Flak Magazine: Review of The Last Samurai, 12.31.03

One of the most vexing questions in literary criticism is the extent to which an author is allowed to "arrange" historical elements. Fictional characters interacting with historical places and personages can offer psycho-social insight into the death and birth of bygone cultures, but when does this interaction become exploitation? In his "A Handbook to Literature," Hugh Holman says there's only one universally accepted criteria of historical fiction: that it "pays the debt of serious scholarship to the facts of the age being re-created."

Director Edward Zwick's The Last Samurai, like most Hollywood mega-epics, excels at re-creation, as far as physical detail is concerned. But what about its scholarship of the social context? Like Sir Walter Scott's skilled and thrilling Waverly novels, The Last Samurai's romanticism and drastic rearrangement of history probably places it closer to a "costume romance" than a true Novel of Manners. You could even say that The Last Samurai, as Mark Twain once viciously argued of "Ivanhoe," exploits history as a mere setting for adventure. But like Scott's historical fiction, Zwick's film turns out to be partially redeemed because it reaches deeper than most works of its kind; in the case of The Last Samurai, Zwick's ambition is to explore the very definitions of "honor" and "dignity" in warfare for a public confronted daily with news and thoughts of weapons of mass destruction.

Tom Cruise plays the fictional American army captain Nathan Algren, who is haunted by nightmares of war atrocities — he actually fought alongside Gen. Custer. Desperate for money, Algren accepts an offer from a Japanese oligarch and a representative of Winchester to train the newly conscripted Japanese army to squash a rebellion of provincial samurai. Algren is chosen because he has fought the "red man," and knows how to deal with these "savages." In battle, however, Algren is captured by the samurai, which is an unusual arrangement — samurai kill themselves in shame after defeat, whereas the lion-hearted American will fight to the death. And so Algren is taken to an idyllic samurai village deep in the mountains of Japan, where feudal lord Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) uses him "to know my enemy."

During Algren's time amongst the samurai, we of course see that it's really the white man, with his weapons and methods, who is savage. The Last Samurai has been criticized as a simplistic modern=bad/ancient=good "going native" story, or even lambasted as inherently racist because a white man "saves" the "savages," but these are half-baked criticisms. The model for this kind of argument was Nobel winner Chinua Achebe's 1973 "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness,'" which indicted bleeding heart sympathy as racist because it "manage[s] to sidestep the ultimate question of equality" and reduces the "savage" land to a "metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity." The Western mind, Achebe asserts, looks at non-Westerners "through a haze of distortions and cheap mystifications, [not] simply as a continent of people — not angels, but not rudimentary souls either — just people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society."

Certainly, these samurai are highly gifted and enterprising, not rudimentary souls; as Algren notes, "from the time they rise until the time they sleep, whatever they do, they do it well." And so while The Last Samurai improves on Conrad by making Algren and Katsumoto brothers-in-arms who learn from each other about dignity and honor, the "angel" charge still floats through the movie like the cherry blossoms falling through Katsumoto's courtyard. The Katsumoto character is so noble that he seems unreal — not just to Algren, but to the audience as well. Watanabe gives an intimate performance that completely upstages Cruise, but there's an undercurrent of condescension, as if the screenplay and direction were intent on deifying him.

The reason for this change is revealed in the book "The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori" by Emory University professor Mark Ravina, which chronicles the life of the samurai upon whom the Katsumoto character is based. The historical Saigo was a great warrior embroiled in a complicated conflict with the new Meiji government, which the film confusingly abridges. This government, which Saigo helped create, exiled him after they stripped the samurai of their privilege, putting Saigo in the awkward position of opposing a government he helped to establish. He remained intensely loyal (the way of samurai, after all), but retreated to the countryside where he created a Confucian school to teach young samurai of the old ways which Saigo knew were in jeopardy. Satsuma samurai rebelled against the government, though Saigo remained ambivalent until his disgust with the "amoral" Tokyo government prompted him to action. This led to the War of the Southwest, in which the last of the traditional samurai warriors were vanquished by the conscripted, modernized government army.

To further complicate the critical view of The Last Samurai, the aspects of Katsumoto's samurai village that struck some critics as historically suspect are quite similar to Saigo's. In contrast to Kurosawa's feudal lords, Saigo was indeed a poetry-writing, cherry blossom-picking, Zen-meditating afternoon fisherman. But the movie takes it too far, painting Katsumoto as an unflappably moral hero, where the real Saigo adopted this virtuous front as a political protest. He became and acted the part of a legend to those wary of modernization; in the words of Ravina, "Zen mediation had made Saigo impossibly arrogant… Saigo's smugness was rooted in the sense that his retreat to the countryside was part of a great cultural project." Further demystifying the samurai, Ravina observes that "Saigo's satisfaction with his own virtue is certainly unappealing." In context, the fictionalized Katsumoto character seems far simpler, almost condescendingly so. Saigo did indeed fight heroically against the conscripted army, but unlike the film's virtuous tradition/modernity showdown, the rebels also used guns from time to time. The swords-versus-guns showdown as depicted in the movie's climactic scene is similar to Saigo's true fate, but Ravina suggests his fatal assault against the guns was motivated more by vanity — self-aggrandizement disguised as moral principle — than Katsumoto's pure heroism. Algren's words about Gen. Custer might be applicable to Saigo: "He was a murderer who fell in love with his own legend, and his troops died for it."

In other words, it's a story compelling and complex in itself, making the Westerner/"savage" archetype unnecessary. This is not to argue against the poetic license of the historical fictionist, but the success of The Last Samurai hinges on whether the moral it culls from its thematic elements overcomes the vanity of the fictional construct. The film argues that the modernity of Japan "killed" an important part of its culture, and that the Westernization of Japan ironically neutered it. But the historical truth is that the Meiji Empire's rapid modernization of Japan restored its honor in the eyes of many Japanese — including many former samurai. By centralizing the government, rather than distributing power and resources throughout the feudal realms, Japan was more able to negotiate fair treaties, compete in world markets and protect itself from America's reach toward China. Thus the ancient "way of the samurai" was simply impractical to Japan's preservation in the modern world. But that "way" wasn't destroyed like it is in the film; it was instead relegated to myth. Men like Saigo were no longer the public face of Japan, but spirits seen in comets in the night sky. Though the War of the Southwest virtually abolished samurai feudalism, respect for the tradition remained — down to the government's ritualized, deferential treatment of Saigo's disembodied head.

And so we're back to the basic question: Does the fiction justify the gross rearrangement of historical details? The shock of the final assault suggests that the warriors' ancient virtues of humility, respect and duty are especially important in the age of modern weapons — but this point certainly could have been made without the Westerner/"savage" construct. The complexity of the fall of the samurai could fill a Kurosawan trilogy, but this film just asks us to accept Tom Cruise as the Last Samurai — a stroke of vanity that makes it very hard to answer our basic question with "yes." Ironically, we're asked to cheer when the West is shamed in the final battle, and so perhaps the appropriate question for the audience is the one asked of Nathan Algren upon his return from his samurai exile: "What is it about your own people you hate so much?"

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)