black music. Elvis Presley and many of his white fans had issues with blacks, but they took elements from blackness to prevail over blackness, thus ensuring(at least for a time) that a white man sat atop the throne as the King of Rock n Roll.
As much as Yonoi resents and rejects the West, he wants Japan to be a great world power like the glorious and shining Britain. (If only he could have seen what would become of the UK by the turn of the century.) As much as he embraces the values of Japanese spirituality and racial consciousness, he can’t help beholding the finer qualities of beauty and grace of the West. Thus, Yonoi is at once a superior man with an inferiority complex and an inferior man with a superiority complex.
Yonoi is both offended and impressed by the resilience of Western individuality, a modicum of worth independent of one’s place in the order. Also, like other stiff-mannered-and-minded Japanese, he is no match for the cool rationality and wry wit of the British.
In one scene, a repellent stocky Japanese officer makes a wise crack at Celliers and thinks he’s really clever. Perhaps, it might have passed for killer wit among the wooden Japanese, but Celliers’ retort pulls the rug from under him and he’s left speechless. Humiliated in wit, he beats up on Celliers with the help of his obedient dog-like goons. The collective and conformist-minded Japanese act like a pack of robot-dogs, to whom the value of wit as a marker of mental agility independent of rank is an alien idea. Yonoi is both infuriated and inspired by this quality among the British, especially Celliers whose mind is as razor-sharp as they come.
Even though Yonoi rather likes Lawrence, he has little use for the latter’s dry wit or irony, in which he senses an air of mild condescension(especially smarting when Yonoi is being most sincere in his concerns; if British sensibility has a place for irreverence, none such exists for Yonoi for whom certain things are fixed and inviolable).
Even Yonoi’s humanity and sense of fair-mindedness can be rather inhuman. When Celliers first appears in the camp, Lawrence recognizes his friend and calls out to him, whereupon a Japanese soldier strikes him for overstepping his bounds. Yonoi comes to Lawrence’s defense by striking the soldier’s face many times over with a rod. Yonoi acts humanely through an inhumane act.
Even though Yonoi may appear open-minded and sympathetic in his defense of Lawrence, a foreign soldier, on another level he could be beating on a lowly yellow ‘Jap’ to impress white people that he himself is a higher and better kind of Jap. (Similarly, some light skinned blacks used to insult and abuse darker skinned blacks in the past to prove that they were higher Negroes than mere darkie ‘niggers’. And today, we have white liberals who go out of their way to bash white ‘conservatives’ to show that they themselves are so much better.)
Furthermore, Yonoi seems unaware that the reason for the Japanese soldier’s brutality could be that he too was systematically brutalized(and dehumanized) by the Japanese military. So, even as Yonoi conscientiously defends Lawrence and disciplines the soldier, the violence he metes out could be of the kind that drove so many Japanese soldiers to craziness in the Pacific War. They were raised to be like dogs, to obey and bark/bite.
Yonoi is deadly serious, emotionally and behaviorally stiff as a bonsai tree. Still, he holds steadfast to his personal code of honor and its peculiar concept of fairness. He is also eager to show the Westerners that the Japanese are made of hard, heroic, and honorable stuff.
The problem is that Yonoi, for all his intelligence and knowledge(of things outside Japan), fails to understand that Japanese-ness cannot be understood outside its cultural context. He wants to both impress and intimidate Westerners, to showcase what is unique(or exceptional) about the Japanese Way while, at the same time, making believe that non-Japanese could appreciate it as well.
In one scene, Yonoi assembles the P.O.W officers to witness an act of seppuku(or harakiri)by ‘Kanemoto’, a Korean soldier. The scene is doubly disturbing because the Western officers and ‘Kanemoto’ have no appreciation for this gory side of Japanese culture, indeed all the stranger for having survived as a ritual practice even after the elimination of the samurai caste system. The Korean soldier carries out the ritual in a terrified and haphazard manner, and the Western officers watch in disgust.
Yonoi had intended to demonstrate to the Westerners the pure spirit of the Yamato race. But, ironies abound. In traditional Japanese society, seppuku could only be committed by a samurai to cleanse his shame and regain his honor in a noble and masterful death. But, it’s perversely farcical in the film, given that ‘Kanemoto’ is not even Japanese(let alone of samurai background), the act is carried out thousands of miles from Japan in the jungles of Indonesia, and most of the witnesses are whites than Japanese.
Unsurprisingly, the whole thing turns into a fiasco, with the Korean soldier bowling over(a big no-no during the ritual), screaming in agony while the swordsman assigned to lop his head off keeps nicking his shoulder and commanding ‘Kanemoto’ to sit up for a proper beheading. Things get so bad that the brutish Hara, in a surprising act of mercy, finally steps in and provides the coup-de-(dis)grace. To make things worse, Dejong, the blond Dutch soldier whom ‘Kanemoto’ may have buggered, bites off his tongue in a fit of hysteria and passes out.
Yonoi had intended to impress the foreigners but only lost face. He woefully miscalculated the whole situation. The initial scandal came about because Hara wanted to have some fun bullying a hapless underling. Hara didn’t really care what ‘Kanemoto’ had or hadn’t done to the Dutch prisoner-of-war. A natural bully, he picked on ‘Kanemoto’ for personal jollies.
To be sure, Hara did it partly to impress Lawrence, which carries a certain significance in relation to other developments in the story. In a way, Hara’s motivation is a crude precursor to Yonoi’s more fine-tuned one.
The film opens with Hara waking Lawrence and leading him to where ‘Kanemoto’ is to commit seppuku. Why is Hara so eager to have Lawrence witness this suicide-execution?
Hara, though a ruffian and boor, embodies certain psycho-cultural parallels with the refined and impeccable Yonoi. Hara too suffers from what might be called an inferiority-superiority complex. He is a soldier of the great Japanese Empire seeking domination in the East, but a certain inferiority-complex vis-a-vis the Europeans nags him. (He tells Lawrence he was getting it on with Marlene Dietrich in a dream.)
Europeans probably appear to him as more confident and independent as individuals. Hara derides the P.O.W.s as cowards to Lawrence’s face, i.e. as individuals, the white men chose life over honor, something a noble Japanese soldier would never do(presumably). On the other hand, the fact that white men chose to survive as individuals than die as a collective suggests a sense of freedom unknown or inconceivable to the Japanese whose cult of honor may imply submission than true courage, which is always more an act of volition than of command.
Since the Japanese weren’t ready to be free in body and soul, they could only be inferior individuals by the standards of modernity. They could not stand on their two feet but bowed down to superiors and were bowed down by those below them. Their meaning, place, and purpose owed completely to being part of the hive. Sense of worth and pride depended more on one’s place in the pecking order in the overall hierarchy than on one’s set of individual attributes.
Thus, individualism could be threatening to the collective-esteem of the Japanese, for everyone from top to bottom. To those on top, individualism could mean that an ‘inferior’ with naturally superior qualities should have the freedom(and even obligation) to politically, socially, and morally challenge the ‘superior’. To those on the bottom, it could mean that their ‘inferior’ status is the result of their timidity and slavish nature, a failure to assert themselves as individuals.
The traditional way of climbing the social rank in Japan(and in most of Asia around the same period) was that those on the bottom had to take endless abuses from those on top and gradually crawl upwards, abusing those below them in the same manner along the way. Because even those on top had gained their status by eating bitter rice, they felt entitled to dole out the same treatment to their inferiors. (Granted, something similar could be said of the rigid English educational system of yesteryear, albeit with the caveat that Britain respected and even encouraged individuality-of-excellence in the way that the Japanese did not. Unlike in Japan where individuality of any kind was suspect, individuality could be justified with merit in the Anglosphere, as when T.E. Lawrence becomes a figure of celebration upon achieving his great feat across the desert in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. Because individuality was suppressed in Japan, talent tended to manifest in the form of eccentricity, whereby special qualities were attributed to oddness or quirk than to self-confidence.)
Japanese worth comes from belonging to a collective hierarchy, from serving something superior. One’s groveling to the superiors is compensated by being groveled to by the inferiors.
Because neither Hara nor Yonoi can impress Westerners with a force of individuality(something that Lawrence and Celliers possess even as prisoners), he can only show off how resolute and unflinching the Japanese are within their system of hierarchy. In a way, both Hara and Yonoi are admitting Japan is a nation of slaves but one where the slaves run the plantation as everyone, from top to bottom, is honor-and-duty-bound, as tough on oneself as on others. High or low, everyone is equally willing to die for the Emperor. (To be sure, Hara possesses a crude and instinctive kind of individuality that at times protrudes from his regimented shell.)
So, in the opening scene, Hara tries to impress Lawrence with Japanese fearlessness in the face of death, and later Yonoi wants to impress Celliers in a similar manner. But what a delusion.
Lawrence, as admiring as he is of the Japanese culture and people, knows insanity when he sees one. And Celliers doesn’t even bother to be present at the bloody spectacle of barbarism ritualized into an art form(and performed rather grotesquely by the terrified Kanemoto). A big disappointment to Yonoi since his main objective had been to impress Celliers. Lawrence explains that Celliers was still too weak to be up and walking, but Yonoi finds the reason inexcusable. We sense a duality in him, both genuine compassion for the half-dead Celliers(upon arriving at the camp) and grandiose expectations of him(as a god-man with divine power to will himself back to health), a contradiction that will explode in their showdown at the end.
The screaming irony is that, in the name of Japanese purity and honor, both Hara and Yonoi force ‘Kanemoto’, a bewildered and disoriented Korean, to carry out the most Japanese of acts.
In a way, however, the conceit could be seen as an outgrowth of the Japanese colonization of Korea where the natives came to be regarded as part of the Yamato race and given Japanese names. After having forced the distinctly un-Japanese Koreans to become ‘Japanese'(as if Japanese-ness, for all its peculiarities and uniqueness, could be imbibed by the Other), the next logical step was to present it to the larger world as evidence of Japanese superbness(if not superiority). In a way, the samurai film had such an impact on the world, albeit after Japan’s defeat in the war.
It’s rather odd that the Japanese would demonstrate their worth by an act of self-annihilation. Usually, a culture shows off its pride and power through outward-directed violence, but Japanese sought to impress the Other by showing how superb they are in killing themselves. (The same mentality pervades Takeshi Kitano’s BROTHER where the Japanese characters as fish-out-of-water in America excel most in acts of self-immolation.) If you can’t beat the world, impress it by showing you can take a beating beyond comprehension. It sure takes a lot of guts to do harakiri.
Granted, Western Culture was long defined by Christianity with its story of Jesus sacrificing His own life for the sake of humanity. On that score, the West also indulged in the cult of noble sacrifice. Still, if Jesus died horribly so that others wouldn’t have to, Japanese culture expected all samurai to be ready to ‘crucify’ himself via seppuku if need be.
One could argue Christianity was a spiritual copout for the West, i.e. the sacrifice of Jesus meant everyone was handed a get-out-of-jail-free card and didn’t need to face a similar ordeal. In contrast, every Japanese was expected to make the ultimate sacrifice, even with his own hands, if necessary. But did this really make for a culture of courage or a culture of terror, as it goes so against human nature to stoically slit one’s belly while waiting for one’s head to be chopped off.
The scene could be of historical-cultural significance, an allusion to Yukio Mishima’s final act in 1970. Mishima had yearned for a tragi-heroic death, one carried out in the spirit of a samurai warrior of feudal Japan(though it can’t be fully understood apart from Mishima’s modernist sensibility). He was going to be the last samurai-patriot of Japan then turning into a cultural nullity under the rule of the merchant-collaborator elites whose only vision for Japan was consumer-conformity of materialism and hedonism.
So, what happened with the noble ritual intended as his last testament in action, the fulfillment of the ‘harmony of pen and sword’? Like ‘Kanemoto’, Mishima slumped forward from the agony. The real didn’t align with his ideal. Not very dignified as seppuku protocols go. Worse, Morita as the second, the attendant for delivering the coup de grace of the beheading, lost his nerves and repeatedly failed in his efforts, making the horrific scene all the worse. Then, another stepped in to deliver a clean strike, like Hara intercedes to put ‘Kanemoto’ out of his misery.
The horror then continued. It was now up to Morita, now frightened out of his wits(like ‘Kanemoto’), to commit the ritual and follow his master to samurai heaven. For all his high-minded training and inculcation under Mishima, he was led to his death for ideas not his own and beyond his comprehension. The star-struck lad had joined a personal cult. In his attempt, his blade barely scratched his abdomen before the beheading. In other words, Mishima’s grand finale went off as a fiasco and farce. Just like Yonoi and Hara absurdly involved the Korean ‘Kanemoto’ in a powerful display of Japanese-ness, Mishima recruited a simpleton — Morita was a farmboy — to convey his high concept fusing art, culture, life, and politics into one final act.
There had been a time when seppuku carried ethical significance in Japan, a feudal society where rebellion and dishonor were regarded as unspeakable and unforgivable. Therefore, the only way for a samurai to salvage his honor(and have his family spared) was by committing seppuku as a show of absolute contrition. It had meaning as punishment and redemption. It certainly took courage and resolve to drive a blade into the most painful region of the body and move it horizontally and vertically before finally being relieved via decapitation. (Some might argue it was as cowardly as courageous, i.e. a truly courageous soul wouldn’t have been so anxious about social rejection or stigma; the Japanese were more afraid of losing face than losing life. Indeed, Akutagawa’s RASHOMON isn’t about pleading innocence to save one’s life but admitting responsibility to save one’s honor.)
At any rate, seppuku also gained meaning as an act of protest, a fusion of righteous rebellion and higher loyalty. As a samurai was honor-bound to always obey and serve his lord, his dissent(or even defiance) had to be justified as a truer act of loyalty, the most eloquent proof of which was seppuku.
The samurai would disobey the command of his superiors and then commit seppuku as proof of his pure motives. His disobedience would be presented as an act of higher loyalty. By disobeying and then taking one’s own life, one would prove beyond a doubt that it wasn’t out of self-interest but greater devotion to his superiors(or the imperial system).
During the ‘feudal’ era, seppuku was a legal, ethical, martial, and spiritual ritual reserved for the small caste of warriors. Despite the horror involved, the samurai were offered an honorable way out than merely ignoble execution.
Once the samurai caste system was eliminated and Japan needed to unite and develop as a modern nation, samurai ethos became democratized, especially as the Japanese military recruited the majority of its soldiers from the farmer class.
If the samurai caste of the pre-modern period at least had a finer understanding of samurai codes(and seppuku), Japanese militarism popularized(and even vulgarized) them in the 20th century.
In time, seppuku turned into a much sensationalized fetish among political fanatics. The personal and local flavor of the samurai ways gave way to mass mania and imperial passions. Seppuku, which had been about personal honor within an enclosed domain, became a political statement with international implications. (Of course, what made a certain sense to the Japanese public, also steeped in Japanese myths and culture, only made the Japanese seem crazier and more demented to outsiders, especially as it so starkly contrasted with Japan’s very real modernization. The Samurai of old doing seppuku was understandable within their cultural milieu; modern Japanese doing it seemed schizoid. It’s no wonder Hara and Yonoi are so eager to impress upon the foreigners that what appears to be a crazy death ritual is actually rife with meaning. “We not crazy; we honorable.”)
If the main loyalty of the samurai in the feudal era had been to their immediate lords, Japan’s modern military’s main loyalty was to the emperor as the embodiment of national honor and then imperial ambitions. Prior to the rise of modern Japan, most acts of seppuku were over personal or local issues. But once national consciousness emerged in emulation of Western style nationalism, seppuku took on an ideological character with national repercussions. Given Japan’s cultural ethos, even those who rebuked the violence of the political fanatics were impressed, even moved, by the purity of their motives.
The mindset lingered even after the Pacific War. In the early 1970s, many in the Japanese media were more offended by the surrender of the far-left radicals than by their loony politics. The fanatics had vowed to fight to the end, i.e. die like a samurai, something that could inspire any Japanese, left or right. When they, push come to shove, timidly gave up to the authorities, it was a huge disappointment. No true fighting spirit, all talk no walk.
Interestingly enough, one reason why the Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe soured on Hirohito was because the god-emperor didn’t commit ritual suicide as his final act, the only honorable exit for him(following which perhaps, his spirit could have been ‘resurrected’ in the form of a myth, like Ben Kenobi of STAR WARS or Jesus for that matter, who became bigger in death than in life). If Oe lost all respect for the Emperor, in whose name countless men had sacrificed their lives but who himself opted for self-preservation(in a rather comical and pathetic role, in some ways a fate worse than death), Mishima chose fidelity to the institution of the Emperor as the only true spiritual embodiment of Japanese-ness.
Japan, as a society favoring cohesion, order, and harmony, has generally fostered a national character amenable to obedience, tolerance, and compromise. Not tolerance in the modern sense of do-anything-you-please but one of acceptance of people’s failings and the need for certain allowances(though on the basis of hierarchy than equality). Perfectionism could lead to puritanism, which is inherently intolerant and may result in spiritual or ideological struggles, like under Christianity and Communism.
It’s been said Japan’s a shame culture than a guilt culture, meaning its sense of right-and-wrong is more about one’s proper place in the order than about the sanctity of individual conscience. For the merchant and peasant classes, this culture of compromise and tolerance was workable, but it was problematic for the samurai who lived by an unwavering code of honor. Paradoxically, the social order that could only be maintained through tolerance and compromise, the necessary defenses against perfectionism(as purist strains may flare into ‘religious wars’, as happened in the radical Sixties in Japan among the various Red factions), also fueled a perfectionist streak in the Japanese mindset. If order and harmony are so essential, the ideal implies a model of perfection. But if order is maintained by compromise(as well as corruption), then it is a form of hypocrisy. Many could live with this conundrum, but some could not in their desire, or even demand, for a more perfect order based on what is true and good.
Thus, the merchant model of order, one built on mutual understanding through pragmatism, was often at odds with the samurai ideal of order, one bound by honor and devotion. Granted, the samurai were no strangers to corruption(as they were in the ‘business’ of politics) and the Japanese merchant class was deemed, at least by world standards, rather honorable and trustworthy. Still, the core ‘values’ of the two spheres, the merchant and the military, that came to shape modern Japan couldn’t have been more at odds in their conceptions. Such tensions among various domains exist in all societies, but the difference was the military not only had an outsized role in Japanese politics and culture but also represented the true ‘soul’ of Japan. Unlike in most societies, Japanese military culture was like a theocracy of sorts.
Between the neo-feudal militarists and the ascendant-but-anxious bourgeoisie, there was the vast pool of people of farming background. Traditionally, the farming folks had been squeezed by both the samurai caste who taxed them and the merchant class that profited off their labor. In the troubled first half of the 20th century, they gravitated to the military as it was more accessible than the business world. And given the widespread poverty in the countryside, many officers of farming background came to scapegoat the merchant class as soulless leeches willing to sell out the nation for profits. It came down to diplomacy vs determination, manners vs manhood. Its counterpart in the communist world was the tension between the adventurists and the pragmatists.
After the war, many voices on both the right and the left grew critical of the New Japan as one big collusion between the business class and the bureaucratic class, especially with the military(as honorable guardians of the nation) and the Emperor(as divine patriarch of the Japanese race) out of the picture as sources of power. Such critical swipes are found in Akira Kurosawa’s IKIRU and BAD SLEEP WELL. In the former, an old bureaucrat, nearing retirement and facing death(from stomach cancer), goes ‘samurai’ in making a commitment and sticking with it through thick and thin. It was honorable for the samurai to be ‘true’ unto death, and in the case of the bureaucrat, the choice was made for him by the fatal disease, confronting which imbues him with courage and boldness he’d never known he possessed.
Of course, unlike the chickenshit Emperor and the leftist radicals who surrendered than fought to the last, Mishima did go all the way and died for Japan in a most spectacular manner, but then, he too became an object of scorn. Why? It wasn’t so much the outrageousness of his act but his exposure of the whole of Japan as a soulless whore of the American Empire(especially embarrassing for the Japanese Right) and a mindless copycat of Western fashions(embarrassing to the Japanese Left).
Yukio Mishima’s memory was largely swept under the tatami mat, like that of the samurai-rebel in Masaki Kobayashi’s SEPPUKU. Both spoke too much truth, though of a different kind. Mishima was about modern Japan’s lack of soul in pursuit of maximum profits, Kobayashi was about the feudal system’s lack of basic humanity in pursuit of warrior perfection.
No one wants to be shamed with the truth. How many white ‘conservatives’ want to be confronted with the fact that they’re cuck-maggot whores of Zion? Speak that truth, and they try to un-person you.
In the buildup to the militarist takeover of Japan, various simple-minded junior officers(often of peasant origin), weaned on ultra-nationalist dogma and propaganda, frenetically went about assassinating ‘spineless’ politicians and even their superiors for betrayal, lack of fighting spirit, and/or misleading the Emperor. As they’d violated the rules of hierarchy, harmony could be restored(in their minds) only by demonstrating the purity of their intentions by way of seppuku, as portrayed by a character in Yukio Mishima’s novel RUNAWAY HORSES. It was as if to prove that their apparent rebellion was actually in deeper loyalty to the divine and highest authority of the nation, the Emperor and all he stood for.
The Japanese public was both disturbed and moved by these acts, though bloody and shocking, executed in the name of honor and devotion, themes that resonated with the Japanese imagination.
In a society where many people felt disoriented by modernization, so-called ‘democratization'(seemingly to benefit the greedy and corrupt), & sudden shifts in economic fortunes at the whim of outside factors, and where the ethos of honor and the myth of the Emperor were the last meaningful vestiges of the past, as well as among the few remaining unifying motifs across the nation, many were bound to sympathize with, at the very least, the sincerity of the junior officers(even if, or especially because, their actions were of such an extreme nature, leaving no doubt as to the intensity of their commitment come what may). In an order where most people barely stuck out their necks and lived in a state of subservient compromise, many felt ardent admiration for the actions of young men willing to kill and die for what they believed in. Furthermore, it was as if the junior officers, often of peasant stock, wanted to prove to their higher-ups, society-at-large, and themselves that they were, spiritually if not by lineage, even more-samurai-than-the-samurai.
In MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, Captain Yonoi is clearly of samurai lineage whereas Hara is most likely of a humbler background. In an earlier time prior to modernization, Hara would most likely have been stuck on the farm, but, recruited into the Japanese army in Japan’s gamble for Eastern Hegemony, he wields a sword and talks to Lawrence(who speaks Japanese) in a boastful manner. At one point, he tells Lawrence that all British must be a bunch of homos, though his point isn’t so much that homosexuality itself is abominable but that white men are too cowardly to face up to their sexual peccadilloes. Like so many Japanese of that period, he insists a Japanese soldier would never surrender to the enemy and prefer to die in battle(or take his own life through seppuku). He’s a man of little knowledge and limited experience but an overly inflated collective ego.
At the very end, we see him as a P.O.W, meaning he too surrendered instead of ‘dying like a Japanese soldier.’ We also find out that Yonoi was executed, meaning he also chose to surrender, not that it did him any good as he was soon sentenced to death. When push came to shove, if they could help it, most Japanese chose surrender and life than honor and death. (In the novel, Yonoi is sentenced to seven months imprisonment, his life spared by the victorious Allies.)
There’s a revealing moment early in the film when Celliers is brought before a Japanese military tribunal, a rather ridiculous one at that. During the procedure, a young Japanese officer says to Celliers than a Japanese soldier would prefer to die than surrender(as Celliers did), to which Celliers replies, “I’m not a Japanese soldier.” It conveys the Japanese mindset stuck in the twilight zone somewhere between modernity and feudalism, between rational laws and cultural codes. What does the code of the Japanese warrior have to do with international rules or military law? Of course, it would be too easy for Westerners to take pride in their supposed proper practice of the law based on facts and fairness, as it should be clear as day to everyone that the current Western Law(fare) is, more or less, a combination of atavistic tribal-Talmudism, Negrolatry, and the Cult of Globo-Homo, with a good deal of deep-state-corporate gangsterism thrown into the mix. What goes by the ‘rule of law’ in today’s America is hardly more rational than what transpires in the kangaroo court in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE.
While other Japanese officials in the courtroom bluster on, Yonoi sits quietly as if transfixed in the presence of the blond ‘Aryan’ god Celliers. Though MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is based on the novel SEED AND THE SOWER by Laurens van der Post, this aspect of Yonoi seems an allusion to Mishima, a homo with a ‘sexual’ fetish for blond men. According to his first major work CONFESSIONS OF A MASK, Mishima’s first orgasm came by way of a picture of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows. And Mishima’s mansion was adorned with neoclassical motifs of ‘Aryan’ archetypes. There was within Mishima a struggle between a fascination with Western flowerings and a fidelity to Japanese roots, though one didn’t necessarily cancel out the other. Unlike the arch-reactionaries of an earlier time who rejected everything foreign(seemingly unaware that Japanese culture couldn’t have been conceivable without ideas and expressions from overseas), Mishima appreciated the necessity as well as the benefits of adopting foreign things but believed that the soul of Japan must remain constant throughout these changes. He seemed to be conceiving of a meta-Japanese-ness. Likewise, even though modern Jews look and act differently from ancient and medieval Jews, they still feel as the Eternal Jew.
Yonoi, like Mishima, is both profoundly Japanese and beyond-Japanese. He’s committed to the Japanese code of honor and warrior cult but also strives for Nietzschean superiority not necessarily bound to culture or race. It’s as though, if only subconsciously, he wants to convert foreigners(or at least the best of them) to the Yamato Way of the Warrior. It’s a strange fusion of ultra-elitism and universalism, i.e. non-Japanese may apply but only the very best of them.
In historical isolation, Japanese culture could remain snugly in its island home, oblivious to the rest of the world, even nearby Korea and China. But as an imperial power(that modernized not only with Western technology but Western concepts such as nationalism), the Japanese felt compelled to justify their ‘cultural hegemony’ over the non-Japanese. In the case of the Koreans, the policy was to turn them into New Japanese, seemingly viable because of racial similarities and cultural overlaps between the Japanese and the Koreans. With others, especially of non-Asian races, the worth(or even superiority) of Japanese-ness had to be demonstrated ‘philosophically’ or ‘spiritually’, no easy matter as (1) Japanese culture had value as uniqueness than universality and (2) Japanese sensibility was more about the balance of senses(akin to an acquired taste) than about making sense. One cannot neatly and/or rationally package the meaning of Japanese-ness as one could the essential meaning of Christianity, Enlightenment principles, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam. Either you feel it and take it to heart or you don’t. Also, Japanese-ness, unlike most identities, is not just a tribalism or ethnicity but also a ‘spiritual’ identity that connects all Japanese with the gods, of whom the Emperor is the living embodiment. If Jews believe they are the Chosen of God, Japanese mythos say the Yamato race are of divine blood. However, if the personality and the mind of God are well-articulated in the Jewish religion via prophecies and laws, Japanese spirituality is comparatively ‘mute’ on its overt meanings and is more about rituals and intimations. It’s more about feeling Japanese than knowing what being Japanese is about. This makes Japanese culture fragile and vulnerable but also, in a way, resilient and flexible.
Yonoi sees in Celliers an ideal figure of his dreams, political and personal. At the level of political philosophy, Celliers appears to Yonoi as the ideal warrior, handsome, courageous, tough, and intelligent. Though a member of an enemy nation/race, Yonoi the elitist sees in Celliers a kindred spirit, a fellow natural aristocrat, a member of the rare breed of god-men, equal or even superior to Yonoi. At the personal level(of repressed homosexual attraction), Yonoi is overpowered by Celliers’ beauty, an impact not unlike the nymphet’s spell on Humbert Humbert in LOLITA(Kubrick’s version) or the naval officer’s effect on Alice in EYES WIDE SHUT. It’s a power beyond power, all the stranger for being so effortless on the part of the charmer(often unwitting), which reduces the proud and disciplined Yonoi into something like a teenybopper in the heyday of Beatlemania. Yet, Yonoi isn’t one to indulge in personal desires given the rigid and uptight milieu to which he belongs, one where the personal and sensual must be subordinate to grander themes of power, unity, and sanctity. As Merlin reminds Arthur who is bewitched with Guinevere, “You have a land to quell…” in EXCALIBUR — Imperial Japan has a conquest to secure.
Amidst this national-imperial struggle, or History on a grand scale, Yonoi embarks upon an enigmatic personal quest. As it wouldn’t do to blurt out, “I’m homo and maybe you are too, so why don’t you fuc* me in the ass, white boy”, he tries to lead Celliers to his way of thinking so that they could be united in spirit if not in body, no easy feat due to the political, racial, cultural, and philosophical rifts between them. Yonoi may have correctly perceived Celliers to be a superior figure, but Celliers is the product of a vastly different culture and, furthermore, he too has repressed personal(or biographical) reasons for his own peculiar thoughts and actions.
If Yonoi’s attraction to Celliers becomes his most overpowering emotion(even more than samurai spirit and nationalism), the main driver of Celliers’ emotion is his guilt regarding his brother. For all their outward symmetry, their engines run on different fuels. Precisely because his homosexual attraction would be embarrassing, not to mention scandalous and disqualifying, as a motive for the special treatment rendered to Celliers, Yonoi constructs a rather convoluted myth to convince others(as well as himself) that his pet project involving Celliers is noble and high-minded.
By sparing Celliers and treating him well(and impressing him with poetic displays of Japanese honor and spirit), Yonoi hopes for Celliers to be appreciative and reciprocate in kind. But not only does Celliers have no interest in Japanese culture but he has little regard for this Yonoi character and whatever he’s up to. To Yonoi, Celliers is like everything, but to Celliers, Yonoi is nothing, just another Japanese officer. If anyone is remotely appreciative of Yonoi, it’s Lawrence who has studied the Japanese culture and language, but he casts no spell on Yonoi.
There are three kinds of emotions of attachment. There is familial and familiar affection, the sense of intimacy and fondness that forms among family members and close friends(and even animal pets). There is deep appreciation, a consciousness that comes by the way of one’s understanding of one’s people, culture, land, and history. Both affection and appreciation, though potentially powerful, take time to develop and take shape.
Then, there is instant passion, a spell that ‘owns’ someone in an instant, like what happens in ROMEO AND JULIET, a passion that makes both betray their own clans in favor of their love as the most important emotion or the only one that matters. Some may argue that the story of Romeo and Juliet is about conquering hate with love(or unreason defeated by reason), but theirs is not of the brotherhood-of-man kind but a blinding obsession, no less extreme than the deep-seated hatred that divides the two families. They merely replace the tribalism of their families with their own passion-tribalism, because, in order to safeguard their love, Romeo and Juliet are willing to do anything, even acts of hatred and violence(unto others or themselves). The thing about this passion is it may be the most powerful emotion but cannot be shared and is indeed invisible to those who don’t feel it, which adds to its unique quality but also renders it frustrating, as is the case with Yonoi’s passion for Celliers.
As hard as he tries, Yonoi doesn’t get through to Celliers, no more than Saito in BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI gets through to Nicholson(Alec Guinness) and vice versa when Nicholson, overcome with a strange notion of patriotism through treason, becomes an enigma to those around him who don’t get his way of thinking.
Celliers has his own values to live by and his own demons to exercise, meaning no inclination to play games with Yonoi. To Celliers, Yonoi is like a silly little boy all-too-earnestly playing (toy)soldier.
Yonoi, as intelligent and knowledgeable as he is, lives by his myths, perhaps more acutely than most because of his poetic(and homoerotic) disposition. What unnerves but also stimulates him throughout the film is the tension that develops within his psyche between the officially sanctioned myth, something imposed on him and countless others by the system and culture, AND a personally created myth he feels arising from some hitherto unknown part of himself. He goes from a participant of a shared or collective myth to a generator of a new one(centered on his idealization or idolization of Celliers), something he feels powerfully but cannot quite articulate(even privately to himself) and mold into a viable idea.
It’s somewhat similar to what happened with Flynn in TRON: LEGACY when his purely logical and orderly vision of the ‘grid’, something that could be formulated into a general program, was interrupted by a burst of inspiration from the deeper recesses of his soul, something that at once complemented but also threatened his earlier conception of ‘perfection’ and system-harmony.
Yonoi’s inner-self is a compressed box of contradictions, as was the case of Mishima, who was most proud and honored to be of the Shinto Nation but also beholden to the beauty of the Other, especially the West. As such, Yonoi tries to Japanify non-Japanese things, to bring them together in some fruitful union. He tries, in his own way, to fuse the East and the West.
Modern Japan was obviously modeled on the West on so many levels but still held out against total Westernization in its defense of true Japanese identity, roots, and spirit. Thus, Japan was at once pushing and pulling with the West in some kind of cultural judo. Both in love with it and fear of it. Neither the fictional Yonoi nor the real Mishima could accept only the Japanosphere or Westernsphere. They needed both but the two worlds were at odds, not just in war but also in peace. The only solution was some kind of synthesis, which is at the heart of Yonoi’s longing in relation to Celliers. He tries to turn Celliers into a kind of blond-samurai soul-brother.
Generally speaking, the more earnest one-track culture of the East has had less appreciation for wit and irony. East Asian societies cultivated subtlety and refinement but were anxious or unable to go the next step. There is order and disorder, subordination and subversion. Every culture understood and practiced/experienced harmony and chaos but usually one or the other, not both at once. It took a certain nimbleness of mind and quirk of sensibility to somehow contain chaos within harmony, to slip subversion within subordination, to dismiss with politeness. It required a modicum of appreciation of individuality. While it was commonplace in all cultures for social superiors to snub or insult inferiors, it was usually hazardous for inferiors to get the better of their superiors. But in a social order where wit is valued as a kind of art and sport, the sharper wit of an inferior could be acknowledged, even by the superior as its target. It was deemed good sportsmanship as a true gentleman must credit talent, even at his own expense. This had a meritocratic filtering effect on British society. No social order can tolerate wanton chaos and rampant rebellion as things will fall apart. On the other hand, if a rigid hierarchy took its privilege for granted, the superiors would grow lazy and uncompetitive while the inferiors wouldn’t bother to strive for success as social mobility was denied them. But what if a system maintained order and hierarchy but provided an outlet whereby those with discernible talent could make their mark, especially through verbal dexterity.
Prestige in British elite society was measured not only by proper manners and etiquette but a certain agility of wit, to be a bit daring and ‘naughty’ without losing form. This mindset probably reached its breaking point with Mick Jagger and Monty Python, where the contradictions became too big to maintain any longer. When John Lennon cracked jokes at a concert for the Royalty, that was still within bounds, but it became less viable by the day that Mick Jagger could manage his upper-middle class sensibility and devilish-white-negro antics.
In elite British circles, even the well-heeled American Brahmins could be deemed déclassé, so the idea that some well-brought up English lad with all the advantages in life would emulate semi-literate boorish Negroes of the American South was a weird proposition to say the least. In time, something had to give, and Negrolatry won out and now runs wild revamping British History into a saga of Junglo-Saxons. And the British Royalty might as well be a TV-game show and cuck-humiliation ritual society.
