Ghosts of Oppression: Ugetsu, The Uninvited, and Night and Fog

In the intensely shocking short Documentary Night and Fog, we are taken through the horrors of what we, as human beings, are capable of.  It is one thing to hear of or read about the atrocities of the Holocaust, and an entirely different thing to be shown them.  We are cast down into the pit of guilt and responsibility, shaken by the true terror of annihilation and desecration.  But we hear at the end of the film repeated the phrase “I was not responsible.”  That is where the horror bludgeons us.  Those whom we desperately want to blame are passing it on.  In the end, who is left to blame but a shadow, a reflection, a ghost.

When taken in conjunction with Ugetsu  and The Uninvited, this trilogy of Ghosts speaks of the terror of reality: People are, often, horrible to each other.  While obviously taking a different tone and style from each other, the three films show the grand injustice and depravity of humanity.  Night and Fog displays it as the main focal point of the film.  It is a film of degrading injustice.  In its blatant indictment of the Nazi regime there is the tacit complicity of all humans.  While not perhaps on this scale, this sort of destruction exists historically and consistently.  In Ugetsu we see this destructive nature as part of a larger hegemony and formal institution.  The Shogunate in Japan was an institutionalized oppressive structure that was destructive to the lives and livelihoods of the majority of the Japanese people.  The peasants were subject to the daimyo but received little to no benefit from that relationship.  Often the oppression would lead to death, with the inter-warring states of the various Daimyo destroying and pillaging that which stood in their way.  Additionally, the plight of women was of the depth of sorrow.  The two spouses of the two main men suffer greatly due to the hegemonic system of oppression in their state.  The wife of the would-be Samurai is raped, not by marginalized bandits or outcastes, but by the samurai.  The system places the samurai above the peasant women, and therefore, dehumanizes the women, leaving them to used and discarded.  The woman has been raised and therefore buys into the system which states that a raped woman is of no value to her husband.  She abandons hope and becomes a prostitute.  Her counterpart is murdered by ronin samurai on the road so that they can steal her provisions.  This, while horrific to us, is acceptable in the system.  

In The Uninvited we see the horror of humanity played out in contrast to the nature of system.  Though many theorist lump the family into the hegemonic systems designed to maintain our capitalist structure, I consider the family a structure that has endured various structures and systems regardless of the economic base.  The family is deemed  by many in religious circles (of which I consider myself a part) a fundamental good and a source of love and support within the horrid world.  This assumption about the family is contrasted in The Uninvited with individuals who abandon the appropriate role in the family structure for self serving means.  The two ghosts represent two versions of the mother.  The true mother is loving and kind and the false mother is vengeful and retributive.  This binary of motherhood becomes the commentary on the potential for good and evil within the family structure.  A mother who is hateful and vengeful to her child is the source of horror, while the mother who is loving and caring is the source of peace.  Murder by the evil mother is the individualized expression of the same thing that motivated the Holocaust and the oppressive Shogunate: otherness.  The false mother viewed the true mother as an other and therefore worthy of death.  In ghost form she views the daughter as an other and tries to enact that judgement as well.  

In these films, we realize that the perpetrators of these horrors are not others, they are reflections of ourselves, shadows, ghosts of the evil mother, the daimyo, the Kapo.  These are the ghosts that haunt us, more than those who suffered and died at their hands.  For in these ghosts we see that which we could do, and have done.  We make a person an other, and then they are a thing, and we claim we are not responsible, it is the institution.  But we are the institutions.   We made the ghosts.  And we need to face them.