Artists and the machines of death: The Wind Rises (2013) and The First of the Few (1942)

Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises was pitched as the director's final film, and as such has an extra weight of expectation attached to it, as if it should not only match up to the rest of his celebrated oeuvre, but also somehow act as a coda, a definitive statement, a portrait of the man as an artist. It tells the heavily fictionalised tale of Japanese aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi, creator of the legendary Second World War fighter the Mitsubishi A6M “Zero”, and given Miyazaki's love of flying machines of all kinds, it's easy to see it as a metaphor for the man himself.


In watching The Wind Rises, I decided to take it in as a double feature with another film about an aviation designer, the British wartime drama The First of the Few, which told the story of Reginald J Mitchell, the designer of the Supermarine Spitfire. Between the two films, there are a number of interesting points of comparison relating to their portrayals of the engineer as artist, of the creator who makes machines of destruction, and of relationships and obsession.


Both films make it explicit that they regard their protagonists as artists, somehow above mere engineers, and they do this partly through portraying Horikoshi and Mitchell's interests in and appropriation of natural forms. Horikoshi's admiration of the elegant curve of a herring bone that he picks out of his lunch isn't of any real practical use, since the curve of a wing for maximum aerodynamic efficiency is a matter of mathematics, but his appreciation of this natural form tells us that he is not just an engineer: he is a man of inspiration, who searches not just for engineering efficiency but also for elegance.

Similarly, when we first meet Mitchell in The First of the Few, he is birdwatching during a seaside picnic with his wife. The circumstances of both Mitchell's and Horikoshi's moments of inspiration come during moments away from work, but both find their attention drawn from their food and companions by the power of sublime nature. In Mitchell's case, the focal point of his inspiration lies in the simple elegance of the bird's form which he seeks to emulate in contrast to the ungainly network of struts and wires that make up most aircraft of the early 1920s.

One big difference between the films is in the relative weight placed on dreams and reality. Horikoshi is portrayed as a dreamer and The Wind Rises frequently disappears without warning into his (and by extension Miyazaki's) fantasies. The First of the Few, however, explicitly anchors itself in reality. This contrast is exemplified by the opening scenes of the respective films.

The Wind Rises opens with a dream of the young Horikoshi taking to the skies in a homemade flyer, soaring over the peaceful countryside of early Taisho period Japan, only for the peace and purity of his airborne antics to be shattered by the arrival of a vast, German airship (Japan was Britain's ally during the First World War and fought against Germany, although this also foreshadows other aspects of the film) and a fleet of idiosyncratic flying bombs.

The First of the Few, on the other hand, rubs your face in reality. It begins right in the thick of The Battle of Britain, with newsreel footage of German conquests, genuine footage of German bomber squadrons over southeast England, and the words of Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Lord Haw Haw and Churchill. The acting of the extras who trade quips and banter between sorties may seem unnaturally awkward and stilted, but that's largely because many of them were genuine RAF pilots who had been drafted into the film for propaganda purposes.

And that's a core difference between the films. Made in 1942, right in the middle of the war, The First of the Few is essentially a propaganda film, while The Wind Rises is divorced from the most immediate implications of the war by nearly seventy years. The Wind Rises has an ambiguous relationship with the war, reflecting the work of a director who hates war but loves its machinery, and Miyazaki feeds that attitude into his central character. Horikoshi experiences the destruction of Tokyo firsthand near the beginning of the film, as the Great Kanto Earthquake hits in a terrifying scene just as his train is approaching Tokyo, and this is a clear foreshadowing of the destruction from the air that is to be visited upon Tokyo from the kind of machines he is set on creating. Later on, Horikoshi's befriends German dissident Castorp, who warns him of the destructive path Germany and Japan have set themselves on, and Horikoshi must wrestle with his love for his art and the knowledge of the ends to which his work is being put. He does this primarily by doubling down on his work, immersing himself in it to such an extent that he doesn't even think about the war. Basically, he decides that art supersedes all other concerns.

