the dog is not the cat: a suburban satire
by
Douglas Messerli
Kōgo
Noda and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) お早よう Ohayō (Good Morning) /
1959
As several critics have reiterated, along with Rick Prelinger, writing in the new Criterion edition of the film, Good Morning is the “wildcard” of Yasujirō Ozu’s films. It doesn’t quite look or behave like Ozu’s other works, and appears, as Prelinger suggests, more like a kind of American TV comedy series of the same period of the late 1950s, than any other Ozu movie. At moments, Good Morning has the feel of a colorized Leave It to Beaver (running at the same time on American TV sets), except that in the Japanese version, the houses of this suburban community are much smaller and coexist in a space that seems a bit more like a commune than the Mapleton and Pine Street houses in the US television series. (My family lived for several years on Maple Drive in just such an American suburb).
Unlike Ozu’s 1932 silent film, I Was Born, but..., upon which this film
was very loosely based, the father no longer has much significance in the
family life. Instead, the mother, Tamiko (Kuniko Miyake) is the center of
family life (again not so very different from what I have previously argued
about American TV situation comedies, including Leave It to Beaver, The
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and The Donna Reed Show, all putting the
maternal images at the center of control [see My Year 2004]).
Yet Mrs. Hayashi, given her gossipy
behavior, has other problems: she has accused the Treasurer of the neighborhood
dues, Mrs Haraguchi (Haruko Sugimura) as perhaps having used their payments for
the purchase of a new washing machine. And when it turns out that Haraguchi’s
senile mother simply forgot to pass on the payment envelope, all the neighbors
begin to turn against Hayashi, returning
anything they may have previously borrowed in order to be free of her viperous
tongue.
Subtly, the boys not only somehow
assimilate this, but recognize that all their elders say little about truth in
their daily polite expressions of “Good morning,” “How are you?” and
“Have a good day.” A bit like more adolescent
Holden Caulfields, these two youths, in fact, are rebelling against the banal
suburban life in which they are forced to live, despite the fact that their
desires—the ability to watch sumo wrestling matches on the TV—are not so very
different from the adult males surrounding them.
To make his point, Ozu goes beyond what
any American situation comedy might have portrayed. As the adult males
perpetually release flatulents, sometimes even expressing a kind of private
language to their wives, the boys play games in which they fart when pressed by
their peers on their foreheads. Yet, obviously, their pressed foreheads also
represent a kind of “turning on,” just like a television set, which immediately
results in their seemingly comic actions. Only one of their group, who
regularly “messes” his pants, cannot join in this mockery. In a strange sense,
they are repeating the process of their consumer-culture society, literally
performing like the machines which they wish to possess.
In Ozu’s world, the regular walks around
neighborhood blocks of a TV comedy such as Leave
It to Beaver is replaced with a series of linear structures where people
come and go, on several different levels, from right to left, and left to
right. The neighborhood women incessantly open and shut the bamboo sliding
doors of their friends. As in a hundred stories of suburban living, a drunk
neighbor shows up late at night in the wrong house. Ozu presents us with a
series of seemingly linear worlds from which there is truly no escape. Each
member of this society remains trapped in their own strata.
The boys finally get their television set,
of course, and will surely watch all the Sumo
wrestling bouts they might have wished for.
But we do have to ask will they ever truly learn their English lessons (“The
dog is not the cat.”) that might demonstrate to them the dangers of American
culture? Ozu does not answer the question, but suggests that at least the boys’
rebellion has brought their English-language tutor and their aunt to together
by film’s end—even if they can only begin their courtship by talking about the
weather.
Maybe this most Japanese of all directors
was far more American than we might have imagined him.
Los Angeles,
August 23, 2017
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