Anjin.
Pilot.
I sat down to watch a pilot about Goody Three-Shoes Galadriel and the Rings of
Something or Other, Does it Truly Matter? Just to refresh your memory…
*
Galadriel returns home and
has to attend a town council meeting to receive some kind of STAR WARS medal. These town council
meetings are always the fucking same. The rebellious character is on to
something, but the elders don’t want her interfering. So she’s dragged back
from the latest scraped knee incident to be given a final warning about not
doing the thing.
At which point, she proceeds to fuck off and
she does the thing she was not meant to be doing – leading to adventure. Except
for that very last part. Her reward at the meeting is to sail to Elf Heaven on
a boat that is so fucking viciously green-screened that I cannot say the
visuals were the best thing about this pilot episode.
*
My conclusion? Clearly, the
best thing about Galadriel’s pilot episode was the ending. In the sense that
the torture finally ended.
But The
Rings of Pah! reminded me of SHŌGUN
in one respect. Town council meetings. Except…these really are council
meetings, and they all have meaning. It is a time of unease in Japan. The old SHŌGUN
appointed a council of five regents to watch over his son until that young boy
grows old enough to rule.
Then the old guy died. And that’s when the
differences of opinion came in.
Five
friendly lords. Four lords are allied against one. You may have seen Hiroyuki
Sanada in a John Wick movie or an
Edward Zwick production of The Last
Samurai. The man has an impressive list of credits to his name.
But this. This is his time. And this is his
role. It helps that he’s a producer on the show. Often you are told a character
is a master strategist. And you know this on the basis that you’ve just been
told the character is a master strategist. Not here.
Hiroyuki Sanada plays Tokugawa
Toranaga, the lord who is given the shortest and shittiest end of the stick in
these council meetings. You see, you are shown, in every scene he occupies that this character truly is a master
strategist. Every furrow of the brow, each pause in speech, the concealment of
his true plans, the shifting of his schemes to take account of outrageous
swings in fortune…
There’s lot of acting involved in SHOWING
you that he’s a master strategist. And we need more television along the same
lines. All I learned about Galadriel in that shit-fest of a travesty of a TV
show was that…she’s blonde.
Mm.
James Clavell was a writer who worked in
movies. Somehow, he ended up directing To
Sir, with Love. Yes, that’s a film about an outsider. The movie was a
box-office hit. It helped that he was a producer on the film. You’ll find his
writing spread across cinema. He has an impressive list of credits to his name.
Being taken prisoner in World War Two made Clavell
as a writer. The Japanese put him in Changi in Singapore. His wartime book was King Rat. From there, in leaps and
bounds, he worked his way up to writing SHŌGUN.
Clavell wasn’t the first to take history and
fictionalise it into a page-turner. The master strategist Toranaga is a
thinly-veiled fictional copy of Tokugawa. But you can send your fictional
fellow on different paths. You do this to keep a rein on pacing and the
absurdity of life.
History takes bizarre turns at times, and
often outdoes fiction. Clavell worked on the script for The Great Escape – based on the book by Paul Brickhill. Brickhill’s
account of a mass escape-attempt from Stalag Luft III was toned down for the
movie version.
Partly, that’s about pacing and turning in a film
that isn’t as long as World War Two. Many of the escape efforts defy belief and
would come across as ridiculous if you piled them on, one after the other.
If you write a historical novel, you do so
under the confines of history. You must colour your picture within the lines.
But if you change the names to protect your own narrative, history becomes a
broader canvas, and you throw buckets of paint at the damned thing.
Did you write a history book at that point?
No. Did you create a page-turner? Clavell wrote a page-turner. He involved one
William Adams, a ship’s pilot who arrived in Japan in 1600. But he’s John
Blackthorne in the book.
Prison obviously shaped Clavell’s whole life
when World War Two ended. Watching the pilot episode of SHŌGUN, you see John Blackthorne spend a lot of time as a prisoner
of the Japanese. There’s no getting away from that.
You’d think this would crush the narrative.
No. It opens the story up. You get more scenes of interest from a character who
is imprisoned than you view in the whole of that misbegotten pilot episode for Galadriel and the Masters of the Universe. Or
whatever it is called. Amazon and the
Folly of Bezos.
