If war movies generally dwell on the physical manifestations of war, understandable given its nature, there is a subset of the genre that deal with the POW experience away from the battlefield — THE GREAT ESCAPE begins in a prisoner-of-war camp but belongs more in the prison-break genre. Because we are shown enemies co-existing in close quarters under an imbalance of power between the captors and the captives, the emphasis is more on the psychology of the conflict, not only between opposing nations/cultures but among the men of the same team trapped inside the same cage.

In combat, one side brutishly struggles for advantage over the other side, generally by killing as many enemy combatants as possible. Soldiers are faceless in the battlefield, mere shooting ducks, especially in modern warfare where most soldiers are felled by bullets and bombs from a distance. Besides, in order to fight like a soldier, a human killing machine, the last thing on a soldier’s mind is the humanity of the other side. And for all the bonding as brothers-in-arms in the same unit, most soldiers probably live by the rule, ‘better you than me’, Animal Mother’s exact words as he stares down at a dead comrade in FULL METAL JACKET.

The brutality of battle is horrific, but its simple logic is a kind of a saving grace. A soldier need not think. He needs to go by training, orders, and instinct and just fight like a man, or a beast. No one’s paying him to think, let alone feel anything other than the sports-game emotions of ‘we win, they lose’. In the rip-roaring melee of the battle scenes in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the only rule is kill or be killed. (Rather cleverly, Spielberg constructed the movie like a boot-camp. The first battle scene at Normandy explodes with such force that the audience is rendered ‘green’, unprepared for and shitting its pants over the visceral force of mayhem hitherto unequaled in cinema. It’s so powerful that it seems ‘anti-war’ and makes the audience wonders if it could take more of this. But step-by-step, as the G.I.’s gain equilibrium and footing, the violence, though horrific throughout the remainder of the movie, becomes more manageable at the emotional level. So, by the time another huge battle erupts at the movie’s end, we are no longer in a state of shock but one of admiration and respect as ‘our heroes’ gotta do what they must.)

Indeed, the prickliest moment in the movie is when the GI’s capture a German soldier and argue as to his fate, to regard him as a faceless enemy(not quite possible as he’s in their hands at their mercy) or a human being. Spare him or kill him(which could be construed as ‘murder’ or a ‘war crime’; as it happens, the decent Tom Hank character lets him go but, a ‘kraut’ being a ‘kraut’, he eventually rejoins with fellow ‘krauts’ and ironically ends up shooting the very man who’d spared his life; the moral logic of the scene is eerily like the Nazi attitude toward Jews, i.e. all Jews are bad and none should be spared because they are weasels and liars, and some may argue the fatal flaw of Anglo Civilization was going soft-and-mushy and giving Jews the benefit of the doubt, which Jews, like the ‘kraut’ captive, showed no appreciation of; fellow tribesman William Friedkin made a similar point about Arabs in THE RULES OF ENGAGMENT, i.e. it’s justified for the Zionist-directed US military to mow down any number of Ay-Rabs because all them ‘ragheads’, everyone from old man to a little girl, are liars, cutthroats, terrorists, and devil’s spawn; if such an attitude is warranted against a segment of humanity, especially in the eyes of Jews, the logic of ‘antisemitism’ seems just another variation, but of course, it’s intolerable only when directed at Jews and their allies, especially homos and Negroes).

Because of the inevitability and even necessity of human-to-human interaction than merely wanton slaughter, P.O.W. movies make for complex dramas, especially if the cultures and/or visions of enemy nations are strikingly different. In a prison camp, the captors must treat the very people they’d kill without second thought on the battlefield as human beings, and the prisoners must take orders from the very people they were trained and ordered to slaughter.
There is also an element of mutual respect and contempt. Respect in the sense that some degree of communication and even camaraderie may develop between the captor and captive(as between a master and a slave) but also contempt in the sense that the captors must house, feed, and guard the enemy soldiers(who may be deemed as cowards or weaklings who surrendered than fought to the last). Also, as the captives generally far outnumber the captors, whose only advantage is firepower, there’s a sense of unease on both sides. (In Gillo Pontecorvo’s KAPO, the Soviet and other prisoners manage to overwhelm the German prison guards, albeit at a high cost of life.)

In MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE matters are complicated due to the Japanese martial code that an honorable soldier does not surrender but chooses to die. To the Japanese, the Western P.O.Ws lack the spirit of the true warrior and patriot. They feel that the British and the Dutch surrendered to save their own hides. Such a contemptuous attitude is, however, confounded by the character of Jack Celliers(David Bowie) who claims to have surrendered not to save his own skin but the lives of other men.

Though MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE was hardly the first P.O.W. movie, it is perhaps the most psychological in its grappling with subjects and issues that war movies generally ignore or shy away from for their discomfiting or embarrassing nature. As such, it is less a genre movie with familiar ‘tropes’ but a challenging work of cultural psychoanalysis set in a prison camp in Indonesia during WWII. That said, the approach is less clinical than metaphysical, unfolding more like a fever dream than a session on a couch.

