Kurosawa Double Feature

But God would not suffer me to go on with any quietness; I had great and violent inward struggles, till after many conflicts with wicked inclinations, repeated resolutions, and bonds that I laid myself under by a kind of vows to God, I was brought wholly to break off all former wicked ways, and all ways of known outward sin; and to apply myself to seek salvation, and practice many religious duties; but without that kind of affection and delight which I had formerly experienced. My concern now wrought more by inward struggles and conflicts, and self-reflections. I made seeking my salvation the main business of my life.

— Jonathan Edwards, A Personal Narrative, 1740.

Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood is bookended and pervaded with fog. A fog rimmed with grim certainties: there are dragons here, one cannot survive for long. Indeed, as a Macbeth adaption, these certainties are magically augmented: our Macbeth, Taketoki Washizo, is destined for the throne, though his line will end with him. With this fog, Kurosawa modernizes the central moral decay of Macbeth.

To prepare, a brief plot run down of Macbeth for those who last read it in high school: Macbeth and his best bud Banquo are lords who start the play by putting down a rebellion. On their way to report their victory, a group of witches tell the pair that they’re about to be promoted and that eventually Macbeth will be king and Banquo’s son will be king after.

The promotion arrives as promised. Egged on by his wife, Macbeth hastens the second part of the prophesy by killing the king. He does indeed get the crown, and murders his buddy for good measure trying to escape the second part of the prophesy where he loses it. The guy’s kids get away. Macbeth is such a murderous tyrant that the kingdom falls into disrepair and rebellion. The witches Monkey’s Paw Macbeth into thinking he can defeat the rebellion, but he goes down by way of ironic loophole and the second part of the prophecy comes true — the realm has a good king again.

In briefly discussing Polanski’s Macbeth last time, I noted the apparent brute quality of Macbeth’s ambition. Little attention is given to why Macbeth wants the throne, other than a vague sense that “it’s good to be the king.” Indeed, in the play Macbeth self-consciously is choosing evil for the sake of ambition in the murder of the king.

This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips….

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on the other—

Macbeth then is a fallen character, rotten well before his temptation. In this, though, he is fallen in a traditionally Christian sense. Clearly, Macbeth is imbued with a moral sense and seems even to believe he is damned to Hell. Certainly he is damned to be frustrated on Earth — the witches have promised him so much — even if nothing comes after. This makes Macbeth a dramatic case but not perhaps a unique one: Christendom is filled with true believers who nevertheless sin.

The phenomenon of the sinning believer must be regarded as puzzling even as it is widespread. Indeed, it is an old philosophical problem: that of akrasia or weakness of will. The puzzle starts with a simple picture of decision making: the decider has to make a choice, they come to that choice with beliefs about what their options are, what the outcome of each option might be, and then how good or bad that option is. They think it over, do some mental reckoning, then pick the option with the best outcome.

Of course this picture doesn’t imply that people will pick the actually best option. They might have false beliefs about how their actions will turn out or wacky desires. But what this picture does imply is that people will pick what they believe is the best option. Yet, surely, this just ain’t so. Macbeth is an extreme, fictional example, but one can multiply mundane examples — the fast food stop in the middle of a diet, the late night text message to a particularly unhinged ex.

This problem owes itself to Plato, who gave two incompatible answers at different points in his career. The first is nuh uh (we’ll get back to this) and the second is sure, yeah, people are stupid. In particular, people’s actions are not in general made by careful intellection. Sometimes, but there’s also passion and appetite. Decision making is basically the intellect tug-of-warring with these animal drives and it definitely does not always win.

Which is a fine enough start to an alternative story. But I want to give “nuh uh” a fair shake. Because there’s a superficially similar phenomenon to weakness of will: preference falsification. You’re perhaps familiar with this clunker of a phrase from election polling. There are a certain group of supporters of X candidate who, because say of X’s bad reputation, will lie to pollsters and say they prefer more respectable candidate Y.

It’s not altogether crazy to describe putative cases of weakness of will as instead being preference falsification (especially if we’re willing to countenance self-deception). Order the fried schnitzel rather than the wedge salad? Well you might not like to admit it publicly (or to yourself), but maybe you just think actually gustatory pleasure is more valuable than health. (What’s the value of a long life with no pleasures in it?) Murder an innocent man for the sake of career advancement? You might not tell your priest, but perhaps you just don’t much care for the state of your immortal soul. And if all cases can be described in this way, perhaps we needn’t countenance weakness of will as a genuine phenomenon.

