Drunken Angel · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

There is a pool of standing water in the middle of the market district, and it bubbles. Methane. Junk floats on it. Shacks, bars and a dance hall ring its edge, and Kurosawa shoots so much of the film across that water that you keep meeting people through it, framed by their own rot.

He didn't find that swamp in the ruins of Tokyo. So Matsuyama built it on the Toho lot, real standing water rigged so it could be agitated to belch and float debris on cue. That decision is where to start, because it separates this film from the Italian neorealism it superficially resembles. Bazin's case for the neorealists rested on the street: go out into a world you did not make and accept what is there. Kurosawa wanted a world he could compose, with sightlines and depth and sound under his control. The sump isn't evidence of postwar Japan. It's a machine for producing it.

Deleuze has a precise name for a place like that. In his first cinema book he sets aside a family of films he calls naturalist, after Zola: Stroheim, Buñuel. In them, behind the ordinary setting — here the bars, the dance hall, the cramped clinic, all dated with total accuracy to 1948, penicillin scarce, boogie-woogie on the stage, medical alcohol traded on the black market — a second world shows through, made of nothing but appetite and decay. Deleuze calls the ordinary setting the derived milieu and the thing showing through it the originary world. The originary world isn't somewhere you can walk to. It's the surface world seen as pure drive, where everything is only beginning or ending, and it has one law: things run downhill.

Kurosawa put that law in the middle of the frame and filled it with water. The images built on it Deleuze calls impulse-images, and their tell is that people stop behaving like psychologies and start behaving like appetites. This is why the lens earns its keep. Try reading Matsunaga's return to Okada as a decision and the film goes soft, becomes a story about a young man with bad judgment. Watch it as a slope and it snaps into focus. The structure isn't plotted like a gangster picture at all — no heist, no rise, almost no criminal enterprise shown. It's a clinical curve: diagnosis, denial, compliance, relapse, collapse. Medical time replacing narrative time is entropy given a clock, what Deleuze calls the line of slope.

Two objects carry the drive. The white suit comes straight out of Scarface (1932), the hoodlum whose silk is his entire claim to power, and Kurosawa dresses Mifune in it specifically so he can cough blood onto it. Deleuze's word for a thing like that is fetish: a piece of the world torn loose and overcharged, standing in for a force that has no other proof. Nothing else backs Matsunaga's authority. Then the cough itself, which is a symptom in Deleuze's sense — an act that reads as the visible edge of something buried. Tuberculosis in the gangster, alcohol in the doctor, typhoid in the water, obligation in the gang. Kurosawa is not subtle about the equation and shouldn't be: giri is a superstition that kills its believers.

A naturalist film usually has no brake. Kurosawa installs one and then ruins him. Shimura's Sanada barks, sulks, drinks the medical alcohol, and shows compassion only by refusing to stop yelling. Deleuze, writing about Kurosawa at length, noticed that his heroes have to find the question a situation is asking before they can act at all, and that the situation is an encompasser — a milieu so wide it must be exhausted before any act fits it. The sump is that encompasser made literal, and Sanada's entire practice is one question aimed at a body: will you live? The schoolgirl who follows orders answers yes and recovers. Matsunaga answers no, and not because the bacillus is stronger. His self-image is.

Once, the film breaks its own physics. Matsunaga on a beach, prying at a coffin, and his own corpse climbs out and comes after him through manipulated motion and hard seaside light. Deleuze calls this a dream-image, a circuit that isn't anchored to any dated memory and stops obeying the body's business of perceiving and acting. For ninety seconds the movement-image cracks and something else shows: a dead man chasing a living one, time running the wrong direction. Kurosawa would not go back to this register in earnest until Dreams (1990).

And then there's the white. The last fight overturns a can of white paint, and the two men slip and smear through it, and Matsunaga dies on a laundry balcony among flapping sheets. Paint, linen, silk, the pallor of the disease. Deleuze would call this a qualité-puissance, a quality cut loose from any single object that owns it, presented for its own sake. Nobody says a word about it. That is Kurosawa's specific invention here — meaning made by physical accident inside the frame rather than handed over in dialogue. The paint is a spill. It is also the whole film.

His grammar arrived from named places. Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), with a community blocked in depth along one thoroughfare and a tubercular gunman coughing through it, gave him the plaza staging and the idea of tying a diagnosis to a town's geography. Yamanaka's Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937) gave him the built alley shot through doorways and hanging laundry, every composition framing a second frame, plus permission to refuse a genre hero his heroism. That's Deleuze's closed set doing social work: the film's argument about entrapment is carried by who may cross which threshold. The Public Enemy (1931) gave him Cagney face-down in the gutter, the gangster's end as bodily degradation at street level, which he quotes and escalates. His own Sanshiro Sugata (1943) gave him the wipe as hard punctuation and the shot/countershot that accelerates as a fight nears its break, moved intact from a judo match to a knife fight in a corridor. One Wonderful Sunday (1947) gave him the rubble and the street noise. Add Mifune and you get friction.

The sound is where he taught everyone something. Matsunaga walks the district having understood his position, and a bright waltz plays from a machine down the street, cheerfulness making the despair worse instead of illustrating it. Hayasaka's principle, Kurosawa's permanent habit: music that refuses to agree with the image. It's the mild, still-diegetic ancestor of the full audiovisual disjunction Deleuze finds decades later in Duras and Straub, where sound and image finally stop telling the same story altogether. Here the split is small and the effect is enormous, and it has since become an assumption held by filmmakers who have never seen the film that taught it.

What it did to the art: it took the American gangster picture's costume and its death, threw out the machinery of crime, and set a doctor in the middle of the wreckage. The genre's engine changed from what a man does to what he is dying of. It proved a fully constructed world could carry an argument the dialogue never states. And its demystified yakuza set terms the Japanese genre spent thirty years answering — by contradiction in the chivalry pictures, by extension in Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity and later in Kitano. Mifune walked out of it into Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, and into Red Beard, where he takes Shimura's chair and gets the doctor's side of this same argument.

Watch the water. Watch what white does before anyone dies. Kurosawa never settles whether Matsunaga could have chosen otherwise: the schoolgirl says yes, the swamp says no, and the film keeps both and hands you the argument.