Distrust That Particular Flavor

The Baddest Dude on Earth

I ONCE WROTE A SCREENPLAY which featured a stoical, traditionalist Yakuza boss, exiled, in my near-future scenario, to the frozen, cockroach-ridden wastes of a dystopian Newark, New Jersey. Clenched like a fist around his grief at the loss of his daughter, he soldiers on, like a Roman legionary with a death wish the size of a Volkswagen on his shoulder. Meanwhile, his decadent, hotshot young understudy, a bio-tech dandy with a lethal thumb implant, watches for the earliest, easiest opportunity to kill him.

Where, I now wonder, did I find this character, this hard, immaculate man with his hidden inner wound? I had not, at that time, seen any Yakuza films, although I was aware of the genre by some species of pop-culture osmosis. And I had sensed that the roots of that genre would somehow be tangled in a rich mulch of American westerns and gangster films. I was somehow aware of the character as a re-importation. As a friend likes to say, there’s often something in a good translation that can’t quite be captured in the original. But where did my tough and tragic Yakuza boss come from?

He came, somehow, from the films of Takeshi Kitano, which I had not yet seen. He arrived as the crystalline, free-floating essence of an idea or stance. He owed everything to “Beat” Takeshi, a Japanese pop figure of such unstintingly multitalented eclecticism that we have no equivalent, nobody even close. (“They only want you to be the one thing,” Mick Jagger once told me, speaking of his own acting career.) Writer, producer, director, actor, television personality, comedian… But I knew nothing of that, as I wrote. Nor could I know that Takeshi, whose gravitas would one day tug at the film with the pull of a black hole, was said to be both a very great actor and the most famous man in Japan. Both of which, now I know, were and are true.

Fast-forward to a vast, freezing, dilapidated factory building on the outskirts of Toronto, in which has been constructed a segment of my dystopian near-future Newark, an aerial shantytown slung beneath a bridge. Here, amid cameras and crew and the patchwork of our junkyard set, I watch Takeshi prepare to portray my Yakuza boss.

I’m terrified. I’ve only just seen, for the first time, the day before, actors portraying characters I’ve written. And now Takeshi strikes me as a tulpa, a materialized thought-form, sentient plasm of whatever cross-cultural meme generated this character through me. I don’t believe he’s acting. As if to reinforce this, his entourage of smooth-faced, unblinking young associates dress as if in imitation of his character’s costume. Or, rather, as if they had no need for imitation, being already there. Like the character, they are all buttoned into beautifully cut cashmere overcoats. Black.

I never saw Takeshi again, and then, months later, I heard that he had been terribly injured in a motorcycle accident, and was at first not expected to live, and then, when he did live, was not expected to be able to act again.

It made me very sad.

I thought of all this, this past summer, as I watched his film Brother in the Vancouver Film Festival, one of the only films I’ve seen which captures the micron-thin veneer of city-over-desert that one sees constantly in the parts of Los Angeles one never sees in films. Takeshi had survived his motorcycle crash, with the newly limited mobility of his features turned to full advantage as he takes us on his character’s somberly delirious kamikaze run into a simpler and more hauntingly realized vision of night-side America than our own directors have given us for quite a long time.

Toughness has been rather out of fashion, as a masculine virtue, and Takeshi simultaneously radiates it and suggests its wounded core. There can in fact be no depiction of genuine toughness (not brutality but a sort of excess of substance, of soul-stuff) without this concomitant indication of that wound, else the piece becomes simply the pornography of fascism.

Takeshi is simultaneously tougher and more wounded than you or I will ever be. Given the ever deeper and more precise reach of the spectral hand of marketing, I suspect that he’s tougher and more wounded than any Hollywood star is ever likely to be allowed to be.

When I wrote this, I hadn’t yet realized that Bruce Sterling, when he spoke of translations, was paraphrasing Jorge Luis Borges.

If you’d like to see a Takeshi Kitano film, I recommend Sonatine.

Johnny Mnemonic, as cut for the film’s Japanese release, is some minutes longer, all of that in the service of delivering more Takeshi Kitano, and is of course the better for it.