To bring this aside back to Shakespeare (and, eventually I swear, back to Kurosawa), there’s one way to interpret Macbeth’s regicide as a failure of the intellect to govern his actions. Macbeth, a Christian believer, knows this murder is damnable villainy. But he’s just so out of his mind with lusts and ambitions that all it takes is some teasing from his wife for his will to fail and the sword to come out.

This is a reasonable way to understand the drama, but I do think the alternative is more interesting. Clearly, being a tyrant sucks. You have to murder all these people. You have to constantly worry about being murdered back. Sure, you get all these spoils, but when do you find the time to even enjoy them with all this murder to do? It’s not clear if Macbeth really thought all of that through. But what is clear is that he holds on to being a tyrant with both hands. One reading at least is that this is what he truly desires — even if it means death and damnation.

I find this the more interesting and more disturbing reading as it locates the fallenness of Macbeth as a deeper and more essential part of his character. Not a demonic presence that could be cleanly excised, but as much or more a part of him as every noble thought and deed that came before. In particular, this seems to me more of a Christianized reading (hence the opening Jonathan Edwards quote) — Macbeth does not fall or descend into madness, rather he remains as he always was, which circumstances happen to reveal in a dramatic way.

In this way, Macbeth as a story is not all too different from Plato’s Ring of Gyges. Much shorter story: Guy finds ring. Ring makes guy invisible. Guy kills king while invisible and … becomes king. (Not as good a story; Plato was no Shakespeare.) The point: really, people don’t give a guff about goodness and nobility, it’s just that we’re afraid of what other people will do to us if we don’t play nice. To be clear, this isn’t the point Plato is arguing but rather a challenge he takes up. If there’s nothing in it for me, why care about morality?

You might think Christianity has a simple answer for this question: if you kill the king, even if you’re invisible, God will still know and he’ll send you to Hell. But this is at best a very shallow answer to the question, it just denies the possibility that self-interest and morality can come apart (because an eternity of punishment and reward outweigh whatever finite goods you can scrounge in this world) rather than establishing any claim in favor of morality.

But Christianity also has subtler and more promising answers. A traditional bit of Christian metaphysics, for instance, identifies goodness with God: nothing is good except insofar as it participates in God’s being or some such formulation. On this story, to view one’s self-interest on being good on it’s own is a kind of metaphysical mistake, a hubristic one (are you God?). Your self-interest might (might!) have some secondary, dependent goodness insofar as it fits into God’s plan. But, as Jonathan Edwards insists in his autobiography, sometimes it is precisely setbacks to our self-interest, misfortunes, griefs, and illnesses, that force us into consideration of our soul’s relationship to God, and so are good.

Macbeth is obviously not a theological tome. But it is, in a way, a Christian morality play about a conflict between self interest and God-given duty and so must face this kind of question. As I read it, Macbeth gives both the simple and the subtle answer. Macbeth is made miserable for his sins, in this life as well as (presumably) the next. He goes mad. His wife goes madder. But there is also a sense, in how the world goes mad with him, how his evil reaches supernaturally into the landscape, that it is not just that Macbeth has miscalculated about what will make him happy, but that he has trespassed against the fundamental order of things, a trespass that can only be set right with his death and replacement by a good king.

How does this look when we port the story to a non-Christian and contemporary background? A little less than you might expect. Kurosawa has jettisoned more or less Shakespeare’s Christianized vision of “the good king” and the sense that the health of the kingdom (down to its weather) depends on the ruler’s personal virtue. The politics of Throne of Blood are much murkier: the current king after all may well have already won the throne by shedding blood, and all alliances and relationships have an uncertain and a provisional quality.

This I think is consonant with a Buddhist ethic: if all earthly life is suffering, and it is attachment that tethers us to that suffering, then there is no greater attachment, no greater source of suffering, than the pursuit of power and fame. The course of events of earth does not have the directional character of a divine plan, but is instead a labyrinth that must be escaped.

With this change, the course of Washizu’s descent (Throne of Blood’s Macbeth equivalent) is lengthened. Washizu’s murder of his lord is given a (flimsy) justification. His wife convinces him that the king is planning to betray him and it’s kill or be killed. This is not to say that the murder is justified; however, Washizu seems to some extent to believe in this justification. There is an ambiguity in this slide into evil.

