{"id":137,"date":"2003-12-15T12:56:57","date_gmt":"2003-12-15T17:56:57","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=137"},"modified":"2003-12-15T12:56:57","modified_gmt":"2003-12-15T17:56:57","slug":"the-last-samurai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=137","title":{"rendered":"The Last Samurai"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hollywood has given us a run of surprisingly good movies recently.<br \/>\nBy &lsquo;surprisingly good&lsquo; I mean that they&#8217;re rather better<br \/>\nthan one might expect from their genre.  <cite>Loony Toons: Back In<br \/>\nAction<\/cite>, for example, could have been a mere merchandising<br \/>\nvehicle, a repetition of clich&eacute;s and tired sight gags. Instead<br \/>\nit was a wickedly funny combination of Animaniac edginess with classic<br \/>\nWarner Brothers wackiness.  It has a few moments of true brilliance<br \/>\n&mdash; the sequence in which Elmer Fudd chases Bugs and Daffy through<br \/>\nSalvador Dali&#8217;s &#8220;The Persistence of Memory&#8221; (think of melting clocks)<br \/>\nis jaw-droppingly wonderful, sublime art.<\/p>\n<p><cite>Master &amp; Commander: The Far Side of the World<\/cite> was<br \/>\nalso a surprising treat.  I&#8217;ve read all 20 of the Aubrey\/Maturin<br \/>\nnovels.  The movie doesn&#8217;t capture their texture and depth &mdash;<br \/>\nthat would be impossible, they are deeply literary works &mdash; but<br \/>\nas an adventure movie that refers to the books without insulting the<br \/>\nreader&#8217;s intelligence it works quite well.<\/p>\n<p>The <cite>Lord of the Rings<\/cite> and <cite>Harry Potter<\/cite><br \/>\nmovies are so good that hard-core fans of their respective books are<br \/>\nstill pinching themselves, wondering when they&#8217;re going to wake up to<br \/>\nthe discovery that they&#8217;re actually watching the usual dumbed-down<br \/>\nHollywood crap.  (I say this as a Tolkien fan so hard-core that I was<br \/>\nable to catch nuances of the spoken Elvish that weren&#8217;t in the<br \/>\nsubtitles.)<\/p>\n<p>Of course there have been dreadful turkeys where we expected<br \/>\nbetter, as well.  The third <cite>Matrix<\/cite> movie and <cite>Star<br \/>\nWars: Attack of the Clones<\/cite> leap to mind. But dreadful turkeys<br \/>\nare part of the normal scene; what&#8217;s <em>abnormal<\/em> is that New<br \/>\nLine gave Peter Jackson the money and freedom to make<br \/>\n<cite>Rings<\/cite> movies that, while rushed and not without the<br \/>\noccasional compromise, are almost achingly good.<\/p>\n<p>Think about it.  When was the last time you saw a movie that (a) was<br \/>\na book adaptation faithful enough for the fans to cheer it, (b) got<br \/>\ngreat reviews from movie critics, and (c) was boffo box office?  Just<br \/>\ncounting the Rings and Potter movies and <cite>Master &amp; Commander<\/cite>,<br \/>\nwe&#8217;ve now had five of these in relatively quick succession.  Something<br \/>\nis going on here.  Can it be that Hollywood is having an attack of<br \/>\nintelligence and taste?<\/p>\n<p>(My wife Cathy suggests <cite>Saving Private Ryan<\/cite> as a<br \/>\nprecursor of the trend.)<\/p>\n<p>The movie that pushed me to think about this as a pattern, rather<br \/>\nthan a series of isolated incidents, is <cite>The Last Samurai<\/cite>.<br \/>\nI&#8217;d been wanting to see this one since the first trailers six months<br \/>\nago, but was braced for a disappointment on the scale of <cite>Pearl<br \/>\nHarbor<\/cite>.  Hollywood&#8217;s record on wide-screen historicals is<br \/>\ndreadful; they tend to be laughably ahistorical &mdash; either<br \/>\nmindless spectacles or video sermonettes for whatever form of<br \/>\npolitical correctness was in vogue the week they were made. Remarkably,<br \/>\n<cite>The Last Samurai<\/cite> almost completely avoids these flaws.<\/p>\n<p>I said &ldquo;almost completely&rdquo;. The movie is not without<br \/>\nflaws.  But even the flaws are interesting.  They illustrate the ways<br \/>\nin which Hollywood&#8217;s metric for a good (or at least successful) movie<br \/>\nis changing.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s start with the bad stuff.  First, way too much camera time<br \/>\nthat could have been better employed gets spent on emotive closeups of<br \/>\nthe lead&#8217;s phiz (a misfeature <cite>The Last Samurai<\/cite> shares with the first two Ring<br \/>\nmovies and I am thus beginning to think of as &lsquo;the Frodo<br \/>\nflaw&rsquo;).  But this is Hollywood and it&#8217;s Tom Cruise and one<br \/>\nsupposes such excess is inevitable.