By HERIK OLIVEIRA*
Considerations on the film directed by Wim Wenders
“– Can’t you show the good side and proclaim love as a principle, instead of infinite bitterness?
– There is only one expression for truth: the thought that denies injustice. If the insistence on the good sides is not overcome in the negative whole, it will transfigure its opposite: violence.” (Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment).
Em Perfect days we follow a sequence of days in the life of Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), a man already beyond middle age, whose job is to clean public toilets in Tokyo. The aim here is to grope the reception of Perfect days between two specific points: the tendency towards resignation and the possibility of criticism. This text is based on this problem, and it is addressed through reflection on specific aspects of the film, its content and form, in which elements of resignation and criticism are recognized.
As a procedure, interpretation is used. Susan Sontag (2020) was right when, in her valuable essay against interpretation, she wrote that certain interpretations indicate dissatisfaction, conscious or unconscious, with the works in question and reveal the desire to replace them with something else. What the author did not say was that this other thing that one intends to put in their place may be, in some cases, a dignified life, the elimination of unnecessary suffering, something that many works would like to be replaced by.
An aesthetic clown on perfect days
The matter of Perfect days It is the everyday, the routine. The viewer sees Hirayama's life unfold cyclically.
Waking up before the sun, awakened by the lady sweeping the street. Folding his duvet. Brushing his teeth, shaving and trimming his mustache. Tending to his garden in a room lit by black light. Putting on his overalls, his work uniform. Leaving the door of his small house. Breathing deeply and smiling. Drinking canned coffee. Getting into his compact van. Driving to the sound of Patti Smith, The Animals, Otis Redding, Lou Reed… on his rare cassette tapes.
Jumping from bathroom to bathroom – all architecturally polished and technologically equipped – which he cleans obsessively.
On a quick lunch break, eating a sandwich in the park and religiously photographing the canopy of the same tree.
Then, after the work day is over, he washes himself in a communal bathroom and has dinner in a small restaurant, always greeted by the man who welcomes him with a drink and the enthusiastic phrase: “For a hard day's work!”
At home, he reads, lying down. He falls asleep. He dreams.
During his free time, his route also seems predictable, which includes, not necessarily in this order: cycling to a second-hand bookstore from which he leaves with the books that fill his bookshelf and keep him busy at night; sweeping the floor; rewinding the tapes; visiting the temple; developing the photographs he takes during the week; organizing these photos methodically in cans stored in the closet and rigorously labeled by date, tearing up the images he doesn't like; going to the laundromat; eating and drinking at a restaurant he already knows. During this period of rest, he travels entirely by bike.
The viewer also witnesses irruptions in this daily life, sometimes tender, sometimes disconcerting, sometimes curious. Some of them, even though they may seem like significant moments in Hirayama's life, have something habitual, familiar, like the homeless man who dances with trees or the girl who sits on the bench next to the protagonist and eats at the same time as him, always staring at him when Hirayama greets her, but does not return the greeting. Other irruptions are more threatening to the main character's ritual life: the niece who appears at his residence after running away from home because of a fight with her mother, the workmate who quits his job...
In the movement of the film’s main character’s life, some saw “porosity to the poetry of everyday life”, openness to the “charm of small things”, willingness to find “charm in routine” (COUTO, 2024). Others saw a “delicate portrait of the ordinary of life” and the effort to show that “there is beauty in being ordinary”, “there is beauty in cleaning bathrooms and earning your own money, even if the world wants to devour you in a proletarian-sucking machine” (GUEDES, 2024).
There were those who emphasized that, when new things are introduced into Hirayama's life, particularizing the protagonist's routine, to which the public is brought closer in a subtle and slow way, the spectators really allow themselves to be convinced “that the days are perfect” (PEIRÃO, 2024).
It has been written that Perfect Days conveys the “enchantment with the banal” and that this “‘small’ life” by Hirayama, which may seem claustrophobic, is also “comforting in its simplicity”, denying that the film would be “an elitist glorification of the crushing routine of life in late capitalism” and recognizing in the work the impulse to “reveal the courageous struggle for glimpses of humor and beauty” (COLETI, 2024).
It was noted in the work that “time runs over suffering and routine becomes a source of happiness”. Its virtue would be to show that “there is suffering in happiness” (LISBOA, 2024).
It has been argued that the social critique present in WimWenders' film, by showing a dedicated toilet cleaner who is proud of what he does, is to show that “people's human value is not dependent on these external signs of success”, hurting the meritocratic belief that considers those who perform prestigious jobs to be better. Hirayama's attention to what really matters, his love for the arts, his openness to the moment lived would be signs of his sophistication, signs that he is a better person, rejecting hedonism and consumerism (SOUZA, 2024).
Others, faced with the proposal to follow the “peaceful routine of a worker”, recalled its lack of originality, pointing out that, in the film, because there is a tendency to quickly resolve the setbacks that arise (in the routine of that life that we follow), comfort prevails for the audience that closely follows Hirayama’s “little world” (NOLASCO, 2024).