We can see this in Washizu’s return to the castle, which his friend Miki (the Banquo equivalent) is guarding. Part of the wife’s conspiracy theory is that Miki is part of the plot to kill Washizu. So there is a genuine possibility in Washizu’s mind that he will be ambushed and killed as he approaches the castle in the fog. And when he is not murdered, the trust and alliance that is restored seems genuine. Washizu plans to make Miki’s son his heir (to reward Miki’s loyalty and not having a son of his own). This, again, feels initially like a genuine plan and opens the possibility that Washizu will be an okay ruler—yes, one that achieved the position on dubious (to be generous) ground, but who quieted down and made way for peace afterwards. The point of real degradation, of no return, is later on after Wahizu murders Miki.

This change actually I think deepens the moral dimension of the story. It brings out the fact that what is truly wrong with Macbeth/Washizu is not a single moment of weakness but rather a deeper way of being that reveals itself across a series of choices. This may sound fatalistic, perhaps Calvinist: the evildoer expresses an essential rottenness in their evildoing, something constitutive and so unchangeable in their being. However, we need not think this way; character in general may not be completely fixed, a simple formula from scenarios to action, but rather is internally complex and flexible. Washizu struggles, at least at the beginning, with the prospect of murderous ambition. It is this struggle, this possibility that he might have chosen better had circumstances been ever so slightly different, that enhances the tragedy.

We can see this point elaborated in the second Kurosawa film of this post, High and Low. We need at least the plot setup for this. Mr. Gondo runs a struggling shoe-making factory. He is caught between two power blocs among the higher ups: the director, who has kept the company making solid but unfashionable shoes, and a group of other executives who plan to cut costs and quality and pivot to disposable fast-fashion shoemaking. Gondo has a third vision—modernize the style but keep quality high—and a hail-mary scheme: borrow a ton of money to buy enough shares to gain control of the company, implement his vision, achieve profitability, pay back the loan.

This scheme is interrupted by the kidnapping of Gondo’s driver’s son. (The kidnapper intended to nab Gondo’s son but messed up.) He can’t both pay the ransom and execute the scheme. Worse, he’d be paying the ransom with borrowed money and so would end up destitute when the bank came to collect. After a day of tormented consideration, Gondo decides to pay the ransom. This kicks off a desperate police investigation to find the kidnapper and recover the money before the bank collects.

Even more so than in Throne of Blood, this dilemma is surrounded by uncertainty. The kidnapper claims he will kill the child if the ransom is not paid, but would he really do that? It’s possible that, if the police are especially competent or the kidnapper especially incompetent, the money may be recovered quickly enough that the plan could still go ahead. (Or at least the loan repaid to the bank, so that Gondo could keep his wealth.)

This uncertainty, rather than weakening the moral dimension of the dilemma, actually bring out more of Gondo’s character. After all, what a person is willing to risk is as telling about their values as what they’re willing to outright discard. That Washizu is willing to risk murdering a decent man (he has no strong evidence that the king is conspiring against him, only insinuation) to secure his own position is only the slightest if any step down from Macbeth’s cold-blooded assassination of an innocent. And uncertainty provides an opportunity to rationalize, to have one’s values shape one’s belief. To return again to Washizu’s murder: Washizu does seem to believe to some extent that the king and his friend will betray him, but it is of course possible that the belief itself is formed as a pretext, a post hoc justification, for the murder he anyways wanted to commit for the sake of his ambition.

To elaborate this point in Throne of Blood a bit more before returning to High and Low, we can also see uncertainty intensifying the moral character of a decision in Washizu’s decision to betray and murder Miki and his son. What spurs this is his wife’s announcement of her pregnancy, and this mere prospect of having an heir immediately shifts Washizu’s resolve and spurs him to eliminate obstacles to his dynasty (in the form of the competitor Miki) before he has any confidence that the dynasty is even possible. And there are so many ways this could go wrong: his wife could be lying about the pregnancy, the pregnancy could fail, it could succeed with a girl, it could succeed with a boy who dies in childhood, the murder could easily backfire. Hell, part of the prophesy that has been completely correct up to this point is that Washizu will not have an heir and Miki’s son will take the throne. So it is for the tiniest chance at getting the prize of his ambition, weighed against a near certainty of disaster, that Washizu commits this second set of murders.

