The Wind Rises
2/3/14 00:04![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyI don't think The Wind Rises will go down as one of Miyazaki's great movies; but I think it's a very good movie at what it does.
Miyazaki's great early movies, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind and Laputa: Castle in the Sky, were about pure-hearted young people resisting having their talents co-opted by military/industrial/nationalist systems. The Wind Rises is about a pure-hearted young person who knows that his talents are going to be co-opted by military/industrial/nationalist systems, and who doesn't resist. I've thought a lot about whether it's too easy for Nausicaa and Sheeta to succeed, if Miyazaki is a little too optimistic about the possibilities of pure-heartedness and soft power. Maybe this movie is the one that says yes, it's too optimistic, but the alternative to that optimism is terrible.
Film Critic Hulk has a good take on the movie, one I generally agree with. I wonder if I'm reading the movie too sympathetically given what I know of Miyazaki, and Miyazaki's previous movies. I'm not sure if it's possible to make a movie that's anti-war that also glories in the sheer beauty of war planes the way The Wind Rises does, and it's certainly not as left-wing as I might have wished; still, it's a movie that's willing to ask complicated questions, and not give them simple answers.
Jiro Horikoshi is presented, I think, as sort of a pathetic and tragic figure, even as he is fully sympathetic: kind, brave, hardworking, creative, driven. I like him. But he is presented with this double-edged sword -- the dream of creating beautiful airplanes, the knowledge that the beautiful airplanes he creates will inevitably be turned towards slaughter. And I don't think he even takes that sword willingly. He wants to pretend that he can have one without the other.
It's the same with Nahoko. (It's nice to see Miyazaki do a love story that's not about 12-year-olds, but this might have dragged a bit if not for the symbolic weight.) He wants to pretend that he can live with her and not worsen her health, even though she should be at the sanatorium. But he looks the other way until it's too late. He doesn't have the courage to make the hard choices that his life asks of him. You see it in the scene where he catches the parasol -- he gets blown around helplessly by the wind, but in the end, he's the one who chose to catch the parasol, and he's the one who chose not to let it go.
Castorp refers to the hotel as a place for "forgetting," like Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, and I can't help but think that he's referring in some way to the "forgetting" of Japan's imperialism that's taken place in Japan -- not even something as dramatic as the right wing's reinterpretations of Japanese history, but just, a looking away. A desire to see World War II as something tragic and inevitable where a lot of suffering happened but the agents of that suffering are erased.
Miyazaki's great early movies, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind and Laputa: Castle in the Sky, were about pure-hearted young people resisting having their talents co-opted by military/industrial/nationalist systems. The Wind Rises is about a pure-hearted young person who knows that his talents are going to be co-opted by military/industrial/nationalist systems, and who doesn't resist. I've thought a lot about whether it's too easy for Nausicaa and Sheeta to succeed, if Miyazaki is a little too optimistic about the possibilities of pure-heartedness and soft power. Maybe this movie is the one that says yes, it's too optimistic, but the alternative to that optimism is terrible.
Film Critic Hulk has a good take on the movie, one I generally agree with. I wonder if I'm reading the movie too sympathetically given what I know of Miyazaki, and Miyazaki's previous movies. I'm not sure if it's possible to make a movie that's anti-war that also glories in the sheer beauty of war planes the way The Wind Rises does, and it's certainly not as left-wing as I might have wished; still, it's a movie that's willing to ask complicated questions, and not give them simple answers.
Jiro Horikoshi is presented, I think, as sort of a pathetic and tragic figure, even as he is fully sympathetic: kind, brave, hardworking, creative, driven. I like him. But he is presented with this double-edged sword -- the dream of creating beautiful airplanes, the knowledge that the beautiful airplanes he creates will inevitably be turned towards slaughter. And I don't think he even takes that sword willingly. He wants to pretend that he can have one without the other.
It's the same with Nahoko. (It's nice to see Miyazaki do a love story that's not about 12-year-olds, but this might have dragged a bit if not for the symbolic weight.) He wants to pretend that he can live with her and not worsen her health, even though she should be at the sanatorium. But he looks the other way until it's too late. He doesn't have the courage to make the hard choices that his life asks of him. You see it in the scene where he catches the parasol -- he gets blown around helplessly by the wind, but in the end, he's the one who chose to catch the parasol, and he's the one who chose not to let it go.
Castorp refers to the hotel as a place for "forgetting," like Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, and I can't help but think that he's referring in some way to the "forgetting" of Japan's imperialism that's taken place in Japan -- not even something as dramatic as the right wing's reinterpretations of Japanese history, but just, a looking away. A desire to see World War II as something tragic and inevitable where a lot of suffering happened but the agents of that suffering are erased.
(no subject)
2/3/14 06:04 (UTC)It's beautiful, but it's totally empty of emotional impact because again, no consequences for anything, and very little emotions from the characters, too.
(no subject)
3/3/14 18:56 (UTC)And... I don't know. Overall I am conflicted? It felt very much to me like a movie made by someone who feels incredible guilt over his love of this subject matter, and tries to assuage it in ways (the occasional mentions of war in China, Hitler, etc.), but doesn't quite have to fortitude to look at it head on. Like Jiro in many ways.
I did find it moving despite my unease with the subject matter and the treatment of WWII and war-time complicity, and ... I don't really have a conclusion? Except that I don't feel like I can outright condemn it even as I don't feel like I endorse it either.