There is an uptightness about some of the main particulars in the movie, especially concerning the tensions between Captain Yonoi(Ryuichi Sakamoto) and Jack Celliers. Yonoi is dedicated to the purity of the Japanese warrior code(to which all else is subordinate or secondary), whereas Celliers is a man who seems partly to have embraced war as an escapism from private anguish. Both are driven to some extent by a guilt complex(and death wish, either of poetic death or personal redemption). Yonoi grieves the deaths of his comrades in a failed military rebellion, an attempted coup in the name of the Emperor of course, and harbors a certain shame that he hadn’t been one of them; therefore, he strives to be the perfect warrior with the purest spirit. He seems partly drawn from Yukio Mishima who was haunted by shame for not having died an honorable(and beautiful) death in the Pacific War, something he managed to avoid. (Though rejected by the recruiting board for his sickness and frailty, other accounts suggest he cunningly avoided being conscripted.) Celliers’ repressed shame(or guilt) is more of a personal(and familial) nature, something he’s nursed all his life without the knowledge of anyone, not even his brother, the one he’d wronged. He bears a private cross, for which he seeks atonement(and when it comes, only his friend Lawrence knows the deeper motivation of Celliers’ sacrifice).

Even though John Lawrence(Tom Conti) is the most prominent character in the film, the essential moral and spiritual conflict arises from the battle of wills between Yonoi and Celliers. Oddly enough, despite being of different nations, natures, and cultures(made starker by the war), Celliers and Yonoi cross paths to arrive at a synthesis, a deeper peace beneath the waves of violence. Paradoxically, peace often sets civilizations apart whereas war brings them together, even if in hatred, a kind of brotherhood of blood, not unlike the grudging camaraderie of boxers in the ring. MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE could have been titled, ‘Enemies: A Love Story’. Enemies naturally oppose one another, but opposites may reflect and reveal what the one cannot see within the self.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is an unusual work, not least because the themes of Christmas, usually associated with the snow and chill of winter, are played out in the hot humid jungles of Southeast Asia. Also, the two antagonist island nations, Japan and Britain, are fighting for domination of island territories that aren’t even theirs, further complicated by the fact that Indonesia belonged to the Dutch Empire before Imperial Japan swooped in to claim the entire territory.
In the global conflict, Britain is an ‘old’ seasoned empire with lots of experience, whereas Japan is a ‘young’ nascent empire, one that is rapidly expanding but short on expertise in governing vast territories of alien cultures.
However, for all their differences, what the two empires have in common, perhaps fostered by their island mentality, is a racial consciousness, a sense of uniqueness, separateness, and isolation despite the ambition to conquer and expand. Indeed, what stood out most about the British Empire was its emphasis on race, or the ‘isolation’ of British blood from those of the subject peoples. It was the feature most admired by Adolf Hitler who believed empires throughout history eventually fell as the result of the dominant race(usually Aryan) mixing with the subject(likely inferior) ones. In military and economic terms, the British Empire was the biggest the world had ever known, but in racial terms, the Brits remained very much an ‘island’ unto themselves. The Japanese in the 20th century, just getting started in the game of empire, had a similar attitude. (Of course, things are totally different in the Anglosphere today where Jewish Power has completely taken over. So, while it’s perfectly acceptable and even praiseworthy for Jews to emphasize and maintain their own bloodlines, it is usually taboo, especially for whites, to desire and encourage racial integrity of any kind. If anything, with Anglo hearts-and-minds having been totally colonized by Jewish Power, the new order promotes interracism, especially with blacks, as a matter of collective redemption for past ‘racism’. The most ‘racist’ civilization has become the most ‘anti-racist’ and suicidal one, even though, in regards to Jewishness and Zionism, it remains utterly ‘racist’, even to the point of supporting genocidal supremacism against whomever Jews target for destruction, which ironically includes the Anglos themselves whose fate is to be White Nakba.)

It’s a war between trespassers and aliens in a part of the world that has no understanding of them and their motives. In this regard, it has similarities with Wernor Herzog’s AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, perhaps the ultimate cultural-fish-out-of-water film. (One wonders if it might have partly influenced THE MISSION by Robert Bolt & Roland Joffe.)

There are two kinds of war movies: One where the characters defend the home turf against invaders/occupiers — Polish films about WWII perfectly fit this mold — and one where the characters fight in foreign land for empire, ideology, or adventure. The former(even in fantasies like RED DAWN) comes with greater moral clarity as we can sympathize with the defense of the motherland or fatherland(though it’s complicated when the defensive side provoked the hostilities in the first place, as in JAPAN’S LONGEST DAY and DOWNFALL). War movies set in foreign lands weave a more complex moral web due to elements of adventure, exoticism, culture clash, and the nihilism of doing the unthinkable on the home turf — you can’t blow up a beach town in the US to go surfing as Kilgore and company do in APOCALYPSE NOW.

