Takeshi Kitano interview

[Aaron Gerow]

I was glad to see the issue of Kitano Takeshi's politics broached on the 
list.  It has the potential of opening up the proverbial can of worms, 
but it is an issue worthy of discussion, as a means of approaching both 
his films and certain contemporary cultural issues.

Mark was right in emphasizing that Takeshi is more contradictory than 
consistent in his opinions.  Certainly, as Mark concludes, that is in 
some way a mark of his creative energy as an artist, but there are other 
issues involved.  Takeshi as a popular icon almost by definition can only 
exist in the popular mind as a contradictory phenomenon (reflecting the 
contradictions in popular culture).  This is in part because he can be 
popular only if his image can be read different ways by very different 
people.  It is, in other words, amorphous and amenable to multiple and 
contradictory appropriations.  I would dare say that if he was more 
consistent in his political opinions, he would end up creating an image 
that was less malleable and thus less open to the popular imagination.  
Perhaps he would not be as popular.

I am certain that Takeshi is aware of all this, if only because many of 
his films in which he appears can be read as his critique (or, if you 
follow Abe Kasho, willful deconstruction) of his popular image.  This is 
not only an issue of the "death wish" contained therein, but of a larger 
critique of identity which is brilliantly conjoined with a deconstruction 
of the basis of narrative form.  Whatever pretense there is of a stable, 
positive identity "Takeshi"--either as character in the fiction, auteur, 
or public media figure--is undermined by a thoroughgoing emptiness formed 
through the opening of liminal spaces between opposites such as 
life/death, movement/stillness, land/sea, etc.  (I think _Violent Cop_ is 
a much less interesting film precisely because it has not acheived that 
self-critique, that rendering of "Takeshi" into nothingness.)

We must, of course, try to separate the different "Takeshis": the real 
person, the TV personality, the director, the character in his films, 
etc.  They all may relate in the end, but I think Takeshi's brilliance in 
part lies in his refusal to equate all of them in a single identity.

Takeshi, by definition, cannot be pinned down.  But that, I don't think, 
prevents us from engaging in an ideological critique of his various 
images.  If one just concentrates on Takeshi the opinionator (the "New 
intellectual" valorized by Yoshimoto Takaaki), it is true one finds many 
contradictions, but I do think, if pressed, that you can place him more 
in the right wing than in the left.  He was a public supporter of a right 
wing political party in the 1980s and, if you take a look at the book 
that some of his opponents put out some years ago (I forget the title, 
but is was something on the order of "Why we hate Beat Takeshi"), you do 
find a record of him spouting a lot of very repulsive ideas (especially 
about women).  Mark is right to point out that his rightism is sometimes 
contradicted by seemingly non-rightist statements, but I would remind 
people that the extreme right in Japan has always been hard to categorize 
and, for Westerners, may seem as close to the left-wing in some of its 
positions (anti-capitalist, anti-bureaucracy, andt-politicians, etc.) as 
it is to our vision of the right.  The manga artist Kobayashi Yoshinori 
could at one time seem a darling to the left for standing up against the 
Health Ministry over the AIDS scandal, but in the next moment, he's 
denying the existence of the Nanking Massacre and spouting 
neo-nationalist rhetoric.  Takeshi's public discourse is somewhat similar 
and must be analyzed as such.  While we can't pigeon-hole it as 
"rightist," it is ideologically problematic and worthy of critique (both 
for its content and its popular cultural form).

Since we must keep the Takeshis separate, I stress that this must not 
lead us to reject his films or simply look for rightist ideology in them. 
 In fact, as I argued in _Yuriika_, I think some of his film work is most 
interesting precisely because it refuses to adopt some of common 
constructions of the nation found in other popular media.  

But there are elements of his film work open to ideological critique.  
Two issues in particular are:

1) Violence. Violence in Takeshi does operate in system of oppositions 
(especially with stillness and the ever present deadpan faces) that 
prevents us from considering his films as elegies of violence.  _Violent 
Cop_ and _Hana-Bi_, however, do not manifest this system and thus, I 
think, harbor a much more problematic conception of violence, especially 
as it is directed towards women.  How does violence operate here in 
reconstructing the identities Takeshi was previously deconstructing?  Can 
we make parallells between violence here and extremist violence in 
Japanese culture (Takeshi has spoken of Nishi in _Hana-Bi_ as precisely a 
man who can act, using rhetoric not dissimilar to that that has valorized 
rightist violence)?  

2) Women. This, unfortunately, is one area where I think Takeshi the 
opinionator and Takeshi the filmmaker may be too close.  While I think 
his representation of women is more complicated (I think it's involved in 
a general deconstruction of binary opposites), I have always disliked 
_Violent Cop_ for its pretense that the hero's sister must be killed 
simply because she has been "violated."  The man with the right to kill 
women reappears in _Hana-Bi_ and it simply can't be explained away as a 
representation of "unspoken love between man and wife."  Frankly, the 
reduction of Nishi's wife to silence (except at the end) is too typical 
of Takeshi's reduction of women to powerlessness.  Few feminist friends 
of mine here like Takeshi and not a few were offended by _Hana-Bi_.  
Again, the issue is not clear cut, but it deserves a lot more discussion. 
 (The weakness of feminist film criticism in Japan has not helped advance 
this issue.) 

There are other issues, but I just want throw these two out.

Let me reiterate to those of you who are Takeshi fans that I say all this 
not to offer reasons to reject his films.  I love his films too and think 
he is the best director of the 1990s.  But love for his cinema should 
never prevent us from understanding its complexities on multiple levels, 
including the political.  Artistic praise should not prevent us from 
doing ideological analysis.

I think the time is ripe to do this analysis precisely because of 
_Hana-Bi_.  As I hinted above, I think _Hana-Bi_, while a great film, is 
a return to more conventional notions of identity, gender, and nation in 
Takeshi's work.  In fact, with Takeshi now being celebrated as a 
cinematic master, it has become his occasion to reconstruct himself as an 
auteur.  Part and parcel of that is a reduction of his self-critique 
evident in previous films and a more bold assertion of "who Takeshi is" 
cinematically.  In that image, I think we do have a distinct object of 
analysis which can serve as the locus for connecting Takeshi the person, 
the media figure, the director, and the film character, with larger 
contemporary issues of popular culture and ideology.

Aaron Gerow
YNU