glistening too brightly: yojimbo, sanjuro, and the consequences of violence
I originally wrote this essay in 2018, and it's probably the only essay I posted on Medium that I've ever really wanted to repost somewhere, so here we are. Please enjoy the words of past me.
"I hesitate to say this after you so kindly saved us, but killing people is a bad habit. You glisten too brightly, like a drawn sword. You’re like a sword without a sheath. You cut well, but the best sword is kept in its sheath."
I want you to picture an action sequence from any given Avengers movie you can think of. The camera is probably focused on our protagonist, likely from a bit below to make them appear larger than life. There are rapid cuts, big explosions, and lots of nameless enemies appearing from out of frame only to immediately be punched and sent flying back out of frame. It’s big and expensive and exciting. Now: how many people died in that action sequence? Does the camera linger on their deaths, or does it linger on the cool-looking property destruction that these superhuman behemoths left in their wake?
Action sequences in modern cinema (or literature, or video games, or tabletop roleplaying games) seldom care about the purpose or consequences of violence. They are there to entertain, and, sure, they frequently do a good job of it. But I think we can do a better job, both as creators and consumers, of respecting the fact that violence has very real and frequently quite dire consequences. And for examples, you’ll seldom find better than the samurai duology by Akira Kurosawa, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. It’s instructive to see how these films handle violence.
We’ll start with Yojimbo, the first film in the duology, and far and away the bloodier of the two. It opens with a wandering samurai who gives his name as Sanjuro entering a small town that has been torn apart by gang warfare. At first he surveys this place with disgust, but as he stops by the local inn--kept by Gonji, who doesn’t even bother to keep the rice hot because no one comes in to eat anymore--he learns about the town and makes a decision. He’s a man who’s good at killing, and this is a town full of people who need killing. He might as well stick around and earn a few ryo. He decides to accomplish this by tricking the two factions into killing each other.
He meets setbacks along the way to achieving this goal, but everything is going well until he finds someone in this town who is not completely irredeemable (besides his pal Gonji). A man from the village has lost his wife and his house to gambling debts; she’s now being kept prisoner by one of the factions. Despite his deepest desires to be an amoral tough guy, Sanjuro isn’t one to let such injustices lie, so he sets them free. Unfortunately, no good deed goes unpunished, especially in this garbage town. Sanjuro is subsequently captured and beaten within an inch of his life.
The violence in town, meanwhile, has, thanks to our hero’s machinations, escalated from occasional scraps to open warfare. Buildings being burned down, bodies in the streets--somehow the town has managed to get even worse. When Sanjuro finally manages to escape, it’s the last straw. One of the gangs burns down the home of the other, killing everyone inside. And when Sanjuro finally recovers (slowly, agonizingly--he could barely even crawl when he got himself free) he faces down with them and kills the rest of them off. Nearly everyone we have seen on screen at this point is now dead. Sanjuro looks at the desolation, comments that at least it’ll be quiet in this town now, and wanders off.
Clearly, the entirety of Yojimbo is steeped in violence, but despite that, there are surprisingly few action sequences, and each of those sequences is short and has a distinct purpose. The first time Sanjuro draws his sword, he’s demonstrating his prowess to one of the factions as the first move in the chess game he’s playing to get them to destroy each other. We never see fighting just for the sake of fighting. Even when the gang violence has reached its apex, Kurosawa prefers to show the consequences of the violence rather than the violence itself: bodies in the streets, buildings burning, the sake brewer’s barrels spilling out their contents onto the soil. He does show us the massacre at the end, but only to underscore how bloody and pointless this all is.
Sanjuro starts this movie with the smug certainty that he is clever enough and skilled enough that he can solve this town’s problems. He is wrong on both counts. That is, you could probably make the argument that he leaves the town better than he found it, but it wouldn’t be very compelling; and in the end, no matter how clever he is, he ends up getting captured. And it’s not just a minor inconvenience: he is beaten repeatedly and mercilessly. The film goes out of its way to make sure we know that he is in about as much pain as it is possible to be in while still drawing breath.
So, the path he’s chosen nearly kills him, nearly kills his pal Gonji, and destroys a town that was already in pretty dire straits. Most of the violence we see makes things unequivocally worse. But you could be forgiven for missing the thesis that violence is a poor solution to your problems--Sanjuro is theoretically the good guy here, after all, and most of these deaths are either directly or indirectly his responsibility. But while this story is done, the character’s story is not.
Sanjuro is interesting in how unlike its predecessor it is. While Yojimbo’s cast is primarily criminals and ruffians, each more vile and irredeemable than the last, most of the cast of Sanjuro are samurai or members of the aristocracy. They are clean and polite servants of their clan. While the tone of Yojimbo is dark (if still darkly humorous), Sanjuro is lighter. The darkness is still there, but there’s a comic veneer concealing it at first glance.