No beating around the bush, Perfect days was also labeled as “phony everyday poetry”, false everyday poetry (FURTADO, 2024) and as an “escape fantasy – especially attractive to the wealthy” (JONES, 2024).
More than just a portrait of the reception of Perfect days, split into celebration and rejection, the division outlined in the reviews is based on an aesthetic element that constitutes the film itself; it is not a mere manifestation of subjective critical judgments, but an expression of an objective trait of Perfect days: the aesthetics clown (SILVA, 2017).
The dichotomy would express, in a bifurcated manner, aspects that would be entangled with each other in the work, that is, in tension. The dual character of aesthetics clown, resistance and adaptation (SILVA, 2017), focuses on Perfect days and the reception reflects, in a split way, this dual trait. Precisely because it walks on the slippery ground of aesthetics clown we see the movement of the film's reception as a wavering between taking it as resistance or denouncing it as resignation, demanding that this tension be scrutinized before considering whether the film falls into resignation, makes a critical leap or remains in an unstable balance.
Given this, the question of this work can be formulated as follows: what scene Perfect days makes up of everyday life in the administered world, in which alienation reigns, when it stumbles, like a clown, into aesthetics clown? Probing this question depends, first, on making explicit the presence of aesthetics clown em Perfect days.
Aesthetics clown concerns the entrenchment of characteristic elements of praxis clown – as exaggeration, fantasy, madness, subversion, transgression, manifestation of vulnerability – in the form and content of the works, with or without a representation clown personified, objectifying itself, in cinema, both in the plot and characters as well as in technical choices of photography, framing, language, script (SILVA, 2017).
Inheritance of the tension between entertainment and criticism intrinsic to its matrix (the art of clowning), aesthetics clown oscillates between adaptation and resistance to domination. Depending on how the elements of form and content are coordinated, humor clownish it can serve an aesthetic of distraction, catharsis and reconciliation of people with domination or it can serve the critical aesthetic experience of non-pacified contact with the reality that produces suffering. Fantasy, central to the dynamics of this aesthetic, can also operate both in the sense of escaping the reality of suffering and in the sense of, groping the subterranean of reality, pointing out possibilities of overcoming (SILVA, 2017).
Although the consequences of the presence of elements have not been consciously perceived and unfolded clowns em Perfect days, its immanence to the work was revealed, somewhat accidentally, in certain reviews and criticisms. Sometimes, traces clowns were pointed out fortuitously in the comments on the film, but, symptomatically, in a tone of disqualification, although not always in that tone.
For example, Hirayama’s playful disposition was noted (COUTO, 2024). A certain grace, manifested in scenes that provoke discreet smiles in the audience, was also noted, as well as the contrast between Hirayama’s rigor and the “crazy” manner of Takashi, the protagonist’s workmate (PEIRÃO, 2024). This same contrast between the young, exasperated and talkative Takashi and the taciturn old Hirayama was noted by another reviewer, although taken as an “almost caricatured” representation of the relationships between the characters in Wim Wenders’ film (NOLASCO, 2024). It was even written that Takashi “is deliberately silly and clownish, always chattering without thinking” (JONES, 2024).
With these clues, critics were one step away from recognizing aesthetics. clown em Perfect days, however, those aspects were noted as details. It was not realized that, in the contrast of Hirayama and Takashi's temperaments, a typical game of a duo of clowns, a white man and an august man. It is not only Takashi who is a clown, Hirayama is too. The caricatured nature of this relationship would not be a mistake in Wenders' direction, but rather a method (whether conscious or not). The attributes of aesthetics clown are present in several other elements of Perfect Days. I will highlight a few.
Let's start with the language of Perfect days, who chooses silence, privileging the image and giving primacy to the gaze. Following him from the beginning of the film, the viewer has to wait about sixteen minutes until he hears Hirayama's first, synthetic word, and only after another twenty minutes does he speak again. And the character's verbal silence is not a consequence of being alone. To the people who address him, he either responds with gestures and mimics or does not respond at all. The protagonist's expression remains predominantly gestural, even after he starts speaking. In cinema, the preponderance of the image over speech and the privilege of the gaze make up the aesthetics clown (SILVA, 2017).
A careful observation will find in Perfect days, especially when Hirayama is with his niece, the use of mimetic movements, typical of clown. The body dynamics of the two characters are imitative in a scene in which they are having lunch in the park: without her knowing that this is a daily habit of Hirayama, the girl removes and positions her smartphone to photograph the same trees that his uncle photographs; then, he takes out his own analog camera and positions it in a similar way (a scene that even brought smiles to the audience). There is, shortly after, a scene in which the two ride bicycles in sync.
You don't have to look very hard to find scenes that work like this. gags spirited in Perfect days. I remember one, almost silent in fact, of Hirayama trying to pass through his small room, where he put his niece to sleep, to get to the adjacent room where his plants are housed. The character tries not to make any noise to avoid waking the girl, but each carefully calculated step is quite loud, as is the sound made by the spray bottle, which he presses desperately quickly to finish his morning ritual. He fails, and the niece wakes up.
there are others gags, such as the escape on a bicycle when he is caught secretly watching the restaurant owner – with whom he seems to have an emotional interest – hugging a man he doesn't know; the shock when he is unexpectedly kissed on the cheek by the girl Takashi was involved with; the exaggerated startle, which almost ends in a fall, when he realizes that his niece, with her back turned, is going to take off her shirt (which is reminiscent of the way clowns stumble). An emotional-sexual tone is common to these scenes, accompanied by the childish embarrassment of Hirayama's reactions.
