Vampyr/Kwaidan as "Squash": Chapter 5 Part 5 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
VAMPYR/KWAIDAN
In Metropolis, the house of prostitution, where a mob idolizes the robot
is “Yoshiwara.” Nonetheless, at the time that film appeared, one of the most common
names for a movie theater was “Oriental,” or some variation thereof such as the Hollywood
Egyptian Theater (1922), replete with exotic gods, or Grauman’s Chinese Theater (1927),
modeled on a Far Eastern temple, because for centuries the Orient stood as the legendary
source of wealth–the continent toward which Columbus sailed. As if Hollywood were
the last stage of that interrupted voyage, movie stars’ homes turned metaphorically
toward Asia as in Harold Lloyd’s and Clara Bow’s Chinese dens (Anger 102, 109). This
in turn influenced films, such as the idol-bedecked, 1920s apartment that begins
Auntie Mame (1958).
To Occidental cinema, the Orient was a continent of dragon ladies, silk-clad Fu Manchus, and other androgynous figures, with all the promise and threat of psychic unity. Although these particular stereotypes have little connection to reality, tendencies in some East-Asian metaphysics do support merging, e.g., the atman blending with Brahman in Vedanta and the inseparability of yin and yang in Taoism. Judaism and Christianity concern “individuals”–not to be divided or dissolved; Far-Eastern metaphysics concern membership in a group or union with nature or the Absolute. Admittedly, in his Mysterium Cunjunctionis, C. G. Jung unearths conjoined opposites among some Christian heretics and Romantics, but he recognizes that the mainstream in the West expects the opposites to be separate, while the major traditions in China and Japan have had some version of the squash as a psychological/spiritual ideal.
At any rate, a greater fear of merger appears in many Western than in Japanese ghost tales. According to Nicholas Bornoff, the latter are typically about an evil “phantom girlfriend” vs. a naive man as in Ugetsu; the Western antithesis is a “male fiend” vs. innocent women as in Dracula (Bornoff 387). Although both patterns oppose sexual indulgence, they have different emphases. The Japanese warns against abandoning society (i.e., larger context) for individual pleasure; the Occidental tries to defend purity against any potentially contaminating amalgamation.
One exception is that not all horror stories are paranoid. They
may evoke many other modes including depression. Consonant with the usually reduced
sexuality of depression, melancholy ghost tales tend to be less overtly erotic, e.g.,
the French/Swedish/German production Vampyr (1931), directed by Carl Dreyer,
and the Japanese Kwaidan (1963), directed by Masaki Kobayashi and based on
stories recorded by the Irish—American journalist Lafcadio Hearn, yet in these also
Occidental anxiety about merger contrasts with a Japanese greater acceptance of it.
Vampyr
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Here one comes close to the heart of Dreyer: the tension between inside and outside, between reality and fantasy, darkness and light, natural and supernatural. --Tom Milne, The Cinema of Carl Dreyer |
In Vampyr, much need for this exists, since the morbid mood of the protagonist Allan Gray permeates the film. Dreyer (who co-scripted it with Christen Jul) explains: “Imagine that we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant the room we are sitting in is completely altered; everything in it has taken on another look; the light, the atmosphere has changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed and the objects are as we conceive them” (Milne 109).
What form does this morbidity take? Faced with a similar question, Koboyashi renders the coloring particularly vivid–the customary Japanese assumption that evanescence adds vitality to life, even while intensifying the melancholy mono no aware (the pathos of things), which is not ultimately tragic but a positive acceptance of dissolution. Dreyer, however, does the opposite. He blurs the black and white with fog, gloom, shadow, and pervasive camera trickery (e.g., shining a light hung in black cloth onto the lens). The result is a grayness appropriate to the protagonist’s last name. In The Cinema of Carl Dreyer, Milne adds that the film’s sound is also murky because Dreyer insisted on having many actors speaking in languages they did not know (Milne 110). To be melancholy, the film refuses (Occidental) desire for the definite, finite, and pure.
From the text of Paul Bonnard’s The History of Vampires (shown at length on screen), Vampyr first presents two religions, Christianity and Satanism. The latter brings its devotees into the “land of shadows,” contrasted with the God—created world. The Christianity is scholastic, considering evil a privati bono, a diminishing of what God has created, which should remain individual and indissoluble. Evil reduces hope and leads toward depression, despair, and suicide. Bonnard thought this last to be vampires’ final plan for their victims, a prelude to damnation.
Dreyer takes the shadow world literally. In the sabbat witnessed by Gray at an old mill, the figures are bodiless shades. Other adumbrations flit through most shots. Since Bonnard wrote that a criminal’s shadow was his ally, the silhouette of a one-legged man moves independent of his body. Shown running toward a church, Gray then slumps on a bench. In dream or trance, his dim Doppelgänger arises from his body and runs to the former scene of the sabbat. There Gray discovers his corpse in a coffin. While the body is taken to the grave, the audience finds itself looking upward from the casket at an attendant tightening screws, next at the vampire, then at tree boughs and a church.
