What Would Toshiro Mifune Do?

Via Dewayne Mikkelson and Shadow his Webdog comes this jewel from Brokentype. What a great read on sensibility, identity, honor and so forth as viewed through the personalities of one of Japan's iconic film stars and the director who most complemented his persona. Four concepts: Pride, Suck-it-up, Don't look back, and "Change." A snippet:

1) 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, (which is annoying since Clint Eastword stole his man-with-no-name persona wholesale from Mifune's performance in Yojimbo, right down to the charro root) but Clint Eastwood is a terrible model for masculinity. He trades dignity for cool, duty for revenge. While Eastwood has some kind of restrained rage smoldering inside him, Mifune has pride. A pride that is so otherworldly it shimmers on the screen like some new, previously untapped emotion.

The pride Akira Kurosawa evoked in collaboration with Toshiro Mifue has nothing to do with the Hubris of Greek Tragedy. Akira Kurosawa's great gift was to take the stories of the West (the cowboy western, Shakespeare, the detective novel) , dip them in Japanese culture, and bring back a story that was different from anything we could have hoped for, and twice as true for it. In Kurosawa's films, pride is not fatal - it is the only way to survive. In Stray Dog (one of the first films starring Mifune) a rookie police officer has his gun stolen on a train, and scours the city for it. He doesn't sleep, he doesn't eat, he certainly 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 before a backdrop of Japan's humiliation following the war) and when he finally confronts the man who has the gun he looks upon him without an ounce of sympany. Pride is the motivation for living, and when you've lost it, you cease to be human.

Way cool and thoughtful. I'm breaking out my dusty old VHS of "Rashomon" or "Yojimbo" once we get the kids to bed tonite.

UPDATE: Okay, watched Seven Samurai instead. Went back and reread the Mifune piece because one segment of it bothered me: Number 3, Suck-it-up...

With pride, there's a profound revulsion to the pathetic.... 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 crime is to let them loose, to acknowledge them publicly, to let them master you through expression. It is the opposite of what every psychiatrist will recommend, and it is the best thing to do. Keep it inside and create yourself from it. It's the only thing you can be sure of, the only self-perpetuating resource your will ever get. You can't rely on love or loyalty or happiness, but if you learn to build a wall out of sadness you can keep the legions out.

Ouch. Real self-abasement is the ugliest of indignities. (As opposed to the feeble attempts at apology for typos, randomness, etc as I spin and spew War and Peace-length posts chock full of certitude and bluster at this blog's four readers--see, there I go again.) And there is no honor in lamenting the past, only in resisting its failures power over you. But I think it's wrong to suggest "Keep it inside and create yourself from it. It's the only thing you can be sure of, the only self-perpetuating resource your will ever get... if you learn to build a wall out of sadness you can keep the legions out."

To me, that's the opposite of Kurosawa's messages: Strength, not hardness, from hardship. Inner will, not willfulness or outer complaint. Pride makes you stronger, but rage and denial makes you brittle and unable to parry the inevitable feints and failures of life. His message is that life is ugly, and that the life of samurai is often ugly and fruitless. That people are failures of the ideal. Failure of will. But Kurosawa's cinematic framing and pauses seem to say that he'll take the sublime hope of a peasant's life, quietly lived, rather than the noisy, unforgiving code of his rootless Ronin or Samurai.

And maybe that Pride is a stopgap when your service is to others, till you find service to yourself a worthy cause. Or something like that.

Okay, it's 3:45. Time for a bit o sleep.