One of Sontag’s favorite films

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/susan-sontags-best-of-list

Must catch this one.

I grew up in a high iq, high trust monoculture. I forget or do not easily see how my conduct and attitudes have changed in response to americas enstupidation and devolution into a low trust society. To see it plainly, i look at my parents and how they have not adapted and thus fall prey to the jackals in their twilight years.

I think we have tolerated enough of this foolishness.

I love your posts! Smartest person here.

I would like also to see Trevor review the movie Gummo interpreted as a portrait of midwestern wignats. What does it signify when the rabbit boy runs up with the cat at the end?

Have you seen Dersu Uzala?

http://www.decentfilms.com/reviews/dersuuzala

I loved this movie up until the detective scenes started.

High and Low is a portrait of a virtuous industrialist who is targeted for destruction by a nihilistic criminal who hails from the professional rather than the working class and is motivated not by need but by envy and pure malice.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s virtuous. He was compelled to do the ‘right thing’. If he has something in common with the kidnapper, it is that neither character really understands himself. Gondo did the moral thing, but he’s not really sure what drove him to do it. And even though the criminal tries to justify or explain himself, he doesn’t really know his own heart(or lack of one). After all, the economic argument isn’t very compelling on his part. Though he’s known poverty, he was studying to be a doctor and had something of a future. So, he was driven by something else. An idea? Or was it just the nature he was born with? In RED BEARD, there’s a psycho-woman who goes around seducing and killing men. We learn she was victimized as a child, but Mifune’s character of the wise doctor says that some people are simply born evil or wicked. If that is so, are they to blame for their pathology? If being born-evil is a natural condition in some people, what is to be done? Most likely, even had the kidnapper been affluent and privileged, he still would have had evil in his heart and would have committed other crimes of sociopathic nature. There are surely plenty of white collar criminals and scumbags in the Deep State. But they have the Law on their side and can get away with so much.

But it turns out there is a heroic and manly way to make women’s shoes. Gondo… is hosting some of his fellow executives, who wish to enlist him in a corporate coup against the “old manâ€� who… is stuck in a rut of making unfashionable “army boots.â€� Gondo’s colleagues wish to manufacture flashy shoes that are cheaply made. Gondo wants to make more fashionable products, but he feels that selling shoddy merchandise is dishonorable…

Here Kurosawa was probably making a commentary on the culture as a whole, not least film culture. HIGH AND LOW came out when Japanese cinema was coming under serious competition from TV. Also, with rising prosperity, the culture was changing from post-war humanism & moralism to consumerism, hedonism, & even nihilism. Given the wreckage of war and widespread poverty, the humanist themes/message in fiction and movies had resonated with many Japanese audiences. But as in Europe, the rise of La Dolce Vita outlook led to people hankering for style and fashion than morality and sobriety. And some even regarded YOJIMBO as a nod in this direction; it was a huge hit in Japan and inspired the nihilistic FISTFUL OF DOLLARS that changed film history, not necessarily for the better(though Sergio Leone was a true giant). But beneath the veneer of nihilistic ‘cool’, YOJIMBO was meant as morality tale and satire, and Kurosawa was dispirited by the changing in the culture, especially among the young. On the one hand, he understood that Japanese cinema could not rehash the same humanist messages that had special meaning for post-war Japanese audiences. He understood people wanted popular culture with more color and excitement. And in a way, HIGH AND LOW is the kind of shoes that Gondo is talking about. It is about serious themes but made with remarkable style and suspense.

Kurosawa was feeling the pressure. Not only from the rapidly rising popularity of TV but from a younger generation of film-makers with more of a ‘new wave’ approach. Two years prior to HIGH AND LOW, Shohei Imamura made PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS set in a similar cultural milieu, though mostly of ‘hell’ or the ‘low’. There’s a devil-may-care sensibility in Imamura’s film that lends it nuance and flexibility missing in Kurosawa’s work that, despite ‘modernist’ touches, is essentially a moral drama(which at times comes close to melodrama). Kurosawa wears the themes on his sleeves, as with Otto Preminger, and it could be off-putting to subtler sensibilities(which is why many cineastes never tire of telling everyone they prefer Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, or etc. over Kurosawa). Imamura’s films have a licentious curiosity and creativity, leaving the meaning up to the audience to piece together on their own. In a mercurial way, Imamura just runs with the idea and takes it wherever it may, whereas Kurosawa projects a moral map in an Apollonian manner. Like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, Kurosawa came into his own in the humanist 50s and was somewhat at odds with the newly emerging film sensibility of the 60s though YOJIMBO did play a role in defining it. While more audiences were turning to TV, more critics were shifting their attention to younger talents like Nagisa Oshima, Hiroshi Teshigahara, and Imamura. Another problem was Kurosawa, like David Lean, got so accustomed to scale that he was unwilling to adapt to changing times and a more fleet-footed way of making films. Kurosawa wanted to stick with established conventions of major film-making, albeit with nods to fashion. He wanted to make fancier boots than high heels, and sadly, HIGH AND LOW was the last of its kind for Kurosawa. The next film RED BEARD was an excellent boot but very much an old boot.

