Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, the

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, the film is as much about the historical present of the audience as it is about the historical scene it portrays. Indeed, this may be even more so now that the issue of gays in the U.S. military has become such an issue. The elements that display this in the film are many. This author will focus in on the most important of them, analyzing the themes according to the analysis of Sigmund Freud and Earl Jackson, Jr.

The taboo of homosexuality is strong enough in many societies, but is especially harsh in an ultranationalist and traditional environment. The Japanese Captain Yonoi is no exception to this when he orders the execution of a Korean soldier after being caught in a homosexual relationship with one of the Dutch prisoners. While the execution is carried out, the Dutch prisoner is forced to watch it along with the rest of his fellow prisoners and the Japanese as well. In grief, he bites his tongue and then dies of suffocation.

Yonoi is enraged to see the prisoners behaving in what he perceives as a cowardly way for not wishing to witness the executions. The taboo of homosexuality is suggested throughout the film as well. Such themes are investigated in the film as Yonoi seemingly develops a homoerotic fixation with Major Jack Celliers, often asking about him silently visiting him in at night as Celliers is confined. Yonoi's orderly suspects the homoerotic mental hold that Celliers has on Yonoi and tries to kill Celliers but fails.

Military homoeroticism is also portrayed in climax of the film when Yonoi is ready to kill the POW's commander for not having all of his men present for parade. Celliers then breaks rank and in Yonoi's direction, stopping and kissing the man about to be executed. Yonoi reaches for his katana to punish this breach of bushido, but collapses under his conflicted feelings of vindicating himself from the offence suffered in front of his troops and his true feelings for Celliers.

When the new camp commander has Celliers executed, Yonoi furtively takes a lock of Celliers hair in respect. As Earl Jackson Jr. comments, the film is filled with homoerotic elements but lacks a definitively coalesced into a coherent representation of sexuality of any type. We never see anything of the type represented on the screen. The film is from the point-of-view of the Japanese commander, very much the view that we have as a militaristic society today. In reality, we are fascinated by the idea of homoeroticism.

Indeed, individuals like the Japanese commander many times are closet homosexuals and never know it. Unknowingly, they bond with like minded individuals in a military organization that is aggressively male and excludes females. Such a fascination in particular is of what it would be like to trangress the taboo and what would happen if one could do it furtively, without being found out. Of course, homoeroticism surfaces here in its form as a deviant perversion.

It can not be seen in a more natural environment, as in the most recent military developments in the U.S. with regard to gays in the military. Interestingly, Jackson sees this homoeroticism as being bound up with the decline of U.S. power in the era when the film was made. The decolonization of Southeast Asia provides a background where national and colonial identities are represented in a film that according to Jackson "articulates and disfigure gendered subject positions and "pervert" sexual desire.

Such perversions, however, do not celebrate necessarily celebrate or exacerbate...subject's undoing..."deviations" are often the vehicle of the subject's recuperation (Jackson Jr. 136). Jackson goes on to apply Freud. The dominant militaristic values of masculinity in Western and Japanese contexts is portrayed as a form of ideological excess that cannot deal with its own internal contradictions. The film's value according to Jackson lies in its exploration of the forbidden zone between our values and reality.

He attributes the ambiguity in the film in the portrayal of castration anxiety and the fetishes associated with it. He refers to the fantasy of the maternal penis and the inevitable fantasies of castration that a young boy feels. This would seem to relate to the opening scene where the Korean prisoner is taunted to pull out his penis and to use it on his the Dutch prisoner who was his lover.

In addition, this portrayal of masculinity is overlaid by fetishized and feminized Japanese (and by extension, their prisoner) and subjected and examined in a cinematic apparatus (ibid 138). The subject is materialized as white, male, heterosexual, European and yet her personifies all of humanity whose Oedipal complex sees femininity as "castrated" and a threat to their masculinity. This causes the male to engage in the fetish of fantasizing about castration as a way to disavow the threat from his mother or older female siblings.

Ironically, the fetish saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual by endowing women with the ability to be acceptable as sexual objects. As Jackson continues to apply Freud, he claims that the situation is then written large on macropolitical levels. The relationship between mother and son and similar to colonized and colonizer. Also, there is a dichotomy for women between the "female penis" and male dominance. While there are no females in this movie, females are in the outside society.

The relations between the film's politics and its process mirror this dichotomy (ibid 154-156). To speak about the audience, the audience identifies with the problems of the characters. Jackson claims that in our film, homosexual desire is not the political imperative, but is a strategy of its presentation. Unfortunately, it is threatening to the male spectator mostly due to the type of castration complex present. Shame and shock at seeing this violation of male virility makes a male spectator react to this virtual castration strongly.

The castration is stronger since there is no female to objectify as a sex object. Viewing the film itself drives home the reality of the loss of mastery without having any stabilization. This makes the film subversive due to its homosexual content because it derails European hegemony in the context of the film (ibid 159). While the director dethrones European imperialism and indirectly exalts the Japanese variety in the film, this is not his end game.

Once the European figures are broken down, one can home in on the codes that he supplies in the rest of the film that poke at the Japanese part of this as well. For instance Yonoi tells Lawrence about his absence from the February 26th coup attempt against the Japanese government. Though the officers involved were executed, they became heroes. Because he was absent, he considers it a dishonor until he can fulfill his obligations to the comrades of his old unit that are now heroes (ibid 159-160).

In the movie, he has admitted his shame to the European Lawrence, in effect putting them on an equal level. Interestingly, Jackson points out Sergeant Hara's exclamation that "'samurai do not fear homosexuality' " (ibid, 161). In the opinion of this author, it would seem as though Hara has made his peace with the castration and now is open to using male's as sex objects. As Jackson points out further, this concurs with the samurai Hagakure written by retired samurai, Yamamoto Jocho.

The text was meant to be a moral text for samurai that helped to flesh out the code of Bushido, what later became guiding principle that guided the ultranationalistic enthusiasm of Japan in the 1930's as well as that of the kamikaze of World War II. This way of the male includes the homoerotic in the hypermasculinity. Jackson claims that this mix of death, eros and masculinity is played out again in Cellier's death. The director of the film is linking homoeroticism with the code of bushido.

David Bowie's androgyny and bisexuality heightens this in Japanese parlance, further accentuating the East-West homoerotic contact via Japanese exoticism (ibid 163). Under the exigencies of war, cruelty and sadomasochism abounds as portrayed in the film. To further understand the film, we need to delve deeper into the work of Sigmund Freud. In Freud's An Infantile Neurosis, he posits that many psychotherapists experience their patients detailing a fantasy about a child being beaten. This brings about a sadomasochistic sexual satisfaction, one which produces feelings of guilt.

Despite some limitations, Freud's pioneering psychoanalysis sheds light on the sadomasochistic fantasies that many of us harbor, but are afraid to admit to, or if they do only under duress and then only with great shame (Freud 1955, 179). In school, these fantasies become reality as children are disciplined. There, they bond with a number of other children under collective rule in a cohesive unit (ibid, 180). This is much like the military does in war.

In this author's opinion, this identification of punishment with sexual fantasy (a sadomasochistic one at that) conflicts with the home stability antidote provided by the objectivization of females as sexual objects in the Oedipus complex. The military short circuits the normal human experience and subverts normal sex and pleasure (homosexual or heterosexual) by throwing it in the closet. The sexual energy is released, contorted in a sadomasochistic fashion that fed into the energy needed to run a military, run a war, or to conquer and administer an empire.

The state has hijacked the sexual urge and put it into the service of the.