The Last Samurai

I wrote this post a little more than 3 months ago, which feels practically a lifetime back. I had been wrestling with a personal dilemma at that time (now resolved) and I wrote this when I thought I had made my decision (crafted, in my usual way, within a film). The thing is, although I completed the post I never put it up... and here we are, 3 months later......

Looking back (now that I can look back), I wonder why I didn't put up the post. Retrospection is always slightly nebulous because memory can be so tricky... but in essence I think it was because, even then, I knew in my bones I was making the wrong decision. Because, even then, I had hoped that I was wrong.

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The Last Samurai took me by surprise because I generally don't expect much from Hollywood big-budget epic flicks (who does??). Sure, there were the Hollywood trademarks that attract so much derision from critics: the unimaginative editing, the schmaltzy moments, the stock characters, the stereotypes, the death-and-glory slow-mo heroics, the soaring soundtrack, the Oriental pandering......

But The Last Samurai ultimately succeeds because it realizes a very powerful theme: the old versus the new (among others). This is not, of course, unexplored in art films, but I think the excessive sentimentality of Hollywood in this case does serve the theme well, whereas art films (eg Goodbye Dragon Inn, or almost everything by Ozu) tend to be clinically cold, too intellectual in their approach, with (dare I say it) too much deconstructing which detracts from the pure force of emotion. And in between we have something like, say, The Witness, another American film which deals - gently, kindly, but unequivocally - with a similar theme: the violent, modern world of John Book versus the peace-loving, compassionate world of the Amish - another world and from another time.

A few days ago, I came across an article from The Times, headlined "Why Buying Dinner is the Path to Love", which described the findings made by UCL mathematical researchers as to how calculations can be made on gifts and other manifestations in a relationship as to the probability of the relationship's success. So, for example, a man incurring both time and money like an expensive night out (as opposed to expending money only in the form of, say, a diamond ring) is deemed more likely to attract a woman because it is an indication of his more serious "investment", which in turn relates to the likelihood of his being a better parent so as not to leave her, as the Guardian puts it, "literally holding the baby". The ludicrous implications of these (including but not limited to the assumption that all women are out looking only for good fathers for their offspring, which, in turn, assumes all women want to breed) I shall save for another day. My immediate reaction, however, was to despair of the sheer mercenariness of it all. I sent the article to a friend, exclaiming how depressing it is "to see the word 'investment' in the same sentence as the word 'relationship'", wondering "whatever happened to nice, simple romance, where the only thing that matters is one's emotion and happiness from the moment, rather than some mad internal calculation of percentage returns on 'investment'"?? I concluded my e-mail by saying I felt simply too old for this new world, which runs on capitalist business models I do not appreciate, returns on money whose worth I do not understand.

Before you start thinking I'm some kind of latter-day Thoreau who is about to run off and live in a Walden forest, I assure you I do have a real job in the real world, and I am (as this blog testifies!) very much in touch with modern technology like the internet, mobile phone, portable music players etc. But that does not preclude me from mourning an old world whose ways are lost to a new one - Pasolini crying for Fruili, for Casarsa, for his Gramscian scene, or...the last Samurai in his last battle, dying on his sword in penance for what he could not save. Easily moved at the best of times, I cried buckets when Katsumoto died, as he lay in the battlefield strewn with so much death, honour and regret. But even then I realised I was crying for more than the movie: I was crying because I was realising, as much as the Japanese did, that I can't hold onto an old world any more than I can stop my own life. Maybe our changes are rushing us to certain doom (they probably are), but that is the force of our lives today - even as I have to obey my own, even if it means giving up the possibility of love, passion and happiness. How do I describe the sound of inevitability? It sounds like the death of Katsumoto, reverberating into an emptiness he would rather not live in. That's the movies for you, of course (and Hollywood at that). In real life... it's more like a sigh echoing a heartache which will fade but probably never go away. But life rushes on, and I have to go with it. And yes, in the process there are things we have to let go: softly, quietly, with the gentlest of kisses, and undying regret.