Granted, the British elites were so defenseless against these challenges precisely because the art of manners remained intact in their circles, the pathological fear of giving offense or upsetting the decorum. But, here was the rub. The understanding or agreement in the past was that the straight types would keep their cool and the naughty types would keep their manners. In other words, the ‘bad boys’ would outwardly play ‘good’ and only poke than, say, grab the nuts. (In A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, this contract breaks down, what with the youth shamelessly attacking people, and so, a technology is developed to ensure that they outwardly act good even if they remain bad inside.) Once the nut-grabbing began, fists should have flied at the bloody ball-snatchers. But, at some point in British History, not least with the ascendance of the more vulgar and lewd Jews, the rules began to change. Jewish wit didn’t just poke but began to nudge toward nut-grabbery, and things really came to a head in the post-war years, of course the Sixties.
At this point, the British elites should have put on the gloves(as Enoch Powell did) but, having been so acclimated to a culture of manners, chose to maintain their decorum even as their balls were being yanked and pummeled. It’s no use keeping a stiff-upper-lip if they’re hellbent on busting your lip.
Granted, it wasn’t all sticks but plenty of carrots to sweeten matters. In a way, the sudden rise and, for a time, the global predominance of British Rock filled the people of the UK, from top to bottom, with pride. British may have lost their empire but conquered the world with pop music, and who ever thought the British would be a dominant force in that particular art-form, in which the other Europeans traditionally far outpaced the Brits?
Also, instead of merely imitating Negroes and Hillbillies, the British Rockers could take credit in elevating the raw material into something akin to art, and the likes of Mick Jagger, for all their vulgar antics, were no strangers to wit and irony, the bread and butter of British sensibility. Thus, there were enough elitist elements in this Rock Culture that was appealing to the well-born and well-educated. Just like whites used black labor(slave and free) to build things Negroes could never build on their own, it was as if whites(especially Brits) harnessed black energies in ways that the Negro couldn’t even imagine. “Me and Devil Blues” became “Sympathy for the Devil”. And of course, David Bowie, possibly even more than Mick Jagger, exemplified this oddity and appeal.
If the Western mind grew accustomed to handling the grey ambiguities between the polarities of black and white, the Eastern mind was more at ease with the binary outlook. Something was either right or wrong, hot or cold, than to be considered as a matter of graduation.
To be sure, the Japanese Way, traditionally militarist-samurai-oriented than credo-driven, was absent of a totalistic moral system(like that of Christianity and Islam, even Confucianism), and this allowed for a wider range of cultural pluralism, with no single system vanquishing the rest on account of god-on-my-side. Still, when it came to honor and loyalty, the Japanese Way was totalistic, i.e. you were either loyal or treasonous, leaving little room for complexity or ambiguity in between.
Even though it’s been said that the Western mind, especially under the influence of Christianity, came to possess a more powerful(and sanctimonious) sense of right and wrong, often leading to purity spirals and panics(as well as one righteous cause after another, some nobler than others), it didn’t necessarily mean that the Eastern mind developed a keener understanding of ethical ambiguities in its relative absence of totalizing moral-spiritual systems.
More often than not, the Eastern mind eschewed moral clarity more out of convenience than conscience, control than controversy. The East was hardly unique in this, but the case of Japan(though not always emblematic of the East) is instructive for its powerful sense of rightness in the absence of righteousness.
Honor necessitated that you do the ‘right thing’ even if you knew it was wrong, a conundrum that Lawrence is faced with in the scene where Yonoi expects him to take responsibility for something he isn’t guilty of. (In a somewhat similar vein, the lower officials are compelled to commit suicide to take the heat off their superiors in BAD SLEEP WELL by Akira Kurosawa who, incidentally, recounted that he was willing to kill himself if demanded by the Emperor despite his personal disdain for the imperial-militarist system that led Japan to ruination.)
There’s a difference between a hesitation of moral judgment on account of greater empathy(as is the case with Lawrence) and neglect of it due to lack of concern. It’s like uncertainty can come by way of thinking too much or thinking too little. Hara and his ilk seem not to care about anything but following orders.
In contrast, Yonoi does care and is, in a twisted way, a very moral person, at least within the samurai mythos of Japan. He not only wields Japanese power over the Western prisoners but seeks to uphold it as a principle that both Japanese and non-Japanese can abide by. He says of the prisoners at one point, “They are all honorable men.” The problem is cultural particularism translates poorly into a universal value. His sense of right and wrong, of the sacred and the profane, is too culture-specific to have meaning for others.
Lawrence, a man of experience and empathy, sort of understands Yonoi’s perspective at the intellectual level but doesn’t share it at the emotional, let alone moral, level. Yonoi’s agenda is further complicated by the uncertainty of whether it’s animated by the honor code among proud warriors(something that binds even the enemy aristocrats in Jean Renoir’s THE GRAND ILLUSION) or by his repressed homoerotic feelings for Celliers.
In one scene, Yonoi tells Lawrence that the latter must die(and willfully accept his death) even if he is innocent for the sake of preserving ‘honor’ and restoring harmony. This is where even the usually mild-mannered Lawrence has had just about enough with serving as a go-between and a conciliator between the Western P.O.W.s and the Japanese. He could take the constant barking of the Japanese soldiers and even their occasional blows, but this is too much, especially coming from Yonoi, an educated and worldly man. (But then, only an educated/sophisticated person could contrive such notions in the name of honor. Though Yonoi’s formulation is Japanese in flavor, even most Japanese wouldn’t understand its ‘logic’. It’s like only educated fools could possibly believe in some of the highfalutin conceits cooked up by ‘woke’ pseudo-intellectual jargoneering, especially regarding multiple genders, ‘systemic racism’ as the reason for black failures, and how opposition to Jewish Supremacism is ‘Anti-Semitic’.) Lawrence is essentially a good man who tries to be reasonable, but his reason, and an open-minded empathy for the Japanese, slams into the ‘inscrutable’ or irrational aspects of Japanese culture, further complicated by Yonoi’s eccentricities.
Lawrence is caught in an all too typical liberal dilemma. Lawrence is committed to the ideals of individuality and rationality, and at one point says, “I don’t want to hate any individual Japanese.” His curiosity, open-mindedness, and tolerance allow him to observe and appreciate cultures not his own, even one as distant and alien as Japan. However, his understanding can go only so far before souring on the more ‘extreme’ elements of the other culture. He wants to understand and negotiate than judge and pressure, build bridges than smash the ramparts, but there are divides that remain unbridgeable except through force, where one must totally prevail over the other if it comes to war(and control over the world).
Lawrence wants to understand the Japanese way but not come under its power. He doesn’t want to force his values on the Japanese, but even liberalism, for all its nice-sounding rhetoric, is premised on its rightness and ultimate triumph.
Indeed, the only reason why Lawrence was able to learn and admire Japanese culture was because feudal Japan had been forced open at the threat of total destruction by the ‘liberal’ Western powers, namely the UK and US.
As a corollary, as much as intelligent and educated men like Yonoi do admire the West and wish to learn from it, there’s a burning sense of resentment and humiliation that their sacred island domain had been forcibly thrust in world affairs under the auspices of Western Imperialism with a Liberal Face. One side of them wishes that traditional Japan hadn’t faced the humiliation of bending to foreign will, but another side of them knows full well that Modern Japan rose to a kind of greatness only under Western pressure and influence.
Incidentally, the author of THE SEED AND THE SOWER, the source novel of MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, was a white South African who came to know the Japanese by a chance encounter in a Western restaurant. The owner had referred to the Japanese as ‘niggers’ and didn’t want their business, but the author, Laurens Van Der Post, was deeply offended by the owner’s prejudice and invited the Japanese men to his table. The Japanese embassy heard of his act of kindness and invited him to Japan, where, for two years, he came to learn the language and love the culture. Lawrence in the film is loosely based on Laurens. (It must be said that controversy dogged Van Der Post’s career as some deemed him to be an inveterate liar and fabulist.)
Van Der Post later opposed Apartheid in South Africa and sought racial harmony between blacks and whites. Therein lay both the nobility and naivete of his brand of humanism. There is a Useful Limit to all ideas and values, and it’s a bridge too far to believe that any long-term arrangement is possible where white people can peacefully coexist with large numbers of blacks. Indeed, for blacks accustomed to the standards of white civilization, there is nothing more depressing than the prospect of living with ‘all them crazy niggers’, but then, this paradoxically makes them hate the white world even more as a reminder that blacks, being naturally ugabuga, cannot have nice things on their own.
Yonoi is unmistakably Japanese in culture and physiognomy, but he is also unique among the Japanese, as was Mishima, truly one of a kind. In certain respects, Yonoi is as different from other Japanese as he is from Westerners. He’s somewhat similar to Crassus(Laurence Olivier) in SPARTACUS who roars, “Did you truly believe 500 years of Rome could so easily be delivered to the clutches of a mob?” Both men are characterized by a kind of sacred-profane neurosis, akin to the Madonna/Whore Complex, in their attachment to their respective domains. As Gracchus(Charles Laughton) says of Crassus: “This Republic of ours is something like a rich widow. Most Romans love her as their mother, but Crassus dreams of marrying the old girl, to put it politely.” To Yonoi, Japan is more than a nation but a god or goddess, the vision of which intoxicates him. This acuteness or special sensitivity to beauty could be linked to his homosexuality with its narcissistic strains. The problem, of course, is that there are beautiful things outside one’s domain, even among the enemy, and for a beauty-firster like Yonoi, his deepest loyalty is threatened when his love of country is challenged by his desire for Celliers as the blond ‘Aryan’ demigod, a tension that Yonoi seeks to ease by impressing upon Celliers the nobility of the Japanese Way, which is why it’s so essential that Celliers be present at the seppuku ritual of ‘Kanemoto’.
At the outset, Yonoi strikes us as a somewhat enlightened and even conscientious soldier who tries, in his own way, to be fair with the enemy and do things the proper way. He is also a closet-homo, which would make him an outsider in ANY social or cultural context(though Anno Sodomini since the Obama years have turned things upside down in the Jewish-run West and its hapless satellites). He is a tightly wound bundle of contradictions of Eastern upbringing and Western influences, of sympathy and ruthlessness, of sensitivity and psychosis. He is, in a way, his own worst enemy.
At any rate, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is not a simple morality tale about the superiority of reason over unreason, the West over the East, individual conscience over collective mindset, and/or humanism over militarism, notwithstanding the fact that Lawrence has the last word in the movie, though, to be sure, the final utterance is by Hara who, facing execution the following day, wishes Lawrence a Merry Christmas.
While Lawrence may be the most decent character in the film, it is Celliers who sows the seed of greater love in Yonoi. Celliers, though very much a modern man of reason like Lawrence, is also haunted by ‘irrational’ emotions as powerful and tortured as those of Yonoi. It is Celliers’ guilt(regarding a past incident involving his brother and eating away at him) that propels him to do something beyond the will of most men.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is devoid of the feel-good and self-satisfied(often to the point of smugness) tone of the ‘Liberal Movie’ that, no matter how harrowing in parts, has a hallmark-card glow about it as it ties up all the loose ends into a pat conclusion. (Think of Stanley Kramer’s JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG, terribly made, or Norman Jewison’s A SOLDIER’S STORY, reasonably well-made.)
It is radical cinema at its finest, all the more evident when measured against radical cinema at its worst, usually ranging from agitprop to enfant-terrible antics, to which Nagisa Oshima was no stranger as a willfully confrontational, subversive, or just downright nasty personality, whose works were often stuffed with attitude but starved of thought.
In contrast, even as MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE carries on in the vein of controversial topics with subversive implications that characterized Oshima’s career, there’s a thoughtfulness and maturity lacking in most of his earlier works; it is also devoid of the self-righteous ideological posturing that once characterized Oshima as something of the Godard of Japan.
Despite his ideological polarity with what Yonoi(and by extension Mishima) stands for, perhaps Oshima saw something of himself in the troubled character as he too had been trapped in a purity spiral, having fashioned one film after another into a middle finger at Japan and normal/bourgeois society.
A few years after MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, Bernardo Bertolucci, another radical darling in his heyday, would make THE LAST EMPEROR in a similar vein, i.e. true to the spirit of leftism minus the air of radical certainty.
Lawrence is a good man but not the self-sacrificing type. He fights for his country, tries to do the right thing(by everyone), and is ready to face death when it comes knocking, but, like any normal man, he’d rather not give his life for others.
In contrast, Celliers, in the tradition of Christian sainthood, has a martyrdom complex, even perhaps a hidden death wish, one that might redeem the sins of his life. This makes his ‘sainthood’ public/private, at once moral/spiritual and psychological, aligned with the ‘universal’ principles of the Christian-Humanist tradition but also haunted by personal demons. Anyone can understand the moral aspect of Celliers’ act, but only a few, like Lawrence to whom Celliers confided(or confessed), could possibly guess as to the psychological motivation. For the onlookers of Celliers’ sacrifice, it’s simply an expression of his inner goodness. For Celliers, it’s the punishment that redeems his badness.
Ironically, it is yet another manifestation of his ineradicable sense of elitism, even superiority. Even in choosing to die for others, he exhibits moral courage beyond the purview of most men. A rock star moralist. It’s akin to the Jesus Complex(or Jesus Christ Superstar Complex). Jesus embraced the wretched of the Earth but as the Son of God. His heart was a fusion of deep humility and profound megalomania, i.e. in humbly carrying out the Will of God, He claimed the pride of being God.
A person can change his ways but not his nature. Someone possessed of an inborn sense of superiority but ideologically committed to equality will nevertheless exhibit elitist tendencies. He may, at once, strive to be MORE humble and MORE sanctimonious than others. He may be a moral supremacist. Or he could be like those communist leaders who monopolized power in the name of the people.
In this, the two JC’s, Jesus Christ and Jack Celliers, are similarly disturbed but worthy of respect because theory becomes practice. In contrast, most ‘social justice’ types preach one thing but do another, like the pigs in ANIMAL FARM.
Cellier’s conscience is of universal import(humanism or human rights), but his motives cannot be understood apart from his private hell. Yonoi’s vision is tribal and eccentric, but he hopes to broaden its meaning to other men, even those of other cultures(and the enemy camp). One’s universalism is rooted in the personal, whereas the other’s particularism strives for the mutual.
Apart from the cultural differences and political hostilities, Yonoi faces an uphill battle as the West is accustomed to accepting something as sensible or plausible, not simply for the sake of obedience. In Japanese culture, loyalty over-rode all other considerations. Thus, if the superior gave an order, one’s obligation was to obey and adhere, usually without question. If questions might be posed, they must come after the fact, never before. The first duty was to simply ‘agree’ and comply. Indeed, to ask WHY could be considered irreverent, presumptuous, traitorous.
In contrast, the West is used to explaining or justifying an idea or policy, implying reason and justice as the premise for consensus or compliance. Even though rigid hierarchy and blind obedience were also hallmarks of the West, the ideal self-conception(or conceit) was that of an order where decisions were made on the basis of facts and arguments accessible to all men. “You explain why, we comply.”
Whether it’s Hamlet talking to himself or Mark Anthony speaking before a crowd, the idea is to use words to reason and persuade.
In contrast, the Japanese way was, “You say, we obey.” Men like Yonoi aren’t used to being questioned by inferiors. Just as they, without question, follow the orders of their superiors, they expect the inferiors to do as ordered. When Mishima asked several of his disciples to join him in his final act, the last thing on anyone’s mind was to ask why. The master spoke, and the only proper thing was to concur, without question, without understanding. It was the Japanese Way.
Naturally, Yonoi sees the P.O.W. as the inferiors in the situation, though ironically, he also sees them as superiors(because the West is more powerful and advanced than Japan). Indeed, he orders them(as ‘inferiors’) to witness the seppuku to impress them(as ‘superiors’). When the whole thing turns into a grotesque debacle and even the usually conciliatory Lawrence expresses displeasure, Yonoi loses face twice over.
Yonoi is in an impossible situation as he’s trying to politicize an aesthetic-sexual fetish. It’s usually the case that the personal is often at odds with the political. In DOCTOR ZHIVAGO(the David Lean film), the main character is an artist, a poet given to personal dreams and reveries. While an artist may politically involve himself in a movement(that may or may not align with his artistic predilections), the demands of art are different from the demands of politics(and ideology), which consume the whole being of the ultra-radical commissar Strelnikov.
It was no easy feat for Bob Dylan the radical folkie to transition into Dylan the personal artist. Creativity gives free flow to one’s imagination, whereas control and consensus are the essence of politics. Even as art or entertainment is shared by the public, creativity flows from within an individual of rare talent or vision. Politics operates on shared ideas and interests, i.e. the politician must be mindful to separate public office from personal life. Creativity, though producing works for the public, is nothing without the personal, or inspiration drawn from within the recesses of one’s psyche, which is why artists hold a special place that politicians do not. Politicians(and military leaders) strive to measure up to well-formulated ideals of what they should be, whereas the worth of artists(and notable entertainers) relies to a great extent on how one is different from all the others. It also explains why artists, more than any other category of people, are forgiven or indulged for their failings. They’re primarily prized for their uncommon talent than their contribution to the common good. There were good and bad presidents, but even if giants like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln hadn’t existed, some other leaders might have more-or-less filled their shoes. But there could have been only one Beethoven. Had he not existed, there would be a great big hole in the world, albeit one going unnoticed as we cannot miss what we don’t know. It’s like a person born deaf cannot miss the sound he never heard. It was as if Beethoven, though going deaf himself, contributed a whole new set of ears for the world. Artists at their best create entire new universes of the mind.
An artist lives in a kind of paradox. He must pore deep into his inner-self to draw out the inspiration, but true fulfillment comes only by its validation by others. Zhivago, even as he abstains from politics, writes poetry so that it will be read and appreciated by others. Indeed, he seems rather hurt that his half-brother Yevgraf and the revolutionary Strelnikov dismiss his works as ‘bourgeois’ or pettily occupied with ‘private life’, no longer relevant in the New Order.
Granted, not all creative types seek out the largest possible audience, and their prestige owes in part to their limited appeal. If singers like Celine Dion or Whitney Huston aimed for the whole world(and their fans reveled in the mass appeal), artist-entertainers like David Bowie actually gained by losing the entire world and would have lost by gaining it. Though a major Rock Star and even something of a household name by the 1970s, his music(as well as shtick) wasn’t for everyone and had a certain cult appeal, which was essential to his brand.
Thus, some artists and their fans exist in a tricky space between openness and enclosure. It attracts an audience but is for ‘members only’, even if informal. It’s what distinguished cinephilia from mere fandom or film-buff-dom. THE SOUND OF MUSIC and STAR WARS were for everyone, but the films of certain ‘auteurs’ were for ‘members only’. Some artists, like Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, have managed to operate on both levels. As for sickly cults like that of Chantal Akerman, that goes even beyond ‘members only’. It’s only for the ‘initiated’, something like a secular monastery for cultural vegans, though complicated by efforts to ‘mainstream’ its avant-retardism, which sort of defeats the whole conceit.
Because artists must reach out to an audience, they do have a similarity with politicians(and some develop an affinity for and even model themselves on them, e.g. Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, etc.) Politicians have followers, and so do artists and entertainers. David Bowie at one time said Adolf Hitler was the first Rock Star. Likely, he wasn’t simply pointing to Hitler’s ‘rock star’ charisma but his background in and lifelong obsession with art and music. For Hitler, the personal and the political could achieve singularity via the cult of race and beauty. The Aryans were nature’s work of art in health and beauty, and the Aryan soul was uniquely gifted with vision and inspiration relatively deficient in the other races. Thus, creative vision and political will could be two sides of the same coin. True, not every Aryan could be a Beethoven or Wagner, but he too shared in the blood and soul of the great Aryan genius, visionaries, and artists of history, the creators of new worlds of the mind and soul.
Based on individual works, the twelve years of the National Socialist period could be dismissed as delusional and unproductive. If however, instead of limiting one’s focus on art galleries, the whole of society and culture is taken into account, one could argue that the National Socialist period, at least before the war, was an impressive art project, perhaps the grandest attempt by mankind. A totalizing art project that molded people’s behaviors, values, emotions, work activities, and family life. Arnold Schwarzenegger in PUMPING IRON said that, whereas sculptors work with marble or clay, he molds living art with muscle and bone. For Hitler, all of Germany, peoples, places, and things, were to be molded into his vision of grandeur and beauty.
But then, one could argue that Hitler succeeded in art-as-politics because he failed in art-for-art’s-sake. A true artist of deep talent may find it difficult to square the demands of one with those of another. While a second-rater or hack compensates for his lack of inspiration or originality with ideology or conventionality, a true creative talent wants total freedom to explore, imagine, and pursue his ideas and intuitions, though it may also be true that he supports the suppression of other people’s freedoms. For all I know, David Mamet the ultra-Zionist zealot likely supports the suppression of the BDS movement, but he’d surely fume about any restrictions placed on his artistic freedom.
It’s an unresolvable contradiction. If art thrives in freedom and if a true artist relishes his own freedom to create, how can he be part of a political movement or ideology that suppresses the freedom of others? Take the Rock Band R.E.M. that valued its own freedom while supporting various causes designed to restrict the liberty and freedom of others. The band prided itself for being the most ‘politically correct’ in the business.
And Yukio Mishima had his own contradictions. His success and fame owed to possibilities availed in post-war ‘democratic’ Japan(under US occupation and influence), but his political agenda was no less repressive than that of the far left.
But then, it wasn’t merely a matter of art(freedom) vs politics(control) as much of his political vision was inseparable from his aesthetic obsessions. Japan to him was like a holistic artwork of nature, mythology, people, history, culture, and manners. Art to him was more than the modernist conception of an individual having the freedom to pursue his personal inspiration. It was life itself in accordance to proper forms of nature, man, and culture.
Indeed, the modern concept of art is rather alien to most of history where creativity, though clearly stamped with individual genius, was primarily in service to what was deemed to represent beauty, higher ideals, deeper truths, and/or peoples/objects of prestige. Even as Michelangelo’s personal passions burst at the seams(THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY by Carol Reed), often at odds with Church authorities, they were in service to the glory of God as the ultimate Creator and Arbiter. It’s been said Michelangelo may have been a tooter, but those sinful leanings were sublimated toward higher and grander themes. There was a kind of Faustian bargain between religious sanctity and homo talent. The Church hinted it would overlook and even tolerate the homo’s ‘sexual’ deviance IF he applied his talent to glorifying God, Jesus, and the Madonna. Thus, the Church would get its art while the homo would have a chance to exercise his artistry(even though a part of him preferred to make paintings/sculptures of men engaged in profanity than piety). It’s no wonder that the homos are so eager to win over Catholicism to Globo-Homo as they believe it’s always been an aesthetic expression of esoteric-homoeroticism.
The early Christians attacked sensual paganism(with an undeniable homoerotic element) as satanic/devilish, but it was the wellspring of much of the finest aesthetics, something the Church came around to acknowledging, especially in the so-called Renaissance and its ‘rediscovery’ of pagan glories.
The disturbing implication was that God needed to hire the Devil to have beautiful things. Religious folks always harbored a duality about beauty. On the one hand, it was venerated as proof of God’s existence as who but God could create such beauty in the world? On the other hand, beauty was distrusted as a superficial distraction from the deeper eternal truths, as well as a seductive temptation from personal modesty and humility before God, i.e. it was just another variation of the fruit offered to Adam and Eve.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s ANDREI RUBLEV imagines the travails of a prodigiously gifted icon painter of the late medieval period. His talent is rare and unique, an object of admiration and envy, but in service to the higher universal themes of Orthodox Christianity. No doubt, Rublev of the film was meant to be Tarkovsky’s alter ego, or Tarkovsky saw himself as the Rublev of the modern era, which makes his film both modernist and medievalist. Modernist in seeking new forms of expression unique to tech-centered cinema(especially with time as the key element) unbound from conventions of earlier artforms, yet medievalist in using new possibilities to pay tribute to sacred history and God’s eternity.
In one respect, Tarkovsky’s struggles with Soviet authorities(cultural as well as political) symbolized an artist’s longing for freedom of expression and conscience, all the more so when he was effectively exiled in the early 1980s, ironically when Glasnost was just around the corner. But like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Tarkovsky was no libertarian(or what Americans refer to as a ‘constitutionalist’) but a Russian with a profoundly Christian-Nationalist take on the purpose of art and culture, one often at odds with the Western-Modernist conception centered on the primacy of either personal expression or mass entertainment, i.e. neuroticism or hedonism.
Rather, the artist, however peculiar or eccentric, found deeper meaning through contemplations of God, country, tradition, and community. Rather than conceiving of this as a dichotomy of creativity vs morality, the proper dynamic was to feed creativity to serve morality.
Generally, morality without art makes for poor storytelling, which is why most Christian-family-friendly are worthless. As everything is set in stone, there is no real conflict as it’s obvious what’s good and what’s bad. Same goes for the so-called Liberal Film, which isn’t really liberal in the sense of being open-minded and empathetic, even though it feigns a bit of faux-sophistication to flatter the intended audience’s conceit of nuance and subtlety. The Liberal Film too has pat messages and obvious heroes and villains. In contrast, the Christo-conservatism of Andrei Tarkovsky and the Christo-liberalism of Martin Scorsese have resulted in true art as they give the Devil his due and give God a run for his money. Scorsese’s films are about the power of the Fruit, forbidden but inspiring, and the pain of faith in God who remains silent. In Tarkovsky’s films, faith in an unalterably dark and violent world is like a delusion or madness but, without it, man is alone with fallenness with nothing to guide him. One thing for sure, there is no deliverance via the modernity of prosperity and security because a society devoid of spirituality and roots is hollow. Tarkovsky’s final film was made in Sweden in the early 1980s, then still a safe and pleasant place, but look what’s happened to that ‘liberal-secular’ paradise since.
Instead of seeing the good and the bad as two separate entities, the films of Scorsese and Tarkovsky present a world where the good is contaminated with the bad and vice versa, and as much as we try to separate one from the other, the very essence of one rests in its eternal struggle with the other. The good, in order to remain good, must always wrestle with the bad, even make love to it. It is this sense that makes their films devoid of the smugness or glibness of the Christian-Family-Movie or the Liberal-Film.
If morality without art makes for inferior storytelling, art without morality often leads to solipsism, nihilism, neuroticism, hedonism, narcissism, and/or radicalism. ‘Morality’ here means a certain sense of truth, integrity, honor, balance, conscience, and introspection(minus which true redemption isn’t possible) than a simple conflict of Good and Evil. At the existential level, everyone has his own interpretation of right-and-wrong, but most people under proper uses of education and governance can agree on what constitutes the natural, the normal, the healthy, the sane, the meaningful, the spiritual, as well as what is to be valued in tradition and in progress. It certainly isn’t about green-haired men with piercings and tattoos claiming to be ‘women’ offering quasi-porno ‘educational’ material to children. But in absence of such Moral-Mindedness, storytelling can become neurotic navel-gazing, mindless celebration of violence(as is the case with most video-games that pretend to have narratives), or self-indulgence in animalism. Or, starved for meaning and purpose, turn to fashionable radicalism as a neo-crusade or neo-inquisition, which is a kind of anti-moral moralism. Is it any wonder that so many people today are ‘morally’ outraged in defense of the obviously immoral and demented? 80% of Americans believe ‘gay marriage’ is morally justified, even ‘sacred’.
For most of history(and even now in popular culture), the talent was personal but the themes were not. Whether it was Rublev and his frescos or John Ford and his Westerns, the distinguishing feature was that small but special element that set one apart from the rest. Few artists were visionaries(like Beethoven, Wagner, Picasso, or Kubrick), the aesthetic equivalent of the prophets of the spiritual realm, the kind who founded whole new systems of expression. In most cases, genius was measured in inches than in yards.
Given the adherence to established genres, one could overlook what separated the wheat from the chaff, the concern of ‘auteurist’ critics who maintained that the great Hollywood directors went underappreciated because they worked with familiar formulas that, however, didn’t negate the ‘personality’ of their talents. (Modernism gave free flow to the personal until various modernist and then post-modernist schools of thought churned out like-minded faddists joined by the conceit that they’re too advanced and radical, or just too hip and cynical, to naively invest themselves in any classic, traditional, conventional, or standard criteria of art, resulting in less emotional immersion and thematic involvement in favor of the cleverly provocative/subversive, elusive/obscurantist, or cynical/mercantilist, of course in the footsteps of Andy Warhol, an uncool person who out-cooled the cool people with deadpan opportunism mistaken for a kind of post-beat Zen.)
In theocratic orders, art was a veneration of the gods or an approximation of their holiness. Thus, the representation of the sacred and the profane could be a matter of life or death for the artist. What the artist offered as tribute could be deemed as transgression. (In the modern era, an artist could similarly fall afoul of ideology and end up in the Gulag or with a bullet in the head. Sergei Eisenstein, who’d earned the favors of Stalin with IVAN THE TERRIBLE, lost it with IVAN THE TERRIBLE PART II, deemed by the Red Tsar to be a thinly veiled mockery of his paranoia. In the USSR, to displease Stalin was to offend god himself. In the West, plenty of artists have been blacklisted, and people continue to be ‘canceled’ for their insufficient devotion to Jew-Worship, Negrolatry, and Globo-Homo, the new holy trinity of the now degenerate West.)
Consider the tensions between the great Renaissance artists and the Church authorities who patronized creative talent in service to God but often found the results to be overly sensual, pagan, or even demonic for spiritual confirmation.
The Church also supported the sciences as a means to reveal and validate God’s design in all things great and small, only to realize that science has its own logic and methodology that stumble on discoveries that go against the supposed divine truths of Scripture.
Given those tensions, we’ve been tempted to think in terms of religion/politics as dogmatic and art/science as free-thinking, but art can have utopian(thereby dystopian) implications and science contains totalitarian tendencies as it pursues truths to unlock their potential, often for power and domination, which is the story of nuclear physics. In our time, the Covid hysteria and agenda, made possible with the complete cooperation of the much politicized and corrupted medical community, exposed the dark side of science that, like everything else, operates in the domain of man who can’t help but to ‘politicize’ everything.
On the positive side, the traditional patronage and practice of art were in service to what were deemed as higher or nobler themes than to indulge personal whims, which could spiral into neurosis, navel-gazing, or degeneracy, as so much of modern and postmodern art have tended to be.
On the negative side, the effect could be suffocating, stultifying, repetitive(yet another painting of the Crucifixion or the Madonna), and propagandistic. Art could become a cage. In the modern era, Dmitri Shostakovich, a modernist working in Stalinist confines, had to walk the tightrope between the personal and the political.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is like a combination of the politics of PATHS OF GLORY with the intimacies of LOLITA. Like PATHS OF GLORY(or THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI), it is a story centered on political conflict(as well as excessively politicized egos), and like LOLITA, it’s about one man’s living heaven/hell of lovesickness.
PATHS OF GLORY delves into political matters, whereas LOLITA peers into the private world. Everyone in PATHS OF GLORY is a political animal, from top generals to lowly soldiers. Each is occupied with issues of control and advantage in a group setting. Generals command the battlefields for territory and stature. Soldiers, in contrast, have no control over strategy but do their utmost to remain in one piece. During the trial, the accused soldiers jostle for better chance at survival, a cruder counterpart to the rivalry among generals who, though in no danger of facing the firing squad themselves, could suffer the demise of reputation, the very lifeblood for men of vanity and ambition. Everything is rife with politics.
LOLITA is about a different kind of power game. For some reason, Humbert Humbert finds himself completely besotted with some teeny-bopper ‘nymphet’. Though the girl is pretty, no one quite feels about her as Humbert does. He keeps the secret between himself and Lolita, whom he tries to control and ‘own’, ever more difficult by the day given her growing defiance.
At any rate, Humbert wouldn’t dare to reveal his feelings for Lolita or attempt to fashion them into something more than what they are: His private heaven/hell. But then, he isn’t a political animal but a deeply private man. As a British professor working in the US, he seems to have no particular national or cultural affinity. When his gaze fell upon Lolita for the first time, Humbert the private man became a private madman. But, for how long can one keep such a secret when Lolita isn’t content to live in his world and longs to interact with people of consequence?
Though Humbert and Yonoi couldn’t be more different, they share one quality, a yearning for respectability. The difference is Yonoi sublimates his obsession into a honor code among men, whereas Humbert suppresses his obsession to maintain a semblance of a bourgeois normality, which isn’t entirely a facade as, but for his hots for Lolita, he would be more-or-less your typical bourgeois person.
Still, if Humbert’s concern is to keep it strictly between Lolita and himself, Yonoi faces the barbed task of fashioning his obsession into an esoteric concept about pride and dignity among warriors. Unlike Humbert for whom sexuality and politics are separate, Yonoi cannot help but be political given his emotional investment in sacred Japan, his training as a soldier(in service to the empire), and his duties as a P.O.W officer. Therefore, his homoerotic feelings for Celliers cannot be pursued or resolved as a private matter, e.g. by trying to convince the blond boy to accompany him to some ‘gay bar’ for a fruity tryst. Nor can he simply ignore or suppress his feelings as they are too strong, perhaps even with the power to override his loyalty to Japan and the Emperor. And, it’s not just a matter of lust but an intoxication with beauty, which lends a mythic quality to the madness. Therefore, he is desperate(and excited) to tend the flames of his passion into a sacred fire. Would it have been better for everyone if Yonoi had simply been forthright about his feelings? Say to Celliers, “I want to saku yoru diku and faku your asu.” BEAU TRAVAIL, a film based on BILLY BUDD directed by Clair Denis seems to suggest as much, as the officer whose repressed sexuality was the source of envy and cruelty is shown in the last scene to be liberated doing a dance in an unabashed ‘gay disco’ style.
In truth, outright liberation of sexuality is no answer, as the abject pornification of society in Japan and the West has amply demonstrated. The end-result is bestial shamelessness. If excessive shame represses what is natural and healthy, excessive shamelessness represses what is balanced and proper, and is, in its own way, quasi-puritanical in stigmatizing those who reject it. Nagisa Oshima made a notorious film in the 1970s called IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES where a man and a woman go at one another in complete sexual abandon, but it ends in just another kind of madness. It turns into a game of pushing the envelope until the man is strangled to death of his own volition and has his penis lopped off as akin to a holy relic.
But then, as absurd as Yonoi’s private project may appear, it could be he was onto something after all. Consider how much of Catholic art owes to sublimated homoerotic feelings. Sacred paintings with pious overtones may have been fueled by beauty-obsessed homos whose innermost desire was to suck dick and take it up the arse. (Orthodox aesthetics, in their solemnity and austerity, was less appealing to ‘gay’ fancies, and perhaps homos could argue that the stagnation of Byzantium owed to the relative lack of homo vibrancy and eagerness for new things. But then, what about the Protestant North that rejected the Catholic aesthetics as overly sensual and sumptuous, excessively paganistic and idolatrous, but nevertheless surged far ahead? Homos might argue that attributes such as English manners owed as much to ‘gay’ sensibility as to Protestant insistence on sobriety, which, by the way, tended to be sharp and focused, whereas the Byzantine mindset was misty and opaque.)