The construction of the character Hirayama – in the role of which Yakusho won an award at Cannes (2023) –, in his hyperbolic gestures even as a child, in his expressive gaze, in his wordless eloquence, in his innocence, bears a great resemblance to the clown.
The vulnerability of the clown, a sign of the vulnerable condition of humans in general, is a central character of aesthetics clown (SILVA, 2017). It is shown in Hirayama not only in the reverse of his observance of rituals that make explicit the need for protection, but especially in certain reactions that remind us of a child – I remember, in this regard, how childish the hug he gives his sister (a rigid and “adult” figure) is, holding the bag with the chocolates that she gave him as a gift. His countless scares also tell us something in this sense.
There is, in Hirayama, despite his excessive aptitude for work, a certain inaptitude for simple things, common to his time, and this last is a characteristic clown (Hirayama thinks that Spotify It's a store! His niece laughs, part of the audience too, but isn't he right?).
It is, however, really in the dynamics of the relationship with Takashi that the constitution stands out clown, from the differences in the physical build of the two (Takashi is very thin, making Hirayama seem even more corpulent than he is), to the costumes (Takashi wearing very loose clothes and even his blue work overalls are somewhat loose, while Hirayama's are tight[I]), going through the opposite characteristics of “character” and attitude (Takashi talkative and completely histrionic, absent-minded, clumsy, silly, relaxed, unpunctual; Hirayama silent, attentive, careful, sensible, meticulous, upright).
They both share the principle of identifying with outcasts and misfits (the boy with Down syndrome, the niece, the homeless man, the girl Takashi falls in love with).
As indicated, Hirayama and Takashi refer to a duo clown of the white and august type. As Silva (2017) reminds us, these two traditional clown figures embody the dynamics between power and servitude, order and marginality: “The white man represents the holder of power, a comic of seriousness and rigidity, while the august man refers to a supposed innocence and stupidity, also a supposed subservience to the white man. However, as the subversion of the imposed order is a constant in art clownish, in this game there is a transgression of the roles initially presented” (SILVA, 2017, p. 41). It is easy to recognize in the two characters of Perfect days this movement.
The work relationship that unites Hirayama and Takashi permeates this relationship of servitude (although without violence), insofar as the latter is subordinate to the former. Also, the values embodied by Hirayama (dedication, mature self-control) tend to socially triumph over what Takashi personifies (negligence, youthful impulsiveness).
In the dynamics between the two characters, just like that subversion of roles possible in the game clownish, there are twists and turns. They occur in scenes such as the one where Takashi takes control of the vehicle belonging to Hirayama and the scene in which the young man takes control by threatening to sell one of Hirayama's cassette tapes, to which Hirayama has to give in by handing over to Takashi all the money he has in his wallet.
However, the most striking subversion is observed in a scene in which Hirayama suddenly becomes an august clown, not with his regular double (Takashi), but with the man he sees hugging the landlady of the bar where he dines on the weekends, a man he seems to have been jealous of. They talk about the man's cancer and, at one point, he asks the question "Do shadows get darker when they overlap?", lamenting that there is so much he still doesn't know while he seems to think about his reduced life expectancy. Wittingly, Hirayama conducts an absurd "experiment" to find out the answer to the question and they reach no conclusion; one thinks yes and the other no. Afterwards, they play tag with the shadows, with Hirayama being the counterpoint to the austerity and hopelessness of the other character.
Looking at the film from this perspective, it is possible to ask: how can an aesthetic clown em Perfect days affects the expression that the film gives to the elements it takes as material, that is, the individual's relationship with everyday life, work, free time?
Poetics of everyday life in Scandinavian life?
As stated, the reason for Perfect days It is everyday life. It would not be legitimate to expect the film to present the conceptual determination of everyday life, in which routines unfold, like Hirayama's. Its language is different. But the lack of conceptual determination for everyday life has its drawbacks in some of the reviews and critiques, from which it would not be abusive to expect the mediation of theory in the reflection on this dimension.
The ordering of existence, however banal the ordered aspects may be, is not an indeterminate and random obviousness, there is a certain “structure of everyday life”.
Agnes Heller (2000) points out that everyday life is heterogeneous and hierarchical, that is, it is made up of work, private life, leisure, social exchanges and other activities; activities that are asymmetrical in priority. In particular, the importance of the types of activities that make up everyday life is determined according to social and economic dynamics.
Other hegemonic arrangements predominated in everyday life at other times; “everyday life is not 'outside' history, but at the 'center' of historical events” (Heller, 2000, p. 20).
