one of their more boring insights come here, because they contrast wealth against happiness, instead of realizing what the point is of such castrated (and they realize so much) dialogue.

for context, this quote arrives in the movie as one of the first actual lines of any significance, given the thirty minutes of film that came before this point all had significations presented through events and film narrative rather than through words. this is arguably the first time the movie speaks. this matters because it leaves a substantial feeling after hirayama basically glosses over everything for the previous however many events that happen before they get to the record store.

these assertions aren’t as repeated as they are tangential, because obviously the young assistant understands that he is being castrated by the social selection mechanism and his desperation is towards capitalism itself, it isn’t intimate. when he wants to sell the cassettes, this isn’t an intimate moment, it’s more like something that hirayama can easily make a mature decision about

contrast this explanation with farnam & baradaran’s choice to explain the movie away: “the lower class comprehends the significance of money and the hardships associated with its lack far more acutely than the bourgeoisie. it is solely the bourgeoisie who possess the privilege to reject all that is essential” now obviously wenders wouldn’t intend this reading (which doesn’t actually matter to an ideology critique, but important to state), and farnam & baradaran know that. but, them knowing it doesn’t apparently change the way they talk about the movie. for such an intentional movie, what made them go with the idea that the criticism should apply so directly?

they could argue that wenders’ movie, past its own most intentional symbolically complicated reasons, would lead to passivity and acceptance of capitalism and the drive towards mindful acceptance. but instead of this, they hammer the narrative in directly, as if the most basic egalitarian reading and class distinctions are apparently enough to explain the reason to make a character barely verbal, easily symbolically distracted, and so on. obviously the zen angle is intentional, and ideology isn’t absent from the movie, but the messaging can’t be so contrived as to deliver its own sentiment directly through such a hard-headed economic reading.

wenders literally argues that he wants the economic hints to be so light, and his reasons for quitting his high economic position in society so subtle and ambiguous, and the questions the movie asks (as will be extrapolated later) so open-ended, that it genuinely reads like a mistreatment of the movie regardless of if they read the way that wenders talks about the direction of the movie, and regardless of if they even watched the whole thing or summarize it according to the most literal, mind you, wikipedia-derived quotations (but nonetheless, this doesn’t prove if they watched it or not nor does it ultimately matter, and of course they have given for example they explain the shadow play in detail, it’s just that, if there are precise details what the optimal amount of already existing paraphrase one should use and so on), would it be excusable

“wenders is captivated here by the same opiate that our world has been infected with for decades: acceptance of every foe and emphasis on collective castration. it is true that the world is covered in destruction and everything has become our ultimate apocalyptic image, but we may appreciate the ‘path,’ preserve our ‘inside,’ and accept that ‘it is what it is.’” the latter end of the paragraph we have been going on about lands quite fairly, and honestly, they are right. but in the movie, it doesn’t exactly show up as castration, when considering the way for example that hirayama treats his personal assistant.

hirayama gives his assistant money instead of letting him sell his cassettes, and ignores the implicit obsessive burden that the assistant puts on his ambitions and relationships, whilst still allowing himself to co-exist within the pull of his desire. he doesn’t start to pander him about the way that modern dating is hypergamous or something a more “socially aware” analysis would posit, at least something along the lines you’d see on internet forums. similarly, the air of burden around the weight of what the assistant says is part of the point: hirayama isn’t just abusing his economic ability to sustain himself whilst doing mediocre tasks, or enjoying the power that not having to necessarily sexually compete gives him in class society.

instead, he already finds the economic incentives in his life meaningless, and actually almost exclusively gains satisfaction out of minor pursuits. this critique of ordinary life extends far past economic possibility, so much so that the entire class struggle aspect becomes one minor, tantalizing, frankly artificial critique of a much larger possible criticism of class society. this is because, even if it is abruptly true that class differences immensely affect quality of life, it is only after losing in his life in almost every way imaginable, brought about partially or mostly by the system he lives in (but even some intimate aspects i’d argue even escape this distinction) it is that hirayama actually reaches the stage where he can derive joy from abandoning his desire to satisfy himself with lower economic necessity.

