Culture: January 2006 Archives

Fear and Trembling is a fascinating French film spoken in Japanese and French with English subtitles. The film washes over you and the multiple languages enhance the spectacle of the story.

Sylvie Testud -- an amazing actress who performs her role speaking both fluent French and Japanese -- plays Amelie, born in Japan from Belgian parents, and she longs to work as a translator in a major Japanese trading company. After she is hired, one of the first directives from her boss' boss is to never speak Japanese while working or she'll be seen as a spy and shame the company -- so the very reason for her hiring negates her very being.

Fear and Trembling will help explain the curious disconnection from human interaction in the intricate hierarchies in Japanese culture that many Westerners find troubling. If you have ever been confused by Asian cultural norms or by personal interaction with those who were raised to value Japanese customs and found yourself wanting and lost and conflicted with the cold and rigid -- and unspoken -- rules of Japanese personal interaction, then this movie will lay it all out for you in painful detail and show you precisely why and where and how that chill was created and is sustained by the Japanese system. The fantastic Japanese actress Kaori Tsuji plays Fubuki -- a name, Amelie tells us, that translates into "snowstorm" indicating "when the beauty of the sky fell upon the beauty of the earth" -- and we watch in amazement as Fubuki, Amelie's immediate boss and intimate tormenter, threatens and punishes and force-feeds cruelty and hatred to Amelie under the necessary approval of an ancient structure of a Japanese business culture built to command obedience and to require inborn identical sameness.

We always hope Amelie and Fubuki might find a way to help each other advance instead of killing the other's career dreams -- but we realize early in the movie an immutable will can never move a mountain of molehills -- and the fact of that human tragedy is plainly spoken to Amelie by Fubuki when Amelie mentions how similar their names are: Fubuki means "snowstorm" and Amelie means "rain" -- they are both falling from the sky -- and Fubuki, with dead-cold glassy eyes, and barely able to contain her insulted fury, asks in a glossless tone, "Are you comparing yourself to me?"

The lesson of Fear and Trembling is nothing is as it seems in Japan and what you think you know you can never learn. The key to surviving in Japan is to go along, to play dumb, to obey; and if that process of spirit repression crushes individuality and honesty and intellectual creativity -- all the better.

The deaths of 12 miners in Sago, West Virginia is no less a communication tragedy than the deaths of two Jersey City Police Officers who were killed in the line of duty after plunging off the edge of an open bridge last week.

The 2006 midterm elections are our nearest hope for relief from the constrictive conservative religious agenda that is wrenching our freedoms against us and returning us to a time when things were perceived as better and morally old-fashioned. The current culture war against narrow non-believers is mainly based on fear of foreigners and the unknown -- take a look at how our national leadership treats non-Americans abroad and the disenfranchised here at home -- and we begin to see a ballistic desire to ratchet back the clock when all the dirty details of family and life and a national policy on belief were held in abeyance in the privacy of the home, but this time around the goring twist is a mandatory drum-beating government and faith-based fifing of private desires against public compliance of home matters of belief and the family. This perceived perfection in the post-war America of the 1950's tugs at people who wish to return to a simpler time when melancholia sedated the nation in cultural conflict. Family Values becomes Intolerance via Religion as advances in medicine, science and humanity are actively pressed back into the primordial muck of believing only in the power God rather than in the rational consequences of scientific discovery. The road backward is paved with falsities and "forget about its" and rights revocations and a removal of social advances of equality that sicken those who fought so hard to win them. The courts and legislatures and the Congress are all taking away these human merits in the name of a dead notion of the "original intent" of Constitutional construction and under the misguided pretense of serving our Founding Fathers and it is an ultra-religious agenda that is driving these changes as only true red believers are appointed to jobs in politics for which they are not qualified in order to press a private agenda on the public. The only way to fight this reversion and pulling back of technology and medicine is to stand up and say "Enough" and "We're not doing that anymore" in a loud and public manner with votes that actually get counted at the ballot box and then the furious embers of the middle class will once again burn blue as the extremists right here at home begin to lose their radical push-backs against the human spirit and they will begin to live in jeopardy of losing their cultural revolution against the polite and the cautious and the non-boat-rockers -- because once that strata of America stands to be heard – the conservative cultural revolutionists will die the loud and obnoxious death they deserve.