Who is the Last Samurai?

[mark schilling]

Who is the Last Samurai? Not an easy question to answer, is it? In his
review Roger Ebert notes, approvingly, that a case can be made for either
Algren or Katsumoto. [SPOILER ALERT] In other words, by the end of the film
the two men are so close, as warriors sharing the same fate, that the
differences between "insider" and "outsider," "samurai in fact" and "samurai
in spirit" have become all but meaningless. Howitzers are great equalizers.

A stronger case can be made for Katsumoto, though. At what point in the film
does Algren truly acquire samurai status? When Algren and Katsumoto are
about to depart for Tokyo, after Algren's winter sojourn in the samurai
village, Katsumoto urges the American to "go home" because he does not want
him "to be my enemy." When Algren and Simon Graham rescue Katsumoto
following his arrest, he is surprised. "I thought you returned to America,"
Katsumoto says. In his mind Algren is still an outsider.

Later, in a voice-over as Algren and Katsumoto make their escape, Algren
notes that he has "trained to fight rebels, now I am one." Rebel -- not
samurai. Then before the climatic battle with the Imperial troops, Taka asks
him to don her dead husband's armor. "If you wear this, it will honor us,"
she says. In other words, Algren does not appropriate this symbol of samurai
status -- it is given to him by someone who, of course, is not a samurai
herself. Soon after, Algren receives a sword from Katsumoto, inscribed with
the words "I belong to the warrior in whom the old ways have joined the
new." But again it is more of a mark of respect than a clear-cut symbol of
promotion to samurai status.

Even after the two men have fought side by side against the Imperial forces
and only a hundred samurai remain, Katsumoto tells Algren "This is not your
battle -- You do not have to die here." The implication being that, as an
outsider, he has an option denied to Katsumoto.

Then, following the final charge, when Katsumoto and his warriors lay
bleeding and dead on the field, the soldiers who have defeated them kneel
and touch their heads to the ground. Here the script notes that they are
"honoring the last samurai" -- in the plural. Algren and Katsumoto are among
this number -- but only Katsumoto dies as a true samurai, of his own sword,
on the battlefield.

Later, at the Imperial Palace, Algren presents Katsumoto's sword to the
Emperor with the words "He asked that I bring you this -- that the strength
of the samurai be with you always." Algren is respecting Katsumoto's wishes
and conveying his message -- not arrogating his role. Then, after the
Emperor has rejected Ambassador Swanbeck's treaty and dismissed Omura in
disgrace, he approaches Algren and says "The samurai is not a man now. He is
an idea. Tell me how he died." In other words, the Emperor regards
Katsumoto, not the foreigner kneeling before him, as the samurai who has
become "an idea."

In Graham's concluding voice-over, he refers to Algren simply as the
"American captain" who "may have found at last some small measure of the
peace that we all seek."

The reading of Algren as the "last samurai" is natural enough -- he wears
samurai armor, wields a samurai sword and is the last one left alive on the
battlefield -- but the script indicates that, in the filmmakers' minds at
least, Katsumoto is the one.

It also hard to see how Algren plays the role of "colonizer." He and
Katsumoto learn from each other -- Algren, the way of the samurai,
Katsumoto, the history of the American West and, as a frustrated Bagley
notes during the climatic battle, "Indian tactics."  In the end they are
comrades, not superior and inferior.

Throughout the film Algren has been flashing back to the slaughter of women
and children in the Cheyenne village, in which he was a reluctant
participant. In that massacre he lost his honor -- and his will to live. In
the samurai village he rediscovers the later; fighting with Katsumoto and
his men, he regains the former. At no point does he claim to know the
samurai better than they do themselves -- his priorities lie elsewhere, in
saving his own soul.

It is, in fact, Algren's complicity with his own government's colonizing
project -- and his commander's murderous execution of it -- that plunges him
into the abyss. In the beginning he considers himself a gun for hire, with
the target immaterial. ("If you want me to kill Jappos," he tells Bagley,
"I'll kill Jappos.") Then, in Katsumoto, he finds a warrior who is something
more than a killer of innocents, who fights for something more than a
paycheck or advancement -- or blood sport.

Disclosure here -- I worked as a script advisor on the film. I wish I could
relate some juicy anecdotes about Hollywood vulgarity and insensitivity, but
Ed Zwick sincerely wanted to learn as much as he could, particularly from
his Japanese staff and cast -- while spending as much time and money as he
could to get it right (and getting into trouble with the studio for it).
That he failed in ways large and small was both deliberate and inevitable.
He was, as he explained to me, making "a big-deal Hollywood entertainment"
not an art film for Japanophiles. Thus the need to sacrifice historical
accuracy for drama. I don't agree with all the choices he made -- the ending
in particular struck me as contrived -- but, after months of back and forth
on script minutiae, I think I have some understanding of why he made them.

Mark Schilling
schill at gol.com










----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Aaron Gerow" <aagerow at hotmail.com>
To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 10:15 AM
Subject: Re: Last Bill Translation


> 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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