CONFUSION'S MASTERPIECE

Mabel likes Kurosawa for the horses. And I like him for the Shakespearean themes.

Mabel and I agree on most things, but on this she's wrong. The horses, I told her, are a cheap distraction — the historic counterpart to the modern car chase. I'm guessing there are scholars who agree with her point of view, but, as usual, she couldn't cite a single one. (Isn't there a Latin word for relying on the passion of one's argument vs. its logical authority? This is one of Mabel's favorite rhetorical devices).

"Throne of Blood" is based on "Macbeth." In Akira Kurosawa's version, the Macbeth character is a medieval Japanese warlord — a very apt adaption. And Lady Macbeth, the "butcher's fiend-like queen," is a Japanese ice princess, more sinister and creepy even than Shakespeare's original villainess.

I love what Kurosawa does with the setting in "Throne of Blood" — a barren plain shrouded in a dense, roiling fog that seems to mock humanity's ambitions; a haunted, maze-like forest that has no beginning and no end; a wooden castle that, for all its Oriental minimalism, is intensely layered and romantic; the set-piece of samurai sitting stiffly as boards, legs akimbo, in their armadillo-like armor; the shrieking birds that accompany the known world's collapse. It's all perfect for "Macbeth."

And Kurosawa's emphasis on the Macbeth/Lady Macbeth scenes is stunning — just two people in an empty room plotting to kill a king.

The amazing thing to me about "Macbeth" is how Lady Macbeth rushes into the void of her husband's psyche and inflates his vanity to a false and unsustainable courage. Art thou afeard to be the same in thine own act and valor as thou art in desire? She's able to make him mistake her desires for his own, to proceed with the murder on the strength of the solidarity and courage of two, not grasping that the consequences will belong to one. There will be no help, no company, for him — or for her — in the moral isolation that follows the murder.

After the dark deed, she tells him not to fret. Things without all remedy should be without regard. What's done is done. But later, she rephrases slightly, and with anguish: What's done cannot be undone.

Beforehand, she tells him, "Screw your courage up to the sticking place and we'll not fail." But, in the end, there is no sticking place – for courage or love or honor or anything. Everything is unhinged, unmoored, set adrift. There is nothing to grasp or cling to. Shakespeare's Macbeth famously, eventually, concludes:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

In a way, Kurosawa's relentless fog seems to embrace this sentiment more deeply than Shakespeare's inevitable moving on, as it were — as it always is — to the crowning of a new king. For Shakespeare, life goes on — always — despite the blackest tragedy. For Kurosawa, the blackness lingers. The despair seems to win in the form of an almost Buddhistic resignation to the folly of humanity. (There might also be something of the mood of post-World War II Japan — an empire propelled by jingoistic vanity to its own annihilation).

In Shakespeare's play, noble Ross warns English Siward, whose son has been slain by Macbeth, to not cling to grief: Your cause of sorrow must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end.

But Kurosawa's world — it's easy to imagine — can accommodate a sorrow without end.

Another interesting thing about Kurosawa is how his movie actors are really like stage actors. Their facial expressions are exaggerated, as if they are meant to be seen by people sitting in the back row of a theater. The Lady Macbeth character begins icy and immobile, like an evil oracle, then her movements become increasingly alive and panicked as the plot is set in irreversible motion.

For Shakespeare's three Weird Sisters (or witches) — those of "double, double toil and trouble" fame — Kurosawa substitutes an elderly spinner, a sort of ancestral spirit, which I suppose is more Japanese, but I personally prefer Macbeth's "secret, black, and midnight hags." It seems important that these seers be women, in the context of the play, because they counterbalance and complement Lady Macbeth herself. (I also find it disappointing, though, that Kurosawa substituted sons for daughters in his "Ran," which is based on Shakespeare's "King Lear." Again, the daughters seem essential, but Kurosawa — inexplicably, to me — went with sons.)

Perhaps he did it for the same reason he includes horses and battles, whatever that might be. To appeal to a more "action-driven" crowd?

One could argue that the advantage of film over the stage is that you can show the horses and battles, you can dwell on them, but I don't find this very persuasive, especially with Shakesepeare. I think for Shakespeare the emphasis must remain not on the action, but on the talking about the action. His plays aren't interesting for what happens in them — he borrowed nearly every plot from some other well-known source — but for how the characters process what happens. What is the point in spending time showing warriors silently hacking each other up, when you could be listening to warriors talking prettily about the hacking?

Why do we need real cutlery flailing about when we have Macbeth's "dagger of the mind" proceeding from his "heat-oppressed brain"? Why do we need gory wounds and blood spurts when we have the imaginary blood that Lady Macbeth can't wash off her hands, the mental gore she can't escape. Here's the smell of blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

I'm not a Shakespeare "purist." I love modern adaptations. The whole point of Shakespeare is that he is for all time. I just don't like when the emphasis is taken off the language. The whole point of Shakespeare is the language.

The central action of "Macbeth" is not shown. King Duncan is slain offstage. But the slaying precipitates a flood of words, which take center stage — among them, my favorite in the play, spoken by Macduff when he apprehends that noble Duncan is dead. He says: Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.

It's not the guttural cry of woe you hear, for example, in "Romeo and Juliet" when Juliet is thought dead: O me! O lamentable day!

It's not even something someone would actually say. But it's an absolutely perfect description of grief: Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.

And it's an absolutely perfect example of "emotion recollected in tranquility," which is what poetry, if not cinema, is supposed to be.