Fireworks scene


When Aochi is going to nakasago's to sleep with his wife, he sees people watching fireworks. in the "audience" are all the other characters in the movie. what's the significance of this? i thought it was kind of like to show us the sense of guilt aochi feels in sleeping with nakasago's wife, as if he's afraid of being caught by all who know him. this falls in line with afterwards, when he gets paranoid about the rock falling off the roof, and his obsession with knowing who threw them.

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Your explanation of the figurative meaning of the fireworks scene is as good as any. The absolute fascination of this film for me is the unending enigma between what's in the mind and what's really out there. All things "out" there are first incorporated into the mind before we interact with it. Even when the thing out there pushes back after our own action towards it, we reincorporate the reaction of the external thing to us in this same mind before we react again or perhaps don't react again. Of course, there is the will which for the most part doesn't care about what's out there to stop it except perhaps for dangerous reprisals to ourselves for acting out our wills. This is Aochi's torment, whether he has acted or only thought he acted. I think in this film, all the real or imaginary bridges and lines between human beings or even with their non-human environment are really non-existent. To my reading, all this film is the memory and/or rethinking of things by one man (including Aochi's guilt and his not understanding all the "doublings" of himself and others in his life). If you can comprehend this, think of all the characters as either Aochi himself (his different aspects) and how he perceives, treats, or wants from and takes from the different aspects of womanhood (or women) in his life (and in his fantasies). Nakasago, perhaps an imaginary alter ego (or not), undergoes a process in his life and death, whereas Aochi does not and it takes a child, Nakasago's (his post-death medium), to tell Aochi so. A ghost (or near ghost) is trying to tell us something about worldly desires and delusions. What some of those are can be seen from Nagasako and Aochi's life as shown in this nightmarish film about what some of us want and don't want (or take and don't take) from other human beings, most of the times these contradictory impulses happen or are felt towards the same person (and even towards ourselves). The later two parts of the Taisho trilogy is also very similiar in this way. I think the key word or thing with this trilogy is the idea of the "doubling" of characters as well as the underlying idea of the different aspects of ourselves and others. The haunting guilt is in how we treat others (and ourselves) in life, and the overcoming of the cognitive dissonance to realize that about ourselves beyond personal facades, which as far as I see in literature and other artistic works, seem to happen late in most people's lives. Because of all the self-reflexive mirrors, devices, and characters used by Suzuki in this trilogy, we get as thoroughly complex a portrait of aspects of manhood (and womanhood too, though from the outside, in my opinion) as I've seen on film.

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I have not seen the film.

From what I gather, from the informative and tolerant discussion here, I'd throw in this theory: It's about guilt and self-justification. He is (I read here) "going to Nakasago's to sleep with his wife." The fireworks that everyone else is watching represents the pleasure that supposedly everyone _else_ is giving _themselves_ permission to have, so it reflects his thought of, "Everyone else is having their fun, so I am going to do so too."

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