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75 For all the freedom it takes with its source, Kurosawa’s stirring, austere transformation of Macbeth remains remarkably faithful to the spirit of its original. As with Shakespeare’s great work, Kurosawa’s offers apt, precise emblems for the kind of survival sought by power, for crowds and their symbols, and for the human horror of the dead. Washizu’s (Toshiro Mifune) ascent and ruin, like Macbeth ’s, traces the vanity of humankind’s ambitions beyond its spectacular manifestation as the fall of a great man back to its deeper origins in the fundamental unknowability of the world. In his story, we see not only the isolation and paranoia that attaches to seekers of power but a more universal and deeper terror that, despite all our struggles, only dissolution awaits us. Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most ironic tragedies, and Kurosawa fully retains that pervasive irony in his cinematic adaptation . Shakespeare’s drama shifts its realities as unpredictably as the branches of Birnam Wood. All understanding “is smothered in surmise, and nothing is but what is not” (III.iii.140–41).1 The more one knows, the more perspectives multiply, and the more confused and self-contradictory become one’s conclusions. “Welcome and unwelcome things at once / ’Tis hard to reconcile” (IV.iii.138–39). The radically ironic modality of both play and film has the effect of making truth inconstant and point of view paramount in human perception of the world. The indeterminacy of knowledge in Macbeth—“Fair is foul and foul is fair”—is specifically focused in Kurosawa’s equally ambigu3 The Deceitful Dead and the Triumph of Nothing: Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood CHAPTER 3 76 ous film on the traditional uncertainty of human enterprises and the reversals of pride and violent ambition. Kurosawa’s addition of a moralizing chorus invokes both Western and Japanese classical and neoclassical tragedies thematically centered on the falls of overreachers and on the vanity of human wishes. As Macbeth comes to understand that “all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death” (V.v.22–23), so the chorus of Throne of Blood declares, “Death will reign; man dies in vain.” But what appears to be the chorus’ melancholy resignation to the inevitable end of human aspiration actually contains a surprisingly large measure of triumphant celebration. Ernest Becker argues in Escape from Evil that human behavior —especially the violence that we do to each other—is fundamentally motivated by the fear of death and “the inevitable urge to deny mortality.”2 Summarizing his argument, he writes, “In this book I attempt to show that man’s natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.”3 To a considerable degree, Throne of Blood may be seen as embodying Becker’s view of human behavior and consciousness . It portrays the archetypal heroic struggle as occurring between life and death, with the victory invariably going to the latter. The antagonists in Kurosawa’s film, however, are not simply an ambitious man versus his fate, but a mortal against what is identified in Crowds and Power as half of one of three archetypal human “double crowds,” the double crowd comprised of the living and the dead. (The others are “war crowds” and the opposing crowds of women and men.) The fear of the dead, Canetti writes, is “universal ,” for people everywhere attribute to the dead a hostility “to life itself” (262). “In the eyes of those who are still alive, everyone who is dead has suffered a defeat, which consists in having been survived. The dead cannot resign themselves to this injury which was inflicted on them, and so it is natural that they should want to inflict it on others” (263). Freud takes a similar view in his oft-cited essay on “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919): “Most likely our fear still contains the old belief that the deceased becomes the enemy of his survivor and wants to carry him off to share his new life with him.”4 In Throne of Blood, the dead have already outlived the (formerly) living of whom the narrative tells. Such an outcome, from the points of view of both classical tragedy and Crowds and Power, is inescapable; for in the “age-old antagonism between the living and the dead,” the weight of numbers is on the side of the latter, and “dying is thus a [18.191.5.239] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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