The First of the Few is, in a way, by its very nature far more honest and direct in how it confronts the issue of war, but it deals with the same conflict between art and the destructive purposes to which this particular art is put. Rather than have Mitchell wrestle with it as a moral dilemma, however, the film is divided into two parts, each reflecting a different side of aviation technology. The first part deals with the Schneider Trophy and how Mitchell's Supermarine S5 and S6 designs first won and then permanently retained the trophy. The romance of the high speed air race is something Miyazaki had touched upon previously in Porco Rosso, which references the Schneider Trophy and in the name of American pilot Donald Curtis references the same Curtiss R3C biplane that is shown in The First of the Few beating Mitchell's prototype Supermarine S4 to the 1925 trophy. The second part of the film kicks off with Mitchell's visit to Germany to see one of Hitler's glider clubs. His awe at the purity of the German gliders, so close to his own vision of birdlike simplicity, soon gives way to the realisation of the Nazis' ambitions for their own military airforce, and like any true patriot, he is from then on fully invested in making machines of war.

Part of this reflects the circumstances and timing of each film's creation, but it also reflects the contrasting natures of each country's involvement in the war. Britain could easily justify its military air programme as the island itself was under immediate threat. The Spitfire was a short range, land-based interceptor, designed to shoot down enemy bombers attacking the homeland and their escorts. The Zero, on the other hand, was a carrier-based fighter, whose role included escorting bombers and projecting Japanese power far overseas, while Japan's own role in the war was offensive before any need for defence of the homeland came into play. Miyazaki acknowledges this when Horikoshi is inspecting a new bomber aircraft built by his friend Kiro Honjo and asks who it's going to be used on. Honjo rattles off a list of countries including America, China, Britain and the Netherlands that makes it abundantly clear that Japan's intentions lie in expansion. The differing circumstances are also reflected in the differing attitudes of the respective establishments to money. While Horikoshi's Japan labours in poverty during the Depression, the expansionist government pours money into the aviation industry; meanwhile Mitchell's Britain, still war-weary after the trials of 1914-18, is unwilling to fund new aircraft development during such straitened times.

It is interesting that in both films a trip by the protagonist to Germany proves an important turning point for the characters. For Mitchell, his it is what resolves him to invest himself fully into making machines of war. True to the film's propaganda origins, the Germans are portrayed as arrogant and megalomaniacal, making use of all the contemporary stereotypes that still to some degree form the core of British prejudices towards our Teutonic cousins. Significantly, the practical, unsentimental Germans also gently mock Mitchell's romantic notions of the poetry of flight as being essentially British sentimentality. In The Wind Rises, Horikoshi and Honjo's visit to the Junkers production facility in Dessau demonstrates the junior status the Germans consider Japan to hold in their partnership, and the two Japanese engineers are constantly being barred from inspection of certain pieces of technology. The only place where The Wind Rises could be called explicitly patriotic is where Horikoshi and Honjo are forced to assert themselves against the arrogant Germans, again reinforcing the film's conflicted attitude towards its protagonist's work and what it represented.

Another interesting moment from the scene at the Junkers yard comes when Horikoshi is involved in a fracas with a German guard over his wishes to more closely inspect one of the new all-metal aircraft. In that moment, the elderly Hugo Junkers himself intervenes on Horikoshi's side. This moment of solidarity from a fellow artist is given greater significance later on, when Castorp reveals that Junkers is not on good terms with the Nazis (he was a socialist and a pacifist who hated the Nazis and ended his days under house arrest). A much bigger relationship with a fellow aircraft designer is the friendship that Horikoshi strikes up in his dreams with Giovanni Battista Caproni. Caproni was prone to plenty of errors and failed experiments himself, and his bizarre Ca.60 Noviplano makes a brief appearance in one of the dream sequences, wobbling and warping as it flies. Caproni takes on the role of a sort of spirit guide, representing unfettered creativity, the dream of aviation as a peaceful technology, as well as the compromises an artist must make to pursue his dreams.

In The First of the Few, there is no fellow designer or engineer with a comparably large role, but again during the visit to Germany, Mitchell encounters one of his opposite numbers in the form of Willy Messerschmitt, designer of the Messerschmitt Bf 109, the plane which would be the Spitfire's primary opponent during the Battle of Britain. Mitchell and Messerschmitt's encounter is terse and brief, but lasts long enough to give the enduring impression of two opponents sizing each other up in advance of a fight. Other than that moment, Mitchell's only encounters with his contemporaries are in his encounters with the likes of Robert McLean and Henry Royce, both of whom are allies, who assist Mitchell in creating his masterwork.