If the foreign land is sufficiently alien from one’s own, the war experience becomes stranger yet. Americans could culturally better relate with German enemies in World War II than with South Vietnamese ‘allies’ in the Vietnam War.
Some of the saddest and most harrowing war movies are about soldiers dying far from home: German soldiers freezing to death in the final scene of STALINGRAD or the dazed and Japanese soldiers driven to hunger and madness in FIRES ON THE PLAIN.

On the other hand, a deeper sense of humanity could come by way of contact with an alien world, making one reappraise or better appreciate one’s own. A person is often comfortably situated and well-camouflaged in his own society with its time-honored rules; in contrast, against the backdrop of a different culture, his accepted ‘truths’ are challenged and call for clarification; he must struggle for the validation of his values in a world in which he is the alien or give them up as false in face of a greater truth.
In a way, a fish discovers its true fishiness only out of water. In a lake or sea, the fish, being in its own element, takes its reality for granted, even as a kind of universal reality. Out of water, the fish is confronted with the shocking limitations of its fishy nature. To survive, it must struggle back to the water, or it must evolve into something other than fishiness.

A similar logic applies to maturation in that children become adults only by stepping outside the comfort zones of home and family. Only in a world where one can no longer take one’s place in it for granted does one find one’s truer self. This is indeed the difference between the traditional Italian mama’s boy who is emotionally slower to leave one’s family & home and the Northern European male who is expected to accept independence in the larger community of strangers(who may in time become friends). The Northern European male relies more on law and responsibility whereas the Italian mama’s boy more on loyalty and dependence.

To an extent, there is a similar contrast between the more mature British and the schoolboy-like Japanese in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE. (Surely, one reason why the West arrived at a higher truth was by exploring worlds outside its own, which challenged and inspired the West to readjust and reformulate its limited concepts of realities and possibilities. The West became more adept at paradigm shifts in scientific, cultural, historical, and philosophical fields based on new discoveries and ways of thinking, whereas the rest of the world clung to their sacred assumptions of immutable truths. For example, China had smugly thought itself the center of the cosmos before the rude but instructive encounter with the West. Those with the greatest cultural arrogance came under the domination of those with the most curiosity, even respect, for other cultures; even though the British and the French never lacked for cultural pride and arrogance of their own, they had genuine interest in the achievements of other civilizations, much of which had been lost and was rediscovered only through the modern science of archaeology, ironically serving to inspire native cultural pride and struggle for independence.) In PLATOON, the protagonist arrives at a deeper moral truth in the jungles of Vietnam by mingling with soldiers of different classes and regional & racial backgrounds. His pat notions of right-and-wrong based on Apple Pie and God & Country are put to the test.

Then, war films set in foreign worlds can be illuminating as well as nostalgic. There is clearly the element of homesickness(or the lost dream of empire), but there is also the sense of having seen the larger world and come face to face with many more facets of humanity from the noblest to the most venal. And, few films achieved as much in this vein as MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, which is about soldiers of starkly different cultures displaced far from home but find a kind of spiritual home, if only fleeting, in a strange world. The story is set in some place in Indonesia, but the ground on which certain events unfold become almost hallowed, beyond the conventions of names and borders, or emotionally canonical to those involved. With (the relativity of)sickness, physical and mental/spiritual, as one of the main themes, the film’s atmosphere is feverish and hallucinatory, as if on a malarial journey into the mythic dimensions of the psyche.

What follows is a consideration of the film without much in the way of synopsis, so it might not make much sense to those who haven’t seen the film.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE takes place in Java, one of the main islands of Indonesia, the country that was the setting of another outstanding 1983 film, THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, which, by the way, deals with the socio-political problems of Indonesia itself, whereas MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is strictly about empire vs empire — we hardly notice the locals even in the background. (The country was also made famous, or infamous, through the documentary THE ACT OF KILLING.) Still, despite the absence of natives, the tropical setting is a living-breathing character in its own right(though the film, like THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, was not filmed in Indonesia). Even though Indonesia’s largest demographic group consists of Muslims, Buddhism and Hinduism have their place in history and culture as well. A chain of islands, large and small, made of up diverse ethnicities, tribes, and even races, it only became a ‘nation’, in the modern sense of the word, through Western imperialism, a process not uncommon throughout Africa, Middle East, and South Asia. In other words, the very concept of Indonesia as a ‘national’ entity emerged only under the ‘oppression’ of Dutch imperialism.

Indonesia is not a typical Muslim country, at least in the Western Imagination. If Muhammad was essentially a desert warrior and his religion became associated with aridity, purity, and fundamentalism, this cannot be said of Islam in Indonesia. (Christianity also began in the Middle East but became most associated with the cold North, or lots of snow. Despite Islam’s spread into vast expanses wholly unlike the deserts of Arabia, such as the jungle regions of Malaysia and Indonesia, the religion is still most associated with lots of sand.) Though there have been problems of extremism, the practice of Indonesian Islam is a more syncretized phenomenon. Separated physically and culturally far from its canonical places of origin, it blended more with local traditions, just like the Buddhism that reached Japan had changed considerably since its origins in northern India.