The embodiment of Christian virtue is a nun. Shown frequently praying
by a cross and rosary, she is the nurse of the one victimized by the vampire. That
fiend, Margarette Chopin, is dressed almost exactly like a Danish Lutheran minister
(Milne 114), turning the Christian/Satanist dichotomy into a Catholic/Lutheran one.
She died excommunicated, an unrepentant heretic, choosing execution rather than renounce
her faith in Satan.
What does this costuming mean? Perhaps some avant-garde spectators (particularly
if they had just seen Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928) may have wondered:
how can we be certain that the torture-death of Chopin was totally different from
Catholic persecution of Lutheran martyrs or of St. Joan? More conventionally interpreted,
the vampire hypocritically dons robes of holiness, or this image of minister as monster
may have been a satire of Lutheranism (since Dreyer was raised by a repressive Lutheran
family, comparable to a Lutheran sect he later described, as “severe, often fanatic”
(Milne 21). At any rate, the costume muddies together the imagery of good and evil.
The movie ends, but without closure. The vampire perishes with
the customary stake through the heart, yet her evil continues. Gray’s beloved (the
sister of the vampire’s victim) is being held by Chopin’s accomplices. Gray rescues
her, taking her across a fog-filled lake, where they are quite lost to view from
time to time. Eventually, they walk hand in hand through a clearer landscape, but
the last vivid shot is of an evil doctor dying. The machinery of a mill, seemingly
of its own accord, suddenly begins to function, burying him in powder. Is this a
divine miracle? Or the malign power of the vampire reasserting itself despite her
staking? Or a direct intervention by Satan? Or the doing of an old servant seen lurking
in the vicinity? Emblematized by the concluding fog and by Gray’s hysterical (i.e.,
slightly feminine demeanor), the film presents a pervasive blurring of boundaries
as horrifying.
Kwaidan
Underlying Vampyr is the theological dichotomy: God-created nature vs.
beings defying its laws. Even machines (not being wholly natural) seem in the latter
category, notably the murderous mill, though there is also the doctor’s alchemical
paraphernalia placed with a living scull and books of black magic. In contrast, Kwaidan
arises from the fundamental Japanese antithesis: society vs. the asocial.
As Bornoff suggests, this latter pairing also underlies the male mortal/ghostly seductress pattern he emphasizes. Kwaidan, however, comes from traditional Japanese stories selected by Lafcadio Hearn, a Victorian gentleman with a more sentimental than condemning attitude toward women. Moreover, Kobayashi’s selection from that selection singles out a range of instances of what Buddhism calls “emptiness.” The term occurs in the Prajña-Pâramitâ-Hridraya-Sutra written on the body of the character Hoichi, a blind musician. In Hearn’s translation, that scripture begins: “Form is emptiness; and emptiness is form. Emptiness is not different from form; form is not different from emptiness” (Hearn 162). Buddhist interpretations of it differ. A common approach is that the universe can either be viewed as form (definite patterns) or formlessness (chaos). Enlightenment serves as a “squash,” uniting the two.
Hoichi’s story most obviously illustrates the scripture. Being blind, he mistakes the ghosts for living nobles, part of the social structure. Thus, he goes among them peacefully. Sighted servants, though, perceive anomalous phantoms and are terrified. Despite being in the rain, Hoichi sits dry entertaining a court. Seeing where they are, the servants battle a torrential storm. Only when they break his concentration and begin to drag him away is he lashed by the downpour. Now that he recognizes the ghosts as such, he is in great danger. Pulled between mundane order and the phantoms, he will be torn to pieces. Recognizing this, the priest has acolytes cover Hoichi’s body with the sutra, which shows all to arise from unity. It may preserve the blind singer from conflicting perspectives.
At dusk a spectral Samurai arrives, but cannot see the scripture—covered flesh. Not a Buddha, merely a ghost, the samurai thinks that form and emptiness, life and death are different. So he cannot recognize their union (the scripture).
The ghosts want Hoichi to sing songs commemorating their death. They have spent seven hundred years in a melancholy obsession with their own demise. Never have they confronted the paradox that if they were truly the departed, they would not be there to mourn.
Hoichi is also not a Buddha. Remaining “as if in meditation” but not actually practicing it, he stays quiet from fear of the ghosts. The scripture covers his skin, but penetrates no further, nor can his blind eyes see it. He has ears to hear, but has not truly heard the saving words of the scripture. Symbolic of this, the text does not cover his ears, so the ghost rips these away. Then Hoichi enters the depths of loss and dejection, long deprived of sight and now a virtually deaf musician. But as so often in Buddhism, enduring despair may be beneficial. Here, his having survived so much makes his art more attractive to audiences, who journey from far to listen.
