Show Me Who You Are

A microessay on gestures and visual storytelling in Princess Mononoke.

These days, there are angry ghosts all around us. Dead from wars, sickness, starvation, and nobody cares. So you say you’re under a curse? Well, so what? So’s the whole damn world.

— Jigo, “Princess Mononoke”

In an early scene of Hayao Miyazaki’s best movie¹ “Princess Mononoke,” the monk Jigo eats three bowls of porridge while Prince Ashitaka doesn’t finish even one. It’s such a delicate detail in a scene loaded with theme and information that I never noted² it till I watched it a month ago, my eighth or ninth time watching this film in the past twenty years. We, the audience, are still trying to figure out what exactly this movie we’re watching is, who we should be clocking: Jigo is the first substantial character we meet outside of Ashitaka. By the end of this scene, we don’t really understand explicitly who Jigo is or what he wants, but since we’re not gonna see him again for another hour or so and he’s a major player in the plot, Miyazaki does a lot of heavy-lifting with this less-than-five-minute scene.

Character gesture provides such a substantial texture to a story and builds inside its universe (and ours) symbols, character. Miyazaki does this brilliantly with all his films, but you can also see gesture work form substantially in Akira Kurosawa's films (look for the chin scratch) and Pina Bausch’s choreography (the whole things.) While those two do amazing work in their own rights, Miyazaki’s use of gesture echoes a narrower theatrical conceit called gestus, a term and definition coined by Bertolt Brecht. Gestus, in his world, is (roughly) character behavior to concretely manifest social relations and the way the performer politically perceives these relations.³

Outside of theater, I think Brecht is usually pretty hard to shoehorn into conversations⁴, but in this film, what I mean is that, of the many foils to Ashitaka, Jigo is the most antithetical to his character—for Jigo, the world is cursed and it’s get-what-you-can; for Ashitaka, the world is sacred and we connect without presumption, with our earnest open selves.

Let’s digress!!

A week or so before rewatching this film high on a couch with my friend, Salvio⁵, I was teaching 6th graders about performance, more specifically, gesture. I ask the students what they do with their families and then ask them to make a gesture (with beginning-middle-end) out of that. There’s lots of eating: students all do a relative approximation of bringing something to their mouth and they all do it at roughly the same pace with the same nom-nom-nom sound.

What’s always interesting is how students are both deeply self-conscious and therefore dimly aware of how much their bodies and clothing speak, how they might be read. But the second you put them onstage, they become inundated with how they might be read, and close up any sense of reality or vulnerability their bodies might carry. When I ask them more questions and prompt changes in their physicality, (“what are you eating? Do you normally eat that slowly? Do you actually shove the whole taco into your mouth in one bite or do you just want me to leave you alone?”) this dimness sort of luminesces for a moment: the other students ask questions on top of these initial prompts, usually giggling, but that dim understanding adheres to their classmates physical behavior.

This isn’t quite gestus, but it’s the beginning of it—of understanding how our physicality relates to our society. I think also of Hoda Katebi’s statement that individual aesthetics tell of how we perceive our social roles.

Let’s look at Jigo and Ashitaka’s clothes:

You’ll note that Jigo’s primarily wearing reds and whites, what would later become the colors of Japan’s national flag. Since this movie takes place in the Muromachi period (14th century) this seems more like a little anti-nationalism comment on Miyazaki’s part as well as a soft foreshadowing of Jigo’s role as the Emperor’s stand-in, rather than an intimate world-building detail. (His shoes are also interesting in that they put about six inches between him and the earth, as opposed to Ashitaka who usually we see barefoot.)

Ashitaka, on the other hand, has a much more diverse palette, that includes red and white: not as indicators of purity like the monk, but possibly as an homage to nature or his red elk friend, Yakul. His outfit also contains a comparatively striking amount of blue (but not in the above photo, where I tried to capture his outfit with all of its accessories)

Now that we’ve got a general sense of these two and what their gestural differences are — remember: Jigo eats four bowls of porridge in the time Ashitaka eats one — we can talk about what this indicates. Ashitaka, we understand, is a member of the indigenous Emishi tribe, subjected centuries before to genocide. He lives in respectful relationship to the land, its spirits, and creatures. He eats slowly and thoughtfully.

Jigo, ostensibly a spiritual man, is not judicious about eating; he keeps serving up to himself. There are many possible contexts for this so it fades into the background. But!!! During this conversation, he also mentions to Ashitaka: did you know that the emperor will pay a fortune to anybody who can find him the secret of immortality?

I won’t say more — if you’ve seen the movie, then you know; if you haven’t, ask me for my HBO password — but Jigo’s body was telling us what he was not.

I was thinking about those kids in the school, who defaulted to the same body, who believed that eating was always the same. In our white, Western society, we don’t think much about what the body says or expresses — labor and commodity are the only relevant components. But the body tells if we listen.⁶

1. Like, I think so, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a MIyazaki fan who doesn’t love this one.

2. As opposed, I think, to noticed.

3. A good friend who reads this newsletter is far more familiar with Brecht than I am and we spoke briefly four years ago about gestus and it is much more nuanced than this, but here I am, chumping it up. Thanks, Stefan, for subscribing and also for teaching me so much whenever we talk.

4. But I keep trying.

5. And it was! Their! First! Time!!!! It was also the first time not falling asleep during a Miyazaki film!!

6. Also, Hayao Miyazaki is the goat for making animation more physically alive than a lot of theater I’ve seen.