Indonesia has historically been a strange place, one of high civilization and the most abject primitivism, one of purist religions(such as Buddhism & Islam) and diverse local ‘pagan’ beliefs(closely associated with nature worship), and one of lush forests and grinding poverty(with some of the worst pollution in the world). Because of the vastness and the wide range of variations between one extreme and another, it’s one of the most fascinating places on earth, one of those countries that constitutes a universe of its own.
Today, Indonesia is the largest Muslim country by demographics and an important player in the world economy, and one need only consult a map to notice how scattered and divided the country is. To be sure, a handful of islands, especially Java and Sumatra, comprise the bulk of the population and political power, and if the country has held together thus far, it owes less to good governance than incompetence and indifference among those who’ve been left out of the game.

There is a certain symmetry at work in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE. Two great seafaring powers have clashed halfway around the world in a place alien to both. As to hegemonic rights, one could argue that the Japanese are Asians in a part of Asia or that Europeans are more qualified by experience. Though Indonesia was a Dutch colony, the main military engagements were between the Japanese and the British who then ruled much of the world. Even though the British had once vied for world domination with the Spanish, Dutch, and finally the French, the Western powers arrived at a kind of gentleman’s agreement to respect and even guard each other’s interests under general British dominance. Better to compete and cooperate than fight toward mutual destruction(which is what eventually happened when the Europeans ganged up on Germany). Meanwhile, Japan, a rising power in the first half of the 20th century, believed it was their destiny to ‘liberate’, ‘protect’ and rule Asia.

Given that both the Japanese and the British are foreigners in a distant land, it isn’t easy to ascertain the political morality of the situation. Westerners would have been hypocritical to complain about Japanese warmongering and invasion when they’d pioneered world domination, which eventually led to the forcible opening of feudal Japan to modernization(and then participation in the imperialist enterprise). One could even argue that the Westerners in Southeast Asia who came under Japanese rule merely got a taste of their own medicine, as did the French under German Occupation.

On the other hand, it should be common knowledge by now that the Japanese colonizers, in desperation, inexperience, and ultimately madness, committed unspeakable cruelties throughout their empire. Technologically inferior and materially disadvantaged, Japan’s only chance of fending off American advances was to exploit labor and resources to the fullest in Southeast Asia, leading to the enslavement and deaths of hundreds of thousands of lives, more than in the centuries under European rule.

Some Indonesians may wonder about the absence of Indonesian characters in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, but this is par for the course in most war movies. Most American movies about World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Iraq War have almost nothing to do with the locals or their troubles. It’s almost entirely about Americans, with Oliver Stone’s HEAVEN AND EARTH as one of the few exceptions. (Clint Eastwood’s LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA presented a counter-perspective from the Japanese side, but it too was mostly about fighting men. Generally, movies like THE BIG RED ONE and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN have token moments to remind us of the war’s impact on civilians. For a glimpse of the larger reality of war, one needs to search out films such as THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS, FORBIDDEN GAMES, PAISAN, and etc.)

Be that as it may, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is not a conventional war or P.O.W. film, even such notable ones as THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, STALAG 17, and KING RAT. (PATHS OF GLORY, like BREAKER MORANT, is an unusual kind of war prisoner film in that the soldiers are imprisoned by their own side.) It has certain genre elements, especially in the conflict between rigidity and flexibility, principles(no matter how misguided, unrealistic, or delusional) and pragmatism. Still, if STALAG 17, THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, and KING RAT are essentially dramatic, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is meditative and dreamlike, not least because its two ‘spiritual’ antagonists, Celliers and Yonoi, are like ships passing in the night. The drama that might have been materialized only at the end and briefly.

The thematic nucleus of the story involves the clash between Captain Yonoi’s commitment to the spirit OVER the body and Major Celliers’ commitment to the spirit FOR the body. Initially, it appears Yonoi the rigid disciplinarian is a man of iron-clad principles, whereas Major Celliers is a maverick prone to breaking rules. In the end, we learn Celliers is no less doggedly principled, albeit for reasons of his own. He may not be hard on others but is so on himself, indeed to an extreme degree, as if his private salvation depends on it.

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, for all its excellence, belongs more or less in the Hollywood genre of the action epic. Intelligently written and realized, it nevertheless remains within middlebrow sensibility, which is to say it has enough food-for-thought for the sophisticates and enough excitement for the popcorn crowd. In contrast, MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE was clearly conceived of as an ‘art film’, for lack of a better term, and it was made by a more mature and reflective Nagisa Oshima, once one of Japan’s most irascible radical and provocative directors of the 1960s and 1970s. At the very least, the films that made his reputation(or notoriety as, like Jean-Luc Godard and R.W. Fassbinder, he had plenty of detractors) — CRUEL STORY OF YOUTH, VIOLENCE AT NOON, DEATH BY HANGING, IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, and etc. — have value as social artifacts, but most of them haven’t dated well; they’re either too topical, polemical, or cartoonish in their satire. Personally, I prefer his more conventional narratives such as MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE and GOHATTO(aka TABOO).