Incidentally, the stuff about plotting to overthrow the ‘old man’ in the opening of HIGH AND LOW later re-emerges with RAN where the two older sons plot against the father while the youngest son, though seemingly hot-headed and rebellious, has principles.

I prefer Kurosawa’s morality plays to Imamura’s anthropological forays, but the didacticism had a somewhat rigid and limiting effect on Kurosawa’s work. Though Kurosawa’s imagination widely wandered from the world of the high to the low, his lens always focused on the good and the bad, honorable and dishonorable, teacher and student, noble and ignoble. He was unwilling to just see people and accept them as they are. His vision always had a moral vertebrae lending shape and structure from head to tail. The stuff good vs evil and heroes & villains that audiences can readily recognize. But perhaps a closer consideration of humanity requires increased malleability in observation and inspection. Imamura was like an octopus. Lacking the rigidity of backbone, he could slither in and out of all kinds of human situations without moral judgement though his works are not without moral sense. VENGEANCE IS MINE, for example, is the kind of film that Kurosawa could not have made. Kurosawa tries to confront the evil of the kidnapper/murderer in HIGH AND LOW but hits a brick wall. The man is evil and beyond comprehension. He can only be judged and condemned. There is a limit to human understanding, as with the woodcutter and priest in opening of RASHOMON who simply cannot penetrate the mystery of human darkness. In contrast, Imamura quietly slipped into the decrepit souls of the characters in PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS and VENGEANCE IS MINE and observed like a naturalist. A special kind of skill, to be sure, but discomfiting to many.

Gondo then explains to his assistant that he has been planning his own takeover of National Shoes, mortgaging himself to the hilt buying up chunks of stock. All he needs is to complete one last purchase.

This suggest Gondo isn’t exactly virtuous. Though clearly more admirable than his partners, he’s not above backroom deals and intrigue to gain the upper hand. Perhaps, he’s justified in his maneuvers, but he’s also driven by egotism and pride.

If he does pay, the child may still die, the money may never be recovered, and Gondo will almost surely be ruined. Eventually, though, Gondo is persuaded by his wife, his driver, and the police to pay the ransom. It is the compassionate thing to do.

It is a bit more complicated. There is the matter of public opinion. If Gondo doesn’t pay the ransom and uses the money to take over the company, he will get such bad press that he will be ruined anyway. It’s really a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. So, even though he was surely motivated by his conscience, he really didn’t have a choice. Either way, he would have been ruined. A man is not an island but lives in a community. If the community rejects the man as immoral, the man becomes an outcast. There is some of this in the dynamics of ‘woke capital’, the difference being that whereas Gondo was faced with a real moral dilemma and really did what was right, most of ‘woke capital’ is either just delusional or craven in sucking up to PC narrative pushed by insane Jewish Supremacists. (I mean, when will ‘woke capital’ push ‘Palestinian Lives Matter’ or ‘Justice for Libyans and Syrians destroyed by Obama and Hillary’ or ‘Sanction Israel that has nukes and stop sanctioning Iran that has NO nukes’?)
As in IKIRU, we don’t really know the motivation behind Gondo. He doesn’t really know either. Was he truly motivated by conscience or did he do the right thing because he couldn’t win either way? Likewise, was the old man in IKIRU really motivated by compassion or did his ego seek validation before he died? Was it really selfless or was it about the self, the need to be remembered?

Thus far, High and Low has been, in effect, a filmed stage play. But Kurosawa is so virtuosic at creating dramatic tension and coaxing out compelling performances that the result is not static at all.

An odd thing about HIGH AND LOW is that the ‘stage play’ opening of the film is more exciting and suspenseful than the latter part of the movie that is outdoors and full of movement. Oddly, the interior scenes are less static than the exterior ones.

The film then switches gears again into a quasi-documentary about the police’s attempts to find the kidnapper and recover Gondo’s money. At this point, some people might feel the movie drags, but I found the meticulous rationality of the detective work fascinating.

For first-time viewers, it won’t drag because of the element of mystery and suspense. But for repeat-viewing, some of the later scenes with detective work do drag because they are presented more like docu-drama procedural than psychological drama. (In contrast, Fritz Lang’s M is compelling from start to finish no matter how many times you watch it.) It would have been more interesting if Kurosawa developed the detectives as fully-realized characters than social ideals. They strike me as too-good-to-be-true, too upright. Kurosawa mocked such earnestness in the young samurai in SANJURO, but the police of HIGH AND LOW are to be taken as the best of the best. For this reason, the darker aspects of the police work doesn’t register as powerfully. After all, the police could have arrested the kidnapper but prolong the pursuit to charge him with a more serious crime(because the punishment for kidnapping in Japan wasn’t very serious then, though the film helped to change the law). As a result, the kidnapper ends up killing another person, a female junkie. This raises a ethical question as to whether the police acted professionally or out of vendetta against the criminal, especially as the head detective became personally invested in bringing justice to Gondo, who did the right thing at great cost. His personal feelings about Gondo may have affected his professional decision, leading to the death of a woman.

