An Attempt at Perfection

A common theme throughout almost all of the films we have watched this semester. One theme seemed very important to me. That theme being, there is a significant value to how you are seen by the world. Within the films, A Better Tomorrow, The Drunken Master, Raise The Red Lantern, Fists of Fury, and Farewell, My Concubine each display this idea with stunning clarity, but each in their own narrative arcs. Cheng Chao-an in Fists of Fury is fighting the urge to fight so he can be seen as a proper citizen. Dieyi from Farewell, My Concubine at first fights the urge to play a girl on stage, because he wants to be seen as a man, then fights to keep his spot in the sunlight. Jackie Chan’s character Wong Fei-Hung is forced, rather unwillingly to fight to regain honor and respect from the world so he might return home. Mark from A Better Tomorrow is determined to pull one last job, because he has fallen so far after being injured. Even woman are faced with this problem as well, Songlian the newest wife in Raise The Red Lantern has to fight for a perfect image. The idea of being perfect in the eyes of the world is at the route of these character’s motivations.  Their worlds range from large cities to an oppressive compound, but each has an audience for these people to perform their roles in front of, and if they fall from their pedestal they must fight tooth and nail to get back on top. By examining their individual journeys through each story one can see the pattern more clearly, each character fighting for their place on the stage of life.
            Cheng Chao-an in the beginning of Fists of Fury is a reformed young man. He has sworn to his family, on his honor, not to participate in another fight. He wears his mother’s locket as a reminder of that promise. As an adult he is expected to be loyal and perform as an upstanding gentleman. It is that fact, rolling around in his head, that keeps him nonviolent, though it seems to be a part of his nature, firmly rooted inside him. During his time with his cousins he looses more and more control over his actions. He gets cornered into fighting. Instead of being non-violent, it becomes imperative that he use violence. It is the only way he will survive.  When his cousins begin to disappear after going to meet the Big Boss he must make the choice to leave passivity behind. Stepping into a fight and saving his family from a brutal thrashing by the Boss’ men however, only garners him a position on the wrong side of the fight. Cheng is easily led astray, and falls from grace in a matter of speaking. He makes some bad choices while he’s drunk and afterward, when even more of his family disappears it becomes time for him to take a stand and face what is really being asked of him. Upon discovering what actually happened to the missing family members he’d been searching for, and the ones he left at home, Cheng is faced with the bloody truth. His honor has been compromised by not protecting his family. He hurt them by falling prey to manipulation. Revenge becomes his only option. Then for good measure he accepts that he must be taken away by the cops after killing all those people. He broke the law and fought, but regained his honor by taking revenge. He fulfilled his role and rose to the pedestal he was meant for. A hero, though only his love interest is left to praise him for it.
            Both Dieyi and Xiaolou of Farewell, My Concubine both provide interesting characters, bent on literally remaining on the stage, in the limelight.  Dieyi, however, is the better example when examining a character fighting to perfect their image for the world.  At a young age Dieyi is forced to become sexualized as a female, though he is in fact a male. His thin frame and feminine features do not help his case. Trained to play the Concubine he begins to exude that femininity in his everyday life. He learns his role and it becomes his life. It is everything to him, every part of him. Throughout the film there are continuous references to his need to be the Concubine, and play his role. Upon first seeing him as an adult, as a famous actor, everything about him, except his biological sex, screams female, the way he sits and the way he talks, all of it is the exact opposite of Xiaolou. He is his role; he is exactly what his audience wants him to be. But when his counterpart, Xiaolou fails to live up to his role, the pressure gets to Dieyi and it becomes too hard for him to keep up his high standards and remain on the stage. He cracks as times change and looses the person he was. At the end he is willing to die because his art was inevitably taken away from him. It was so essential to his life, that without it. Without being free to act, and for that matter act alongside Xiaolou he cannot go on. His not willing to die for his art, but forced to die because it has been taken from him, and he has no way to rise back to the person he once was.
