The Profound Desires of the Gods

Because Shohei Imamura's epic film, The Profound Desires of the Gods (1968), is, at least in part, a sprawling family chronicle, the viewer's first impulse is to chart the lineage of the people shown in the film.  This turns out to be a daunting objective and one that, I'm afraid, that I probably haven't properly achieved.  But, since understanding the picture involves understanding who is related to whom, I'll start with that exercise.  Imamura, periodically, puts his lurid melodrama on pause to try to unsort the Futori clan family tree -- but these efforts are, often, too little and too late.  Part of the narrative strategy of the film is reflected in its strangely occluded and constricted use of the extreme wide-screen Technicolor format in which the film is shot.  Imamura intentionally blocks his images, hiding crucial aspects of what we are supposed to be seeing.  This pictorial strategy is mirrored by the filmmaker's approach to narrative -- we only gradually tease out of the bizarre occurrences that the film shows something approaching a narrative.  Kagura, the island in the Okinawan archipelago, where the action is set is not easy to reach.  (In one scene, we see a fat pig fall off a skiff bound for the island and, then, immediately succumb to the sharks patrolling the reefs around the atoll.  When the engineer arrives in the island's suffocating heat, the first thing he does is to vomit -- it was a rough ride over the sea to Kagura.)  So, an understanding of the film's plot and the relationship between its principal characters is also intentionally confounded -- the pictures hide things, although sometimes in plain sight; simultaneously the story-line is concealed, digressive, often obscured by anthropological episodes.  My task in this note is to make it easier for you to watch this film -- a monument in Japanese cinema.  And, so, I start with the gens around which the story (or stories) revolve, the Futori clan.

Granddad in the Futori clan is a bearded elder.  If he has a name other than "Dad" or "Granddad", we don't know it.  Futori seems to have had two children, a brother and sister named respectively Nekichi and Uma.  Incest, as they say, runs in the family.  Nekichi is alleged to have had sex with his sister Uma, although it's unclear whether the act was consummated or merely intensely desired (at least, until the film's climax).  Granddad has also raped Uma or, possibly, a daughter who is not in the film named Ushi -- this is unclear to me.  The product of granddad's incest (with either his daughter Ushi or Uma) is Toriko.  Toriko is like Daisy Mae in the old Al Capp comics -- she's a nubile, mentally retarded sexpot who spends her time trying to seduce everyone in the movie.  (Her come-on line is that "my ear is itching", something that she wails while wrapping her legs around the men who try to assist her).  Toriko, accordingly, is Nekichi's sister and Granddad's daughter.  Nekichi was in the war with his buddy, Ryu, sometimes called Mr. Ryugen.  This man is the island's chief politician, a smarmy Jaycee-style  booster, who is married to Uma (Nekichi's sister and would-be mistress).  Ryu is nouveau riche in the island's economy.  A century before the action shown in the film -- which is contemporary to the movie's release (we hear planes flying over Kagura bound for Vietnam) -- Ryu's family were sugar plantation slaves.  The island was converted, sacriligiously from its ancient rice-based economy to producing sugar.  This dislocation has had a profound impact on the island's fragile economy.  The production of sugar cane requires lots of water and fresh-water is one of the things the isolated atoll-island lacks.  (At one point, Ryu shows shackles that were worn by the unfortunate forebears in his family -- the island seems to have been run once as a kind of concentration camp, a place similar to the hell depicted in Sansho the Bailiff, Mizoguchi's masterpiece.)  By 1968, Ryu's family, who are mercantile and a bit like the Snopes in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county, has come to prominence, primarily because of a strategic alliance with island's priestly caste represented by the decrepit and in-bred Futori's -- the alliance arises from Ryu's marriage to Uma, a noro, that is, shamaness who channels the island's ancient Shinto kami (or gods) as well as the ghosts haunting the place.  Uma, notwithstanding her sacred role, is plump and cheerfully lecherous -- Ryu has to torture her periodically to get her to comply with his wishes.  It's suggested that she "prophecies" on order for the purpose of communicating Mr. Ryu's political demands to the others on the island.  We see Ryu torturing her a couple times, Imamura's nod to the pornographic "pink" (S & M) movies apparently much beloved by the Japanese public.  (This raises another difficulty with this film -- in Japanese melodrama, almost all the sex looks like rape:  it's unclear whether the rape is intended to be painful or, in fact, something that is mutually enjoyed by both participants.  Sex on the island involves a great amount of pinching and biting as well as lots of shrieking and grunting. In light of American sexual mores, particularly those existing today, the "consensual" torture rapes in the film will, probably, be even more disqualifying to audience enjoyment than the pervasive incest -- which, often, looks like "consensual" rape as well.)  Nekichi, immediately after returning from the war, is alleged to have had sex with his sister, Uma, the island's chief Noro and his war buddy, Ryu's wife.  But Nekichi has also been poaching fish with dynamite, something that is taboo, and has committed several other infractions as well.  As retribution for his bad acts, the gods have sent a tsunami, as well as a malaria plague.  The tsunami has hefted a huge boulder across a stream or fresh-water spring, thereby, further diminishing the island's water supply.  Nekichi seems to be the scape-goat for all the island's sins (it seems that others, for instance, have been poaching fish with dynamite) and he's blamed for everything that has gone wrong on the island, which is, of course, a lot.  His father, the elder of the Futori clan, accordingly has chained him next to the huge, three-story boulder cast onto the island by the tsunami.  He's supposed to be excavating around the base of the giant rock for the purpose of undermining it and freeing the water supply that it impounds.  Nekichi has been doing this for 20 years, although he seems to have the key to his ankle-chain and spends nights "night-crawling"-- a euphemism for creeping around at night and raping the local girls.  (He also periodically goes out to the atoll's reef and dynamites fish.)  The island's ecology is collapsing and, it seems, everyone is happy to blame Nekichi for these problems -- probably, as a way of avoiding a sense of their own complicity in the environmental calamity.  Because of the Futori clans' crimes, they have also been forbidden to "go to sea" -- that is, they are not allowed to fish or visit the other desert islands nearby.  Into this witch's brew of incest and superstition comes an outsider, Mr. Shimajiri (although he is generally referred to as the "Engineer").  The Engineer is employed by the sugar mill company and he's supposed to survey the island and find water so that the sugar processing can continue.  The Engineer enlists the aid of an earnest young man named Kametano.  Kametano is Nekichi's son and the elder Futori's grandson -- I never figured out who his mother was.  Kametano represents the up-and-coming modernizing young people on the island.  Later, the engineer falls in love with Toriko, the half-retarded Daisie Mae nymphomaniac and has a torrid affair with her.