Less fortunate is Minokichi, the protagonist of another sequence (“Woman of the Snow”). Time-lapse photography exaggerates the speed with which a tempestuous blizzard besets him and his master, Mosakuo. They shelter in a hut. Therein comes one of the nature spirits or gods of Shinto–a snow maiden. She brings death to the master, but, attracted to the apprentice, she spares him, conditionally. He must never mention her. Then, she exits and vanishes.
A year later, he meets and marries a woman with the common but revealing name Yuki (snow). She becomes an ideal wife and mother. One day, a glimpse of her reminds him of the Snow Woman. The audience sees the change as one of light and color–a shift to cold blue. Despite having a wife transformed from the supernatural world of emptiness (the chaos of nature) to the human one of form, he cannot believe that the two are one. His denial goes so far as to tell her of the Snow Woman, whom he now presumes to have been a dream. His breaking his oath of secrecy shows that he does not know his own wife. She leaves him. He stands in the doorway, as a blizzard slowly coats the room. At last, he carefully deposits her shoes amid the whirling crystals.
Also sad, “The Black Hair” shows an impoverished Samurai deserting his wife to seek his fortune elsewhere and marry a rich girl. But this second marriage fails, so he returns to the first. The former wife remains tender. In a scene imitating the asymmetric diagonal compositions of Japanese court painting, the two reconcile. Kneeling or otherwise staying lower than him, she seems what Japanese tradition considers the perfect wife. Then, morning comes. He wakes to find he has been sleeping with a skeleton crowned by her beautiful black hair.
The scene repeats a stereotype: “... in erotic shunga prints ... shades of necrophilia emerg[e] from the graphic depiction of a man copulating with a skeleton” (Bornoff 386). These prints are warnings against straying away from home into the clutches of a succubus. In “Black Hair,” the corpse shocks him with the sudden realization of how much he has lost by abandoning his family for his individual wants.
The final segment, “In a Cup of Tea,” is the deepest plunge into emptiness, both in subject and style. It commences with a frame story, a writer composing an inexplicably interrupted tale. This derives from Hearn’s query: “Have you ever attempted to mount some old tower stairway, spiraling up through darkness, and in the heart of that darkness found yourself at the cobwebbed edge of nothing? .... The emotional worth of such experience–from a literary point of view–is proved by the force of the sensations aroused, and by the vividness with which they are remembered” (Hearn 7).
Then begins the narrative destined to end in the void. Finding a mocking ghostly face repeatedly appearing in his cup, Lord Nakagawa Sado drinks both tea and visage. That the ghost substitutes for his reflection already suggests that it constitutes an antagonistic fragment of his self. That evening, the ghost reappears. Lying, the samurai says, “I do not recognize you.” The specter accuses him of injuring (i.e. repressing or swallowing) him–the failure to recognize being another suppression. When the samurai attacks with his sword, the phantom disappears. Next night, three ghosts arrive announcing that the Lord wounded the former ghost, who will return for vengeance after he is healed. At first, they vanish each time he tries to strike them. Later, they allow him to pierce them. At their seeming death, the frame freezes, fracturing the temporal flow of the film. When they return whole, the samurai begins laughing, maniacally.
The frame narrative recommences (with something not in Hearn’s original). A publisher arrives. A woman assures him that the author has not left, yet she does not know where he is. The publisher reads the writer’s last words: he could not invent a satisfactory ending, so he leaves to the readers’ imagination what happens to a man who swallows a soul. Suddenly, the woman starts screaming. After following her gaze, the publisher begins laughing insanely. The author has become a mere reflection.
With even less closure than Vampyr, Kwaidan strongly evokes the emotional experience of confronting “emptiness” (i.e., a merging with the universe so extreme that it eliminates all distinctions, including that between self and other, fantasy and realty). When the audience hears that a ghost may return for revenge, they, predisposed toward binary pairing, expect this foreshadowing to lead somewhere. Instead, the film deliberately ends before what, given human expectations, would seem natural. Indeed, the movie generally removes any pretense of the natural, substituting the slowly constructed artifices of the imagination (as, in Buddhist thought, reality is shaped by the way it is viewed). To emphasize this artificiality, most footage was shot on elaborate sets in a giant airplane factory during a whole year, following five years of preparation).
Vampyr employs real locations as sets. These contrast with
the camera distortions, representing either Gray’s subjective responses or the vampire’s
perversion of the natural. In Kwaidan, however, the artificial sets show opposites
(and everything else) coming entirely from the mind–thus able to be squashed therein.
That movie carries Oriental stylization to expensive extremes, making it the most
ambitious Japanese film to its date. Nonetheless, being based on Hearn’s works, it
has also had some appeal in the West. In 1965, it won the jury special prize at Cannes.
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