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*This post discusses key plot details of No Country for Old Men and Eureka*
There�s a classic episode of The Simpsons(from probably fifteen or so years ago, back when Clinton was in office and The Simpsons was still funny) that finds Lisa at a club listening to a jazz performance. The man sitting next to her says, apropos the performance, �Sounds like she�s hitting a baby with a cat.� Lisa responds sententiously, �You have to listen to the notes she�s notplaying.� To which the man responds, �I could do that at home.�
So he�s not buying in, but Lisa raises a question that can be applied to all artistic media, namely, �How is the work of art impacted by the things left out?� And not all things, mind you�if there is an infinity of things, then all art works leave out an infinite number of them�but rather those things that are conspicuous by their absence. For instance, so many of the films of Yasujiro Ozu revolve around getting married, but in all the Ozu movies I�ve seen, I�ve never seen an actual depiction of a wedding. Or (spoiler alert), look at the Coens� adaptation of No Country For Old Men, which pissed off almost everybody by ending the game of cat-and-mouse between Anton Chigurh and Llewellyn Moss by killing Moss off-screen. The Coens, in their defense, were just following their source material; Cormac McCarthy before them had decided to dispatch Moss off-screen (or off-page?) and presents the death to us only when Sheriff Bell comes upon it. Now, the Coens wisely end their film shortly after the killing of Moss, but McCarthy�s book continues on far longer than it should and gets us involved in some of Bell�s WWII flashbacks (it would seem that McCarthy did not understand what kind of genre he was writing in; you could argue that he was trying to �subvert� genre conventions, but if that�s case, it was still ineffective).
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| La la la la, what? Oh, Moss is dead now, apparently. |
I don�t pretend to have a good answer for why McCarthy and the Coens chose to kill Moss off-screen, but I think I can shed a little more light on another dramatic cinematic elision, that which occurs in Shinji Aoyama�s masterpiece, Eureka (2000). Filmed in a hazy no-man�s land between black-and-white and sepia and clocking in at about three and a half hours long, Eureka�s premise is this: A lunatic hijacks a bus (he bus-jacks it?) and kills everyone on board except for the driver and two children, a brother in his mid teens and his sister, who�s maybe 12 (?). The lunatic is killed by police and the rest of the film follows the efforts of the bus driver and the children to continue living despite the horrors that they�ve witnessed.
Now, as the bus-jacking is the main engine of the plot, one might expect Aoyama to film the event in some detail; this event is important, after all, and a bus-jacking also has great dramatic potential (see Jose Padilha�s heartbreaking 2002 documentary, Bus 174). But Aoyama doesn�t do this.
The film opens with the brother and sister waiting for the bus. They board it and take a seat. The bus driver seems friendly, which is no surprise, because he�s played by the impossible-to-dislike Koji Yakusho (perhaps you�ve seen him in every Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, or in Takashi Miike�s 13 Assassins, or in a woefully misguided American crossover effort like Memoirs of a Geisha). For the next few minutes we follow the bus as it goes on what we can assume are its usual rounds. Passengers get on and off.
Then there�s an abrupt cut and we only have a few seconds to take in the sight of the bus in an empty parking lot, and a man running away from it, and someone shooting that man in the back. He goes down and we see several other crumpled bodies scattered around the bus. We realize that we�re being plunged into the bus-jacking in media res. Everything leading up to this moment, between the kids sitting placidly on the bus and this hostage getting killed, is left to the viewers� imagination. Aoyama has not considered it necessary to show us the bus-jacker boarding the bus, or declaring himself to be armed and crazy (which we assume he must have done at some point); we don�t know how the bus ended up in the parking lot; did the bus-jacker want to go there for some specific reason? Or did he just want a place to park the bus so that he could have himself a stationary hostage situation? Perhaps most chilling is that we don�t know exactly how the bodies of the dead passengers came to be scattered around the bus, but the flight of the passenger whom we see getting shot would seem to indicate that the bus-jacker must have told individual hostages to run and then shot them at his leisure, and we can imaginethe horror of this, and this leads me to a few conclusions.
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| Our protagonists, later in the film, attempting to overcome their trauma by revisiting the scene of the killings. |
First off, an implied horror is often more frightening than one made visible; this hearkens back to H. P. Lovecraft, who knew that it was better to hint at monsters than to actually describe them. It�s quite possible that the suggestionof the terrors to which the bus-jacker subjected his hostages before the camera started rolling again is more frightening than actually showing them. Second, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, I think we have a question of taste, or at least of tone; all the bus-jacking business is over with in about fifteen minutes, leaving about three and a half hours to chart the emotional struggles of the film�s protagonists. Aoyama has set out to make a psychologicalfilm, not a horror movie or an action movie. The viewer does not need to �luxuriate� in atrocities unflinchingly filmed in order to feel their impact. Eurekais a film of subtlety and contemplation, and arterial spray would have gotten in the way of that.
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| A sepia-tinted shot. Note the lack of blood and gore. |
Now don�t get me wrong, I love a good cinematic bloodbath as much as the next blogger. I believe I have previously quoted Jean-Luc Godard, who, when asked why there was so much blood in his movies, responded, �It�s not blood. It�s red.� Bright red splashes of blood can be aesthetically pleasing and emotionally affecting, but they must be deployed with care. I suspect if Sion Sono (Suicide Club, Cold Fish) were to direct a movie like Eureka, he would have taken a different approach, but there�s a place for everyone in the realm of cinema (and actually, if we�re talking about Japanese movies about dealing with terrible trauma, I believe Sion Sono just finished making the first film of a projected trilogy that deals with the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown. The film is called Himizu, and I have no idea if it�s any good or not�I suspect it is, as Sono has a good track record�and I might have to wait a few years to see it�what with the philistinism and cold mercenary capitalism of the American film distribution business�but when it makes its way to my computer, you, the loyal blog reader, can look forward to an exciting blog post comparing Himizuand Eureka.)
So there�s just one example of the what and wherefore of really conspicuous cinematic elision. Aoyama certainly had his reasons, and Eurekais a masterly film which I recommend enthusiastically to anyone who can manage to snag a copy. I got mine used on Amazon; imagine my delight when it played properly, and the anguish I would have felt had I gotten three hours into it and had it freeze up on me. There is a spectrum of horror, and finding yourself partway through a rare DVD and abruptly discovering that it will go no further must rank somewhere between a bus-jacking massacre and a vicious paper cut.
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Ok, and now, having hopefully mastered the technology, here is the trailer for Eureka, embedded right in the blog post!
