Part 2: Way of the Gun

Journal sielwolf's Journal: Part 2: Way of the Gun 11

Journal by sielwolf on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:58PM

"He's sending us out the old way. Like real fucking gangsters." -Vinny, 'Ghost Dog'

After throwing around some IMs I thought it would be important to try and clear up what the Way of the Gun series here is about. We're talking about the gangster picture which I've broadened to mean any movie with criminals as protagonists operating in a criminal or underworld element. Now that's unusually wide for a genre often just attached to "about guys in the Mafia/Yakuza/Triads" but I wanted to capture a wider scope movies without being hemmed in with a straitlaced definition.

And we're looking at this genre in a global setting since filmmaking is one of the few media to experience wide crosspollination pretty much as long as its existed. There are the great cinemas, the national cinemas that with no concern for international audiences crafted fundamental changes that determine how movies are made now. Consider this: go and watch an old White Courtesy Phone movie from the 50s. Some Minelli picture. Now go and watch a New Wave film like Jules and Jim. The first is the classic Hollywood artificial. Even if set in a "natural setting" (old John Ford Westerns). The New Wave was set up with restrictions because no one would finance these young audacious directors. So in the process of saving money by shooting on location, using untrained actors and being generally reckless with How Things Should Be Done they rewrote how movies work. After watching the above two, watch, I dunno The Bourne Supremacy. Watch how it has tense moments of handheld shots in location settings... the hallmark of the New Wave.

What is so interesting is that the supposedly national cinemas studying crime, the desire to look through the glass darkly, has invariably created an international style incestuously reinventing itself from all corners of the globe.

This is about retaking the Other. Those douche elitists who act as "foreign film's" caretakers are really just protecting their fragile sense of superiority. Fuck any shit about High Art. These are great movies. People die, people get killed. Drama. The life lived by the knife, the gun, and the hustle. The blood pumping through our veins quickens when we can live through men and women unbound by societies rules. Freed somewhat from our culture-bound reluctance we might at once see clearly into ourselves.

"Money, Power, Respect" - Junior M.A.F.I.A

Honor or Nothing...

It is interesting that I would talk about gangster movies in terms of the anti-mainstream and decidedly 1960'sish tone of anti-authoritarianism. Though the French crime picture added a Jungian anima to the genre the construction of the film is on the decidedly Western template of crime: the law-abidding mainstream and the criminal undertow.

In the Japanese Honor Film, such things really aren't the case. The quirk of Japanese gangster cinema starts with the Yakuza in the greater Japanese culture and how the Yakuza syndicates are semi-legitimate. I want to spare the history lesson (and you are on the Internet. It isn't as if the topic isn't a Wikipedia search away) but the Yakuza rose out of the same traditional hierarchies as the rest of the nation in the form of gambling and racketeering. These positions weren't necessarily respected but their use was begrudgingly accepted and so the Yakuza structure has flourished in parallel with the Japan as a tolerated agent. Tolerated to the point where individual groups have storefronts for their services. Today the modern business consists of the classic rackets into their modern incarnations: sea ports, black market goods, and entertainment. The world's largest criminal organization is the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi with a base of 39,000 brothers. Better is an illustration: when the earthquakes struck Kobe, the Yamaguchi-gumi mobilized disaster relief services which was reported in the media as a counterpoint to the government's slow response. Teflon Don indeed. [But don't let me give you the impression that the Japanese are content with matters. Laws, such as those in 1995, have been passed that severely curtail racketeering practices very similar to the RICO statutes in the US.]

The Yakuza genre finds its roots in the same Jidaigeki ("Period Drama") supergenre. The Jidaigeki is the fascination with the classical medieval Japanese era and the stories within all the various groups. It is a study of what is fundamentally Japanese. Though there are the interesting flavors (like the lowly prostitute or farmer's daughter soap opera) the one most of you are familiar with is the Chambara samurai movie. Blah blah blah, I already talked about it here. But from the Jidaigeki also comes the Honor Film. You can see it in such movies as Kurosawa's Yojimbo with the town overrun by competing gangs or all the backroom characters that Zatoichi has to regulate.

