You Love to See It: Seven Samurai (Patreon)

In a raging river, the self-declared samurai Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) holds a child to his armored breast as he flees downstream from a burning mill. Then, slowly, the shock of adrenaline fades. Kikuchiyo freezes. “This baby... is me,” he cries out loud. The blunt-force generational trauma of one war orphan rescuing another hits like a hammer, the river’s pounding flow emphasizing that these forces of cyclical violence are in some ways irresistible, that they move under their own natural power without regard for the people caught in their currents. His life has led him in a long, wandering circle right back to the moment bandits razed his village and killed his parents, and now he holds his own broken heart in his hands.

Mifune’s blustering performance — already layered with pathos by his justly famous rant about the craven, greedy uselessness of peasants — implodes in this moment, its impact heightened by the slow disintegration of the burning mill in the shot’s background. In the visual language of Kurosawa’s best-known film, the scene’s closest ties are to arguably the film’s most devastating scene. During an ill-fated raid on the bandit encampment, the peasant Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya) sees his kidnapped wife (Yukiko Shimazaki) standing in the entrance of the bandit stronghold set ablaze by the mixed force of peasants and samurai. Dressed in finery and immaculately coiffed, she seems to have been made a concubine by her captors. Her look of horror at the sight of her husband is difficult to parse, a silent play of vast emotion in the shadow of the burning building.

Why does this nameless woman run back into the flames? Is she mourning her captors? Ashamed of her own forced infidelity? We can never know. All we see is that her past and the most acute point of her present meet in one all-consuming moment, and that the power of that conjunction destroys her. Is Kikuchiyo’s fate really so different? His life torn to pieces by armed bandits, he takes up steel himself and becomes one of them, scorning his peasant roots. What is that flight from his true self but a drawn-out retreat into another burning building? What is his death but the inevitable collapse of his life’s charred and ruined roof? These two figures are connected by fire and ruin, their external differences burned away until only the drive for self-destruction remains.