The beginning of the bourgeois era inaugurated, in everyday life, an unprecedented margin of movement for the individual to be able to construct his or her own hierarchy, according to his or her consciousness and personality, within the socially established hierarchy. However, the development of the same bourgeois society led to a retraction of this margin. In the capitalist mode of production, the alienated form of everyday life expanded widely, although everyday life is not always and necessarily alienated, understanding alienation as the distance between the possibilities materially effected by human-generic production and the possibilities available for conscious individual human life (Heller, 2000).
The infinity of decisions required in everyday life makes it impossible for each demand presented to the individual to be responded to with all possible energy and awareness, so that everyday behavior and thought are characterized, in addition to a significant immediate unity between them, by a certain degree of pragmatism and spontaneity, economism and ultra-generalization; they function by analogy, prejudices, precedents and imitation (see Heller, 2000, pp. 34-37).
The activity demanded by everyday life does not constitute praxis because it is not configured as “conscious human-generic activity” (p. 32), although this does not mean postulating an insurmountable split between the predominant form of everyday activity and praxis, since the former would be a necessary moment of the latter. If praxis is a moment of elevation above everyday life (Heller, 2000), it depends on the same everyday life over which it rises.
In capitalism, that immediate unity between thought and action crystallizes to a great extent. Pragmatism and spontaneity, economism and overgeneralization, the way of acting and thinking guided by analogy, prejudices, precedents and imitation are hypostatized. The qualitative leap over everyday life is hindered.
Perfect Days unfold in this specific form of everyday life – everyday life marked by alienation in the capitalist world – and this is essential to weighing up its limits and possibilities.
How is Hirayama's daily life divided? The same as general life under capitalism: work, free time and sleep.
It is fundamental to remember, from the outset, that it is not only the strict work activities that are under control in the administered society. And the administered society is the larger world in which Hirayama's little world is located.
Also tied to alienated labor are so-called free time and sleep. The confinement of sleep at night itself has its economic determinants and the unconscious activity that occurs during sleep, dreaming, is in no way exempt from these.
In capitalism, not only do the programs that fill free time conform to the logic of profit, but those activities carried out in that time that seem to remind us of work ensure that we can work more later. The same applies to sleep and free time as was said about the latter: their “function is to restore the workforce” (ADORNO, 1995, p. 73). Another characteristic aspect of the relationship between work and free time in capitalism is the rigorous separation between the two. This is done with a “puritanical zeal” (ADORNO, 1995, p. 73). It is not difficult to recognize a similar zeal in Hirayama’s relationship with time and routine. From the severe degree of Hirayama’s identification with this logic, Perfect Days derives a substantial part of its comedy.
If, in the impulse of the art of clowning, aesthetics clown is geared towards denouncing suffering and misery and paying attention to the failure to fulfill the promises of culture (SILVA, 2017), one could say, in Perfect Days, about the laughable nature of identifying with the dominant social order (in Hirayama due to his servile and content relationship with work), an order that shows its failure, in the sense of emancipation, by producing high-tech toilets and bathrooms with operating mechanisms that would surprise even magical powers if they existed, without changing the need and social organization of the work of cleaning bathrooms.
Hirayama is the exaggeration of this identification, he is the caricature of a divided life: he works hard during work; he sleeps when he should sleep; he has fun during his free time. As a caricature, there could be some resistance in showing how absurd unrestricted dedication to work and compartmentalized life can be, but perhaps the film lacks the absurdity that is reality itself – like the quite predictable absurdity of showing the cleanliness of a toilet being ruined after the character has thoroughly cleaned it, and that does not happen.
If the configuration actually proceeds clown in Hirayama's character, there would perhaps be the possibility of a tension between the role of a worker in a stigmatized role (irrationally preserved in undignified conditions judging by the objective possibilities of a society capable of designing toilets in that way) and his representation clownish lead to something like: having to do this, in this way and with a smile on his face is a joke and he, like all clowns, takes his clowning very seriously. Despite seeming so ingrained in the work and particularly in the construction of the protagonist, the elements of aesthetics clown em Perfect days do not seem to lead to that point and fall back on easy and pleasant laughter, suggesting that it can be funny and rewarding to lead this life, as long as there is a willingness to welcome the minimal movements of happiness in the daily routine of damaged life.
The only moment in the entire film in which Hirayama shows fury is precisely when he loses his partner, when Takashi resigns. Fury apparently not because of grief for the young man, but because the company cannot find a replacement immediately and Hirayama is forced to cover the young man's shift, finishing work late into the night. Hirayama arrives home, takes off his uniform, leaves it carelessly on the floor, lies down, sleeps and dreams. Day dawns, he opens the door to work, smiling. The rupture is buried. Hirayama, the worker, is returned to work, in good spirits.
Even Takashi's “separation” is resolved by sending another employee to replace him. In the few seconds in which the first contact between the two (Hirayama and his new partner) is portrayed, one gets the impression that the replacement is a duplicate of Hirayama. She also appears to be strict and disciplined (she arrives even before the protagonist), brings her own work equipment and even her vehicle resembles that of the protagonist, except for the color, which is red. This, which could well convey the objective threat that even the most circumspect worker is replaceable in the world of alienated work, ends up arousing amusement in the audience and undisguised satisfaction in Hirayama.
