Film Notes: Mishima

Paul Schrader didn’t see his first film until 17 years old, so the story goes, sneaking out of the home of his strict Calvinist family to indulge in the collective dreaming of cinema. Years later, despite having made his career in the movies, his films feel nothing like freedom—instead, they capture the myriad ways people self-flagellate even in the absence of a repressive God. Schrader’s seen your little modern world, and he has discovered people crave a Hobbesian absolute rule, the very thing Schrader looked to escape. Schrader’s protagonists seek meaning beyond themselves, but the search for meaning doesn’t redeem them. Rather, it obsesses them, drags them under, and often ultimately kills. 

Mishima: A Life in Four Acts is no different than some of Schrader’s other more well-known films in this way, even as a biopic. Famed writer of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima (Ken Ogata) is obsessed with the idea of making his life mean something. Both in Schrader’s film and in actuality, Mishima scorned modern society, from democracy to the post-war materialism brought by the West, choosing to live by the samurai code of bushido. As Ogata’s Mishima states: “My need to transform reality was an urgent necessity, as important as three meals a day or sleep…I wanted to explode like a rocket…light the sky for an instant and disappear.” Mishima aestheticized the flesh and the body, describing bodybuilding and martial arts as an artistic endeavor in his essay “Sun and Steel,” thinking of himself first as a work of art to be hewn and refined rather than the craft of writing. It’s a sentiment shared by many Schrader protagonists as they seek to re-enchant the world through a mix of tradition, fascism, violence, and religion, not knowing that to attempt such a thing means taking the first step into megalomaniacal madness. 

What sets Mishima apart from Schrader’s other works is its unconventional structure and style. Schrader uses the films’ four chapters as self-contained vignettes interweaving Mishima’s life with hallucinatory scenes from three of his most well-known novels. The film becomes a compelling visual essay, using Mishima’s biography as a lens to view and evaluate Mishima’s art, still grounded in his own ideas and philosophies. Even as Schrader acknowledges the writer’s own aims, he creates his own portrait of a man desperate to hide his insecurities and to tame his sexuality. Cinematographer John Bailey and set designer Eiko Ishioka make Mishima’s fractious, self-contradictory, and self-destructive life into a surreal and stylized romance up to the film’s end, displaying Mishima’s contradictory impulses to create through violence, and to destroy through art.

In tribute to a controversial man and brilliant writer, Schrader ultimately fulfills Mishima’s wish, making his life into a work of art—a task Mishima himself was arguably unable to accomplish. What that art means, however, is for the viewer to decide.