The Blind Swordsman

When I was a kid I loved Cony Island, I loved Times Square: entertainment: neon lights, crowds, everything braying, everything for sale. After a while I saw the dirt, the disease, the whorishness. I was perhaps fourteen before I ever loved neon lights again: it was a National Geographic picture of Hong Kong’s entertainment district: the neon lights sculpted characters I didn’t understand. Drained of meaning, the patterns were once again beautiful to me.
Like opera: I don’t mind it if it’s in a language I don’t know (though after a while you DO understand some of the Italian, the German: or at least can mimick it phonetically.

When I was a kid I disapproved of westerns: people killing each other, stealing cattle, taking the law into their own hands. The church, the school, fed us parallel lines of behavioral propaganda; Hollywood contradicted all that, stimulated our imaginations to a cartoon of anarchism. But that cultural artifact, my "self," was determined to be "good." So I hardened my heart against all the shooting.

Imagine how confused I became when I saw Kurosawa’s Roshomon in the early 1950s. There the violence was so stimulating I couldn’t resist it. I didn’t see The Seven Samurai till it had been out at least a couple of years, a rerun: and I was smitten afresh. So what good had it done me to resist Hopalong Cassidy? Zoro? Oh, hell, admit it: I never resisted Errol Flynn.
But notice: I was seduced by the violence when it was alien. (Then how come The Seven Samurai seemed so, if not Christian exactly, so moral, so ethicaly challenging?)

2011 09 06 Whoops, IonaArc's graphics thru 2006 were stored at PKImaging.com. The fed destroyed all my domains, my images evaporated. Now I try to fix things as I notice which posts need fixing.

So I learned to love great Japanese films: Ugetsu, The Hidden Fortress, Bandits on the Wind, Yojimbo ... And they were all battle-torn. Indeed, I became addicted: and the addict starts seeing films that are far from great, that one doesn’t expect to be great, ethically challenging (or their challenge is concocted horeshit), just so long as the kendo will be good: Sword of Doom, Zatoichi ... (And by now I’ve gobbled a bunch of horseshit westerns too, any damn crime drama.)

But rather than ask what happened to Protestant Paul, let’s rather hypothesize that Hollywood knew my syndrome long before I discovered it in myself: they make their violent entertainments alien, they put them in a "west" no one ever actually colonized, ever lived in. Mine just had to be a little bit extra foreign before I succombed.

These thoughts visit me as I am about to watch a Zatoichi film for the first time in decades: Zatoichi, (the blind swordsman). The Zatoichi series in Japan was to Roshomon what B movies were to DW Griffith, what Quentin Tarantino became to John Ford. to John Huston ...

Later: It was cute. Big budget, professional production ... but this Zatoichi was blond (or at least ashen) and had blue eyes!

Every ronin cliché was employed: and at the end the huge supporting cast engaged in a hoedown: jazzy, funky, with syncopated percussion, and even tap dancing in high-heel clogs!

2005 08 07 I’ve an itch to detail a couple of other cute things about this bit of entertainment. (No one, not once, got kicked in the balls! (Though they were forever cutting themselves and each other with sloppy draws of the sword in crowded conditions.)
We have Zatoichi travelling as a masseur. He’s taken in by a nice farm lady. (She gets a massage, but doesn’t seem to give him any pussy.) The pair befriend a pair of pseudo-geishas: a brother and sister act, the transvestite brother masquerading as a dancer-whore-drinking-companion. Sister plays a biwa whose strings detach so she can use her instrument as a garotte, strangling the john while brother robs him. The biwa like all their paraphernalia conceal steel stabbing and cutting weapons. Seems to me that a wakizashi in the wood would ruin the tone. But my point is: none of the principals seem fazed by their profession or how they practice it. Hell, they’re just a couple of misunderstood kids who had a hard childhood. But then Zatoichi himself kills six out of seven people he meets. But we can see he’s just a farm hand at heart.

Zatoichi can kill everybody lickety-split because, being blind, his other senses are more finely tuned. He can taste where everyone is and what they’re doing, smell the precise position and intentions of their weapons. He makes beaucoup pocket money feeling whether the dice, hidden in the cup, add odd or even.

Which brings up the last point I’ll add: The gambling house gets tired of Zatoicho winning every bet, so they switch dice. He can hear that the dice are different: so he kills everybody present: the dice man, the pit boss, the cashier, the gofer, the joint manager: trashes the place. But the next night, clean and neat, they’re back in business: new dice man, new pit boss ...
Bush for President? How about Hollywood for God? Everybody neat and clean, no matter what a slob they are.