It is a wonderful portrait of what is possible in a homogeneous, high-IQ, high-solidarity society—everything whites have lost by embracing diversity.

This is questionable. Japan has been called a high-trust society, but it’s more a high-conformist and high-obedience society, though these days perhaps not even that. Japanese justice system has been notorious for being unresponsive to problems until things get really bad. Also, the caste-mentality and strong sense of hierarchy have led to distrust among the people. After all, the film is called HEAVEN AND HELL or High and Low. Japanese with privilege don’t care about the rest. Their attitude is “I got mine”. Why is Japan dying? Because Japanese look down on dirty, dangerous, and degrading labor. Japanese would rather die than do ‘dirty’ work. In the past, many Japanese just accepted their lot and did whatever job available but affluence led to higher expectations among many Japanese, and they’d rather commit national suicide and import cheap labor than do ‘dirty’ jobs. In BAD SLEEP WELL, Kurosawa exposed the hollowness of the cult of trust in Japan. While underlings sacrifice their lives for their bosses, the latter just hoard everything for themselves. The rich care about family members but lack any sense of larger good or national interest.

High and Low is clearly an anti-Marxist film.

While it’s not a Marxist film, it isn’t anti-Marxist either. It might be called ‘national socialist’ with little ‘n’ and ‘s’. It is about a rich man who comes to look beyond class and privilege and embraces the child of his servant as if his own. He goes from capitalist mindset and family concerns to national and humanist consciousness. This was the positive side of National Socialism and New Deal. This theme, of the high and mighty being forced to recognize the humanity of those below them in status, recurs throughout Kurosawa’s works. In SEVEN SAMURAI, the ronin are masterless knights but they are still higher in social rank than the lowly peasants. Initially the samurai feel it’s beneath them to risk their lives for dirty peasants, but the two groups join forces against the bandits. In MEN WHO TREAD ON TIGER’S TAIL and HIDDEN FORTRESS, noblemen in exile disguise themselves as commoners and come to see the other side of society. Kurosawa as a young man had communist sympathies and even as late as the 1970s, he had glowing things to say about Lenin(to Andrei Konchalovsky’s horror).

Video Link

In films like BAD SLEEP WELL, RED BEARD, and YOJIMBO, merchants don’t come across as people with noble qualities. And yet, Kurosawa could see things from both sides. As such, HIGH AND LOW makes an interesting contrast with BAD SLEEP WELL. The latter film is about the evil of greed, whereas the hero of the former is a businessman tormented by an impoverished medical student. Thus, good and evil isn’t a matter of class(though it seems those who gain great wealth or power tend to be on the sociopathic side: take the loathsome Jeff Bezos and the scum in the Deep State; on the other hand, consider all the lumpen scum who loot and burn; 2020 is the year of synergy between elite deep state and lowly street scum, with horrendous consequences; for sure, the convergence of sociopaths on top and psychopaths on the bottom is recipe for disaster). Kurosawa had socialist-humanist leanings but also had an elitist streak, not least because of his samurai background. It’s like Oliver Stone is a man of the Left but with a Great Man Complex: Tony Montana, Gordon Gekko, Alexander the Great. Kurosawa found humanism in the lower depths but also nobility in the higher reaches. KAGEMUSHA is kind of a reverse of HIDDEN FORTRESS. A vulgar thief comes to appreciate and ultimately die for the lofty honor of the Takeda clan.

In fact, the leftist rhetoric he spouts is simply a tool by which these monsters gain the power to murder millions.

There’s an element of leftism but also nihilism. He tries to convince Gondo and himself that he doesn’t care if he dies. He claims to be unafraid of anything and above human emotions, but he breaks down with a fury and desperation that is all too human, even animal. The final moment is harrowing because the would-be-nihilist finally realizes his humanity, its fragility and weakness. It’s been said of Kamikaze pilots that they died beautifully and poetically without fear, for country and emperor. But it’s been recorded that many charged to their deaths scared out of their minds screaming for mother. In the end, they were human after all.