Let’s return to the toilet cleaner’s routine; this time outside of work hours. True, Hirayama’s trips to the second-hand bookstore, where he buys books for a few coins, have little in common with the expensive leisure activities organized around profit in capitalism. The same can be said of the likely cost of his dedication to photography and the pleasant but modest restaurant where he chooses to drink and eat on his days off.
However, his way of occupying his free time seems to coincide with the management of free time carried out through the practice of activities that follow a logic and rhythm very different from work: taking care of the bonsai garden; following the slow passage of time in nature by photographing the same trees; cultivating himself by reading William Faulkner, Aya Koda, Patricia Highsmith... Under the appearance of freedom in the mask of moderation, circumspection, “sophistication”, and the refusal of hedonism, there may be management.
It is significant that in reviews of the film, the word appeared with some frequency hobby to name the protagonist's activities outside of working hours; a word absent in the film, a word that I would not use without reservations to describe those actions. It is significant because it shows how the mechanism of reproduction of capitalist society takes advantage of the openness of cultural productions to promptly mark them with its own signs, putting them at its service as propaganda. In this case, reinforcing the “ideology of thehobby'” (ADORNO, 1995, p. 74). However, one should not rule out the possibility that this mechanism merely names and incites what was already instilled in the work.
O hobby, a typical phenomenon of administered society, belongs to a type of “organized freedom” (ADORNO, 1995, p. 74). In it, a social coercion operates on people to choose some occupation from the catalogue of institutionalized and permitted diversions. The crucial thing is that this socially prescribed offer responds to people’s genuine need for freedom (freedom from work), but functionalizes it in favor of domination by work.
No external guidance seems to influence Hirayama’s behaviors (and even less his free-time activities), but isn’t this an effect of the degree of proximity with which we follow his life? All of our traits, attitudes, and actions seem specifically ours at a certain distance—not so far away that we would recognize them in other people, nor so close that we would be able to uncover their social genesis.
Perhaps it derives from a certain composition clown something of the apparent authenticity of Hirayama's temperament and his freedom, but the clown takes its originality from imitation, questioning all originality, making fun of its presumption in the administered world and, therefore, denouncing the lack of freedom. Hirayama seems to flaunt them, with subtle vanity, in spite of the administered world. By presenting the results of control without showing the control of the results, these seem to be the fruit of spontaneous generation, an expression of freedom. The way in which the decision to concentrate absolutely on the present was executed in the film cannot be exempted from responsibility for this impression – “Now is now”, states Hirayama in one scene. Although there are no overt traces of heteronomy in Hirayama, Perfect Days does not free itself from heteronomy by seeming to recommend contemplation.
One of the reviews asks, surprised: “How can a person [Hirayama] who has a job that is despised by society still have reasons to smile? hobbies?” (GUEDES, 2024). This question, much more exclamatory than inquisitive, requires an answer.
Being this person constitutes the bourgeois project of the worker. The spirit of the bourgeois class, prescribed to everyone, advocates moderation, a healthy balance between work and play, “repressive self-discipline” (ADORNO, 1993, p. 114) and identification with the functions performed, whatever they may be in the list of occupations registered in the social division of labor, sustained by the promise of individual fulfillment and dignity through toil. Working and having hobbies are not antithetical. The ability to balance this divided existence is a feature of the bourgeois model of life.
But there is reason for this astonishment. When, as today, exploitation through labor advances to the point of seeking to deprive workers of the right to leisure – once again extending the working day throughout the world (BESANCENOT; LÖWY, 2021) –, our eyes turn with a certain nostalgia and admiration to those who manage to maintain the habit of having hobbies. A habit that already seems like a notable fossil of a declining phase of capitalism – the word itself hobby sounds decadent[ii] –, and Perfect days highlights Hirayama's inadequacy in relation to the present time (which, on the other hand, he serves well).
The character himself has something of a fossil. This inadequacy, also present in the aesthetics clown, there is a certain humor in Perfect Days. Just like his coveted cassette tapes, Hirayama acquires more value conferred by the same rationality that produced his downfall. As a fossil (both of the human race and specific to the species of the bourgeois class), he preserves important potentialities present in the past and marks of domination that have become character and conduct. As a fossil, he can also be displayed in a display case, as a model. As a model, he lends himself to adaptation.
In Hirayama’s lines – which, to be fair, show signs of mutilation, signs of violence suffered, maladjustment, and psychological obstacles – there is a tendency toward a life that is averse to the unbridled compulsion for novelty, averse to brute force, and to an industrious character. At first glance, all of this seems opposed to the subjective elements corresponding to a society governed by the maximization of profits and the indefinite exploitation of resources, that is, to a society dominated by the principle of performance, as Herbert Marcuse (1981) called it. Confronting the principle of performance is not that simple.
