Criterion has released a five film collection of lesser-known post-war Akira Kurosawa films from the new Eclipse series. One of them, I Live in Fear (aka Record of a Living Being), is discussed in Slate's DVD Extra's column. The writer draws parallels between the film and the psychic effect of post-9/11 life:
In the United States, a couple years after I Live in Fear came out in Japan, Norman Mailer wrote an essay called "The White Negro," which began: "Probably we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years." Mailer was celebrating a new type of person, the hipster—the "American existentialist" or "white Negro"—who responded to this fate with rebellion. But the vast majority of people, in America, Japan, and probably everywhere, kept going to work and paying their bills as they always had. Kurosawa captured the "psychic havoc" on that side of the fence—and what happens when one otherwise upstanding citizen snaps out of the spell, stares into the abyss, and feels in his bones there's no way out.In the weeks and months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many of us, especially in New York City, feared to ride the subway, shuddered at strangely shaped bags, conjured mushroom clouds over the Empire State Building, and contemplated moving, if not to Brazil, then at least across the Tappan Zee Bridge, where life might be safer. But at some point, we put the fear aside, ignored it, or suppressed it as the only way to snap back into some semblance of normalcy.
This is the turbulent terrain that an American update of I Live in Fear—a film about our own "psychic havoc"—might cover and somehow dramatize: the line between obsession and obliviousness, between whimpering terror and blithe denial; the undeterminable toll on our "unconscious minds" from embracing either course; and the question of whether it's possible to lead a fully conscious, sane life on some road in between.
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