A Film Canon

If Ikiru presented terminal illness as a synecdoche for post-war bureaucracy, The Bad Sleep Well presents suicide, and the shame society that sanctions it, as the structural basis of collective capitalism. To this end, Kurosawa condenses the corporate production of shame, and its tension between self-destruction and reproduction, into a family drama, in which a marriage of disability and illegitimacy effectively pre-empts a suicide-inducing, patriarchal presence, forcing it to manifest its suicidal requirements actively, as murder. That this manifestation, or exposure, is pessimistically circumscribed, is suggested by Kurosawa's translation of it into the barest disruption to his hyper-symmetrical, hyperactive mise-en-scenes, which tend to be characterised by deep, wide focus, a repetition and standardisation of objects and people, a geometrical proliferation of spaces-within-spaces, and a progressive abstraction of traditional Japanese interiors into the omnipresent, but elided, Noir bar. This is accompanied by a racy, schematic mode of characterisation and exposition that, combined with the centripetal narrative structure, produces an aesthetic of simultaneity that recalls the Mabuse films, and culminates in Toshiro Mifune's gradual disembodiment from an already uncharacteristically mild, disembodied presence, into an omniscient mastermind, a ghost in the very machine that he is attempting to destroy. It feels as if Kurosawa's ultimate aim is to shoot entirely within the confines of the cars that play such a critical narrative role, their final destination and industrial motivation the lunar, carpet-bombed munitions factory where the corporation first emerged as a parasitic post- war species, "no longer human, a functionary...an alien creature, molded by bureaucracy".