Blood is thicker than water, and as pulp fiction would have it, that viscosity is never denser than in the bustling underground of organized crime. They don’t call it a capital-F Family for nothing; trust is the only currency with any worth among gang types, and the type of alpha-male mentality lending itself to mob life favors members of its own pack. In Goodfellas, Henry Hill’s half-Irish lineage prevents him from ever graduating to a full-fledged “made man” in the mafia to which he pledges himself, no matter how hard he tries. (Not that pure Italian blood can save Tommy DeVito from the doom awaiting him.)
Per the new Netflix release The Outsider, however, they’re playing it a little looser with assimilation in parts east. The latest feature from Denmark-born journeyman Martin Zandvliet shares more ancestry with films like Dances With Wolves and The Last Samurai than Martin Scorsese’s Cosa Nostra opus, narratives about white men rising to lead a foreign people instead of struggling for mere acceptance. The faulty gene in this family pool recurs once again as Nick Lowell (Jared Leto, an apt ambassador of whiteness if ever there was one) rises through the ranks of the Japanese gangsters known as yakuza. These films give lip service to a faux reverence for their subjects, but then reduce them to a collection of signifiers and monolithic character types before placing them in a position of inferiority to the white interloper. In its obsession with all things Japanese, the film places a special emphasis on the quality of humility. Nevertheless, the story ends with an elite corps of Asian assassins bowing to the former frontman for 30 Seconds to Mars.
Post-second world war Osaka sets the scene for this culture clash, though the aesthetic of oppressive dark grey-ness suggests that the production crew shot inside a raincloud. We’re made to understand early on that Nick has earned his stripes among his adoptive brethren: while shuffling through janitorial work as a prisoner during the war’s final days, he saves some poor sap’s life after a brutal bathroom beating, who then offers him a gig once the unconditional surrender makes Nick a free man. Even before he’s tossed into the middle of a turf war, Nick honors and respects the Japanese and their ways of life, going so far as to pulverize a racist American GI still using slurs in conversation. Like the innumerable college students following in his path during semesters spent abroad, he takes a local lover and gets a cool fish tattoo after a few months.
For a gaijin, a catchall term referring to anyone not of Asian descent, he’s pretty committed. But the film containing him may be better described with the newer invention of weeaboo, pejorative slang for white people with an off-putting, superficial attachment to the far east. Indeed, the film has a fetishistic relationship to Japanese elements that could have only come from someone who sees them as exotic, rather than intuitively understanding their place in society. Screenwriter Andrew Baldwin could have very well run a quick online search of “what are some Japanese things” as he awkwardly incorporated such regional touches as sumo wrestling, kabuki theater, and a traditional tea ceremony into his script. At a certain point, the Japanese actors filling out the smaller roles start to feel like set dressing tacked on for a little added authenticity.
The tell, the dead giveaway that this film appreciates the concept of Japan far more than its reality, is Nick’s unequivocal victory over the civilization he purports to love. There’s real drama in the first half-hour or so, as Nick bumps up against the limits to which he can fully shed and remold his identity, but it disintegrates the moment the film decides those limits don’t have to exist. He’s got military training and all, but the notion that Nick could stroll right in and take over a complex criminal network suggests that his whiteness is the real secret weapon enabling him to beat the yakuza at their own game. If the film’s not going to interrogate the politics behind its core premise of an army man’s quest to out-Asian actual Asian men, it’s scarcely worth telling at all.
Presumably, the great Japanese film-maker Takashi Miike had an answer in mind when he signed on to the project in 2014. It’s by no means impossible to carve a challenging, meaningful story out of difficult interchanges between the east and west. To return to Scorsese, consider Silence, a fine film about European men slowly realizing just how little they understand of Japan. But neither Zandvliet, Baldwin, nor Leto care to look beyond themselves. They’re worse than the simple gaijin, or the over-affectionate weeaboo – they’re tourists who think they own the place.
- The Outsider will stream on Netflix from 9 March