But like the Western, relevance has replaced much of the genre with exercise. It is hard to represent the 47 Ronin as the minority ownership of a company that just suffered a Gordon Gekko takeover. But like the gumi themselves, the gangland picture thrives as Gendaigeki.

Now in the West the crime movie is seen as the flip of the police procedural (to the point where mixing the two is a favorite... Heat, Collateral, the Wire and the entire British BBC family of Prime Suspect, Second Sense and others) there is no flourishing counterpoint to the Honor Movie. The Yakuza tree is just another branch in the great social strata. In the movies the police are tertiary, often absent.

This leaves the Honor Picture as the classic kubuki dissonance of giri-ninjo: conflict between the self and the expectations of society. Where the structure usually just gets updated touches of paint, once again the question of Self offers profound and perilous journeys.

Women... It wouldn't be a Story without Them

In classic Yakuza film, the metaphor of the self is set in place as a woman. A dame shows up stirring up emotions in our good worker bee hero. Sometimes she is a petulant innocent, bored with life and dipping her toes in the underworld (Kanto Wanderer, Underworld Beauty) or a brash complete woman who seems to pass through the culture like light through high waves. There is often something that places her just out of touch of the protagonist: he's about to go to prison, she's the boss's girl, or she just appears with the convenience of temptation. Sometimes this is just used as a vehicle to complicate the hero going into a fight guns blazing (instead of with topknot and sword). The Yakuza Papers saga is an example. But some filmmakers took it to the theatrical extreme, compressing things with gravitational intensity. The best of these early Yakuza movies would be Shinoda's Pale Flower where the female lead tiptoes in and out of the gambling circles our hero is in control of. His temptation to follow her, to need, own and possess her conflict with his duty to keep the parlor running. Shinoda breaks out the stops: surreal dream sequences, metaphorical races down empty nighttime streets. In the end the hero is tasked, as the guy who's just too full of himself but the only one who can do it, with killing a rival boss in revenge and then walking up to the police, confessing and going to prison for it. He knows she will be there. He knows that her morbid fascination both draws her to the death and sends her flying to safety. Will he go with her?

That's the painful paradox at the center of all things.

Kurosawa

In talking about samurai movies originally, I had avoided discussing Akira Kurosawa because he has a habit of overshadowing everything. People will get into discussions about how great Seven Samurai and Ran are and ignore the other... I dunno 99.999% of the genre which they are absolutely ignorant about.

But what made Kurosawa so great, beyond his groundbreaking camerawork, editing, pacing, ability to draw out the best of actors, and samurai, was his ability to work in many genres. The best of these might be Ikiru but there are many others including a whole host of crime and punishment movies.

Take as an example his first time working with a young Toshiro Mifune in Drunken Angel. Although there's a girl the movie never parts long from its focus on the young mad Matsunaga as he dances, writhes, drinks with an unquenchable fury in his eyes. The closing sequence of a dying Matsunaga struggling through a hallway in a mortal knifefight only to die hanging from the balcony with the laundry is an omen of the powers both Kurosawa and Mifune would bring to bear.

And though too the moral arch is the classic "though you may be tempted, you will always submit. Always" there is the hallmark of Kurosawa's endless humanism: Matsunaga death is a heartbreaking affair. You loathe him only to find his life and death to be such a failed opportunity. Something, somewhere had been lost and now we watch morose as the flower freezes with the night and shatters in a cold wind.

Through the remaining part of the decade, Kurosawa's films would become a quiet prayer for human compassion. If this was a wider scope we could talk about the fantastic Stray Dog (about Mifune as a police officer searching for his lost service weapon) or The High and Low (an industrialist has his son kidnapped for ransom only to find out it is the son of his butler. The dilemma is only complicated with the capture of the villain: a nameless nobody who is a shocking revelation) but I'll leave with The Bad Sleep Well. I've heard of it as Kurosawa doing Hamlet, although the parallels are much more of a stretch than the more direct translations of MacBeth (Throne of Blood) or King Lear (Ran which I rock two-fisted on the weekends it's so good). What it is about is the son of a dishonored worker for a corrupt industrialist and the way he works his demise. Though not my favorite (it lacks about three scenes while being overlong in many places) it is still worth a viewing. Like he often did, Kurosawa found an expression of a greater humanity through the simplest of acts.