Many of his earlier films are marred by willful rudeness, made worse by self-righteousness, resulting in something like enfant terrible puritanism, an awful combination. Imagine a spoiled brat throwing tantrums as part of a moral crusade. Many of his films are now relics of radical 60s agitation, hardly surprising as one of Oshima’s main inspirations was Jean-Luc Godard, many of whose films have also been totally forgotten.

Apparently, Oshima matured or wised up at some point to realize something so remarkable as MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, which isn’t merely leftist agitprop or avant-garde bleating for attention. Perhaps, Oshima saw himself in the character of Celliers, the misunderstood troublemaker. Celliers sometimes acts the ‘bad boy’, even prankster, but is really a noble(and tormented) soul, and Oshima, who made his reputation as the proto-punk of Japanese cinema, may have felt similarly in his role as a kind of modern-day shaman to awaken Japan’s soul from the doldrums of conformity, consumerism, and compliance with an unjust order(built on false memory). And in the character of Yonoi, there are shades of Yukio Mishima, the right-wing ‘bad boy’ provocateur who, despite the ideological clash with the the Left, also diagnosed something sick about post-war Japan built on the false edifices of ‘democracy’, ‘peace’, and ‘prosperity’.

There are interesting historical, thematic, and plot similarities between THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE. Both films take place in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in Southeast Asia. Both films pit the elitist man of high principles with a man of(or for) the people. And the meaning of heroism, personal sacrifice, and redemption weigh heavily in both films.
However, there is one key difference. In THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS, the primary dramatic conflict is between Col. Nicholson(Alec Guinness) and Shears(William Holden). Though Col. Nicholson initially butts heads with Col. Saito(Sessue Hayakawa), the former wins the test of wills, and the latter mostly fades from dramatic importance. (Of course, one could argue Nicholson’s triumph is delusional as, for all his sense of pride and dignity, he ends up doing exactly what the Japanese ordered, indeed even better. Imagine someone beating you in a game of nerves but then going the extra mile to do what you want of him.) The moral gravity of the movie derives from the tension between Nicholson’s ‘mad’ rationale for building a bridge for the Japanese(ironically on the sanest sounding principles) and Shears’ transformation from a self-centered cynic to a true believer on a British mission to destroy the bridge. Shears is no one’s idea of a hero, let alone a saint, and initially comes across as concerned only about numero uno. He isn’t big on ideals and loyalty, and his main concern is to make it out alive and enjoy life. Indeed, he is slyly blackmailed into ‘volunteering’ for the mission, but along the way, he becomes as committed as the others in blowing up the bridge. That becomes his redemption.

Nicholson, unlike Shears, is introduced as a man of inner strength and high principles; he’s an officer’s officer, much respected by his men who would go to hell and back for him(which suggests Anglo society was less about universal individualism but narrow individualism at the top and degrees of obedience below;
indeed, it’s telling that when Nicholson does embark on the project of bridge-building, almost none of the men protest). Unlike the plebeian and rather shameless Shears, he’s very much the product of the British elite culture.
That said, Nicholson has a fatal blind spot when it comes to order and duty. He’s so dedicated to the codes of duty & discipline and so determined to demonstrate(to the Japanese and posterity alike) the superiority of the British work ethic and workmanship that he fails to see the full implications of what he’s doing.
One may argue no British officer could be this ridiculous, and of course, THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS is a work of fiction, but there is a strange logic to Nicholson’s justification that makes the project oddly seductive, even noble. (For sure, the primacy of duty is alive and well in the West. When job-well-done is one’s highest priority, for whom you do it matters less than how well you do it. Notice how white folks continue in their job of making trains run on time even though their work is now in service to Jewish Supremacist Satanism.)

In a way, Nicholson appears to have a historical than a political sensibility. When we survey ancient ruins, do we think about the politics of the bygone period or marvel at the ingenuity and effort that went into building them? In his own eccentric way, Nicholson isn’t merely a man of minutiae but of vision, contemplating time on a grand scale that transcends the rises and falls of empires, perhaps even his own.
A man of contradictions, he inspires and pushes his men to build the bridge for the most practical reasons; it’s good for their discipline, their mental and physical health. He’s also driven by ego; it’s not enough that his will(hierarchical than rebellious, it must be noted) prevailed over Col. Saito’s authority; he has to show that he was 100% correct on just about everything.
However, the bridge also represents something beyond ego, something beyond even the imperial ambitions of the British and the Japanese; it may serve as a kind of timeless monument to man’s ingenuity and determination in the middle of a jungle world populated with primitive locals and monkeys — THE MOSQUITO COAST has a similar character played by Harrison Ford. He’s not raving mad like Aguirre(of Werner Herzog’s film), but he is moved by the power of dreams. He is a tight-buttoned visionary.

