September 14, 2002
What Would Toshiro Mifune Do?
A manual inspired by the Toshiro Mifune retrospective playing at the Film Forum
In Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai a band of ronin make camp in a poor town to protect the villagers from marauding bandits. Toshiro Mifune plays Kikuchiyo, a brash, half-mad drunkard who wields a sword that is nearly as tall as he is. He is an imposter, and the others regard him as a low-born pretender, but he sticks around, and eventually becomes the seventh samurai.
When the samurai first arrived in the village it had been stripped bare by bandits, but the peasents have stashes in the hills, and when Kikuchiyo discovers a cache of arms he dons a suit of armor and returns triumphantly to headquarters. On seeing this display, Kembaii, the leader of the samurai, is outraged. The armor had been taken off of masterless samurai who had been murdered by the townspeople, and this insolence, Kembai insists, proves that he is not a warrior.
And then Kikuchiyo looses it. He confesses that he was born a peasant, and defends their actions as the only option of the powerless. It's a shocking moment for all of the samurai. Mifune's howling anger is uncomfortable to watch, and it challenges the cool professionalism Kembai espouses. At the end of the tirade everyone is silent, and what follows is my favorite scene in the movie. The shot is framed so that you only see Mifune from the waist down. He turns, pauses, straightens up, and then leaves. There's nothing more to it than that, but somehow in those three simple actions Mifune showed a character moving from humiliation to pride.
Have Pride
I have a theory that the only thing a man needs to do to live an honest life is to imitate Toshiro Mifune. He's often described as Japan's Clint Eastwood, but that name is disingenuous, since Clint Eastwood borrowed his man-with-no-name persona from Mifune's performance in Yojimbo, right down to the charro root. And the characters Eastwood plays are terrible models of masculinity to begin with. They trade dignity for cool, duty for revenge. Eastwood has a restrained rage smoldering inside him, but Mifune has pride; a pride so otherworldly it shimmers on the screen.
The pride Akira Kurosawa evoked in his collaboration with Toshiro Mifune has nothing to do with the Hubris of Greek tragedy. In Kurosawa's films, pride is a virtue. In Stray Dog (one of the first films starring Mifune) a rookie police officer has his gun stolen on a train, and spends the rest of the movie trying to recover it. He doesn't sleep, he doesn't eat; even in the heat he doesn't change out of his white linen suit. He is single minded in his determination to salvage his dignity (It's no accident that this all takes place on a backdrop of Japan's humiliation following the war) When he finally confronts the man who has the gun, there's a moment where you think he might actually forgive him. Instead, he dispatches him without an ounce of sympathy. The man who stole his gun had no pride, and was therefore beyond contempt
Suck-it-Up
With pride, there's a profound revulsion to the pathetic. In Yojimbo, Mifune's character rescues a woman from a bandits and returns her to her groveling husband. When they fall prostrate in gratitude he rages at them. In High and Low, Mifune determines to save his chauffeur's son from a kidnapper, but never lets the sniveling man thank him. In The Seven Samurai he curses at an old woman who recounts the miseries she has endured. But Kurosawa isn't saying that grief and misery are to be taken lightly - they are everywhere in his films - the danger is to acknowledge them publicly, to let them master you through expression. It is the opposite of what every psychiatrist will recommend: keep it inside and create yourself from it.
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