<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, the movie is seriously anti-historical in one respect; we<br \/>\nare supposed to believe that traditionalist Samurai would disdain the<br \/>\nuse of firearms.  In fact, traditional samurai <em>loved<\/em> firearms<br \/>\nand found them a natural extension of their traditional role as horse<br \/>\narchers.  Samurai invented rolling volley fire three decades before<br \/>\nGustavus Adolphus, and improved the musket designs they imported from<br \/>\nthe Portuguese so effectively that for most of the 1600s they were<br \/>\nactually making better guns than European armorers could produce.<\/p>\n<p>But, of course, today&#8217;s Hollywood left thinks firearms are<br \/>\nintrinsically eeeevil (especially firearms in the hands of anyone<br \/>\nother than police and soldiers) so the virtuous rebel samurai had<br \/>\nto eschew them.  Besides being politically correct, this choice<br \/>\nthickened the atmosphere of romantic doom around our heroes.<\/p>\n<p>Another minor clanger in the depiction of samurai fighting: We are<br \/>\ngiven scenes of samurai training to fight empty-hand and unarmored<br \/>\nusing modern martial-arts moves.  In fact, in 1877 it is about a<br \/>\ngeneration too early for this.  Unarmed combat did not become a<br \/>\nseparate discipline with its own forms and schools until the very end<br \/>\nof the nineteenth century.  And when it did, it was based not on<br \/>\nsamurai disciplines but on peasant fighting methods from Okinawa and<br \/>\nelsewhere that were used <em>against<\/em> samurai (this is why most<br \/>\nexotic martial-arts weapons are actually agricultural tools).<\/p>\n<p>In 1877, most samurai still would have thought unarmed-combat<br \/>\ntraining a distraction from learning how to use the swords, muskets<br \/>\nand bows that were their primary weapons systems.  Only after the<br \/>\nswords they preferred for close combat were finally banned did this<br \/>\nattitude really change.  But, hey, most moviegoers are unaware of<br \/>\nthese subtleties, so there had to be some chop-socky in the script to<br \/>\nmeet their expectations.<\/p>\n<p>One other rewriting of martial history: we see samurai<br \/>\nceremoniously stabbing fallen opponents to death with a two-hand<br \/>\nsword-thrust.  In fact, this is not how it was done; <em>real<\/em><br \/>\nsamurai delvered the coup de grace by decapitating their<br \/>\nopponents, and then taking the head as a trophy.<\/p>\n<p>No joke.  Head-taking was such an important practice that there was<br \/>\na special term in Japanese for the art of properly dressing the hair on<br \/>\na severed head so that the little paper tag showing the deceased&#8217;s name<br \/>\nand rank would be displayed to best advantage.<\/p>\n<p>While the filmmakers were willing to show samurai killing the<br \/>\nwounded, in other important respects they softened and Westernized the<br \/>\nbehavior of these people somewhat. Algren learned, correctly, that<br \/>\n&lsquo;samurai&rsquo; derives from a verb meaning &ldquo;to<br \/>\nserve&rdquo;, but we are misled when the rebel leader speaks of<br \/>\n&ldquo;protecting the people&rdquo;.  In fact, noblesse oblige was not<br \/>\npart of the Japanese worldview; samurai served not &lsquo;the<br \/>\npeople&rsquo; but a particular daimyo, and the daimyo served the<br \/>\nEmperor in theory and nobody but themselves in normal practice.<\/p>\n<p>Now for some of the good stuff.  It begins with an amazingly strong<br \/>\nperformance by Ken Watanabe as the rebel daimyo Katsumoto. From the<br \/>\nfirst moment that you see him, you believe him; there are no moments<br \/>\nof hey-I&#8217;m-<em>Tom-Cruise<\/em> to mar his immersion in the character, for<br \/>\nwhich excellent reason he actually upstages Cruise at several key points.<\/p>\n<p>Through Katsumoto and the other Japanese characters, we are made to<br \/>\nsee the intertwined quests for perfection of both technique and self<br \/>\nthat was so central to the samurai warrior-mystic.  Indeed, there are<br \/>\npoints at which the filmmakers have some subtle fun with the fact that<br \/>\nAmericans of our day, having successfully naturalized Japanese martial<br \/>\narts into our own culture, have learned to understand that path rather<br \/>\nbetter than Cruise&#8217;s Captain Algren does.  I&#8217;m thinking especially of<br \/>\nthe point at which a bystander watching Algren lose at sword practice<br \/>\ntells him he has &#8220;too many minds&#8221;.  The viewer probably knows what<br \/>\nhe is driving at even if Algren does not.<\/p>\n<p>Better: the movie is properly respectful of Japanese virtues<br \/>\nwithout crossing the line into supine multiculturalism.  