What Roger Ebert wrote about the end of Seven Samurai (WRT The Magnificent Seven) rings through these films:

"The samurai at the end have lost four of their seven, yet there are no complaints, because that is the samurai's lot. The villagers do not much want the samurai around once the bandits are gone, because armed men are a threat to order. That is the nature of society. The samurai who fell in love with the local girl is used significantly in the composition of the final shots. First he is seen with his colleagues. Then with the girl. Then in an uncommitted place not with the samurai, but somehow of them. Here you can see two genres at war: The samurai movie and the Western with which Kurosawa was quite familiar. Should the hero get the girl? Japanese audiences in 1954 would have said no. Kurosawa spent the next 40 years arguing against the theory that the individual should be the instrument of society."

SEIJUN SUZUKI!!!1 THIS MOVIE IS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE IT IS YELLING AT YOU ALL THE TIME!

The wake behind the Kurosawas and the Ozus was a hunger for more visceral and muscular cinema. Much like Hollywood today that, in competing with other media such as the Internet and DVD (then in Japan, Television), the Japanese film industry began pandering to the lowest denominator in order to sell tickets. Pink Films (a genre of softcore porno), Giant Monster Movies (Godzilla, Gamera) and the Yakuza. In this mad rush, the studios gave leeway to a young director named Seijun Suzuki.

Their mistake.

His earlier films fit the mold and displayed cinematic flair but nothing to lead anyone to think Suzuki would go any further. I've already mentioned Underworld Beauty, Kanto Wanderer but his earlier career has titles such as Young Breasts, The Naked Woman and the Gun, Age of Nudity. Of course the idea was to titillate young boys into buying tickets which Suzuki did well-

But then something went wrong.

Some point at around 1960 (maybe when completing Everything Goes Wrong) Suzuki just seemed to throw in shots on a lark. Like "how about we have the hero cut the bad guy in two... and then the entire building falls away so the hero is just standing in a soundstage before a giant glowing red backdrop. And we hold that shot for like 30 seconds." (Kanto Wanderer)

And that lead to "You know what would be cool? What if I made a movie about a guy who gets so caught up between his girl and his military training that he turns into a complete psycho and just gets in ridiculous fights all the time and dudes are flying everywhere." (Elegy of Violence)

Finally "Fuck this. I'm going apeshit bananas." (Youth of the Beast)

Suzuki would then go on to make films that were so agogo crazy and over the top that after making Branded to Kill he got blacklisted for making an unshowable film. Even before you start talking about the plot consider that the lead actor, Jo Shishido, had collagen implanted into his cheeks to make him look tougher... which made him look like a chimpmunk sucking on some acorns. Beyond the actors vanity the plot of Branded to Kill is like this: Hanada is the #3 killer for the syndicate who gets off by sniffing rice ('If he were Italian I guess he would sniff pasta' -Suzuki) who get snared by this psycho-woman who lives in a butterfly arboretum. One day when making a hit, a butterfly lands on the barrel of his rifle causing him to miss his target. Hanada is a marked man. He ices #2 only to find out #1 is on his case. Things get really weird. There is a sequence where Hanada an the #1 killer are living together, walking down the street together, eating together while psycho-woman burns in a hallucinogenic fire. There's butterfly room sex and... the movie is insane.

And if you've seen Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai you have already seen an homage to to two of its shots: the above butterfly on the barrel scene and the assassin capping some dude by shooting up the drain in his sink.

Or I could mention Tokyo Drifter which features a Yakuza killer who sings his own theme song.

After letting that wash over you, what you can see now is that the individual has undergone a public transformation. Where before the question was how to balance his impure or selfish wants with his duty to a question of the individual being perhaps more important than the system which ensnares him... we finally have the beginnings of self-destruction. The system has pressed and pressed, nodded and politely gone on with its work... and now the undercurrent is building with explosive gas. With a fuse lit, the result isn't focused rebellion, it's the thermal madness blasting out through the doors. The humanity that had to be repressed in the name of service left and took all reason with it. Insanity is the only remaining metaphor. In a way the message is even more socialist than Kurosawa's humanity: as the only authority, the power structure is to blame for the failings of its young. A pretty bold statement for movies that are at one level just orgies of violence and sex.