Still, at least the maverick artists, homo or otherwise, working in the Christian cultural milieu had universal themes readily available to them. Whether Fyodor Dostoevsky, Robert Bresson, or Pier Paolo Pasolini(the homo), as unique and peculiar as each of them was, his version of Creative-Christianity was part of a shared community, indeed the biggest religion in the world. Besides, even people who hadn’t read the New Testament could understand what Jesus was about and the worldwide appeal of the faith around Him.
In contrast, the substance of Mishima’s themes was restricted to Japan, or tragically to the Japan that no longer existed(or was defeated and disavowed out of existence). It meant nothing to outsiders and little to the younger generation that grew up under ‘liberal democracy’ imposed by the US.
Still, given the universal appeal of beauty and exoticism, Mishima’s blend of modern sensibility and traditional Japanese aesthetics had a considerable cachet in both Japan and the West, but then, it turned out he wasn’t merely a stylist but a man after substance, one in the form of devotion to an emperor who’d disavowed his divinity, which made the whole thing all the more absurdly tragic. To pretend to believe in a god that no longer believes in himself.
Pasolini, being a homo, was an odd case as a Catholic, communist, bourgeois, and satanic pervert. Part of him loved the Church, as much as Yonoi loves sacred Japan, but another part of him took delight in reveling in the Deadly Sins(as he scoured the rough parts of Rome for young men). In some ways, he kept separate and compartmentalized his reverence for the holy from his addiction to the bung-holey, but a film like TEOREMA suggests that he also entertained notions of constructing a new holy out of the bung-holey.
In the film, a god-man(Terence Stamp) appears before a bourgeois family and, contra the puritanical or anti-sexual streak in Christianity, has sexual relations with each member. He even buggers the men of the family. A kind of homo-christ who, instead of preaching, gives the reach-around.
In a way, as terrible as the film is(indeed close to unwatchable), it offers a glimpse into the narcissistic and egomaniacal homo mentality that wasn’t content to be ‘gay’ in its own space but to somehow mold homosexuality into a kind of new cult bordering on religion for the whole world.
Fast Forward to today, and maybe Pasolini was a pervert-prophet of sorts as Anno Sodomini now defines the West. Not only do the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, and other branches of the US government(and so many mega-corporations) pledge their allegiance to the great-homo-anus but even the churches are flying globo-homo flags as if the entire history of Judaism and Christianity was meant to culminate in the worship of homo-fecal-penetration and tranny-penis-cutting. The Catholic Church is now about ten years away from outing itself as a ‘gay disco’.
In a way, it’s truly remarkable, horribly so. Just think. It was once rather discomfiting to ponder that much of sacred art was fueled by homoerotic feelings, i.e. the profane and/or pagan were sublimated to serve the sacred and the scriptural. But now, with homosexuality not only out of the closet but atop the pedestal, the world is supposed to prostrate itself before homos in a year-round butt-naked celebration of sodomy. Not only that but the neo-imperial US military is among the main crusaders of Sodomania. It’s as if one of their main purposes, other than serving Zion, is to plant the ‘gay pride’ victory flag in every corner of the world, be it Afghanistan or Ukraine.
So, even though Yonoi of MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is supposed to be somewhat unhinged, he doesn’t seem so kooky when we consider what’s become of our world. If anything, Yonoi didn’t go far enough. We now live in a world where Jewish Supremacists(whose proxy globo-homo is) risked World War III with Russia and China because neither country put out to Anno Sodomini(like the EU and the cuck-puppet satellites Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan).
Who knows? If Japan becomes imperialist again and invades a country in the name of spreading the joys and celebrations of homo-buggering, it might have lots of defenders in the West, which supports Israel’s ‘Gaza Genocide’ campaign on account of Tel Aviv being the ‘Gay Capital’ of the world.
Celliers is a man of principles(of what might be called the best of Western Values), but his attitude and actions owe as much to personal angst. In his own way, he is no less riven with psychic torment than Yonoi is. However, Celliers and Yonoi are not only counterparts but counter-currents. It all comes to a head in their final confrontation, a crystalizing moment that is as tender as it is brutal.
Yonoi orders all the P.O.W.s to be assembled outside, including those in the camp’s makeshift hospital. We see a sorry lot of bedraggled men, some of them holding onto life by a thread. Yonoi tells them that they are all fit to work, that their sickness is essentially ‘spiritual’, that their physical feebleness can be overcome with the power of will; they can all be honorable soldiers capable of labor.
On the surface, Yonoi is being a cruel and heartless bastard, but what’s more disturbing is he really seems to believe what he’s saying, which makes it all the more psychotic for its twist of idealism. To a degree, Yonoi has respect for all soldiers, Japanese or otherwise, and believes in the power of the spirit to overcome the body’s limitations. Notice he doesn’t merely order the Western prisoners to obey and do as told but tries to inspire them to be like Japanese soldiers, or ‘honorable men’ of proper spirit. It’s like communist work teams didn’t merely order people around but inspired them to be good comrades with Stakhanovite superhuman will to work(and industrialize Russia in a decade). In other words, History was on their side, and anything was possible, and if the human cost was great, it was justified in the name of progress.
Of course, the Japanese were very much into this kind of mania, which would prove fatal against the US. True, the spirit can drive the body to go the extra mile, but there are limits to everything, as T. E. Lawrence discovers in David Lean’s film, i. e. while a man’s actions may not be ‘written’, his limitations certainly are. The Japanese militarist attitude wagered that the greater manpower and material resources of the US could be fended off by the Japanese with their purity of spirit. Was it stupid arrogance or repressed desperation, as when a smaller animal in danger puffs itself up to appear bigger and more threatening? Maybe a bit of both. Until the Battle of Midway, Japan had won a series of victories against the supposed ‘invincible west’, further fueling its delusions of grandeur with the most tragic consequences.
Still, it would be smug and conceited to deride such delusions as exclusively the features of an ‘irrational’ system such as fascism or militarism. In the end, the tragedies of Germany and Japan owed to their being embroiled in the-winner-takes-all conflicts. If American History seems less foolhardy, it’s because the US never fought a war where failure meant total defeat. One could argue that the US rationales for becoming embroiled in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq(as well as Ukraine) were just as foolish and delusional, the difference being the US never faced the danger of the war following them back home in the manner of Napoleon-going-to-Russia-and-Russia-coming-to-Napoleon.
In some ways, the American rationale for the interventions in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine were more evil than Japan’s for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whereas Japan acted in desperation and in the correct assessment of the US’s hostile intentions(albeit with serious miscalculations of the power dynamic), the US cynically exploited 9/11(iffy as to its real causes) to willfully generate lies about Iraq, which posed NO threat to the US, and in servility to Jewish Supremacists as the new masters of the West.
The White West’s slavish and dog-like cucking to Jewish Power is more demented than Japan’s submission to militarism. At the very least, Japanese militarism was about Japanese power and glory, whereas the Neocon Agenda is strictly about Jewish power and hegemony, made all the worse by the fact that Jews are by far the most hostile and destructive force against white well-being and survival.
And in their assessments of the likely prospects of war, the US deep state was about as delusional and demented as the Japanese or German military command, the difference being that Americans never had to fear being invaded, conquered, and destroyed in turn. So much exuberance about it being a ‘cake walk’, only to result in a quagmire.
And if the Cold War had a certain logic in terms of ideological differences and superpower rivalry, what is the animating impulse behind the current ‘Russophobia’ and endless provocations(that inflamed into a horrific war in Ukraine)? For all the talk of ‘muh democracy’ and ‘rules-based order’, we know it’s really about appeasing the sick and demented Jewish Supremacists as the rightful Master-Racists of the West. Same goes for the blind US support of Israel in its Nazi-like destruction of Gaza. At the very least, National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan were more-or-less honest about their intentions of conquest, whereas every mad and horrible thing that is done around the world as a sacrificial offering to Jewish Supremacism is characterized as ‘spreading democracy’, ‘fighting terrorism’, ‘defending the free world’, and/or ‘maintaining the rules-based order’.
Thus, the current West is doubly delusional. Not only in provoking wars that usually end in failures(and leave behind fields strewn with dead bodies amidst the rubble) but in spreading the lie that it’s all for ‘muh democracy’, the face of which today is more often than not the porny celebration of globo-homo decadence and tranny-tyranny degeneracy.
Speaking of delusions, how about the Jewish-promoted cult of BLM that would have us believe that the biggest racial problem in the US is crypto-nazi white cops hunting down pure-as-snow innocent Negroes? The amazing thing is so many people have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker; they’ve been ‘stancilized’.
All of this goes to show that you don’t need Fascism, Nazism, or Militarism to have a society running on delusions and dementia. Power in the West is now essentially Jewish Demonology wrapped in the banner of ‘Liberal Democracy’, a system that uses manufactured race riots, medical hysteria, financial inflation, election rigging, and lawfare in the name of ‘defending democracy’.
By now, gone should be the smug conceit that irrational exuberance or collective psychosis could only happen in OTHER systems. Throughout history, when a system was overly irrational, it either grew weak or made terrible mistakes, paving the way for invasion by others, as happened to Germany and Japan in World War II. Or, the system imploded under the weight of its own contradictions and was replaced by something new, as happened in Russia(and to an extent in China where the Maoist system was essentially replaced by something more economically rational). The US never faced any danger of conquest by foreign armies, but given its over-reliance on the Dollar as World Currency, broken borders(invasion by migrants and freeloaders), anti-white ideology(leading to demoralization among whites, the key demographic for system sustenance), Negrolatry(idolizing the very race that is most thuggish and criminal), cultural degeneracy(from sodomania to pedomania), and mindless servility to megalomaniacal and ultra-paranoid Jewish Supremacists, could the system begin to collapse from cracks appearing on all sides? At least the Soviet collapse was relatively simple, essentially a controlled demolition whereby the very center ordered an end to communism. But, is there a center anymore in the West? Jews, the most powerful bloc, hide their power and accountability, e.g. for Mayorkas, it’s always “Muh ancestors died in the Holocaust”. White America, still the official face of power in the US, only cucks to Jews and produces ‘leaders’ like Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney. Homo and black elites, as proxies of Jews, do the bidding of Zion for favors, privilege, and the gibs.
One thing for sure, while it was impossible for any country to militarily conquer the US, it was certainly possible for a strong-willed, intelligent, and hostile group to infiltrate the elite institutions of the US and recode everything to its own aggrandizement, which is exactly what happened in the US, now a very delusional and irrational country that, worse, spreads its psycho-political and cultural diseases all around the world as the hallmarks of ‘democracy’ and the ‘rules-based order’, which comes down to worshiping Zion, celebrating sodomy, flattering black thuggery, and employing every means of the rule-of-lawfare to subvert the rule-of-law that might allow dissent to grow.
At any rate, Yonoi’s appeal to the spirit in the climactic scene may conceal an element of moral crisis. He’s been ordered by high command to send half the prisoners to build an air field as a last ditch effort to reverse the tide of war. A part of him may feel that it is inhumane, as well as contrary to international law, to use prisoners in this manner, but as a dutiful Japanese soldier, he has no choice but to comply. He wants to be an honorable officer but has been handed a rather ghastly order. By invoking the spirit, he could be trying to convince himself, as well as the enfeebled prisoners, of not only the rightness but the nobility of his order.
Furthermore, there’s a matter of personal pride and military interest at stake. Yonoi had insisted on Hicksley handing over a list of men who are specialists in armaments(as they could be of use to Japanese) but was repeatedly rebuffed with denials that such men exist among the ranks of prisoners, something Yonoi knows to be untrue. What is clearly patriotism to Hicksley is a personal insult to Yonoi who has decided on extreme measures to pry out the truth.
It’s as if Yonoi regards the prison camp as his Japanese Garden(of Eden). When everything is in proper order, he’s amenable to kindness and grace; but if any detail is off, he takes it as a personal affront and goes psycho. It’s rather disturbing to surmise that what is so beautiful and poetic about Japanese culture is grounded in the psychosis of perfectionism, or absolute intolerance, even unto death by suicide or execution, of any flaw in the arrangement.
Yonoi is a strange case for he embodies both a purist Japanese particularism and a Western-inflected universalism. He labors to impart his brand of Japanese spiritualism to the Westerners. He is a perverse blend of Shinto spirit and Christian(or at least Buddhist) proselytizing; his message is that anyone, with proper mindset, can be like an honorable Japanese soldier, or possess something like the samurai spirit. (In traditional Japan, provincial Shintoism and universal Buddhism learned to live side-by-side, but Yamato spirit as an ‘export’ item was inconceivable.) This eccentricity makes Yonoi both more humane and more inhumane than other Japanese officers. If most Japanese officers are content to control the bodies of the conquered, Yonoi wants to control(if not convert) their spirits as well. Yonoi sees it as a path to illumination than a means of oppression. He believes that despair, sickness, and humiliation could be alleviated among the P.O.W.s with proper attitude and mental concentration. In this sense, Yonoi fancies himself a spiritual revolutionary. (Universalized spiritualism can be more dangerous than its particularist original. For sure, Arabs posed less of a threat as pagans than as Muslims who fused elements of their local culture with those of Abrahamic faiths. On the one hand, Christianity and Islam are brotherly faiths committed to spreading the light of divine justice to all mankind, but they’ve often been intolerant and impatient, amassing tremendous body counts along the way. And two frightening movements in China in the 19th century and the 20th century were the Taiping Rebellion instigated by a crackpot who dreamt he’s the brother of Jesus Christ and the secular spiritualism of Maoism that swept through the country like a wildfire. Still, Christianity, Islam, and Marxism-Leninism emerged as full-fledged universal credos, whereas Yonoi attempts to generalize what is incorrigibly tribal and particular. In order for Buddhism to have emerged, it had to break free of the particularities of Hinduism. Same with Christianity’s break with Judaism. Yonoi’s pet project is somewhat like what the Jews have pulled off in the West, a Japanese version of Tikkun Olam. Jews insist on their tribalism, specialness, Chosenness, and even superiority in holiness, intelligence, and/or will, but they also try to persuade the goyim, along with themselves, that the Jewish Way is best for all the world. But if only Jews can be Jews and if Jewishness inherently divides humanity between the superior Jews and inferior goyim, how can the Jewish Way serve as the basis for any kind of workable universalism? According to Christianity, all believers are equal before God. Islam says the same of its faithful. But the Jewish Way, even as it claims to care for all humanity, always implies Jews are better than everyone else. Even the notion of Tikkun Olam, a kind of Jewish Man’s Burden, presupposes that ONLY the superior and wiser Jews can save the world, the corollary of which is goyim are hopeless on their own and cannot save themselves. Of course, it wouldn’t be so bad if the Jewish Way was at least well-intentioned, but in truth the marketing of Jews-as-saviors has mostly been a ruse to hoodwink and browbeat the world into accepting the power grab of Jewish Gangsterism. In this light, maybe Yonoi isn’t so nuts after all, as the Current West has more or less rejected the true universalism of Christianity, Liberalism, or Socialism in favor of the Jewish Way wherein the supposed universalism doesn’t make Jews and goyim equal but bends the will of the latter to the former. It isn’t universal liberation but universal enslavement of goyim at the feet of Jews.)
One of the most politically dangerous agendas is an expansive particularism, rife with obvious contradictions. It was a problem faced by the Germans in World War II as they moved eastwards, creating an empire without anything to bind the conquerors and the conquered in some meaningful way.
At the very least, a universalist creed, religious or ideological, though often aggressive and ruthless in expansion and enforcement, regards all people as promising material for salvation or enlightenment. At the end of the day, when the conquered have been converted to the values of the conquerors, all are deemed equal, at least in theory.
That said, there was a certain brutal logic and honesty to the National Socialist ideology, i.e. the Teutonic Aryans were a superior breed deserving and capable of more, and therefore, it was too bad that the Russo-Slavs had to make way for German colonization.
The Japanese imperial agenda in Asia was more confused as a blend of arrogant Yamato ultra-nationalism and, to an extent, a sincere attempt to bring all Asians together into a ‘co-prosperity’ sphere, the problem being the Japanese were too uniquely and rigidly themselves to rule and administer a vast empire of non-Japanese.
Yonoi’s dilemma, intensely particularist in its Japanese-ness and anxiously universalist in its modernity(or Western influence), has no means of resolution, especially as it’s further complicated by hidden homoerotic feelings for a man of the enemy camp. Yonoi believes he could elevate others(even or especially the Westerners whom he may privately admire more than the fellow Japanese) to his level or at least near it. It’s unsure to what degree he considers the Westerners as his inferiors in need of improvement or his superiors whom he must impress with an exaggerated display of Japanese honor.
He is a closet-narcissist whose conceit has been tested by reality. For all his intelligence, determination, and discipline, he obviously hasn’t seen much action in war. His outlook is conceptual and idealistic, as only an elitist aesthete could maintain within his own domain. He’s like a gardener frustrated with nature’s own ways, its blunt indifference to man’s painstaking efforts to impose order on the scenery.
When Yonoi mandates all prisoners to take part in ‘gyo’, a fasting ritual to cleanse the self of bad spirits, he believes the order to be honorable and fair-minded as he will do likewise. But surely, going without food for a few days is far tougher for famished prisoners than for Yonoi. (In his first encounter with Celliers, Yonoi the military lawyer is impeccably dressed and groomed, whereas Celliers is in khaki, looks worse from wear from combat and beatings at the hands of Japanese soldiers.)
Besides, whereas the ritual has cultural significance for Yonoi, it has no such significance for the prisoners of an alien culture. Yonoi suffers from misconstrued goodwill, highhandedness confused with high-mindedness. He admonishes others on matters of purity and honor but has yet to encounter true adversity on his own. Even though there’s no lack of brutality — Hara and his ilk have certainly seen to that — , the prison camp serves as a kind of laboratory for Yonoi, where he plays the role of spirit-doctor. The camp, though part of the war, is nevertheless to the battlefield what garden is to the jungle.
Yonoi, like the privileged and haughty samurai in SEPPUKU(directed by Masaki Kobayashi), can sustain his illusions as long as a barrier remains between the ideal and the real. As Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan before he gets hit.” As with Nurse Ratched in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, Yonoi favors prescription over description and conflates authority with respect, i.e. contrary to his wishes, the only reason why the Western prisoners pay him any heed is because his side has the guns. (Plenty of people in our time believe they are due respect, even reverence, because of the prestige of their positions and pedigree of their knowledge. They expect us to regard them as they regard themselves. Because they shower one another with praises and honors on account of their ideological consensus and professional courtesy, they have a hard time conceiving that they may actually know a lot less than they assume, be completely wrong on some matters, and/or distrusted, even despised, by hoi polloi.)
In one revealing moment, Celliers tries to escape from prison(or the solitary prison within the prison camp) with a badly beaten Lawrence slung over his shoulder and armed with a dagger, which fell into his hands as the result of a botched attempt on his life by one of Yonoi’s adjutants.
Yonoi appears before Celliers, blocks his path, and draws out his sword. He expects a duel between god-men, the drawing of blood and honorable death for either one. But, Celliers drops his dagger and gives up. Yonoi asks why he doesn’t fight; if he wins, he can escape and be free, not necessarily a bad thing for Yonoi as it’d be an honor to be bested by a superior-god man(as Lancelot thought was the case with Arthur in EXCALIBUR).
Yonoi’s sense of reality is so bound to myths that he overestimates the power of Celliers, who is plainly underfed & weary and armed merely with a dagger, whereas Yonoi is in tip-top condition and wields a sword, with which he is expert. To Yonoi, even Celliers in his drained state is a formidable god.
Yonoi acts on these myths, whereas Celliers merely acts real, i.e. he hasn’t a sliver of chance of defeating Yonoi, and getting killed for someone else’s mind game isn’t his cup of tea. Just as the Japanese overestimated their national strength based on myths, Yonoi overestimated Celliers in a similar manner.
In the incident and soon after, two remarkable things take place.
When the troops appear and point their rifles at Celliers, Yonoi blocks their aim. Yonoi, who’d been willing to kill or die just a moment ago in his confrontation with Celliers, cannot bear to have lowly soldiers kill the god-man in such a crude manner. At least his way would have meant an honorable death for Celliers or himself(or maybe both in a kind of poetic Double Homicide). In death as in life, Celliers’ fate must comport with the archetype Yonoi envisions of him.
But, on some level, it is an act of compassion, even at the risk of reputation as, surely, words have been going around the camp that Yonoi’s been acting a bit weird since the arrival of the blond rock-star man.
It’s a risky move on Yonoi’s part, and it anticipates and parallels Celliers’ later standing between Yonoi and a man condemned to death. As Yonoi stood between the soldiers and Celliers, Celliers stood between Yonoi and a terrified British officer. The difference is, whereas Yonoi was defending a fellow god-man from ordinary men(the lowly Japanese soldiers), Celliers defended an ordinary man from Yonoi the god-man. (Even though the designated victim is higher-ranking than Celliers and Lawrence, there is nothing to distinguish him as part of the superior breed. Indeed, his constant pulling of rank betrays his insufficiencies as a man.)
Secondly, in the immediate aftermath of the incident, the failed-assassin explains to Yonoi why he took matters into his own hands to kill Celliers. He says that Celliers’ mere presence casts an evil spell on Yonoi, clouding his judgment and rendering him indecisive.
It’s a classic Japanese reiteration of the rare instance where disobedience is a higher loyalty, especially if backed by honorable death as proof of one’s intention. The adjutant’s rationale is within the honor code, and Yonoi accepts his expiation by seppuku. (In a way, it illustrates what Lawrence said about the problem of the Japanese. “They were a nation of anxious people. And they could do nothing individually. So they went mad, en masse.” Japanese culture is nothing without inhibitions, of timidity or taboos, meaning even vital actions could be hampered by social codes and restrictions, whereby an outsider has to step in to remedy the situation. There is some of this in the West as well, as plenty of whites would rather die and/or see their civilization go to pot than be called a ‘racist’, ‘Anti-Semite’, or ‘homophobe’. It’s no surprise that some of the more outspoken critics in the West are not whites themselves but immigrant types, like Vivek the Hindu. Most whites are stuck in the discourse that goes, “You’re racist” and “No, you’re the REAL racist”, emotionally incapable of rising above the occasion and speaking the honest truth about race.)
Even today, Japanese people plead with foreigners to speak what they themselves dare not(for sake of ‘harmony’). The necessary disruptor has to come from the outside. Granted, there is an element of this in any culture, the West as well as the East. In NIBELUNGEN and PARSIFAL, only an outsider like Siegfried or Parsifal can bring forth the transformation that the gods or the noblemen cannot or dare not, as power and hierarchy are often set in stone. A cinematic iteration of this theme is found in ZARDOZ where only an outsider can free the Eternals from the system they’ve built, which has become as much a prison as an oasis. In some ways, the story of Jesus Christ is perhaps the biggest example of someone stepping in to do what humanity cannot. It took a God-Man to complete the circle of meaningfully binding Heaven and Earth together with eternal love(and a good deal of fear of Hell). With Jesus having accomplished the impossible on behalf of mankind, people could more easily go about their ways(as the path to Salvation has been opened to them by Christ the Lord).
Granted, there’s a difference between doing what is necessary and what is above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty, which is what separates the mere soldier, brave as he may be, from the war hero. It’s the difference between survival and salvation. According to Christianity, you don’t need Jesus to survive in this world, but you need Him to be saved. What Celliers does near the end of the film could be deemed above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty both in the military and moral(or spiritual) sense, i.e. while his sacrifice ended up saving the life of a British officer, it may have saved a piece of Yonoi’s soul as well.
In his earlier life, Celliers, like Yonoi, had been preoccupied, even obsessed, with purity and perfection, being around the best kind of people in an ideal setting. This side of him emerged at the boarding school where, for the first time in his life, he was freed of the obligation as his brother’s keeper. You choose your peers but not your family members, and it just so happened that Jack Celliers had a deformed younger brother, someone he’s sentimentally attached to but who represents the opposite of what a superior boy like Jack naturally aspires to.
In a way, Celliers sees deeper than Yonoi because he’d once been where Yonoi is, albeit not so psychotically. So, when Celliers kisses Yonoi on the cheek(in an act as tender as defiant), it’s as if Celliers is finally able to forgive his younger self, one that is reflected in Yonoi. Celliers’ action evokes both Jesus and Judas. It’s an act of self-sacrifice by way of forgiveness and love of the enemy, but it’s also an act of betrayal, as Celliers the superior man is betraying another superior man or his natural class, though for compassion for humanity than thirty pieces of silver. It also carries sexual overtones. Even though Celliers isn’t a (crypto)homo like Yonoi, he does a ‘gay’ thing and kisses another man(rather atypical for an Anglo whose culture disdained physical intimacy so common among Greeks, Southern Italians, and Slavs known for hugging and kissing one another, even among the men), as if to whisper into Yonoi’s ear that he understands the heart of the matter.
Celliers finally attained a measure of inner peace by this act of atonement, though no one, with the possible exception of Lawrence, would have seen it as anything but a noble act. They see an innocent man carrying out a virtuous deed, not a guilty man making amends for his past sin. To them, he’s like a Christ figure, but to himself, he’s more like Peter overcome with guilt for having denied Jesus three times and in need of redemption.
Perhaps, the saddest part of all this is that his brother will never know of Celliers’ final thoughts and dreams, in which Celliers visits his younger brother(shown as a child) and apologizes. Indeed, what has especially been gnawing away at Celliers wasn’t merely his betrayal of his brother at the boarding school. It was his air of pretense that he knew nothing about it, thereby absolving himself of any responsibility and contrition. It was thus a double betrayal, of his brother and of himself. And his brother went along with the lie even though he suspected otherwise, and Celliers knew this. Thus, they swept it under the rug as if nothing untoward happened between them, but they both knew. Celliers never heard his brother sing again, and he took this as a silent reproach. In the following years, Jack was at once too proud and too ashamed to settle his account with his brother. Conceivably, worse than failure is the failure to apologize. Silence, as in Ingmar Bergman’s PERSONA(which might have had an influence on MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE), can be more harrowing than noise. Yonoi doesn’t make the same mistake. In his own way, he does ‘apologize’ and pay tribute to the dying Celliers(buried up to his neck in the dirt) by gesture and salute.
So often, what happens in the NOW is motivated by what happened THEN, i.e. biography is as much a guide as to human behavior as ethos or ideology is. We not only act on what we believe to be right but on what we believe to have done wrong, especially because we often don’t act on what we believe to be right due to compromise, cowardice, opportunism, or indifference. Thus, the moral quality of a man is relative, his goodness a matter of a glass being half full or half empty depending on one’s perspective and knowledge of biography. It’s like the motivations of Peter O’Toole’s characters in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and LORD JIM cannot be understood apart from the events of the past that haunt them.
Celliers plants a seed in Yonoi, with both spiritual and sexual connotations. Celliers’ nobility of heart affects Yonoi in some profound way, but the impact cannot be understood apart from Yonoi’s sensual attraction to Celliers bordering on worship. If Celliers looked like Danny DeVito, Don Knots, Chris Farley, or Curly(of the Three Stooges) and pulled off the same stunt, it wouldn’t have had the same effect. The power of Celliers’ goodness overwhelms Yonoi because it’s one with the power of his beauty(at least for those who believe Bowie to be beautiful). It suggests the strange relationship between aesthetics and morality, a dynamic that may not be fair but is true enough.
After all, we want to see the good-looking represent the good-hearted, which is why most movies have attractive people in the roles of heroes and the like. It’s why Jesus has been presented as a beautiful figure in countless paintings and sculptures. Even the horror of the Crucifixion is ennobled and poeticized through his beauty. The popularity of Cecil B. DeMille’s TEN COMMANDMENTS owes to the beautiful Charlton Heston in the role of Moses.
Given this dynamic, is morality serving beauty or beauty serving morality? In the case of Yukio Mishima as a young boy, the image of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows had a mostly aesthetic impact. Sebastian’s story was secondary or insignificant to his image of agony joined with ecstasy, an offering of beauty to the gods.
The Catholic Church long rested on beautiful images(and music) to justify and preserve the Faith(and to win over converts). Still, it’s been an uneasy formula as Jesus was no connoisseur of beauty(though He certainly was with words). He wasn’t a promoter of fashion shows or a patron of artists. He wore simple clothing and went among the sick, the poor, the wretched. Like Edith in ALL IN THE FAMILY, He looked through men’s exterior into their hearts, the true domain of redemption and salvation.
All those beautiful/noble representations of Jesus and the Disciples(except for Judas) and the casting of attractive people in the roles of the Good Guys in movies and TV shows, we’ve been led to feel, at least subconsciously, that Physiognomy-Is-Reality when, in fact, some of the most vapid & stupid, hollowest, and/or vilest people are on the attractive side, while some of the most kind-hearted people are ugly as sin. And looks don’t say much about talent because, if they did, Elton John would have been nothing.
The iconography of morality is useful but easily corrupting(if misused, which is often). In the case of fanatical National Socialists, beauty = morality, i.e. it was the righteous crusade for the beautiful race to wage war on the ugliness of the world, the antithesis of Aryan Beauty being the Ugly Semite. Homos, more than any other group, have a tendency to conflate beauty with the good, even though their vision of beauty can be degraded by narcissism. While narcissism means beauty in love with itself, even the ugly can be narcissistic, thereby demanding that its ugliness be deemed beautiful, similar to the ‘logic’ of the so-called Pronoun Wars where someone’s gender-delusion must be confirmed(and even celebrated) by all. Thus, narcissism can actually work AGAINST beauty because the ugly insists on drastic revisions to the beauty standard. Homos are known for both their sensitivity to beauty AND their outlandish narcissism, and it seems the latter eventually won out as what the ‘gay’ world now promotes is mostly ugly, hideous, and trashy, but as long as the egotism of every twerpy homo or obese tranny is satiated, it’s a matter of ‘pride’.
Negrolatry is also a corruption of the iconography of morality. We’re supposed to care more about blacks because of their ‘cool’ factor as rappers, athletes, studs, and ‘twerking’ ho’s, what with the black ass being the new ‘face’ of the West. Also, instilled into countless minds are the images of black suffering under slavery, the source of a giant moral fallacy. While it’s only natural to feel sympathy for the oppressed, the fact of oppression doesn’t ennoble a people. If I do terrible things to Jeffrey Dahmer or Jim Jones, it’d be wrong, but that wouldn’t turn either one into a saint. Being wronged doesn’t make you right; it just makes you wronged. But the West now believes that black suffering in the past turned them into eternal saints.
We don’t believe Germans and Japanese, who suffered a great deal in World War II, turned into eternal saints because of their ordeals and trial by fire. Rather, even as we sympathize with their suffering and plight, we understand the context in which those events took place. But, such contexts are prohibited in the narratives of black slavery in the United States and the Jewish Shoah; the only permissible narratives are of totally innocent, wonderful, and magical peoples having been violated by white people with an innate and unique penchant for evil.
Iconography of morality doesn’t always involve beauty. In the case of Jews, it’s a combination of the cults of Chosen-ness, genius(and knack for wit & humor, a kind of mental athleticism as exciting for some as black athleticism), and narrative of unique suffering the kind of which is said to be unparalleled in history. So, Jews massacring entire cities of Gazans is justified because Jews are ‘morally iconic’, whereas Palestinians are not. For Evangelical Zealots, it’s just the latest reiteration of the Biblical Narrative where the Jews, by virtue of their Chosen-ness, may go about wiping out entire tribes off the face of the Earth with God’s blessing. As for libertarians infatuated with wealth & power and HDB types enthralled with high IQ & genius, whatever Jews do is ‘right’ because Jews are the superior race.
It must be said that, for quite a long spell, the iconography of morality favored whites in the West(and even abroad). American Indians have recounted their youthful selves cheering on the ‘cowboys’ in Western movies against their own kind. They were raised in a country where whiteness was the face of pride and progress. Well, things sure changed fast to the point where they’re removing white monuments and replacing them with nonwhite(usually black) ones(or burning down churches in Canada on account of false reports that white supremacist Christian do-gooders massacred Indian students at schools and buried them, ROTFL).
Moral iconography can work both ways. It can morally favor or elevate your people on account of aesthetics, celebrity-value, or narrative, or do the very opposite. Whites, once favored by moral iconography as natural heroes, are now deemed the natural villains. There are, to be sure, some strongholds around the world where whiteness still carries worth(that whites themselves have rejected in the West). Take Hong Kong, which, for over a century, developed under the shadow of the Great White Man, thereby coming to identify itself as a yellow-wanna-be of the West, which may explain why Hong Cucks usually have a Chinese name and a Western name, e.g. Ding Ling Wong and Wellington Wong. ‘Jimmy’ Lai clings to the moral iconography where everything white/Western is superior, meaning that the West is Best and Hong Kong created by the West is second best, whereas Mainland China no good because it no suck up to Great White West.
When Celliers stands between Yonoi and his intended victim, Yonoi cannot make himself kill Celliers even though he could easily do so with blade or pistol. He has the physical means at his disposal, fully backed by the Japanese soldiers, but not the emotional wherewithal. Upon lifting his sword to strike Celliers, he finds his will shattered and falls into a fainting spell. It’s as if, in some deep recess of his psyche, the biggest taboo is causing harm to this god-man Celliers. Just like Lancelot’s love for Guinevere ultimately overrode everything, even his vows as a knight and Arthur’s right-hand man, in EXCALIBUR, the entirety of Yonoi’s elaborate system of beliefs and devotions collapse like a house of card when confronted with the possibility of killing Celliers. Not that Yonoi’s political and cultural convictions aren’t deep and sincere; they most certainly are, but even such they wither before his adoration of Celliers.
It’s sort of like the scene in THE APOSTLE where Billy Bob Thorton’s redneck character comes to raze the church of the ‘nigger-loving’ white preacher(Robert Duvall), but when a Bible is placed before his bulldozer, he just can’t make himself ‘move that book’. Of course, whereas the ‘conversion’ in THE APOSTLE is spiritual and moral, Yonoi’s fever-dream is mythic and romantic, but they have in common a sense of humility before the divine, be it of the soul or the body, which in paganism can be a sacred object of beauty.
Yonoi’s fainting fit is followed by Japanese soldiers piling on Celliers with a thrashing, if only to cover up the embarrassment of the situation, their proud commandant crumbling like a dainty little girl from too much sun. The beating recalls the one Celliers received from the local kids in defense of his younger brother in the flashback scene.
Colonel Hicksley, the man saved by Celliers from Yonoi’s blade, is the sort whose self-esteem rests on class and rank, maybe race too, as a kind of crutch. In face of certain death, however, the façade of soldierly pride evaporates and leaves him trembling like a child.