            Songlian, from Raise The Red Lantern, is performing a similar dance on a much smaller stage. After her entering into her marriage with a stone face of blind acceptance she finds that she has given up her life as a student for a life of confinement and competition. At first she does not see the good at being chosen by the master, but soon, with so little an option she is forced to participate in the competition for affection. There is a very small stage within the compound and if she is not successful in garnering her husband’s attention, which often she is not, her world grows very lonely and dark. Her position is entirely unstable; the only stability she can find is by performing as the dutiful wife and getting the lanterns lit up in her portion of the massive home she is now resident in.  Success is marked by the lanterns. Her grey world only finds color outside her bedroom when the lanterns are lit. Everything is bathed in their light.  When she falls from grace and it is revealed she’s faked her pregnancy they cover her lanterns in black bags. Black is the utter absence of color. She is shunned and darkness over takes her part of the house.  After she goes mad, she even returns to her black and white attire she wore upon arrival. When she can no longer please, she must lose everything imaginable, without dying like the third wife.  She falls because she cannot rise to the challenge.
            Wong Fei-Hung from the drunken master and Mark from A Better Tomorrow are no different from the rest of these characters, but these two, start out on top of the world. They believe they have everything, but it’s a false victory. They are only in possession of a false kind of fame. Each of them actually runs before fulfilling their true goal, before stepping into the role they are supposed to play. Fei-Hung is a trickster kid, a bully. He even attacks his own aunt when she threatens his position on the top of his rag tag gang. He makes a fool out of his teacher before that. All of his actions lead him to being proverbially dethroned by his father. A fighting master is called upon to track Fei-Hung right from wrong, but he literally runs away causing even more trouble first. During his training he does everything he possibly can to avoid fully committing to his training. He first is forced to fall as far as he can. His father has kicked him out of his comfort zone and then he encounters Thunderleg who utterly humiliates him. Fei-Hung truly hits bottom. When he finally is shown the true reason of his training he does what he’s meant to do and learns the drunken fighting style. For the first time in his story he accepts the challenges set before him. All of this adventure culminating with a final battle, him vs. Thunderleg, the fighter who is trying to kill his father.  It is only by standing up, and regaining the honor of his family, is he found to be successful.
            A Better Tomorrow is a gangster’s story. Mark beings on top of the world with his partner at his side. They are powerful, but when they are double crossed, and Mark loses his partner, and then proceeds to lose his position among his peers he becomes virtually worthless. He is wounded and cannot even move like he used to. Based on his old job alone, Mark is a bad guy, but we feel sorry for him. The viewer is forced to pity him, because he has some redeeming qualities. When he finally gets the chance to regain some of his stature, pulling off a final job with his partner, he runs. He leaves Ho to die. The entire film is a series of events where Mark fails to step up in a good way, but it is at the end that he earns the viewer’s respect, when he steps up. When that boat turns around and he comes back to fight with his friends, we finally can like him through and through. He dies for his cause and earns our love.  Each of these characters is playing a role, and forced to live up to expectations in one form or another. They each follow their own narrative arcs to get to their individual ends, but each are forced to rise and fall. Songlian and Dieyi fall because they cannot be their versions of perfect. Everyone wants perfection, but perfection is not for everyone.

Kurosawa: The Mutibility of Idenity and Truth

       Akira Kurosawa likes to play with the ideas of truth and identity.  Two perfect examples of this are his films Rashomon and Ikiru. Though both films are very different in content Kurosawa uses similar techniques in order to set the stage for two questions. Who are we and what is truth? The narrative arch creates a language for these questions so that they might be asked indirectly, through silent implication. He uses distinctive shots and the motives of his characters to present the viewer with his message, but forces them to participate in finding the answer. The major techniques Kurosawa uses are flashback storytelling and point of view. Both techniques are present in Rashomon and Ikiru, but used very differently just so they can promote the same ideals. These films examine human decision and what it says about who we are when we make choices that are out of the realm of acceptable.