In their meeting, the kidnapper realizes that Gondo is not the monster that he made him out to be, imagined him to be, indeed willed him to be. Seeing the big mansion from below, the kidnapper created his own impression of Gondo. Since greed is a common feature among the rich, the kidnapper created an essentialist view of Gondo as a parasite. In a way, it might have pleased the kidnapper IF Gondo hadn’t paid the ransom and let the child die. Then, the kidnapper would have been vindicated in his view of Gondo. But Gondo paid. Gondo did the ‘leftist’ thing in favoring the life of a servant than profits. In contrast, the kidnapper ended up taking money in exchange for the life of a poor man’s son.
Perhaps, the kidnapper would have been more pleased if Gondo had been bitter toward him in their meeting. Instead, the kidnapper sees a decent man and has to face the fact that he ruined the life of a man, not a monster. Thus, the kidnapper loses something more dear to him than his life: His radical illusion based on a delusion. Sadly, such deluded conviction is now the official ideology of the US. Any black person is morally justified in seeing every white person as ‘racist’, ‘fragile’, ‘privileged’, or whatever. The fantasy of righteous hate takes precedence over reality and complexity. Thus, the whole nation has been taken hostage by lunatics led by insane Jewish supremacists.

High and Low’s portrayal of a heroic businessman plagued by an envious villain, as well as its celebration of the rationality of the police detectives could almost spring from the pen of Ayn Rand. Gondo and the detectives represent the highest virtues of bourgeois modernity, whereas the kidnapper represents its deepest vice.

I don’t know about this. Ayn Rand was not about bourgeois values but radical individualism. Ayn Rand might have sneered at Gondo’s decision to pay the ransom as sappy ‘altruism’. Granted, Randism at its core isn’t really about ‘muh profits’. In THE FOUNTAINHEAD, Peter Keating does the profitable thing by whoring out to public taste whereas Howard Roark faces many hardships and bouts of poverty. Still, he has Rand’s respect because he has a vision and never compromises. But HIGH AND LOW isn’t about that. Its morality is closer to IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE where an individual with visibly superior qualities sacrifices his individual interest for what is moral, what is good for the community. Would such outlook have sat well with Ayn Rand? Rand surely would have told George Bailey to leave dinky Bedford Falls and follow his dream like Howard Roark.

HIGH AND LOW might make for an interesting comparison with the Oscar-winner PARASITE. Both are about class differences and tensions. The difference is, whereas HIGH AND LOW offers some hope of mutual understanding between the classes on the basis of nationalism and humanism, there is nothing to salvage in PARASITE where society and culture are utterly soulless, bloodless, and gutless.

HIGH AND LOW diagnosed the problems of its day festering into the future if untreated. Prosperity was welcome but had a divisive effect on the Japanese who, due to war and deprivation, had shared in the hardships together as a nation. Class divisions are inevitable in any society but threaten the danger of a sense of national identity and unity. Today, we see this problem all over the world. Western elites no longer feel any sense of unity or solidarity with their racial brethren. They are too busy snubbing white masses as ‘racist’ or virtue-signaling about homos, Negroes, and Diversity. And much the same is happening in Japan. Its merchant elites have turned Japan into a soulless consumer society. With its adoption of globo-homo, afro-globo, mass immigration, and irreversible decline in birthrates, Japan is doomed like the West.
There’s a harrowing scene of druggies in HIGH AND LOW, and fast-forward to today, and look at the problems of drugs all over the world. Massive addiction to legal and illegal drugs. Mass white deaths from opioids(but white lives don’t matter in Jewish Supremacist America where countless brain-dead whites worship George Floyd the Fentanyl Negro.) Entire cultures centered on drugs and fantasy of escapism. Junkies seek insta-heaven with easy highs but fall deeper into the pits of hell.
HIGH AND LOW also shows the problem of US imperialism and all the vices it spreads. Surely, the most outrageous scene is in the nightclub where some monster-sized Negro with a big ass fattened with countless buckets of fried chicken keep trying to land a five with his big fat hand on everyone. Japan as whore nation to the US. A memorable Ugly American scene. Against drugs, nihilism, and mindless hedonism Kurosawa offered a vision of life and economy centered on honest work, family, and morality. At one time, such values were easily recognized by most, but today, they are shocking and scandalous in a world of the New Normal where the highest morality is LGBT marching with BLM to push utterly delusional visions of reality. In the end, Kurosawa’s warnings came to naught, and modern civilization all around the world is one big suicide cult.

Imamura’s “The Profound Desire of the Gods” is a real hoot, too. A sort of divine sloppiness, WC Fields as scripted by Brendan Behan.

‘… they are impressive in their intelligence, sensitivity, camaraderie, and teamwork. It is a wonderful portrait of what is possible in a homogeneous, high-IQ, high-solidarity society—everything whites have lost by embracing diversity…’

…sort of. This also has to do with how obsessively polite the Japanese are.

That’s pretty pleasant most of the time, but it can become exasperating if there is in fact some point of discord that one would like to get definitively resolved in reasonably short order.