Both Yonoi and Hicksley, when faced with something more powerful than their self-conception as proud soldiers, be it worship of beauty or fear of death, lose their nerves and fall apart.(Hicksley isn’t a bad man but something of a fool, a man of limited imagination and empathy who seems to think the cosmos runs on British time.)
In contrast, there’s something almost Zen about Celliers in his resoluteness even in the face of death. In an earlier scene, he’d been subjected to a mock execution, one where he, unlike Hicksley, remained cool and calm in face of what he deemed to be sure death. Celliers isn’t fearless but possesses the will and courage of conviction to take action and suffer the consequences.
It’s a strange scene. Yonoi’s abject paralysis before Celliers seems at once sexual and spiritual in nature. To Yonoi the repressed homo, Celliers is the very embodiment of the perfect man. Killing Celliers would be like killing a god. Even a hunter would seriously think twice about killing a magnificent creature, one of the few remaining members of a rare species. Yonoi’s inner-crisis recalls the scene in EXCALIBUR where Uryens simply cannot bring himself to kill Arthur, as something within him succumbs to the power of Excalibur that has chosen Arthur as the rightful king, The One.
Yonoi senses a similar kind of power in Celliers. Even the kiss by Celliers is on the strange side, ambiguous in its compassion and mockery. On the one hand, Celliers, like Merlin in EXCALIBUR, is appealing to the humane side of Yonoi, as if to whisper, “I know you have a heart.” But in another way, it’s as if Celliers is insinuating, “I know you’re a repressed gay-boy and too in love with me to kill me.” The kiss is at once sexual, spiritual, and sardonic.
Following the incident, the disgraced Yonoi is to be assigned elsewhere while Celliers is buried up to his neck to die of exposure. Celliers’ plight, in the tradition of Christian saints, illustrates the heroism of the spirit overcoming the body’s defeat. In this, Celliers has something in common with Yonoi(and plenty of other Japanese) who also believe in the power of the spirit over the body, the difference being Yonoi’s (fighting)spirit drives the body beyond its limits whereas Celliers’ spirit offers relief to hearts broken in body. That said, Celliers’ own ordeal requires him to bear the unbearable, rather in the Japanese manner. In putting himself forth in defense of other men, he has in effect committed his own kind of ‘seppuku’. It becomes his suicide mission, a personal crucifixion. As his brother was stripped(thus exposing his hunchback) and encircled at the boarding school for ritual hazing that turns into abject humiliation, Celliers may feel a certain spiritual unity with him in undergoing a similar ordeal. A similar psychology to what happens in THE VANISHING(by George Sluizer) when a man chooses the fate of his abducted and murdered lover out of deep-seated sense of guilt.
Paradoxically, what may provide his mind a measure of peace is what had been tormenting him all these years, the guilt over his brother. It may be less hurtful for a guilty man to face punishment even if for a crime he isn’t guilty of. A part of his psyche may have always wanted to pay the price somehow. It’s like the Sydney Carton’s sacrifice in A TALE OF TWO CITIES by Charles Dickens: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.” For Carton, death is a way to ennoble an ignoble life.
The ‘politics’ of family has always been thorny, especially for those possessed of special talent and/or inclined toward ambition. Politics, as most people understand it, is about people of shared values, common interests, peer abilities, and/or agendas coming together to effect or prevent change. Even in a tyranny where options are limited, politics still has an eye for talent as no order can survive for long without identifying and recruiting the relatively rare pool of talent.
In this sense, politics is cold and pragmatic, dictated by considerations of power and interests. It comes with many partners but few friends as deep emotional bonds obstruct the flow of business. It’s one where winners must abandon losers without second thought, one where enemies today can be allies tomorrow.
This political(and the related professional) mentality is complicated by the sentimentality of family attachments. One chooses one’s politics but not one’s family. Even the most ardent Nazi fanatic had to think twice about betraying his family members. Even the most crazed Red Guard was surely torn up about radical mobs beating up his parents. What comes to haunt Michael Corleone most is his ‘political’ decision to take out his brother Fredo. A family member is easily removed from the world but not so easily from the heart.
It has been a great source of tension at the heart of Jewishness, especially as more than most groups, Jews regard one another as being part of one big family with the deepest roots and of a shared Covenant. Moses, though raised as an Egyptian, throws in his lot with his tribal family.
As so many Jews in the modern world turned to secular ideologies, some of them profoundly at odds with Judaism and Jewishness, there was always the nagging reminder of betrayal. Should a Jewish Socialist be Jewish First or Socialist First? Although one isn’t as sentimental about members of one’s race or ethnicity, most of whom are strangers, than about members of one’s family, a strong ethno-consciousness can make for an overwhelming sense of bond, passionate if not sentimental, that approximates the psychology of family.
Christians of all stripes experience a tension similar to that of the Jews. Should a White Christian be white first or Christian first? However, for a white Christian, the choices may be clear-cut. As a Christian Firster, he can be a universalist; and as a White Firster, he can be a particularist. It is by rejecting his universal spirituality that a white person puts his race first.
In contrast, it’s the spirituality that compels the Jew to favor his own race over others. And, even if a Jew rejects his spirituality, he may still identify as a Jew because Jewishness is also an ethnic category.
The Family Politics Complex haunts Jack Celliers who, given what he is and what he prefers, would never have chosen to be around someone like his hunchback brother. Easily recognizable as ‘one of the best’, he would have naturally restricted his social relations and attachments to others like himself, as indeed he does to great success at the boarding school. Had he not grown up with a deformed brother, he would still have been a decent person, someone with natural good-will for humanity in general. But he would have had no sentimental attachment to someone like his brother, thus not burdened by the guilt for not having interceded on behalf of someone in trouble.
Perhaps, the prevalence of smaller families and effective reduction of children born with serious birth defects via abortion have made it less likely for people to be troubled by the Family Politics Complex. One exception is with homosexuals who continued to be born in the same percentage. Even conservative families, given their sentimental attachment to the homo kids, couldn’t so easily tell themselves, “God Hates Fags”. It could be that one of the reasons for the Globo-Homo agenda of reaching kids at the earliest possible age to turn them ‘gender-fluid’ is to create sentimental bonds between more families and their ‘gay’ kids.
There are two kinds of triumph, by victory and by defeat. Warriors triumph by physical victory, whereas saints do so spiritually, even or especially in physical defeat. The body perishes, but the soul presumably lasts forever. And whereas physical victory, in war or sports, always entails winners and losers, spiritual victory allows for all to win and share in the victory as humanity united in faith.
In a sense, Celliers loses the battle but wins the war, at least spiritually with Yonoi and his past self. Yonoi’s gods(of beauty and force) fall before Celliers’ God(of love and forgiveness). And Celliers finally has a chance to purge his own demons. While dying, he imagines reuniting with his brother for one last time.
As for Yonoi, in the middle of the night before his departure, he visits the execution ground to pay respect to a near-dead Celliers and snips off a few locks of hair and then bows/salutes him before leaving. For all the humiliation and disgrace resulting from the incident, Yonoi seems almost grateful, finally at peace with that part of himself that had never known calm despite the self-discipline and meditation. Celliers brought about the catharsis that Yonoi couldn’t have had on his own or among his own kind.
Yet, despite this leap in consciousness beyond his iron-clad precepts, Yonoi’s reaction is powerful precisely because Celliers’ action could be interpreted within the context of Japanese values. Earlier, Yonoi had expected Lawrence to ‘die for me(Yonoi)’, something the latter refused to do. As Lawrence said, if he must die, he will die but not for Yonoi. Japanese culture, steeped in themes of death and sacrifice, demands and appreciates the willing self-sacrifice of one for another. Even though Celliers did it for his side(and himself for personal reasons), Yonoi could spin a myth that, at last, his god-man came to him, graced him, and transformed him. Celliers cared for him and his soul. He could believe Celliers ‘died for me’.
Yonoi’s relation to Celliers is somewhat akin to that between Hart and Professor Kingsfield in PAPER CHASE. Kingsfield feels next to nothing for his students, but Hart is sure there’s something going on between them, a kind of furtive ‘spiritual’ back-and-forth between a student who idolizes the Law and the scholar who embodies its very essence. However, whereas Kingsfield really cares little if anything for Hart(or any student), Celliers at the very least acts on his knowledge of the effect he has on Yonoi. He plays the mind game for real.
Later, with tables turned with Japan’s defeat, we learn from Lawrence’s meeting with Hara(in a prison cell where he awaits execution on the following day) that Yonoi, prior to his execution for war crimes, had requested Lawrence to take Celliers’ lock of hair to a shrine in Yonoi’s village.
In contrast to the intelligent, learned, and sophisticated figures of Lawrence, Celliers, and Yonoi, Sergeant Hara(Takeshi Kitano)comes across as a brute and simpleton, a lout with the saving grace of childlike camaraderie. A rather volatile fellow, he can switch from affability to brutality at the drop of a hat. He could be shooting the breeze with Lawrence in one moment, only to twack him with a wooden sword in the next.
For all his boorish antics and beast-like demeanor, however, he can also be quite devious and cunning. Like a cat toying with a mouse, he knows how to keep the game going, alternately playing hard and easy. He’s also adept at the game of deference, e.g. Yonoi has the authority, but Hara knows the angles.
In the opening scene, he viciously torments ‘Kanemoto’, the Korean soldier accused of a (homo)sexual indiscretion with a Dutch prisoner. He then brutally strikes Lawrence with a bamboo rod/sword for yelling out to Captain Yonoi to come and put an end to Hara’s twisted game. Thus, we are first acquainted with Yonoi and his dual nature.
Yonoi casts a contemptuous look upon ‘Kanemoto’ for dishonoring himself(which later becomes ironic as he himself develops a sexual fascination for a Western soldier, namely Celliers) and is clearly not averse to Hara’s punishment per se.
However, Yonoi the honorable and upright officer will not tolerate the unruly and sadistic manner in which Hara has handled the occasion. He orders a halt to the coerced seppuku, and the Korean guard’s death is suspended until a proper
‘ceremony’ could be arranged.
As mentioned earlier, Yonoi’s manner of punishment for ‘Kanemoto’, though certainly more formal and dignified than Hara’s ruffian approach, is driven by motives that aren’t all that different from Hara’s. Just as yellow Hara sought to impress white Lawrence, yellow Yonoi wishes to impress white Celliers.
Yonoi, by the standards of his martial culture, could be deemed conscientious, but his concept of justice is a matter of form and propriety than of right or wrong. Doing something in the right manner is more important than doing the right thing.
When a radio is discovered in the P.O.W camp, Yonoi feels someone must be punished for the violation, and he chooses Lawrence to take the fall regardless of his innocence or guilt. Lawrence, bewildered, asks, “I’m to die to preserve your sense of order?” and Yonoi answers “You must die for me.” It’s not so much that Yonoi wants to make an example of someone as a warning to others, a common political ploy in any system — consider the plight of those involved in Charlottesville and 1/6 ‘insurrection’, whereas BLM thugs and Antifa miscreants routinely got off with light sentences or weren’t arrested at all. What matters to Yonoi is not so much the facts but the spirit of the matter, a need to reestablish a sense of harmony. It is right in his mind because, if the shoe were on the other foot and it was he who had to sacrifice himself, he would do so without a second thought. In his mind, the P.O.W.s have disgraced themselves by violating the trust between themselves and the Japanese. To redeem and restore the collective honor of the men on both sides, someone, even if innocent, must bear the burden. For all the similarities with Jesus’s sacrifice on behalf of mankind, the differences are more striking as Jesus died for the sins of others so that they could be free as individuals, whereas the individual is completely subordinate to the whole in Yonoi’s conception of justice.
That said, Yonoi’s ideas may not be so alien in today’s ‘woke’ climate whereby white people must collectively accept their punishment via ‘affirmative action’ and myriad other policies as means to appease the gods of ‘historical justice’. This applies not only to white Americans whose ancestors may have owned slaves but to ALL whites, even those from places like Poland and Finland. The rise of PC and its worse variant ‘wokeness'(as forms of secular idolatry) has totally disconnected what remains of the Left from facts, reason, and logic. (Not that the establishment right is much better as, instead of offering an alternative accelerator to advance society towards a rightful destination, it only serves as a brake to wherever society is being driven to by Jewish supremacists and their so-called ‘progressive’ minions.)
Though Yonoi comes across as a bit unhinged(to say the least), he is morally consistent to the extent that he would demand no less(if anything, even more) of himself and his men under similar circumstances. Such obligations were deemed par for the course in the Japanese Way. The clan or community mattered most, not only in terms of survival and security but in respect and reputation.
For example, to offset a scandal or crisis, someone might be served up or serve himself up as a scapegoat as a face-saving gesture for the clan or, in the modern context, the corporation. (Something faintly similar existed among the Sicilians if we take Mario Puzo as our guide.)
In turn, the family of the willing scapegoat would be taken care of, and, more importantly for the larger community, everyone could go on as if the problem has been resolved to satisfaction, something to be swept under the tatami.
To the extent that the individual didn’t factor into the equation in traditional Japan, the guilt of one, especially if prominent, could be shared by all in the clan or community. So, even if YOU as an individual didn’t commit the transgression, being part of the social unit made you responsible as well, not least because morality in such a system was less a matter of individual conscience and free will than the product of social pressures. Because a man’s character in a shame culture(as opposed to a guilt culture) is perceived to be molded by those around him, his personal failure becomes the communal failure to shape him into a proper member of society.
Such attitudes are especially pronounced in martial cultures, and the centrality of the samurai caste likely had a profound impact on all segments of Japanese society, more so than in other East Asian cultures that were, though also conformist and consensus-oriented, not so ‘anal’ and obsessed with honor, even to the point of developing a death cult as a social norm.
Shame culture, more than guilt culture, is central to maintaining order in the military of any country. In FULL METAL JACKET(directed by Stanley Kubrick), the burden of the repeated failings of ‘Gomer Pyle’ is placed on the shoulders of all the soldiers. And in the opening scene of PATTON, the famed general says there’s no such a thing as ‘individualism’ in the military.
However Yonoi may feel about the situation, it’s an absolute affront to Lawrence’s sense of decency, or just plain sanity. Lawrence may understand the Japanese mind more than most, but in no shape or form is he willing to submit to Yonoi’s sense of order and die for a lie. They can kill him, but he will not play their game.
He is duly slated for execution and locked in a prison cell next to that of Celliers who’s detained for another reason, passing out stolen food to the prisoners when Yonoi had specifically ordered a fast in the honor of ‘Kanemoto’.
With matters having come to such a boil, what with Yonoi acting so irrationally(despite his modern sensibility), Celliers being so defiant(bordering on the reckless), and even the mild-mannered Lawrence losing his cool, one would think that the gruff simpleton Hara would be the last person to make a difference, yet he becomes one of the crucial figures in the film, illustrative of the themes of Christian humanism that, to have any value, must resonate with the heart of the common man.
In terms of class, education, and culture, Celliers, Lawrence, and Yonoi are clearly superior to Hara, who comes across as a hick who barely learned how to read and write and got his one-chord mind twisted with highfalutin ideas about national pride and honor beyond his comprehension, a case of ‘little knowledge is dangerous’.
His practice of the seppuku ritual involving ‘Kanemoto’ seems like a child’s game, or a monkey’s unthinking imitation of human behavior. He could be one of the gorillas in THE PLANET OF THE APES.
Celliers and Yonoi are obviously men of superior qualities. And, Lawrence is that rare breed, naturally decent and good-hearted, curious and empathetic, but also full of strength and courage. His sense of fairness and forgiveness, the willingness to let bygones be bygones, emanates from toughness than weakness. For all he had to bear under the petty and erratic tyranny of Hara, he looked upon the latter as an adult would upon a child or a beast, a creature that for all its volatility and cruelty is ‘innocent’ in its ignorance.
Even without or against a superiorist ideology, the mere presence of superiority has a way of making people unwittingly belie their humanist or egalitarian principles. We sense this in Lawrence when he rationalizes Celliers’ violation of Yonoi’s decree of ‘gyo’ or spiritual fasting(by passing out stolen food to the P.O.W.s) when, earlier, he’d clearly insisted that everyone must comply with Yonoi’s orders. Why the sudden change of heart, why no harsh words for Celliers for violating the trust and putting everyone at risk? Why can’t Lawrence raise his voice with Celliers in the way he did with Hicksley? Most likely, Lawrence is so taken with the majestic Celliers and craves his approval that he’s blind to his own inconsistencies on policy. Yonoi is more impressive than Hicksley, but Celliers is more impressive than Yonoi and Hicksley put together.
It’s as if Lawrence intuits Celliers as above the law of ordinary men, thereby deserving to live by his own rules. In a way, Celliers seeks redemption and escape from such fawning indulgences that have followed him all his life, fostering a mindset of privilege that led him to betray his brother. He’s different but wants to be cured of this difference(that has set him apart favorably from the rest, even getting preferential treatment from a Japanese captain), which however is attainable only by being different, which culminates in his final extraordinary act that no one else would have dared or even conceived of.
The average person isn’t like Celliers, Yonoi, or Lawrence. His basic makeup is closer to Hara’s(or Jake LaMotta’s in RAGING BULL), though less prone to violence. On that note, Hara’s transformation, if only for a day in a state of inebriation, is the key to the story’s moral theme. That a simpleminded brute like Hara can undergo a change of heart and exhibit something like grace and affection, in effect saving Lawrence’s life at the last moment, lends credence to the message of Christian humanism.
Jesus on the cross was perched between two common criminals, one who mocked him and one who defended Him, and Hara’s character reflects both men in its vacillating brutality and sentimentality.
Given the reality of war and the general situation, there wasn’t much that Hara could have done(even if he had undergone a total change of heart) but, still, the little that he managed lent a new lease on Lawrence’s life. It’s of a piece with Kurosawa’s IKIRU where a dying man cannot hope to change the system, let alone save the world, but could still make a difference, which however small, means everything to the affected. And what Hara did means everything to Lawrence. Later, there isn’t much Lawrence can do for Hara, now a prisoner awaiting execution. Again, the larger reality, the politics of the post-war situation, leaves Lawrence no choice but to go along with the decision of the higher-ups. Still, the gesture of his visit to Hara is the least he could have done, and it means everything to Hara.
A key difference between the more traditionalist-conventionalist position of Kurosawa and the modernist perspective of Oshima is in their approach to moral issues. For all the ironies in Kurosawa’s works, they move toward a summation of values, a moral statement, which some would characterize as ‘didactic’ with all its negative connotations, whereas Oshima’s approach, at least when not stridently and rather stupidly ‘radical’, along with those of Shohei Imamura and Hiroshi Teshigahara of the modernist camp, favors moral perceptions(as opposed to ‘statements’) that ultimately leave it up to each viewer to piece together the shards of contrasting ‘truths’ into an ‘existential’ meaning within the limits of one’s own knowledge, experience, and understanding.
Why the change of heart in Hara? Was he from a Christian minority community, the influence of which he’d cast aside as a military man but graced him just enough and in time to spare Lawrence whom he grudgingly came to like? Or did he become a bit more reflective, if not guilt-ridden, after ‘Kanemoto’ died horribly as the result of what he’d instigated?
Whether it’s closer to sentimentality or crude morality is anyone’s guess. Even though Hara’s behavior is fueled by gut instinct(or whatever he feels in the moment), he’s not entirely heartless nor humorless(though, of course, humor could make cruelty even crueler). He’s beastly, but then even beasts are surprisingly capable of gentleness in their childlike nature.
Consider the videos of monstrous predators that, upon noticing a familiar face, act like the sweetest child. Lawrence is Hara’s physical ‘slave’ but his mental ‘master’. Hara made an extra effort to spare Lawrence, something he might not have done for someone else. Thus, one can argue it was more affection(akin to animal emotions) than true morality, which doesn’t play favorites based on personal feelings, but then, feelings are the basis of morality, and without the capacity to feel for a man, there’s no hope of feeling for mankind as a whole. This can also be said of Celliers whose profound moral sense is partly an outgrowth of his feelings for one person, his brother.
The scene where Hara chants Buddhist prayers for the edification of the deceased’s soul(of the adjutant/chauffeur who made an attempt on Celliers’ life and then committed harakiri) is rather instructive. (Hara’s cursory knowledge of Buddhist rituals anticipates his surprising role as ‘Father Christmas’ who saves Lawrence from execution. Whether Buddhist or Christian, there is meaning and hope for mankind beyond the strictures of culture.)
Everyone(unless totally psycho) is moral within his cultural and personal boundaries, and to this extent, we cannot begrudge Yonoi and Hara their sincerity. Yonoi isn’t merely toying with Lawrence, and Hara’s prayers for the dead man are genuine enough(despite the mercenary aspect of procuring a pension for the deceased’s family).
That said, higher morality must rise above culture and operate on universal principles of verifiable truth, basic sense of rights, individual liberty & conscience, and mutual understanding, which in and of themselves are problematic because, in order to create such an order of ‘human rights’, a degree of imperialism, both military and ideological, is often necessary in order to steer more peoples into its system via coerced consensus; if pushed too hard, it leads to deracination not only of the subject peoples but of the enlightened imperialists as a sense of mutuality beyond culture is essential to their shared understanding, or the lingua franca of ‘rights’; the Anglo and Anglo-American West, as the premier world power, did much to culturally dilute themselves in order to dilute the cultures of others in the creation of a global system based on ‘liberal values’, ‘human rights’, and ‘democracy’, but this only gave an opening to the vampiric Jewish Supremacists who took advantage of the weakened anemic identities among the goyim to assert their own identity and interests as the ‘universal’ priorities of the West, which turned out to be contradictory because, far from demanding that Jews be like everyone else, it applied pressure on all non-Jewish peoples to universally subject themselves to Jewish authority and agendas; it explains why the current West is so confused, hypocritical, demented, and decrepit in what remains of its ideology, now closer to idolatry; the current ideology is not about universal rights for all but for universal goy subjugation to Jews; just ask the Palestinians and white people, though the difference is that most Palestinians know the enemy & its hypocrisies and actively resist, whereas most whites are still stuck in philosemitic cuck mode of sucking up to Jews as their rightful masters, i.e. even as many whites resist the agenda pushed by Jews, they virtually worship Jews as the wisest and most sacred people on Earth, or “Mayorkas’ agenda is bad, but Mayorkas’ identity is the ‘awesomest’ thing in the universe”).
From the modern and Western(as well as just plain sane) perspective, Yonoi and Hara, for all their sincerity, are trying to justify injustice than truly being just. On some gut level, Hara seemed to sense this, although alcohol helped some, and it may explain why he spared Lawrence’s life. Hara justifies his rash-seeming decision to Yonoi on account that the real culprits, Chinese prisoners, were found out and duly executed, presumably restoring the much needed honor and order to the camp.
One suspects that Hara, in his intervention on behalf of Lawrence, may have scapegoated other prisoners and had them killed instead. (As China was a secondary power at best in the war, the fate of its prisoners was of far less consequence than that of Western prisoners despite both the Japanese and Chinese being East Asian. Even today, much of the non-West is more anxious about punishing Western, especially Jewish, individuals than people of their own race and/or culture. In the mid-1990s, when a white guy, Michael Fay, and two Asian guys were arrested for vandalism in Singapore, the Asian boys got six lashes while the white guy got only four.)
If indeed Hara railroaded Chinese prisoners to have Lawrence spared, humaneness came by way of inhumaneness. It says something about the human condition whereby the choices are often not between good and bad but between bad and bad(or worse) — in FIRES ON THE PLAIN(directed by Kon Ichikawa), the welcome procurement of meat turns out to be the result of cannibalism. For whatever reason, personal, cultural, and/or racial, Hara deemed Lawrence more worthy of life than the Chinese prisoners. Lawrence, an astute and perceptive individual, surely suspected as much, but he, beaten and weary, is in no condition to play saint. In this rotten world filled with madness and treachery, he will take any gesture of humanity, however compromised it may be.
In his act of kindness toward Lawrence, Hara is more Santa Claus or Father Christmas(as he jokingly refers to himself) than any kind of Christ figure, an idea too complex and demanding for him to grasp. As with most people, even lifelong Christians, Hara’s understanding of Christianity is crude and childlike. Unlike a true Christlike figure, Hara isn’t the type to sacrifice his own life for others(except, of course, for the Emperor, the utmost figure of authority in Japan), but he has a bit of what is known as the ‘better angels of our nature’, sometimes when least expected. Every heart is like a series of locks, a few of which are unlocked in Hara’s heart by a combination of factors, some more discernible than others.
At the very least, it’s worth noting that his ‘good deed’ was done on his own initiative, no less than the attempt on Celliers’ life by Yonoi’s adjutant/chauffeur. Hara also ‘disobeyed’ out of ‘higher loyalty’, albeit in service to something other than the authority of his immediate superior, Yonoi. What felt right at the gut level seeped into his heart, compelling him to restore his own sense of ‘order’ by saving a good man. Although alcohol fueled his boldness, there had to have been a goodness trying to get out.
The next day, as Hara explains his decision to Yonoi who is angry(but also a bit relieved given his respect for Lawrence), he states his willingness to suffer the consequences, which could even mean death. Yonoi decides to put the matter to rest as he has far graver matters to deal with. He’s received an order to deliver prisoners as forced laborers to build an air strip.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE shows how different peoples and cultures interact in a constant state of tension but also in discovery of common ground, and moreover, illuminations of certain truths availed only in clash with the incorrigible Other, just like any hero/protagonist realizes something of the world, the deeper truth, and his own self in conflict with the villain/antagonist. The Other serves as mirror and maze, the navigation through which reveals the surprising links, as well as the unbridgeable gaps, between the two sides.
Lawrence had attained a good deal of knowledge as a member of a powerful civilization, indeed a world empire, and had learned a thing or two about the Japanese as an amicable visitor in peacetime, but it was in the brutal realities of war and in the nightmarish episodes and the rare but miraculous moments in the life-and-death struggle between the two cultures that he found a deeper understanding of his true strengths as well as his limitations and weakness.
To an extent, every culture is an island unto itself and every individual is an island unto himself. But in a world where the world is becoming smaller due to travel, commerce, and communication(and where distinctions between private space and public sphere are dissolving due to social networking that not only brings the world to the bedroom but projects the bedroom out to the world) and where the concept of ‘human rights’ is oft-invoked in the name of mutual respect among all peoples, by which means could greater understanding be fostered around the world?
The answer from the radical left was communism, which isn’t the message of MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE.
There was imperialism, increasingly ‘enlightened’ and ‘aspirational'(even ‘liberational’) in its capitalist manifestation, and it no doubt played a giant role in creating entirely novel global systems, especially in the Americas where various races(mainly whites and blacks in the US; and whites, indigenous browns, mestizos, and blacks in Latin America) were bound together, forcibly or voluntarily, under Christian values and Western ideals of human rights and freedom.
The Muslims often employed war and conquest to spread the faith in pursuit of their dream of a one world community. And, in their own ways, the British and French empires regarded their expanding global domination as an epic crusade to spread the leading edge of civilization to the rest of the world, aka the White Man’s Burden.
In a way, the moral vision of MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, at least that of the author of the source novel THE SEED AND THE SOWER, might be called post-imperialist reform-humanism. ‘Post-imperialist’ implies something different from ‘anti-imperialist’. Whereas the anti-imperialist stance opposes or resists imperialism simply as a great injustice or evil, post-imperialist discourse could accept imperialism as a necessary historical process through which something better could arise; in other words, imperialism eventually had to go, but it did transform the world and brought all of humanity to the point from which it could advance further as one. It’s somewhat similar to classic Marxism that regarded capitalism as a necessary stage in the development of socialism to be followed by communism. Thus, the Marxist version of communism is more post-capitalist than anti-capitalist.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, in showing the positive aspects of British values and their impact on Hara and Yonoi, isn’t exactly anti-imperialist. Indeed, as a story of the clash of imperialisms, the British come off better than the Japanese. Via the positive influence of Western Christian-Humanism on Hara and Yonoi, the story obliquely justifies Western hegemony, at least in part. Of course, the irony is that the imperialists themselves are ‘colonized’ by the new imperialism, the short-lived Empire of Japan, complicating matters further still(like in THE PLANET OF THE APES).
Whether the film is an improvement on the novel is a matter of opinion. One thing for sure, in combining the elements of three separate narratives, forming composites of certain characters, and interweaving characters in different settings into a single setting, the film resulted in a storyline and dramatic tensions far more potent than anything in the novel. The changes are, at the very least, well-warranted in the film. There is also the incomparable musical score and the artful cinematography that matches and even outdoes the poetic prose of Van der Post.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is set in a time when the old paradigms were dissolving, bringing to near-completion the processes unleashed by World War I, though one wonders how History would have played out if the Axis Powers had won(or at the very least, managed to survive as great powers).
World War II, the decisive event of the mid-century, shaped into a titanic struggle between established empires and aspiring empires. Japan’s ambitions in Manchuria led to a wider war with China, followed by the U.S. oil and iron embargo, whereupon Japan banked its future on its hegemony over most of Asia & the Eastern Pacific, effectively expelling the West from the East. And at some point, Hitler decided that Germany’s future as a great power could be guaranteed only through a massive land-grab in the East(and all the horrors it would entail).
World War II is remembered as the ‘Good War’ because the bad guys were very bad indeed, but it set the stage for the fall of European Empires as well, with the fate of the world caught between the rivalry between two Neo-Napoleonic empires claiming to be anti-imperialist(in defense of democracy or socialism) in contrast to the European and Japanese empires, the glory and pride of which were said to have brazenly rested on domination and subjugation. Indeed, it was customary for the US of the Cold War era to refer to itself(and even the Soviet Union) as a superpower than an empire.
Even though Great Britain played a key role in defeating the Evil Nazis, the occupiers of France for most of the war, it wasn’t lost on anyone in the aftermath that the British and the French were also imperialists denying national independence and sovereignty to their subject peoples. In the eyes of the anti-imperialists, what the French had been under German occupation, Vietnamese and Algerians were under French colonization.
Soon enough, the ripple effects of World War II doomed Imperial Europe as a whole, and if anything, Western Europe re-emerged on the world stage as an assembly of vassals of the US empire/superpower. The loss of sovereignty and the accompanying humiliation were downplayed on the rationale that the alternatives were far worse: Imperial German hegemony or Soviet Iron Curtain for all of Europe. As it’s been said, the purpose of NATO was to keep Germany down and to keep Russia out.
Today, with a totally deracinated Germany, post-communist Russia, post-national Europe, and Jewish-dominated US, what is NATO about? To keep Europe weak, Russia and Germany apart(economically), and whites in the US and EU(and Canada and Australia) servile to Zion, Sodom, & Wakanda.
The World War II Narrative increasingly became counterproductive to Europe. Not only was Germany, the heart of Europe, the main instigator of the horrors that destroyed up to 50 million lives, but most European nations either allied with or surrendered to Germany, or remained neutral(and made handsome profits doing business with the ‘most evil regime of all time’, like Sweden for example). And many actively collaborated in the destruction of Jewry or didn’t lift a finger to save them.
Poles were something of an exception, but as much of the resistance came from the ‘Anti-Semitic’ Right, the heroism was overlooked by the post-war Liberal Europe and the Polish communists(who actually hunted down the remnants of the Resistance that turned out to be as opposed to the Soviets as to the Nazis). Poland also became synonymous with the Holocaust for many(unfairly to be sure) because the most notorious Nazi camps happened to be there. For the Jews who gained near-total dominance of the Western media, the revulsion of Polish ‘antisemitism’ usually trumped recognition of Polish heroism against the Nazis. Jews think, sure, the Poles resisted the Germans more than most Europeans, but, and it’s a big BUT, they were just another bunch of Anti-Semites who, for the most part, didn’t care what happened to the Jews.
And of course, it wasn’t long before the ennobling aspects of the World War II narrative were turned against Europe itself. The nobility of the French Resistance was turned on its head by accusations against the French acting like Nazis in Vietnam and especially Algeria. (Something similar is happening to Jewish Power in our time as much of the world is condemning Israel for acting like the Nazis of old against the Palestinians. Holocaust Narrative, for so long a priceless moral capital for the Jews, is showing signs of becoming a liability, i.e. “How could the people who suffered so horribly under the Nazis act like the Nazis against the helpless Palestinians?”)
The U.K. was the one untarnished(though not for long) nation that emerged from the war as a clear victor, but its wealth had been spent and its role much diminished on the world stage. Also, the moral framework constructed in the aftermath of World War II made old-style empires less tenable. Only the paradoxical Cold War concoction of the empire-against-empire(US and USSR) was doable.
Furthermore, World War II transformed the Soviet Union from a mostly isolated European backwater in the early stages of industrialization(or ‘building socialism’) into the other superpower, a new hegemon in the battle of hearts and minds in the Third World. For the first time, the non-white peoples, still under European domination after the war, had a Great Power Champion in their struggles for independence, effectively pressuring the US to side with the Third World against the European colonizers lest it be accused by the Soviet Union of aiding and abetting Evil Imperialism.
America and Russia had the most to gain from the World War II narrative(other than Jews, of course, who turned the Holocaust into a universal religion of sorts), but dig a little deeper and things get complicated. There was the pact between Stalin and Hitler in the dismantling of Poland and the Katyn massacre, eventually established as a Soviet war crime.
Also, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the result of the collapse of Germany hegemony in World War II, turned out to be a double-edged sword. The Soviets expanded their sphere of influence but their sphere of resentment as well. The Soviet Union, which supported anti-imperialist causes around the world, ruled an empire of its own over peoples who regarded Russians as occupiers and worse. Granted, Eastern Europeans come off better in some ways than Western Europeans because their lack of sovereignty during the Cold War was the result of totalitarian tyranny, whereas their Western counterparts willingly signed away their political independence to the Americans by ‘liberal democratic’ processes. Likewise, white Americans surrendered their identity, territoriality, pride, dignity, and sanity to the Jews in one of the freest countries in the world, which goes to show that a free people can be led to slavery just the same.
With the completion of Jewish supremacist control over the US, World War II came to be remembered less as a great victory for white Christian America(against neo-pagan Krauts and feudal Japs) than a great tragedy for the Holy Jews in the unprecedented scale of the Holocaust as the final culmination of the centuries of European ‘antisemitism’, most of which came to fruition under Christian rule.
When Christian organizations increasingly purged their sermons and narratives of the slightest traces of ‘antisemitism’ in the postwar climate, especially in the context of Nazi evils, it seemed less an expression of sincere moral/spiritual courage than a craven attempt to appease the Jews or to whitewash Christianity’s long history of anti-Jewishness(as the religion is inconceivable without its hostile stance toward Judaism); Philo-Semitic Christians will often say stuff like, “The Nazis were pagans, atheists, and/or socialist-statists, and THAT is why they were anti-Jewish, whereas true Christians love and honor Jews.” ROTFL. Of course, Jews don’t buy it, which is why they pull every trick to further subvert and pervert Christianity into nothingness or a cult-worship of Jews, homos, and Negroes than of Jesus and His Father.
