The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987, Kazuo Hara) (Patreon)

63/100

Went into this with zero foreknowledge and have been wrestling with my real-time reaction for several days now. On the one hand, it's the most extraordinary slow-motion train wreck I've seen in documentary form since Daughter From Danang. On the other hand, its very existence often registered to me as a significant ethical lapse—or at least a misguided allocation of time and resources and creative energy—on Hara's part. As my mildly positive rating suggests, that tug of war wound up weighted slightly toward an appreciative, slack-jawed ZOMG, not least because I'm acutely conscious of the ways in which current events are influencing my perception of this 35-year-old movie. Still, a lot of processing power got devoted to the hypothetical question of whether I'd "love" (or indeed tolerate) a contemporary doc that follows a QAnon dude as he hassles various election officials.

Yes, that analogy is decidedly imperfect. Without having checked, I'd imagine that most folks nowadays would cite The Act of Killing, as it eventually becomes clear that Okuzaki has a legitimate grievance—that he genuinely did witness his WWII superiors commit atrocities that were subsequently covered up. His method of seeking justice, however, makes him look batshit crazy, albeit in a polite, deferential way until he physically attacks people who refuse to confess. I couldn't look at Okuzaki's car, transformed into a mobile billboard (none of its text gets translated in the subtitles, but I got the general idea), without flashing on pictures I've seen over the past year of vehicles festooned with messages like "COVID IS NOT THE ISSUE ADENOCHROME IS." Consequently, I was inclined to dismiss his accusations about wartime cannibalism as the equivalent of "Democrats are drinking babies' blood," which made much of the film feel like just watching someone endlessly badger people from a soapbox. But that skepticism ("rejection" is probably more accurate) amplified the power of his superior officers' eventual admissions, which he really did pretty much have to beat out of them. But I spent the entire movie thinking about the dude who took a gun to Comet Ping Pong (alleged Pizzagate HQ) absolutely convinced that he was gonna find a secret child-porn dungeon in there, wondering if and when Okuzaki was gonna snap and genuinely hurt someone, and I was right, he eventually does. 

It seems to me quite significant that while Hara makes note of Okuzaki's attempted murder and arrest (along with the fact that a bunch of footage he shot on a trip to the Philippines was confiscated and presumably destroyed), he does not mention that Okuzaki had cordially invited him to film the crime in question. "Goes to consciousness of guilt," as a prosecutor would say, though I do give Hara credit for including the moment in which a woman incredulously asks how he can stand there training his camera on an assault-in-progress without ever attempting to intervene. Daughter From Danang crosses intimacy lines in a way that sometimes inspires the question "Uh, should I be watching this?", but it doesn't creep up on the prospect of becoming a snuff film (or a real-life Man Bites Dog, though that came a few years later). I felt very uncomfortable throughout Emperor's Naked Army, especially as Okuzaki says that a great man always observes God's law in preference to man's law and casually tells people "I'm a much better human being than you" and eventually just comes right out and declares that the ends justify the means when it comes to vigilante violence. (Enlisting people to "play" the relatives of executed soldiers after the actual relatives bow out is another whole subject at which I'm merely gonna scowl via this parenthetical.) Even when he's not being weirdly, calmly threatening, Okuzaki can just plain be hard to take, speaking in what sounds (to my non-Japanese-speaking ears, at least) like a breathless torrent of self-righteous invective with the brutalist rhythm of a pile driver. That he's ultimately more or less vindicated does make a difference (without excusing his own reprehensible actions en route), and there's no denying the film's sheer fascination. But I still feel dirty.