so, a light is a symbolically positive inscription, it is seen as an ultimate gift, the appreciation of something so small. this, in many ways, from our economic perspective is frankly manic, maybe even something you’d only experience when hallucinating. to gain a life-long commitment to extreme gratefulness and attention to detail in toilet-cleaning. this, being a positive inscription brought about by an external event, literally is not the same as the negative inscription required by the definition that an economic reading would prescribe to the film.

a film that intentional about its alienation would never allow itself to attempt to promote resignation or adornianism that simply, of course its tongue in cheek, the slower and more absolute it is about the character — he literally doesnt even speak to his co workers he just sits there and communicates only through actions — cant possibly be trying to sell the message of mindfulness in any straight forward way

“this internal conflict and the potential for a concealed sadness beneath the surface of his ‘perfect’ existence are hinted at in the film’s final scene, where hirayama’s face alternates between joy and sorrow while listening to nina simone.” this is right, and in the interview article wenders is quoted as saying “we wanted to release hirayama out of the film, so he could continue his life without us watching, so to speak.” as well as “did he make the right decision to live the life he is living now?” this makes farnam & baradaran’s idea that “the scrupulously cultivated ‘perfect day’ serves as a protective shell, preventing hirayama from confronting the underlying anxieties and unresolved questions of his past or the broader societal malaise.” a little bit ill-fitted given that wenders explicitly states that the confrontation may happen in the future and that the movie doesn’t actually finish an opinion on the matter

right after the quoted segment in the article, zupancic continues in her own essay: “‘with time, one gets used even to the worst of things,’ we say. this is not simply and necessarily bad, if we knew what exactly we had lost and were mourning. but this is precisely what, for structural reasons, we cannot know, because this ‘something’ is being created as we go along, with our daily adjustments. our apocalypse is a loss without the lost, a mourning that precedes the loss and actually creates it with its work (that of mourning). it is a mourning without object.”

notice how only one part of her analysis extends to farnam & baradaran’s essay but essentially no other part of what they’re saying is connected with zupancic’s analysis, which is far more concerned about how we are already in a constant process of integrating ourselves with apocalypse. using blanchot she even argues to be reasonable through the aspect of mourning, as in, to be aware and observant about exactly what is happening to us without letting on. as wenders says about hirayama at the end of the movie, he is in fact constantly considering his life choice, and whether his patience towards the world and his nearly technocratic exactitude, maybe even castrated preciseness towards ordinary matters of insignificance is the correct fix.

(albeit, ones that very much can “contain” a certain experience, where toilet cleaning is invocative of a larger not just closure of the world but something like facing it on terms that you’d prefer to set, over the scattered reality of the terms that, as a broader perspective, the world would let onto us).

hirayama’s resignation is absolute and adornian but its not necessarily promoting his mindset. there is even this idea that the film is using him as a device to showcase the “absolute relation to capital that a subject could have if he was plugged in 1:1 to the exact way modern infrastructure allows him to” something along these lines, like as a unit he tries to represent what is essentially ascetic about our living conditions without any additives but without any external augmentations either, so nothing religious nor consumeristic just the most default cynicism that would be expected from an npc worker only if it was done fully intentionally, if it was done with the awareness that the ability to live in the world would allow you to, regardless of whether he identifies with some type of trauma or an inability to feel intimate towards others.

take for example the proto-paedophilic experience he has early on in the movie where he helps an isolated child locate his guardian without the mother even expressing thankfulness. the child is curious and so on, but it’s not jumping at the possibility to rejoice with the actor beyond a wave, and he’s solipsist enough to register it as a simple error. it’s true that he basically modularizes away libidinal flows often times, and actually scrapes away at the complexity of the world by de-trashifying it. but that’s also the position of the rebel, who refuses to actually experience the quantized libidinal flows of the world as productive, but often times as castrating (as with the kiss, which troubles him and makes him think rather than unsettles him or makes him apathetic, which would be clearly far worse)

farnam & baradaran explain in the article how the corporate western world appropriated buddhism to mindwash modern precarious workers and even elites but as it turns out in the research i read, the main ideologues that used zen buddhism to do this were literally the post ww2 japanese nationals that massively abused it themselves way before it became a western import.