Goody Three-Shoes spends an episode walking
around Middle-Class Earth twiddling her fucking thumbs. Over in SHŌGUN, John Blackthorne, a man with the
occupation of twiddling his thumbs while held prisoner, does more.
Everything in the sub-Tolkien parody is so
fucking earnest. Meanwhile, in Japan, practically every second character is a
barbarian or calls another character a barbarian. I watched a shower of
bastards being a shower of bastards to each other.
And there was more sympathy for these
rascals, rogues, rapscallions, and ruffians than there was for all the
nice/twee characters across the way in Tolkien-ish land. Spoiler alert. One
character has a man cooked in a big metal pot. We have sympathy for this swine
when he almost dies in the sea.
Not by drowning. He’s going to commit ritual
suicide before that happens. Gchaladriel went about being nice and I didn’t
care. (People became unaccountably Welsh when they uttered her name, hence the
extra letters.)
In Japan, a bunch of bastards thrived.
Everyone had an agenda, and that agenda was often violent and bloody. The
English pilot? Bastard. All the Portuguese? Utter shower of bastards. The four Japanese
lords, intent on protecting the heir – but secretly plotting to kill him and
each other – total bastards. Toranaga – under sentence of death from the start
of the show – has to be a bastard in order to survive.
His main rival, Ishido, is a complete and
utter bastard who wants to kill everyone on the council. And then he wants to
find more people to kill so he can die gloriously in a legendary battle. We
even have sympathy for him.
No sympathy for Gchchchchaladriel. Even less
for the photocopied Indiana Jones who lumbered through a non-movie. These
things were difficult to watch. SHŌGUN
was easy to drink in.
A character speaks out of turn at the
council meeting. Well, that’s it for him. He must go off and commit ritual
suicide. Oh, and his baby must die with him. Surely his lord will be merciful?!
Toranaga allows the man’s wife to live. That’s it. No last-second rescue for a
loyal follower who let his emotions get the better of him, almost creating a
massacre right there in the room.
Why does it work? The stakes are
all-consuming and they are explained to us. Then they increase vastly at every
turn. Is it a perfect TV show? Perhaps it’s asking too much that the characters
speak in their own languages…
There’s a little bit of The Great Escape here. The movie convention for the years 1939-1945
is that all the actors speak the same language for the benefit of the audience
in that country. The Great Escape is
in English for the English-speaking market. But you know everyone in the movie
speaks German for the German market.
Here, with SHŌGUN, the Japanese characters speak Japanese with subtitles. John
Blackthorne “speaks Portuguese” to the Portuguese bastards who do their
damnedest to have him hanged or crucified when they translate from Portuguese
to Japanese. But for the English-speaking audience the “Portuguese” speech is all
in English.
I think they could have gone full subtitle
with this show. Throw in all the languages with all the subtitles. It’s a
weak mark against a production with so many strong points, and I let it pass
without real complaint.
Speaking of strong points. The production
has such a great level of detail to the costumes that the costumes bleed
character. I love the acting, particularly across the language barrier. It’s
great. Some of these bastards truly are dressed like a shower of bastards. And
others, perhaps even bigger bastards, are resplendent in the finery of
peacocks.
I understand there’s a degree of technical
wizardry involved in portraying scenes. John Blackthorne at the tiller of a
ship in raging weather simply can’t have been filmed in a genuine storm. But
the scenes at sea look as good as they can look. You are right there with the
crew as water dominates the deck.
Contrast that with the choir of heavenly
angels at sea in Middle-Class Earth. I watched two pilot episodes. One about an
elf named Blah-Meh of the Beige.
Barely a character. I’m having trouble spelling Galadriel. The other pilot was about a pilot. A bastard. Prisoner.
Liar. Pirate. Heathen. A character we could care about.
One story had no story and made me flee the
series in search of sanity. The other story made me want to tune in for more.
Which I did. The pilot episode of SHŌGUN
was the least-impressive episode of the series. Stakes increased in episode
two. No matter the awful things characters did, I’m guessing you’d be cheering
them on at that finish to episode three. At least, in that show, the characters
dive into the sea for a reason.
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