the dog is not the cat: a suburban satire
by Douglas Messerli
Kōgo Noda and Yasujirō Ozu
(screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) お早よう (Ohayō) (Good Morning) / 1959, USA 1962
Indeed, Good Morning is, at
least in part, about television itself. The two sons of the Hayashi household,
Minoru (Shitara Koji) and Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu) are angry, not only because
their mother won’t allow them to visit the neighbor’s house to watch TV—the
seemingly bohemian couple who wear their pajamas all day, sing scat songs, and
have posters of American films on their walls—but refuses to even consider the
possibility of buying them a television set. Their father, Keitaro (Chishū Ryū)
insists that the new device “will produce 100 million idiots.” And when, after
their open rebellion against his viewpoint, he demands they keep quiet, the two
boys determine to become permanently silent to all adults, rebelling as nearly
all adolescents eventually do, in a manner that threatens not their education,
but their very survival, since they refuse to share in family meals—the very
center of home activity. Dobie Gillis did the very same thing, at a slightly
older age, in the series that bore his name.
Unlike Ozu’s 1932 silent film, I
Was Born, but..., upon which this film was very loosely based, the father
no longer has much significance in the family life. Instead, the mother, Tamiko
(Kuniko Miyake) is the center of family life—again not so very different from
what I have previously argued about American TV situation comedies, including Leave It to Beaver, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and The Donna Reed Show, all of which place
their maternal images at the center of control.
Yet Mrs. Hayashi, given her gossipy behavior, has other problems: she
has accused the Treasurer of the neighborhood dues, Mrs Haraguchi (Haruko
Sugimura) as perhaps having used their payments for the purchase of a new
washing machine. And when it turns out that Haraguchi’s senile mother simply
forgot to pass on the payment envelope, all the neighbors begin to turn against
Hayashi, returning anything they may have previously borrowed in order to be
free of her viperous tongue.
Subtly, the boys not only somehow assimilate this, but recognize that
all their elders say little about truth in their daily polite expressions of
“Good morning,” “How are you?” and
To make his point, Ozu goes beyond what any American situation comedy
might have portrayed. As the adult males perpetually release flatulents,
sometimes even expressing a kind of private language to their wives, the boys
play games in which they fart when pressed by their peers on their foreheads.
Yet, obviously, their pressed foreheads also represent a kind of “turning on,”
just like a television set, which immediately results in their seemingly comical
actions. Only one of their group, who regularly “messes” his pants, cannot join
in this mockery. In a strange sense, they are repeating the process of their
consumer-culture society, literally performing like the machines which they
wish to possess.
In Ozu’s world, the regular walks around neighborhood blocks of a TV
comedy such as Leave It to Beaver is
replaced with a series of linear structures where people come and go, on
several different levels, from right to left, and left to right. The
neighborhood women incessantly open and shut the bamboo sliding doors of their
friends. As in a hundred stories of suburban living, a drunk neighbor shows up
late at night in the wrong house. Ozu presents us with a series of seemingly
linear worlds from which there is truly no escape. Each member of this society
remains trapped in their own strata.
Maybe this most Japanese of all directors was far more American than we might have imagined him.
Los Angeles, August 23, 2017
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2017).
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