971 words
Martin Scorsese’s Silence is a very fine film that seems to belong to an entirely different world. Imagine what American movies would be like if our film industry were not controlled by hostile and decadent aliens who have weaponized the medium against European man and culture. Silence is such a film. It is wholly untouched by political correctness and white guilt or self-abasement. Instead, Silence is the story of self-confident, expansionist whites battling non-white savagery.
Silence is about Portuguese Jesuit Missionaries in 17th-century Japan, who had converted large numbers of Japanese to Christianity before the Japanese government, alarmed at the threat to their culture and sovereignty, launched savage persecutions that extirpated organized Christianity and drove the remnants underground for more than 200 years, until the Meiji restoration established religious tolerance in 1871.
The film follows two young Jesuits (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who are smuggled into Japan to learn the fate of their mentor, Fr. Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly renounced the faith and gone native. The young priests and their Japanese converts are movingly portrayed as intensely religious in the face of methodical and cruel persecution and martyrdom.
Yet, as the story unfolds, we come to knew and even respect the Japanese Inquisitor who orchestrated these atrocities. The Inquisitor’s interpreter speaks of learning Portuguese from one of the Jesuits, who merely taught his language but never learned Japanese. The Jesuits also, apparently, neglected to learn about Japanese religion, Japanese culture, and the Japanese mind. As the interpreter drily remarks, “Japan already has a religion. Pity you did not notice it.”
The Japanese, by contrast, learned all they could from the Jesuits about the doctrines and methods of the Church, then promptly turned them against it, including the creation of an Inquisition complete with executions by crucifixion and burning alive and a whole panoply of tortures to secure confession and apostasy. The Japanese even understood Christian theology well enough to make priests renounce Christianity out of essentially Christian motives. (This is how we get liberalism, by the way.)
But the Japanese understanding of religion as an essentially public and civil affair still left a space for inward Christian belief and private household devotions. Thus, in the end, one could argue the Inquisitor was defeated. The Japanese answer, however, might be that even the private Christianity of the Japanese was more Japanese than Christian. Beyond that, the real threat posed by Christianity was as a tool of Western colonialism, and that was stopped dead in its tracks – basically until 1945.
One small touch that reveals the alienness of the Japanese mind, which accords absolute primacy to social roles over individual identity, is that two apostate priests were simply given the identities of dead Japanese men: their houses, wives, children, even their names. One wonders what the wives and children thought of the arrangement. But that apparently did not matter any more than whether some of them might have prayed in their hearts to Jesus. The first man is said to have been executed, so maybe the whole family was being punished.
There are two debates between the Inquisitor and one of the captive priests. The Japanese clearly think Christianity is false, but they diplomatically declare that it may be true in Portugal, but it is not true in Japan. The priest glibly replies that truth is universal. Of course the Japanese wondered why a universal truth required that converts adopt foreign names and customs. They might have wondered why a universal truth came to them from men of a different race, speaking a different tongue, who told stories of a very particular tribe in the Near East (near to Europe, that is), who answered to a man in Rome, and who worked hand in glove with European conquerors and colonizers. That’s a whole lot of particularism, and in its face, who can blame the Japanese for choosing to defend their own culture, religion, and independence – with Christianity’s own weapons, if necessary?
Silence is a superb film, largely because of its intelligent script and sensitive acting. The pacing is slow and thoughtful. The camera work is not flashy, focusing on its objects for seconds at a time. There are no American gangsters, kung-fu fighting, CGI monsters, or laser battles. In short, this is a movie for grown-ups. Silence is one of Scorsese’s best films. The fact that it springs from and portrays intense Christian devotion will rankle and discomfit modern Leftists. But in the end, I predict that it will win great critical acclaim. It will not sell a lot of tickets, though, unless the churches promote it like The Passion of the Christ. See Silence in the theater, not because “you’ve got to see it on the big screen,” but because we should want this movie to do well, so more movies like it are made.
Although Silence was long in the making, there is a kind of symbolic appropriateness about the fact that it was released after the election of Donald Trump. Political Correctness is dying. We’re saying “Merry Christmas” again. And movies like Silence are being made. Meme it, until the spirits of the enemy completely break, until they trample on their Hope posters and begin to praise Kek.
From an Identitarian point of view, Silence is somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, it is a story about the heroism and suffering of European Christians and their Japanese converts. And for all the film’s fair-mindedness toward the Japanese Inquisitor – itself a very white thing – Silence remains an essentially Christian film dedicated, at the end, to the greater glory of God. On the other hand, all my sympathies ultimately were with the Japanese, not because white is bad and non-white is good, but because their cunning and ruthless struggle against a colonizing universalism is the struggle of all white men today.
6 comments
…I have to see this film now.
I remember coming across the name “Shūsaku Endō” in an Asian studies class. Now that there is a movie based off his work, I would have to do my own research.
There is also a cheesy 1971 Japanese version of the film too, with a love affair between a White male and a Japanese female. I haven’t seen Scorsese’s version of silence. Is their a subtle love affair in this film too?
