In our relations with other people we want to be cultivated, superior, mature, so we use the language of maturity and we talk about…Beauty, Goodness, Truth…But within our own confidential, intimate reality, we feel nothing but inadequacy, immaturity…
- Witold Gombrowicz, tr. Danuta Borchardt
There’s a certain quality in films, literature, etc., that I don’t find so much anymore. I don’t mean to place blame, or revel in some orgasmic nostalgia. Frankly, I just want to define this elusive, endangered creature (which I call immaturity, as the Polish novelist Gombrowicz puts it), find its murderer, and see if it cannot be resurrected, or reproduced. Life is such that truly immature beings — those who do not strive for beauty, truth, or goodness — cannot exist for very long, even as children. They are encouraged at an early age to acknowledge their potential for greatness, or pretty-goodness, their potential for an ambiguous significance, like their febrile bodies were only larvae preceding the development of gilded wings.
It is difficult for anyone to understand themselves as small, ineffectual, and immediate, a dot on a very large sheet of paper. We are acutely aware that we are extraordinary beings living in extraordinary times, perhaps the most extraordinary beings in the most extraordinary of times, and our films reflect such a belief. When I talk of immaturity and maturity, this belief is the essential division. To be mature, or to exhibit the traits of maturity, is to consider yourself capable of importance, and responsible for nurturing said importance. A mature person does not play shallow, cruel jokes because a mature person has the potential to make complex, important jokes. A mature person does not spend their time lazing around absent-mindedly because they are capable of performing acts with great social or individual significance. “Mature” acts, “mature” jokes — the word is not indicative of quality, but of intensity and intent. Maturity is not the fulfillment of great potential, but simply the presumed existence of that potential, and the ingrained desire for its fulfillment.
Megalomania? No, because it is not so much a concern with the self, but just a concern. An irritation begetting an anxiety, an itch on the nape that could be a simple rash, or skin cancer, or hepatitis, or something further, a malady of truly extraordinary proportion, unlike anything that has been ever reported. Or maybe something endemic, a disease of the times, another dimension of these strange modern creatures we’ve become. In any case, being what we are: important humans, and the times being what they are: important times, our lives should be lived out importantly, our diseases should be studied as profound and unprecedented, and our art should never be taken for granted. All art must be formed with the moral propulsion of a revolutionary discovery. That part of us which is satisfied by a bad joke, a disposable image, a mild aggravation is mostly gone, or at the very least underfed, as a joke must follow a solid punchline, no image is truly disposable, and an aggravation is no good without a target. Art is not only terribly serious, but must be pursued in the grave conscientiousness of a dermatologist studying a benign wart.
But the trait, however dormant, has not vanished from the cinema. The only reason I’m compelled to note its absence is the shock of its presence, in full force, from Takeshi Kitano’s Kubi. It might appear strange to conjoin an absurdist author like Gombrowicz with a comparatively commercial filmmaker like Takeshi Kitano, but they are made kin by a single beckoning call: immaturity. They both stand at two simultaneous precipices: one overlooking a great pastureland, verdant and agitated by a classical austerity, the other, right over a juvenile detention center, where fucked-up kids invent games of increasing hilarity and cruelty. One does not exist on top of the other, or in spite of the other, though they are in contention, but instead, side by side, these strange siamese twins, like Jekyll and Hyde, occupying the same corpse, in cahoots with his opposite.
This double-faced quality to the filmmaker’s work has always made his reputation confusing. Beat Takeshi the clown, I can understand. The “funny old man” of Japanese cinema has always fit him snuggly. But Kitano the serious artist? It fools no one. Since his explosive popularity wained in the early aughts, each new Kitano falls on partly-deaf ears, at best met with fleeting acclaim, at worst in an empty, woeful silence. What about Glory to the Filmmaker! or Achilles and the Tortoise could possibly interest a 21st century audience, films so minor and slight as to barely register? Even relative successes like the Outrage trilogy is met with pity more than accolades — cries of “ah! he’s still got it!” and “good to see him working again!” like adult children gathering around their doting grandfather, congratulating him on a competent sentence.
I don’t say this to denigrate his latest work, when most of it is certainly among his best. His elaborate copulations of self-parody, public flagellations against a quietly beloved icon have lost their awkward international appeal, the global film audience now demanding a certain universal austerity, a social or aesthetic immediacy that Kitano has no interest in. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, even the impetuous Wim Wenders — they deliver a product the old man won’t. For Kitano’s old friends at Cannes, Berlin, Venice — these are very serious, important, and transgressive institutions, you know — he finds no more than condescension. There is no room for chicanery, immaturity, stupidity in such superior, hallowed places.
When I describe Kitano as immature, it has nothing to do with the narrative or visual quality of his work. Flatulence, innuendo, “gratuitous” violence, shit-barf-blood-cum: none of these have an inarguable (anti-)intellectual character. They denote nothing but a subject and a comedic lineage, the same way verbosity does not, in itself, result in academic rigor, and vice versa. His immaturity does not lie in cruel jokes or incessant cynicism, either. He is not some brooding, nihilistic prankster, a wayward child that must chip away at a disappointing world. Kore-eda, Hamaguchi, Wenders prefer similar thematic pets to Kitano’s own (ineffectual masculinity, disaffected national identities, relations to the natural world in an industrial landscape), and even use the same vantage points to describe them (old professionals, grieving wanderers, losers and dropouts), yet the first group continues to win the hearts and wallets of international distributors and the other is Takeshi Kitano.