And while conservatives pretend(or ‘cope’) that the Holocaust Museum in D.C. is a testament to America’s goodness in the struggle against Evil Nazism, it actually serves as a condemnation of the entire West and a moral blackmail against America to do the bidding of Zion. It places Jews atop the pedestal while forcing white goyim into the morally defensive position, i.e. Jews, by the virtue of being the Holy Holocaust people, may accuse and judge, whereas whites must always prove their innocence or demonstrate their redemptive potential(like the Joseph K character in THE TRIAL BY Franz Kafka). No wonder the lone superpower with the biggest Holocaust Museum in the world is aiding and abetting the ‘Gaza Genocide’ carried out by Jewish Supremacists who’re surely as deranged as the Nazi Germans.
As for Asia and the Pacific, World War II ended on a sour note. Even though the Japanese Empire was demolished to the delight of many around the world, Asians and Americans alike, the US certainly committed terrible war crimes in its fire-bombings and dropping of the atomic bombs on civilian centers. The collapse of the Japanese in China, followed by a similar fate for the KMT, led to the communist takeover, adding fuel to Cold War tensions between the core Asian land-mass and the peripheries(especially Japan, Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and later Indonesia) and the Pacific dominated by the US. In other words, there was no conclusive ending to the conflict, which mutated into new ones.
Then, it’s fitting that the coda of MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is sad and muted. At best, the better guys beat the worse guys than the good guys beat the bad guys. Even so, there’s a small victory for Celliers and Lawrence. Celliers’ final act planted a seed in Yonoi’s heart, and Lawrence’s decency did affect Hara in some small but meaningful way. Despite the cultural barriers between Yonoi/Hara and Celliers/Lawrence, the courage and scruples of the latter got through to the former(in the spirit of true Christianity where the weaker party may spiritually conquer the stronger party). The moral principles of Celliers and Hara have a universal import and transcend the merely cultural, like those of Yonoi and Hara.
All cultures have their rules of right-and-wrong but based on different foundations of justice. Celliers and Lawrence belong to an order where the highest good is a matter of personal conscience based on universal principles or deeply held convictions(like the Christian sprinter in THE CHARIOTS OF FIRE), whereas Yonoi and Hara belong to one where unwavering obedience and loyalty are the iron rules, the violation of which may be redeemed only through the demonstration of one’s purity of intentions by dramatic means, like ritual suicide.
So whatever concept of moral right and wrong may have existed in Japanese culture, it was inseparable from one’s loyalty to the master and devotion to codes of honor & reputation manifested in their proper forms. It wasn’t enough to do right but to do right rightly, or what might be called the poetics of virtue, which went a step further than mere good manners.
To an extent, it was a perversion of the Buddhist concept of Zen, the moral or spiritual content of which had been substituted with the nihilism of style and form, i.e. the ideal of spiritual detachment from the illusory world turned into emotional detachment from one’s duties, which could be the ruthless mowing down of people with a samurai sword.
Consider seppuku, which, though grotesque in actuality, became ‘dignified’ into a poetic ritual to be performed with grace(as if oblivious to what must be unbearable pain), like flower-arranging but with one’s innards. Or, beauty and honor made ‘zen’ to the brutality and horror.
If a samurai was ordered to kill, he ideally did so not only unquestioningly but properly, not as a fanatic or a boor(with the physical and emotional messiness that such implied) but akin to a craftsman, a professional who has mastered his ‘art’. Whatever ideas or loyalties he may espouse, it was not for him to think or decide but merely to perform his duties and orders without passion, which, of course, wasn’t always the case given human nature.
It sort of explains Heinrich Himmler’s fascination with the samurai caste. Despite its ideological fanaticism, the Nazi SS was all the more chilling for its cold methodology. It took to carnage like workers in a meat factory. In some ways, overt displays of barbarism, cruelty, and sadism are more human in the sense that people’s emotions are aligned with their actions, i.e. they act beastly because they feel beastly. It’s more jarring when madness is contained within order, like saying or doing something crazy with a straight face.
It’s no wonder the Anglos and Northern European types are regarded as more sinister for their ‘racism’, past and present. When Italians or blacks say offensive things about ‘niggers’ or some other racial/ethnic group, their style matches the substance. They say ‘crazy’ things in a crazy manner, with wild gestures and colorful language. The manner even makes the outrageousness sort of endearing. But when ‘bloodless’, well-mannered, and/or even-tempered Anglos or Northern European types say something ‘offensive’, it just seems plain wrong. It’s like the music can go a long way to ‘justify’ and enliven crazy lyrics, but the lyrics read out without the music merely sounds crazy, not fun and flavorful as well.
Nihilism is usually associated with an anarchic individual spirit(aka “I did it my way”, the battle cry of gangsters), but it’s also manifested in collective form, a handy tool for the Power. The role of ideology notwithstanding, many are attracted to power for power’s sake, i.e. power is its own justification, the trophy of victors, though usually polished with ‘moral’ wax. Many strivers and aspirants are willing to work for Jewish Power simply because it’s so wealthy and influential. (Consider all the people who lined up to work for Jordan Belfort after a Forbes magazine article portrayed him as a notorious figure. And everyone’s favorite character in Oliver Stone’s WALL STREET was always Gordon Gekko.)
The ambitious(especially of the nihilistic bent), short of having the power, want to serve the power. The righteous are pricklier, often willing to take stances that may jeopardize social standings(like college students who denounce the ‘Gaza Genocide’ with full knowledge that the Jewish-dominated industries will blacklist them).
Then, it’s no wonder that the Power, while attracting talent from the nihilistic pool, justifies itself through various (often sham)’moral’ movements. 2020 was a blatant demonstration of this formula. Many in the Deep State knew that the George Floyd dementia and Covid hysteria were all part of an orchestrated attempt by the Jewish Supremacists to bring down Trump and MAGA, but they went along with it because their modus operandi is a nihilistic servility to the Power. While nihilism has no use for moral restraints, it is usually restrained by worship for power-for-power’s-sake, which means the less powerful nihilists more often than not merely serve the reigning Power, be it nihilistic or not.
It’s like Satanists have no use for Christian morals(or any kind for that matter) but do submit themselves to the hierarchy whereby the minor demons serve the big devils who, in turn, serve the grandmaster, Satan himself.
2020 was a blaring illustration of how power really works: Even though Jewish Power did it for tribal supremacism while nihilists in the Deep State did it in awed reverence of the Power, plenty of gullible minions, the countless fools, swallowed the sham medical panic and moral narrative whole hog in their pathetic lack of agency and skepticism. Thus, 2020 has one thing in common with the Cultural Revolution that swept through China in the late 60s in that both were cynical moves by megalomaniacs and nihilists, vicious and cunning power moves really, but swept forward with the force of the masses too stupid and simpleminded to know what the trouble was really about. Thus, nihilism and moralism make for a potent combination.
The Good War narrative portrays Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan as essentially ultra-nationalist-nihilist, whereby moral considerations were secondary(if in play at all) to ruthless agendas of racial supremacism and/or national-imperial self-aggrandizement. It’s been said Japanese militarism was rooted in samurai tradition, one where conscience and sentiment withdrew into a void so as to take refuge from a world of blind obedience(and all that it implied, especially pertaining to duties of questionable morality).
If Christian asceticism and prayer/meditation ideally contemplate one’s spiritual and moral failings so as to rejoin the community with a revitalized heart, i.e. retreat deeper to re-emerge and advance even harder, Buddhist Zen effectively served as a shield, a convenient barrier between the realms of conscience and duty.
As duty was far more important in Japan(and East Asia in general) than in the West, the idea of soul-training to defy injustice or demand reform was close to unthinkable(if only because the desired justice or reform wasn’t worth the affront to harmony); therefore, the usefulness of Zen lay in maintaining an inner sanctuary of peace and harmony, a kind of storm shelter, from the often dark and disturbing ways of the world and one’s obligatory role in it. It was to maintain a wall between the inner-self and the outer world than to strengthen the former as an instrument of virtue to transform the latter.
What was said of Japan was said of Germany as well, often in harsher terms. For example, Germans soldiers, like cold killing machines(like the Terminator), carried out any order, however inhuman, without batting an eye. Apparently, as with the samurai, the virtue of loyalty and obedience trumped all other considerations(deemed as sentimental or weak, or ‘bourgeois’). Needless to say, the Cold War Narrative was skewed to favor the winning side(s). In truth, war brings out the worst on all sides.
Lawrence is no saint but more conscientious than most and beyond the confines of one’s culture. In a way, for all their differences, he has something in common with Yonoi as both men believe themselves to be fair-minded in regards to the other. Yonoi insists that his expectations of the British/Dutch POWs do not exceed those of his own soldiers and himself, e.g. if the prisoners are ordered to fast, he will fast too. Similarly, Lawrence’s sense of justice doesn’t favor one side for the sake of tribal loyalty. As he says to Celliers, “I don’t want to hate any individual Japanese”, and he’s often irritated by Hicksley’s narrow-minded assumptions.
Still, the differences are as important as the similarities as Yonoi’s sense of honor/justice is hopelessly Japanese, whereas Lawrence’s transcends Britishness and is grounded in universal humanism. Lawrence is a loyal British subject, but Britishness doesn’t define his entire moral and cultural universe.
Why were the British notably different from the Japanese in their conduct of war in Asia? Partly, it could have been due to racial or biological factors. The Asiatic gene may predispose people to be less individualistic and more communal in their orientation. There may have been a further complication. Herd mentality exists among herbivores or prey animals, whereas pack mentality exists among carnivores or predators. Japan, like all civilizations, emphasized herd mentality for most people while the warrior caste reserved the pack mentality for itself. It was like a pack of dogs in control of a herd of sheep.
Perhaps, something schizophrenic happened when a nation of sheep was armed and trained to serve as one big dog pack over all of Asia; when dogs are allowed to run free, they act more like wolves. Wolves acting like wolves would be frightful enough, but sheep joining with the wolves? A vast pool of people who’d traditionally known only farming or some ‘civilian’ trade was trained to be killers overnight, and in the process, it’s as if the herd mentality combined with the pack instinct. In a way, Japanese militarist violence made sense as people without individuality(of dignity and conscience) usually go along and mindlessly join in the violence. In a way, the mentality behind the Rape of Nanking wasn’t all that different from the one that would grip the hordes of Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. It was mad, mass, and mindless, everyone getting swept along, sheep running with the wolves.
But, the racial or cultural explanation goes only so far. The West was forced into ‘humility’ in the Southeast Asian sphere by the sudden collapse and defeat that surprised even the Japanese who found themselves in charge of more prisoners than they knew what to do with. (Likewise, the sheer number of Soviet prisoners was something that the German military was ill-prepared to deal with. The downside of swift victory is coming in control of more land and people than can be dealt with, as the titular character of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA discovers when he and his Arab warriors take hold of Damascus.)
Because of Japan’s spectacular successes in Southeast Asia, one can’t help but feel pity for the Western military men there. In an instant, the imperialists became the subject people. Sympathy is usually reserved for the side of the ‘victims’.
It’s tempting to assume that the Western forces chose to surrender than fight because they were too humane to fight Japan’s kind of war rooted in the cult of death.
But then, the British conduct of war in Europe tells a different story. The indiscriminate bombings of civilians in Germany suggest that when a people, however advanced and civilized, are pushed up against the wall, there’s no limit to their propensity for murderousness. Likewise, America’s conduct of War in the Pacific was closer to that of the Japanese than any Western sense of honor and conduct.
The racial explanation also runs into problems when we consider that Nazi Germany and commie Russia, consisting mostly of white people, had no lack of robot-like masses following orders and being unable to think morally as individuals. (And despite the claims of ‘liberalism’, ‘democracy’, and ‘individualism’, was the politics of mass psychology all that different in the UK or US?).
So, the racial or biological explanation is valid only to a point.
That said, even autocratic or ‘tyrannical’ European orders have long appreciated the upright and proud citizen than the bowing and deferential kind of the East. Even if it is true that the masses in both the West and the East obediently marched into battle without much thought, the difference in their self-conceptions was significant. The West(even including Russia) preferred men who held their heads high, whereas the East preferred men who bowed their heads low.
Even if partly a conceit, the West perceived itself to be a world of free individuals animated by pride and dignity, whereas the East idealized an order composed of loyal servants guided by duty and respect.
However repressive and conformist Stalin’s Soviet Union was, everyone was drummed with the idea of being a comrade, liberated and free, deserving of equal justice as anyone. And despite the centrality of hierarchy and obedience in National Socialist Germany, the political vision was of an order where everyone stood strong as a privileged member of the Aryan race, a matter of pride than humility. In European history and legend, the knight knelt before his king; he didn’t grovel like a dog, as was often the case in the East.
With MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE Nagisa Oshima achieved a level of artistic maturity that had eluded(or had been willfully evaded by) him. The topical quality of many of his earlier works doomed them to irrelevance once the radical winds of the Sixties blew past. It’s often the case that works closely linked with the Zeitgeist come with limited shelf life as they tend to be defined by political commitment than artistic content or by kneejerk contrarianism than genuine critique. In radical times, ambiguity and skepticism have often been excoriated as ‘bourgeois’, mere excuses to maintain one’s ‘neutral’ comfort zone than to commit at the crucial crossroads of history.
Arguably, with the fading of Jean-Luc Godard(largely due to his ‘Maoist’ purity spiral that even confounded his diehard cultists), Nagisa Oshima and Bernardo Bertolucci became the two most celebrated radical film-makers of the world in the early 1970s. They’d already staked their reputations in the Sixties but came to international fame(and/or notoriety) in the Seventies with IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES(Oshima) and LAST TANGO IN PARIS(Bertolucci). (With Oshima’s CEREMONY at the beginning of the decade and Bertolucci’s LUNA at the decade’s end, both would also dabble with themes of incest though with less international success.)
Although neither director was a stranger to sexual themes(and even tried to push the envelope earlier within restrictions), the overt sexuality of their works, the kind some characterized as pornographic, contributed to the shift in political discourse. It was a different kind of sexuality than the ones in MIDNIGHT COWBOY, STRAW DOGS, and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, where the sexuality was presented as mostly sordid, exploitative, degrading, transgressive, violent, and/or criminal. In other words, clearly abnormal.
In contrast, the sexuality of IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES and LAST TANGO IN PARIS didn’t so much intrude into the normal patterns of life but take over as life itself. The titillating and discomfiting became mundane, almost drained of eroticism, sort of like how Benjamin Braddock characterizes his fling with Mrs. Robinson to Mr. Robinson: “We might just as well have been shaking hands.”
In Lina Wertmuller’s SEVEN BEAUTIES and Paul Schrader/Martin Scorsese’s TAXI DRIVER, politics and sexuality intersect but still remain as separate entities. In Oshima and Bertolucci’s films, however, sexuality is indulged and pushed to such a degree that distinctions are lost between it and the rest of life. Even though their sexuality is kept private, the manner in which it comes to devour every aspect of their being transforms the erotic into the generic, so much so that the kink must be pushed ever further to generate any kind of excitement, also the dilemma for the Jack Nicholson character in CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, a more calculated and respectable stab at the sexual zeitgeist.
It’s also worth noting that the medium becomes the norm. A private act in a world without media, print or electronic, would be limited to the participants. Some media are more private by nature, like literary works. Even with the wide availability of books, everyone reads a book alone in his or her private space. With cinema, instead of recollection, the dominant mode of literary works, we have something close to re-enactment with real people going through the motions of private acts; effortlessly, we can almost believe we are watching the actual thing as it unfolds, a resurrection than merely a recollection of past events.
Furthermore, far from being consumed privately like with a novel, a film is watched with other people, even lots of people. Thus, no matter how private or intimate the activity on screen, it invariably becomes a public spectacle. When the US Occupation authorities ordered the Japanese film industry to show kissing, not only an intimate but alien practice, the impact supposedly reverberated far beyond entertainment. Even if the kisses on screen were mostly between Japanese men and Japanese women, it was as if they’d come under the spell of another culture and its norms and in a manner that could be deemed enslaving or liberating.
Just about every explicit sexual act in IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES and LAST TANGO IN PARIS happens within the privacy of enclosed walls with no one but the participants knowing of the deeds, but the nature of the movie medium makes the private public. One of those enclosed walls has been rendered transparent or turned into a gigantic peeping hole.
In a way, the cinematic medium, especially with the erosion of censorship, turned everyone in the audience into a ‘dirty old man’, and the barrier between the private and the public began to dissolve. Thus, the medium of cinema normalized the private into the public. The strip joint in the red light district that Benjamin Braddock takes Elaine to in THE GRADUATE is clearly distinct from the mainstream, but when Travis Bickle takes Betsy to a porno theater in TAXI DRIVER, categories are no longer so certain. By the mid-seventies, the most intimate details of sexual privacy were turned into a public spectacle to the point of ubiquity in cities(and even small towns) across the US; even the young ones who weren’t permitted into the theaters couldn’t avoid the ads in newspapers.
Whatever the intentions of those involved may have been, artistic or exploitative, the overall impact had political ramifications. Not only due to the issues of free speech/expression and public morality but because anything public(even if restricted to adults) enters the social sphere and influences society as a whole.
If Ron Jeremy sucks his own dick in his private space, no one would know but himself. But if that private act is rendered into a public spectacle, it becomes ‘normalized’ and affects what society deems permissible, tolerable, and/or acceptable. (The fact that even most so-called conservatives either tacitly supported or sheepishly looked the other way on ‘gay marriage’ is a testament to the sea change in what society deems moral and essential.)
The rise of the VCR, a death blow to adult theaters in the 1980s, might have, at least for a time, reversed the overt pornification of public space(alongside the setbacks in the shamelessly lewd homosexual community as the result of the AIDS epidemic), but in some ways, it had an opposite effect. While raunchy R-rated films and pornography could be consumed in the privacy of one’s home than in a shared space with others, the overall impact was also to degrade the idea of home. Traditionally, home was the place of family. Even the sex there was supposed to happen only between man and wife. If adults wanted to enjoy something kinky, they went to the red light district. But, the VCR brought everything inside the home, thus bypassing the long-held TV censorship imposed on the networks. The home went from a place where mom and dad ‘did it’ in the bedroom(within the morality of marriage vows) to where mom and dad watched Ron Jeremy suck his own dick and then a place where a crafty Jewish boy might invite his friends over to see his dad’s videotape of Ron Jeremy slurping all over his dong.
In other words, if cinema(especially with the legalization of pornography) had the effect of making the private into public, the VCR completed the circle by turning the degraded public into private. Ron Jeremy may not have been the first hairy tub-kin Jew who sucked his own dick, but he was perhaps the first one to have it filmed and rendered into a public spectacle. Still, it was deemed lewd and perverted enough to be restricted to adult movie theaters catering to a certain demographic. But with the VCR, the image of Ron Jeremy sucking his own dick could enter into every bedroom, and there was no guarantee that some crafty kid wouldn’t get a hold of it.
Even if there was no political intention behind any of this, the impact could only be political due to the rejiggering of values as the result of shifts in what constitutes the acceptable and tolerable norm.
There’s the meaning of politics as in the processes of governance, but politics also means the contest of or conflict among contrasting ideas and opposing forces. In this sense, even a lone mind in its private space is ‘political’ in its tension among the various drives, pro and con. “Should I eat that extra slice of cake or should I not to keep the pounds off?” “Should I remain true to my artistic calling or should I ‘sell out’ for easy bucks?” Should one be Apollonian or Dionysian in the occasion?
While the personal pace and the public(or communal) sphere were always at odds throughout human history, they were more-or-less kept apart until relatively recently. The new media of the 20th century, simply by their ‘nature’, subverted and undermined the long-held-and-understood barriers between them, with sometimes the private seeking to break out into the public(like in the metaphorically loaded prison break, though one escapes from prison not so much to be free but to hide amidst the freedom) or the public trying to dig into the private to pry out its secrets(like lions with a warthog hiding in a dugout).
Then, it’s not so surprising that political discourse increasingly came to dwell on or be inspired by sexual subjects(and become sexualized). Historically, conventional or respectable politics on both the left and the right tended to deal with public matters and shared/social issues: Who should govern, how government should be formed, how class interests should be protected or expanded, how large the military should be used and where it should be, how the economy should be regulated, how the population should be taxed, and etc. Whether Karl Marx sucked his own dick or not, he would have thought it was no one’s business but his own. (With Michael Foucault, however, his private behavior was inseparable from his worldview, which is why his ideology felt like a fist up the arse.) Increasingly, with the rise of electronic media that frayed the barrier between the private and the public and the fading of macro-conflicts with general prosperity following World War II, politics grew more inward and self-indulgent, with molehills increasingly turned into mountains(while mountain-heaps of problems going ignored for their difficulty). With the problems of hunger largely solved in the West and with the rise of the middle classes(that never had it so good), fewer people were into grand revolutions, the kinds that once convulsed France and Russia. As disruptive as it was, even May 68 ended up being more an exaltation of confused middle class youth rage than a bona fide political revolution; in the long run, its most baneful impact was cultural, not political. And the antiwar protests in the US turned out to be less pro-communist-revolution than pro-self-preservation, i.e. “I want to stay home and listen to Beatles records and watch HAWAII-FIVE-O than chase after rice-eaters armed with AK-47s in the jungles of Vietnam.”
With radical political revolutions less urgent and likely, people began to obsess more about personal matters or topics that caught their fancy, be it ‘sexual liberation’, drug legalization(or cult of pot), Rock music, or pride of identity. Especially with the overwhelming success of the Civil Rights Movement, the issue was no longer about freedom or equality for My People but how one felt about oneself, e.g. a matter of pride of this or that identity, although of late, the term ‘pride’ has been hijacked wholesale by megalomaniacal homos and trannies with the full backing of Jewish Power.
Then, it isn’t so surprising that to Oliver Stone(and many of his generation), Jim Morrison of the Doors wasn’t just a popular entertainer or a neo-romantic poet of sorts but something akin to a prophet with all its political implications. (Later, Stone apparently modeled his concept of Alexander the Great on Rock Stars like Jim Morrison, albeit with disastrous results.)
To a large extent, the so-called generational conflict with myriad socio-political overtones was due to the differences in how the older and the younger generations understood and practiced the dynamics between the private and the public. What the Sixties generation expressed and indulged in public space was something the older generation would have thought was too lewd even for private space. Even in the privacy of the bedroom, someone like Michael Corleone, let alone Vito Corleone, wouldn’t have done half the things the kids at Altamont Concert did out in the open(and never mind Ron Jeremy’s predilections). To a considerable extent, it had to do with the Judeo-Negrolization of culture, especially as Jews and Negroes tended to be less inhibited than the Anglo-Protestants and the ethno-Catholics, but then, there were also conflicts within the Jewish community(with good many Jews being appalled by the likes of Lenny Bruce and Philip Roth of PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT notoriety) and the black community(as respectable blacks denounced much of black music as Devil’s music or, worse, God’s music degraded into tunes about women, liquor, and steaks dismissed as snack).
If generational conflicts have been somewhat less disruptive in places like Japan, it’s because, despite the profound changes in values and attitudes, behavioral patterns remained more or less intact, i.e. however one’s tastes and values may have changed at the personal level, one’s manners were expected to conform to social protocols. Even bad boy Nagisa Oshima, after a long interview with Akira Kurosawa(against whom and others like him that Oshima had set himself against), bowed respectfully to the master. Thus, a kind of behavioralism has kept in check what could have turned into a more overt generational conflict. Even Japanese leftists shouting radical slogans at rallies could be seen bowing to elders in apolitical social settings.
In the US, however, much more so than in Japan and Europe, the behavior changed along with the values and attitudes, which was one of the factors contributing to America’s woes in Vietnam where authority went up in smoke.
But then, even before ‘sexual liberation’, the rise of psychology and its impact on modernist art were bound to impact the social and political sphere. The field of psychology turned many problems, which people previously didn’t want to talk about or characterized as soul-sickness(work of the Devil) or simple madness, into subjects worthy of open discourse and examination, even fascination and fetishization. Thus, the odd, the quirky, the weird, the eccentric, the twisted, and/or the dark became labeled as ‘neurotic’, even a badge of pride suggesting a person’s psychological complexity due to various sensitivities at the emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual level.
Notable artists always had something strange about them, the X-factor that set them apart from mere craftsmen and hacks, but the traditional idea was to channel those strange qualities toward higher, deeper, or nobler themes with relevance and meaning to the larger community.
With modernism, the strangeness could turn on itself(in what some would say was essentially navel-gazing) in a kind of self-exploration(bordering on self-absorption). Psychology comes in many forms, mass and political for example, but psychology in its essence is personal and individual. Once the ‘neurotic’ was placed at the center of social discourse, cultural attitude, and artistic expression, it was bound to impact politics as well.
So, even before the crisis of sexuality due to the shifting dynamics of private vs public, the rise of psychology as a worthy pursuit and subject of inquiry profoundly changed the balance between the private and the public. In THE GRADUATE, Mrs. Robinson tells Benjamin Braddock without trepidation, “because I’m very neurotic”, followed by “Did you know I was an alcoholic?” She stakes her position on grounds of her ‘complexity’ and ‘individuality’ evinced by her ‘psy-chic’ personal problems. So, it didn’t exactly begin in the Sixties with the boomers.
The greater relevance of psychology in political discourse was both liberating and tyrannizing. In some ways, society and its ruling class shed light on issues, often but not always related to sexuality, that had either gone ignored or overlooked as beneath the dignity or beyond the purview of politics. Many involved domestic issues regarding spouses or children, often related to abuse. Thus, voices and concerns hitherto unheard or suppressed(by society and/or the self) got a hearing, often through TV talk shows such as that of Phil Donahue(before the format turned into a sensationalist joke in the hands of Jerry Springer, Geraldo Rivera, Oprah Winfrey, and such ilk).
On the other hand, the increasing role of private concerns in politics expanded the reach of the state that some regarded as intrusive and tyrannical. First, it was the enforcement of seat-belts and more regulations on smoking, even in privately owned businesses. Then, there were safety seats for children. Some of these regulations were understandable, but the logic eventually led to certain states(once again spearheaded by California) mandating that children have a right to declare themselves as of the ‘other gender’ and opt for genital mutilation and Frankenstein biochemical experimentation called ‘hormone therapy’; as often as not, when you hear ‘therapy’, it means a kind of pseudo-scientific madness.
As more private concerns were aired and validated, greater was the pressure on the state to safeguard those newly minted ‘rights’, e.g. it’s the right of a boy to identify as a ‘girl’ and embark on ‘hormone therapy’ and penis-mutilation(for a fake vagina), and if the parents say NO, they are petty tyrants whose attitude is akin to ‘racist’ southerners who prevented black students from attending white schools, therefore unfit to be fathers and mothers any longer(and besides maybe ‘non-inclusive’ terms like ‘father’ and ‘mother’ should be done away with in favor of more acceptable jargons).
Still, the psychology of sexuality was the big kahuna(and increasingly to be controlled by the ‘queer theorists’, yet another proof that a fanatical minority can steer the direction of history, even over the cliff). Psychology legitimized the discussion of subjects that had been taboo or reserved for the private sphere, and it wasn’t long before it turned into an obsession with psycho-sexuality. In the name of ‘science’, what had been regarded as unseemly for public discourse increasingly became respectable and even urgent topics for research and discussion, leading to the merging of therapy and politics, so evident in our world where academic fields and state institutions have multiplied to deal with just about any problem one can imagine, much of them exaggerated or downright fantastic(such as the tranny stuff).
Sexuality was introduced to public education in the form of informative and cautionary ‘sex education’ but then eventually morphed into a full-blown ideology via ‘slut feminism'(or Paglia-ism) and globo-homo stuff(aka gender studies or queer theory); as if that wasn’t enough, it even seeped into churches and spiritual spaces. It went from a greater openness about sexuality to a tolerance of sexual deviances to an intellectualization of deviance to an institutionalization of queer agendas to finally a consecration of homo-fecal-penetration, tranny-penis-cutting, and increasingly even pedo-validation. It’s not unusual these days to have queer-commissars in the roles of teachers and administrators who believe it’s an educational, ideological, political, and even spiritual imperative to ‘convert’ students from the youngest age possible to the (ass)holy cult of Globo-homo. No wonder young children are now introduced to porny literature that even adults would have found outrageous decades ago while female athletes find themselves having to compete with men claiming to be ‘women’.
There was also the libertarian(or ‘libertyrannian’) logic behind the expansion of the personal as the foundation of more repression. Libertarianism is less about safeguarding the rights and liberties of the small or humble everyman-individual than the cult-worship of the super-individual as mythic hero or demigod. It’s no wonder certain factions of Italian Fascism admired Ayn Rand, even turning her first novel WE THE LIVING into an epic film. Rand herself couldn’t care less about most individuals(the so-called losers and nobodies, the nondescript mediocrities of the world) and emphasized individualism as the surest means to allow the most intelligent, most determined, most talented, most visionary, and most ruthless to rise above everyone else and guide/shape/rule mankind as they see fit. The super-individual was to the humdrum individual in the Rand Equation what Superman was to a mere mortal in the superhero universe.
Of course, Rand predictably denounced fascism as just another kind of collectivism that suppressed individualism, but the end-result of her so-called Objectivism and most well-funded schools of libertarianism came to resemble the fascist model. After all, classic fascism wasn’t ONLY about collectivism but about the cult-worship of the super-individual as embodied by Il Duce or Der Fuhrer. In a way, it was about the rule over the masses by the super-individuals of iron will and the power of vision. Thus, fascism in its initial conception was less anti-individualist than pro-super-individualist, i.e. most people didn’t amount to much as individuals themselves and were better off rallying around the Great Men of history, the titanic individuals.
Libertarians like to believe their super-individual heroes stand for freedom against the tyranny of statism, but in fact a kind of quasi-fascist interdependence forms between the two spheres. Thus, so much come to depend on the personal whims of super-individuals who, with their monopolies and in collusion with the Deep State, effectively come to control the destinies of entire societies.
But so awestruck of the super-individuals are the toady libertarians that virtual censorship via capitalist monopolies and deep state collusion is rationalized in terms of ‘private enterprise’ and ‘personal choice’ of businessmen. It doesn’t trouble the toady libertarians that what little that remains of free speech in Big Tech platform monopolies is purely at the personal whim of the oligarchic Elon Musk who, more often than not, caves under Jewish Supremacist demands(but that’s cool too with toady libertarians who believe that Jewish individuals, being smarter and more successful, have every right to buy up and control entire monopolies and pretty much do as they please, even if it means the rest of us end up like the ‘Palestinians’). In a winner-obsessed and loser-deriding society like the US, individualism has a way of turning into super-individualism whereby the personal preferences of the super-rich and successful are not only protected but promoted even to the point of trampling on the personal values of most other individuals.
To an extent, it was indeed philosophically valid and socially useful to develop scientific approaches in regards to all facets of human psychology, behavior, and condition. Why should anything be taboo to the empirical and rational mind? If science says the Earth revolves around the Sun and mankind evolved from apes(that evolved from monkeys and etc.), so be it. And indeed there was much of value that was revealed through the modern field of psychology and the ever expanding disciplines in medicine.
But subjects pertaining to mankind were always vulnerable to politicization or some kind of ideological agenda. As things turned out, Marxism was more prophecy and dogma than social science. And Freudianism was more the vision of a cult-leader than a medical pursuit grounded in science.
There was also the danger that the new disciplines would go from exploring essential topics to dwelling on ever more marginal ones, duly turning into a pissing contest of pushing the envelope on ever more ridiculous formulations, which eventually became the theoretic basis of today’s gender ideology. Who would have thought the study of abnormal psychology and sexual deviancy would one day turn into a validation of them, followed by political protection and commercial promotion?
Granted, such an outcome was not inevitable, and one shouldn’t throw out the baby of science and modern thought with the bathwater of decadence, delusion, and degeneracy. But, one must always be vigilant of the intellectual tendency to turn into hairsplitting competitions of who can be more radically ridiculous, or ‘radiculous’. The psychology underlying such a compunction isn’t all that different from members of a primitive tribe outdoing one another by sticking ever more bones through their noses. “My hole is bigger than yours.”
The personal-as-political has been a double-edged sword, equally supportive and subversive of the role of the personal in the political and vice versa. In one way, it takes a page out of spiritualism, especially of the puritanical kind, that posits there is no meaningful division between the personal and the public in the eyes of God who, after all, sees and hears everything, from major events to the murmur of the heart. Thus, piety mustn’t be reserved for the Church and religious occasions. It must be part of every facet of life. As God is everywhere, you are always with God and must be worthy of Him. As Jesus said, it’s not enough to be a good person in behavior; one must also purge one’s soul of evil thoughts as a person who acts good in public but thinks/feels bad in private is ultimately a no good sonabitch. In other words, there is no meaningful division between spiritual life and secular life to a true blue Christian. True, Jesus did say, ‘give unto Caesar what is his’, but that was about pagans, those outside the Faith. For those within the Faith, they must be spiritual at all times.
The secular version of this argues there is no meaningful division between the social/public interests and the personal/private beliefs because, ultimately, society is the sum of the ideas, values, and assumptions held by its citizens. Then, we can understand why some people say “I believe in free speech but not hate speech.” And, it’s no wonder the ‘woke’ types antiseptically obsess about ‘microaggressions’ in the conviction that evil must be eradicated not only at the conscious level but at the subconscious one as well, where it lurks unbeknownst to even the most ‘progressive white liberals’ whose brains have been wired with ‘systemic racism’ over the centuries.
But, the personal factor in politics has also had the effect of increasing skepticism about figures of power and authority. While psychology in the form of ‘therapeutism’ is often invoked by institutions to intrude further into our personal and private lives, psychology as an analytical tool of personality has served to question and/or raise doubts about the true motives of those in power or seeking power.
Lina Wertmuller the anarchist film-director upset some apple carts in the Seventies by portraying affluent Western Marxists as over-educated and privileged virtue-signalers who adopted radical talking points as status symbols. In the case of the poor communist in SWEPT AWAY, the servant on the yacht, his ideological commitment serves as a crutch for his resentment of the rich who not only boss him around but even appropriate class struggle talking points for their bourgeois selves.
Later, stranded on an island, the true natures of the rich woman and the poor man come to the surface: The man wants to be king/boss, and the woman finds a crude but irresistible fulfillment in her submission to his raw prowess, a theme explored earlier in John Boorman’s ZARDOZ(and now coming to fruition with the spread of wussy ‘faggotry’ among the white males while white women increasingly gravitate to the Real Men from Africa and the Near East who barge into Europe en masse as either conquering studs or converting imans, which is why the future of the West may well come down to the conflict between the Black Jungle and the Arab Jihad).
