Evil Does Not Exist (2023) Philosophical Analysis
If evil does not exist but yet we know it when we see it, then from whence does it come?
The first few scenes in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest film show us immediate labor between man and nature. In this is the subsistence activity which needs no symbolic universe. But, after the father picks up his daughter from school we then we see the process of signifying nature, of thinking about it reflexively, when he guides her around in nature. In fact, the daughter literally follows in her father’s footsteps. The parallel arcs of the father and the daughter will structure the rest of the film. The situation is set up in full when finally we learn that the father is missing his wife, and the daughter is hence without a mother.
At this point, the day’s events (her walk through the woods) become represented in a different light in the daughter’s dream. What appears in the dream that she does not encounter in the forest during the day is a deer, and this deer is seemingly an object of condensation, in which the mystery of the young girl’s desire can find expression.
Then, the daughter starts to follow the footsteps of an unknown, presymbolic other, the deer. She follows the deer and then the bird, and picks up a feather just like her dad did.
Then comes the narrative transformation, the glamping service brings its news to the town, somewhat like the acting troupe’s arrival in Ozu’s Floating Weeds.
It is crucial to keep an eye on the parallel action between what occurs in the conference room, which will no doubt be for many the focal point of the film for obvious reasons, and what the young girl does at the same time. She witnesses the beginning of the scene, but then wanders off into nature, where she finds and follows deer prints. At the same time as the fiasco in the conference room unfolds, the young girl ‘traverses’ her dream, and, after following a hawk, picks up a feather and returns.
This will become more important later on, as the narrative will unfold on the basis that where the young girl will end up in her wandering, so too will the father. What truth nature will show the path toward, this is the truth the narrative will resolve itself with, too.
Like Yasujiro Ozu, Hamaguchi recognizes that a new form of capitalism is coming to the unurbanized sections of Japan. Corporate service sector capital. The worst offense the corporate glamping proposal commits is not a violence against nature per se, but against the minimal social law which emerges naturally in a localized community.
The land is purchased and quite literally alienated from the community, therefore, the community is alienated from the land. The community’s concerns about the land as a whole, as a basis for their living activity, are literally ignored. However, it is through the apparatus with which the impersonal “evil”, the embodiment of corporate rent profit, does its bidding as a public-facing entity that we then begin to follow, which is the agency group – a group of actors speaking on behalf of the corporation. I think we must understand this expansion of the ensemble of the narrative to include the unproductive workers at the behest of corporate power as a delay. In the abstract, the structure of the narrative is a quid pro quo, an act of violence which generates another act of violence in return. What disturbs the narrative ‘equilibrium’ is news of an expropriation of land, and what ‘resolves’ this as the end of the story is the response, which, in accordance with the abstract (but no less violent) violence of expropriation, kills the ‘messenger.’ Of course, thought of as a vengeful act, it is completely ineffective. Therein lies the political ethos of the film; that the corporate power is essentially equivalent to a force of nature, since its force lies in its impersonal and abstract existence beyond any individual who speaks on its behalf.
As the wise chief says, “water flows downstream, [and therefore] those who live upstream must be responsible for what comes downstream.” Despite appearances, then, nature spontaneously leads to abstract laws. The basic function of law in its negative foundation is to prohibit the breaking of natural law, thereby producing law where it thinks law already was, the law that cannot be any more determinative insofar as what it permits, other than: “follow nature.” This force which does not abide to the minimal social rules of the relation with nature awakens something, a form of self-consciousness, within the town. The corporation is breaking the law (of nature), whilst at the same time being impervious to resistance.
In the film’s fantasy structure, the everyday situation is stolen as the object of the Other’s fantasy (the corporate tourist fantasy it offers consumers). This event is not unlike any other transformative event in narrative more generally, its function in the story is to disturb the equilibrium. However, then, this objective fantasy which has been made out of the situation, as a means for its offering to the Other as a situation which for the tourist they can use as an escape from their own situation, becomes a mysterious structure, whose impersonal demands are issued by the actors who will come to question them. The top of the corporate structure is lacking, and the actors only have to become self-consciousness to know this, for their activity is a testament to this lack. The very fact that they had to be hired to do this means they are the living supplement of what their employer cannot do by itself. Since the actor is emptied of substantial content, he falls prey to the fantasy of the organic situation of interaction with nature, the very fantasy that he has been hired by the company to establish or construct.
The second half repeats the routine of the first, only this time, the visitors are there to see it. It presents to them as a situation of delicate balance, a seductive fantasy. When the music cuts, there is a literal cut; and the fantasy goes missing. The young girl who follows nature until she disappears is the Dorothy (Wizard of Oz), a childhood development that the rest of the adults repress. This means that her silent journey communicates in a pure form the central Idea of the narrative development, which I articulated earlier as a minimal ‘social’ law of nature: “follow nature.” What is in nature that leads to this presymbolic desire to follow nature (which leads her into the symbolic as the father gives name to the mysteries of nature) is nothing in particular about nature, but rather the mystery of nature that acts as a signifier toward which your understanding must go. It is in fact the actors from the talent agency that become seduced by this directive to follow nature; even though nature is what the law produces a separation from, once in the social universe nature can act as a higher law.
However, at the end of the film, the young girl goes missing. The final act of the film involves the father and the two actors walking into the woods. Again, this happens parallel to the young girl also wandering. We do not see where exactly she has gone, but follow the father as he stumbles upon a clue to where she had been.
The innocence of living in according to the minimal ‘social’ law of nature has, thus, also gone missing. To find the child, in other words, is to find the end of the fate of nature, or where nature has taken her. It is at this point that the other people in the community get brought back into the narrative, who had, since the pivotal message of the expropriation and glamping project been missing from the story. Finally, the father, after following the clues of the feather, finds his daughter who has, in turn, found the central object of her dream: the deer.
This leads to the drastic act of violence committed by the father of the young girl. It is at this moment, in the girl witnessing the violence that emerges immanently in nature, that the abstract threat represented by the corporate power and embodied in the corporate actor becomes concrete. But beyond this recognition of the impasse which gets translated in all of its irresolvable significance to the physical fight between the father and the actor, the film leaves it to the indeterminate, to exactly what it is, a beyond.
All of the thematic strands of the film come to the front in this scene. The death of the mother is linked to the wounded innocence of nature, understood imagistically in the wounded deer; and since the actor functions symbolically for the father as what the (corporate) actor is, an embodiment of an exterior (evil) force, then the father can get revenge for the wounded innocence of nature by killing this actor. If this actor can represent the bidding of evil, then he can represent evil as such.
The final symbolic condensation that the film enacts is that after the strangling, the father goes to pick up his daughter and it turns out the image of her and the deer previously was illusory in the sense that in reality she is the wounded deer. It is difficult to describe this moment in words.
The parallel is complete, and so we can summarize this film as a re-telling of the ‘fall’ in one sense, the loss of immediate relation to nature; and a re-telling of the way in which land expropriation politically re-stages this loss for its victims.