Sanjuro opens with a cast of nine samurai meeting in a shrine outside of town. They have uncovered evidence of corruption within the clan, and they have decided that the best way to deal with it is to go to the chamberlain and the superintendent and tell them about it and ask them to deal with it immediately. The superintendent, Kikui, is the source of the corruption, and has told them to meet at this shrine so that he can kill them off.
Fortunately for them, Sanjuro is sleeping in the back, and he spots the trap early enough that he can hide the lot of them. So when Kikui’s men arrive to kill or capture the samurai, they find only Sanjuro, grumpy that they woke him from his sleep. He makes a show of his skill to drive them off, winning the admiration of Muroto, Kikui’s chief enforcer.
Most of the rest of the film is Sanjuro trying to convince his new friends not to just draw their swords and charge headlong into any given situation, despite their constant desire to do so. Despite their bumbling nearly ruining everything on several occasions, in the end he manages to trick Kikui and Muroto into sending their army away so that he and his friends can rescue the chamberlain and put things right again in the town.
Early on, shortly after our hero and his friends have rescued the chamberlain’s wife, she gives Sanjuro a piercing look and tells him that he glistens too brightly, like a sword that won’t stay in its sheath. And it’s clear, from his reaction, that he knows she’s right. Throughout the film she requests that he avoid excessive violence, and throughout the film he seems to be trying to avoid violence where possible. He frequently fails--violence is still all he knows--but whereas in Yojimbo he seemed to find it all amusing, now he clearly regrets every time he needs to kill someone else.
Most of Sanjuro is lighthearted, especially compared with its predecessor, which makes the final sequence all the more striking. After achieving victory, freeing the chamberlain, and effectively rooting out the corruption in the clan, Sanjuro leaves in his old ragged kimono rather than staying and enjoying the victory celebration. His nine companions find him on the road, preparing to have a duel with Muroto--the only character in the film presented as his equal in terms of skill and intellect.
Sanjuro tries to talk Muroto out of it, but Muroto has been tricked and humiliated. His honor demands a duel. So the two stand there in uncomfortable stillness, staring each other down, for nearly thirty seconds before they both draw their blades. In that single motion, Sanjuro wins the duel, cutting Muroto open with an impressive gush of blood--the only blood we see all film. And as our hero stands there, disgusted with himself, one of his samurai companions steps forward. “That was brilliant,” he says.
He chastises them--this wasn’t brilliant, it was wasteful. It was senseless. Just like the chamberlain’s wife said: “the best sword is kept in its sheath.” He warns them to stay in theirs, orders them not to follow, and wanders off once again, leaving his companions bowing before his mastery. Because they still don’t get it. This isn’t cool, or brilliant, or admirable. It’s another pointless death to add to a string of deaths that, had a group of nine young men been willing to sit patiently and not solve their problems with impulsive violence, could have been avoided altogether.
I think it’s significant that Sanjuro’s reaction to killing his rival is disgust and anger, not sorrow. We’re not supposed to feel sorry for him. After a movie with no blood whatsoever, the fountain of blood at the conclusion of the duel is shocking and uncomfortable. When he turns and condemns his companions for telling him how cool that was, he’s also condemning us.
There’s a moment that’s become sort of stock in the more serious variety of action and adventure films, where one of the characters, usually the protagonist, laments how sad it is that they’ve lost so much, that so many people have had to die, et cetera, et cetera. It’s meant to add a layer of depth to it, to make it feel like the filmmakers understand that violence is serious and has consequences, but it’s usually undermined by the fact that when an action sequence is going on, modern film spends most of its energy trying to make it look cool as hell. That’s what we’re here for, right?
In both Yojimbo and Sanjuro, the action sequences are quite brief. When there is extended violence, it’s never to showcase how cool Sanjuro is, but to showcase how brutal and unpleasant violence is. So when the duology ends with the protagonist talking about how senseless this is, it works. Everything about these movies, from the story to the cinematography, has been telling us this from the very beginning.
Stories about violent conflict are, for good or ill, a part of human culture; it’s the subject of some of our earliest stories. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — I enjoy a good fable about good triumphing over evil as much as the next human — but it is important that we be thoughtful about the violence we include in our stories. Yojimbo and Sanjuro both showcase how that thoughtfulness can manifest, by subverting our expectations and encouraging us to think about more than just the entertainment value of our action sequences.
They also show us that a meditation on the nature and consequences of violence needn’t be a somber affair. There’s room for that, too, but comic moments can be just as effective, if not more so: comedy is, after all, based on subverting expectations and breaking taboos, and a well-timed comic barb can linger in the psyche a lot longer than an entire Shakespearean tragedy.
So the next time you’re watching an action sequence (or writing or animating or directing one, or whatever), stop and think about it. Why is it happening? Is it there just to entertain? Are the characters fighting for a clear reason? Are there visible consequences? What are they? Is the focus on making sure the heroes look as cool as possible? The answers to these questions tell us a lot about a story, which is why, I think, Kurosawa puts so much thought and intention into each one.