the text argues that buddhism in its religious pre modern form was capable of causing political resistance and the history of it does confirm this, but whats funny is that, even if it did cause lots of revolts and was regularly politically dangerous, a lot of it was also marginalized to help the government, and also it was kinda the state religion in most places so people stored gold and land property in the temples and most priests and sages were political bureaucrats, so to say that its default religious form is rebellious is also nonsensical, cause a lot of those guys practiced buddhism even back then as a detached form of mental practice, so the western world didnt reify it by “scientizing it” when already feudal warriors were doing that themselves, literally within the most religious context they could be in

that brings us to an important secondary question, what religious practices still havent been reified? this reminds us that even if you argue religious activities getting reified is ideological in nature, the ideology obviously isnt about the action itself cause theres only one real way your body can be mindful and this is the way no matter what political or social context you’re in

if the whole point of being mindful is to not care about if being mindful does anything (and i think this is actually what it does, changes your feeling of temporality and your desires), then its impossible to be subsumed by capitalism except like a stupid cheap brainhack that wont do anything for you anyways, you cant exist in two contradictory modes of thinking at the same time

so what do we do with this contradiction? well for the obvious thing, you can clearly see a correlation between what type of political activity happens and what it produces. basic, detached mindfulness is a particular economic activity, even when in general terms it can reproduce a particular mindset (like mindfulness and distance, against say, gambling or recklessness?) but even this type of distance, the one where a non-snarky, general dis-association between expected economic behaviors and personal restitude builds up, the actual way that somebody absorbs ideology seems to be totally irrelevant to the more general fact of distancing yourself from a particular frame. a shared frame about what type of economic activity you are doing has nothing to do with a wider social allowance to break through your role. but at the same time, absorbing an ideology is clearly not just about mentality.

so, the ability for a corporation to enact the absorption required to lock in a sell or to create some “objective mindset” that guarantees sales has nothing to do, apparently, with the purported ideology that your mind is convinced it is enacting. in fact, they appear to be two entirely separate realms. the ability for a machine to run a specific ideological codex for you to be captured by, and the ability for your subconscious to run a particular self-behavioral script with all the ideology that comes with it, are two different spectacles. to be distant from the object that you are inherently connected with whilst behaving in the exact ways you cynicize to yourself about as zizek mentions, isn’t the same thing as being distant from the overarching apparatus that solidifies that a certain act is perceived as signifying an alignment with a particular style of living

maybe that’s why that hygiene service is so good, it’s so good that its in front of its own job. or even worse, its so good that it wont even let wenders film dirt. or its so good that it doesnt even produce anything abject anymore. or its so good that before wenders can even turn on his camera, the actor behind hirayama has already felt he has to clean the toilet. or its so good that even intimate scenes can do nothing to stop it from cleaning itself. at around the 57 minute mark, both actors clean already clean mirrors, whilst staring at them. hirayama is looking at himself almost in pity, he’s not necessarily happy. what does the average person think when he’s in the middle of his job? that doesn’t stop him from recognizing an intimate moment between his assistant and a younger kid pulling his ears, but its almost like hirayama needs to “confirm” that an intimate moment is happening before he can be happy about it. you can see that his happiness register is so “wise and distancing” that he needs to sit there and really think about if the moment deserves his smile or not

there is nothing ideological about the cleaning scenes. everything is clean, details aren’t missed, details exist or they don’t. the camera angle is odd as hell too — it’s oblique. it shoots in orientation with the weird japanese toilet domes that have really high gates and weird little modular bits integrated into their toiletry that hirayama scrubs violently. job supervision tends to be funny about this, there is no perfect cleaning amount. sometimes too much on the wrong thing is globally too little for everything else. everything has a perfect cleaning amount, which is always decided by somebody else. crucially, there are no warriors, hell, there is barely even any capitalism involved. if capitalism is mostly about brushing toilets (or mostly acting like you are doing so), then this movie is mostly hirayama’s lunch break and love life — not a great way to represent or talk about capitalism.