All of this could be made fairly clear if Imamura had used the Engineer's character as a way to introduce us to the island's denizens.  But Imamura rejects this obvious narrative strategy:  the stranger coming to town and showing us what the people are like in that town when he interacts with them.  Rather, the film begins in media res as it were with melodrama occurring among the Futori clan; the engineer arrives about a half-hour into the 172 minute film.   Indeed, the narrative is often obscured by digressions and hard to follow -- this seems to be an intentional strategy on Imamura's part.  There is a picturesque trip to a nearby bird island led by Nekichi who, despite being chained to the rock, seems generally free to go wherever he wants so long as he doesn't flaunt his freedom.  The Engineer gets a letter in which her wife admits to adultery -- everyone on the island seems to read the letter before it is delivered to the Engineer.  There is a complex plot involving a tract of woods, trees called the Otoki forest that has been preserved because it is taboo.  The Engineer tries to drill a well in the Otoki forest, a task that Nekichi, apparently, sabotages.  Toriko gets pregnant by the Engineer -- her kin try to transport her to the mainland for an abortion but she escapes and swims the gauntlet of sharks back to the island.  Kametano, then, tries to persuade her to jump off the cliff and drown herself in the sea -- this cliff was instrumental in the past as a means of "population control", the island's tenuous resources inadequate if the atoll is too populous.  (There's also a meadow into which everyone had a cram themselves -- those that didn't fit were butchered.)  Toriko refuses to jump off the cliff, although I'm not quite sure what becomes of her.  In a coda to the narrative, five years after the main action, she appears as a ghost.  Ultimately, two strands of the complex narrative collide --  Nechiki dislodges the rock and installs a rice-paddy and the natives of the island perform an elaborate festival called the Dongama celebration:  the festival involves masked oarsmen, much drinking and being beaten with bamboo rods, and huge fetish figures simulating copulation.  Uma, who seems to have lost her gift of prophecy, has sex with the newly liberated Nekichi (or is raped by him -- the level of consent is always problematic) and the two of them flee from Kagura to the Western God's Island, a sort of paradise.  The aggrieved natives, led by the cuckolded Mr. Ryu, don their masks, pursue the lovers, and beat Nekichi to death.  Uma, although left to die tied to the red mask of the sabani (little skiff), becomes a goddess.  Five years later, the entire island has been deforested and reduced to a massive sugar plantation.  Planes now can land on the island and it has been promoted as a tourism destination.  The Engineer returns with his wife.  The island's minstrel, a legless man who sings ballads about Kagura's mythical past, is still pushed around on a cart by one of the women -- but she is now selling icy coca-colas to the tourists embarked on the island.  Kamentano, who participated in the ritualized murder of his own father, Nekichi, has come back to the island to operate a narrow-gage railroad that carries the tourists from the airport to the island's one village.  He sees the ghost of Toriko and, then, a sweeping high-angle shot shows us Uma's skiff sailing into the sunset of the Island of the Western God.