It comes from the same Marcuse (1981), some of the most forceful words to be kept close in a reflection on the limits of the modest life model present in Perfect days, which has been celebrated: “Progress beyond the performance principle is not fostered by improving or supplementing the present existence by more contemplation, more leisure, through the propaganda and practice of 'higher' values, and through the personal or life elevation of each individual. Such ideas belong to the cultural heritage of the performance principle itself. Complaints about the degrading effect of 'total work', the exhortation to appreciate the good and beautiful things of this world and the world to come, are in themselves repressive attitudes, insofar as they reconcile man with the world of work, which they leave intact. Moreover, they sustain repression, diverting effort from the very sphere in which repression is rooted and perpetuated” (MARCUSE, 1981, p. 144).
The trap in inviting people to pay attention to good and beautiful things, to the poetry of everyday life, of the banal, even when they are sincerely good, beautiful and poetic, is to join the industry that works to distract the conscience and prevent it from facing the existing horror, consuming the energy needed to confront it. No small amount of energy is spent on a task like seeing this poetry. Amidst the norm of horror, the eye will have to turn over a lot of rubble to look for it and, at the limit, it will make an effort to regress to the point of seeing poetry where there is barbarity, if it is not already prone to fascination with terror.
Not all banalities are poetic, nor does poetry exist only in the banal. Even without reaching this extreme, the pressure for people to identify with life, the survival, is still present as a shadow of the logic that brings poetry (or enchantment, as the reviews call it) and banality. A similar reification was represented in the film in the striking scene of the character amazed by a plastic bag flying in the wind in the film American beauty (by Sam Mendes, 1999).
If we understood poetry as the singular objectification of the living in the objectified totality, we would have to guard against the fetishistic usurpation of poetry by the dead in order to mimic the animate. It is not a matter of proclaiming, by critical decree, the end of the poetry of life – what objectively decrees its end is the domination that runs through history and culminates in systematically planned horror – and condemning the openness to experience with it, but wouldn’t our chances be better without pushing for its pursuit? Wouldn’t the struggle for a dignified life be more decisive than the “valiant struggle for glimpses of humor and beauty”? May the spontaneous glimpses remind us of and nourish that struggle.
Expropriation through work is accompanied by an ideology that preaches that there is a margin of possibility for each person to accommodate the demands of work in a healthy and happy way. The idea of a different relationship between the individual and work is spread. It is not difficult to imagine this morality being taken away from Perfect days, with a dedicated worker who does not succumb to the devouring appetite of the capitalist world, preserving openness, love, happiness.
If one clings to this hope – the hope of making peace with work in the capitalist world, accepting the burdens and resigning oneself to the idea that there is “suffering in happiness” – one speaks in tune with oppression, assuming that there is happiness (when we experience clandestine joys) and taking suffering, in the sense of the pain of existing, as barbarity.
“There is no correct life in a false one” (ADORNO, 1993, p. 33). Perfect days seems to suggest that there is, although it is not simplistic enough to make it seem that this resolution does not cause harm to the weaker party. A narrow and managed life, well managed within the given limits, passing itself off as a self-imposed regulated life. Surprisingly porous in the exact measure to filter invigorating particles of joy from the dense and painful substance of life. What opposes the scant, atomized life is not an integral life, but the collective possibility of an individual life open to its own rhythm, capable of founding new rhythms, without having to always touch it in the metric of work, without having to live only in the programmed breaks.
Sinking into Hirayama, Perfect days makes the individual hypostasis precisely in the world that seals his decline. The individual rearrangement with his own activities does not alleviate one gram of the weight of the universal alienation that prevails over all work in capitalist society. Another relationship with work depends on another society, that is, on the transformation of this one. The moral dignification of the subject with his work – which is not the same as the struggle for rights that make work more dignified – not only does not discredit the objective, generic indignity of work under capitalism, but can corroborate it. Even efforts consciously directed towards that transformation are doomed to sustain the contradiction of still being work, even if they are work against the oppression of work.
Let us return to Heller (2000). She refers to a variable margin of maneuver available to the conscious individual within the hierarchy of everyday life so that he or she can effectively “conduct one’s life” (p. 40). This possibility of appropriating reality, leaving one’s own marks on it, only becomes effective as a universal social possibility with the overcoming of alienation. However, there is a bet, while alienation prevails economically, on a certain conduct of life oriented towards a consciousness that confronts the silent coexistence between particularity and genericity dominant in everyday life, a type of engagement with the potential to transform everyday life into a moral and political action. The capacity to conduct one’s life would not be a gift or special disposition exclusive to rare beings; the potential of this type of conduct of life would be its representative and provocative character (HELLER, 2000).
