Akira Kurosawa Drops the Bomb

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Everyone knows that Godzilla was, in its original context, a metaphor for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and by now a number of commentators have made the leap of seeing Cloverfield, whose advance publicity cited the veteran thunder lizard as some kind of role model, as either addressing or exploiting the memory of 9/11. Actually, American filmmakers have been trying, in one way or another, to deal with 9/11 in movies ranging from Oliver Stone's World Trade Center to Spielberg's The War of the Worlds to such indies as The Great New Wonderful. And Japanese filmmakers, including some of the greatest, took their best shot at dealing with the bomb and its aftermath, often in movies without rubber monster suits. Writing in Slate, Fred Kaplan argues that "If someone should feel compelled to make a film about 9/11 — specifically, about the social and psychic toll that the attacks have and haven't taken — a good model would be Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear, a relatively little-known film by perhaps the most revered of all Japanese filmmakers that's just been issued on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection's Eclipse series. The movie stars Toshiro Mifune as an industrialist who becomes obsessed with protecting himself from the bomb and from radioactive fallout. His solution is to sell his company and move himself and his entire family to Brazil — a plan that inspires his three sons to try to get him declared nuts so that they won't lose their share of the family business. (Kurosawa often openly ransacked Shakespeare for his movies, and this thread of the plot suggests King Lear turned inside out for the nuclear age.)

The punchline is that Mifune's character really does go mad and winds up being institutionalized — in response to the shattering realization that even exile to Brazil wouldn't be enough to ensure his safety in the event of a nuclear war. The punchline to the punchline is that, in Kurosawa's vision of "a world in which the most dreadful dangers are shrugged off as routine", the man locked up as crazy is the only one who seems to have trouble simply adjusting to the ever-present danger of being wiped out at the touch of a button. ("Sirens wail in the background all through this film; it's not clear what kinds of sirens [police, ambulance, air-raid drills?], and nobody pays attention anyway." This is, as Kaplan points out, "a rather unsubtle message, but Kurosawa compensates with an understated visual style. According to his autobiography, he started using three cameras around this time, letting them all roll while the actors played the whole scene as if in a stage play, then choosing the best angles in the editing room. It gives the film a documentary feel — many scenes are shot from behind the characters — as if we're peeking in on a slice of life." It also captures something that Kurosawa himself must have felt to the marrow — though he may never have addressed the subject again so explicitly, he was playing with images of nuclear devastation as late as thirty-five years later, in the 1990 Dreams. As it happened, the idea of a man set apart from his society because of his inability to deal with the thought of its destruction turned out to be a pretty good metaphor for the movie itself. Made in 1955, it not only bombed in Japan but didn't play in the American until it was shown at the 1963 New York Film Festival; it received limited U.S. theatrical release in 1967. It was issued on VHS back in 2001, but at no point has it ever — you'll excuse the expression — set the world on fire.

The Cliffs Notes to Tom Cruise

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Juliet Lapidos offers a handy rundown of "the good parts" in Andrew Morton's new unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise. From the sound of it, the book's focus is on the same two damn subjects that Cruise-related gossip has always centered on: his sexual orientation and his devotion to Scientology. To the thumping disappointment of millions, Morton seems to have found nothing but evidence that Cruise is heterosexual. He even offers testimony that the guy is homophobic, which if true is...well, pretty damn funny, really, since he has to listen to the same rumors as the rest of us. Based on the anecdotes that Morton offers about Cruise's romantic life, you may wonder if people started getting the idea that he must be putting on some kind of an act because, rather than acting on instinct, he works from notes that he made on the courtship process based on his close textual reading of Archie comics. The Tomcat likes to make out in cars and subjects his favored ladies with unholy barrages of long-stemmed roses and love notes, until they have only two options: give in or, like Sofia Vergara, freak out at all the over-attention and slip away through the fire exit while Top Gun is on the phone to the florist again.

Eventually, in the course of this grand narrative, Cruise converts to Scientology and is finally inducted into the deepest secrets of the universe, which are reserved for the eyes and ears of those who have proven themselves worthy of receiving the ultmate gospel of L. Ron Hubbard. According to Morton, church father David Miscavige may have misjudged Cruise's readiness to, as Jack Nicholson once put it, handle the truth: "Tom found the knowledge he had just received disturbing and alarming, as he struggled to reconcile the creationist myth with the more practical teachings contained in the lower levels of Scientology. … It was recalled that around this time relations became 'ugly' between David Miscavige and the Hollywood actor, Tom complaining that he had studied all these years and the whole faith was about space aliens." (All this may lend an intriguing new subtext to The War of the Worlds.) Earlier, under Miscavige's orders, a "team of twenty Sea Org disciples was set to work digging, hoeing, and planting wheat grass and wildflower seed near the Cruises' bungalow. Former Scientologist Maureen Bolstad recalled working until early in the morning in the mud and pouring rain," all so that Cruise and Nicole Kidman could realize their shared "fantasy of running through a meadow of wildflowers together." This was the point where my own faith in Cruise's heterosexuality began to flag, since I find it hard to believe that any straight man would have a fantasy like that. But then I realized that I was being small-minded; I can't really picture any gay men, or hardly any women, having that fantasy either. It could be that Morton missed his real scoop, which, if this story is true, would seem to be that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are actually a couple of eight-year-old girls.

For more Scientology weirdness, check out Dana Goodyear's recent New Yorker article about the church's "Celebrity Centre", a seven-story, turreted castle, originally built as a "a long-term residential hotel for movie stars", where celebrity church members are encouraged to check in for weeks at a time and concentrate on their study of church teachings. It doesn't have much about Tom Cruise in it, but it does have a terrifying description of the annual Christmas variety show, where this year someone took note of cast member Jenna Elfman's last name and took it to the terribly logical extreme.

The Screengrab : the war of the worlds

Akira Kurosawa Drops the Bomb

The Cliffs Notes to Tom Cruise