Criticism

Evil Always Already Exists in Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist

Thomas Johnson, editor

The paradox of cinema sometimes comes into violent collision with the push into new phenomenological territory. Reducibly we are here to be entertained and persuaded, but then there’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi opening his latest film Evil Does Not Exist with six-minutes of tilt-panned tracking shots staring straight up the forested sky, slowly rolling under the trees of a small village in Nagano prefecture. He’s asking us, what are we thinking comes next?

Projections onto the scene meet the audience seated in their expectations. The act of buying a ticket and viewing the cinematic arts comes with its grounded genre realities, this is a drama, it will be dramatic. What we already know about nature and the unending great blue yonder above – as a source of life, of wonder, and of, principally, the state of nature distinct from human involvement – comes crashing down in vertical illusion onto the viewer suspended in place waiting for something violent to occur. This is merely presage.

It’s in that manner of addressing the cinematic arc, through the introduction of pensive backward gaze into the possibilities of the natural past, that Hamaguchi anchors his work with equal footing in the specters of human history as well as the ghosts of our impossibly collapsing future. Evil Does Not Exist tells the forward coming event of capital encroachment on the home village of Takumi Yasumura, played by Hitoshi Omika, which we know from trailers, reviews, and YouTube shorts, will involve the for-profit installation of a glamping campground that could (will? already has?) upend Yasumura’s ecological balance. And even if you caught the film without knowing that in advance, the teleological presence of the film’s title does the work for you – something wicked this way is coming. This is what makes the unbelief of cinema a tacit act in believing itself.

On the screen, whether silent or not, one is dealing with apparitions that, as in Plato’s cave, the spectator believes, apparitions that are sometimes idolized. Because the spectral dimension is that of neither the living nor the dead, of neither hallucination nor perception, the modality of believing that relates to it must be analyzed in an absolutely original manner. This particular phenomenology was not possible before the movie camera because this experience of believing is linked to a particular technique, that of cinema. It is historical through and through, with that supplementary aura, that particular memory that lets us project ourselves into films of the past. That is why the experience of seeing a film is so rich. It lets one see new specters appear while remembering (and then projecting them in turn onto the screen) the ghosts haunting films already seen.”1

Hamaguchi is asking for balance between what is there and what is not. “It’s about balance” becomes Yasumura’s chief line and statement among the very few times we even see him speak, and we believe him: partly because we want to, because our inner desires are brought forth to haunt our viewership, but also for having watched Hamaguchi’s patience-enduring long takes that follow Yasamura as he ladles fresh water from a mountain stream, one spoonful at a time into clean, white jerry cans, then walking what feels like many miles step by step toward his Toyota 4-Runner and back to whatever life he lives. We hear every crunch of snow under his feet with each silent minute. Eiko Ishibashi, tasked with scoring another Hamaguchi work, leaves these moments empty for the viewer. This is the world moving at the world’s pace. Yasamura is in equal balance where we meet him. Where Yasumura drives off to, we don’t get see. We appear in the next moment with him, and we know that he has driven to somewhere, someplace.

Seeing that 4-Runner appear, listening to Yasumura strike a lighter to smoke a cigarette, catching every beam of light in the crisp midday sun, Hamaguchi mourns for the world around and beyond. That thing unheard. There’s a truck, it will get on a highway, but, even as we’ve walked along with Yasumura for many minutes now, we deliberately do not see the truck drive off, not in this scene. And yet its knowledge, its presence still greets us. We carry with us the expectation now of wanting to go back into that forest, even as we haven’t yet seen Yasumura’s exterior capital world. For us and everything we know about Yasumura, it is of the state of nature, a world of balance.

These filmic slights of hand, leveling the world that no exists against the world that does, are Hamaguchi’s tentpoles in Derrida’s haunted cinema. That nothing can exist without having always-already been somewhere in the past, first as idea, then as object, then as a ghost. We are left with the mourning, the metaphysical presence of memory lingering in our ear and provoking feeling and emotion for something that is – at once – here and not here any longer.

“Haunting then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or – and this can sometimes amount to the same thing – the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfactions once can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.”2

There are layers to the haunting. Subjectively as Hamaguchi nudges us into the centers of our hearts, finding in our own pasts that irreducible longing for nature, and objectively as Yasumura silently bereaves over a photo of his late wife. We’re being provoked into the question, what is it that’s not here and why is moving me? The question of ghosts and specters in cinema has been tossed around for decades now, but Hamaguchi is openly tackling it, alluring to us that something is gone and something else is coming up real quick.