Would this be the case with Hirayama? There is undoubtedly an intention to make Hirayama’s conduct something representative, something to model. But that political form of conducting life would be defined by the capacity to make conscious the relationship between the particular individual and the generic-human, a relationship that tends to remain, in everyday life, in a “mute” form, in the words of Heller (2000). An embryonic manifestation of the awareness of this relationship between the particular and the generic is outlined in Hirayama’s feeling of “communion”, in his identification with others, but we do not know if it goes beyond that, including thinking about the objective obstacles to this “communion”. In any case, Hirayama seems to return, silently, to his particularity.
the bet of Perfect days is in an alternative way of life within capitalism. The alternative to the capitalist way of life is not seriously in question. While the second tendency represents a radical opening, the first tendency, by keeping capitalism alongside alternatives, even “radical” ones (including in their asceticism), reinforces a state of affairs that moves not only towards the elimination of alternatives (including those that are permitted), but does so by eliminating life itself. By anchoring itself in the idea of an alternative life, a type of negation from “outside”, and not in the determined negation, in the search to free imprisoned life by forcing the internal limits of administered life, perhaps the principle of fantasy that runs through aesthetics clown em Perfect days be it the escape from reality, which is an escape, through other shortcuts, into the same reality.
In a caricatured manner – and, at this point, the caricature is not an exaggeration that safeguards the truth, but rather a gross amplification of a socially necessary untruth – Wenders and Takasaki constructed the character of Hirayama’s sister as the antithesis to his way of life. She is the canon from which he represents a deviation (or an escape, given that the plot insinuates that Hirayama has renounced the type of life led by his sister). The sister embodies power and toughness, a serious luxury, an intimacy with the top of the hierarchy that views with unrestrained contempt an occupation such as cleaning toilets. By mobilizing these two caricatures, Hirayama and his sister, the film emphasizes the separation between these life orientations, which the main character calls “worlds,” in the plural, which he suggests are incompatible during a conversation with his niece.
This, which could refer to the conflict between classes, gains the frozen representation of the social surface. It does not even pass as a conflict, because personalism makes the social split become confused with the sad situation of the distance between brothers. Emphasizing the separation and preserving it under the formula that “there are worlds that do not meet”, Perfect days operates in preserving the false consciousness incapable of perceiving that these worlds are one. Hirayama's existence is the foundation for his sister's existence and vice versa.
The lack of awareness of this interdependence in the social totality is projected into the deception of Hirayama's life orientation fixed by Perfect days. Just as the condition of the sister's luxurious existence is the existence of exploited workers like Hirayama, in this world, Hirayama himself, doing his job and being "happy" in the gaps of routine, can only exist because there are many who are deprived of even the right to gaps. The small movements that make his Perfect days depend on others with every day of their lives ruined.
Wenders and Takasaki did not completely close their eyes to the precariousness of work and overexploitation. There are traces of them in the light meals, in the signs of fatigue, in the fact that Hirayama pays for his own work equipment and in the portrayal of the protagonist's living conditions – although all of this can also be taken, respectively, as an option to have time to appreciate things; a consequence of those who make the most of their days; care and an attempt to make their own work easier; ascetic orientation towards life.
If the screenwriters did not completely close their eyes to overexploitation, they also did not look closely where the misery of the worker has been made explicit in the systematic death in dangerous occupations, in the enslavement of bodies, in the complete inability to provide the minimum subsistence, and not in the supposed lack of education of people kicking the signs that warn of the cleaning in progress. This look is not an obligation, nor is it intended to establish any decree of commitment of art to the impotent raw realism, however, the work is nuclear to the substance chosen by Perfect days and gross exploitation is at its heart.
Shouldn't it be mind-boggling to watch someone work at cleaning every crevice of a toilet, using a mirror to make sure they've gotten rid of all the dirt that's out of sight? It would be unpleasant if such behavior seemed to be the result of a serious mental illness. It would be revolting if such an action were an order from a superior. It doesn't seem to be anything like that in Perfect days and, worst of all, the possibility of scenes like that being enjoyable to the viewer cannot be ruled out – I recall that there is a segment of videos circulating on social media, designed to provoke satisfaction, showing people cleaning very dirty things and places.
As portrayed, it seems that Hirayama triumphs over dirt in his cleaning work, and this produces a false sense of accomplishment in the subject and instills meaning in the task. Achievement and meaning are systematically blocked in relation to work in the world where it is alienated. It was Beauvoir (1967) who observed how cleaning work is particularly torturous, like the punishment of Sisyphus, because dirt and dust are never defeated. It is difficult to say whether Hirayama feels that he defeats dirt or whether he is immune to the suffering of this almost always the same task, derives satisfaction from it and produces comedy from it.
In 1956, during a conversation with Max Horkheimer about work, free time and freedom, Theodor Adorno asked himself: “Do we only find happiness in work because we are bourgeois?” (ADORNO; HORKHEIMER, 2014, p. 28). A decade earlier he had written something more affirmative, in a slightly different sense: “Only the cunning interweaving of work and happiness leaves open, under the pressure of society, the possibility of a proper experience” (ADORNO, 1993, p. 114).
Because the dominant powers have shown themselves to be more cunning in the interweaving of real work with the parody of happiness, perhaps, in order to reflect on the relationship between work and happiness outlined in Wenders' film, the following question is more fruitful: Does Hirayama only find happiness in work because he is bourgeois? Bourgeois not according to his objective position in the social division of classes (as a proletarian), but rather according to his structure of consciousness, which is bourgeois, as it is for everyone in capitalism, since capitalism has socially universalized, together with the economic structure, a structure of unitary consciousness (the bourgeois, reified), formally common to the dominant class and the proletariat, as György Lukács (2018) reminds us.
