Intruding on Epics: Subversion and The Trope of the Stranger

This week I'm wrong about my new TV obsession Shōgun and how it relates to (I'm not kidding) My Cousin Vinny, plus my impending emotional devastation

This is the best blockbuster television since…probably Band of Brothers?

The past 48 hours of my life were absolutely devoured by Shōgun, the new FX mini-series currently halfway through its 10 episode run. I stayed up late last night so I could watch the newest episode the moment it released at 12AM. I’ve spent most of the rest of my free time researching the show’s historical inspirations and the novel and 1980 mini-series that inspired it.

Shōgun is essentially perfect television. It’s well-written, deeply immersive, filled with incredible actors, builds its tension and themes and stakes through dialogue but has explosive and shocking action scenes often enough that you never feel comfortable. I’m not an expert on 1600 Japan, but every set and costume and set piece feels incredibly textured and lived-in, which from what I’ve read is due to the involvement of Hiroyuki Sanada as a producer and lead actor (who is brilliant, and this showcase of his talent is long overdue in a Western production) and a creative team invested in historical authenticity. A particularly brilliant aspect of the show to me is how much of the tension comes from translation between “Portuguese” (which in the show is spoken as English) and Japanese—the motives and biases of the translators are always evident in the cross-language exchanges—often in hilarious or profound ways—and the ability to twist communication in their favor makes those characters especially powerful. It feels like a more cohesive and consistent, better written Game of Thrones. You should absolutely rush to Hulu to watch.

I was initially—before I knew anything beyond the basic premise—deeply skeptical of the show, mostly because I thought it was going to fall prey to the white-savior Eurocentrism of many stories that feature the stranger-in-a-strange-land trope. I knew Cosmo Jarvis played John Blackthorne, an English sailor who pilots the first non-Portuguese or Spanish ship to reach East Asia, and I was worried the show would mostly be about him coopting and mastering foreign customs to become the “best of both worlds,” in the style of Last of the Mohicans or The Last Samurai (which also stars Sanada) or even James Cameron’s Avatar movies.

The show is absolutely rooted in Blackthorne’s perspective much of the time (as was the novel, which based his character on an actual English sailor who was favored by an actual Shōgun)—which feels like a concession to the series’ Western audience to provide a gateway for understanding feudal Japanese culture—but unlike the earlier mini-series, he is not a driver of plot or action in any significant way. He does provide very limited expertise in sailing and cannon-based military tactics to Sanada’s character, Lord Yoshi Toranaga, but almost all of his active choices are deeply stupid and ultimately ineffective. He is used as a political pawn without his knowledge, everyone calls him “the barbarian” (and the show emphasizes how little he likes to bathe or otherwise follow basic standards of hygiene), he usually has no clue what’s actually happening, and Jarvis over-acts the part, swearing and yelling and stumbling, in a brilliant contrast to the deeply restrained, intentional Japanese characters around him. He isn’t a white savior, but he is a useful catalyst to challenge the assumptions and values of the more active characters who are participating in the struggle for power over Japan—especially Toranaga and Anna Sawai’s Mariko (the best character in the show). The central conflict isn’t Blackthorne’s quest to exploit Japanese wealth for England, or even his slow conversion to Japanese values—it’s the conflict between Japanese lords over power, and the collective Japanese struggle with the Portuguese over their own sovereignty. The show never loses sight of the more interesting and important plot-lines even as Blackthorne remains a viewpoint character.

The stranger-in-a-strange-land story is a popular trope for a reason. The tension built into the concept, the potential for active change from characters on both sides of the divide, and the way it allows a specific audience represented by the stranger to fantasize and self-insert into the story all make it fruitful ground for popular storytelling. But because so much of the history of this trope is in justifying and sanitizing European and Western colonialism—at times, such as with movies like Dances With Wolves, even coopting victimization from the victims of genocide and oppression—it has justifiably earned a bad rap. At this point, it demands subversion in one way or another to work.

This is an overdue cultural moment for those subversions—Dune is doing it at a blockbuster scale—and Shōgun does it by not even indulging the concept. But the subversions have been around much longer. And when I think about the best examples, I think about My Cousin Vinny.

I hope I don’t need to explain the plot of My Cousin Vinny to anyone—it’s a perfect movie—and obviously it’s not a subversion of the white-savior trope because pretty much everyone in the movie is white. But it is a subversion of most stories of a stranger entering and disrupting a new culture, because rather than being about someone with rural values moralizing to corrupt city folk, it’s about someone with city values disrupting the well-meaning but lethargic morality of the rural south.

Vinny is confrontational and direct rather than avoidant and polite. He argues with aggression rather than passive-aggression; he shows he cares about people through conflict as much as through support. To the small Alabaman town where he arrives to defend his cousin from false murder charges, he’s practically a barbarian, with no sense of decorum or social grace.

Like the best versions of this story, Vinny and the town learn from each other to their mutual benefit. Vinny gains a versatility of manner that allows him to win the case and learns to care about the details as much as the big picture in his work. The town becomes at least somewhat aware that their strictly enforced placidity is artificial and that some of their problems could be resolved through more honest and direct communication.

What Vinny and Shōgun have in common is their stranger is in most ways less “civilized” than the culture they intrude on, and the stories don’t forget it. Blackthorne and Vinny both lack an understanding of the rules of social decorum that apply to their new settings, and despite the wildly divergent tones of the two works overall both characters are hilarious because of it. While Vinny is a much more direct moral guide for the small Alabama town he disrupts, Blackthorne’s most interesting active contribution to his show is also how he provides an argument for intense individuality and personal freedom that runs counter to the deeply felt community and family values of the Japan he is thrown into. While the show clearly doesn’t fall on his side of the argument, he does, like Vinny, create an awareness of different approaches to self-definition and presentation that ends up deepening the Japanese characters and our understanding of their agency within their own culture.

Reading this back, connecting Shōgun to My Cousin Vinny might be the biggest stretch I’ve ever attempted in this blog. But they’re both absolutely worth your time, and both display how the trope of the stranger can be used to complicate moral and cultural understandings without succumbing to simplistic affirmation of the audience. Go watch!

When You Read This, I Will Probably Be in Deep Emotional Pain

That’s because I’m publishing this post just before the start of Virginia men’s basketball’s first game in the NCAA tournament (the women, still in a rebuild, had a great season but didn’t make March Madness). UVa quite honestly shouldn’t have made the cut, and they’re playing in the First Four, which is essentially a play-in for the worst teams to qualify for the real event.

On Friday, Virginia missed 4 of 5 free throws, fouled a three point shooter, and gave up a buzzer beater, all in the last minute, in an epic display of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in the ACC tournament. The program is clearly still deeply in the karma-red from their magical run to a national title in 2019, having not won a tournament game since, and I have no reason to believe they won’t lose in painful fashion to Colorado State tonight. That won’t stop me from being devastated emotionally and probably making bad life decisions when they do (I have quite literally broken up with a girlfriend in part due to my despondence in the wake of a Virginia loss, embarrassingly (it was the right thing to do for the wrong reason, if that makes sense)). Wish me luck.