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A Story Retold: Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars

    The classic Akira Kurosawa 1961 film Yojimbo, and its spaghetti western remake, Sergio Leone’s 1964 A Fistful of Dollars, tell an almost Shakespearean story of a wandering stranger who comes into a town riddled with violence. The stranger uses wit and martial skill to trick the town’s competing gangs into destroying each other. The two films follow the same basic plot structure but use different tones and filmic techniques to tell the story. Yojimbo has many comedic elements, with witty dialogue and interesting characters in the town, which make up for the relatively few and simple sets. A Fistful of Dollars retells the story, but makes the film more about the action, with more violence, vivid color, complicated sets, and fewer character development scenes.

    Yojimbo was made in black and white, set in a simple Japanese town while samurai were still powerful, but guns were being introduced. A Fistful of Dollars is set in a Mexican town just south of the US border; the gangs in the town have more developed compounds and attempt to operate without the knowledge of the army. The sets of the films are very different, much of the dialogue in Yojimbo, following the ronin Sanjuro, takes place in the bar or on the street, while A Fistful of Dollars has more scenes outside of town and in the vast compound the Rojo gang has. The Rojo gang is made up of three brothers and their followers, they have a walled compound, with large storage rooms, and a courtyard for feasts. The story follows the Rojo’s more than their counterpart in Yojimbo, Ushitora’s gang. Yojimbo’s sets are very simple, with a few small houses and the large open street having most of the action. The Rojo’s rival gang, the Baxters, did not receive much development, while Ushitora’s rival Sebei is made to seem like more of a player in the game. Of the two films, Yojimbo gives off the sense that the town is full of real characters, from the merchants to the low-lives. A Fistful of Dollars has fewer character outside of the gangs, and almost no extras, making the town seem dead, but this strategy allows for the filmmakers to focus on developing the Rojo’s and the Man With No Name’s relationship with them.

    In both films, a rivalry is set up between the protagonist and the other most competent man in town. Unosuke in Yojimbo, and Ramon Rojo in A Fistful of Dollars. Both Unosuke and Ramon are distinguished from their brothers and the rest of the town by their skills as marksman. Unosuke is in possession of a handgun, a rare and deadly weapon that often spells death for samurai. The pistol defines Unosuke as a killer, he goes on to prove his vicious nature throughout the film, before dying to Sanjuro’s sword. Unosuke’s need for violence, even in his dying moments as he says: “without my pistol… I feel sort of naked. I can’t go to the other world without it.” Somehow, when Sanjuro hands him the pistol, Unosuke is unable to shoot, perhaps revealing that violence is not really the answer. Ramon Rojo, from A Fistful of Dollars, is also out for blood, murdering a Mexican Army squad for gold and framing the Americans. This scene was surprising because there was no basis for it in Yojimbo, showing that the western uses action to drive the plot.

    Ramon is given more external motivation than Unosuke, by trimming down some of the content in Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars has fully removed the Sake brewer and the Silk merchant’s characters. The Sake brewer, siding with Ushitora, was given the woman Nui (Marisol in A Fistful of Dollars) to secure his loyalty. Without an intermediate character like the Sake brewer, Ramon himself covets Marisol and stole her from her family. When the Man With No Name rescues Marisol, there is a personal vendetta between them, and makes their showdown much more emotionally charged. Ramon is a master marksman, and the only character shown using a rifle. The sword versus pistol in Yojimbo hits much harder than the pistol versus rifle concept in Fistful of Dollars, but the final fight scene is executed extremely well, with the Man With No Name goading Ramon into using up all his ammo before proving himself to be the better gunslinger.

    The two bartender characters contrast well considering the different approach both films take to violence. Gonji, the elderly bartender is sick of seeing violence in the town, he is distrustful of Sanjuro, who he fears will incite further killing. His temperament reflects the moral stance the film takes: violence and gambling are wrong, and evil men will be punished. A Fistful of Dollars does not talk about morality much at all, the Man With No Name simply finds a situation to take advantage of, without a clear motive. The bartender her befriends, Silvanito, is against his involvement with he town affairs but celebrates as the gang members are killed and tricked. He is not as averse to violence, and watches as Ramon kill the Mexican soldiers. Silvanito does not serve as a moral compass like his counterpart Gonji; both help the protagonists, but take different views to their actions.  

    In conclusion, the plot of Yojimbo is trimmed down slightly in A Fistful of Dollars, but the two films approach the story differently, with Yojimbo functioning like a play, with snappy dialogue and reduced fight scenes, while A Fistful of Dollars capitalized on action, and only developed the most important characters. The focus on action is engaging and visually pleasing, as well as effective at creating tension during the shootout scenes, which any good western should strive for. In Yojimbo, the focus on writing and dialogue gives both a levity and intelligence to the film, while limiting the exploration of the set. Both films follow the plotline well and have excellent final fights.

