Last Bill Translation

[Aaron Gerow]

Nice to see all the discussion after too long a spate of inactivity. Is 
everyone enjoying the holidays?

Anyway, I though I'd throw in my two bits, since I originally suggested the 
topic.

First, I have not seen Lost in Translation, so I can't really comment on 
that, though it was interesting to read how some films can intersect with 
certain spectators depending on their restricted subjective expriences, 
creating a collective reading formation that supports seeing a film as 
reflecting a "reality."

The Last Samurai is more disturbing, first because of the title. Who is the 
Last Samurai? In some senses, it is the Watanabe Ken character, based on 
Saigo Takamori, but clearly in the end it the Tom Cruise character who 
represents the samurai, one who then teaches the samurai spirit to the 
Japanese at the end. Others have commented how this "dances with samurai" 
narrative allows the guilty Westerner to overcome his trauma by killing 
lowly Japanese conscripts, but on a larger scale, this is very much the 
mentality of colonialism. "We colonize you because in the end, we understand 
you better than you understand yourself--because we are more you than you 
are yourself'' is a classic strain in colonialist ideology. The film's 
conceit is then not merely a case of wish fulfillment (didn't all you fans 
of samurai films wish to play the samurai just once? I did!), but also of a  
power relationship that is still all too real in Hollywood's current world 
domination. Hollywood has historically appropriated the styles and talents 
of foreign cinema, in sometimes vampire-like fashion, to revitalize itself 
(taking in German expressionism in the 20s and 30s, the New Waves in the 
1960s, Australian cinema in the 1980s, Hong Kong wire action in the 1990s, 
etc.). The Last Samurai, perhaps ironically, embodies and even justifies 
this form of cultural power.

>From a Japanese standpoint, it is also disturbing because Japan, at the 
lower end of this power relationship, has often been in the standpoint of 
being taught "who it is" by the West through processes like "gyaku yunyu" 
(reverse importation). The classic example is ukiyo-e, which was denigrated 
and rejected by early Meiji society until Western scholars like Fenellosa 
began praising it. But this is also evident in cinema, where Rashomon only 
became a masterpiece when foreign festivals awarded it. Even today, the film 
industry, especially the independents, is direly dependent upon foreign 
praise to be accepted even in Japan. The Last Samurai reinforces these 
relationships, so one must ask what is going on when some Japanese cry in 
joy at the end of that film, as some have reported. And what does it mean 
that some contemporary Japanese, at a time of renewed nationalism, are 
enjoying a idealistic vision of bushido that has too many similarities to 
the version espoused in 1930s militarism?

I should note that some Japanese reviews I read were critical of the film's 
embodiment of Western fantasy--that it wholly erased all the (bad) reality 
of the samurai class (which one can see a lot more of in the revisionist 
samurai films of the 1960s, by the way). But many of these reviews also 
revealed the deep-seated complex towards Hollywood that still defines 
Japanese film culture--an "acknowledgment" that in some ways Hollywood can 
make a samurai film better than "we Japanese" can.

What I think saves Kill Bill, for all its problems, is a consciousness of 
the problem of appropriation--although not one that ever becomes political. 
Yes, it is a film that is perhaps nothing but appropriation as it quotes 
from everything from Seijun to Sonny Chiba, from the Shaw Brothers to 
Samurai Fiction. But unlike Last Samurai, it is very conscious that these 
quotations have nothing to do with reality, and celebrates that fact. Yet it 
does have a reality: as some people have said, it is very true to elements 
of 1970s culture in a variety of nations (Tarantino has watched his films 
very closely). His is an otaku vision, but it is in a certain sense true to 
how some of the cultures were representing themselves at the time.

While there are problems in how these are combined, which I will get to 
later, what makes the film interesting to me is evidence of a consciousness 
of the problems of this culture. This essentially relates to the issue of 
how critical Kill Bill is to its own violence. There have been many debates 
about this on film studies mailing lists, but quite a number of people have 
argued that including such devices as the daughter at the beginning inserts 
a critical viewpoint towards the violence that rampages throughout the film. 
I think this critical stance can also be read in the "sloppiness" of the 
performance of these quotations. Hong Kong action is frequently utopian in 
its depiction of the body fully able to master gravity (if the body fails, 
that is typed as comic), but in Kill Bill, the wire action is more unstable, 
as characters teeter and totter and don't always maintain their balance. It 
is as if characters are trying to emulate Hong Kong films, but either don't 
fully succeed, or run into problems of gravity not always important in those 
films. This instability between the quote and the quoted I find interesting.

But I do wonder about the problem of combination. Kill Bill may be true to a 
certain pop cultural reality of the 1970s, but it creates combinations that 
would never exist in the works quoted or in the cultures that enveloped 
those texts. Perhaps that is part of the instability of those quotations, 
but I wonder how spectators are reading this. This is not only a problem of 
whether or not some audiences do see Kill Bill's "Japan" as real (or as the 
fantasy Japan that they desire to make real), but also how these 
combinations function to create cultural identities. One could argue these 
wild combinations (a 60s dance floor with Edo era architecture) undermine 
essentialist notions of Japanese identity, but I wonder about that. The 
other day, wandering through a US mall for the first time in years, I went 
into a store selling DVDs and videos and checked out their anime section. 
While it was perhaps logical that they were also selling manga right next to 
the anime display, what struck me as curious was the fact they were also 
selling Japanese candy (Pocky, Glico, etc.)--the only foodstuffs sold in 
this store. I wondered what was the logic behind combining Japanese anime, 
manga, and candy. This may yet be an attempt to create a unity behind the 
combination of elements, but why candy? And why anime? Why didn't they sell 
Hong Kong candy in the martial arts section? What does this tell us about 
the consumption of anime, manga, or other forms of Japanese pop culture?

Perhaps this reminds us of the necessity to continue examining the 
ideologies of combination and quotation and how they relate to colonialism, 
Eurocentrism, and national identity.

Aaron Gerow
Yale University

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