live like pigs
by Douglas Messerli
Hisashi Yamauchi (screenplay), Shōhei Imamura (director) Guta to
gunkan (Pigs and
Battleships) / 1961, USA 1963
I've never seen nor read the John Arden
play whose title I have borrowed for this short essay, but I cannot imagine a
more appropriate phrase since Shōhei Imamura's 1961 film is not only literally
about pigs and battleships, but is, metaphorically speaking, a work in which
all the characters more or less live like pigs within the post-war Japanese
society of the port Yokosuka. Although the Allied occupation of Japan has
seemingly brought some sense of industry to the democratized city, it is still
a world of slums and darkness where nearly every individual—Japanese,
Americans, and other outsiders—are on the take, each preying on one another in
the form of everything from sex to pig slop, from, as the title suggest, pigs
to battleships—or, at least, what comes with the latter.
Like Kurosawa in Druken Angel,
Imamura takes the viewer through a world of thriving backstreets and alleys,
all lit up with neon and filled with sailors, prostitutes, petty thieves,
hoodlums, members of the Shore Patrol and Japanese police. At times his camera
is so frenetic in its chase of figures through his set, that audience members
might almost lose their breaths. But for Imamura this energized chaos is as
comical as it is dangerous, each layer of the social structure using the others
to sell and buy, the body being the most saleable commodity, or, as the local
Yakuza describe it, to rake in "contributions."
At the center of this fomenting world is the
likeable but slightly dumb-witted Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) and his pretty
girlfriend, Huruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura), who works in a nearby bar. In large
this couple stands apart from the rest of the community in their simple desire
to marry and find a way to eke out a living. But in this dark world, there is
no easy escape. Kinta stupidly thinks he is rising in society as he moves from
a position of a ringer who brings American sailors into the underground
brothels to a role in the local gang as a pig farmer, a capital venture of
gangster Tetsu and his friends, who use black market slops to feed the
profitable beasts.
Huruko faces daily pressure from her mother to leave her job at the bar
and become a high class prostitute, like her older sister, serving the American
sailors under the tutelage of the slightly mysterious American, Mr. George, who
is suddenly replaced by a similarly opportunistic figure. And, at least twice
in the film, the young girl, penniless and fed up with the actions of her
lover, is drawn into this dark sexual underworld, at one point being gang-raped
by three American sailors—an event which quite literally sets her mind and
Imamura's camera spinning—and, after she attempts to steal cash from one of
them, is arrested.
Despite this, however, Huruko and Kinta's elderly father are the only
ones presented who seem to have moral values. Throughout the film Huruko's
major role is her attempt to try to convince Kinta to leave the Yakuza and
travel with her to a neighboring city where they can find employment in a
factory.
Factory wages, however, are notoriously low, and Kinta has dreams of
either owning a band that might play every night on the American base or
working as a high-class pimp. Despite his own involvement with gang shakedowns
of nearly everyone, it never seems to dawn on him that no matter what money he
might make, it would taken. Because of these ridiculous aspirations and his blind belief in his gang future, the
Yakuza make exaggerated demands of him, forcing him to agree, after they kill
an aging gangster, that if the body is found he will claim the guilt.
Imamura's work
soon swings into full motion, lurching back and forth over more and more absurd
events, sometimes without a great deal of narrative coherency. But the result
is as lively story-telling as are his hilarious types. The handsome head of the
gang, Tetsu, like Kurosawa's Matsunaga, is a dying man, or, at least, he is
convinced he is (in fact, he has only a stomach ulcer). And the others betray
one another as they struggle to make payments to the American for the outdated
rations to feed the pigs. When they cannot come up with the money, both sides
attempt to sell the animals, which leads to a free-wheeling street chase
between big-rig trucks—with Kinta mistakenly thought to have betrayed both. In one
of what has to be one of the most ludicrously comic scenes in film history,
Imamura places the inexperienced Kinta at the center of a machine-gun battle
that shoots up the entire town, ending with a mad release of hundreds of pigs
who go trotting up and down streets and into the alleys, ultimately trampling
the members of the Yakuza to death. In a mockery of James Cagney-type American
movies, Imamura shows Kinta being shot, eventually dying face down in a woman's
latrine.
At film's end, a new battleship has arrived, as the women in the town
rush out to meet it and the Americans who will pay for their pleasures.
Although she has been finally convinced by her mother to join the others, in
the final scene Huruko moves off in the opposite direction toward the train
station that will take her away from the pigs and battleships that have
destroyed any possibility of true love.
Imamura's movie is, at times, patently anti-American, but he is no
easier on his own countrymen, who in attempting to get their hands on the
American dollar, live like pigs on their way to slaughter. In the end, the
director transforms Hisashi Yamauchi's sometimes loopy story into a serious and
memorable satire.
Los Angeles, June
16, 2012
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