The Creature: The Thing and Alien

Horror is a vast genre, and one of the best at keeping an audience in suspense. The chilling dread that a good horror film can instill is priceless, but creating an avatar of pure fear is even more so. Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien, and John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing, take the classic horror idea of ‘The Creature’ and use their films to explore how an isolated group of humans attempt to defeat an alien organism. Both creatures have unique strengths but must overpower or assimilate the humans in order to escape. In Alien, the crew of the Nostromo, a mining ship, encounter the Alien, and in The Thing, an American Arctic Outpost is infiltrated by the Thing and devolves into paranoia.

Scott’s Alien has arguably been the most memorable and menacing alien design in pop culture for 40 years. The shiny black carapace, metallic teeth, and terrible oozing saliva enraptured audiences so much that sequels and spinoffs were bound to be made, further exploring how the Alien can outthink and outperform any human. It is an alpha predator with the ability to both hide and attack. It is larger, stronger, and faster than any human, with acid blood that makes it just as deadly when it is injured. The crew of the Nostromo, which accidentally let the alien aboard, attempt to stay alive while being used by the corporation and the android Ash to bring the Alien back to earth so it can be used as a weapon.

Carpenter’s Thing may have less lasting cultural impact, but certainly rivals the Alien in creativity. The thing is less tangible, and therein less marketable, but the suspense it creates is just as real. An alien organism that thawed out of the arctic ice, it has the ability to take on any form, and cells that can infect all other organisms and assimilate them until there is only The Thing. The power of The Thing lies in its shapeshifting ability. Anyone or anything could be ‘The Thing’, which ignites the paranoia and suspicion that tears the Artic Outpost apart. The protagonist and de facto leader, MacReady, attempts to keep order by minimizing the paranoia and organizing the living humans to destroy the Thing.

The hunter versus prey dynamic is one of the main differences in the films, with the Alien stalking the humans across the Nostromo and effectively eliminating them one by one. Even in the scenes where the crew is tracking the Alien through the ventilation system, Captain Dallas, the ship’s commanding officer, is not in a position of control. This proves deadly when he is hunting down the Alien and it still sneaks up on him and kills him. The crew must run from and attempt to escape the Alien, which to their horror is faster and arguably smarter than they are, so the dynamic throughout the film is that the humans are being hunted.

In contrast, The Thing centers around the creature being hunted down. MacReady puts it on the ropes when he finally figures out how to differentiate humans from the Thing. By putting a heated wire in a petri dish of human blood, they can determine who is human, due to the Thing’s defense mechanism. The Thing is unique in that each of its cells have their own consciousness, and each cell will defend itself from damage, which reveals the weakness that a single cell would rather avoid its own destruction than protect the rest of the cells. So when the heated wire is brought into the petri dish of Palmer’s blood, the blood moves supernaturally to avoid the heat, revealing the Thing, which must then attempt to escape but is finished off by MacReady. The Thing is still strong as prey however, just because the assimilated Palmer was destroyed does not mean the Thing was defeated, cells of the original monster had infected Blair, who would force the destruction of the entire outpost.

Ripley’s attempt to escape in Alien by setting off the Nostromo’s self-destruct system and using the shuttle to get away showcases how smart the Alien really is, it tracks down and kills the other two crew members, and hides away in the shuttle to escape with Ripley. This action is surprising because it heavily implies that the Alien fully understood that the self-destruct system was being armed and that it would only be safe if it entered the shuttle and hid. The intelligence the creature must have in order to make such a distinction is impressive and proves that the Alien can be a more patient and calculated creature than the Thing, as shown by how it revealed itself in the heated wire scene.

Alien ends with a sense of resolution, as the Alien is gone, floating in the vacuum of space, and Ripley has escaped. The Thing does not end with resolution, as it is unclear if MacReady and Childs (the last surviving humans) are infected or not. The paranoia of whether the creature has really been destroyed is evident as the two wait to freeze to death. If the Thing burned to death in the remains of the outpost, then the world is safe, but if not, when the winter ends, and humans come back to check on the outpost, the Thing could be thawed again and destroy the world. This is the real threat of the creature, despite not being as strong, smart, or immediately deadly as the Alien, its threat spreads inconspicuously and rapidly.

In conclusion, the creatures portrayed in Alien and The Thing are both deadly alien organisms that infiltrate and nearly destroy a group of isolated humans. The threat posed by the Thing may be more widespread than that of the Alien, but the Alien is an avatar of terror that can overpower any human and shows practically no weakness. Both aliens take the center stage as a ‘Creature’ of terror, cementing both films as terrifying and classic.

As Above, So Below: Us and Parasite

(Spoilers Ahead!) 