Mitchell's primary confidant is his test pilot, the debonair ladies' man Geoffrey Crisp, whose role can perhaps best be explained by the need for a sizeable role for the eminently bankable David Niven. Nevertheless, Mitchell's wife Diana also plays a key role in supporting her husbands dreams while at the same time keeping him grounded. Diana is portrayed as an archetypal domestic goddess and dutiful wife, willing to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of her husband's dreams. In one poignant moment, as she begs her sick husband to stop his work and go away with her, he confronts her directly with the idea that the looming war and the work he is doing is “more important than us”.

While Mitchell and Diana are presented from the start as a fully-formed couple, Horikoshi's relationship with Naoko is shown from their first awkward meetings, gradually blossoming through their courtship at a rural holiday retreat, and their eventual marriage. Like Diana, Naoko is self-sacrificing to a fault, eventually leaving for the mountains to avoid distracting Horikoshi from his work.

Both films follow the traditional pattern of studies in artistic obsession by interweaving the artist's passion for his work with the notion of death. The sacrifices the women make for their men are also harbingers of death, symbolising the victory of art and its eternal legacy over life in the present and now. In Naoko's case it is her own death from tuberculosis, while in Diana's case, it is resigning herself to Mitchell's own self-destruction via an unnamed disease (the real RJ Mitchell died of cancer, although for dramatic reasons this is not stated in the film, in order to keep the possibility of his recovery open).

Also, in both films this relationship between obsession and death takes on a mystical significance. In The Wind Rises, the wind itself takes on a metaphorical role, with Horikoshi and Naoko's meetings always accompanied by strong gusts of wind. It is the appearance of one of these gusts as he watches the successful test flight of his new plane that tells Horikoshi that Naoko has died. In The First of the Few, it is Diana who is present to see the Spitfire's test flight while the now very unwell Mitchell watches it fly over him in his garden. After the flight, Diana returns with the news and leaves him to rest in the garden, surrounded (perhaps significantly) by birdsong, and as she enters the house, she is struck by a similar psychic realisation of a life passing from this world.

These mystically-inflected moments of death link back to the mystical nature of the inspiration that Horikoshi and Mitchell themselves are portrayed as having discovered at the start of their stories. Just as the word inspire, to breathe in, can also mean breathing in the life of creativity, so its opposite, expire, can also mean death. In each case, a life must be traded for the creation of a work of art.

While The Wind Rises is an antiwar film that appears conflicted in its love for its subject matter, The First of the Few has no time for pacifism and is unambiguous about the necessity of war. Still, both films make a point of contrasting their artist-heroes with the warmongering Nazis, in the British film's case quite explicitly, while in the Japanese film's case more subtly, using Horikoshi's encounter with the Germans to define Japanese national pride against an enemy everyone can agree on. It's tempting to see this as an adoption by Miyazaki of the postwar Allied consensus of who World War II's goodies and baddies were, but it also serves to draw attention to the confused and troubled nature of Japan's involvement in the war, as a partner to a regime that saw Asians as inherently racially inferior. While The First of the Few is a propaganda film and The Wind Rises is essentially a personal work that could be seen in some ways as a partially cloaked autobiography by Miyazaki, they both follow certain generic patterns of the obsessive artist subgenre, and both are films about men who sacrifice their marriages, albeit ultimately with their women's active consent and support, in their obsessive pursuit of creating machines of destruction. In the end, Mitchell sacrifices his life with Diana for the Greater National Good, while Horikoshi sacrifices his life with Naoko for something far more abstract and intangible. Miyazaki attempts in the final scenes to show some sort of cosmic balance between the horror of the war's destruction and the beauty of the planes that Horikoshi built. The First of the Few ends where it began, in the midst of the war with the RAF pilots fighting for their lives in Mitchell's planes.

My troubled relationship with Joss Whedon

I have a problem with Joss Whedon.