Christians believe everyone is universal under the eyes of God. I was in the Church for a long time, and still associate with the hipster Christian culture. I like to believe people can understand one another and the power of love will prevail. …Not in that fuddy-duddy hippie sense. But, most Whites will fall for this. Pathological altruism is a driving force among our people. It has to be controlled in favor for us. “Universalism” often means being around other white people.
I would sympathize with the Japanese too. Their struggle is ours. Again, not to sound like an anti-white cuck. Whites went about to colonize the world, to conquer it, and in return, created a violent, capitalist, globalist society. …It was going to happen. You could say the driving force of Jews made it that way. However, like Jared Taylor said, their is something in our innate nature that works against us.
Without White or Asian societies, there could be no prosperous people. Without Whites, China would put everyone on display in a wax museum. No Asians, well, contrary to Hollywood Nazi philosophy, we would lose out on a lot of technological, mass-produced, and advance resources.
Whites who proselytized the Japanese under Christianity thought they could come under our power. …That is somewhat true in today’s environment. But none of these Christians ever saw that a future “multiculturalism and diversity” would ever happen.
If this film portrays the Christians as kooky leftist, then this film will shed light. We should rather ask, are we heading towards a “go-to-your-room” ethnostate world, where the multy-culty paradigm finally dies? And all races, homogeneous and small mutt / mixed races, propose communities for themselves?
“On the other hand, all my sympathies ultimately were with the Japanese, not because white is bad and non-white is good, but because their cunning and ruthless struggle against a colonizing universalism is the struggle of all white men today.”
The Book did speak of reaping what you sow. And we are.
I always thought Jesus’ words on preaching to all the other races was meant as a warning, not a directive. More like “I’m not going to do it but you will. And when you do, it will be the end.” Which then ends up Matthew 24:14, etc. In support of that I note Jesus refused to go out of His way to preach to those not of Israel, and there are plenty of warnings about casting pearls before swine, staying out of the way of the blind leading the blind, etc.
Clearly, trying to save the 3rd world has been a disaster for our race, and I think if you read Jesus’ words in context with everything else the Bible preaches, there’s good basis to have never tried.
Unless you’re *trying* to bring about the end lol.
Jesus didn’t preach much to non-Jews (though he did heal the Roman centurion’s son). But in the book of Acts, it tells the story of how Paul, himself a converted Jew, tries to preach the Word to the Jews and is rejected by them. “For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn …” The book ends by saying that henceforth he will take the Word to the Gentiles. “Therefore let it be known to you that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen.”
Good review, by the way, I’m looking forward to the film. It would seem to invite comparison to The Mission, another film about Jesuit missionaries, but in Latin America. Also with Liam Neeson, and a great performance by Robert De Niro, back when he was still an actor.
From a Christian perspective, there’s also a heart of darkness thing going on, where the missionaries question whether there’s any real logos in Japan (called a swamp by the inquisitor). We see Japanese torturing and murdering citizens even when they give due to Caesar… just to torment the Priests. Even the Romans let you off if you publicly did your duty.
There’s also a question in a globalized world as to whether you allow ‘savages’ like that to prosper, and one could say, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the world’s answer to the Japanese way of doing things. Ironically, a jesuit church was the only thing to survive the bombing.
Quite frankly, no, I do not want radical islamics and whatever to be ignored and allowed to prosper, with their nukes and their poisoning of the earth. If ‘evil colonialism’ is the only way to oversee these regions, then so be it.
As for the film, it won’t do well financially. Scorsese sticks to the book’s plot (instead of making a sweeping drama like Last Samurai), and his nuanced views mean nobody is ‘cheerleading’ the message, which means no awards from leftist or christian media.
“The camera work is not flashy, focusing on its objects for seconds at a time.”
Along with PC politics and compulsory diversity one of things that makes much contemporary film so unwatchable is the bent for superfast editing. The shots follow one another in such rapid succession it’s mentally exhausting trying to follow.
And it’s poor film making. Instead of carefully creating a fascinating storyworld and letting the audience ‘look through’ the movie screen and engage with the world directly, the film-maker falls back on using the interface between the audience and the storyworld itself as the means to create a response.
Editing is part of the language of film and great film makers can use fast cuts in the right place to enhance a scene. But the modern style of relentless hyper-fast editing is part of the vulgarisation of our culture because such superficial busy-ness is a substitute for depth.
Truly great filmmakers can take the time to let you actually see what’s happening and still hold you rapt.
I did not think I would like this movie and would not have bothered to watch it without this review. But, I did really like it. I knew I would from the beginning because there was an intellectual distance instead of graphic horror that is so prevalent today in movies. While I appreciated the cunning of the inquisitor, it was the innocuous servant who seemed to be the one who moved the action forward. He constantly betrays the priest and then with great dissembling begs for forgiveness and absolution which the naive priest constantly gives him, only for it to repeat. Who was converting who? It really is a brilliant movie about moral conflicts and mystery.
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