Samurai

Ah, what a pleasure. I'm anticipating watching still another samurai flick. Knatz.com [censored, temporarily offline] goes into why I love samurai fantasies in several locations. I review some of the reasons right now.

Even as a kid I was embarrassed by Westerns. Sure I responded to the Lone Ranger on radio, but by the time Hopalong Cassidy was baby sitting TV kids in the 1950s I was having problems: being quick on the draw and hitting people with chairs in bar fights isn’t what my Sunday School taught me to approve. Swiftly, war movies were worse. Almost all movies were worse: if they weren’t shooting someone, they were showing a lot of tit, showing a lot of adultery ... Comedies where chinks get bowled down like tenpins didn’t amuse oh-so-self-serious pk. It took a little longer, but not much, for me to disapprove of feudal fantasies. Robin Hood was in my blood before my defenses were up -- yea Errol Flynn. But I wasn’t too old before I had problems agreeing with knights that the other knight was a bad guy and needed to be chopped up with a broadsword.

Even once I dismissed my Sunday School ideals as so much controlling rubbish I still resisted civilization’s training of the public in the easy delusion that the audience is good and that good guys should swiftly nuke whoever the media blackwash as bad.

I was no vegetarian, but I was the kind of a moral prig who was proud not to hunt. I was twenty-two or -three before I discovered the lust of dipping oneself in gore, exulting as I ripped guts from bluefish. But by that time Akira Kurosawa’s art had brought me to my senses, taught me that I could enjoy butchery as well as anyone.

By the end of High Noon every pimple-face is booing the frigid Quaker non-wife and rooting for Coop’ to kill, kill, kill.

Anyhow, that’s background, and I’ve given it before, not in too dissimilar words. Here’s what I wanted to add: if I had trouble with Shakespeare, and Sir Walter Scott, and Hollywood because of my silly delusion that I was a Christian, that I was ethical, I had no such problems with Japanese High Noons because I was not Japanese!
Nobody from Scarsdale wants to see Scarsdale nuked, but many a one from Scarsdale will laugh to see Chinatown turned to rubble. It bemused me as a kid to notice Christians reveling in Hollywood gore so long as the movie pretended to be religious. The Jewish merchant in the joke sells crucifixes without any sense of hypocrisy: it’s business. And there were plenty of real Jews in Hollywood, and plenty of non-Jews, all going to the bank after a technicolor crucifixion. Ah, but whatever hypocrisies were involved in Japanese investors going to the bank after a Japanese blood bath, well, what did that have to do with me? I could enjoy the blood bath with a clear conscience.

Funny thing is: the movie I’m about to watch is The Twilight Samurai. My pre-viewing impression is that this flick will be an exception: and already aware of the kind of stuff I’ve babbled above.