ZEN MASTERS
In a calming way, the movie Perfect Days has links to both Barbie and The Matrix
“Next time is next time! Now is now!”
That's the mantra that serves as an unofficial motto in Perfect Days, the new film from German director Wim Wenders and the latest addition to the small but potent genre of Zen cinema. The movie follows a contemplative middle-aged man named Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho), as he goes about his job cleaning public toilets in the upscale Shibuya district of Tokyo. Serenely content in his work, Hirayama is visited by a young niece (Arisa Nakano), fleeing in rebellion from a wealthy family, and as the two bicycle around Tokyo, the niece starts making plans for her next visit. “Next time is next time!” her uncle gently chides her. “Now is now!”
When we immerse ourselves in a narrative onstage or screen or the printed page, or lose ourselves in a pop song, a symphony, or a painting in a museum, we give ourselves over to a different present tense, that of the story, the melody, the line. We forget our own now and go where the artists or storytellers take us, to the now of the work. It's a sleight of hand that, at best, can send us back into the daylight with fresh eyes and refreshed spirits.
But this also presents a functional and even metaphysical dilemma to someone like me, a working movie critic of four decades who for much of that time has also been a practising Zen Buddhist. My spiritual beliefs urge me to rise above the world's delusions, but what is cinema if not the greatest illusion machine ever? The Sixth Grave Precept specifically instructs us to avoid finding fault with others, but how do you square that with a four-star rating system?
By striving to enumerate flaws in the art rather than in the people who make it, for one thing. And by recognizing when the movies themselves serve up lessons in being alive to each moment, recognizing the karmic tragicomedy of life, and savouring the connections that bind everything to everything else. As the sage Dustin Hoffman notes in I Heart Huckabees (2004), it's all part of the same blanket.
Huckabees writer-director David O. Russell studied in college under Robert Thurman, the renowned Tibetan Buddhist scholar (and father of Uma), and any comedy whose characters ask themselves “How am I not myself?” with such discombobulated regularity is doing the satori samba.
There are films that explicitly address Zen philosophy and themes, like the lovely Korean monks' journeys Why Has Bodhi-dharma Left for the East? (1989) and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring (2003), and they tend to play to arthouse audiences. The Zen movies that don't announce themselves as such — and sometimes don't even intend themselves as such — can often be blockbusters, resonating across a mass audience that senses the dharma at a deep and inarticulate level.
The very premise of The Matrix (1999) is that reality as we perceive it is an illusory construct, and that the truth is out there if you're willing to take the red pill.
In last summer's pop mega-event Barbie, Margot Robbie says, “I want to do the imagining, not be the idea. I want to be part of the people who make meaning, not the thing that is made.”
That's the sound of a plaything awakening from her perfect plastic universe into a world of human suffering and joy.
The mother of all stealth Zen movies, is Groundhog Day (1993), in which the dyspeptic weatherman played by Bill Murray repeats the same Feb. 2 over and over and over until he finally gets it right — until he can return to temporal reality as an enlightened being, a bodhisattva whose mission is to save all sentient creatures with compassion and kindness.
The movies, in fact, are full of Bodhisattvas if you know where to look. The Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski (1998) has been claimed by Christians, Jews, Nietzschean nihilists and the Stoics, but if The Dude abides isn't a grand statement of Buddhist non-attachment, I'll eat my theoretical hat.
To bring it back to Perfect Days, the new Wenders film is a near twin to Jim Jarmusch's Paterson (2016), in which Adam Driver plays a bus driver named Paterson in Paterson, N.J. Both films are about working-class heroes who find peace in and make art from the repetition of their days. The bus driver in Paterson writes poetry, but Hirayama in Perfect Days is poetry who has chosen to live as what the koans call “a true person of no rank,” scrubbing out the toilets of Tokyo and marvelling with immediacy at every person and occurrence that crosses his path. When Buddhas are truly Buddhas, wrote the 13th-century Zen master Eihei Dogen, “they do not necessarily notice they are Buddhas.”
The Zen movies that don't announce themselves as such ... can often be blockbusters, resonating across a mass audience that senses the dharma at a deep and inarticulate level.