I find his work pretty much universally enjoyable, ranging from at worst (early episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) acceptable timewasting visual chewing gum to at best (Firefly, the whimsical and experimental bits of Buffy The Vampire Slayer) genuinely impressive, eye-opening television, but there's always something nagging at me.

I think part of it is simply that he's so established and has such a large body of work that his interests and habits now show up too easily. Characters behave in the ways they do because they are Joss Whedon characters, not because they are themselves. In that sense, Whedon -- like other writers with easily recognisable sets of tropes and concerns, for example Haruki Murakami to name but one) is a victim of his own success.

Another part of it is his insistence on working with a big network like Fox, where every idea he has must live or die on its ability to capture a sizeable mainstream audience. It was this environment that guaranteed Dollhouse would fail before it had even begun. The idea was just too weird, and Whedon's attempts to appease the network feel like they hobbled the show and prevented it from doing justice to its own concept.

Whedon's treatment of female characters is one of the most talked-about features of his work. A lot of this comes from a feminist perspective and rightly so, but it's also clear that Whedon is not a feminist in the full-on theoretical/ideological/political sense of the word. Whedon's feminism comes across as more like the video gamer who prefers to play Mass Effect as the female Shepherd, or the anime fan who got a kick out of the way Priss could casually blow off the advances of Leon McNichol before crushing the skulls of some rogue boomers in Bubblegum Crisis. Joss Whedon's feminism feels like that of a nerd who finds it easier to identify with female comicbook characters than the butch masculinity of male heroic archetypes. A lot of other fans, both male and female, feel as he does, and the way he recognised that and persuaded the network to take a chance on it with Buffy shouldn't be underestimated.

Watching Joss Whedon's shows from a feminist perspective can sometimes make uncomfortable viewing though, both for good reasons and bad. His women get brutally beaten about, often by men much larger and more physically threatening than they are. His shows invite us to be entertained by this, and that should make anyone pause for a moment. In any real life situation, that man punching that woman in the face that hard, would be an act of sickening violence and the reinforcement of a deeply troubling power dynamic. In the context of Buffy, Dollhouse or S.H.I.E.L.D., however, the point we need to take away from it is that in the world he is showing us, where women have the power to take on men in their own traditionally action and violence-orientated roles, the flipside of that is women must take as well as dish out the beatings. Every time you see Buffy, Echo or Agent May (or indeed Black Widow as written by Whedon in Avengers) take a boot in the gut or a fist in the side of the head, and every time they shake it off and come back with a leg sweep and a spin-kick of their own, they are asserting their equality with, and as heroes this really means superiority to, their male counterparts. This isn't the kind of feminism many people want, and certainly not a sort of feminism that has a great deal of relevance in most people's daily lives, but in the limited milieu of Joss Whedon's comicbook-inspired action universe, it's at least consistent. It's an environment where the highest virtue is badassery, and the women are the baddest-ass there is.

The way Whedon treats sex is one that seems to have evolved, and he seems to have taken onboard criticisms that emerged in response to Buffy. He admitted himself that Willow's coming out as a lesbian proved so popular a move that there was no way he and his team would have been able to have her just announce, "Hey guys, I'm cured!" It's very easy for writers to say that values, ideology and "political correctness" shouldn't be allowed to impinge on narrative, but what political correctness really means in its best sense is to question why you are choosing to say one thing rather than another. Often, ostensibly positive portrayals of homosexual characters in dramas still resolve themselves along the arc of a tragedy, and that's what Whedon did to much criticism with the Willow-Tara storyline. Sensitive as the portrayal was, Tara was still "punished" for being a lesbian. Whedon obviously didn't intend it to play out like that -- he was just playing the standard comicbook card of killing off the love interest of a central character to give a narrative boost to the story -- but the rarity of lesbian characters on TV gave extra significance to Tara's role, and her demise was consequently freighted with far more significance than Whedon had intended. He seemed to recognise this as a mistake and took measures to make it good later.

