My "interdisciplinary" interpretation paper:
There is something so common to the thread of life that the same scenes play out across cultures – if only in dreams. In Dreams, Akira Kurosawa takes his audience through eight of his own dreams. As he does so, he reveals not only something of his own heart, fears, and understanding of the world – he reveals something of human experience. Thus, coming from a Buddhist worldview, speckles of an apocalyptic end of the world, earned through sinful, greedy living, can be found in this work. As it does not come from a highly Christianized, Western worldview, this connection is both more difficult to find and more rewarding once uncovered.
Before we reach the apocalyptic element of Dreams, we first examine the very form of the film. “I saw at night.” A dream: so begins the eight visions of Zechariah, rich in imagery and potent in meaning. They are instructive and invite Israel into a new way of spiritually being. “A Dream.” So begins Kurosawa’s prophetic work. It seems, at first glance, to be nothing more than an artistic portrayal of those inescapable images dreams leaves us. Digging deeper, it is a poetic autobiography from Kurosawa, feeling his time running out. However, looking more deeply, this is more than a collection of dreams, it is a collection of dreams forming a prophetic work.
Moving on, we look at the visions leading up to the apocalyptic dreams. The first, Sunshine Through Rain, has edenic qualities. A boy, in an innocent world, is warned not to venture out in sunshine and rain, as the foxes have their weddings on these days. He disobeys and is caught watching the foxes. As a result, his mother locks him out, telling him to seek their forgiveness. “They do not usually forgive;” she says, “you should be prepared to die.” With this, the innocence nature, respected, and untouched, is lost. From this point, in the dream, nature is not comforting and humanity and nature struggle with each other.
The second through fourth dreams develop this theme of the sins of humanity and enmity between humanity and nature. Finally, the fifth dream is a hinge. In Crows, an older man walks into a Van Gogh painting. Van Gogh is fighting against time and has a task at hand. He must finish his work before it is too late: before the crows come. After this, Kurosawa’s work takes a different, more instructive and even rushed tone. The first four visions set the stage and the fifth announced the urgency. Now, the prophecy comes.
Mt. Fuji in Red is the first of the two apocalyptic dreams. The mountain is glowing as though erupting. However, it glows because, behind it, nuclear power plants are exploding. The nuclear waste destroys everything and everyone. The same older man as in the last dream is now a tourist, caught up in this storm of people and runs with them as they flee to the sea. When he reaches the sea, there is nowhere else to run. Here he engages in dialogue. In the end, it is revealed that this desperate end is justified punishment for the sins of humanity, for human pride and disbelief that humanity will ever be brought to mourn in such a way.
This dialogue echoes Revelation 18:7:
To the degree that she glorified herself and lived sensuously, to the same degree give her torment and mourning; for she says in her heart, 'I sit as a queen and I am not a widow, and will never see mourning.'
If the sixth dream is apocalyptic, the seventh, The Weeping Demon, is post-apocalyptic: where there was no mourning, the suffering brought for transgressions has now brought weeping. The older man finds himself, again, as a tourist. He is climbing a dark mountain and finds a mourning man. He looks more closely at the man and asks, “Are you a demon?” The man affirms, “I suppose I am.” He continues, “Once was human,” but now he and all those whose greed led to a nuclear apocalypse are punished with eternal life and suffering. Where they feasted at the expense of nature and of the poor, now they hunger and have nothing to eat but each other. There is real sense of drinking double from the cup they poured. Finally, the demon-man turns of the traveler and, again, the viewer craves escape.
Village of the Watermills, the final vision offers exactly that, a sense of escape. The tourist is now walking through a bright, breathtaking, simple town, adorned with spring flowers. He comes upon a man who is working a watermill. The two discuss. In a fairly preachy way, the conclusion is brought: this simple way of life is the alternative to the death and destruction he has seen. The invitation is, in essence, to return to the boy of the first dream and keep him from engaging in that original sin that tore humanity and nature apart, or at least to live as though it hadn’t happened.
Obviously, these are very Buddhist ideals. The first, obvious, thing a Christian can receive from this film is a picture of sin and purity in an Eastern mindset. Through this, we see Kurosawa’s lens and interpretation – not so much of Christian scriptures or even of his dreams, but more his dreams’ interpretation of life, of the common human fear of a cataclysmic and deserved end of life, and the longing for something different – something I would describe as worship.
Through this film, we see common threads of human life that are reflected in Christian scriptures as well as in the dreams of Kurosawa. We find that our faith tells the story of fallen beings created in the image of God and that the struggles and even fear and thoughts of a catastrophic but just and hyperbolically punitive end to the world runs in the veins of humanity.
A person of faith can engage this film by calling for something more than a retreat to simplicity. Retreat, as Revelation reveals, is not the way to restoration – judgment brings restoration. More importantly, the judgment does not return us to Eden. To the contrary, it takes us to a new city. Given how sinful cities are this seems too impossible. Can the whore of Babylon be destroyed? Can a city come that does not prey upon the poor? The answer is worship. A city built on worship, will worship as God has called – through justice.
Finally, I’d like us to return to that word worship. At the beginning of Revelation 18, God calls God’s people out. Like God called God’s people out of Egypt to worship, in Revelation 18, the call is the same. Do not be caught in her sin – in her pride and abuse – instead, worship. Kurosawa’s first seven dreams paint a picture. His eighth dream pens an invitation, “Come out of this, my people, do not participate in the modern world’s abuse of nature and ridiculous pride in the face of nuclear weaponry and power. Instead, come to a worshipful, simple way of living.” The difference we must highlight and praise is that Revelation calls for worship of a triumphant God who redeems God’s people and destroys the city who has spilled their blood (metaphorically as it may be). The call is not to worship or restore peace with a passive world that we must care for, but to bow in jubilant worship of the God who reigns and redeems.
