Recently I happened to watch Netflix’s Blue Eye Samurai. It’s propaganda and not even entertaining propaganda.
Blue Eye Samurai is about Mizu, a half-white woman living in Edo era Japan; when all contact with the outside world has been cut off and no foreigners allowed. The protagonist, and her theme, is all about suppression and rebellion. She conceals her signature blue eyes with tinted glasses, and conceals her femininity by wearing men’s clothing and chest binding (If you’re wondering if this is a thinly-veiled LGBT parable, then yes, you’re completely correct). And like in literally every other samurai-themed western movie and show these days, she’s on a quest for revenge against the people who wronged her.
I watched the Russian dub, and as is typical in Russian dubs, the voices are very gendered. I actually had to go on YouTube and listen to what Mizu’s original voice actually was. The dub with the high-pitched feminine voice that still somehow fools everyone into thinking she’s a man is very funny though. Now I know what Nadezhda Durova had to deal with.
The bad guy of the show is Abijah Fowler, an Irishman conspiring to take over Japan with an arsenal of European firearms he’s carefully smuggled into the country. Again, I just cannot shake the feeling that this show is just a synopsis of all Japan tropes we’ve already seen in other media. Conflicted white protagonist fights bad white antagonist who is going to take over because the natives are too stupid to use guns… okay I get it.
And this is really where Blue Eye Samurai seems to sabotage its own message. Japan, from both Mizu’s perspective and what the audience can observe with their own eyes and ears, is cruel, brutal, savage, primitive and completely lacking in positive characteristics. Clearly, I am supposed to agree that Fowler is an evil colonizer, but the show goes out of its way to deprive me of any reason to care. When there are two sides who are both portrayed as equally bad except one of them is smarter and technologically superior, then obviously that’s the side that should win, logically. Japan might not be better under Fowler’s rule but it can’t be worse.
If we boil down Blue Eye Samurai to its core imperialist theme, the time and location it is set in almost don’t matter. Mizu could be Iranian, Russian, Afghan, Chinese or any other barbarous autocratic foreign land that needs a color revolution. That is why LGBT has come to be so prominent, to the point it became actual weapon of the US state department. Gender norms, whether they’re barbarous or lenient, exist in every culture. So an attack on gender norms is an attack at the very foundation of human society. A young woman who is made to feel ostracized and shunned by her own society can become the perfect foot soldier for the USA, which, through the lens of propaganda, she comes to see as a city on a hill where no one is forced to live or act a certain way. This puts the targeted country into a very difficult situation; the more they react, the worse the rebellion comes. When the young protesters push, the elders push back, and the internal conflict escalates, and at no cost to the rebellion’s foreign sponsors. There is simply no winner in a war between the old and the young.
Painting Fowler as a sneering villain is classic neoliberalism. “I agree US imperialism is bad, but…” Both sides are bad, but the western colonist is clearly the least bad, so the sophisticated “media literate” liberal sides with that, regardless of whatever lip service to bothsidesism he gives along the way. The answer is always “The West is bad, but the native society is worse.”
I just wish this show was entertaining. The plot itself was incredibly pedestrian, and the vector art, while not terrible, was unimaginative. And the attempts to animate movement in people’s faces just made them look rubbery.
There are many sex scenes, and of course that’s what I had left the TV paused on when my girlfriend came back from her trip (Oh so that’s what you do while I’m gone). Maybe 12 year old boys who like anime girls too much enjoy these scenes, but I am not sure who else is supposed to. The fight scenes are, like the animation in general, okay but uninspired. It all gets very repetitive. I admit to not watching Blue Eye Samurai to its season finale and don’t plan to.
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Ian Kummer
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