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| Is this the most famous shot in cinéma history? It's pretty much this or Harold Lloyd hanging from that clock. |
No doubt Akira Kurosawa is one of the canonical great filmmakers, universally respected for his 2,465 samurai movies, his disciplined camera movements, beauty-out-of-chaos mise-en-scène, and classical sense of tragedy. Yet his legacy in the west largely consists of fat neckbeards eagerly telling you Star Wars is based on his The Hidden Fortress, which is like if Michelangelo were mostly known for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named after him. Fortunately, after ruining cinema with the runaway success of his Flash Gordon pastiche, George Lucas made some efforts to redeem himself by teaming up with his pal Francis Ford Coppola to fund Kurosawa's late-period epics, chief among them the master's adaptation of William Shakespeare's brilliantly edgy adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's King Lear.
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| The run-on sentences will get longer in direct proportion to the pedigree of the project under examination. |
Geoffrey's ostensibly historical account of Lear followed the same basic plot as Shakespeare's extremely unfaithful adaptation in having the old king give away all his lands to his obviously evil daughters named after venereal diseases, while disowning his one good daughter for having an autism attack and failing to jump through the hoops of flattery he lays out for her. The difference is that Geoffrey's account has a happy ending, with the evil daughters vanquished and the king and his good daughter reconciled. Because he was the original edgy boi, Shakespeare completely changed the ending to make King Lear his greatest masterpiece; a bleak, harrowing tragedy almost devoid of hope; a caustic and curiously Machiavellian cautionary tale against ego, resentment, and the folly of squandering your power and birthright to appease smooth-talking social climbers who tell you what you want to hear over the bluntly honest autismos who'll tell you what you need to hear. Macbeth may be more Gothic, Hamlet more metaphysical, but King Lear is the one that hits you like a horse kick to the gut.
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| Most of this kino was filmed on the slopes of active volcanoes, and the bitter, ashy waste of the landscape pervades each frame like a miasma out of hell. |
So what could even Kurosawa add to such a bona fide masterpiece? Naturally he set it in feudal Japan, and made the three daughters sons, proving race and ""gender"" swaps can be based, presumably to the confused soyrage of both sides of movie YouTube.
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| This summer, Nicki Minaj IS Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. |
But Kurosawa also muddies the waters to intriguing effect by conflating the Lear narrative with a story about IRL historical daimyō Mōri Motonari, who taught his sons that individually they were easily breakable sticks, but together they formed a mighty faggot.
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| Zoomies will be shocked to learn I stole that joke from The Simpsons. |
In this telling of the tale, however, the "good" son, Saburo (who is not a type of car) throws a sperg fit at this obvious metaphor and forcibly snaps all three arrows round his knee. While Cordelia's awkward autistry in Shakespeare's version contained a harsh but ill-timed truth, Saburo's meltdown actually undermines the potential unity of the clan and thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in its own right, which adds a further layer of 40Kesque unforced-tragicomedy-of-errors to the drama. Moreover, while Shakespeare's Lear quite plausibly claims to be more sinned against than sinning, Kurosawa's Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) has clearly built up his dominion through bloody battle. The redemption he craves can only be attained through the unity of his sons ensuring what he's bought at the cost of his soul is a sustained peace. In this light the dissolution that befalls him damns him utterly. Like the boomers, like the ""greatest"" generation, he fails and betrays his own legacy. We're plumbing crushing, totally aphotic depths of tragedy here.
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| White westerners when they sense a drop of Twitter clout in the enthusiastic dispossession of their people. |
The master also ""gender"" swaps another character from Shakespeare's Lear in the form of ascended bastard and master manipulator Edmund, here replaced by Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada). A superficial reading indulged for ideological reasons by most critics makes her out to be le ebin reddit Complex Sympathetic Villain, since her beef with Hidetora is grounded in his earlier campaigns that claimed her family and ancestral castle.
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| Media literacy enjoyers when the horrendously evil antagonist has a traumatic backstory like every murderer and pedophile in real life. |
Anyone actually familiar with Shakespeare and human psychology, however, understands that she's entirely in keeping with the Bard's presentation of his villains: Edmund and Shylock (who are blatantly Ol' Bill's favourites, since he gives both of them a thoroughly unwarranted redemption arc right at the end of their respective plays) both have self-serving rants in the form of soliloquies that explain their grievances not to convince the audience, but precisely to demonstrate how delusional their self-justifications are. Most people in modernity are so morally, culturally and intellectually debased that they actually mistake "Hath Not a Jew Eyes" and "Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards" as legit points, instead of the psychotic ravings of embittered narcissists. This misreading also explains everything about these people's engagement with contemporary politics. But Kurosawa surely understood the Bard's device, as he renders Kaede an almost supernaturally evil presence: only she and Hidetora use heavy Noh stylisation in their physical performances, rendering them archetypal.
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| Maybe this scene where she literally licks blood from Jiro's neck like a vampire should give you a clue. |
It's the most important part of Shylock's soliloquy that's rarely quoted: "The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction" [emphasis mine (and Shakespeare's)]. In her pursuit of personal vengeance, Kaede destroys a kingdom and condemns thousands of lives, no doubt creating hundreds more Kaedes in turn. Kaede simps are the same BPD drones and soy orbiters who stanned the chick in Gone Girl when she went on her rant about men liking "the cool girl" over...BPD drones. Are you seeing where I'm going with this?
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| Soybeards will bore you with the standard take that this show was a heckin wholesome satire of heckin floofin boopin snootin toxic man-capitalismerino, but anyone with a triple-digit IQ and a human soul knows at a deeper (unconscious?) level, it was about men as the instruments of female proxy violence, and women as the instruments, in turn, of cluster B. |
But finally we'd be remiss to overlook the sheer visual spectacle that Kurosawa brings to his and the Bard's magnum opus. Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage, but Kurosawa was able to use modern technology to paint on a much broader canvas, and his great work pops with the lurid colour of a fever nightmare, and teems with a cast of thousands Shakespeare might have pictured as he wrote, but never lived to see onscreen.
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| The colour-coded pāmitls alone are so cinematic all Japanese history might have been staged with just this film in mind. |
Nor does our boi forsake the audio component of the format, with the famous silent battle, the sounds of screams and clashing weapons dipping out under an aching score, correctly lauded among the great sequences of the medium. How often does one of the greats of one art format remix and actually build on the best work of another? Ran is one of the essential films.
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| May we reach this point before it's too late. |
