Senior Seminar, Spring: Week 11 3/28
I’ve been trying to get in the habit of writing daily. It’s been a slow habit to develop, but what I’ve been doing for the last month has proven effective. Almost immediately after watching a movie, I sit down at a desk, remove my cheap, digital watch from my wrist, the same one I used to time myself when I was prepping for the SAT back in high school, start a timer, and write and reflect on whatever I watched for 15 minutes. With each viewing of a new film, I found myself continuing longer and longer than the planned 15 minutes. Below is my reflection of Paul Schrader’s film Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters based on notes I took as I re-watched it the other day.
In his long form essay on the cinematic style that he dubbed the “transcendental style,” Paul Schrader argues that the purpose of the style is to create within the viewer an experience with the Transcendent, or Wholly Other, or God, etc. He examined three different artists and their respective styles (Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer) in order to show the different steps a filmmaker could employ/ take so as to create an effect within an audience. He concludes the essay by admitting that these methods are in no way the only means to elicit this reaction within an audience, just most effective way that he’s seen.
In the early 80s, Schrader undertook a daunting task: to write and direct a biopic about the life and work of Japanese artist, writer, and filmmaker Yukio Mishima. What resulted was Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters, a film made in Japan with a Japanese cast and crew that employed an unconventional story structure that managed to weave together three distinct sets of narratives into four chapters so as to perfectly encapsulate the enigma that was the artist Mishima.
Each chapter attempts to examine who Mishima through the lens of beauty, art, action, or the harmony of pen and sword. The first narrative strand shot in color and edited in a similar manner to a political thriller, shows the events of November 25, 1970, when Mishima and a group of his ideological followers, who - like him - practiced a life of total commitment to Bushido, the code of the Samurai, attempted to inspire a coup d’état and restore power the Emperor. Mishima leads four other men to the headquarters of the Japanese army in Tokyo, takes the commander of the military base hostage, gives what he thinks is a rousing speech to the assembled soldiers about how it is their duty to reclaim the duty of guardians of the soul of Imperial Japan. The speech, however, falls on deaf ears, and Mishima commits ritualistic suicide in the form of Seppuku.
The flashback strand is the one biopic convention the film sticks to. Shot in black and white, it articulates how Mishima started as a sickly, aristocratic boy, became a writer, adopted a samurai like code that sought to create beauty not just through words, but also through the body, became physically fit through vigorous weight training, and, I’m not kidding here, established a private militia to help espouse these principals. As far fetched as it sounds, the philosophical narration provided by Mishima on all of these events weaves the past together in a way that it makes sense that he ended up commiting Seppuku. The flashbacks explore his own writing process and his struggles to manifest the transformative and ethereal powers of words in to physical action. His obsession with physical beauty is tied in with his homosexual yearnings and adolescent arousal painting of a martyred Saint Sebastian.
The final strand, and the most stylized, is composed of dramatized sections from three of his novels: Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), Kyoko’s House (1959), and Runaway Horses (1969), with each section examining the themes of the Chapter and its respective flashbacks. These sections act as cinematic stage plays, with vibrant colorful sets that disregard realism in favor of expressionism, beautiful costumes, sweeping camera movements, and detailed sound design. In the same way that one reads a novel and constructs the world with the words that they are given, the viewer is given vibrant images and must either construct a real world from that or suspend their disbelief and give into expressionism.
The first novel in the first chapter examines a stuttering Zen Buddhist acolyte who burns down a famous temple because he is overwhelmed and feels to be made inferior by its beauty. This section is dominated by green and gold colors.
The second novel in the second chapter examines a vain actor who sells his life and body to a woman gangster in exchange for canceling his mother’s debt to her. The two enter into a sadomasochistic relationship that results in a their double suicide. This section is dominated by pink and grey colors.
The third novel in the third chapter examines a group of student nationalists who seek to purify Japan by murdering Capitalist figures in the government and society. They are eventually found out and their leader manages to kill one business man before committing seppuku. This section is dominated by shu (a hue of orange used in temples) and black.
The final chapter culminates in Mishima and his men’s assault on the military base, address to the soldiers, and suicide. As he plunges the knife into his abdomen, the film cuts to the respective conclusions of the three novels: the acolyte burning the temple, the sadomasochist couple committing suicide, and the student leader killing himself. As the student leader falls to the ground, the sun rises over the horizon and the credits roll.
The transcendental style creates a world that is a hyper exaggeration of the common, “everyday” life. As the film progresses, the trasncendental filmmaker infuses a sense that something else is possible or can exist in this pure mundanity. The film culminates in some form of miracle or event that proves this underlying feeling to be true. It is at this moment that the viewer will make an emotional choice to suspend disbelief or not. If the viewer can hold the contradictory ideas that this world that has been presented to them can be both rational/ mundane/ boring AND have miraculous moments that cannot be explained with logic, then they will have a transcendental experience. This moment is followed by a moment of stasis that concludes the film in which these two competing rules of the world exist together in harmony.
With Mishima, Schrader does something similar. In the first Chapter, beauty, Mishima as a boy concludes that life consists of two contradictory elements: words and reality. Words could change the world, and the physical realm of the world had nothing to do with the ethereal nature of words and thoughts. This classic mind/body dichotomy and its relation to beauty and art are complicated and explored throughout the film. Beauty for the young Mishima is the martyred body of St. Sebastian. When he sees this image, the narration explains that his “need to transform reality becomes urgent”
The acolyte in the Temple of the Golden Pavilion section intimidates him and prevents him from his first sexual experience. The acolyte explains that beauty’s eternity has the power to fill the whole world and to poison humanity and block us out of our pride. Therefore beauty, manifested by the temple, becomes and enemy and must be destroyed.
In the second chapter, art, Mishima as a young man has become a successful writer. While out dancing with a lover, Mishima is insulted by the man’s jab at his flabby body. Later, Mishima explains that he has a strong sense of aesthetics, and can’t look in the mirror because he isn’t beautiful. Aesthetics, or art, is a means to express beauty. In narration, Mishima explains that because he had a sickly childhood, he now feels lacks a physical presence. He learned to express words before he could express the physical, and therefore, words had separated him from his body. He concludes that creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself are identical. Later, he recreates the scene of St. Sebastian, but this time with himself as the model.
The actor in Kyoto’s House decides to become a body builder so that his body can become as beautiful as his face. As Mishima begins to work out and obtain physical strength and therefore a physical presence, so does his character. Their obsession with self beauty is a means to express/ create art. The act of working out itself is art, for the express purpose of creating beautiful bodies, just like the Classical, idealized marble statues of old.
The actor has a conversation with an painter friend of his and the two discuss this very idea. The painter argues that time kills the body, so there will be no chance of eternal beauty. Only art makes human beauty endure, the artist’s scheme preserves it. The only way for one to preserve the physical existence of beauty, manifested by an idealized body, is to commit suicide at the height of one’s beauty. That way time will not decay the body. Immediately after this, the actor is introduced to Loan Shark and becomes her lover. She starts to mutilate and cut his body, his red blood matching the pink hues of the set. She explains that his skin just had to be cut, just as the temple just had to be destroyed in the previous chapter. The actor proclaims that the act of mutilation felt pleasurable to him. This idea of the destruction of beauty is introduced in the first chapter. Then the idea that the body is art or a medium to create beauty is introduced, and the idea of mutilation is made bare.