Kubi has gone virtually unnoticed and untouched by most film circles. And is it a surprise? Based on a script he developed in the 90’s, a discursive gay period film cum political satire cum Oshima-esque samurai drama cum comedy of matters, etc. etc. It acts and looks near identical to the self-parodic, nihilistic gestations of the final Outrage film, only transplanted in time and subject. Unlike other geriatric masters, whose films have mellowed into pensive meditations and career evaluations, Kubi has no interest in legacy, retrospection, intrigue. He simply refuses to slow down or change his tune.
Kubi re-enacts, revises and relishes in the Honno-Ji Incident, or the assassination of Oda Nobunaga (Ryo Kase) by his vassal, Akechi Mitsuhide (Hidetoshi Nishijima), and the eventual rise of daimyo Hashiba Hideyoshi (Kitano). Within the framework of a mostly accurate, if highly speculative rendition of a uniquely frenetic historical situation, the film jolts in fits and spasms, welps of intense romanticism before long descents into distended violence. Homosexual lust seeps into every power struggle, its character unpredictable and unbearably temporary. We open with a crab crawling from the open neck of a decapitated samurai; it is not enough to say his world is unforgiving, but actively sadistic, so naturally only those closest to death rise to the top.
For a film as narratively complex as Kubi, it has very little interest in an even distantly accessible plot. Character motivations deteriorate from scene to scene, without explanation, as is most clearly studied in Nishijima’s Mitsuhide. We understand him, first, as a rebellious though ceremonial figure, plotting against Nobunaga for opportunism’s sake. As we learn of his forbidden love for the renegade Murashige (Kenichi Endo), a more complicated, tragic character develops: are Mitsuhide’s efforts all to protect Murashige? does Murashige plan to use Mitsuhide for his own power struggle? does Mitsuhide know this, yet still abide in the name of love? and so on and so forth. Then, Mitsuhide executes Murashige apparently to consolidate his rule, but in actuality, for some other mysterious reason, as the killing is inessential, gratuitous, as Mitsuhide’s struggle is certain to fail from the outset. but such a reason remains unconvincing. The killing is inessential, gratuitous — only made more so by Mitsuhide’s legendary failure. His motivations remain mysteriously pointless, but no less tragic, even vampiric in nature, a man that cannot help but plunge his lover into death.
What matters for all these characters, then, is no more than a forward, homicidal drive, as much as it is a homosexual one. To continue in this world of butchery is to shed all motivation, even for power, sacrifice in the name of pure thanatos. This is not exclusive to the ruling class, but to the peasantry as well. Early on in the film, two characters drift down a riverbed, into a village basking in a purple, perpetually nocturnal sky. The majority of their culture, including their dances and dress, are devoted to a constant appeasement toward the dead, and preparations for their own demise:
what a curious village
it’s a curious world
Even further, Kitano’s Hideyoshi, who spends most of the film as a crafty mediator between the young Nobunaga and Mitsuhide, acts as the ultimate emissary of death. He is seemingly content with his waiting game against both parties, biding time for absolute power, but will still force vassals, civilians, mothers, and children into death, often by way of hara-kiri, out of temperamental fits. He scours a battlefield littered with fallen soldiers as a farmer would peruse a plentiful cabbage patch. And who can forget the words that end the film, as his soldiers search for the decapitated head of Mitsuhide:
who gives a fuck about his head? so long as he’s dead, I don’t care!
The conclusion is a cruel, bitter joke — 2 hours of slaughter, not only for nought, but less than: a death drive that is satiated by nothing, not even material slaughter, just the act and continuation of it. The film is a long hunt for an unwanted macguffin, like a pair of soldiers digging their own grave. Ruthless or nihilistic does not suffice; it’s an immature hoodwinking, the nasty joke of an ancient, mischievous specter, leading men to their insignificant demise. Gombrowicz’s final couplet from his surrealist novel “Ferdydurke” could fit just as well as an epilogue to this film:
It’s the end, what a gas
And who’s read it is an ass!
A matter of anatomical production sets Kitano & Gombrowicz apart from the usual award-winning fare. Cannes only accepts the byproducts of a few organs, namely: the heart, the soul, the brain, or, in extreme cases, the loins, all of which communicate universal intensity and importance, none of their creations are to be taken lightly. All indicate something or other, all treat the world, and their role in it, with seriousness. Kitano, on the other hand, makes his films from the stomach. They are cramps that must travel through the intestines, aggravating refuse, to be expelled quickly and decisively, though not without fuss. He makes films from the “gut,” which is not to say they are instinctual, but minor, misshapen; extended silences are punctuated by brief moments of violence, the release is not satisfactory, leaving a queasy disappointment in its wake, so the effort is repeated, without much concern for audience attention, until the whole thing is done away with, and flushed right down the drain.
A scatological analogy isn’t normally praise, but in this case, it celebrates an all-too-rare irrelevance. Kubi is an immature joke, equal parts cruel and indulgent, a festering feast for the maggots atop a diverse perennial garden, the two forces trapped in constant war, a cycle of decomposition and recomposition, disgust and reverence. Even when reconfiguring a terribly important historical moment, Kitano’s characters are not exceptional, aside from their cruelty or their masochism. He proposes a world of trap doors that lead nowhere, a history of white lies, gibberish written in invisible ink. A child tells you there’s a marble in one of his closed fists — there is no reward for finding the bead, and, really, what’s a marble to you? — both of them are empty, and you are left with some feeling of getting gipped, when all the child stole was time. The film hides nothing from you, but still hides, and that emptiness upon knowing what you’re searching for not only doesn’t exist, but probably wasn’t so desirable anyway, is there a more immature joke yet designed, since: what’s a marble to you, what’s a head to you, anyway?