Another criticism of Buffy was the way that the sexual agency of female characters often seems to be punished with tragedy. Buffy having sex with Angel in the second season precipitates a string of tragedies, and throughout the show, sex is shown to be a perilous adventure for girls. Again, it's doubtful Whedon had any particular anti-feminist agenda here. Buffy was a show as much about being a teenager as it was about monsters and demons, and the mystical significance sex takes on is a metaphor Whedon uses for the fear and confusion surrounding sex when you are a teenager. He also perhaps less consciously locks into a tradition of vampire stories as religious metaphors that paint sex as explicitly sinful. I don't think he really intends this to be the primary message, and the way the religious aspects of the story are treated elsewhere reinforces my belief -- the cross has no particular significance beyond its power as an anti-vampire superweapon, and holy water is bottled and branded like it was Perrier or something -- but it's a tradition that Buffy nonetheless falls into at points. Anya/Anyanka partly rectifies this by being a female character with a strong sense of sexual agency, although she is denied a happy ending. Faith is a more complex proposition, who goes through plenty of her own ups and downs over the course of the series. More significantly, as time has gone by, characters such as Zoe and Inara in Firefly, and May in S.H.I.E.L.D. have presented women who, whatever else we might say about their characterisation, are completely in control of their own sexuality.

What Whedon is very good at doing is anticipating a cliché, leading the audience down the road towards it, and then diverting it at the last minute. You can see this in the Firefly episode The Train Job where Mal leads the audience along the traditional track of the merciful hero before kicking Russian gangster Niska's man-skinning henchman Crow (a reference to Murakami's The Windup Bird Chronicle there?) into Firefly's engine intake. It's a surprise and by showing both that Whedon is aware of the trope and willing to subvert it, he winks to the audience that he's on their side. It also allows him to get away with letting Mal act as the traditional merciful hero for most of the rest of the series simply by showing us that he's willing to break with the trope once on a relatively minor character. Another example is in Avengers where Black Widow's interrogation of Loki follows the path of the hero whose personal demons are easily exploited by an unscrupulous villain before turning the tables and revealing that she was manipulating him (as had been foreshadowed in her first appearance in the film). And by nodding to and then subverting this cliché, it again allows Whedon to then go ahead and have Loki's plan work out more or less flawlessly anyway.

And this is perhaps one of Whedon's problems, and one that relates back to his position working in network TV and Hollywood rather than blue-chip grownup channels like HBO: for all his awareness of conventions and clichés, he still remains tied to them. Many of the things that made Buffy seem so ahead of its time were tricks that disguised an essentially fairly conventionally structured teen drama, albeit one characterised by some incredibly good writing in places, apt to fly off in all sorts of exciting diversions in form, and comparatively bloodthirsty in its attitude to killing off main characters. In S.H.I.E.L.D. those same habits are at play and seem far more dated.

The way Whedon characters often suddenly and unexpectedly reverse their personalities for the sake of a surprising twist (Boyd in Dollhouse was one of the silliest examples of this, which is ironic in a show that's almost entirely about people's personalities being changed and edited) reveals a writer who sometimes puts keeping one step ahead of the fans before narrative consistency and plausibility. Whedon also has a compulsive need to explain everything, where leaving it unexplained might make for a more satisfying experience. The way the film Serenity wrapped up the mystery of the reavers was anticlimactic, and the awakening of River as a ninja ass-kicking superweapon made her less interesting as a character than when she was this unexplained, potentially perilous enigma. These little writerly habits nag at me.

But at the same time, watching a Joss Whedon show satisfies me in a way few other things do. There's an easygoing drive to the storytelling, and the way he delights in showing you the nuts and bolts of the narrative, while often making him like he's being a bit cleverer than he really is, lends a reassuring air that he's fighting the same fight as us fellow nerds. More importantly perhaps, there's an air of attainability in what he writes. Read Thomas Pynchon or watch The Wire and you're just constantly being blown away by how rich, layered, intelligent and downright brilliant the work is. Watch a Joss Whedon show and you think, "This is good, but it's also within reach: I could do this!" This might sound like rather faint praise, but in a way, it's still further testament to Whedon's ability to show his fans a vaseline-lensed, rose-tinted vision of themselves, not in the characters and situations but in the behind-the-scenes machinery that creates and controls them.