just endlessly thinking about blue eye samurai.
thinking about how akemi, taigen, and mizu are if a coin had three sides or maybe just the two and mizu is the bridge of metal between them.
akemi being the ideal image for women, for the life they endure. she was simultaneously a princess, a prostitute, and a prisoner. her entire life was men making decisions for her, even the ones that had good intentions, and she believed her deepest desire was freedom. it still is, but she has been revealed to this heinous predicament of her gender, and she’s realized that to reach true freedom as a woman is to be the bird in the cage, to play nice and to earn the love of a man until he buys her a bigger cage and a bigger cage until he trusts her not to fly away. and it'll never be true freedom, but it will come with power. it'll come with the freedom of only one master rather than many.
taigen being the ideal image of a man. not all powerful, but not weak. he had a taste of what it'd be to succeed, and when it was taken from him, that easy success, he mistook it for his honor. he hunted mizu down to kill him, and instead he saved him. he saved him and saved him and he came closer to killing mizu when they were on the cliff's edge, and just when he gets to the point where he may actually fight mizu, he's tortured for information on him. he is tortured. Literally tortured within an inch of his life, enduring such a heinous violence, and he refuses to break. this man was a fight, was the torturer, and the victim of his torturing could've been his salvation from pain but he refused. mizu gave back taigen's honor but not by fighting him.
akemi wanted freedom and learned she would need power to have it.
taigen wanted power and learned that the violence that came with it was infinite and dishonorable.
and then there's mizu. mizu who wants revenge, wants acceptance. arguably the same things as them both. mizu wants acceptance, the freedom of living and the freedom to love and be loved. mizu wants revenge, which follows after violence and power, to get said acceptance. she thinks she must do both, have both, to live peacefully, and she's blatant about how she will not live without either.
she's given acceptance with the blacksmith, her "mother," her husband, but she sees the flecks of avoidance in it.
the blacksmith will not hear of her true gender. her "mother" will not acknowledge the crime of her birth. her husband can't find tolerance for the violence within her, the man of her.
and so she has to balance the woman and man of her, the ronin and the bride. taigen and akemi. and it's meeting mizu that they start to unravel their own identities.
mizu, who is both, and akemi and taigen who thought themselves one but turned out to be neither.
god.
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The stark contrast in the artistry of how it was shot.
The first: zooms in from everyone else being visible and is only just him like this for a moment. Center frame. Bright.
The second: Set up by previous shots from this angle in which Will was there, emphasizing the empty space where he used to be (my favorite part). Uses rule of thirds. Silhouette to emphasize isolation.
Cinematography is purposeful and art and a storytelling device just as much as anything else and this is proof.
Shot 1: he's upset
Shot 2: Will left a hole in his life
Even the framing shows a different severity. When El is gone, Mike still takes up the entire screen. When Will is gone, he can't fill the hole, in fact, it just becomes more evident.
I see so many gifs but don't rewatch the actual scenes as much like making edits is now forcing me to do. But this shot was the ending shot of the scene. They could have kept it at him calling after Will, but they didn't. So so many shots they could have cut but didn't. Because it wouldn't hit the same. They needed go back to Mike's POV after Will left. They needed you to see the emptiness.
Because this
Doesn't hit like this
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I put this together months back when I decided to burn a dvd of the movie and only realized yesterday looking at a bunch of cool art in the tag that I never bragged about it to more than like two people. so: my Emesis Blue DVD cover, complete with a rave review from the comments section.
Bonus: here it is with the rest of my little collection :)
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