#der samurai

There's a sense of euphoria you get from a film like this – I think I last felt it when I watched Sound of Violence last year – which is quite hard to explain. It's almost addicting honestly.

I'm pretty sure both of these came onto my radar courtesy of @cipheramnesia so thank you for that.

Lately I have been trying to train myself out of the automatic assumption that movies contain dogma about human life on earth, or how it ought to be lived. It's reasonable to expect a film to have a point of view, but it isn't always as literal as all that. The more sociological discourse rears its head in media analysis, the more important it is to be aware that not all art is pushing a moral agenda that has to be rigorously validated or condemned. I often think about Lucky McKee's indispensable slasher movie MAY, in which a lonely outsider decides to build the perfect friend from the parts of those who let her down. The eponymous antiheroine is as sympathetic as any Universal monster looking for love, and her victims ask for it about as loudly as possible; you'd have to be a real monster not to feel for with May. Ironically though, this emotional alignment with the frustrated killer is exactly what the enemies of slasher movies have always been afraid of. And on that note, if you really want to, you can find an alternative reading of this picture: that shunning quirky weirdoes is actually the right thing to do, because their difference from the status quo indicates danger. In any case, this set of opposing interpretations should point out that it's important to remember that the way a movie hits you is inescapably subjective. It is not a reliable source of moral instruction.

*The usual spoiler alerts apply here. Do what you must.

Till Kleinert's queer fairytale DER SAMURAI should give anyone a mental workout, in terms of making meaning out of metaphor. Michel Diercks plays Jakob, a fresh-faced young cop in a rural town. His virginal air makes him the laughing stock of the local rabble he struggles to discipline, and like Little Red Riding Hood, he serves a better purpose at home taking care of his elderly grandmother. His gentle disposition gets him into trouble when he opts to deal with an interloping wolf by leaving out bags of offal for it, safely away from people's homes. This has the effect of summoning a demonic forest entity: a cross-dressing blonde with a samurai sword. As Jakob tracks the seductive creature's bloody trail through town, he realizes its purpose here is to awaken the beast within himself.

I'm choosing my words carefully here, because of course, one can't draw conclusions about the Samurai's identity based on our real-life political conversations. We have to assume that the film has told us what we need to know cosmetically, and we can argue about which is the bigger indicator—the way the entity dresses, or Pit Bukowski's full-frontal nudity—but it may be more helpful to remember that the Samurai is not human. It is aligned with wolves and the forest, it enters Jakob's mind hypnotically, and hallucinatory visual flourishes remind us that this does not take place in a totally familiar reality. The Samurai is a general purpose cypher for the queerness that lies dormant in Jakob, and the most complex thing about it is that here, embracing one's sexuality is equated with embracing the desire to kill.

The queer-coded villain has haunted the horror genre since time immemorial, with the aforementioned Universal monsters giving it the image of a forlorn outsider whose love language is incurably taboo in an often unjust world. On the opposite end of this moral compass is the Norman Bates, whose violence is tied directly to his mercurial gender expression; he shares this space with the even more controversial Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo Bill from THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Both of these contentious figures still garner our sympathy as the products of torment and trauma, if not societal oppression, but the Samurai embodies the pure joy of living as you are—which in this case is as a murderer. While Pit Bukowski is such smokin' hot stuff that he might convince anybody of anything, wanton decapitation should remain a pretty hard sell. Jakob finds the Samurai squatting in a dilapidated house, seated at a vanity table surrounded by doll furniture as echoey new wave music swirls around them, much the way we discover Mr. Gumb in the Jonathan Demme film. The Samurai's seduction of the young officer is openly erotic, but just as explicit is the mandate that Jakob find his true self through the act of killing. There is very little moral ambiguity around murder, which complicates the ordinarily uplifting matter of becoming who you really are.