The Eel · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the fish. A man crouches by a glass tank in a quiet barbershop, talking to an eel. He tells it things he tells no one — about the night he came home early, the love letter, the knife. The eel circles. It does not judge, because it cannot. This is the image the whole film hangs on, and it is stranger than it first looks: a confession that requires no listener, a relationship engineered to carry zero risk. Imamura, who spent fifty years watching people the way a naturalist watches insects, ends his career by giving his most withdrawn protagonist a creature instead of a person — and then slowly, against the man's will, taking the creature's job away.

Deleuze gives us a precise name for what Imamura is doing in that opening murder. He called it the impulse-image. Most cinema runs on the sensory-motor circuit: a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the action settles the situation. The impulse-image is the degenerate, savage version of that — not action but compulsion, a drive that erupts from beneath the social surface and drags the world down a slope it cannot climb back up. Yamashita's stabbing of his wife is staged with a sudden, almost documentary brutality that belongs to nothing around it. It is not a decision. It is an eruption. And it points past the tidy bourgeois apartment to what Deleuze calls the originary world — the layer of pure instinct that Imamura always insisted lurks under the ordered Japanese surface, of which the apartment, the river, the barbershop are only the derived milieu, the visible skin. The whole of Imamura's filmography is the argument that this layer is real; The Ballad of Narayama made it by intercutting humans with copulating snakes. The Eel makes it once, in ninety violent seconds, and then spends two hours metabolizing the shock.

That metabolizing is the second thing Deleuze helps us see. After the murder, the film stops being about acts. Yamashita serves his time — the prison years elided — and emerges into a world he can only watch. He becomes what Deleuze calls a voyant, a seer: a character who no longer acts on what he perceives but endures it. The scenes turn into pure optical and sound situations — Deleuze's opsigns and sonsigns — where the camera lingers on a face caught in the act of not-quite-speaking, on the lapping of the river, on the eel gliding in close-up while the man murmurs. Nothing is being driven forward. This is dead time, the everyday simply held: conversations allowed their silences, the comic ensemble of parolees and UFO-watchers accumulating around the shop by patient accretion rather than punchy timing. Editor Hajime Okayasu lets duration win over momentum, and the wager pays off because suppression, given enough screen time, starts to read as feeling. Yakusho gives almost nothing, and the nothing becomes unbearable.

Watch what the eel actually does in this scheme. It is a mirror Yamashita can survive. Deleuze's crystal-image names the moment present and reflection become impossible to tell apart — and the tank is exactly that, an aquarium-still surface where the man's interior life circles back at him without ever talking back. The crisis of the film arrives when a person, Keiko, begins to occupy the eel's role. She works in the shop; she resembles, in his mind, the wife he killed. Suddenly the safe mute communion is replaced by the riskier thing — speech to someone who can answer, refuse, and resemble the dead. The late melodrama (jealousy, the return of the past, a brawl) is not genre payoff. It is the impulse-image returning to test whether civility ever truly banished the drive. Imamura's lifelong answer was no, and the film honors that by refusing tidy absolution. The resolution gestures toward grace and stops.

This is film history, not just philosophy. The aquarium-confessor is a literal inheritance: Imamura built it first in The Pornographers, where a man confides in a carp he believes is his reincarnated wife. The cool anthropological framing — bodies observed like specimens — is the entomological distance invented in The Insect Woman. The bustling underclass community comes straight out of Pigs and Battleships; the unreadable killer watched without judgment is the achievement of Vengeance Is Mine, which Yakusho here extends into a gentler key. And the patient, duration-over-momentum pacing is Imamura's debt to Ozu, whose assistant he once was — except where Tokyo Story kept its serene tatami-level decorum, Imamura frays it into riverbank and barbershop, instinct showing through the weave.

What The Eel did to film was small and exact. It took the redemption parable — a form built for catharsis — and ran it through a director who did not believe in clean surfaces, producing something that earns its tenderness only by first refusing it. It proved that the time-image's patient watching and Imamura's naturalist drives are not opposites but neighbors: a man can sit perfectly still by a tank for two hours, and the stillness can be the most violent thing in the room. Watch it again for the silences. That is where the eel is listening.