Capitalism and its Discontents (Giants & Toys)

There is a long-standing line of cultural products that critique capitalism and the changes that are wrought in the cultural values of the populace. Once can certainly say that there is nothing incendiary or truly revolutionary about them. Dissent has become commodified and channeled, and it is possible to say that this is precisely the way in which it becomes shorn of any potential for true change. Hegemony reasserts itself by this exercise in which free speech is manifest, but any real mechanism for change never moves foreword. How can it, when it has become so deeply institutionalized?

After seeing this Japanese film from 1958, directed by Yasuko Masumura, I wasn't particularly impressed by the message. It is part of what we all know about how traditional codes are supplanted by capitalist values, and in the 1950s, as Japan was taking off economically, it was inevitable that such a film should appear. These issues of how capitalist values distort traditional codes of behavior and serve to undermine the collective ethos of harmony as well as personal codes of honor strike one as old and rather out-dated. I wonder at times how this film and others such as Akira Kurosawa's suspense thriller "High and Low" (from the same era) might have affected the public at the time. Did it strike them with a shocking force of ice-cold condemnation?

In this film we have the saga of a young and idealistic advertising agent (Nishi) who works for a firm (World Caramels) that manufactures candy. They are in competition with two other firms, Giant and Apollo, and they strike desperately to come up with the most effective advertising campaign to corner the market. The film strikes one with a certain innocence, especially with regards to the motives of the agent, who admires the decisiveness of his ruthless chief, Mr. Goda, but who also becomes progressively disenchanted with the detritus of a culture that manufactures and discards human capital. In this case, this "capital" will take the form of a poor, lower-class teenager by the name of Kyoko Shim, she of the bad teeth and the childish manners who will become a spokemodel for the quality that a company such as his seeks to associate with their product, which is innocence and irrepressability.

It is inevitable that Kyoko will be consumed by this culture, and will be transformed into yet another conniving character. Innocence has no chance in this business, and it must be said, in any business. That is not the nature of modern-day capitalism, and even as these campaigns have been transformed to expouse a new form of social concern and preocuppation for ecological sustainability (think for example, of Starbucks), these are self-concious campaigns that proceed from a need to influence consumers into believing that their patronage is part of a grander humanitarian gesture. It is a false gesture, nonetheless, and this cynicism has been deeply ingrained in many of us.

Inevitable the whole scheme will devolve into a catastrophe where the shortcoming of desperate capitalism and faith in the advertising medium will be challenged. The factory of one of their rivals, the one with the better campaign (a "subsidized life from crade to marriage" contest) burns to the ground, and World Caramels is unable to capitalize on this temporary absence. The market cannot be relentlessly expanded, as is the expectation and item of faith of all fervent capitalists, and sales are on the verge of plummeting. And this precipitates as well a moment of crisis where Nishi is able to appreciate how human values have been systematically subverted by the need for illusion. His admiration for Mr. Goda will suffer, becoming as evident at the blood that his mentor coughs up under the pressure he finds himself.

Nishi tries to remain true to his convictions, and can't force himself to become another human cog. He is cynically told to seduce the young spokesmodel his chief discovered and molded, only to behold how she has become as self-serving and conniving as any of his colleagues who work at the other competing firms and who have chosen to betray his personal confidence in order to further their own career. The model herself, Kyoko, hardly resembles the young and defenceless urchin we had seen in the beginning, and she herself recognizes this in a scene towards the end.

Perhaps the meaning of this film is most powerfully transmitted in the final scene, where Nishi is forced to take up the mantle from his fallen idol, the incapacitated Mr. Goda. He will be forced to don the costume of a spaceman who will be hawking caramel, and he does it with a bitter expression that elicits laughter from the public at a big commercial event, until he is told by his sometime lover and competitor to smile as he sells his honor and dignity. And he does, walking through the crowded streets with a toy space gun, having given in to the dictates of this new commercial society. He has, so to speak, left the planet and the values he recognized, to now live in a realm that is, ironically, less ethereal than he had hoped.

Mr. Goda presents his views about how publicity and advertising constitute modes of control.

 Mr. Goda reveals a willingness to break sacred family bonds by confronting and critiquing the chief of advertising, a man who tellingly is his father-in-law. Mr. Goda is an intensely arrogant and ambitious individual, recalling Gorden Gekko from Oliver Stone's 1980s film, "Wall Street".

 Nishi, the idealistic advertising agent, and his lover from a competing company who tries to convince him about the necessity of the new values that accompany modern capitalist society.

The transformed spokemodel, Kyoko, who is no longer an exploitable, lower-class girl, but has become suffused with a sense of her power, even if it is doomed to be temporary.

 Mr. Goda, in his desperation, demands that Nishi seduce Kyoko. He resists, although he makes a token effort to do so.

The dance of modern capitalism, likened to another spectacle of desperate competition and adversity. It is the new "Law of the Jungle".

 

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011