Of course, all sides have sought to delegitimize the other side via psychological critique. Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST is based on a novel by Alberto Moravia that suggests, via Freudian psychoanalysis, that fascism is rooted in the repression of sexual anxiety. The main character has chosen to conform and rise up the ranks as a ‘good fascist’ because of his homoerotic anxieties stemming from a traumatic childhood event where he was molested by an older male. (Freud had explained homosexuality in terms of childhood trauma.)
And on the right, there was the book INTELLECTUALS by Paul Johnson whose method of detraction had less to do with tackling the ideas or works of the leftist thinkers/artists head on than exposing the dark matter of their private lives and mental states, i.e., most of the great leftist intellectuals were really EMOTIONAL cripples or PSYCHOLOGICAL wrecks. Ad-Hominem-ism now pervades so much of political discourse, especially with the fading of clear-cut ideologies in favor of cults of celebrity, idolatry, and iconography.
Expansion of the range of personal views, expressions, and choices was initially greeted with hope and high expectations. Just think of all the potential ingenuity, originality, and creativity trapped inside every individual just waiting to be tapped, like oil that’s been lying beneath bogs and sands forever. Instead of imposing a dominant or hegemonic standard on everyone, why not have each and every person discover something of himself or herself(in the ‘existential’ sense) and share his or her insight, vision, or genius with everyone else. Let a hundred flowers bloom.
The sheer explosion of new ideas, expressions, and methods in the various fields of arts and science at the dawn of modernism indeed seemed to herald a new future. There seemed to be no limit to new possibilities in just about every field, and as more people became educated and gained access to news and information of all kinds, perhaps many more Shakespeares, Newtons, Rembrandts, and Mozarts were in the offing. And with greater leeway for the personal to express itself, the world would be a fascinating canvas of unexpected colors and shades.
But the promise didn’t pan out as expected or hoped due to the logic of elitism and populism. In regards to the problems of elitism, no matter how many more people were educated and informed, genius remained a rare quality; and furthermore, there were only so many slots in the most coveted fields. And to keep ahead of the competition, the avant-garde in various fields, especially in the arts and humanities, grew ever more esoteric and obfuscatory, rendering much of intellectualism into the sophistry of pseudo-intellectualism. In time, the clever and/or demented learned to dress up simple or stupid ideas in ‘intellectualese’, which is the basis of what passes for Critical Race Theory and Gender/Queer Theory, as well as much of radical feminism.
In regards to the problems of populism, the expansion of education and the participation of the people in shaping opinions and taste didn’t so much contribute to higher meaning and greater insight as hasten the vulgarization of society, especially as society increasingly grew hedonistic and shameless.
Many had underestimated the challenge posed by vulgar populism because the baser instincts had been held in check by the power of the church, traditional norms, bourgeois respectability & class divisions, prestige of seriousness, race-ism(with its dampening effect on black oogity-ness), and ‘antisemitism'(that warned Jews against going totally bananas with irreverence toward White Goy Society). Given the checks on overt puerility and shameless wallowing in piggishness, even those inclined to be somewhat racy and self-indulgent channeled their energies toward more serious endeavors and loftier pursuits. (Had Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag grown up in the 1990s, they would likely have turned into the likes of Lena Dunham and Emma Sulkowicz, girls raised without any restraints and inhibitions.)
Over time, most people, highly educated or not, decided to obsess mainly over the fun stuff. Amidst and/or following the search for meaning in a world mulling over the death of God, ideological battles of the Great Depression, the tragedies of World War I & World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, and the so-called End of History, most people concluded that the only thing that really matters is the pleasure(and more and more of it in EXTREME doses) of food, sex, gaming/sports, highs, and idolatry. Consider all the food shows on TV with fat tattooed ‘chefs’ serving up the calories, the utter pornification of society(extending not only to skanky music videos but elementary education with quasi-pedo ‘reading’ material), the cultural dominance of videogames & superhero movies resembling videogames(and the rise of gambling) & obsession with black athletes, the expanding legalization of drugs, and the cult of idolatry/celebrity mainly centered on megalomaniacal Jews, narcissistic homos, and self-aggrandizing Negroes. The rise of Pop Art was a sign of things to come, and it’s no wonder Andy Warhol came to be held in such high esteem for his confession of nihilism and nullity, the void of which is filled by gravitating toward or attracting the latest ‘action’.
Today, it’s difficult for young people to wrap their minds around the reality of another time when serious philosophers, artists, critics, and scholars were at the center of culture and discourse, especially for the aspiring middle class demographic that was anxious for respectability and prestige. But then, the fact their ‘mid-cult’ interest in the arts and ideas had less to do with genuine curiosity than status anxiety spelled trouble ahead.
If God is dead and if philosophy revealed the absurdity of life and if it’s up to each of us to choose what matters most and if most of us have decided food and sex(and gaming, drugs, and etc.) make life most fun, then the logical end of personalism is piggery. Given the shamelessly bestial and infantile nature of the current culture, it isn’t difficult to fathom why, on the occasion that people do aspire toward ‘higher meaning’, it’s usually stuff like the consecration of St. George Floyd the career thug, cult of the lifelong hustler Donald Trump as the national savior, or veneration of Anno Sodomini as the focal point of all values, through which all must be ‘christened’ or ‘queeristened’.
Naturally, sex is the object of greater obsession and fetishization than food due to its associations with the various facets of life and for its relative inaccessibility(to the so-called ‘incels’). Except for the most expensive food items, just about anyone can eat anything(and in huge amounts), and the obesity problem proves it. Thus, food is less the object of fantasy or imagination. (In the not-too-distant past when food was often scarce, they were venerated in many cultures.) Also, the pleasure of food is rather simple, one of deliciousness and satiation. Food is no more and no less than what it is.
In contrast, the appeal of sex ranges from the bestial to the mythic. Women have been degraded as whores and idolized as goddesses, sometimes both, the perverse conceit of the pop music creature called ‘madonna’. Also, despite the ubiquity of sexual images via media ranging from art institutions to pop entertainment to pornography, actual sex isn’t accessible like real food, especially as most people are more discriminating with their private organs than with their mouths.
Whereas food is mainly associated with two sensations, taste and odor, sexuality is woven into the rich fabric of human emotions, with much inspiration fueled by pride, narcissism, vanity, envy(of the beautiful), and contempt(for the ugly). And if the end result of eating is digestion and excretion, sex can go beyond the animal/pleasurable and serve as the basis of long-lasting affection and attachment beyond sexual feelings, aka family life. While sex in its raw form is ‘consumed’ like food, it can grow into love that is all-consuming. Because of such interlinkages, sex is never just sex(as Freud understood) like food is just food. After satiation, one has no interest in food, but even after the sexual climax, one may have feelings for the partner, indeed with a clarity attainable only post-climax.
But then, in order for sex to impart meaning and promise beyond instant gratification, it must operate within a system of inhibitions and rules. Our culture, however, disabuses people of such ‘quaint’ notions and encourages everyone, from the youngest age, to jump in the sack in a hook-up culture.
Even the stated purpose of sex education has changed over the years. Initially, it was to preventively warn young people of the dangers of sex, pregnancy, and disease, but today, it’s mostly about which precautions to take so as to indulge in sexual activities(even sodomy and the like) as soon as possible.
The culture of sex without inhibitions animalizes humanity. Animals have no concept of shame. They instinctively understand stealth(to stalk and hunt) and security(to hide from danger), but they’ve no idea of shame or dignity. They have safe spaces but not private spaces in the human sense. (To be sure, the notion of privacy as an individual right is a modern liberal invention as most people throughout history lacked sufficient property to enjoy much of privacy and could be intruded upon at any moment by the authorities. Ironically, however, with the broadening of privacy rights, the private space expanded into something like the public space, especially via social networking on the internet, through which innumerable women and homosexuals flaunt their most intimate secrets and objects to worldwide viewership.) And so, animals in the wild(and captivity as well)eat, shit, and engage in sex whenever and wherever. Chimpanzees and bonobos often act like Ron Jeremy sucking his own dick out in the open and indulge in jungle orgies.
Among the human races, the least inhibited is the Negro, now most ‘renowned’ around the world for ‘twerking’. It’s no wonder that so many whites(and nonblacks of various colors) are grateful to black rhythm as the great liberator from the repressiveness of civilization but without contemplating the dangers of animalization, which is another kind of slavery, one trapped in savagery. Blacks may act most wild-and-free in the US(to the thrill and excitement of the Negrolators among the nonblacks), but Detroit and much of Baltimore are like jungle-ghettos of savagery and criminality, and the same dynamic is spreading like wildfire all over Negrolatric Europe that welcomes and celebrates blackness solely as a positive and liberating force. Blackness in limited amounts can loosen things up for the good but in excess leads to the jungle-imprisonment of mankind, whereupon it becomes like survival in the bush among the crazy apes and baboons playing grab-ass and tear-limbs.
There have been three ways that mankind has dealt with the problem of shame: Simian shamelessness, pagan walls & enclosures, and Abrahamic paranoia. Many black cultures opted for simian shamelessness where inhibitions were tossed aside in favor of ass-shaking, dong-bouncing, bumping-and-grinding, and ‘twerking’ out in the open. In the UK, there is an annual celebration where blacks hump-and-pump anything in sight(even the behinds of white police officers).
The way of pagan enclosures allows for kinky stuff but within walled spaces. It’s why physical barriers were so important to the Greeks and Japanese who were no stranger to various odd sexual peccadilloes. As long as such behaviors were contained within private spaces and didn’t spill out into the open, they were deemed permissible.
Then, there was the Abrahamic paranoia that arose from the belief in the all-seeing, all-hearing, and all-knowing(and very judgmental) God, i.e. even in the most hidden, concealed, and private space, God sees and hears everything, not only what you do but what you think and feel. Thus, conscience penetrated deeper among those of Abrahamic faiths, especially the Protestants who emphasized individual effort than reliance on institutional authority(as among the Catholics). Conscience came to matter less among Jews who, though the original conceptualists of the all-seeing-and-knowing God, created and guarded a tribal-private space(or a kind of exclusive country club for Jews) governed by a different set of divine rules than in the goy realms outside. Furthermore, if Torah-Jews were mindful of obeying the laws of God handed to Moses and adhering to the advice of the great prophets, the later Talmudic Jews turned religious practice more into formulation of lawfare than faithfulness to the law, whereby God’s authority was turned more into a partner-in-crime or facilitator of Jewish interests than upheld as immutable and eternal. Talmudism is more about how to get around the Old Laws than how to obey them in the most direct way possible.
As for the Protestants, even their private spaces were permeated with matters of conscience as defined by Christian teachings, but once those values were eroded by secularism and, more importantly, secularist substitutes for faith, one’s private conscience was defined by whatever the Protestants or former-Protestants absorbed from the media and academia(under control by Jews and goy cucks). Private conscience thus came to favor sexual shamelessness as liberating and even ‘redeeming'(or reaming-redeeming); and, as shamelessness was the New Good, so many former Protestants came to express their ‘virtue’ via shameless displays of ‘slut pride’ or just ‘Pride’, now meaning the brazen celebration of homo-fecal-penetration(and anal-fisting) and tranny-penis-cutting.
The overtly sexual works of Oshima and Bertolucci embodied the sexualization of politics and anticipated its further growth, though, to be sure, it came to be dominated not by the sexuality of the overwhelming majority but that of deviant minorities, especially homos and sluts(or skank-ass-biatches if black).
Of course, family politics was also and always sexual as it’s impossible to have a family without sex. To a large extent, the Bible is a manual on the burden of sex, how not to go wrong with the misuse of the dong. The central themes of family and tribal obligations emphasized sexual mores warned against excess and deviancy, e.g. stoning for those indulging in sodomy, bestiality, adultery, and etc., though one could argue the moralism itself became excessive in its self-righteous rage. Thus, sex was a path, not the destination, of life. It was a means to create life and form a family, the true destination of life.
But with the rise of individualism, fast pace of modernity, nihilism, consumerism, and hedonism, quicker gratification became the name of the game. We see this in pop music where the three-minute pop song is favored over classical symphonies and even jazz arrangements that now mostly go unheard. Likewise, sex-as-fun in and of itself came to be favored over sex as a means to something deeper, more meaningful, and longer-lasting.
While there’s plenty of hookup culture and licentiousness among straight or heterosexual folks, there remains the sense, especially among conservatives who aren’t few in number, that they must eventually approach sex as something more than fun. In contrast, homos cannot reproduce and blacks have pretty much given up on the two-parent family, and so, their types of sexuality remain more at the level of instant gratification. Then, it’s not surprising that the homos, among if not the most promiscuous people on Earth and aligned with the logic of pop culture, have come to command much of sexual politics, what with month-long celebrations of homosexuality whereby even the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon, along with schools and libraries all across America, fly ‘gay-rainbow’ colors as symbols of what is ‘best’ and ‘noblest’ about ‘Western Values’ and the ‘free world'(or ‘democracy’).
The cultural resonance of the film TAXI DRIVER was a sign of a reactionary pushback, a wish to put the genie back in the bottle, but the birds were out of the cage(as Alfred Hitchcock sensed in the early Sixties).
Still, even IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES and LAST TANGO IN PARIS presented unchecked sexuality as a dead-end, initially exciting or liberating but ultimately exhausting and enslaving, reaching a point of annihilation by the last extreme act or annulment by withdrawal symptoms. The boost goes bust.
The unprecedented politics of sex(with heavy emphasis on the act itself), as opposed to mere sexual politics, in the 1970s owed to a convergence of various trends. Partly, reeling from the Youth Revolution of the Sixties and Dionysian Rock Culture, the West of the Seventies was a much transformed world. So-called Women’s Liberation owing largely to the Pill made the culture all the more brazenly sexual. The erasure of the last remnants of the Hays Code, followed by the even more dramatic legalization of filmed pornography, made the representation of sexuality a major social, cultural, and political topic. While many in the film industry had little interest in sex or nudity even with the new permissiveness(like Steven Spielberg), others couldn’t help but try out the new freedom in the name of art: John Schlesinger’s MIDNIGHT COWBOY, Sam Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS with its infamous rape scene, Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE with its even more infamous rape scene, John Boorman’s DELIVERANCE & ZARDOZ, Nicolas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW. In Europe, Pier Paolo Pasolini especially went wild with sex and nudity with his grubby versions of CANTERBURY TALES, DECAMERON, and ARABIAN NIGHTS, finally culminating in one of the sickest films ever, SALO: 120 DAYS OF SODOM. In a more cheerful and comical light was the treatment of sex and violence(as natural partners) by Lina Wertmuller. Her most admired film SEVEN BEAUTIES could have been called Seven Beauties and the Beast, as the eponymously nicknamed Italian ‘worm’ decides on the survival strategy of seducing and humping a monstrously corpulent female Nazi commandant.
As with Luchino Visconti’s THE DAMNED, Pasolini’s SALO, and Wertmuller’s SEVEN BEAUTIES, Liliana Cavani’s NIGHT PORTER framed the new and unprecedented artistic liberties within the themes of fascism. While the Zeitgeist of greater tolerance and licentiousness was defended, even celebrated, as a resounding victory for liberalism(and even leftism given its Foucaultian turn whereby the communist fist salute might as well have been a fist-up-the-arse) against the forces of the right and tradition, there was also the lurking suspicion that it either unleashed or could be exploited by a new power-obsession, a kind of ‘fascism’.
After all, fascism as an ideology came closest to being the pornographics of power, i.e. exploring and exercising power in its rawest form and shaping this dynamic into a new myth. If Marxism denuded history and society of their ‘liberal bourgeois’ conceits to lay bare the materialist basis of power, fascism did something similar at the psychological level, i.e. history is driven by the will to power, and the world is best ruled by those with the greatest will. It was the most Darwinian of ideologies and, as such, naturally linked with sexuality. Benito Mussolini certainly got a lot of mileage among the ladies as a Real Man. And not for nothing did National Socialism attract a good number of homo-nationalists, that is before Hitler and Himmler said, ‘enough with that’.
If Marxism idealized Man and Woman as comrade-workers, fascism idolized Man as warrior and the Woman as mother. Thus, sexuality was built into fascism like into no other ideology. Even as National Socialism waged war on Weimarian sexual degeneracy(mostly controlled by Jews), it wasn’t a prudish movement like that of the Catholic conservatives, monarchists, and cultural reactionaries. Instead, sexuality would be placed at the center as a noble and healthy instrument of the cult of beauty, as who-mated-with-whom would determine the character, physical and ‘spiritual’, of the future nation.
In a darker light, fascism’s obsession with power and will had certain hallmarks of ‘gay’ culture, a constant sense of gauging who fuc*s whom in the arse in a relentless power-play. Not for nothing did a Nazi-leather-regalia fetish develop in the homosexual community, even involving Jews. It was like a sadomasochistic concentration camp of extreme theater, one of domination and humiliation, of bungs being barbarossa-ed and holocausted by dongs(and some fists).
In its ideal form, fascism stood guard against sexual degeneracy, as when Travis Bickle the lumpen-proto-fascist tells Iris(Jodie Foster) in TAXI DRIVER that this women’s lib stuff is just so much malarkey and that she’s really just a slave of some lowlife pimp who exploits her for money, a crude display of quasi-fascist impulses seeking to curtail the most exploitative manifestations of capitalism, the corollary of fascism’s use of socialism while checking its radicalization into communism.
At any rate, the power-trip at the heart of fascism could seem sexy to the degenerates who couldn’t help but appropriate and revel in it for kicks of their own. It’s no wonder that, just as the National Socialists championed their cause as one of health and normality against sickness and degeneracy, many anti-fascists among liberals and leftists did their best to portray Hitler and his cohorts as closet-homosexuals, drug addicts, and perverts of various stripes, if only to win over the Moral Middle in the West against the Axis. National Socialism wouldn’t have tolerated anarcho-street thugs like Alex and his droogs in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, but the Ludovico Treatment that Alex undergoes conflates Nazism with random violence of urban hoodlums.
In George Lucas’s first feature film THX 1138, sex is banned but not pornography and masturbation in a futuristic totalitarian underworld state where entertainment consists of holograms of naked Negros and Negresses shaking their butts and getting it on. Later, Lucas copped a good deal of his STAR WARS designs from Leni Riefenstahl & Nazi aesthetics and then went off to marry a Negress, making THX 1138 more personally prophetic than anyone would have assumed at the time.
Speaking of Riefenstahl, she basked in a rehabilitation and revival of sorts in the 1970s on grounds of aesthetics — whatever the ideology, art is art, talent is talent, beauty is beauty, and should be appreciated as such — and her photographic works with African tribes(that suggested she’d moved away from Aryan master-racism), which soon came under critique from the poison pen of Susan Sontag in her essay “Fascinating Fascism” — she would also write a long piece on pornography — that posited that, far from undergoing a true change of heart after the war, Riefenstahl’s fascination with the warrior cult of African tribes was very much in tune with her racial idealization of the German volk, less a humanist acceptance of all races and peoples but an ultra-elitist fetishization of the types of people who embodies the most fearsome qualities of manhood.
Nowadays, with Hollywood blockbuster tropes making Nazi aesthetics seem like a pacifist playhouse, Sontag’s observations may seem quaint, but she was onto something. Because of the moral fetishization of certain demographics as eternal victim groups, people are often blind to the neo-supremacism inherent in their politics and agendas. No amount of black arrogance, brutality, megalomania, and racial supremacism is called out for what it is because we’re stuck in the Civil Rights Narrative. And because Jews have been branded as the Eternal Holocaust Tribe, people have a difficult time mentally and emotionally processing that Jewish supremacist Neocons and Zionists are the New-Nazis in their going to any lengths to push through their tribal hegemonic agenda, even carrying out open genocide in Gaza and allying with Naziesque types in Ukraine.
Despite the darker contours of the new sexuality, more brazen, lurid, and shameless than ever, what with pornography promoted as even natural and healthy, many chose to believe in the affirming narrative of progress and greater freedom, especially among the homosexuals and macho male types.
It was here that a rift began to form between so-called women’s lib and ‘gay liberation’, especially as a powerful faction among the feminists(disproportionately lesbian) denounced pornography as degrading and exploitative of women whereas homosexuals generally favored the rampant pornification of society. To an extent, it was a conflict between dour lesbians(who promoted the sisterhood against male-female relationships) and flamboyant ‘gays’ who couldn’t get enough of their whoopy-doopy jollies. Still, even as many feminists fought against pornography, even allying with Christian Fundamentalists at times, they too were in favor of looser sexual mores and of course stuff like the Pill and abortion that could only encourage more sexual activity or ‘balling’.
In essence, male homos were far hornier than female homos, and it was only a matter of time whence, once let loose to indulge in their abnormal nature, male homos would go totally wild. The scene in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET where the homo butler is being interrogated is rather instructive. He was introduced as a worldly person of erudition and refinement, a servant by profession but a master of manners. But he’s found out as having orchestrated a massive homo-orgy at his boss’s penthouse. When pressed to explain himself, he says it all began with ice cream. He was having some ice cream and thought who else likes ice cream and invited others over and, before long, they were all buggering one another in wild abandon. In a way, his recollection encapsulates what happened with the new freedoms in society at large. Initially, there was the hope and promise that more people would become cultured, refined, and sophisticated, but it wasn’t long before it turned into obsession with little else but sex, food, games, and drugs. Likewise, for all the butler’s façade of culture and sophistication, the only thing he really cares about is having wild ‘gay’ orgies and getting bung-donged. From licking ice cream to slurping other men’s sperm. (Recently, there was a semi-scandal of Senate staffers doing homo-fecal-penetration in the Capitol hearing room. It was only a semi-scandal because homosexuality hasn’t only been normalized but lionized and sacralized, implying what the staffers did was totally wonderful and the ONLY problem was when and where they did it, i.e. it was a violation of professionalism than of morality.)
In the end, the joke was on the anti-bourgeois anarchist types who thought sexual libertinism would deal a severe blow to the bourgeois-capitalist order, which certain variants of Marxian-Freudians argued ran on the fumes of sexual repression and conservative conformity. Indeed, anarchist-artists like Luis Bunuel had long prodded and provoked both the Church and the bourgeois capitalist class as repressed and repressive, hypocritical and self-deceiving, greedy and indulgent but too anxious of their respectability to confront their true natures and desires, i.e. crassness hiding behind the class of respectability or sanctimony. A more natural attitude about sexuality would surely tear down the veils and reveal institutions of authority for what they really are.
But while it’s true that cultural conservatism(of the Communist East as well) was mortally wounded by the cultural transformation, capitalism quickly adapted and all too happily appropriated the new sexuality. Indeed, even prior to the profound changes in laws that ultimately legalized pornography, the Capitalist West had come to rest more on happiness and pleasure than on ideology in its contest with communism. What is Ernst Lubitsch’s NINOTCHKA about but a humorless and dogmatic commissar from the East who learns to laugh and enjoy life in the West? In the thirties, it was “Garbo laughs”, but by the seventies, it was “Lovelace swallows”, which posed a bigger challenge because traditional capitalism in the US had been inhibited from excesses by the Protestant Work Ethic and the Catholic League. Could capitalism thrive without its alliance with socially conservative forces?
The eighties resoundingly said ‘yes’; indeed, for all the socially-conservative façade of the Reagan Era, it was the decade of the yuppies who fused the new shamelessness and lack of restraint with capitalist enterprise. As things turned out, capitalists turned out to be bigger and better sexual-libertinists than the radicals and anarchists ever could be.
If anything, those who’d taken ‘seriously’ the new sexuality in the Seventies were, in a perverse way, taking a kind of ‘conservative’ position. Bertolucci and Oshima, for all their blatant radicalism and perversion, insisted on a serious and sober perspective on sexuality. Even as they showed it all(except for Marlon Brando’s dong), they were striving for meaning, in contrast to the dime-a-dozen pornographers who were selling the fuc*s for the bucks.
Thus, even as they opted for greater sexual freedom, they sought to contain and confront sexuality as serious themes in art, ideology, philosophy, or some worldview. They couldn’t just let sex be sex at the animal level or as a consumer product. Likewise, when John Lennon and Yoko did the infamous TWO VIRGINS naked cover in 1968, they believed themselves to be making a statement.
By the eighties, none of this mattered as the new sexuality, now the established norm, no longer required any justification, meaning, or purpose. It was just something to flaunt and party with, which is why there was a feminist backlash against the popularity of madonna whose sexuality was too easy to be ‘radical’, too shameless to be dignified or empowering in the name of sisterhood.
In this atmosphere, the ascendant capitalist class of the decade, the yuppies, though well-dressed and adorned with status accouterments, imbibed sexual shameless like cocktail, and the attitude extended to their shameless view of wealth, as expressed by Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s WALL STREET: “Greed is good.” Not “self-interest is good” in the Ayn-Randian sense of unleashing creativity and productivity, a kind of philosophical justification, but good simply because it’s good to be greedy and successful and show it off to the world. The new sexuality, far from undermining capitalism, was easily exploited and marketed for massive profits and, furthermore, imparted its shamelessness to business culture that no longer felt it had to justify itself because ‘greed is good’, and that’s that.
It’s telling that the elaborate theories on sexuality by Sigmund Freud were later superseded by ‘muh dick’ by rappers and ‘boing’ by Beavis(and Butthead). Freud lived in a world where such theories were necessary to justify the discussion of disreputable topics, but once the cultural inhibitions were gone, a kind of ‘idiocracy’ reigned supreme. Likewise, whatever value Queer Theory and Gender Studies may have had as schools of thought(never very much, to be sure), the pretense of any real intellectualism has given way to fantasy, of cooking up more ‘genders’ than carefully exploring the reality of the sexes. But then, a generation raised on HARRY POTTER, where the study of magic has been institutionalized and is the answer to every prayer, can hardly be expected to think seriously about anything, especially when so many adults are themselves immersed in the POTTER universe.
It’s often the case that those who led the charge either come to turn against the tide or at least grow more introspective, even tinged with regret. While it was bold and daring to be ahead of the pack, once the novel, radical, or subversive became the mundane, the dogmatic, or the nihilistic(detached from any deeper purpose), as well as either pervasive or passe(eliciting only boredom than outrage), the initial excitement and original purpose are lost and forgotten, rendered irrelevant.
As the Seventies progressed and turned over into the Eighties, the radicals in arts and culture found themselves the victims of their successes and failures. Many of the social revolutions/liberations had indeed succeeded and become part of the new normal, even adopted as part of middle class culture. Once what had been radical or ‘punk’ had been made mainstream or pop, the pioneers were no longer esteemed as being at the cutting-edge. And whereas the initial efforts were pregnant with significance(in their violation of taboos), the imitations followed by normalization, robbed the expression of even that. In this, the radicals and enfants terribles were victims of their own success.
Of course, they enjoyed a downhill advantage as much as faced an uphill fight. Despite capitalist domination and the presence of powerful conservative forces in politics, the postwar climate in the arts, academia, media, and most institutions was overwhelmingly liberal and leftist, i.e. supportive and laudatory of radical or subversive voices in the arts, entertainment, and criticism/commentary. For example, for every obstacle blocking the legalization of pornography, there were many legal, financial, academic, and media forces working behind the scenes to see the agenda through in the name of free speech/expression.
While artists like Oshima and Bertolucci certainly got pushback, they also got a lot of push-from-behind, often stronger. Many so-called darlings of the left who presumably suffered slings and arrows in their struggles nevertheless had lots of patronage, protection, and support. Those who were speaking ‘truth’ to power or sticking it to the power were, more often than not, supported by one faction of power who used them to destabilize other factions of power. Feminists, for all their kvetching about the patriarchy, garnered tremendous support from powerful institutions, indeed far more than the forces of so-called ‘patriarchy’ ever dreamed of. Much of radicalism was about the powerful marshaling the ‘powerless'(or those calling for ’empowerment’) against rival powers. Jewish Power, immense in the Sixties, sponsored and promoted lots of radical voices to discredit and dismantle the power of the WASPs and conservative institutions of the Church and Military. Such a dynamic is even more pronounced today as ‘wokeness’ is essentially faux-radicalism funded and promoted by the super-powerful against the last vestiges of white, Christian, conservative, and/or nationalist elements. Far from being a challenge to the truly powerful, it is a tool of the truly powerful to divert the politics of outrage from itself in the direction of evil ‘whiteness’. Indeed, for all the problems faced by ‘woke’ voices in the media and academia, theirs is a piece of cake compared to the challenges faced by the likes of Kevin MacDonald and David Duke, for whom it’s entirely an uphill battle with no push from behind by the powerful.
In this sense, contrary to the smug or vain conceits of many radical figures in the Seventies, they were far less independent, consequential, and maverick than they thought themselves to be. They were being egged on and manipulated by larger forces like the heroes in THE ILIAD by the gods. They mattered at the time because they were allowed to matter, favored to matter. Likewise, the so-called ‘freedom fighters’ of various stripes actually turn out to be pawns of the CIA, the gangster squad of the Lone Superpower. And where would BLM, Antifa, and LGBTQXYZ be without Jewish support? Ever notice that the fortunes of the Antifa rise and fall depending on how useful it is to Jewish Power at any given moment? It’s sort of like how Youth Power is manipulated by the Real Power. Youth Power never existed because young people are too ignorant, stupid, inexperienced, and without wealth & position. If the opinions of the young seem to matter in the public discourse, it’s only because the media and academia controlled by adults fill young minds with certain values and attitudes and then present them as the Voice of Youth.
The so-called youth vs adults generational conflict was, more often than not, about one bunch of adults using the youth to degrade the authority and influence of another bunch of adults, though not on the scale of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. For example, when adult Jews pushing Globo-Homo were met with opposition from anti-‘gay’-agenda adults, they used their power of media and academia to fill young minds with ‘gender’ nuttery and ‘rainbow’ idolatry and then unleashed this youth rage on the so-called ‘homophobes’.
Anyway, if many of the social and cultural movements of the radical era bore fruit, the political and ideological struggles mostly faltered or failed completely. May 68 didn’t fundamentally change the politics of France. The middle classes rejected the ideologies of the radical student movements. Politically, the radical politics not only hurt the Democratic Party in 1968 but gave Richard Nixon the biggest landslide victory in 1972. And once the Vietnam War ended and the US washed its hands of that debacle(while communism disgraced itself with the Boat People fiasco and the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge), the Cold War became a story of the capitalist West gradually but surely prevailing over the communist East, which would become embroiled in its own ‘Vietnam’ in Afghanistan.
Sixties radicalism, bound up with youthful energy than with ideological consistency, soon petered out as the boomers graduated from college and had to find jobs. And the hope that Rock/Pop Music and Cinema as personal art forms could redefine people’s perceptions of the world faded in luster as the various ‘new waves’ crashed and subsided(while Steven Spielberg & George Lucas came to command the future) and as Rock turned into ‘glam’ fashion show music, the nihilism/retardation of punk, and the joyful silliness of disco.
So, if figures like Oshima and Bertolucci stood out as radical heroes, ideological stalwarts, or political visionaries up to around the mid-Seventies, they and everything they stood for seemed tired or antiquated by the Eighties. Indeed, the biggest ‘radical’ movie of the decade, Warren Beatty’s REDS, basked in golden nostalgia as an essentially old-fashioned Hollywood romantic epic.
It is then unsurprising that Oshima and Bertolucci, older, wearier, and a bit wiser, made films in the 1980s with less to prove in terms of ideology, fashion, or the Zeitgeist, in and of itself a faded concept in the late stage of decadence. Francis Fukuyama missed the finer point of his End-of-History thesis. It wasn’t so much that the Capitalist West won the War of Ideas against the Communist East but that all ideologies had been given up in pursuit of materialism and hedonism. Thus, End of History wasn’t so much about Idea A prevailing over Idea B as the last contender but the fading of all ideas in favor of atomized individuals in search of the latest idols.
Freed of the ‘radicalesse oblige’ of the earlier crisis-ridden era, Oshima in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE placed classic elements of characters and story at the center. While it was clearly a thought-provoking project of ideas, character development wasn’t sacrificed for the sake of pushing the message or experimental ideation. Each of the major characters in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is given his due, space and time to emerge as a full-blooded agent of history. They aren’t pawns or cutouts subordinate to the thesis but full-fledged characters who hold our attention as unique individuals. Life is a contest of theory vs practice, and works where theory dictates practice tend to be emotionally one-dimensional, however complex at the conceptual level. LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD(directed by Alain Resnais), for all its virtuoso style and ideas about identity and memory, feels rather thin with characters akin to symbols in mathematics; mannequins could almost have done just as well.
Similar to MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, Bertolucci’s mature epic of THE LAST EMPEROR, though lacking in the boldness and verve of his earlier works, the ones that made his reputation, has a richness of perspective and introspection. Absent is the restless mugging for controversy and notoriety, not necessarily a liability in artistic and critical circles. MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE and THE LAST EMPEROR are works of artists who found a measure of peace with themselves and the world.
Ken Russell’s ALTERED STATES turned out to be a cautionary tale about the radical and/or experimental generation and its conceit of no limits. What begins as a promising scientific experiment(with hallucinogenic drugs), one that brings modern man ever closer to the core of existence, ends up in a reductive spiral that reverts man to primitive ape-man and then into the primordial constituents of life. Far from illumination, it’s a descent into darkness.
Likewise, all the obsession with the new sexuality and its possibilities soon slammed into a concrete wall of realization. Sex, in its most basic and primal form, isn’t very interesting. Of actual interest and fascination are all the things around it than the thing itself, which is just in and out of sexual organs, so easily represented by pornography.
Then, it’s hardly surprising that the sexual dynamics in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is infinitely more interesting than the slops of raw sex in IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES(that soon grow senseless) or the rustic noir-ishness of EMPIRE OF PASSION.
Oshima would go on to make only two more films, the unwatchable MAX MON AMOUR(which showed that Oshima’s flair for notoriety had left him, as the outrageous subject matter involving bestiality with a chimpanzee lacks even the conviction for controversy) and GOHATTO(aka TABOO), Oshima’s other mature masterpiece that, like MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, didn’t sacrifice characterization and essentials of storytelling in service to some highfalutin concept. (Todd Haynes also fared better with ‘conventional’ storytelling in works like the TV adaptation of MILDRED PIERCE than with ‘academic’ games in the insufferable I’M NOT THERE and etc.) How odd that Oshima’s two most impressive and richest works were made after his star(as the foremost figure of the Japanese New Wave) had faded. In retrospect, the prolific years that made his reputation produced lesser works than the last decades that largely forgot him.
Oshima, for ideological or intellectual reasons(or commitment to modernism), tended to place the thematic concept at the center, sometimes at the expense of character development and narrative, two most tried-and-true elements of storytelling. In the arts, no idea is as interesting as the person(s) through whom it is processed. To the modernists, however, the classic or conventional appeal of well-developed characters and narrative progression was the umpteenth pandering to the comforting expectations of readers or viewers whose main interest was a ‘good time’. Peter Greenaway never tires of pontificating about how cinema is stuck in the conventions of 19th century storytelling.
