The Great Movies III

As unorthodox as Schrader's approach to Mishima's life may be, I cannot imagine a better one. Like Hemingway and Mailer, Mishima conceived his life and his work as intimately related through his libido. In Mishima's case this process was made more complex by his bisexuality and masochism, and his "private army" combined ritual with buried sexuality; his soldiers were young, handsome, and willing to die for him, and they wore uniforms as fetishistic as the Nazis.

Schrader has throughout his life as a screenwriter and director been fascinated by the starting point of a "man in a room," as he describes it: a man dressing and preparing himself to go out and do battle for his goals. In his screenplays for Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, great emphasis is placed on Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta preparing for conflict, Bickle with his elaborate gun mounts and verbal rehearsals, LaMotta in his dressing room. In Schrader's own American Gigolo, his hero trains and dresses himself to seem attractive to women, and in his film The Walker, he shows a man carefully preparing to be a presentable companion for older women.

Mishima is his ultimate man in a room. There is the young boy, separated from his mother and held almost captive by a possessive grandmother, who won't let him go out to play but wants him always at her side. There is the writer, returning to his desk every day at midnight to write his books and plays in monkish isolation. There is the public man, uniformed, advocating the Bushido Code, acting the role of military commander of his own army. On the last day of his life, he is ceremoniously dressed by a follower and adheres to a rigid timetable that leads to his meticulously planned and rehearsed suicide, or seppuku. Considering that he is a man fully committed to plunging a sword into his own guts, he seems remarkably serene; his life, his work, his obsession have finally become synchronous.

He is insane, yes, but not confused. He thinks with the perfect clarity of the true believer, and in this case his belief is in himself and his statement. His desire is to provoke an army mutiny that will overthrow democracy and other Western infections, and restore the supreme power of the emperor. Not even the emperor agrees with him, but such is Mishima's overwhelming charisma that his army recruits want to join him in death.

Schrader contrasts this adult martinet with the shy sissy whose grandmother warned him he would get sick if he went outside. As a boy, Mishima was afflicted with a paralyzing stutter, was weakly, was the target of bullies. The film's biographical sequences show him being advised by a friend who limps to exploit his own disability as a way of making himself attractive to women. Eventually these lessons take a turn: Mishima becomes a muscular bodybuilder, a paragon of surface masculinity, to attract men-not so much as his lovers but as his followers or slaves. Their worship validates his supremacy and denies his deep-seated feelings of inferiority.

These scenes from his life find mirrors in the sequences inspired by three of his novels, Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko's House, and Runaway Horses. These scenes, shot on a sound stage at Tokyo's Toho Studios, are remarkably stylized, and filmed in rich basic colors. The production design is by Eiko Ishioka, who was honored at Cannes for her work on this film, won an Oscar for Coppola's Dracula, designed M. Butterfly on Broadway and the Varakai production for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, and created the extraordinary visuals for Tarsem Singh's The Cell (zooz).

Temple of the Golden Pavilion involves a young monk at an ancient temple who is overcome by its beauty and burns it down. The story is inspired by actual events in 1950. Ishioka's sets of dazzling red and gold include collapsing walls that open before the monk vagina-like. Kyoko's House is based on a 1959 novel that turned out to be prophetically autobiographical. Its hero, a bodybuilding boxer, commits suicide with his lover. Runaway Horses is about a young man in the early 193os who leads a plot to assassinate government figures and restore the emperor. In one way or another, all three prefigure events in Mishima's life; the first, about the destruction of beauty, connects with his belief that a man should grow steadily more beautiful until the age of forty, when he has reached perfection and should die before decay sets in.

The title character is played as an adult by Ken Ogata (Vengeance Is Mine, The Pillow Book), who portrays the character without signaling or spin; his Mishima is self-contained, reticent, confident. Only in a voiceover does he betray his uncertainties. What we see in the "present" is essentially the persona he so elaborately created, and it is easy to think of Norman Mailer stepping into the boxing ring, running for office, head-butting Gore Vidal, stabbing a wife. The public actions somehow lend weight to the writing.