I’ve visited Japan, and I liked and admired it immensely — it’s very high on my ‘I want to go there again’ list. However, as with every place, there are drawbacks. We won’t get to heaven just by copying Japan.

PROFOUND DESIRES is one of the greatest epics of all time. Released around the same time as 2001, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, MARKETA LAZAROVA. and PLAYTIME.

It’s very good, even if I prefer The Bad Sleep Well. Mifune is a genius actor.

I just watched this movie last week after purchasing it a couple months ago. Quite a coincidence. I thought it was excellent. You can really see the blueprint for police procedurals.
I must admit, I was upset early on just after the cops got involved. It seemed obvious to me that the other executives at National Shoes must have masterminded the kidnapping so that Mifune would have no money to make a move. I thought the cops were foolish to not pursue that angle. I suppose that would have been too hamfisted for Kurosawa.
Definitely worth seeing.

It seemed obvious to me that the other executives at National Shoes must have masterminded the kidnapping so that Mifune would have no money to make a move. I thought the cops were foolish to not pursue that angle.

But as the execs explain when the police question them, they came to Gondo’s house to hatch a plot against the ‘old man’. They came to work with him. They didn’t expect Gondo to be so hot-headed and defiant. Also, they were in the dark about Gondo’s secret maneuvers against them. So, Gondo doesn’t suspect them. Also, the police arrive after the row between Gondo and execs, and only gradually do they learn about the tension at the company, especially due to the flunky with second thoughts about the check.

My problem with the film is that the execs are reduced to paper-thin scoundrels to make Gondo so much better. It would have been more interesting if the execs were presented as men with reasonable motives of their own. After all, they are selling women’s shoes, the kind women don’t intend to wear for too long. Shoddy boots are a bad idea, but shoddy women’s shoes make sense given women’s shoes change with fashion, which changes every year. Also, there is the high-end market and low-end market. A lot of people buy stuff that they don’t intend to keep for long.

Indeed, Gondo and others could have compromised. Make high-end quality shoes at higher price and make cheap shoes for low-end market. Why not both? It’s like Hollywood made both A movies and B movies.

In RAN, while the two older sons are nasty characters, we can at least understand their motives that aren’t purely scoundrel-ous. They aren’t merely being nasty and saying, ‘we are a**holes’. The oldest son isn’t very bright and has only position to stake his authority. The second son is smart and feels the power should really go to him. They are bad but understandable. In contrast, the execs in HIGH AND LOW are merely shallow jerks, and that’s about it. Now, there are real people are little more than shallow jerks, but in HIGH AND LOW, such characterizations seem too easy a way to make Gondo look good by contrast. There’s an element of cheap shot.

The great thing about SEVEN SAMURAI is that even the most craven and despicable peasant, the father of the pretty girl, is utterly understandable on human terms. And he’s not entirely wrong in his arguments and in his feelings. HIGH AND LOW doesn’t reach so high.

The Japanese title of High and Low… literally means “Heaven and Hell.â€� But High and Low is a good title, because the movie is constructed around the contrasts between a modernist mansion… and the crowded, chaotic city below.

While HIGH AND LOW as title is certainly workable, it misses at the bigger meaning of the film. ‘High’ and ‘Low’ indicate differences in wealth and status, but Kurosawa finds something darker than mere economic hardship and poverty. One can be in the low world but not in hell. ‘Hell’ is a moral and spiritual condition. Kurosawa’s earlier films showed much poverty. But in ONE WONDERFUL SUNDAY where a couple barely have enough money for a cup of coffee, they are still in a kind of heaven than hell because they have each other.

The hell in HIGH AND LOW is not the world of the poor. It’s a state of mind, the destruction of souls. The film goes from the rich world to the world of the poor, but we still don’t see hell. We see hell when we meet the kidnapper and the world of addiction. We also see hell in the raucous night club scene. Now, hedonism isn’t necessarily hellish, and every city has(and even needs) something like a Red-Light District, but there’s something especially sleazy about the night-club scene and not because of some gorilla-like big-ass Negro fattened on fried chicken. It is a vision of Japan as un-Japan, a zone not only of military occupation but cultural degeneration. The racial mix in the club are united only by noise, rancor, and amnesia. (It’s different from the folk music in HIDDEN FORTRESS that confirm the community.) Now, if such stuff can be restricted to the Red-Light District, it wouldn’t be so bad, but such Americanism came to serve as the blueprint for ALL OF CULTURE and ALL OF SOCIETY and ALL AROUND THE WORLD, a hellish vision of the Kalergi Plan of no borders, no limits, no thoughts of past or future but just the thrill of the jungle moment. What is the main expression of Western Civilization today? ‘Twerking’. At least the Twist(seen in the movie) was a half-decent kind of dance.