Apparently, the development and presentation of full-bodied characters, while no easy feat on the part of the artists, encourage the audience to ‘lose’ themselves in the false reality of fiction(in a suspension of disbelief), thus lowering their mental guard as to the true character of the fictional characters: ‘propagandistic’ tools of the author’s agendas. Furthermore, a well-moving narrative lulls the audience into complacency and compliance.
Traditional art placed the power in the hands of the artist. He created, the audience admired. He spoke, the audience listened. He led, the audience followed. Thus, the audience left a key part of its critical faculty on the shelf to immerse itself in the work. However serious or complex the product, it invited an escapist mentality. Popular culture even more so. The public via attendance or purchases conveyed what it wanted, invariably escapist fantasies or idealized melodramas, and the role of entertainers was to deliver. Thus, serious(high art) or unserious(pop culture), it was generally a one-way street: The artists and entertainers created, the audience ate it up. While the audience(and critics) signaled or communicated to the creators as to what they wanted or expected, once what was ordered was delivered, the main thing was to escape and enjoy, much like at a restaurant where the customer decides what to order but then enjoys the meal once served.
Modernism posited a two-way street in the dynamics of arts and culture. Instead of the artist making and the audience taking, it would be more like a dialogue between the two sides. The artist would thus employ techniques such as ‘alienation’ or ‘distancing'(especially as developed by Bertolt Brecht)to check the full suspension of disbelief; the audience, instead of losing itself in the dream, would be like lucid dreamers, i.e. inside the vision of the creator but also awake to its true nature as fiction, sort of like the way of the dream-walking characters in Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION. It’d be like a magic show where the trickster, rather than just pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, would simultaneously expose the artificiality, thereby provoking the audience into engagement as well as enjoyment, sort of like what happens in Nolan’s PRESTIGE(not that Nolan is a committed modernist; he’s essentially a classic storyteller fascinated with modernist tropes). Instead of the artist doing everything, conditions would be presented to prod the audience into a kind of dialectic. Thus, ‘bourgeois’ complacency and populist infantilism would be challenged by a more alert and questioning approach to art and culture(as instruments of power and manipulation), i.e. the Wizard would be exposed along with his tricks in the Land of Oz. Thus, the modernist-artist is partly auto-subversive, pleading with or even pressing upon the audience to question his authority and engage in a back-and-forth exchange of ideas and meanings. A modernist painting, for example, is for provoking an imagined conversation between the creator and the viewer(while conveying a perpetual sense of ‘work in progress’) than merely to be enjoyed and appreciated as a masterwork, a completed product. The audience may feel uneasy or unfulfilled with much of modernism, but that was the whole point, to rise above escapism and ponder the psycho-political dimensions of art and culture.
It explains why modernism ran into problems with both the Right and the Left. The Right preferred familiar and affirming representations and narratives, and the Left demanded commitment and solidarity. Thus, the ambiguities inherent in modernism were disparaged by the Right as ‘decadent’ or ‘subversive’ and by the Left as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘formalist’, i.e. mulling over finer points of theory(for the educated and privileged) than using art as the weapon of revolution(for the masses).
As things turned out, modernism soon lost its luster of novelty. Also, it spawned various ‘schools’ with dogmas stuffier than anything in traditionalism and ever multiplying conceits as ludicrous as the constantly expanding categories of ‘gender’. And increasingly ensconced in elite academia and cynically exploited by organizations such as the C.I.A., it became just another base of power and propaganda tool, i.e. “The Capitalist West is better than the Communist East because it appreciates Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.”
In the long run, after post-modernism and post-post-modernism and whatever the latest fashion is called, we can reasonably say modernism was a fascinating and even necessary detour but hardly the destination of art and culture. All said and done, just like our minds are wired for grammar(in the Chomskyian sense), our minds are wired to be receptive to certain kinds of expressions, representations, and narratives. Modernism’s chief contribution was in expanding the language of art than redefining its purpose and appeal. As Eric Hobsbawn wrote, GONE WITH THE WIND may have greater lasting value and appeal than so many of the avant-garde works of the 20th century.
Even though older directors like Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi were no strangers to modernism, aspects of which are discernible in their works, the true modernists of Japanese Cinema fully emerged in the 1960s, with the versatile Kon Ichikawa as something of a bridge between the Old Guard and the ‘New Wave’.
Among the most notable were Shohei Imamura, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Yoshishige Yoshida, and of course, Nagisa Oshima. (Seijun Suzuki later joined the ranks.)
In terms of fame(and even notoriety), Oshima garnered(partly through sheer will) the most international attention for reasons oddly similar to those that came to favor Akira Kurosawa and Yukio Mishima. While leftist Oshima and rightist Mishima were in opposing camps, they consciously courted the West as the cultural metropole. They instinctively understood that the World’s interest(via Western domination of media and academia) in Japanese culture would be limited to those few figures deemed most representative of the civilization as a whole. While both men were steeped in modernist sensibility, Mishima emphasized what was unique to Japan in terms of tradition and sensibility whereas Oshima emphasized what was wrong with Japan trapped between its dark past and troubled present. Yet, Mishima was far too modernist(and too infatuated with Western things) to embody the essence of Japanese tradition, and Oshima was too steeped in all-things-Japanese to have ideological relevance outside Japan; for all his leftist rabble-rousing, the main appeal of his films in the West was the exoticism, even if the culture presented was being excoriated.
Clearly, works like IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES and EMPIRE OF PASSION, like the sexually-twisted tales of Mishima, featured an Eastern brand of eroticism that tantalized foreign audiences. Still, their unmistakable Western influences, ideological and/or aesthetic-intellectual, placed them in the company of other modernists the world over, and it helped that both Mishima and Oshima were rather shameless self-promoters, perhaps not a very Japanese trait, but then both had a rather mischievous streak of enfant-terrible-ism. Mishima, being a homosexual, was understandably vain and narcissistic, and he built up his body to be the poster-boy of the ‘harmony of the pen and the sword[‘, a variation of what made Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer famous, men of letters as men of action.
Oshima, in contrast, was no homo and looked rather pudgy & unkempt in his heyday. If Mishima molded himself into an idol of neo-samurai virtues, Oshima’s crusade was to smash all idols. It was iconography vs iconoclasm, the sword vs the hammer. Back then, Oshima wasn’t the only one beating the war drums, partly inspired by youth politics in the West, the Vietnam War(which complicated Japan’s pledge to eternal peace, given its alliance with the ‘genocidal’ warmonger in yet another Asian country), and the Sino-Soviet rift, as well as the rift between Western leftism and Moscow, especially after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
For a time, the Japanese radicals in the arts also gained from the near collapse of the Film Industry. In desperation, movie companies tried everything, a lucky break for radically-minded directors willing to work with small budgets on topical subjects, propaganda, and experimentalism, that is until the industry finally settled on churning out mostly soft-corn pornography made for peanuts(and guaranteed a steady audience).
Like Mishima and Oshima, Kurosawa gained an international advantage because his works seemed not only OF Japan but ABOUT Japan to a wider non-Japanese audience, i.e. they weren’t merely Japanese but about Japanese-ness as it might attract or impress outsiders, especially of the prestigious and dominant West. It’s no wonder all three men had detractors in Japan who regarded them as publicists or self-promoters than men of clarity of vision and purpose. More marketers of Japanism than artists of Japan, as if Japanese things needed the validation of the outside world.
And indeed, fame is hardly the best measure of quality. Film scholars in Japan and the West have expressed preference for Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu over Kurosawa. And Mishima had plenty of naysayers who regarded his works as style minus substance. And in retrospect, Oshima was overrated because his sensationalism made him, along with Bernardo Bertolucci and the loathsome Fassinbinder, the go-to-guy in the Seventies for the latest fuss in world cinema.
Far more impressive were Hiroshi Teshigahara and Shohei Imamura because, along with their experimentalism, they were meticulous in their craft, whereas Oshima, much like Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and R.W. Fassbinder, was often haphazard and slapdash in his approach, which, though fresh and flashy in the moment, wielded results that over time seemed out of time, leaving viewers wondering what all the fuss was about, rather like the scene in BLOW-UP(by Michelangelo Antonioni) where, after all the chasing and tussling over a broken guitar neck, it comes to mean nothing to passers-by with no knowledge of the context of its condition.
Of course, it helped that Imamura’s approach was mainly anthropological while Teshigahara’s approach was largely psychological(in partnership with the brilliant author Kobo Abe), as either is far more interesting than any ideological approach that, for all its nuances and ironies, is overly eager to score points and push a message than probe and understand. Not for nothing is Oliver Stone’s NIXON far more interesting than JFK with its neo-Capraesque cast of heroes in search for the grail against the villains who brought down Camelot. In the arts, psychological and biographical approach yields many more fruits than a politically-driven agenda.
Unlike most of Oshima’s output, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is as powerful today as upon its release in 1983(though plenty of film critics were mixed in their reactions). If anything, it gains from being appreciated for what it is, a P.O.W. film, than as a David Bowie vehicle, which was part of its marketing campaign.
Although one may question the casting of Bowie, his performance has a genuineness lacking in his stint(or stunt) with MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH that rather shamelessly milked his Rock Star persona. He serves the film than vice versa. He fully accepts the role of an actor instead of banking on his celebrity status, in the process truly becoming Jack Celliers. It’s not a show-off performance but a somber and dedicated one.
Celliers’ confession to Lawrence ruptures the emotional aquifer within. Deceptively, we are transported from the world of horror and cruelty that is war to an idyllic world of childhood and peacetime, only to discover that the source of Celliers’ deepest hurt was sown in those years.
Celliers sweats it out in a state of agony and vulnerability, as well as nervous relief to finally get it off his chest to a sympathetic ear(though the men are separated by a wall), due to a convergence of factors that put him in just the mood to do so.
He could soon be facing the firing squad. Psychologically and physically, he’s near the end of his tethers. Lawrence, whose situation is as dire as his or even worse, is that rare person he admires and trusts to confide in. A sense of Last Rites hangs over both of them. And, something Lawrence said moments earlier stirred up painful memories of his own. Lawrence recalled that in the pandemonium caused by the impending Japanese invasion of the island, the scene was of chaos and desperation, havoc everywhere. However, a woman he’d seen earlier was exactly in the same position and poise when he met up with her again. Whatever the strangely uncharacteristic moment meant for Lawrence, one may surmise it meant for Celliers the constancy of a memory that has haunted him all these years, i.e. despite all the changes in his personal life and professional career, despite international tensions and another world war upending entire systems, the one constant in his life, the thing he finds himself returning to over and over, is the unresolved matter between him and his brother.
Given the miserable circumstances, it may be Celliers’ last chance to confess his ‘sins’ to someone worthy of his attention and trust. As is often the case, the worst of times for the body may be the best of times for the soul.
For all their archetypal embodiment of the nobler virtues of the West, it needs to be said that Militarist Japan didn’t lose the war because of decent men like Lawrence and Celliers but because the West, especially the US and USSR, proved to be far more proficient in killing with their infinitely greater productive capacities. Whether the Allies were really good or not, they didn’t win because of ‘goodness’. Acts like Celliers’ self-sacrifice, if such indeed happened, would have had zero impact on the overall outcome, and indeed, most British soldiers were just ordinary men doing what most soldiers do: Survive and try to kill more on the other side. Likewise, as much as we may admire the saint-hero of HACKSAW RIDGE(directed by Mel Gibson), the outcome of the war was determined by how many lives were killed than how many were saved.
So, what significance did rare individuals like Celliers have in the scales of history? A thousand Celliers couldn’t have defeated Japan with their spirit of self-sacrifice. It was the US carriers and airplanes, well-fed and well-armed GIs, limitless supplies of ammo, and finally the atomic bombs that finally did the trick(along with the belated Soviet entry into the war). The inhumane Japanese were defeated by inhumane means.
Even so, World War II was a war between the empires of the mind as well as of the empires of armies. Unlike most wars, including World War I, which were mainly about territory and political influence, World War II turned into something like a secular version of the Religious War, a quasi-spiritual battle for the soul of humanity.
If Germany vs Russia in World War I pitted similar political systems — imperial autocracies — in a contest for land and hegemony, the war between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia was profoundly ideological, made even more frightening due to the radical natures of both ideologies.
The war also sparked an internal conflict within the British soul. The British Empire was premised on racial supremacism but also guided by universal values of Christianity and the Enlightenment(or liberal democracy). Its global pride rested on the Anglos as the superior race ruling over lesser peoples, the feature of the empire that Hitler admired most, but the Brits preferred to rationalize their domination as a mission of uplifting the rest of mankind(and doing good work like ending the slave trade).
Thus, many Anglo elites(in US as well as the UK) regarded themselves as ideologically closer to the Soviet Union than National Socialist Germany with its brazenly radical-racist ideology. Communism, with its humanist-sounding brotherhood-of-man rhetoric, sounded nicer than the darkly raw and brutal vision of racial conflict and Darwinian struggle emanating from the National Socialists. As for the Japanese, their worldview seemed downright feudal and utterly irrational.
Therefore, World War II, far more than earlier conflicts, turned into a soul-searching event, one that not only defined the forces of Enlightenment(which would include the Soviet Union despite its brutal exercise of progressive principles) against the forces of darkness and irrationality but also exposed the contradiction at the heart of the West itself that, for all its claims of liberty, individuality, and freedom, practiced its own kind of racial domination over nonwhites(in the US and British colonies).
Indeed, the great irony of America’s eventual involvement in the conflict came by the way of total racial rage and hatred against the dastardly ‘Japs’ who’d dared to attack the navy of the great US of A. Many Americans finally clamored for total war because their hatred of the ‘Japs’ was hardly different in kind from the Nazi hatred of the Jews, a point made by none other than Charles Lindbergh(in empathy with the Germans).
And then, the Holocaust Narrative turned World War II into an event of even greater ‘spiritual’ significance, indeed to the point where many Western Nations retroactively reinterpreted their involvement as mainly motivated by moral outrage over what the evil Nazis were doing to the Jews, i.e. “We fought the Nazis to save the Jews, but alas, we didn’t do enough, and we must atone for our failure.”
And in Russia, the remembrance of the Great Patriotic War became like a holy ritual, with the World War II generation honored as saint-heroes who stared death right in the face and rose from near-defeat into the archangel of history that slayed the dragon of Nazism. (To be sure, Anglos of UK and US could never see eye to eye with the Russians, whom they subconsciously held in contempt. The two peoples couldn’t be more different in their national characters despite their mastery of empire-building. Anglos were the leaders of their civilization, whereas Russians were the followers. Unlike Great Britain that was ruled by the Anglos, Russia was usually under the rule of non-Russians, traditionally Germanic in origin. Anglos had the master mentality, whereas the Russians had the slave mentality. Even when both civilizations adopted Enlightenment ideas, Anglos expanded liberty and individuality with liberalism, whereas Russians reinforced tyranny and servility under communism. If Anglos were the masters of the British Empire, Russians were the slaves of the Russian empire, which was often in the hands of non-Russians, be they Germans, Jews, Georgians, and etc. Of course, today, things have been somewhat reversed. Russians today are more likely to be masters of their civilization, whereas Anglos in the UK and the US are mostly cuck-maggot servants of Jews, Homos, Negroes, and Diversity. Jews and Hindus pretty much own everything in London today.)
The victorious Allies, perhaps overly self-congratulatory on the rightness of their cause, favored an interpretation that more or less went as follows: Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan embodied the atavistic tendencies of mankind, especially dangerous in a world armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction, whereas the democratic West(and communist Russia to some degree) represented the ideal of liberty and equality, along with rationality and dignity of all men as the basis of human progress.
In other words, while traditional Japanese culture had meaning and purpose in its hermetically sealed feudal past, Japan’s emergence as an industrial and military power entailed it to forgo old ‘superstitions’ in favor of rational and universal modes of outlook and policy. After all, American Indians acting primitive with primitive weapons is one thing but it’d be quite another if they acted ‘savage’ with modern technology(though we increasingly witness such a phenomenon with blacks today; even worse, for all their jabbering about ‘liberal democratic’ values and ‘rules-based order’, much of Jewish global policy is premised on ancient-atavistic beliefs of ‘chosen-ness’ and deep-seated hatreds & resentments).
More power means more responsibility, and more responsibility calls for more rationality. Should powerful modern(ized) nations mold their ideology, politics, and foreign policy on pre-modern cults of myth and magic? An order that adopts modernity and science/technology are obliged to operate on rational and humanist principles as too much is at stake(though it must be said just about anything can be spun as ‘rational’, like dropping nukes on Japan to ‘save lives’ or even the Holocaust as a ‘scientific’ solution of finally dealing with the Jewish Question, which is why some have traced Nazi evil partly to the Enlightenment that rejected faith for cold facts).
Now, it may be misleading to draw too close a parallel between National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan as the Germans, for the most part, weren’t so literal-minded in their consciousness of German culture or history. A German equivalent of Japanese militarist Shinto-ism would have been a literal belief in the pagan mythology of the Germanic folks. The Germans clearly knew the distinction between facts and myths, between science and superstition. They might get swept up at a Wagner opera but knew it was based on fantasy.
Yet, the National Socialists were also fatally irrational in some ways because their supposed racial science was to a large extent predicated on narrow and rigid aesthetic prejudices, with the ‘Aryans’ at the top. If the Japanese literally believed in their myth(of the Emperor’s divinity and et al), the Germans pursued what was essentially an art project, perhaps the biggest ever, obsessed with the cult of beauty. Thus, National Socialism’s scientific racism really took cues from its artistic idealism. Beauty, whatever its value, belongs in the realm of the irrational. If Marxism was really a modern reiteration of Judeo-Christian-prophesizing dressed up as social-materialist science and if Freudianism was a modern twist on Jewish tribal-sexual anxieties presented as ‘medicine’, Nazism was really a neo-pagan worship of beauty garbed in the science of biology. In the age of science, even non-science and pseudo-science approximated the appearance of science, or scientism. Even Biblical scholars got into the act with the ‘science’ of Creationism that claimed to prove God’s design in all things on the basis of facts and logic.
Nazi racial science formed the basis of the official ideology and myth of the regime. Like the Nazi policy on the arts, it was to be accepted, not questioned. When a supposed science takes on the aura of myth or religion, it is of course no longer real science. (Not that so-called ‘liberal democracies’ are all that better, what with the current regime’s delirious cult of Negro genius and the laughable canonization of Anthony Fauci as a kind of pope of medicine.)
Hardly surprising given the patterns of history, the Holocaust filled the postwar ‘spiritual’ void as the new OFFICIAL RELIGION of European man. No longer a historical event that bears scrutiny and revision, it became the god to worship and appease.
The communist conception of man had its own problems with rationality. Although more man-centered than myth-centered(like National Socialism and Japanese Yamato-ism), it also spawned some dangerous abstractions. There’s a Peanuts comic strip where Linus says he wants to be a doctor, only to be met with Lucy’s retort that a doctor must love mankind, whereupon Linus replies, “I love mankind! It’s people I can’t stand.” That pretty much sums up the problem of communism. Just as Captain Yonoi insisted that all men could be uplifted and redeemed with the proper spirit, communism believed in its power to mold any man into the New Man with the proper consciousness as revealed by Marx. With the correct revolutionary spirit, there was nothing mankind couldn’t accomplish, the magical thinking behind campaigns like the Great Leap Forward in China. For the sake of mankind, any number of individuals were worth the sacrifice. Mankind > People. It’s like the logic of war where individual lives are inevitably sacrificed for the sake of the whole, and of course, Marxist dialectics explained history as a ceaseless class warfare, that is until the day arrives when all of humanity melds into a single class. A kind of class-melting-pot theory.
For all its claims of social/materialist science, communism relied on an irrational and ultimately unrealistic faith in human nature. And despite its claims of humanist philosophy, communism miserably failed on that count because it was more about mankind than people, whereby innumerable individuals, deemed expendable, were sacrificed on the altar of History. A kind of human sacrifice in the name of humanity.
In contrast to Japanese militarism, Nazism, and communism are the values of true humanism, the acceptance of man as man, warts and all, in the hope that every individual, through effort and reflection, could be a better person. A humble, as opposed to a utopian or overly idealized, conception of man is usually more humane.
Indeed, this is borne out by the monstrous nihilism of American winner-ism and pathological ruthlessness of East-Asian elitism. American obsession with winners idolizes three groups, Jews(brains), blacks(brawn), and homos(style), as ‘exceptional’, giving them free rein to do as they please as with the world-as-their-oyster, with dire results with wars, crime, and corruption. The so-called D.E.I is anything but about true diversity, equity, or ‘inclusion’. It’s really about Jews-as-gods demanding that the diversity of mankind, in equitable measure, look up to Jews, blacks, and homos as better than everyone else. As for East Asian elitism, it divides the world into credentialed elites who deserve everything and the rest who have no reason to live and might as well kill themselves. Both Americanism and East-Asian-ism, in their rejection of humanism, have spawned pathologies that may well bring down civilization.
Surely, there were men of nobler qualities like Celliers and good men like Lawrence in World War II, and on all sides. Nobility and decency transcend racial, national, and cultural boundaries. Some of the most vile, wicked, and dastardly types are found on the good or better side while some of the finest and most admirable types are found on the bad or worse side. That’s one of the great tragedies of any war. Far from being a conflict between good people vs bad people, it’s usually the good and bad of one side vs the good and bad of the other side.
Therefore, even as we tend to see wars in terms of Good Guys vs Bad Guys at the macro-level, there’s plenty of good and bad in every side at the micro-level. DAS BOOT the German submarine film is about the Bad Guys, the Nazis, but its close examination reveals many positive qualities about the men. The tragedy of the three-part HUMAN CONDITION(directed by Masaki Kobayashi) isn’t only about the horrors committed by the Japanese Imperialists in Northeast Asia and their eventual demise under Soviet tanks but about a good man, a noble soul, who finds himself serving a cause he personally detests. But as a Japanese national in a time of war, he has no choice but to serve his country. Despite the horrors all around, much of them carried out by his compatriots(and even himself under orders), we find ourselves moved by his efforts, however ineffectual in the end, to be a good man in a fallen world.
Through such fictional stories and historical accounts, all sides can empathize and understand, if not forgive. An American, British, or Soviet veteran of World War II can be moved by the travails of the hero in HUMAN CONDITION, just like their Japanese counterparts can be moved by the characters of Lawrence and Jack Celliers in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE.
Indeed, the value of Celliers’ deed goes beyond patriotism. In a way, he did it not merely for patriotism but for humanity, even for Yonoi. In preventing the situation from escalating into further violence, he not only saved the P.O.W.s but unburdened the souls of the Japanese soldiers who might have been ordered to open fire. Thus, in his finest hour, Celliers was more than a patriot. He was a saint. Earlier, by his own account at the trial, he’d surrendered his body to the Japanese to prevent the killing of villagers(local Asians), and finally, he surrendered his life for the sake of his compatriots. A sacrifice so noble cannot be contained within categories of tribe, which it transcends in motive and meaning.
The Greatest Story Ever Told, that of Jesus Christ, is founded on a similar mystery, the depths from which a new conception of virtue and goodness arose. According to Christian myth, Jesus, though born a Jew, loved all mankind, for whom His life was given. Furthermore, even though Jesus was the Son of God(thus God Himself), His love for mankind was such that, for the duration of His presence on Earth, the barrier between the divine and the human was suspended as His Heavenly body embraced men(and women) of every background. Thus, the border between Jew and Gentile and between God and man was breached, with Jesus standing at the open gates among the various realms. As Anthony Quinn says as Zorba the Greek, “I have done things for my country that would make your hair stand. I have killed. Destroyed villages. Raped women. And why? Because they were Turks! or Bulgarians! That’s the rotten damned fool I was. Now I look at a man – any man – and I say, he is good, he is bad. What do I care if he’s Greek or Turk?” In His time, Jesus achieved nothing. He gave some beautiful sermons and gathered crowds, but many more people turned against Him, who was finally tortured and killed by Jews and Romans. Yet, the story became the ‘greatest story ever told’ because it could move(and conquer) the hearts of men and women, a power lacking in even the greatest battle story. It was as if, through His extraordinary virtues, Jesus conquered evil itself and thus death as well, with which mankind had been cursed when Adam and Eve committed the Original Sin.
In this light, even though men like Celliers had no impact on the outcome of the war that was decided by guns and bombs, their deeds had a way of inspiring storytellers and story-listeners alike. Audie Murphy was a great soldier, but his feat was solely physical and emotional, about guts and glory, not moral and certainly not spiritual. He did what a good soldier is trained to do: Kill as many of the enemy as possible. And in the heat of war, it’s just about all one could expect of anybody faced with kill-or-be-killed.
It’s near-impossible to be noble in war, just like animals living by tooth and claw cannot afford the luxury of morality(if they could grasp the concept). So, when we do find stories of nobility, magnanimity, or self-sacrifice beyond the call of duty(combat-wise) in a war-torn setting, we find ourselves affected in strange unfamiliar ways. A noble act or outlook in war, at least if not utterly stupid or delusional, has an element of grace, an illumination that, amidst all the animus and mayhem that inevitably blind men to the humanity of other men, the enemy, there are those rare moments of recognition when everyone, friend and foe alike, appears as a victim of history and his own nature. The entirety of Terrence Malick’s adaptation of THIN RED LINE was suffused with such vibes. What is a saint-soldier to do caught between man and nature, between his side and the enemy, between duty and higher calling?
Most soldiers aren’t heroes animated by self-sacrificing idealism and either chose soldiering for ‘mercenary’ reasons or were conscripted. Any moment of grace in war runs counter to the brutal logic of kill-or-be-killed, making for a desert than a garden for anything resembling mercy and compassion. Therefore, the noble act is essentially of one’s volition, not necessity or obligation. ENEMY BELOW’s most surprising and memorable scene is when the US naval commander(Robert Mitchum) throws a lifeline to the German submarine commander(Curt Jurgens) who chooses to remain on the submarine than join his men on the lifeboats. It’s not just an act of professional courtesy(as both men are captains) but of recognition of one another’s soldierly virtues of courage and commitment despite being enemies. Naval battle movies tend to be rich in metaphorical suggestion, with the submarine crew representing the subconscious side of man in conflict with the conscious side represented by the forces above water. (It’s sort of like tunnel or ‘kanal’ warfare but at sea.)
Paradoxically, war generates the most hatred but also the most mutual respect among men, as in violent sports. Boxers who did their utmost to destroy their opponents also develop grudging respect for them as fellow warriors in the ring. For all the trash talk and raging rivalry, they were in the ring trading blows and giving their all, putting pride and reputations on the line, whereas everyone else just enjoyed the spectacle in the safety of their seats. Of course, some athletes never get over their hatreds, and this is even truer among soldiers for whom it wasn’t just a sport but a real matter of life and death, ideological righteousness and even national survival. Besides, whereas even the most savage sports come with referees, wars have no rules but to win, with international laws being mostly an afterthought.
Still, once the dust has settled and hatchets have been buried, many veterans do come to the tragic realization that, regardless of which side was right(er), it was a war between men who believed themselves to be carrying out their patriotic duties. The simplistic image of the irredeemably evil enemy begins to fade and a more human face begins to come into focus. Even when the ideology governing a nation was totally evil and mad, as has been said of Nazi Germany, there’s no getting around the fact that most soldiers were ordinary men, ‘like you or me’, doing their duties as patriots. It is then all the more remarkable that such realizations could happen during(than merely after) war.
In a moment together in the P.O.W hospital, Hara reproaches Lawrence for remaining alive with the shame of captivity. Hara admits Lawrence is a fine soldier, all the more reason for Lawrence to take his own life for the sake of honor than remain alive as a coward, whereupon Lawrence with uncharacteristic vigor explains the situation according to his own cultural views, i.e. British soldiers don’t regard surrender as disgraceful as it takes more courage to remain alive and hope to fight for another day. In this exchange, we notice Hara isn’t as pigheaded or simpleminded as he initially appeared. He is capable of noticing what is admirable in the enemy, evident in his recognition of Lawrence’s qualities as a soldier. Still, he’s trapped in his own cultural mindset and regards Lawrence and other P.O.W.s as cowards who, at the moment of truth, folded than fought to the last as men of honor and heroism. Yet, in an inchoate manner, this crude and bumpkin-ish character(the Japanese equivalent of a redneck) exhibited something approaching grace when he took the initiative to spare Lawrence(and Celliers to boot).
Still, war is war, and even the noblest soul can only go so far in favoring humanity over political allegiance. (In John Boorman’s HELL IN THE PACIFIC, Lee Marvin as American soldier and Toshiro Mifune as Japanese soldier initially confront each other as archenemies but learn to trust and cooperate with one another to survive, but their hatreds begin to resurface soon after they make it off the deserted island. Despite their combined effort to improve their chances of survival, neither man can transcend their tribal bonds. Ironically, the closer they come to rejoining their respective civilizations, the more savage they feel toward one another.) Therefore, noble deeds in war are seeds that may sprout only later when people in peacetime find their memories favoring the oddly uncharacteristic moments over the general eventfulness of war itself, one governed by the sole focus of killing as many of the enemy as possible.
Of course, one suspects some of the oddly moving moments in war were embellished or wholly made up(like Holocaust stories that are too good to be true), but the timeless appeal of stories such as HACKSAW RIDGE suggests people crave something more than victory. No thinking person could possibly believe one side was totally good while the other was totally bad. And people wish to believe that the victory was spiritual than merely political, and furthermore, that even the good victorious side has much to learn and reflect upon because war, however justified, is always a great evil and tragedy for all involved.
Therefore, even the most righteous and proudest war narratives, if thoughtful, are tinged with despair and even remorse that events had to develop into a conflagration that turned ordinary men into killing machines against entire populations dehumanized by propaganda. This sensibility goes beyond letting bygones be bygones, or burying the hatchet, like what happened among many veterans of the Civil War. It highlights those remarkable individuals who, in the strange confluence of events, rose to the occasion that went beyond the call of duty and touched on something like destiny, with the future of humanity hanging in the balance of one’s decision in the pivotal moment, a kind of christ-complex of shouldering the weight of the world. Even in a world gone mad, if there remains at least one sound mind, there is the chance that his example may prevail once the madness recedes. Consider the Noah Story where one good family and its pairs of animals replenished the Earth once the flood receded. Or a forest re-emerging after a devastating wildfire from seeds beneath the ground.
Wars and political campaigns produce passion and change but also bring out the worst in humanity, one that sees everything in binaries of good vs evil and drown out all voices to the contrary. Under such circumstances, even people of sound mind either go along out of fear or powerlessness or get swept up by the sheer thrill of the moment. Rare are the individuals who, despite the tide of events, remain true to themselves in thought and action. Often excoriated, ridiculed, mocked, or worse, they are often the ones who are later remembered and rehabilitated, regarded with admiration and respect. Germans who refused to submit to Hitler’s increasingly megalomaniacal plans later came to be regarded as the best of Germany. It’s doubtful anyone admires the Red Guards who rampaged through China, but some who refused to comply and paid the price, even at the cost of life, have later come to be admired. Such individuals could be at the mercy of a foreign enemy(like in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE) or of his own countrymen(like so many honest and courageous doctors and officials during the Covid Madness who paid a steep price, personally and/or professionally; as time passes, few will think of the Covid-pushers, who had the backing of the power, as heroes, but many will appreciate those who remained true to themselves despite all the pressures, threats, and penalties).
Over time, even the grandest and most horrendous events pass from history as if they never happened, like hurricanes followed by the restoration of prolonged normality. If they’re remembered at all for most people, it’s through stories told of them, often fictional. Storytellers are most drawn to tales of tragic heroism, the basis for hope and inspiration than merely horror and action. A story of a forest fire or hurricane where people flee, suffer, or die may be compelling but is also one-dimensional. The event gains greater significance only through the extraordinary accounts of those who rise above natural/basic instincts of self-preservation. In the case of the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese media made a big deal of the older men who put their lives on the line to prevent further meltdown of the nuclear plant.
All such stories strike a universal chord, and through them humanity is able to cobble together alternative and redemptive narratives of history, be they of wars or other crises. If the past events live on through narratives, then even a seemingly small or insignificant act that inspires stories has a better chance of being remembered than the biggest and loudest events that fail to inspire their telling. Jesus’s life seemed so insignificant compared to the great events of wars, uprisings, and political rivalries of the time, but it is the biggest story to come out of the Roman Empire because it inspired the storytelling in the Gospels and thereafter. It’s no wonder that some Jews have tried to spin too-good-to-be-true stories of the Holocaust because the mere account of Jews-being-killed, though tragic, only seems grim and depressing. (That explains Steven Spielberg’s Capraesque turn in SCHINDLER’S LIST where the central character is a goy who goes from an opportunist to a saintly white knight who ultimately sacrifices his wealth and risks his life to save Jews. A most unlikely deed in the most unlikely place, but the film assures us it’s all true.)
A doubly potent example of the inspirational narrative is ASCENT(directed by Larisa Shepitko). It concerns a noble-souled Soviet partisan who decides to sacrifice his life so that others may live. His decision turns out to be for naught, and the only compatriot who manages to survive is a Judas-like traitor. Still, the man, despite having failed in his objectives, dies with a noble heart(rather like the Robert De Niro character in THE MISSION who meets death with at least the peace of mind that he tried his best to the bitter end).
ASCENT is doubly potent because the film itself might never have seen the light of day and would have faded from history like so many victims of World War II whose stories we will never know. But, the film had such an emotional impact on some officials in the Soviet cultural hierarchy that it was released and eventually came to be appraised as one of the finest films of the Great Patriotic War.
And, SEVEN SAMURAI’s great appeal owes to something other than action and excitement. The story is as ‘spiritual’ as it is physical, an unlikely scenario made compelling and convincing. The purpose of the samurai was to serve a lord, yet the samurai in the film decide, out of their own volition, to serve a village of dirt poor peasants who have nothing to offer them but three meals a day and high odds of getting killed. As such, the samurai in the film do something they aren’t bound to do, a true measure of the nobility of heart.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE shares with other humanist masterpieces of cinema the sense of difficulty of its creed. CASUALTIES OF WAR(directed by Brian De Palma) is no masterpiece but confronts the humanist dilemma wherein basic morality and decency turn into an epic struggle, not only against fellow soldiers gone rogue but against the system that cares more for morale than morality(sadly common on all sides in wartime). Unlike Jack Celliers who goes out of his way to carry out an extraordinary deed, Fox’s character tries to convince his comrades that it’s plain wrong to rape and murder a young woman, but even something so elementary becomes muddled among men gone mad.
In peacetime in a normal community, basic decency is everywhere, growing on trees as low-hanging fruits, that is unless the community is full of Negroes whose natural mode is savagery. But in the jungles of Vietnam, Michael J. Fox’s character discovers even the most basic decency can get lost in the shuffle, and ironically he becomes the black-sheep, the outcast among the men.
