Movie 666

The penultimate scene in Beat Takeshi’s Brother takes place in a lonely desert café where Yamamoto, the ostensible hero of the film played by Takeshi, sips away the seconds while waiting for a gang of mafioso to show up and issue him death.

Badfellas: Takeshi’s L.A. Yakuza

Yamamoto leaves a wad of dough on the counter with the clerk “to pay for repairs” and heads outside to face his challengers in a final showdown. The clerk, puzzled by the somber, surly Yamamoto mumbles something about “the inscrutable Japanese.”

If not the Japanese, there is certainly something inscrutable about Yamamoto and the issues portrayed in Brother, the most violent movie to appear in theaters since Michael Madsen danced with a straight razor in Reservoir Dogs. Brother is a gangster film that bears some resemblance to Goodfellas with its rise and fall of a criminal. But Brother is pure Takeshi, not Scorsese, with Takeshi’s patented style of central framing, lingering overtakes, and chiaroscuro gunplay.

As in all his films, Takeshi reveals a playful, almost childlike soul beneath the hard confines of his haunted, regimented characters. In Brother, Yamamoto arrives in America bitter and brutal. His first encounter with Omar Epps’ Denny results in Yamamoto shoving a broken bottle in Denny’s eye. Strangely enough, Yamamoto and Denny soon become intimate friends, Takeshi style - laughing while cheating one another at cards, bonding while torturing rival gangsters, and saving one another from death. These “fun” scenes are contrasted with episodes of extreme violence and ritual. A rival mobster takes a pair of broken chopsticks up the nose. A penitent cuts off his finger as a peace offering.

What is most inscrutable about Yamamoto is not that he has a soft demeanor hidden beneath his gangster identity, but rather that he is so committed to this identity with no hope of defection. Yamamoto’s fatalism is indeed difficult to understand. Although he does not reflect on his lifestyle (except perhaps in moments of silence), Yamamoto’s actions demonstrate a compulsion to live and die as a Yakuza, as if he was biologically determined with no other recourse in life.

Yamamoto’s fatalism is apparent in the earliest scenes of the film. He arrives in America with a new identity and a wad of cash after fleeing rival Yakuza in Japan. Instead of using his exile as an excuse to change his lifestyle, however, Yamamoto revives his old persona, charging into the Los Angeles criminal underworld with guns blazing. Yamamoto callously pulls his younger brother and his naive friends into a life of violent crime, leading them to inevitable doom.

Love is fleeting: Yamamoto and moll.

Yamamoto may very well illustrate some aspect of the Japanese persona, a childlike personality caught in a web of determinism and ritual. But Yamamoto also represents another type of personality, albeit more abstractly: the corporate aggressor. Yamamoto’s ruthless, callous, unstoppable demeanor coupled with the “business” side of his identity has all the trappings of a ruthless corporation.

Yamamoto consolidates power out of compulsion and deals drugs with no consideration of what he is pushing and why. In short, he has no social responsibility except to his gang. Friendships form in the cracks of the corporate lifestyle: office basketball, a coworker’s birthday party, expensive dinners. The benefits of this lifestyle are questionable at best: nice clothes, fancy food, fast cars, and not much else.

Ultimately, the massive Buddha tattoo that covers Yamamoto’s back and promises to end suffering provides ironic commentary on Yamamoto’s lifestyle. For Yamamoto, life is not about pain or pleasure or salvation of any kind. Life is about identity and compulsion. His final act is to give Denny the second chance that he himself had but did not take. Perhaps this is the meaning of the religious symbol. But one has to wonder that given the chance to escape his enemies and finance a different future, will Denny choose to liberate himself from a criminal’s fate? Such was not the case with Yamamoto, for reasons that can only be called inscrutable.

Related posts:

1. Anticlimax: Fema on Film
2. Film and the Future: Media After September 11
3. Thighs Wide Shut: Kubrick’s Final Film
4. Titanic: Judging a Film by its Context
5. Latin Dragon

Trackback Post