Paul Schrader (1985)
I remember watching it on television during a Christmas holiday, I guess in the early nineties. The memory is one of excitement – the excitement that crystallised in Philip Glass’s score. Seeing it again now at BFI, I found I’d retained next to nothing other than the music. This second viewing was a disappointment. Yukio Mishima is an interesting character, Paul Schrader is an interesting writer-director, and why he wanted to make this picture is interesting too. I was often bored, though, and usually felt miles away from what was happening on screen. I find it hard to ‘read’ Japanese actors and Mishima’s moral and political beliefs are alien to me in more ways than one – but it’s Schrader’s hermetic formal approach that is crucial in making the picture so remote. The Glass music, however, remains very strong: in its accumulating tension (and the pounding suspense thriller elements, which in effect acknowledge that the filmmaker is American); in how well it succeeds, when it effloresces, in expressing the explosive, exultant collision of opposites that seems to have been essential to Mishima’s life and beliefs.
Each of the four chapters of the film – ‘Beauty’, ‘Art’, ‘Action’ and ‘Harmony of Pen and Sword’ – comprises three strands. The first strand, progressing through the four chapters, is the story of the day of Mishima’s death, 25 November 1970, when he and four members of his private army (the ‘Tatenokai’ or ‘Shield Society’[1]), visited a military headquarters in Tokyo, where they bound and gagged the commanding officer and Mishima addressed the army garrison from the balcony of the building, urging a coup d’état which would see the restoration of imperial powers. Mishima was jeered by the soldiers and returned to the room into which he and his companions had barricaded themselves. He then committed ritual suicide – seppuku[2]. The second strand comprises flashbacks to Mishima’s earlier life, from childhood to early middle age (he died at the age of forty-five). The third strand consists of episodes from three of Mishima’s novels (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House and Runaway Horses). Each part of the triptych has a distinct style. The sequences describing Mishima’s life are essentially realistic. His earlier life is shot in black-and-white and his last day in colour. The dramatisations of the novels are, at least in terms of design, highly stylised and richly, beautifully coloured. (The principal male character in each of these excerpts commits seppuku.)
A 2008 piece by Kevin Jackson was used as the BFI note and makes as strong and coherent a case for the film as you could imagine. As Jackson notes, Mishima’s preoccupation with body-building – mens sana in corpore sano to an arguably insane degree – echoes the proclivities of earlier Schrader protagonists: the desperately self-inventing Travis Bickle, in Schrader’s screenplay for Taxi Driver; the narcissistic Julian Kaye in American Gigolo, which he directed as well as wrote. I find both those fictional characters more comprehensible – easier to believe in – than Mishima. Although the debate about his sexuality seems to have continued since his death (whether he was homosexual or ‘homophiliac’), Schrader seems to have little doubt that his subject was either gay or bisexual. (Mishima had a wife and two children.) But the sexual ambiguity is the part of Mishima that’s easy to understand: his ideology, about which we hear a good deal in the film, is another matter. When he says things like, ‘When a man strives for beauty he is really striving for death’, it’s a well-turned aphorism (although I’m paraphrasing) but it means nothing to me – even with visual aids of the martyred St Sebastian, in both Western art history and Japanese versions. And the antitheses (or what he saw as antitheses) that dominated Mishima’s thinking – art versus action, pen versus sword etc – don’t seem to be original ideas. The same goes for his view of death as the unique means of reconciling the irreconcilable.
The square-jawed face of Ken Ogata, who plays the middle-aged Mishima, is very different from (less oriental than) that of the original but Schrader did well to cast an actor with a strongly masculine presence in the role: to a Western audience anyway, it helps convince us that Mishima’s manliness was publicly impregnable. An actor who looked to be an expressionist study of Mishima’s soul – or even one who didn’t but who more closely resembled the real Mishima – might not have been so easily able to do this. It’s not just the amount of screen time he has that enables Ogata to impose himself on the story more than anyone else. He has a natural and considerable authority. Among the rest of the cast, I found it difficult to latch onto strongly individual performers (or to discern any difference in performance style that seemed to correspond with the visually distinct descriptions of Mishima’s fiction and of his life: perhaps there isn’t meant to be any but I wish I could be surer that was the intention).
The excepts from the novels are pictorially impressive but dramatically stiff. I felt more engaged watching an apparently naturalistic sequence like Mishima’s debating with an audience of angry leftist students (being Japanese, they’re still polite enough to hear him out before bellowing their disagreement). Yet a problem with the ‘real life’ parts of Mishima is that you’re primed to expect to understand and accept them in realistic terms and, although intrigued by the climax to the film, I was left dissatisfied with it. The ways in which the Tatenokai’s visit to the garrison go wrong are well observed: they don’t barricade one of the doors properly and some soldiers burst in at one point; when Mishima is preparing for suicide, he has to kick out of the way a debris of telephones and wires in order to make a space for himself on the office floor. But Schrader seems to fudge a seemingly crucial question: was Mishima’s suicide a necessary consequence of failure or the necessary culmination of his life’s work? (The Wikipedia article on Mishima is pretty clear that suicide was his intention. Kevin Jackson, on the strength of the film, seems less sure: he describes ‘the bloody finale’ as ‘perhaps what Mishima had intended from the outset’.) Mishima’s moral code appears to have been alarmingly clear and his preparations for the event are shown as meticulous. It’s not easy to accept that the reaction of the soldiers to his address made absolutely no difference to what he did next. Would Yukio Mishima have committed seppuku if his speech had gone down a storm, if he had seen his ambition of a coup d’état materialising before his eyes?
19 November 2009
[1] According to Wikipedia, the Tatenokai was ‘composed primarily of young students who studied martial principles and physical discipline, and swore to protect the Emperor. Mishima trained them himself. However, under Mishima’s ideology, the emperor was not necessarily the reigning Emperor, but rather the abstract essence of Japan’.
[2] Again according to Wikipeda, ‘seppuku’ (‘stomach-cutting’) was a form of suicide ‘originally reserved only for samurai. Part of the samurai honor code, seppuku was used voluntarily by samurai to die with honor rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, as a form of capital punishment for samurai who have committed serious offenses, and for reasons that shamed them. Seppuku is performed by plunging a sword into the abdomen and moving the sword left to right in a slicing motion’.