Beat Takeshi: Most Extreme Elimination Challenge

It is important to raise the question here of Westernization. This was a criticism that dogged Kurosawa much through is career (generally when he started to gain international fame) and its met with "ahh, of course" when you go and look back on his humanism or his willingness to interpret the works of Shakespeare and Gorky. But with each successive generation of Japanese filmmakers, there are several who always break headfirst into the consciousness of the world. Beyond Seijun Suzuki, the most famous (or infamous) would probably be "Beat" Takeshi Kitano.

You might know him best as the older announcer on Spike TV's "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge" which under its original title ("Takeshi's Castle") was just a part of the Beat Takeshi Media Empire. The guy has like twenty TV shows, a production company, paints pictures... oh and directs and stars in some of the most popular movies in Japan.

So, if I had to describe a Beat Takeshi film what would it be like? Well imagine a bar, and our hero's band come wrangling in and go up to the bar. On of them nonchalantly looks over. Cut to a rival gang sitting around, enjoying themselves in a corner booth.

Cut to a shot of the good guys staring at them.

Cut to a shot of the bad guys staring at them.

Cut back to the good guys, staring. The rest of the bar walks around, oblivious. The bartender pours some Sapporo.

Like 20 seconds go by.

UNGODLY HAIL OF GUNFIRE. Everyone is just standing there guns out blazing away.

Everybody dies.

That's Beat in synopsis: instant, unexpected violence led by quick cutting and then just a merciless bodycount. Now what else are Beat Takeshi's films known for? Children, fireworks, paintings, people playing stupid jokes on each other. He actually made a kid's movie about a Yakuza helping a youngster find his mom (Kikujiro) which includes a scene where they and some bikers do some ad hoc Noh theater.

He's the sort of director who can have bloodbaths bookended by a bunch of merry criminals running around on the beach with roman candles (Sonantine. The above scene is near verbatim from the movie too). Titles such as Violent Cop, Brother (which is actually a Japanese-American production), Gonin all follow the similar template. My personal favorite is Fireworks about a cop who blames himself for his partner getting shot and becoming paraplegic. The protagonist then goes on a crime spree to fuel his revenge... while his partner decides what to do with his condition.

There are fantastic scenes of near defeat where the crippled cop is at a loss and suicidal. There's then the elegant unspoken moments as his vision collapses in on flowers and suddenly he sees himself painting these outrageous anthropomorphic pictures (that Beat did BTW). Freed from the responsibility of society, the individual sprouts into a new being. Even Takeshi's vengeful cop has some great moments where he goes on a vacation with his wife (while seeking revenge of course). She barely talks while he plays his standard bullshitting lovable moron. The movie's perfect.

Wide extreme polarizations. The gangsters are almost schizophrenic as they are both parts rigid adult automatons and stunted children. Giri-ninjo causing the person to split in two. Figuratively of course... except... Uh...

Miike: Is this Movie Legal?

Maybe it's the Honor Film taken to its logical end. Maybe it's the end of the world as we know it. Whatever it is, Takeshi Miike is there squeezing its tiny black heart. Most might know him from the bittersweet romantic comedy Audition that was in many ways the inspiration for Lost in Translation. If you love that movie and I were you I would stop reading right now, go out, buy and watch Audition without reading any of the reviews.

If that is what you ended up doing it would be the funniest thing on the face of the Earth. Reading anything about Miike you would find out he is the popular master of the ero-goro film which is the movie equivalent of the worst in tentacle porn. But often with a sense of humor. Consider the tagline for Dead or Alive:

"WARNING: This motion picture contains explicit portrayals of violence; sex; violent sex; sexual violence; clowns and violent scenes of violent excess, which are definitely not suitable for all audiences."

Who doesn't want to see a movie like that? Miike got his start on the straight to video circuit but soon distinguished himself with ridiculous twists on the regular plot. How about Full-Metal Yakuza which features a bumbling brother who gets snipped in some bad blood only to be rebuilt as a sex-freak cyborg killer. The film demonstrates the start of the mayhem that Miike would become known for later on: chain and leather bondage, rape, sexual inadequacy, sexual frustration, violence, cruelty, cruelty tinged with insanity, cruelty tinged with a sense of the Marx Brothers, etc.

