RAN: The Shades of Good and Evil Found in Akira Kurosawa's Masterpiece

TOHO - STUDIOCANAL

Ran, Kurosawa’s final epic, covers much of the same thematic territory as the Shakespearean play King Lear, which inspired it. They both follow a broadly overlapping story arc, in which an ageing man concedes his power to his children, who grossly misuse it while absolving themselves from responsibility. Consequently, both the play and its adaptation deal with issues of madness, old age, loss of power and authority, in roughly the same way. However, both adaptations have very different views on one particular thing: human nature and the issue of good and evil. 

In the original play King Lear, Shakespeare takes the approach that good and evil are not intrinsic values, so human nature is neither inherently good or bad. To emphasise this across the board, many characters in the play commit actions which are both good and evil – adding nuance to characters rather than painting them in broad strokes with character traits weighted to determine the audience’s opinion – extending, for example, to even the protagonist himself. It is easy to see the titular character sympathetically, as we see his decline into madness due to his misjudgment. However, Shakespeare shows that there are two sides to every coin: he is also arrogant and stubborn, banishing anyone who advises him against what he, erroneously, deems the best course of action. Other characters in the play are also weighted to various extents toward good and evil, further demonstrating Shakespeare’s view that whether a person is good or evil depends entirely on their actions as opposed to anyone else’s. 

On the contrary, Ran very much makes the case that these traits are inherent but, more specifically, that human nature is evil. Evil prevails throughout the film, with Hidetora presented sympathetically as we see him increasingly ostracised and supplanted by his sons. However, in order to bolster its point on the innateness of evil, Hidetora is also shown to have been a ruthless warlord. The scenes of extreme, faceless violence further underscore this, demonstrating how the ruthlessness of humanity gives no distinction to different individuals, thus rendering them evil. This lack of mercy and contempt for life is a recurring theme which gives credence to the film's argument.

The ending of King Lear, however, seems extremely pessimistic, as it is far from the just ending a casual viewer would expect – particularly in Shakespeare's time. In fact, the play was not performed for many years, as theatre operators thought it too unbearably sad for the audience to countenance. Shakespeare's choice of ending is simply realistic. The pain felt at the end of the play is needless, meaningless and unnecessary. Shakespeare is suggesting two things by this: that outcomes such as these are often unchangeable and that they are not the result of any innate form of human nature but, instead, a culmination of our individual actions. It is not suggesting that what happens to its characters is fair and just, as an audience may expect, but that the universe is unjust, uncaring and, most of all, influenced by everyone.

Here, Ran differs in tone significantly. Kurosawa takes a more depressing path – ironic, considering a significant criticism of King Lear was its perceived pessimism. Boldly, Kurosawa not only doubles down but suggests that the causation of evil is humanity itself. The warlord Hidetora dies, unredeemed and with no deviation from his seemingly terminal downfall. Saburo, the hero of the story and seemingly the only moral character, is killed. Lady Sué, Jiro’s unpretending, more morally ambiguous spouse, is also killed. Outright villains such as Jiro himself also die, the result being that he dies without a chance to atone for his wrongs, like all the other characters. The impact of having such a wide-ranging slate of characters being murdered psychologically implants in the viewer the idea that the evil around them has caused this indiscriminately and thus, as many characters die evil, this further spreads. In essence, this is how Kurosawa implants the idea that evil acts always result in an eviler consequence, despite whom this occurs to, and therefore that humanity dooms ourselves. 

Whilst both Ran and King Lear have similarly bleak outlooks, they forecast them for different reasons. Had Kurosawa made Ran years earlier, he may well have come up with a similar conclusion as Shakespeare. This is evidenced by his earlier filmography; for example, Kagemusha, where there was a less one-sided outlook. However, as he got older, his perspective seems to have changed. While he does not suggest that everyone is a villain, he does suggest that everybody falls on the side of either good or bad and that inaction is not an exception to this – though he does not suggest that this will change anything in the wider world. This could be interpreted as cynicism, but in fact, Kurosawa is simply realistic. He is not trying to tell the audience that how they act does not affect the experiences of anybody else; instead, he is merely saying that evil will prevail regardless of one’s actions. Maybe he was right.