            Takashi Shimura stars in both of these Kurosawa gems. Ikiru, 1952, begins with a shot of an ex-ray. It says that this is an image of the stomach cancer that will kill the protagonist, but he does not know that yet. The viewer gets to watch as Shimura’s character Mr. Wantanabe deals with his sickness once he learns of it. He faces the fact that his choices have made him a life where he is the equivalent of someone already dead. He realizes by hearing this that he must make some changes. He cannot die without making some kind of effort. He eventually decides he is going to help a group of women who’ve come to his office. They want to build a park in their neighborhood. After letting all those women get sent through the bureaucratic run around he stands up and offers a hand.  He chooses to help them rather than just pass them on from department to department. Not one person around him understands why. It is in this change and how it’s treated that we are delivered our two main questions. What does Watanabe’s change in character say about him? What does his choice to help the women say about him?
             The second question, what is truth, comes out through the second half of the film.  In the middle of the story we cut to after Watanabe has died. The viewer isn’t privy to story in a linear fashion. We get to see  it through the eyes of the people who knew him. We arrive at the man’s funeral. The park has been built, but the people recounting the process in which it came to be are full of bias and speculate wildly about the deceased man’s motivations. They don’t know the full story, because they never bothered to ask, not that they would have listened. Only a few men recall Watanabe in a good light, as a determined man who wouldn’t take no for an answer and others recount him as a fool. Which is true? What were his motivations? Unlike Rashomon in this film the viewer has been given  the truth, but are forced to watch as Watanabe’s coworkers try to make sense of what this old sickly man was trying to do. By reflecting on his actions these coworkers are able for a brief moment to see the error of their ways.  To realize that our choices can lead us down very dark paths, and our inaction can kill us even before we are truly dead.  Thus we see Kurosawa present us with the two questions yet again. What is the truth, which version of Watanabe was the real one? What do our choices mean, what do they say about us?
            Rashomon, 1950, was around Kurosawa’s twenty-third film, and both of the aforementioned problems come about in this film much like they did in Ikiru but for an entirely different narrative purpose. What is truth, through point of view, and what do our choices say about us, through flashbacks. The film begins with a priest, a woodcutter, and another man forced to take refuge form a rainstorm under the Rashomon ruins. Shimura played the woodcutter, who begins the narrative. Inciting the beginning of a series of stories told about a murder and rape. The woodcutter and priest were summoned to testify at a trial regarding these crimes. Shimura’s character is utterly confused. He is unsure of how to take what happened in the woods and at the trial. The third man has the woodcutter tell his story so that he could maybe help him understand what’s going on.  It comes to light that the woodcutter a few days earlier had found the body of a dead samurai in the woods.  As we proceed through the narrative, the story is told from five different points of view. The priest tells of how he saw the samurai and his wife on the road before they were attacked by the bandit. Then after his story three others tell their own versions: the wife, the bandit, and the samurai himself through a medium. Each version has a thread of similar events, all culminating in the death of the samurai but it comes about in many different ways. The wife is portrayed as a victim, a manipulator, and a whore.  This play with point of view creates the platform for the question, what is truth. Is the wife crazy or a victim? How was the man killed? The second question comes in the guise of the woodcutter. He didn’t tell the courts what he’d really seen, and then at the same time he offers to take the abandoned child home with him. What do his choices say about him?
            Both Rashomon and Ikiru are both in-depth looks at human nature. Kurosawa takes us deep into a culture that is founded on the ideals of honor and respect.  Then he forces the viewers to participate and questions what it means to go against those ideals. He uses the manipulation of perception in flashback and point of view to show that truth is fluid. Our choices are what define us and that’s all that matters.  The flawed human beings in Kurosawa’s films are ones who make judgments and see things in their own persepective, all in all that makes them more human than the viewer is truly aware of.  These facts are part of a reality we all know exists. No two people see things the same way, and both Rashomon and Ikiru show us that. Truth and reality are not as strict as we’ve been lead to believe, there is mutability to what we think we know and who we really are.