Prove This Chair Exists

I’ve been pondering an essay talking about Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure and Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, but whatever tenuous connection I’d made in my mind never formed into the discussion of perception, knowledge, and reality that I’d envisioned. They lingered in the back of my mind, and today they came back to the fore when my brother put in Spinning Man for us to watch.

All he told me was that Spinning Man is a Pearce and Pierce movie, pitting Guy Pearce against Pierce Brosnan in a crime thriller. Pearce’s character is suspected of kidnapping and possible murder, while Brosnan’s is the detective who pursues him. Minnie Driver does her best with the role of the audience insert character who doesn’t know what to believe. I didn’t like the movie, but there were some interesting things about it that served as a binding agent for my thoughts about the Japanese films above.

Spinning Man, based on the book by George Harrar, is primarily about the subjectivity of truth. The suspect is a philosophy professor, teaching a course on linguistics. The connection isn’t made clear, but from context it seems to involve the assumptions inherent in language that make it difficult to express truth. The crux of the movie is that this suspect does not himself know the truth. He has memory difficulties (which initially had us worried it would be yet another multiple personality thriller), and he frequently hallucinates–primarily above young women, because this is a bog-standard story in a lot of ways.

One of the scenes that really worked on me took place in the usual dark interrogation room with one-way mirror. The suspect wants to know who’s watching from behind it, and the detective denies that anyone is watching. Importantly, the film does not show us whether there is anyone there or not. We believe the detective, but should we? If there really was someone behind the mirror it had no effect on the story, but the incident stands as an example of the uncertainty that the movie operated in.

It’s that uncertainty that forges the link between Cure and Dreams. On the face of it (aside from the coincidence of the directors’ names), the films have nothing in common. Cure, like Spinning Man, is a detective’s pursuit of the truth. Dreams is an anthology of shorts based on dreams. Yet they both operate in uncertainty.

In Cure the suspect doesn’t harm or kill anybody. He simply talks to them, and then they kill people. He’s connected to an abandoned asylum where experiments in hypnosis went too far, but it’s left ambiguous as to whether he has any power at all. The movie undermines genre conventions constantly, creating uncertainty in the audience. The suspect is apprehended very early in the film, after which the film stops being a cat and mouse story and starts to explore the edges of reason. There are lengthy shots of people just talking, but they’re incredibly tense. The suspect makes people react, and you never know what’s going to happen.

Dreams are uncertain by nature, so it’s hardly surprisingly to observe that Dreams is filled with uncertainty. But dreams can be about anything. They can be pleasant or upsetting. They can reassure or unnerve. Dreams knocks the viewer off balance immediately with a story of a child’s disobedience leading his mother to disown him and send him to the foxes he offended for execution. It’s a film filled with beautiful images and dark foreboding. The unifying theme of the dreams is the disregard for and destruction of the natural world. One memorable segment has the spirits of cherry trees offer one last show for a child that loved them, after they’d been chopped down. One of the final apocalyptic dreams starts with what appears to be the eruption of Mt. Fuji but is revealed to be the meltdowns of nearby nuclear power plants. Manmade disasters have overtaken the destructive force of nature. The future of humanity is uncertain but probably very bleak.

It’s difficult to build a story around uncertainty. You can find angry viewer comments about Spinning Man by people who felt cheated by the end, and while the end is one of my favorite parts I’d agree that the movie didn’t do a good job of preparing the audience to accept it. It fit too well into standard psycho-killer narratives for the resolution to feel supported. Cure was much more clear about its divergence from standard structures from the beginning, focusing on the calm energy of the rash of killers in opposition to the quick temper and rage of the detective. I’m on the fence about how well it succeeded, but the subversions of the detective story and the daringness of the approach have left me thinking about it a month after watching the film, which is usually a good sign that I’m on my way to loving it. Dreams is simply haunting. Less a narrative than a guided thematic tour of troubling thoughts, it’s the one of these films that instills a lingering uncertainty–not of what was seen, but of the sustainability of the world we escape in cinematic slumber.