That arrival occurs in the middle third of three distinct acts. Hamaguchi establishes our collective past in Yasumura’s daily work, then creates the object of intrusion. Takahashi Keisuke and Mayuzumi Yuuko hold a townhall for their company’s planned campground and take repeated questions, which they are unable to answer, about the ecological impact to Mizubiki’s way of life. Takahashi introduces the film, “We have prepared a video,” and then we jump to ten minutes in the future where the questions begin. The feeling of the video – one we’ve all seen in some version of our lives – remains with us, even as the ghost of the event lingers off screen. It is the eventual, inevitable collision of capitalism, unwrought and totalitarian in its consumption, that will devour your way of life. This collision is the film’s shocking final act.

Yasumura’s daughter goes missing and the final third of the film searches for her. We long for her on screen. We are haunted by her missing. Hamaguchi carefully puts both Keisuke and Mayuzumi in helpless position during the search, evoking their powerless abilities as a symbol of the capitalist regime. Then, abruptly, Hamaguchi lets Yasumura’s daughter reappear. But something’s off, the sun in the sky don’t match with the real time scene, and we are watching her very ghost flicker in Yasumura’s mind. She’s already gone, even as she reappears.

Finally and at last, Yasumura must reclaim the balance of his world again. And as a parallel back to that striking opening image where Hamaguchi gives life to the past, here now returns in whispered, darkened form, a thing taken from us, only the frantic breathing of Yasumura now sounding under a moonlit canopy of tree limbs.

Hamaguchi mirrors his opening and closing images in search of balance. This is a longing for justice:

No justice—let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws—seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.3

We leave the film knowing what we already know – this continued abrasion of natural inclination against capital consumption cannot go on forever.

Where we remain lost is looking for the answers. Like the cinematic framework that Hamaguchi works in, defined, time-tested, constrained to the presentation of moving images projected onto a screen, we can only maneuver so much in the realm of politics and possibility. The key, then, is to ask that our future work in conjunction with the ghosts of the past. If we know in our bones that capital progress is going to eat us alive, we have to learn about the failures of its opposite, communism and communism’s ghosts, to perform any ideation of a better future:

Marxism remains at once indispensable and structurally insufficient: it is still necessary but provided it be transformed and adapted to new conditions and to a new thinking of the ideological, provided it be made to analyze the new articulation of techno-economic causalities and of religious ghosts, the dependent condition of the juridical at the service of socio-economic powers or States that are themselves never totally independent with regard to capital [but there is no longer, there never was just capital, nor capitalism in the singular, but capitalisms plural].4

This antagonism by the persistence of systems already in place is what Fisher calls the “slow cancellation of the future.” There is no resolution for the people of Mizubiki. Rather than the idea of possibilities opening up, rather “than the old recoiling from the ‘new’ in fear and incomprehension”5 the villagers just conduct a timeworn search that ends in timeworn sadness. It feels inevitable even before it’s over. And with our sadness, we know also that the villagers will succumb the approach of capitalism. And we are so worn out.

This is Hamaguchi’s final game. We fade to black with Yasumura running away. We haven’t gotten the answers, there are more ghosts now then at start, and capitalism continues to disrupt nature in lock step. It seems like evil will always be here.

But, what Hamaguchi is saying, it always has been. All the empty spaces in this deeply mournful film are asking, which side are you on?

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  1. De Baecque, Antoine and Jousse, Thierry. “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Trans. by Peggy Kamuf. Cahiers du Cinema, Paris, 2000, pp. 37.
  2. Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Hauntology, Depression, and Lost Futures. Zero Books, Winchester, UK, 2014. pp. 30.
  3. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. Routledge Classics, New York, 1993. pp. xviii.
  4. Ibid. pp. 73.
  5. Fisher, pp. 17.

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THOMAS JOHNSON lives in Hoboken, New Jersey and writes in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at The New School, New York, New York. Johnson grew up in East Texas, graduated the University of Texas at Austin, enlisted in the United States Army, lived in Germany, returned to the federal service, then moved to the east coast and received a Master of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University, all in that order. He escaped Washington, D.C. by the skin of his teeth and is for the umpteenth time unemployed, but life remains beautiful.