Thursday, August 19, 2004

KOKORO BUSHIDO Yesterday night I was a bit late with my dinner and washing up, so when I sat down to relax a bit, I turned on the tv just at the moment when on Belgian tv the film Ghost Dog by Jim Jarmusch started. I am not a tv watcher, but I like Jarmusch. So I saw the film. It's wonderful, it's a good film. Ghost Dog is about a mafia hit man and the chain of violence that ensues. Two books play an important role in the film. The first is Hagakure, the Way of the Samurai. The second is Rashomon, the story of a violent crime as seen from the viewpoint of different persons. Rashomon [the film by Akira Kurosawa] is adapted from two very short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927). The first, 'In The Grove', provides the basis for the main body of the film; the second, 'Rashomon', (the name of a gate in Heian, a symbol of flowering Japanese culture in 784, a symbol of decay in the twelfth century) is the framing story; the two are brilliantly tied together by the woodcutter's narration of the final version of the story." Much has been written about Ghost Dog. But I do not think it is a tribute to a traditional philosophical way of thinking, nor a celebration of a war code of honour, a bushido. On the contrary. Although we may feel a lot of sympathy for Ghost Dog as a person - and he probably felt he did the right thing, died in the right way - he failed. Ghost Dog lived his own version of Rashomon, the mob their version. And the most painful aspect of it is that violence breeds violence, because everyone has his own code to live up to, his own bushido, his own story to tell. The film ends with the young generation taking over, two girls, two children. And that's what it's all about. It's about a continuous chain of violence and we are writing stories around each incident to make them glamorous. We make up codes of honour to justify our and others' deaths. But the codes are not universal, we make them up ourselves. These codes are essentially false codes, they are the codes of violent death. "The end is important in all things." Now it seems the end, death, has become an end in itself, but one that is perpetuating itself and is turning into a juggernaut. 12:10:44 PM

© Copyright 2008 Hetty Litjens.