It all comes to a head when Nicholson sees the lowly Shears sacrificing his life for the mission, realizes his folly, and seeks redemption for his blind-sided treachery. Ultimately as a soldier, his duty is to serve the team, not ‘time’. Even though the ‘good’ or at least ‘better’ guys do manage to blow up the bridge, the closing words, “Madness! Madness!” belong to Major Clipton, who comes across as the most sane, balanced, and decent but also, in some ways, the most ineffective, because a sane man in an insane world is like a fish out of water. Major Clipton’s counterpart in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is Col. John Lawrence played by Tom Conti. Both Clipton and Lawrence represent the humanist striving for common sense and basic decency. They represent mankind as its best but also at its most foolhardy as the full measure of humanity cannot be understood through good will alone. Madness inflames but also illuminates, and if Celliers prevails over Yonoi in the battle of wills, it’s because he possesses a madness to match Yonoi’s.

If THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS’s main conflict is between the American hustler Shears and the British elitist Nicholson — Shears isn’t exactly the ‘commoner’ type as he’s crafty and resourceful in having things go his way, i.e. being a ‘winner’ — , the main rivals in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE are Captain Yonoi(Ryuichi Sakamoto) and Major Jack Celliers(David Bowie). Interestingly enough, both gained fame as experimental composers straddling the borders between pop and the avant-garde. Also, both have been noted for their sexual ambiguity, which adds to MCLM as Yonoi is clearly a repressed homo.

As the story progresses, the rift grows wider, which is especially painful for Yonoi who’s afflicted with a sexual and spiritual obsession with Celliers. Yonoi, unable to turn Celliers into a homo lover, wants to own him as a spiritual partner in a shared aesthetic, a vision of beauty. Even though Celliers’ will collides with Yonoi’s authority, his real beef isn’t with Yonoi but with himself: He feels himself as the worst enemy over what happened between him and his humpback brother. Indeed, Yonoi is at best a mere afterthought in Celliers’ mind.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE is essentially a tale of Christian-Humanism, and as such, its concept of redemption is deeper than that of THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS, whose main concerns are political and social, with a shade of the psychological. Colonel Nicholson, for the social good of his men, made a grievous political mistake. Shears, initially self-centered and opportunistic, meets a noble death as a hero.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE has a warped spiritualist element lacking in THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI and MERRY CHRISTMAS and most war films, all the more so as a clear divide between good and evil is absent. Its mood is somewhat similar to Kon Ichikawa’s spiritualist-humanist BURMESE HARP, another P.O.W film set in Southeast Asia, in this case, Japanese imprisoned by the Allies; in the film, a Japanese soldier turns to spiritual salvation to tend for the souls of his fallen comrades.

The hero of BURMESE HARP turns to Buddhism as solace from the horrors of war, and the Eastern religion is presented as a clear, if not the, answer, in a world riven with crises. The film could serve as a recruiting tool for Buddhism, much like TOP GUN for the US Air Force.
Things get trickier in MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE. There is indeed a ‘spiritual’ battle between the quasi-fascist Yonoi and the Christo-Humanist Celliers, but the dynamics are far more personal, eccentric, and ‘existential’. For all of Yonoi’s devotion to spiritual purity, his fascination with Celliers is largely (homo)sexual. For someone who’s committed to the Japanese nationalist ideology of Yamato bloodlines, he has a rather odd hankering for a blond white guy(though not of the crude and vulgar variety exhibited by the sadistic Turkish officer in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA). It gets even more perplexing because Yonoi is actually a very intelligent and well-educated man who has studied and lived outside Japan. He’s not some closed-minded provincial hick but someone with genuine respect for other cultures and peoples, especially for the great powers of the West, which he deems ‘honorable’.

He is party to a superiorist identity and ideology but, like so many of his compatriots, haunted by feelings of inferiority vis-a-vis the West that has the advantage in land, manpower, resources, and technology — beauty is also a factor in Yonoi’s ultra-homo-sensitivity concerning aesthetic matters.
Japan’s expansion across Asia was to reverse its situation with the West. Precisely because Japanese were materially disadvantaged against the West(and lacked manpower in China), there was a greater emphasis on the FIGHTING SPIRIT as compensation, though Japan drew from its highly aestheticized and spiritualized warrior traditions.
Yonoi is, at once, profoundly Japanese and confusedly universalist. He is no slouch and, if anything, extremely hard on himself on matters of purity and devotion, but he expects non-Japanese to respect and follow his lead. He projects a particularist Japanese concept of the ‘spirit’ onto Western P.O.W.s who are not only completely alien to Japanese ideals(made radical under militarist rule) but barely able to stand on their own two feet. In Yonoi’s mental universe, it’s as if everyone could turn ‘Japanese’, at least on the ‘spiritual’ level, if they put their minds to it. He expects everyone to overcome his sickness and get his act together in service to the Japanese empire.

And yet, as Celliers comes to demonstrate(in front of everyone), Yonoi cannot overcome his own confused but powerful passions, which could be construed as sick(or homo-erotic lust for some white guy) or sacred(or a poet’s recognition of beauty and superiority). In the final confrontation when Celliers kisses Yonoi, the latter cannot overcome his ‘spiritual-sensual’ turmoil about the blond Brit. He finds himself unable to muster the strength to kill Celliers(who’s making a fool of him in front of the Japanese and Europeans alike) and collapses like a girl kissed by her dream beau. For all his talk of godlike control over one’s body and soul, Yonoi is no less a prisoner of his limitations, however rare and peculiar they may be. Though Celliers is destroyed physically, he is the one who triumphs spiritually over Yonoi.

