Having read Mishima's PATRIOTISM decades ago, I wondered how it could've possibly been made into a movie. The answer was embarrassingly simple: do it as a short. As lean as the author himself, PATRIOTISM gets straight to the point (no pun intended). The Noh stage is almost expressionistic in its starkness, and the final act is VERY hard to watch, especially when one realizes that what we're seeing here is a dress rehearsal for Mishima's own death (which affected me greatly as a kid: I saw the black and white magazine spread in LOOK or LIFE and found myself pondering the notion of choosing the moment and manner of one's own death). The DVD I saw included several interviews with Mishima (one in Japanese, with English subtitles, and a long audio interview in which Mishima answered questions in English). "We... imagine death, but I wonder if we're even really living," he says at one point. "There are no noble causes today. Democratic governments obviously have no need for noble causes. Yet, if one cannot find a value that transcends oneself, life itself, in a spiritual sense, is rendered meaningless..." He says, too, that "suicide represents sincerity." For those seeking possible reasons for his actions: one of his greatest fears was a fear of contracting Cancer. "I was born in the wrong era," he laments. "In order to be remembered, I must do something foolish."
Review of Patriotism