The Dead or Alive trilogy thrust him into the mainstream and Audition would make him an icon. But he wouldn't stop there.

In 2001 he'd release Ichi the Killer a movie so fucking bizarre it could me more accurately described as stream-of-conscious. It would also continue on what would be a central theme in much of Miike's gangster movies: the corruption of the authorities in the system. Here several of the bosses, under the auspice of good intentions and the rule of law, slowly lead the underworld into chaos as the ethics are betrayed in the name of greed, revenge and bloodlust.

In the center of it are two of the freakiest Yakuza characters of all time: boss Kakihara (who is the dude on the cover) a sado-masochist who only gets off seeing people get beaten (or himself, if he's lucky). When not hanging guys from meathooks, pouring boiling oil on them, cutting off the end of his own tongue or ramming small gauge wire through people's faces (my favorite: when he sticks it up through the bottom of the guy's chin, up through his mouth and into his nose) he's getting ready for his showdown with Ichi the Killer. Kakihara also dresses like he's heading to a Indonesian drag show. Ichi is a hypnotized lunatic who gets off on women being beaten and raped, goes crazy at trying to avenge the "bullies" who humiliated them and causes scenes where peoples heads and legs get cut off and disemboweled.

Trust me, the film isn't as sick as I described it. It attains a dreamlike ecstasy where the violence just plunges in and out. Characters dress up like dogs and sniff out people. Its lucid dreaming put to film. Un Chien Andalou and people said Bunel and Dali were pornographers for making that.

What is most interesting is the Kafka character Miike creates in the movie: the common snese good guy secondary character who is just baffled as the whole structure of the world disintegrates. He is humiliated by his coworkers, befriends Ichi and has to watch out for his son. The structure has finally imploded around our heads. K had better luck getting into the Castle.

If Ichi the Killer sounds a bit extreme, I'd catch Gozu instead. It's more of a David Lynchian movie: a young brother is taking his superior on a car ride to kill him out in the country. The top bosses just don't trust the guy and it will prove the young brother by getting him bloodied. What happens is a series of events that grow more and more bizarre until the superior disappears and the young brother has to go find him. A bar run by transvestites. A lactating innkeeper. A man and his American wife who's part of the conversation is spelled out phonetically on the roof in pen. A dream of a cow-headed minotaur. Gozu... Gozu... The movie is more gentle. It doesn't tip you off the side of the bed and piledrive you. [George: though lacking a scene where a woman slashes her genitals with a razor, this movie does have a sequence where a fully grown man crawls out of a woman's vagina]

Endings

Where the Honor Film is going is anyone's guess. It's like the rap game: there's only so many ways you can kill a man with sixteen bars.

Now talking to Nick, he asked me (reasonably) why I'm not covering Hong Kong. And it can be said that the Tarantino's of the world were just as inspired by the John Woos as they were the Takeshi Kitanos. The problem is that although there are great films such as The Killer, Infernal Affairs or the Wong Kar-Wai films (or the Korean vengeance epics such as Old Boy or the Thai Bangkok Dangerous) they are trace direct lineage from the American and Japanese precedents.

If not borrowing directly from the giri-ninjo staple, the HK action film made its bones on the Double-Agent picture: a cop would go undercover as a Triad but he's so deep only his boss knows and his boss gets killed so its up to Chow Yun Fat or Tony Leung to believe him as they go running out of the hospital Uzis akimbo.

But the Double-Agent movie is just the localization of the Honor Film. There is no such structure in the US or Hong Kong. As deeply ingrained as the criminal elements may be, there is always the duality of law and lawless societies. What in fact the Double Agent picture does is take the giri-ninjo duality and make it explicit. The protagonist has the same Yakuza self and Personal self only now with both of them having different names. In the end, the Honor Film represents a society that is the individual and the movie is the metaphor for the competition for our soul. The real and the unreal then become intertwined and so the authenticity of Ichi the Killer is no less than that of Pale Flower or Drunken Angel. It is a thousand faces, a thousand spirits each walking alone through the fire, across the crucible. The results are too be seen.

Finally, Britons, Birds and the Crims they Love

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