Even so, there are several layers of meaning, or more than meets the eye. Celliers doesn’t come across as a religious man, at least in the technical sense. He grew up attending churches(as was the cultural norm) and all but seems a worldly person. Thus, his spiritual redemption is more personal(or philosophically ‘existential’) than religious. Though his life is sacrificed for the fellow POWs(and perhaps even for Yonoi’s sake), his main motivation is a deeply private burden of guilt in regards to his younger brother. His compatriots surely see his capital punishment as most unjust, but Celliers may have nursed a death wish for just such a moment, an opportunity to atone for an inner scar that never healed.

Consider the striking symmetries and stark contrasts in the film. Both Japan and Britain are island nations. During World War II, both were striving to expand or maintain control over vast territories as imperial powers. Both nations have long been defined by a rigid class/caste system. Though Britain democratized and liberalized, its class hierarchy remained very much intact well into the early 1960s. Also, form and manners have been of great importance in both cultures(though much less so in the UK since the late 60s). And though Meiji reforms and modernization disbanded the samurai caste and liberalized and opened up Japanese society, including the military, to all classes, Japan, even today, is marked by a sense of place and duty. And both civilizations have been infused with a transcendent faith: Christianity or Buddhism.

Yet, there are also profound differences. By mid-century, Britain had been in the imperialist and colonial game for centuries whereas Japan only joined the club in the late 19th century. The social and political transformations in Britain happened ‘organically’ in stages, whereas Japan was dragged overnight into fast-evolving modernity after centuries of isolation and stasis. (Japan not only had to catch up but keep up with accelerating changes in the West. It was like suddenly going from medievalism to modernism without the developmental phases in between.) Despite the emphasis on social discipline and order, the British had also been defined by individuality if not exactly individualism in the modern sense, i.e. individual worth proven by wit or excellence was allowed a degree of autonomy(like with the eponymous hero of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA whose eccentricities and even defiance of orders come to be acknowledged as having useful merit). Also, the pro-active aspect of Protestant Christianity not only imbued a sense of individual conscience(one of the themes of CHARIOTS OF FIRE) but ensured social reforms and missions around the world(that sometimes opposed certain aspects of the imperialist enterprise).

Profoundly karmic, Buddhism has been a passive spirituality that disdains ‘saving the world’ as a misguided attachment to an illusion called ‘reality’. In Christianity(at least in the modern Western incarnation), one not only draws inward but outward for salvation. In Buddhism, one ‘hibernates’ into monasticism as a resounding rejection of the world. As such Buddhism was more tolerable than Christianity to the traditional samurai order. Though Buddhism’s innate pacifism may have been anathema to the warrior caste, it remained a personal than a social credo. (On the other hand, centuries of Christian faith certainly didn’t prevent the West from being martial and aggressive, and if anything, it often served as a moral justification for West’s expanding hegemony. A recent example of this was the Christian Right’s overwhelming support of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Ann Coulter, though not of the Christian Right, even joked that the neo-crusaders should force Iraqis to Jesus at the point of a rifle.)

Because of Christian social/moral activism and the West’s long experience of ruling over indigenous natives, it was true enough that the British by the 20th century had become seasoned interlocutors with the natives, certainly more than the taciturn Japanese could ever hope to be. Though British manners were reserved, conversation remained a lively part of the culture as long it was within proper bounds, whereas less said the better among the Japanese, especially between members of different social stations or cultures.

If Christianity softened British attitudes somewhat toward the natives, extensive trial-and-error led to improved use of carrots and sticks. And though proper form was at the center of British culture, a degree of impropriety could be tolerated, even admired, if redeemed with wit, one tool availed to all classes. A sharp instrument, even a social inferior could parlay and pierce with flashing brilliance without undue disruption of decorum, akin to pulling the tablecloth without moving the items. The British not only cared for superior status but superior talent, and wit was admired whomever it came from, and thus, even a lower-class member could shine with wit used masterly like a rapier than a blunt instrument of unruly barbarians. It was one way to stave off boredom in polite society. Also, a way to convey displeasure without loss of composure. And an intimation that the hierarchy, for all its snobbery, operated on sportsmanship, handing points on wit to anyone regardless of station. One cannot underestimate the importance of wit in British society as it cultivated an alternative concept of aristocracy, which increasingly became problematic with Jews beating Anglos in wit. If the traditional concept of aristocracy was about lineage and title, the competing one was of natural aristocracy, that of rare individuals who, regardless of their background, exhibited exceptional qualities of the mind, of which wit was the quickest indicator.
Japanese, like the British, were obsessed with proper form and manners, developing refined protocols and rules of behavior, but wit was a matter between equals or intimates, not something a superior would waste on an inferior and certainly not something an inferior would dare wield against a superior, at least if he didn’t want his head chopped off.

