Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man is buried to his neck in sand. The camp is flat, the light is equatorial and merciless, and Jack Celliers's head rests on the ground like an object someone set down there. He cannot move. What remains of him is a face, and Tōichirō Narushima's camera takes that face the way it has taken every face in this film: frontally, close, square to the lens. Ōshima's most famous image states his method without decoration. Remove a body's capacity to act and you are left with a face and the time it takes to die.

Set it beside the film Ōshima built this one against. Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai gives you the same theatre, the same parade-ground standoff between a Japanese commandant and a British officer. It also gives you an engine. Build the bridge. Blow the bridge. Deleuze has a name for that engine, the action-image in its large form: a situation presses on a man until he acts, and the act transforms the situation. Nearly every war film runs on this circuit, and the POW picture is its purest case, since captivity supplies the situation and escape supplies the act. Ōshima keeps the standoff and throws out the engine. No tunnel, no escape plan, no sabotage, no vindication. The film is not plotted, it is arranged: four men in a quadrangle, each pair producing its own kind of failed intimacy.

Deleuze called this break the crisis of the action-image — characters who perceive their situation with total clarity and can no longer react to it adequately. Lawrence is one of the clearest cases in postwar cinema. He has the language. He has the custom. He has years of Japan inside him and it saves nobody. What he explains is never quite what was said. The bilingual structure is built to dramatise translation as failure, which is why the film keeps asking to be read rather than simply followed. Deleuze's word for an image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and has to be deciphered is the lectosign. Lawrence is the film's reader, and his reading always arrives late.

The place helps. Java could not be shot in Java, so the camp is Rarotonga: a clearing in an unplaceable tropics, parade ground, hut, cell, gate, Jusho Toda's geometry closer to a stage than a location. Deleuze calls a space that has stopped working as a setting for action an any-space-whatever, an espace quelconque, drained of dramatic purpose and left as a field of pure intensity. Here the lens earns itself. The stiffness early reviewers took for awkwardness, the non-actors, the frozen postures, reads differently once you stop expecting the space to produce a plot. Nothing is going to happen here. Things are only going to be performed.

And performed constantly. Court-martial, sword drill, mass assembly, an interrupted seppuku. Ōshima stages ritual until ritual becomes the argument: two nations reciting codes they cannot explain to each other, with violence arriving whenever the recital breaks down. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that lays bare a social relation a gest. Not a gesture expressing an inner feeling. An attitude that makes visible the arrangement of power the body is standing inside. The direct craft debt is Kobayashi's Harakiri, which built a whole feature as a symmetrical courtyard tribunal so the rite itself carried the prosecution; Ōshima aims the device at both sides at once. When confrontation is transposed into ceremony like this, argued as spectacle instead of carried out, Deleuze speaks of the reflection-image, the Figure.

The hinge is a gest. Celliers walks through the assembled camp and kisses Yonoi on both cheeks. It destroys Yonoi because it is tender. Insubordination the camp absorbs; a blow, a curse, defiance, all of that it knows how to process. Tenderness in front of the ranks it cannot. Notice the sound there: nobody present can say what is happening, so Sakamoto's synthesizers say it, a second channel of feeling running beside an image whose people have no words available to them.

The film's biggest structural gamble is also about time. Halfway through, a South African boyhood arrives, choral and pastoral and almost Edenic, in which the schoolboy Celliers fails to defend his hunchbacked younger brother from a brutal initiation. It is cut in as an intrusion rather than eased in by dissolve, and that choice matters more than it looks. A conventional flashback is what Deleuze calls a recollection-image: a dated memory, filed and retrieved, explaining the present. Ōshima refuses the filing. The boyhood stays a separate block that goes on coexisting with the camp, and you hold the two against each other yourself. Deleuze's term for the past organised this way, as regions that coexist rather than a line you walk back along, is sheets of past. Celliers's death is legible only from inside the other sheet. It is not resistance. It is payment.

Then the last cut, four years across, to 1946. The power has inverted, Hara is the condemned man, and the film ends by holding his face still. Kitano's Hara has been the most disturbing instrument here all along, the same face delivering the beating and the drunken Christmas absolution. Deleuze's affection-image is precisely this, a feeling registered on a face and never discharged into action, and the freeze-frame makes the concept literal. Nothing follows. The affect has nowhere to go.

The debts run deeper than Lean. Renoir's Grand Illusion had already bound captor and captive by recognition across rank and language, courtesies and shared codes ending in a killing done out of duty; Ōshima rewires that recognition by eroticising it. Ichikawa's The Burmese Harp made song the one channel that crossed the line between Japanese soldiers and their enemies, the job Sakamoto's theme and the shouted title phrase perform across this bilingual deadlock. From Fires on the Plain and Kobayashi's The Human Condition come the indictment of the Imperial Army from inside its own ranks and the humane intermediary destroyed by his position, which is Lawrence's job description exactly. Forward, the film pulled Takeshi Kitano out of television comedy and toward Violent Cop, sent Sakamoto to The Last Emperor and four decades of film music, and modelled the auteur-led, English-language, multinational co-production that became a standard route for prestige cinema in the decade after.

What it did to the art is this: it took out the war film's most reliable machinery and proved the genre stood without it. What holds Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence upright is the friction of two ceremonies failing to translate, and the desire Ōshima locates underneath military discipline and never names aloud. In 1983, at that scale and in that distribution, making it visible at all was not a small act.

Watch it again for the pauses. Yonoi standing one beat too long before he answers. Hara's face deciding in real time whether to laugh or to strike. The film never tells you whether Celliers crosses that parade ground out of love, out of tactics, or out of a debt owed to a boy on the other side of the world thirty years earlier. It declines to choose. That refusal is where the film keeps its life.