On the Noble Art of Not Giving a Fuck: Kurt Cobain, Tadanobu Asano, and the Stoic Philosophy

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Tadanobu Asano in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Invisible Waves, discussed below.

What�s the deal with the girl in Nirvana�s �You Know You�re Right?� You know, the one in the second verse, who gets described thusly: �Let�s talk about someone else, / Steaming soup against her mouth [?], / Nothing really bothers her, / She just wants to love herself.� Now, the bit about the soup aside (and maybe I�m mishearing it and it�s something that makes more sense), I�ve always been struck by the apparent simplicity of the girl whom nothing really bothers.  She just wants to love herself.  Her demands are simple.  She sounds like the type who doesn�t give a fuck.  Kurt Cobain, by contrast, gave an abundant fuck, and that�s probably what killed him.

The Stoic philosophy of the Romans teaches that�much as in Buddhism�suffering is an unavoidable part of life.  Now, you can�t necessarily control or prevent suffering, but you can (theoretically) control your reaction to it.  As the wise woman says to Ashitaka at the beginning of Princess Mononoke: �You can�t escape your fate, but you can rise to meet it.� And the Stoic method of rising to meet one�s fate was to cultivate an active dispassion and emotional neutrality.  Your spouse died? It is in the nature of spouses to die.  Can�t be helped.  Your crops failed?  Well, that�s just a fact.  Why get upset about it? You�ll be dead eventually anyway, and the dead don�t suffer.  The Emperor has ordered you to commit suicide?  That�s what emperors do.

Stoicism doesn�t necessarily tell you to stop engaging with the world, it merely tells you to act without worrying about the outcome.  This is the gist of Krishna�s counsel to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. 

Krishna and Arjuna.

This is also the epitome of the samurai ethos: it�s the sincerity of the act that counts; the outcome is irrelevant.  So if you�re Yukio Mishima, and you�re going to kidnap a general and try to instigate a coup in 1970�s Japan, it doesn�t matter if this is an absurd proposition.  The key is that you acted, and if the mission fails, you can content yourself with seppuku.

Pen-ek Ratanaruang�s 2005 film Invisible Waves was just added to Netflix�s streaming service.  I�d wanted to see it for years, ever since I first saw Pen-ek�s Last Life in the Universe back in 2008.  Both films feature the coolly elegant cinematography of Christopher Doyle (who�s done the cinematography for every Wong Kar-wai movie since 1990�s Days of Being Wild) and wonderfully understated performances by Tadanobu Asano (my favorite contemporary Japanese actor).  In Invisible Waves, Asano plays an expatriate hitman on the run after killing his boss�s wife.  The film takes him from Macao to Hong Kong to Phuket and then back to Hong Kong again, and as his life quietly unravels, he never loses his cool.  And it�s not that he�s apathetic about the outcome of the situation.  He clearly wants to live; but if he�s going to suffer, well, that�s going to happen, and if he�s going to die, well, that�s also going to happen.  He doesn�t get upset about things if it serves no practical purpose to do so.  If only we could all face life with the equanimity of Tadanobu Asano�s affectless hitman.