   Two recent films, Jordan Peele’s Us and Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite delve into exciting portrayals of oppression and classism.  The films have many overlapping concepts: class war, death, subterfuge, living underground, and the fact that both films center around two pairs of perfect nuclear families. The Wilsons and their doppelgangers (Us) and the Kims and the Parks (Parasite), all consist of four people: a mother, a father, a daughter, and a son. Of these paired families, one lives underground and is trying to claim a life above, while the other is explicitly privileged and defends their way of life. Each film could be considered a story about the entire family, but heavily leans on one character, especially toward the ending.  Peele’s Adelaide Wilson, and JoonHo’s Kim Ki-Taek are the principal characters at the center of the films' conflicts. They have very different roles, and end up in opposite scenarios, with Adelaide free and Ki-Taek trapped underground. In Us there is less subtlety in the motivation of the oppressed family, they are coming up from underground to kill the people they are tethered to so they can live in the sun.  In Parasite, as the title suggests, the Kim family becomes a parasitic force, siphoning wealth from the inattentive Park family. 

    Adelaide, played by Lupita Nyong’o is established as the main character of Us at the beginning, when she gets lost as a small girl. The rest of the film serves as a character study about her, even though her family gets a lot of screen-time. She is part of the privileged household (with a nasty secret) and fears the disruption of her way of life.  Us establishes a world where families like the Wilsons have everything they want, while doppelgangers called the Tethered live underground and eat raw rabbit.   In the world of Parasite, the Kim family lives in a sub-basement, which is small and dirty, while their employers, the Park family live in a mansion with a large yard.  The father of the Kim family, Ki-Taek, played by Kang-Ho Song, is not the first of his family to infiltrate the household of the Parks, but he becomes the main character over the course of the film as he is degraded  repeatedly by the Park family. The two characters make for an interesting comparison, because Ki-Taek struggles with his poverty and hatred for the rich, while Adelaide has already fought for her privileged life and now must fight to keep it. 

    Neither character entirely fits in with their family or the privileged lifestyle they try to adopt. Ki-Taek starts off Parasite as a strong head of family, the shot of him stoically folding pizza boxes while the rest of the family is coughing on insecticide establishes his character as someone with drive, even though he is unemployed and lower-class, he will do what needs to be done. But his drive is met with failure, and a foreshadowing comment that “One out of four” are rejects. As one of the early lines in the film it is immediately striking, considering there are four members of the Kim family, the reject is implied to be Ki-Taek. The line could easily have been in Us rather than Parasite, it applies to the Wilsons because Adelaide is not like the rest of her family. As an adult, Adelaide is never at ease, her family is relaxed and unafraid while on vacation, but there is not a moment in the movie, until the last shot of her, where Adelaide looks unafraid. As a child, Adelaide’s mother says “I just want my daughter back” when Adelaide stops talking after the incident with the Tethered, a reminder that she is not like other people on the surface (because she is the fake).

    Both of the characters’ oddness take the form of senses; Ki-Taek has a noticeable ‘smell’ that Mr. Park cannot stand. Ki-Jeong, his daughter, insists is from living in a sub-basement. The smell makes its first appearance when Da-Song smells both Ki-Taek and Choong-Sook, and comments that they are the same. Later, Mr. Park heavily insults the smell while Ki-Taek listens secretly. The insults begin to push him over the edge, the idea that the wealthy can mock the poor for how they cannot help smelling. When Mr. Park does not acknowledge Ki-Jeong’s mortal wound but does take time to acknowledge the stink of Moon-Gwang’s husband, Ki-Taek finds that it is the last straw. He fatally stabs Mr. Park and runs off. Adelaide’s give-away is sound, at the beginning of the movie she snaps her fingers off-beat, confusing her son. Sound is important throughout Us because none of the Tethered can speak, except for Red (the original Adelaide). Their ululating sounds are grippingly inhuman. The audience, and Jason, her son, are shocked to find that when Adelaide finally kills Red, she releases loud ululating sobs, like the Tethered do. Jason is left to wonder who the real monster was.

    Adelaide and Ki-Taek end their stories as dramatic opposites. After killing Red, Adelaide keeps her life above-ground, with her family intact. Her success is because of her desperation, and the brutality she displays in the final fight, and the ending flashback of the film. She has gotten away with climbing the social ladder, and she is happy about it, daring to smile at her suspicious son. Ki-Taek’s story ends in tragedy. Long-suffering and at the end of his rope, without a plan, he kills the cruel and indifferent Mr. Park, and takes the place of Moon-Gwang’s husband in the secret basement beneath the Parks’ house. He has descended even further, rather than finding a place in the sun. Ki-Taek must continue to live as a parasite, underground and with no hope of leaving. It is a tragic ending for the Kim family, showing the dire situation of the impoverished and what little chance there is to move up in the world.