Thanks to Christianity, a natural-aristocratic appreciation of quality, and extensive experience with exploration, trade, and conquest, the British attained a degree of empathy for their non-British subjects. As long as their natives acknowledged British dominance, the Brits took a live-and-let-live attitude towards them.
British Imperialism was somewhat odd for being, at once, more enlightened/tolerant AND more intolerant/prejudiced than other forms of European imperialism. While the other great imperialist powers — the Spanish, Portuguese, and the French — also insisted on white rule and domination, they weren’t so averse to racially intermingling and even mixing with the nonwhites. French-Canadians even enacted a policy of race-mixing with the Indians(as preferable to downright genocide or prolonged tribal race wars between reds and whites), and the Spanish extensively racially mixed with the ‘Indians’ of South and Central Americas. There was far less mixing between Anglos and natives(or other races) in places like the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Paradoxically, it was precisely the British insistence on racial separation(or at least distance) that allowed for greater cultural tolerance. As the British believed in the preservation of racial integrity, it only made sense that nonwhites should live amongst their own kind with their own cultures(though they could surely learn a thing or two from the more advanced British). Even though the British regarded their role as promethean, the bringer of light to a dim-lit world(or a dark one in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa), they hardly entertained the notion that nonwhites would ever reach the civilizational level of the West.

Given the British elite’s haughty(and even contemptuous) attitudes towards the lower classes and the Irish potatoheads, it was undoubtedly skeptical about nonwhites ever rising to the level of the West. Still, it was believed that nonwhites could only gain under the guidance and tutelage of the whites, especially the Brits.
British civilization/empire was built on a contradiction that, for a time at least, supplied the positive and negative charges for its historical project.
One key element of this contradiction was the movement toward progress, liberty, enlightenment, tolerance, universalism, and individuality while the other element was a deep abiding love of the queen, order, hierarchy, racial pride, God & Country, and fish-and-chips. The greatness resulted from the friction of the two dispositions. Had the empire merely sought power and order, it could have gone the way of Imperial Russia or the Spanish Empire. The imperial momentum owed to unflagging progress in politics, enterprise, education, and science/technology. No wonder Adam Smith and Charles Darwin were British than Spanish or Portuguese.
On the other hand, empire building requires loyalty, unity, order, martial spirit, and mythos of identity. The British loved law and liberty but also their lords and lore. The two proclivities collaborated in the expansion of the British Empire, but the contradictions became ever more problematic as the prestige couldn’t fully deliver on the promise(among the lower classes, far-flung subjects, and disgruntled members of the elite), with the American Independence a harbinger of things to come around the globe. Given the heavy investment in the imperial narrative of the great civilizer to audiences both at home and abroad, it was becoming a harder sell that all were fair and free within the empire.

The British grew increasingly apprehensive about the contradiction between supremacist empire-building and egalitarian truth-justice-liberty-spreading as, more the empire grew, more the people, British idealists and nonwhite subjects alike, noticed, especially as the empire wasn’t merely demanding submission but selling inspiration with the promise of uplift for the natives.
The British were clearly unwilling to bestow complete equality unto the ‘wogs’ and the like, especially as the motherland itself was rife with class distinctions, and this could only agitate the westernized non-British subjects who began to smell a rat. Mohandas Gandhi was at one time a proud representative of the British Empire. It was as if the British offered help with one hand while smacking you with the other.

Furthermore, many non-British subjects not only resented British rule but rejected modernity itself as either threatening or confounding. While the more advanced peoples, such as the Chinese in Hong Kong & Singapore and the merchant elites of India, eagerly took advantage of the new opportunities, many nonwhites around the world found modern freedoms to be either disruptive, disorienting, or downright profane(especially among the Muslims and Hindu fundamentalists).
In our time, for all the Sub-Saharan African song-and-dance about ‘democracy’ and ‘progress’, mainly for more handouts from the West, the subcontinent is still into primitivism, tribalism, and superstitions(though it must be said the average black African probably has a sounder sense of what a woman is than the current globo-homo tranny-wanny West does). But then, ultra-modern Singapore, even at this late stage, voices trepidations about the Western Way as the only way and proposes a set of ‘Asian cultural values’ for the East. Even in the West, there was a divergence between Anglo individuality and Continental community(be it socialist, folkish, and/or clannish).

Anyway, from its long dealings with nonwhite peoples, the British formulated an effective system of carrots and sticks, one that was caring and stern, affectionate but aloof. Though proudly and unmistakably British, they could empathize, even emote, with other cultures and manipulate their folks to serve interests deemed to be beneficial to both parties. Despite the unequal power structure, there was a degree of mutuality in the way the subjects were governed. The relationship rested on something more than force and favors; the natives were made to feel inspired in their service to such an enlightened and beneficent empire. The new boss wasn’t just another reiteration of the old boss but something completely different. Like the New Romans except, whereas Romans spread civilization through slavery, the British did so by abolishing it. The British Empire shone a light to a dark and diverse world, but the ownership of the light had to be white(except when Germans entered the stage as competitors), in which case the empire called on the darkies to stand with it against the bad whites of