So, using ‘low’ than ‘hell’ misses what the film is ultimately about. It’s about something worse than poverty of means. It’s about the poverty of the soul. In this respect, HIGH AND LOW is a more lavish variation of STRAY DOG where the gun-thief and his girlfriend have adopted a kind of nihilism. Indeed, the scenes of arrests of the criminals in the two films are similar. They are handcuffed amidst flowers and reminders of innocence lost.

Also, ‘heaven’ lends a special meaning that ‘high’ simply misses. It adds an element of irony for the ‘heavenly’ world of the high is filled with its own demons. And in a way, the problems of ‘heaven’ is connected to ‘hell’. While the kidnapper was likely born evil or had a childhood so bitter & painful that he went crazy, he is also the product of New Japan as created as part of the US empire with the collaboration of the merchant and war-criminal class. Initially, US Occupation worked with the Japanese Left against the Militarist Right. But things soon changed as China turned communist and Soviet Union became the main rival of US power. Also, the Japanese Left got too radical and demanding. So, the US rehabilitated many militarist elites who’d earlier been accused of war crimes. So, many of the militarist elites who’d once sworn to fight the US to the last man were working as toadies, which ended up creating, more or less, a one-party system in Japan totally loyal to the US. As such, there was no national theme in Japan but economic growth and materialism. It was all about the Money, and the kidnapper is someone who grew up under the new system. Of course, his crime is his own. After all, most Japanese, regardless of circumstances, didn’t go around committing crimes or kidnapping kids. Still, his soullessness is part of the larger disease flowing from those on top. Just like the corrupt businessmen in BAD SLEEP WELL are capable of ANYTHING to get what they want, the kidnapper follows the same logic. The differences is that those with privilege and connections can pull strings and get away with it. In contrast, low-level criminals when caught must face justice.

…as the detectives observe Gondo’s character—his decision to pay the ransom, his courage, his intelligence, and his unpretentiousness (mowing his own lawn, breaking out his shoemaker’s tools to help modify the briefcases for the ransom)—they are won over

To be sure, he mows his own lawn because he was fired from the company and has too much time on his hands. Ideally, he should be at work and his servant would do the lawn work.

I saw this movie many years ago, on the big screen, in a revival house. It was great. I don’t remember much about it in detail, but I remember thinking at the time that it was one of the best movies I had ever seen. Although the details of the plot did not stick with me, the overall feeling of the film did. I liked the police-procedural aspect of it, and the way that the cops were ernest, upright, and dedicated. It was like watching a japanese version of Dragnet or Adam-12.

I concur with the reviewers opinion – see this movie (I’ll have to watch it again now).

Lynch makes this movie sound so good I’ll have to buy it immediately.

Video Link
The other day, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and was reminded of HIGH AND LOW as both movies feature a kidnapping. HIGH AND LOW is something between art film and genre movie whereas Hitchcock’s work is clearly adventure-suspense, but the latter offers good deal of food for thought as well, especially relevant in our age.

In a way, the title of Hitchcock’s movie embodies the current conundrum of truth in relation to freedom and tyranny in the our time. Everyone who has been ‘red-pilled’ knows ‘too much’. He or she knows what he or she ‘should not’ know. He or she must live in a constant state of anxiety, even fear. He or she is held hostage by the powers-that-be that can destroy ANYONE who dares to speak the unspeakable. These days, “It’s Okay to be White” is ‘white supremacist’, Stefan Molyneux’s philosophy is ‘far right’, and honest talk about Jewish IQ or black crime rates is ‘hate’. If you dare speak truth against the bogus moral authority of BLM, you will likely be harassed, shamed, and even fired. And not just you. Your relative could be destroyed as well, as the mother of the Atlanta cop found out.

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH begins on a bus in Morocco. Hank, the young son of the American couple, walks down the aisle of the moving bus and accidentally removes the veil of an Arab woman, triggering an angry reaction from a man who seems to be her husband. We are made to think of this North African culture as backward and atavistic in contrast to the modern, developed, and free West. And yet, on the psychological level the movie suggests that people in the West must often wear veils or gags. Despite all the individual liberty and culture of freedom, there are manners to uphold and appearances to keep. Now, many such restraints are so ingrained in everyday life that we don’t even notice them nor regard them as repressive. Indeed, mundane strictures of a culture are usually noticed only in the presence of foreigners who don’t share in the same manners/habits or when fashions & values change fast enough for generation gaps to emerge. This also goes for symbols. So many statues and monuments that Americans regarded as normal representations of American history, spirit, and values have come to be seen through ‘radical’ or ‘alien’ eyes as vile, wicked, intolerable, offensive, and ‘racist’. The New Normal views the Old Normal as monstrous and taboo.

