Yojimbo

Films can do a lot to focus attention on important issues, though it's common enough for audiences to watch them pretty superficially (following the Story, missing the Subtext[s]). On the face of it, Yojimbo seems to be a black comedy (and its sequel Fistful of Dollars is known primarily as Clint Eastwood's first real star vehicle), but there's more to it. As one analyst has put it, "The dreadful town in Yojimbo is contemporary Japan...". In Stephen Prince's The Warrior's Camera (PN1998.3 .K87 P75 2000) we find this:

[Kurosawa] is out to elaborate an alternate mythology, a fantastical account of how history might have, should have, turned out, if only the temporal process had included a moral component to ensure, with a kind of Malthusian logic, the destruction of evildoers once they became too numerous. Yojimbo presents the apocalypse of the business class, the incarnation of every traditionalist's most fervent dream, and ... its drama of samurai against merchant, its portrayal of a world rent by greed, controlled by thugs, but brought down by Sanjuro's sword, constructs a fable about the end of capitalism. The merchants are destroyed by a member of the class they ultimately made extinct, as Kurosawa permits himself an outcome that the actual development of events did not allow. As such, the film has a fairy tale quality, a 'once upon a time' tone, that is the source of its humor as well as its self-reflective meditations. (pp. 222-223)

So. Write a short essay giving me advice on how I could (or perhaps should --or perhaps even should NOT) use this film in next year's incarnation of Anthropology 230.

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