Captain<br \/>\nAlgren appreciates and accepts the best of an alien culture<br \/>\n<em>without<\/em> renouncing his identity as a Westerner, an officer,<br \/>\nand a gentleman. There is a telling scene after Algren has been<br \/>\naccepted into the life of his Japanese hosts in which he takes a heavy<br \/>\nload from Taka (the female lead), who protests that Japanese men never<br \/>\nhelp with such things.<\/p>\n<p>Algren replies that he is not a Japanese man.  In this and other<br \/>\nways he refutes an already-standard knock on the movie, which is to<br \/>\nrefer to it as &ldquo;Dances with Samurai&rdquo;.  But this movie,<br \/>\ndespite the flaws I&#8217;ve pointed out, is more honest and far less<br \/>\nsentimental about the samurai than <cite>Dances With Wolves<\/cite> was<br \/>\nabout its Sioux.  This is progress of a sort.<\/p>\n<p>Algren&#8217;s romance with Taka is also handled with a degree of<br \/>\nrestraint that is appropriate but surprising.  We get no sexual<br \/>\ncheap thrills; instead, we get subtle but extremely powerful<br \/>\neroticism, notably in the scene where Taka dresses Algren in her<br \/>\ndead husband&#8217;s armor just before the final battle.<\/p>\n<p>The film is visually quite beautiful.  The details of costume,<br \/>\nweapons, armor, and the simple artifacts of Japanese village life are<br \/>\nmeticulously and correctly rendered.  In fact there are a number of<br \/>\npoints at which the setting is stronger than the script and carries<br \/>\none through places where the plotting is a bit implausible.<\/p>\n<p>This contrast is an illustration of the uneven way in which<br \/>\nstandards have risen.  <cite>The Last Samurai<\/cite>, the Rings<br \/>\nmovies, <cite>Master &amp; Commander<\/cite>, and the Harry Potter movies<br \/>\nall have vastly better production values than (I think) they would<br \/>\nhave had even ten years ago &mdash; perhaps the huge advances in<br \/>\nspecial-effects technology have created a sort of upward pressure on<br \/>\nthe quality of movies&#8217; depictions of reality.  On the other hand,<br \/>\ndownright silly plot twists are still acceptable and the conventions<br \/>\nof the star-vehicle film remain firmly in place.<\/p>\n<p>One gets ahistorical howlers and (in fiction) violations of the<br \/>\nspirit of the original work, but fewer than formerly.  In all these<br \/>\nmovies, you can see where they were trimmed to fit Hollywood&#8217;s<br \/>\nmarketing needs, but the trimming is done with a lot more sensitivity<br \/>\nand taste than it used to be.  Occasionally one even sees outright<br \/>\nimprovements &mdash; the moment in Peter Jackson&#8217;s version of<br \/>\nBoromir&#8217;s death scene in which the fallen Gondorian hails Aragorn as<br \/>\nhis king, for example, achieves more power and poignancy than<br \/>\nTolkien&#8217;s original.<\/p>\n<p>I like this trend a lot, but I&#8217;m not sure I understand it.  The<br \/>\nHollywood establishment is in business to make money, but the link<br \/>\nbetween market demand and the quality of films has always been<br \/>\ntenuous at best.  It would be nice to think that film audiences<br \/>\nhave required filmmakers to exhibit better taste by developing<br \/>\nbetter taste themselves, but in the face of all the awful schlock<br \/>\nthat still gets churned out and makes money, this is a difficult<br \/>\ncase to sustain in general.<\/p>\n<p>It feels to me more as though some balance of power within the<br \/>\nsystem has shifted and, for whatever reason, creative artists<br \/>\nhave gained power at the expense of the marketeers.  Thus, for<br \/>\nexample, Rowling had more than somewhat to do with the casting<br \/>\nof the Harry Potter movies, and Peter Jackson&#8217;s films display<br \/>\na nearly obsessive concern with getting the look of Middle-Earth<br \/>\nright that could hardly be shared by a typical studio exec.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever the reason, I&#8217;m glad of the trend.  I spend a lot more<br \/>\ntime in movie theaters than I use to &mdash; and that&#8217;s the<br \/>\nmessage Hollywood wants to hear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hollywood has given us a run of surprisingly good movies recently. By &lsquo;surprisingly good&lsquo; I mean that they&#8217;re rather better than one might expect from their genre. Loony Toons: Back In Action, for example, could have been a mere merchandising vehicle, a repetition of clich&eacute;s and tired sight gags. Instead it was a wickedly funny&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=137\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Last Samurai<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}