So what is this all about:  it seems pretty clear that, on one level, Imamura is proposing a giant allegory, a sort of Faerie Queen, based on Japanese history and culture.  Imamura makes this clear by starting the picture with an immense image of the red rising sun, sunrise orchestrated with a blast of wailing saxophone and cornet, an infusion of wild bebop jazz -- thereby, combining the ancient with the modern. Shinto mythology proposes that Nippon, the sacred island, was formed by the intercourse of brother and sister kami (or "divinities").  The conversion of Kagura's economy from rice to sugar suggests the depredations of modernity in Japan.  The great rock cast up by the tsunami twenty years before the onset of the movie's narrative seems to suggest World War Two -- a calamity to which the laboring Japanese people are tethered as if by chains.  (The film's soundtrack is raucous with insect and frog noises, weird snatches of bird song, and the ubiquitous clanking of Nekichi's chains).  Island people are incestuous -- they regard themselves as aristocratically isolated from the rest of the world and, therefore, necessarily, and proudly in-bred.  This was Japan's role in the world before the Meiji restoration and the island's disastrous, rapid modernization, a process that left the old Shinto gods largely abandoned except as symbols of a superstitious right-wing patriotism -- you can make the Noro prophecy any way you want.  But the film, of course, is much more than mere allegory and, probably, best read as a commentary on freedom.  People living on a tiny island are not really free and, when they attempt to act autonomously end up committing crimes.  "Only the gods are free," Nekichi says.  "When men try to act like gods they commit crimes for which they must be punished." 

The film's themes relating to freedom are realized photographically by the obstructions that confound our vision -- the wide-screen is always blocked by trees or foliage or the walls of buildings.  Imamura, like many Japanese directors, is enamored with telephoto effects -- the telephoto lens compresses space, cramming everything into the foreground, and making motion toward the camera seem illusory and futile.  The picture is directed with long takes, many of them a minute or more, sequences in which characters occupying a corner of the big, narrow screen interact -- most of the compositions are asymmetrical.  When Ryu torture-rapes Uma, the camera focuses resolutely on a florescent light on which several tiny lizards are crouching motionlessly -- we see Uma's pink flesh out-of-focus writhing below but can't really see what is happening due to the intervening light fixture. (The use of small lizards in the foreground is also characteristics of the film's repeated inserted shots -- the only close-ups in the movie -- of insects, frogs, lizards, and birds.   Editing suggests that the animals are also wide-eyed and watching Kami.  The Futori are said to be "animals" by the rest of the islanders, but they also have a uniquely close relationship to the gods.)

Imamura was given six months to shoot The Profound Desires of the Gods in Okinawa.  The film's footage was not in the can, however, until 18 months had passed.  Nikkatsu Studios, for whom Imamura made this movie, was ultimately bankrupted when the picture failed at the box-office.  It had to retreat into the production of soft-core Roman empire-themed pornography.  Imamura began his career in the early fifties as an assistant to the great Yasujiro Ozu.  Ozu, of course, embodies the serene Zen Buddhist (tea ceremony) aspect of Japanese art.  Imamura is intentionally Ozu's opposite -- "I was interested," he says, "in the relationship of the lower parts of the body to the lower parts of society."  Whereas, Ozu is fundamentally Buddhist in his approach to the world (at least, in his transcendentally calm late films), Imamura embodies Shinto aesthetics, an equally important, but more impenetrable aspect of the Japanese sensibility. 

The Profound Desires of the Gods has been very hard to see.  Although shot in the late sixties, it seems oddly timeless.  I saw  it on video tape 20 years ago and had no idea what the film was about.  The movie is screened at intervals on Turner Classic Movies, generally after midnight -- it is part of the FilmStruck repertoire of pictures sometimes shown on TMC.