Hitchcock, being an Englishman who settled in Hollywood(perhaps the least cultured and most vulgar yet also most pretentious and striving part of urban America), experienced certain ‘culture shocks’ in relation to the notion of freedom. Whereas the contrasts between Anglo-West and the Non-White West was stark and obvious in an us-versus-them way, the differences between UK and US were subtler. Both were democracies founded on similar principles. The Anglo component was also the essential key to both civilizations. And both social orders took pride in their ideals of individualism and liberty. And yet, as Margaret Thatcher later said, Europe’s about history whereas America is about ‘philosophy’, meaning ideology without roots. So, if English freedom was still connected to deep-rooted manners and habits, American freedom was with fewer restraints. Essentially, Americanism was freer than Britishism, and yet, paradoxically enough, could freedom as a social ideal have emerged in an overly free system? In other words, is American freedom of the cowboy possible only because it is essentially an outgrowth and/or transplant of the British freedom of the gentleman? Even though the tree of freedom grew big and sturdy in the US, could it have begun only in a corner of the well-tended English garden? Traditionally, most political philosophers regarded too-much-freedom as recipe for ‘anarchy’, chaos, and destruction. To hold things together and maintain stability, there was the need for authority and threat of violence to warn potential rabble-rousers. Yet, too much order was oppressive and prevented innovation, criticism, and reform. So, freedom was necessary for truth and progress. And yet, to prevent freedom from veering out of control, there needed to be social hierarchies, strict codes of conduct, taboos against excessive vulgarity, and tough enforcement of laws. So, even though cowboy freedom grew out of gentleman freedom, it couldn’t have developed from cowboy freedom itself, which was too wild. Indeed the Wild West led to high body counts and the eventual rise of oligarchic rule by rancher barons, and something like sustainable freedom only emerged with sheriffs, courts, and rule of law.

Ran, High and Low, Dersu Uzala …does it get any better?

https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/adventures-in-space/Content?oid=892662

How about review a Rock album from the 60s or 80s?

Gondo’s driver Aoki acts like a cringing, servile feudal retainer. This makes Gondo angry. After all, this is modern Japan. Both men come from humble backgrounds. They simply have a business relationship. Why shouldn’t they be on terms of social equality?

Japan was not a society of social egalitarians in the 1960s (nor is it even today).

Here is the opening paragraph of the chapter on hierarchy in Jared Taylor’s book on Japan, “Rising Sun”:

All societies establish hierarchies. In few societies, however, are they so widespread or important as in Japan. For the Japanese, rank is so finely determined that equality is rare — everyone and everything are at least slightly above or below the nearest apparent equal. Family members, workmates, schools, companies, even nations and races all have their places. Hierarchy is inseparable from orderliness; a group is not properly organized unless its members are ranked.

So it is most unlikely that Gondo was angered by Aoki’s servility, since Aoki’s behavior was appropriate to his station. Gondo was more likely angered Aoki’s attempts to prevail upon Gondo to save his son (ie to emotionally manipulate him), or angered by Aoki’s refusal to stoically accept the hand that fate had dealt him.

Gondo was more likely angered Aoki’s attempts to prevail upon Gondo to save his son (ie to emotionally manipulate him)

Gondo’s anger was also a desperate repression of his shame that he chose money over life. It’s especially stinging on his conscience because he was willing to pay any sum to save his own kid but doesn’t feel the same way for another man’s son… which, of course, is natural as most of us don’t care about strangers. Still, with Aoki the relationship is somewhat complicated because, even though he’s just a hireling who’s only owed waged, he’s also been a loyal servant and grown close to the family, indeed to the extent that his son plays with Gondo’s son as if they’re siblings. Whereas the parents are distinguished by rank and status, kids are still kids. They even switch roles and toy guns at the drop of a hat in playing cops and robbers. Ironically, Gondo cheers on his son in the role of robber. He tells him to do ANYTHING to ‘kill’ the cop and come out on top. Winning is what matters. Because his son feels so close to Aoki’s kid, Gondo is especially in a quandary. Also, the ONLY reason the kid was kidnapped was because of mistaken identity. The real target was Gondo’s son, and so, Aoki’s son would NOT have been kidnapped if he hadn’t been playing in the premises of Gondo’s house and mistaken for his kid. So, in a way, even though Gondo’s son is safe at home, it is as if he was kidnapped in a ‘spiritual’ sense. Aoki’s kid could very well be Gondo’s kid. It was only by chance that the kidnapper took the wrong kid. There is also the fact that Aoki is a widower and only has his son as family(like with the widower of IKIRU; one of the sad things about the angry peasant in SEVEN SAMURAI is that his wife has been kidnapped by the bandits, and so, he has no family, which for Kurosawa, is the saddest thing, as with the Dersu Uzala character). (In a way, there are two wrongful kidnappings in HIGH AND LOW. Not only is the wrong kid abducted but the wrong Gondo is targeted by Takeuchi the kidnapper, i.e. Takeuchi’s imagination of Gondo as heartless villain is at odds with the real man who, though no saint, isn’t a monster either. But Takeuchi’s craziness can’t hold a candle to current PC craziness in the West where Jewish Power willfully paints the wrong image of Evil Whiteness, so evil that it must be attacked and destroyed and shown no quarters. People like Tim Wise, Sabrina Rubin Erderly, and Mark Zuckerberg’s disgusting sister are kidnappers and murderers of White Reputation.)

