The Man Who Stole the Sun · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Rubber gloves. A kitchen table. Tape, wire, hardware-store improvisation, hands that keep working while the takeout containers pile up behind them. Tatsuo Suzuki's camera stays close to those hands for a long, near-wordless stretch of The Man Who Stole the Sun, and Takayuki Inoue's electric guitar comes up underneath. A junior-high science teacher is building an atomic bomb in a rented Tokyo apartment, and the film photographs it as labour. Skilled, absorbing, weirdly cheerful labour.

Then he finishes. And the film's actual subject walks in: Makoto Kido has no idea what to ask for.

Everything strange about this picture lives in that gap.

The machinery Kido is running on is what Deleuze called the action-image, in its grandest version: a situation presses on a person until they commit the act that transforms it. The situation has to be big enough to be worth acting on — Deleuze calls that encompassing milieu the synsign. A frontier town. A war. Something whose weight comes down through the hero and out the other side as a deed.

Kido manufactures his own. A private citizen with a working device makes Japan, by his reckoning, the world's ninth nuclear power; he names himself "Number 9." He has built a global situation on a kitchen table. And then he stalls.

What he wants, when it finally comes: that televised baseball games run to their conclusion instead of being cut off for the schedule. That the Rolling Stones, then barred from playing Japan, be let in. Then ¥500 million, which he has no plan for. Part of the list is crowd-sourced, phoned in by listeners to a radio request show.

Deleuze called the mid-century break the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer respond adequately to what they see, situations no deed can resolve. He found it in postwar Europe, among the wanderers of neorealism. Usually that crisis comes from the world outgrowing the person. Hasegawa runs it backwards, and the inversion is his invention. Give one man absolute capacity to act; remove every situation worth spending it on. The circuit doesn't break at the muscles. It breaks at the wanting.

Which is why the demands are so precisely humiliating. Deleuze has a phrase for people adrift among ready-made images, unable to find a desire that isn't already manufactured: the consciousness of clichés. Baseball, a rock band, cash — the whole inventory of what an affluent, television-saturated Japan had taught a salaryman to want, and Kido had to phone a radio station to be told even that much. The film opens with the alternative: an old man hijacking a school bus to demand an audience with the Emperor, grandiose and unmeetable and rooted in a history the country has agreed not to discuss. Kido is that man with better chemistry and nothing to be angry about.

Underneath sits the concept that makes the film political rather than bleak. Deleuze argued that modern political cinema begins when a filmmaker can no longer address a people who exist: the people are missing, and an honest film registers that absence instead of faking a chorus. 1979 is the end of Japan's growth story — past the oil shocks, past the Red Army hijackings and the Mitsubishi bombing, a nuclear programme expanding under a non-nuclear constitution. Kido holds the leverage the 1960s could only dream about and no collective to aim it for. The request line is the missing people, rendered as a phone-in.

So he does what Deleuze says subjects do when no available identity will hold them: he legends himself. Fabulation. "Number 9" is a man counterfeiting a nation-state out of one apartment and a lead box, and the film lets the fiction stand because nothing truer is on offer.

Meanwhile his body runs downhill. Hair in the sink, teeth loosening, nosebleeds. Deleuze's impulse-image describes worlds ruled by appetite and degradation, on an irreversible slope toward exhaustion, where the domestic surface is only skin over an originary world of raw matter that eats whoever handles it. Plutonium is that world, carried home from a civil fuel cycle by a man in rubber gloves. Inoue's blues-funk drives the assembly toward euphoria while the assembler decomposes. That mismatch is the whole tone in one gesture.

Sawada's casting turns this into an argument about cinema. Kitty Films came out of a music and management company, so putting a glam-era idol at the height of his fame inside a genre machine was the financing structure made visible. Deleuze calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. The gest here is the star body, taken apart on camera across two and a half hours while Sawada plays Kido with a cheerful vacancy that supplies no trauma and no manifesto. A pop-industrial system dismantling its own product for money.

And Kido has no public existence. He is a distorted recording on a traced line, a voice routed through Zero's radio show, speech detached from any visible body — what Deleuze calls audiovisual disjunction. Broadcasting is the only apparatus through which a private citizen can address the state, so the airwaves become the real infrastructure of power and he becomes an effect of them.

The consequence for narrative is a picture that won't hold a genre for more than a reel — heist, procedural, slapstick, body horror, civic apocalypse — because none of them can contain a man whose motive is a vacancy. The instability is the argument.

The debts are specific. Leonard Schrader's story transplants his brother's template from Taxi Driver: the rented room as armoury, the autodidact's preparation filmed as patient instruction. Hasegawa keeps the procedure and drains the moral fever out of it. Dog Day Afternoon supplies the loop of criminal-as-broadcast-performer, and Bunta Sugawara's Detective Yamashita inherits its weary, humane bulk, arriving from Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity with the jitsuroku grammar in tow: handheld cameras shoved into real locations, bodies colliding without heroic staging. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three models extortion as a dry radio-channel procedural; Dr. Strangelove licensed comedy as the register for annihilation, and Hasegawa moves the war room into an apartment. Suzuki brings his method from Funeral Parade of Roses intact — 35mm handheld into unpermitted crowds, long lenses pressing pedestrians into a moving wall, cuts that rupture tone mid-scene rather than modulating it. That last debt is why the whiplash reads as technique and not incompetence.

Forward, Kitty ran the same play with Sōmai's Sailor Suit and Machine Gun two years later, and the influence past that is tonal and largely domestic: the licence to treat national catastrophe with velocity and a rock score. The lone catastrophist against a paralysed state recurs from Patlabor 2 onward, though that's resemblance rather than documented descent.

What it did to film: it took the bomb out of metaphor. Godzilla processes the atomic through the monster, the war film through memory. Hasegawa hands it to a nobody in a rented room and refuses to let it mean anything. The ending withholds detonation — Kido dying, adrift in a crowd, the device still with him, the frame declining to resolve what comes next. Deleuze would call that an absolute out-of-field: not a space just past the edge of the shot, but something the image cannot locate at all. Detonation would have handed the film the meaning it spent two and a half hours denying.

Watch the hands. Watch the sink. And when the radio starts taking calls, notice that the film has quietly turned the question on you.