One of the great dramatic strengths of High and Low is the tension its opening minutes build around Gondo’s decision. Initially, it appears that Gondo’s own son has been kidnapped, and Gondo is immediately willing to pay the ransom. When the kidnapper’s mistake is revealed, he immediately leaps to not paying and proceeding with the scheme. (Not his kid, not his responsibility.) He goes back and forth on this a couple of times: his pride and ambition, his fear of failure and destitution, battling his moral sense augmented by the emotional and moral pressure applied by his wife, his son, the kidnapped child’s father.

For an initial chunk of the film, Gondo is not an attractive figure, given his clear willingness to risk the life of a child for the sake of his own success. It is pretty clear without the considerable pressure exerted on him by his family, he would have chosen his own scheme. The moment he decides on paying the ransom is quite telling. Without announcing anything to his family, the child’s father, who are in the room with him, Gondo calls his bank to arrange the money, as if he is willing to do good only if it can be his initiative, an exercise of his power.

After this and as the movie moves focus to the investigation into the identity of the kidnapper, Gondo becomes gradually more admirable. He assists as he can in the safe recovery of the child and the subsequent investigation. He acquires a resolve and dignity towards his predicament, bearing calmly the increasing certainties that he will lose his position and fortune. This growth is made clear in the final scene, where Gondo converses with the captured and to-be-executed kidnapper. (Executed on murder charges—the kidnapper is a real piece of work.) Here, Gondo’s attitude is not rage or triumph, but instead an even melancholy.

It is a trope in adventure stories that the villain is a dark shadow of the hero, a trope usually expressed in a “We’re not so different, you and I” speech, generally delivered right before the climax where the hero can triumphantly throw off this shadow and prove the goodness of his character by murdering the villain with a very sharp sword. Usually this is enormously unconvincing: by this point the hero has usually spent two hours doing noble and heroic thing and it takes a real imaginative squint to find any comparison between the hero’s and the villain’s character.

The confrontation between Gondo and the kidnapper is a confrontation with the shadow done right. The kidnapper is not just “Gondo but evil,” but what they had in common was a shared attachment to wealth and power. Gondo was clearly extremely motivated to build an empire, to accumulate even more power and wealth, to lay low his enemies. The kidnapper, meanwhile, experienced his distance from that wealth and power, his miserable little apartment stuck on the bottom of the hill, looking up at Gondo’s grand house, as a profoundly wounding source of envy and grievance. The kidnapper, despite his briefly sketched traumatic life, has worthy prospects: he’s a medical student, presumably on track for a socially useful career. Yet he fails to get over the attachment that Gondo managed to break.

The difference, and why I think this confrontation is given a disquieting, melancholic cast, is essentially moral luck. Gondo found himself in an environment conducive to his moral development: he married a good-hearted, wealthy woman and just when he might have given himself over to the nihilistic world of corporate backstabbing, a moral shock to his system forced him down another path. The kidnapper, roiling in the dark places of his society, had no such luck.

It’s hard to feel good, certainly Gondo does not feel good, about the kidnapper’s upcoming execution, given the awareness that has been roused of this luck. It is not that this luck excuses or exonerates the clear evil done, but rather punishing the unlucky seems to make one an executioner of a cruel and arbitrary monarch. There is even perhaps something of this attitude at the end of Throne of Blood—Washizu’s men, rather than fight a losing battle on his behalf, betray him, fire round after round of arrows. The ending of Macbeth, typically, is a cathartic one: the tyrant is slain and there will be a good king again. But Washizu’s death is not triumphant, it is instead torturous, the arrows cutting off his escape again and again, a hunter toying with a wild beast. Washizu is nothing but fear. It doesn’t feel good.

In that, I suppose I find Kurosawa’s moral universe more coherent, more attractive than Shakespeare’s Christianity. Hell has a strange and cruel moral logic. In particular, there a sadism to the thought that God decided not only that it would be appropriate to mete out infinite punishment on finite trespassers, but that he should then create those trespassers to punish, like a child buying an ant farm to have something to drown. Grant that it was good of Him to give us free will, so it would be “up to us” whether we went to Hell. However, clearly He could have made it easier: he could have made a species less violent, more naturally inclined to theology and worship. Not only is the deck stacked, but it seems there are favorites being played: some have an easier path to salvation than others.

Without a Creator in the picture, the moral viciousness of the species, the vagaries of virtue, these are just further misfortunes, bad rolls of the dice. Insofar as one thinks of them, it is with a certain measure of ruefulness. Which is not the same as despair. If after all, the state of the world is governed largely by fortune, things could be better. We could roll again, see where things land.