Now, if Aoki’s son had been kidnapped at Aoki’s house for reasons unrelated to Gondo, Gondo would have felt no special obligation to sacrifice his wealth for the kid. But, as Aoki’s kid was playing with Gondo’s kid only because Aoki was working for Gondo, it’s not merely an academic matter but a very personal one. It’s not just a question of abstract altruism but personal attachment. Unlike his partners who are willing to stab him in the back(and vice versa), Aoki has been a loyal worker. Also, children easily become friends and attached to one another, and Gondo would feel shamefaced in front of his own son IF he let the other kid get murdered.

Also, the ‘national’ and ‘social’ elements cannot be overstated. Jewish Power pushed two ideologies on Western Man: Anti-National collectivism(especially via communism and anarchism)
and Anti-National individualism(especially via libertarianism and me-centered hedonism). Though collectivism and individualism are polar opposites, they have one key commonality: Denial of National Identity, Unity, and Purpose. Ideally, communism was supposed to be a borderless ideology of workers-of-the-world(even though its tyranny, failures, and paranoia about the richer and more powerful West led to strict border controls that actually boosted national preservation, if only by accident). And libertarian capitalism denigrates national identities as ‘atavistic tribalism’ and emphasizes the free individual as rootless globalist wanderer. But even as Jews pushed these two modes on goyim, their main mode was a form of ‘national socialism’ via Zionism and Jewish Consciousness. Indeed, it was a key reason as to why many Jews were alarmed by the rise of German National Socialism and fascism in general. Sure, they were disturbed by its anti-Jewish vitriol, but the other reason was the Germans had figured out the real source of Jewish Power: Jews used capitalism and employed elements of socialism BUT centered around Jewish Interests; in other words, make collectivism and individualism revolve around nationalism than abandon nationalism to wholly commit oneself to collectivism or individualism. (To be sure, the main passion of white people today is more idolatry than ideology: Worship of the holy three of Jews, homos, and Negroes, what with both white socialists and white capitalists sucking to Fentanyl Floyd as the holy angel.) Without Tribalesse Oblige, the elites of a people split from the masses of the people… as we are now seeing in the West and even the East.

Now, ‘national socialism’ only works within the nation, which is why both German imperialism and Japanese imperialism became so problematic and ultimately monstrous. Their strong sense of identity made them cohesive at home but alienated & hostile abroad, especially among those they regarded as inferior. And we see the same problem with Jewish Power. Zionism works well for Jews in Israel but unfolds as supremacist Nazi-like imperialism outside the Jewish nation because Jews feel disdain and contempt for goyim, be they Arabs or Iranians.

Now, if Aoki’s son had been kidnapped at Aoki’s house for reasons unrelated to Gondo, Gondo would have felt no special obligation to sacrifice his wealth for the kid. But, as Aoki’s kid was playing with Gondo’s kid only because Aoki was working for Gondo, it’s not merely an academic matter but a very personal one. It’s not just a question of abstract altruism but personal attachment.

That’s all quite true. I didn’t mention it because I thought it was obvious.

Gondo’s anger was also a desperate repression of his shame that he chose money over life.

But he also knew — and we knew too — that it wasn’t just about lucre. The shoe factory was his entire life, it was his calling. His anger could just as well be related to the thought of having to see his dreams go up in smoke in order to save the life of someone that, when you got down to it, he didn’t really have to save.

Remember, Aoki didn’t immediately begin grovelling and pleading. I actually thought he might remain (outwardly) stoic about his kid’s fate for the whole film. I would have found it believable if he’d left such things in the hands of his social superior — his “lord.” When he did begin wailing a bit hysterically (by his standards), I thought Gondo might rebuke him for forgetting his station. (Nothing like that occurred, though.)

I liked Stray Dog. It was another cop movie set in postwar Japan.

A really fine movie, another Kurosawa masterpiece. What has been left out in all this most interesting discussion is that the movie is based on an Ed McBain 87th Street police thriller novel, King’s Ransom. I’d like to know if anyone has read it, as I never have, and how the novel made it to Kurosawa and his associates, and how much of the characterizations of High and Low’s characters is in the novel’s.

One other thing I noticed when I saw the movie was that the slum scenes were of parts of urban Japan that had been firebombed away during the war. The slums to my eyes at the time all looked like new construction slums, terribly gerrybuilt but new. Most impressive, all the postwar new construction, but most disturbing, that it was shoddily built new slums.