Granted, basic decency isn’t the same as morality. A ‘woke’ white community may mostly have nice, kind, helpful, and law-abiding folks but, in their veneration of sodomy and various other degeneracies, they cannot be said to be moral. Charles Murray seems like a nice guy, but the lowlife punk caved to ‘gay marriage’ because he lacks genuine moral fiber. Indeed, true morality requires one to be un-nice, unkind, and impolite at times, as when Jesus flipped out over the money-changers at the Temple. Apparently, money-changing is one thing but belongs nowhere near the House of God.
Anglos are fading from history because, all said and done, they care more about decency than morality. Though interrelated and often overlapping, decency and morality aren’t synonymous. Decency is more about attitude, manners, and behavior; it lacks depth of conviction so integral to morality. Thus, decency is often at the mercy of fashions and trends. For Murray, changing his views on ‘gay marriage’ seemed to be the decent thing to do because classy and successful types seemed to support it. A truly moral person is impervious to fashion and the prevailing winds of elite/public opinion.
Anglos are failing because their culture favors decency over morality. As long as Jews define and determine what is socially ‘acceptable’ and ‘respectable’, Anglo attitudes and actions are careful not to tread beyond the bounds of ‘decency’. In recent decades, Anglos have been led to believe that reverence for sodomy & tranny-penis-cutting and celebration of black savagery & replacement immigration are D.E.I-cent, whereas anyone saying otherwise is sufficiently ‘obscene’ to have his reputation and/or career destroyed. A truly meaningful civilization has an identity that is deeper than ideology, history that is deeper than narratives, and morality that is deeper than decency. If Anglos were true to themselves, they would be angry as hell and fighting like the Viet Cong against the French and the Americans. But no, they must be mindful not to upset the applecart of respectable opinion because that would be so ‘rude’.
Utopianism faces herculean obstacles because mankind cannot be perfected(as proven by communism and Nazism), but then, even if mankind could be perfected, would that be preferable? The end-result could be boredom, the kind that led Adam and Eve to eat from the Forbidden Fruit and shake things up a bit. Besides, even as God demands obedience and loyalty, He seems more fond of those who push back a bit than those who are overly obedient. Compare Moses with Job. Moses was sometimes intemperate and impatient, displeasing to God, who nevertheless chose him to be the greatest of prophets. It’s as if God wants a little fight as a sign of vitality and independence. In contrast, Job was a near-perfect specimen of piety and faith, but God grew bored with him and called on Satan to see if they could get any rise out of him. The Chosen-ness or the Covenant of the Jews is a kind of paradox. The one perfect God demands total submission, obedience, and loyalty but also looks for signs of intelligence, independence, and pride, qualities that elevate man above slavery. Without that element of pushback, the allegiance is that of an unthinking servility than of virtue, understanding, and ‘free will’. And in the subconsciousness of God-ness there’s surely an inkling that a religion like Judaism and its conception of God couldn’t have arisen from a servile non-thinking people. For a people to gain prophetic reach and vision, there had to have been an element of defiance. What divides Jews and Christians is the question of personality and attitude. Jews cannot respect the Christian mind that is childlike, trusting, ‘innocent’, and naive, kind of like Adam and Eve before the Fall. Even as Christians believe in a fallen world, they believe they have Eden in their souls through Jesus Christ. All they need to do is trust and believe, like the good man Job. If Jews feel contempt for the childlike and servile Christians, Christians fear the still-beating heart of Jewish prophetic power and will, which Catholic chickens like E. Michael Jones calls the ‘Jewish Revolutionary Spirit’. When Jones goes on about the Logos, he means there’s no more reason to think or question. The eternal Truth has been delivered, and that’s that. Jones argues that Jews remain restless and troublesome because, in their rejection of the conclusive Christian logos, they’re always in search of the new prophecy or messiah; but if Christianity is so conclusive and complete, why are so many churches so vulnerable to and defenseless against the siren songs of Jewish secular prophecies and visions? Arguably, the childlike qualities of Christianity have fostered a kind of mental servility that is at the mercy of those with greater will and vision, who would be the Jews.
Against utopianism that foolishly believes in the perfectibility of man, there has been what might be called damnation-ism that believes mankind or a subset of mankind is more or less irredeemable. The gloom, pessimism, and self-loathing of such an outlook goes well beyond grim realism. Mankind is made out to be worse than it is and more cursed than it deserves to be.
Certain readings of Judaism and Christianity are heavy on the aspect of the Original Sin. Mankind cannot wash away the sins of Adam & Eve and their son Cain, the killer of his brother. Even as Christianity offered hope and salvation, it served up lots of gloom and doom, especially in the form of Calvinism and its dogma of predestination. Some Christians were convinced that any pleasure is sinful and led lives of self-denial and self-flagellation, as if every minute of every hour of every day must be spent atoning before God.
The secular variation of damnation-ism is Whiteness Studies whereby the white race is cursed forever for the sin of ‘racism’ and ‘antisemitism’ and must atone at all times for all eternity at the feet of Noble Negroes and Sacred Semites.
Another is climatology-theology or ‘climatheology’ that says mankind is damned for what it has done to Mother Earth in its greed, short-sightedness, and piggery. In Paul Schrader’s FIRST REFORMED, a young man commits suicide in light of humankind’s sins against the environment. Some green-energy people don’t care if many millions of people might die as the result of ending fossil fuels as they believe humanity needs to be damned out of existence for its great clime-crime.
Idolatry functions as a kind of mutation from utopianism or damnationism. Even if utopian enterprises fail to result in the perfection of mankind, they often prop up certain individuals or groups as more-perfect than others. For example, even if the Soviet Union was admittedly far from perfect(and had a long way to go to achieve full communism), Stalin was like the near-perfect god-man that everyone was compelled to revere and worship. In George Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM, while most animals must toil and strive toward the impossible goal of perfection, the pigs have chosen the mantle of infallibility for themselves.
Damnationism has its own way of mutating into idolatry, at least if not universally damning of all humanity. If only some groups are damned, it implies their culpability in some great unforgivable crimes against some other groups who thereby are favored as un-damned or especially blessed for their ‘noble victimhood’ status. ‘Wokeness’, in damning whites and straight people as ‘racists’ and ‘homophobes'(or ‘transphobes’ if women), have had the effect of elevating Jews, blacks, and homos as tragic victims of ‘racism’/’antisemitism’ or ‘homophobia’, thereby to be passed-over in the damnation sweepstakes.
Between the Scylla and Charybdis of utopianism and damnation-ism, humanism has navigated the troubled waters. To be sure, humanism has its own set of problems even without the extremes of ideological optimism and pessimism. Situated alongside realism and pragmatism, humanism runs into the myriad challenges of compromise and corruption. Humanism, in accepting the deeply ingrained and ineradicably flawed nature of mankind, is always faced with the red-tape of human frailties. Therefore, achieving anything beyond the ordinary, conventional, and settled can be something of a chore, as in IKIRU by Kurosawa. Humanism finds itself up against not only those above but those in the middle and below who are resistant to any disturbance to the routine in which everyone has become accustomed to his apportioned place and expectations. Most people would rather go through the motions than move the world, even just a little. Thus, even the very modest project of cleaning up a sewage-infested area and making it safe for children attains the element of heroism in IKIRU.
Humanism, due to its modesty, fails when it’s presented as a global formula. There is no one-size-fits-all humanist solution to all the problems of the world. It is certainly applicable to all parts of the world in that any community of any race, ethnicity, or culture has much to gain from ordinary individuals striving to be a little better in all facets of their lives. In other words, a good society is the cumulative(and not insignificant) sum of all the small efforts. However, if humanism is misinterpreted as a means of vastly improving or saving the world with good intentions, it is naive, delusional, and useless… as do-goody Europeans, secular or Christian, should have realized by now in their wasted efforts in Africa. If humanism is to work in black Africa, people there must take it upon themselves to make small changes and incrementally work toward cleaner and more functional societies. There is no Bono-solution for the Third World. If anything, Bonology may destroy the West.
A film that bears a certain resemblance to MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is GRAND ILLUSION by Jean Renoir, also made in the humanist vein. (Supposedly, the deflating ‘Big Illusion’ is the more accurate translation as ‘grande’ in French simply means ‘big’ than ‘grandiose’.) It’s one of those rare ‘message films'(antiwar of course) that transcend the message with its artistry and insight. Released in 1937 at a time of German military resurgence and geopolitical reassertion in European affairs, it reminded viewers of the tragedy of World War I that pitted honorable men(of all countries) against one another and brought about the collapse of entire institutions(though some may argue in favor of the Great War as revolutionary and transformative for those very reasons).
Yet, no simple message film, its richness derives from its ironies. It is set in a German prison camp during the epochal event that came to bring down the aristocratic order and give rise to people power in various forms: liberal-democratic(capitalist), nationalist-populist(usually aligned with fascism), and statist-totalitarian(communist).
The irony, of course, is that the aristocrats, defined by their caste and code of honor shared by their kind in all domains, were more likely to think ‘internationally’ than the ‘ordinary people’ or ‘unwashed masses’ who were more partial to nationalist sentiments. Even though nationalism became a key organizing principle and the rallying cry in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the upper crust, being better educated, cosmopolitan, and well-traveled, nevertheless had developed contacts and bonds with peers and relatives of other domains, be they principalities, nation-states, or empires. They were somewhat like the globalists of today.
With the rise of nation-states, the aristocratic elites had intended to maintain the loyalty of the ever more politically conscious populace with appeals to patriotism and nationalism(in some cases tied to imperial glory), but inflamed mass passions weren’t always easy to contain or control. The more the upper classes felt obliged to represent their own national folks in the era of mass media and politics, the farther apart they grew from their counterparts across national borders. In the generally peaceful century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, it was widely assumed that a major war was unlikely in the European continent given the interrelatedness of royal and aristocratic lineages in Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Great Britain, and etc. Prior to the rise of nationalism, an aristocrat in England may have identified more with an aristocrat in Germany or even Russia than with the ‘rabble’ in his own country, just like the global elites in the US today feel closer to global elites in India, France, or Mexico than with red state ‘rednecks’. And if there’s any uber-authority that all globalist elites look up to, it’s World Jewry and its favored cults of Globo-Homo and Negrolatry. Globalism has produced a kind of neo-aristocracy, with agitprop like D.E.I mainly being used as a smokescreen to veil the true nature of the beast.
In earlier times when kings and aristocrats had all the power while the masses toiled in the fields in silence, the wars between the upper classes(often resembling family squabbles) were usually limited in scope and patched up in ‘gentlemanly’ manner. But once mass politics entered into the fray, much more was at stake in major conflicts between entire peoples than had been in minor ones between narrower and more clearly delineated aristocratic interests.
To the extent that the aristocratic classes had played on these sentiments to maintain the support of the people, they bear much of the responsibility for much that happened in World War I. Of course, given that the bourgeois power-brokers controlled much of the mass media that shaped public opinion that in turn applied pressure on the aristocratic ruling class, one wonders whom the elites were pandering to more, the unwashed masses clamoring for war or the capitalists calculating financial interests. The aristocrats were caught between a rock and a hard place.
GRAND ILLUSION mourns the fading of the aristocratic order even as it greets the dawn of the new populist order. The aristocracy, for all its arrogance, vanity, and hypocrisy, possessed virtues that would go missing in New Europe. German Captain Rauffenstein(Erich Von Stroheim) and French Captain de Boldieu(Pierre Fresnay) belong in enemy camps but share a mutual affection and respect as fellow members of a caste doomed by a war that spiraled out of control beyond anyone’s imagination. At one point, they both speak English, a kind of international language for aristocrats back then, other than French, of course.
In a pivotal scene, the French prisoners attempt a breakout, and Boldieu ensures the escape of his men(one a prole and the other a Jew)by taking the bullet from none other than Rauffenstein who shoots most reluctantly. Duty in the new order required Boldieu to sacrifice himself for fellow nationals and for Rauffenstein to kill a fellow aristocrat. It’s as if the code of honor that once defined and reinforced the aristocracy is now leading to its demise.
In a way, Boldieu is to Rauffenstein what Celliers is to Yonoi. Boldieu puts his class prerogatives aside and sacrifices himself to give his men(of lower social backgrounds) a fighting chance at freedom. Yet, there’s also a certain irony in that, despite the repression of their feelings of superiority, Boldieu and Celliers become like moral or spiritual aristocrats. It’s as if their sense of superiority, far from being wholly abandoned, were channeled into a new outlook. In a democratizing world of dissolving class lines, Boldieu and Celliers maintain their superiority through uncommon courage and decency. The superior man, in rejecting one form of superiority, expresses his superiority through another.
To be sure, the case of MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is more complex as one of Celliers’ key motivations is to wash away his personal sin. The superior man is more sensitive to his own failings. Surveys have shown that self-esteem is actually higher among Negro dropouts than among smart and serious students.
Celliers’ moral character is certainly of a high order, more than just a holier-than-thou act(as with rock stars like Bono). Such men are indeed rare, and their impact on humanity, as saints or moral exemplars, is arguable. How many amongst us have met such people, especially in extreme situations? How many of us are capable of being like them?
That said, to the extent that such individuals have existed and do exist and that their deeds have been told and retold, imagined and reimagined through religions, art, and history, one might say they are indeed the sowers of the seed.
GRAND ILLUSION, the work and its reception, illustrated both the beauty and the limits of humanism. Jean Renoir in good faith hoped to warn Europe against another war, and he did this not by lionizing one side at the expense of another but showing the humanity of all sides. While the main characters are French prisoners, the Germans aren’t the villains, and the German Rauffenstein is perhaps the most memorable and tragic figure in the movie.
For all that, GRAND ILLUSION and others like it sure didn’t prevent World War II. For one thing, it was shown in democratic nations while banned in Hitler’s Germany where the politics was increasingly defined in terms of revanchism, the reverse of the buildup to World War I when it had been the French who savored exacting revenge for the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. In other words, if GRAND ILLUSION had a pacifying effect, it was only on democratic nations that maybe should have been planning for another war instead.
Furthermore, without a truly nasty character in the entire movie, it gives the false impression that all men are basically decent and capable of doing the right thing if given the opportunity.
Many high-ranking Nazi Germans laughed at such notions as sentimental hogwash. While France, like the UK, had grown war-weary(and fearful of German vengeance) after WWI and produced films like GRAND ILLUSION, the Soviet Union made ALEXANDER NEVSKY, a historical epic with patriotic overtones. It was partly meant as a warning to Germany that Russia wouldn’t tolerate an invasion.
Although GRAND ILLUSION deserves all the praise as art, entertainment, and message, its timing was rather unfortunate. Humanism has value as an individual endeavor but not as (inter)national policy, where only cold-eyed realpolitik will do. If politics is about power, and if power is usually controlled by the most shrewd, cunning, and ruthless, invoking humanist principles goes only so far.
Of course, it’s also overly simplistic to interpret World War II as solely the result of psychopathic Nazi leaders who, fueled by an evil ideology, woke up on the wrong side of the bed one day and decided to ‘conquer the world’. It wasn’t exactly a case of supremacism rejecting humanism, thereby forcing even peace-loving democratic nations to commit to the necessary evil of war. Upon closer scrutiny, there was plenty of hatred, resentment, greed, megalomania, and ruthless cunning on all sides, as well as mendacity and duplicity, made all the worse by Jewish elements in the West pulling the strings to drive the world to war against Germany. While World War II is inconceivable without Hitler and National Socialist Ideology, it took two to tango. In the end, the sentiments of GRAND ILLUSION weren’t representative of the Western powers either.
GRAND ILLUSION is better realized than Masaki Kobayashi’s sprawling and at times cumbersome HUMAN CONDITION, but the latter has a better grasp of the nature of men at war. Its humanism is despairingly in lockstep with ‘inhumanism’.
But then, GRAND ILLUSION was made before the unprecedented horror of World War II, whereas HUMAN CONDITION was made afterwards. After World War II, it was impossible to have any doubts or illusions about what mankind is really capable of.
Though surely by accident than design, how fitting that two musical artists were cast in the roles of Celliers and Yonoi. Music is the most aristocratic and the most base(even debased) of the arts, and both men play characters who undergo an entire gamut of experiences and emotions from high to low(to high again). Musical talent is that rare thing, more mysterious than any other creative gift, a strange knack for sculpting emotions, too elusive for most people. There’s also an element of discovery in music, a clairvoyance for tapping into yet another hidden treasure in our collective psyche.
The score for MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is by Ryuichi Sakamoto who proved to be a far more interesting composer for films than for any of the genres(or combination thereof) he dabbled in over a long career. It is surely one of the most memorable and mesmerizing scores, haunting and mysterious, hypnotic yet lucid in its blend of traditional, exotic, and modernist motifs. It’s like a melding of Japanese, Indonesian, and Western sensibilities in a fever dream.
By coincidence or cultural trend, certain works with similar or interrelated themes may appear concurrently or within a narrow time frame. While many such works deal with contemporary issues or reflect upon the latest fashions, even those set in the past(or the future, mostly as science fiction) provide insights and commentary on the present, whether by intention or not. In this light, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE could be seen not only as a war movie or historical drama but a rumination of the time in which it was released.
Other works released in the first half of the Eighties that struck similar or related chords were as follows: BLADE RUNNER, PERSONAL BEST, RISKY BUSINESS, TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., EXCALIBUR, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, MISHIMA, and WOLFEN.
For a better grasp of the 80s Zeitgeist, it helps to consider the failures of both the left and the right in the Sixties and Seventies. Radical movements generated lots of heat but failed to take power. (Generally, members of the Sixties generation who rebelled in the name of disorder lost everything, even their minds. In contrast, those who rebelled in the name of order — “we boomer go-getters can do a much better job once we wrest control of the institutions from the older generation” — were slated to take over. The rebels-for-order always win out over the rebels-for-disorder even though the latter could be useful to the former in shaking things up against those in power. Of course, the modus operandi of such personality types is always power and control than any ideal or principle. The boomer go-getters, for all their stated generational goals, turned out to be a bunch of Allen Dulleses.) Liberals crashed and burned with LBJ’s fiasco in Vietnam(and naivete about blacks, resulting in urban riots and mounting crime), and the Conservatives crashed with Nixon’s Watergate scandal in the early Seventies. In France, Charles De Gaulle fell from grace, but May 68 proved to be a bust. Third World Marxism seemed on the march with America’s withdrawal from Vietnam and with gains in Central America and Africa, but its main sponsor, the Soviet Union, was mired in stagnation. The Counterculture, so ‘happening’ in the Sixties and early Seventies, became just another forgotten(and embarrassing) fashion. Punk and Disco, if construed as ‘movements’, were short-lived. And Jimmy Carter’s presidency went from disappointment to disaster with the Iran crisis.
If the political revolutions of the Sixties petered out, it was nevertheless conceded, even by conservatives, that the socio-cultural revolutions had made permanent gains. The thing was to be natural, let it hang loose(or out), take it easy, grow your hair long, and etc. Such attitudes extended well into the Seventies, plain to see in Richard Linklater’s DAZED AND CONFUSED. So much of society reflected this, from the rawness of TV news to the grit of New Hollywood to the earthiness of popular music. It was a more direct attitude and approach to life, more natural and less ‘hung up’.
But, from the second half of the Seventies through the first half of the Eighties, a new sensibility was taking hold. Partly, the early boomers matured and got sober and more focused while the late boomers, whose professional careers took off in the Eighties, were reacting to the early boomers who’d made a mess of things and spoiled the party. If the early boomers had reacted to or rebelled against the so-called Greatest Generation, the late boomers had just about enough with the Sixties mythologizing but couldn’t quite rebel in the way the early boomers had done. The early boomers, despite their seniority, weren’t old enough to be parental figures, and furthermore, they refused to relinquish their cult of youth and rebellion, clinging to it as their generational keepsake, leaving the later generations, including the late boomers, to dwell in their shadows.
Besides, if there had been a clear cultural demarcation between the early boomers and the older generation(s), no such existed between the early boomers and later boomers/generations who were all immersed in youth culture, Rock music, and a more-or-less libertine outlook on life.
That said, the late boomers and the emerging ‘Generation X’ hoped to define themselves in new ways unbeholden to the mythology of the Sixties with its heavy emphasis on the Civil Rights Movement, Counterculture, hippies/freaks, love/peace, cinephilia(mostly about foreign films), naive faith in drugs, antiwar rhetoric, radical passions, and return-to-nature illusions. For all the mythologizing and nostalgia about Sixties idealism in the media, the period increasingly seemed tiresome and exhausted, even laughable. (It took some time before the early boomers gained full control of culture & education and elevated their generation to newer heights.)
From about 1975 to 1985, the early boomers seemed a spent force, even disgraced forever. As for the fashions and trends of the seventies, they failed to gain long-term traction as cultural landmarks. Even though hippies are long gone, they are forever associated with a transformative decade, and as such, they will always have significance, along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Not so much with the Bee Gees and disco of the late seventies despite being the hottest crazes at the time. In the arc of cultural history, the Summer of Groove couldn’t hold a candle to the Summer of Love(though one could argue today’s pop charts are dominated with songs closer to Disco than 60s Rock).
Still, the attitudes of the young professionals in THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO(directed by Whit Stillman) were a harbinger of things to come. While many regarded disco as populist music of getting down and funky, Stillman’s characters value (their haute experience of)it for the glitz, exclusivity, formality, and classiness. While their disco night out is no Victorian Era aristocratic ball, they have to dress up(after a thorough grooming) and know how to dance to be part of the scene. The music may be black, ‘gay’, and racy — but then, the aristocrats were no strangers to decadent delights — , but style means everything.
Everything is relative, and while disco culture may have seemed downright anarchic to old-style moralists, it had elements of courtship and decorum compared to, say, Woodstock culture. And the songs, though certainly not classical or church music, had to have the tried-and-tested(or ‘conservative’) conventions of melody, rhythm, and harmony, something one might not find in psychedelia, punk, or metal.
David Bowie’s Seventies career, running parallel to other trends in music(not least disco) but too eccentric to be synonymous with any of them, would prove to be a key influence on what would be labeled as ‘New Wave’ in the Eighties(even though he was a spent force after his last triumph, LET’S DANCE album). Despite all the drugs and excesses, Bowie sensed a movement away from the natural, loose, and earthy to the artificial, fastidious, and techno-savvy. Big Brother would rise but as a purveyor of capitalist-consumerism.
It’s often the case that various figures of the Zeitgeist are unconscious of their interrelatedness, if only oblique or ephemeral, with others of the era. Bruce Springsteen, for example, scoffed at the notion that he had anything to do with Reaganism and the Rambo phenomenon, but his brand of Rock Arena patriotism, despite the anti-war rhetoric, was very much in tune with the spirit of the times. David Bowie would surely have dismissed any relation between his works and THE TERMINATOR, but they were all part of a movement toward artificiality and tech-mania.
Woodstock didn’t turn out to be Eden. And the new realism and naturalism grew weary for many people once the taboos became passe. It became more and more like staring at people’s sweat glands. Carole King’s TAPESTRY, the singer-songwriter smash of the early seventies that inspired so many would-be musicians, faded away as a kind of navel-gazing at life. People began to yearn for something brighter and more polished and pronounced; also more processed and packaged with less concern for ‘authenticity’ and raw ‘organic’ qualities, which came to be regarded as messy or grubby.
Preference for the slim and trim in culture came to correlate with the Eighties trends in exercise, workouts(commercialization of which turned Hanoi Jane into Healthy Jane), glossy spandex, and etc. If ‘hippies’ were the buzz of the Sixties, it was the ‘yuppies’ in the Eighties. Some regarded the new trend as narcissistic, materialistic, shallow, status-obsessed, neoreactionary, and, even ‘fascist'(which inspired the pop satire of Paul Verhoeven with ROBOCOP).
However, yuppies weren’t really reactionary, at least in the sense of turning the clock back to the Fifties or earlier. They’d accepted and even expanded on the liberties and licentiousness of the Sixties but in a cleaner, more orderly & streamlined manner. They weren’t about repression but the management of the liberties that had suddenly overwhelmed the Sixties and burnt out the Seventies. In other words, be crazy but in an orderly way, like stuff on MTV. Homos would also move into this direction as HIV began to ravage the wilder homos buggering like crazed rabbits in bathhouses.
Of course, diehard Sixties types griped that the freedoms that they’d struggled for and attained in the name of meaning and significance were being used merely for fun and recreation in the Eighties. (Federico Fellini made a similar charge about Berlusconi’s TV empire and the general cultural trajectory in GINGER & FRED. Apparently, whereas Fellini employed surrealism and the like for the purpose of personal art, Italian TV shows and commercials shamelessly appropriated them as eye-candy or cheap attention.)
Mike Leigh’s Naked(1993) that assessed the socio-cultural and economic fallout following the Thatcher Eighties, like Oliver Stone’s NATURAL BORN KILLERS, featured a world running on the fumes of nihilism. ‘Rebellious’ acts that had once been charged with social significance and personal meaning in the Angry Young Men Fifties and Swinging London Sixties had just become the general attitudes of youths raised on the after-effects of deindustrialization, punk, vapid libertarianism, and Americanization.
We are getting ahead of ourselves, but the damage assessment of the Nineties suggested the failure of both the Sixties and the Eighties(despite ‘winning’ the Cold War). Worse for the idealists, the Nineties were the period in which the post-war generation took control of all the levers of power and would prove themselves to be no better and in many respects considerably worse than their predecessors. So much for the Dream. If there was one reason for hope back then(at least in some quarters), it was a sense of singularity of the ‘left’ and ‘right’ as the Clinton Democrats and Blair Labourites adopted the Reagan-Thatcherite policies of free trade, deregulation(selectively applied of course), and financialization, all of which would lead to the ‘bubblication’ of the economy and culture.
But back in the Eighties, the main worries for the remnants of the Left was the return of militarism and maybe even ‘fascism’ under Reagan and Thatcher. Upsetting to them, not only were the charges of ‘fascism’ less effective but some works in that vein met with great success. Sylvester Stallone changed Rocky from a humanist folk hero(the guy who lost the fight but earned his pride) to a Roman god who not only smashed Negroes but commie Russkies. If FIRST BLOOD combined leftist and rightist sentiments — right-wing war hero John Rambo meets persecution in a conservative small town, rather like the anti-heroes of EASY RIDE — , its sequel, simply called RAMBO, was an out-and-out stab-in-the-back fantasy where Rambo refights the war as a personal venture and manages to slay more ‘gooks’ and Soviet commies in a single afternoon than the entire US military over the span of eight years. It was many times more ‘fascist’ than DIRTY HARRY, FRENCH CONNECTION, and DEATH WISH combined but was met with far less cultural opposition and critical condemnation.
Arguably, Stallone drew from Lucas-Spielberg movies like RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, but if any hit movie established a new standard(for at least a decade), it was CONAN THE BARBARIAN by John Milius. What was the difference? For all the spectacular feats of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, he comes across as human, and his successes owe as much to skill and luck as to toughness(also true of STAR WARS heroes). In contrast, Milius’s comic-book adaptation featured a hero as pure muscle, a man so tough that swords might as well shatter on and bullets bounce off his chest. It was like a caricature or parody of the ideal of new health and strength, except that it wasn’t. Milius and Stallone were having too much fun with their fantasies to rent some space to irony.
Paul Schrader and John Milius, though far from matching the successes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, perhaps best articulated this new trend, either thinkingly(Schrader or unthinkingly(Milius). It’s telling that the hero of George Lucas’s STAR WARS, Luke Skywalker, embarks on a journey that requires discipline, obedience, and sacrifice in order to be a Jedi Knight. But what was essentially fun for Lucas was philosophy for John Milius who wrote APOCALYPSE NOW as a pro-war screed; whatever is ambivalent and ‘thoughtful’ about the film comes from Francis Coppola and Michael Herr.
Milius’s biggest box office hit came in the early Eighties with the braindead CONAN THE BARBARIAN. He also had limited success with RED DAWN, a harebrained anti-communist fantasy where American teenagers train themselves to be topnotch warriors. Of course, the mindlessness was a willful expression of Milius’s machismo as the man himself was anything but ignorant and dumb. It was a different kind of primitivism, at odds with the peacenik dreams of hippie-dom. It had more of the Old West vibes of men having to be even tougher, more disciplined, and more in self-control against the elements, wild animals, and hostile Indians. The most memorably Milius-like thing in APOCALYPSE NOW is Colonel Kilgore and his air cavalry. A man who loves to drink beer, have a good time, and surf but with the iron will and stamina to lead his men into battle. Ride the surf, raze the turf.
If simpleminded or mindless works merely embody the excesses of the era, the more mindful ones have an element of ambivalence, at once capturing(and celebrating) the spirit of the times(if mainly for box office receipts) and critiquing its delusions, conceits, and even madness. A clear example is TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. in which William Friedkin took the Michael-Mannerisms then so in vogue in shows like MIAMA VICE and turned them on their heads. Unlike the heroes of the TV show, the main character in the movie pushes the new spirit to the limit into ecstasy and oblivion. RISKY BUSINESS simultaneously indulged in sex-charged teenage fantasies and used prostitution as a metaphor for the excesses of capitalism. BLADE RUNNER’s archvillain Roy Batty ultimately attained the aura of tragic heroism, eclipsing the film’s central character. (Batty triumphs in relation to Deckard in the way that Kurtz fails to with Willard in APOCALYPSE NOW. In death, he towers over Deckard who survives.) Batty could be seen as a megalomaniacal nihilist, a would-be-god, but also a Spartacus-like figure, a rebel against the tyranny of the Tyrell corporation, itself an ambivalent symbol of technological progress & future vision and of corruption & enslavement. Tyrell’s contradiction, familiar today with the rise of A.I., is to create creatures superior to mankind but submissive to him, a human despite his genius. Imagine creating god as a pet.
Somewhat related in theme to BLADE RUNNER was WOLFEN, also ambivalent about the distinctions between hero and villain. A horror movie about American-Indians who transform into wolves and feed on urbanites(of all races, as Negroes certainly aren’t spared, not even a white biologist sympathetic to the lupine species), it gives a dark twist to the Noble Indian myth. The nihilism of the core concept is somewhat alleviated by the tragic story of the American Indians and the cult of nature, which makes the violence somewhat palatable(at least for some) as the revenge of history and nature. WOLFEN was directed by Michael Wadleigh, renowned for the epic WOODSTOCK documentary, but even as it expands on the sentiments of the latter, it seems to rebuke some of the more naively romantic notions of the Indians as noble souls living in harmony with nature, i.e. if there was a ‘natural’ balance in the Americas before the arrival of the white man, it was of predators and prey, cycles of endless violence. In one way, it could be argued that modern civilization put an end to this brutal but organic cycle, but in another way, it could be argued modern capitalism has revitalized the dynamic with cutthroat competition whereby world affairs are a game of eat or be eaten.
While the usually brainless Jane Fonda went from idealizing the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese to making and selling workout videos in the Eighties where both obesity and health-obsession reached new peaks, something Richard Simmons made a killing on, a far more interesting expression on the subject of health & fitness was PERSONAL BEST written and directed by Robert Towne. (Another movie in this vein was the much promoted and much maligned PERFECT with Jamie Lee Curtis, and one could throw in FLASHDANCE and STAYIN’ ALIVE, in which Sylvester Stallone did with SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER what he did with ROCKY, which would become a ‘franchise’.) The ethos of PERSONAL BEST is far from those of THE LONGEST YARD and THE BAD NEWS BEARS. Training, competing, and winning are deadly serious, the very essence of life. No doubt, Towne’s film owes a thing or two to Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIAD. It might be characterized as somewhat lesbo-fascist.
A far dumber but also far more effective expression of similar themes was Ridley Scott’s TV commercial for Apple Computers, in which the antidote to the Orwellian 1984 Big Brother wasn’t some libertine figure(like Jack Nicholson’s Randall McMurphy in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST) but a neo-Herbert-Spencerian figure of an ultra-fit hale-and-healthy heroine with a hammer. It wasn’t about the anarchy of freedom versus the order of tyranny but about the order of freedom versus the order of tyranny, i.e. ‘good fascism’ vs ‘bad fascism’.
Early in the decade was EXCALIBUR directed by John Boorman who then was best known for DELIVERANCE, a surprising hit given its Nietzschean overtones at a time when Countercultural or Liberal views still dominated the culture. Boorman had long dreamed of making a film out of Arthurian legends, even turning his project on THE EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC into something akin to the search for the Grail, and he finally got his chance in 1980, perhaps thanks to the success of STAR WARS. Apart from its immersion in themes of chivalry(as basis of just order), mythology(as pagan connection to nature and human nature), political philosophy, and sexuality, EXCALIBUR coincided with the challenges of the time. At the center of the film is Arthur’s efforts to create a just and lasting order out of chaos and darkness. Many vying for power and influence in the early Eighties regarded their missions in similar terms.
After all the assassinations, race riots, antiwar protests, political scandals(with Watergate being the biggest, fairly or not), failure in Vietnam, hippies & drug culture, radical leftist terrorism, worsening urban decay, and so-called stagflation, it was time to stop with the tantrums and cynicism and rebuild Camelot that vanished with the death of JFK.
But the tensions weren’t only between the democratic-capitalist West and the Communist East but within the West itself. The racial tensions, mostly involving blacks and criminality. The culture wars with Jews and homos at the center. And of course, the apparent rise of Japan as the new global superpower, which became the fuel for new Yellow Peril fears.
Seen in the political context of the period, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE may have seemed especially relevant in implying, even if not by intention, that Japan, despite having lost the war, had won the peace and was poised to economically conquer the world as leaders in electronics, cars, and technology. The film came out the same year as KILROY WAS HERE by the Rock band Styx with its depiction of a totalitarian future run by what looks like Japano-robots.
After Mishima’s death, little was heard of him in Japan that continued in its path of peace-and-prosperity under the American umbrella. And as the radical generation faded, stability was the only game in town. Despite Mishima having gone down the memory-hole, Oshima may have feared that the far-right author and activist may not have died in vain. With ramping Cold War tensions under Reagan whose administration was deemed to be ideologically aligned with Nakasone’s right-wing government, perhaps radical figures like Oshima were rather perturbed about the state of world affairs, possibly a factor in his decision to direct MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, if only as a reminder of how badly things could go if the Japanese lose their sense of tragic history and get caught between the US and the USSR.
At least the mythology in EXCALIBUR was meant to be taken metaphorically. In contrast, the Japanese took their myths almost literally during World War II, and perhaps Oshima feared that the Japanese hadn’t developed sufficiently independent and rational minds after the war, ironically due to American Power that, more than anything, preferred an obedient and compliant satellite than a hotbed of dissent and criticism, much of which was bound to be directed at the US as the superpower dictating policy for ‘democratic’ Japan. Mishima failed and was forgotten but perhaps an aspect of his political psychology had unknowingly been channeled into the mainstream through the more nationalist elements in Japan’s perpetually dominant Liberal Democratic Party, or so the likes of Oshima may have fretted at the time.
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