Does the flat rationality of administered life project itself into Hirayama's dreams? In his dream space, does the simpleton pass himself off as poetic? Is a certain resignation exposed even in docile dreams, without a trace of fury? Something of these impressions remains when one realizes that the character's dreams, delicate and transparent to the viewer, are a game of overlapping everyday impressions, a duplication of what is experienced in the waking state.
But dreams enter through the door left ajar in the reading. They emerge in a moment of interregnum: the lord who coordinates work and leisure has fallen asleep on the throne. At this time, the traces of what was austerely separated mingle. They mingle timidly. Yes, the flat life projects itself in dreams, but with other colors, or rather, without colors. In a gray scale, ruminating on waking life, dreams tell the melancholic and gray truth of the days, no matter how much the photograph of the Perfect days be colorful, even saturated. The same taciturn truth is expressed in the black and white photos that Hirayama insistently takes of the verdant tree under the bright sunlight.
Despite this, Hirayama can be made a role model because he does not threaten the course set for the world. In an aphorism entitled “Clown,”[iii] Theodor Adorno (1993) treated the situation of the individual in late capitalism not as a radical elimination, but rather as a decaying residue that is “dragged along like something dead, neutralized, impotent,” something that is even protected and gains a certain value, something “kept in a natural reserve, admired in idle contemplation.”
In the administered world, characteristic traits of an individual, such as their lively temperament, their ability to think differently, their originality – elements also found in Hirayama – would transform “what is human into a costume of clown” and would be converted “into an exhibition piece like the aborted fetuses that once provoked astonishment and laughter in children” (ADORNO, 1993, p. 118). There is a striking similarity between this diagnosis of the fate of the individual in late capitalism and the composition of the main character in Wim Wenders’ work (2023).
Although the tendency towards resignation seems to prevail in Perfect days, combining poetic appeal, aestheticization of everyday life and cozy comedy, it does not do so without contradictions.
Let us not forget: Hirayama does not narrate anything that could be taken as a trace of experience and poetry. Isn’t this silence a sign that the one who lives is still short of experience, reminding us that the connection with the other across time – a mark of experience – remains obstructed? Isn’t this silence an indication that life is still poor in “communicable experiences”, as Walter Benjamin (1994) would say? Which of those supposedly significant moments of Hirayama’s days, which aim to intoxicate the spectator, would sustain their expressiveness if they were narrated? Wouldn’t some of them reveal themselves to the other who listens (including the spectator) as trivialities and nothing more?
The “aesthetics” clown is in what escapes”, says Silva (2017, p. 102). Who knows, perhaps she did not protect herself precisely at the beginning clown of Yakusho's performance driven to its peak in the final scene of Perfect Days, when we watch, up close and personal, Hirayama directing once again to the sound of feeling good in the voice of Nina Simone.
Subtly and convulsively, contentment and sadness mix on her face. Her eyes fill with tears. A thin line of a smile appears and hides and appears again and… Almost foreseeing the scene, it is as if it had been described before: “a dialectic of light and shadow, pain and contentment, laughter and crying – almost unified in a single close-up” (SILVA, 2017, p. 56).
In an interview with Slant Magazine[iv], Wim Wenders declared his intention to make Perfect days a declaration of peace, making peace conditional on being content with what one has. A resigned exit in an unequal world. An attempt to reconcile in the particular what is unreconciled in the whole. Fortunately, when it comes to reflecting on aesthetic productions, we already know that the authors’ judgments are not incontestable testaments. The director concluded by stating that Hirayama is his “hero of peace”. It would have been magnificent to have seen Wim Wenders aim at a hero and hit a clown squarely! A stupendous blunder clown! Masterful failure! But perhaps he succeeded and there really were traces of a hero left alive within the clown Hirayama.
*Herik Oliveira is a PhD candidate in School Psychology and Human Development at the Institute of Psychology at USP.
Originally published in the magazine ARTPHILOSOPHY.
Reference
Perfect days (Perfect Days)
Japan, 2023, 123 minutes.
Director: Wim Wenders.
Screenplay: Takuma Takasaki, Wim Wenders.
Director of Photography: Franz Lustig.
Cast: Kōji Yakusho, Min Tanaka, Arisa Nakano, Tokio Emoto.
REFERENCES
ADORNO, Theodor Wiesengrund. Minima Moralia: reflections from damaged life. Translated by Luiz Eduardo Bicca. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
ADORNO, Theodor Wiesengrund. Free time. In ADORNO, Theodor Wiesengrund. Words and Signs: Critical Models 2. Trans. Maria Helena Ruschel. London: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 70-82.
ADORNO, Theodor Wiesengrund; HORKHEIMER, Max. Towards a new manifesto. Trans. Mariana Dimópulos. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia Editora, 2014.
BENJAMIN, Walter. Experience and poverty. In BENJAMIN, Walter. Selected works I: magic and technique, art and politics. New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 114-119.
BESANCENOT, Olivier; LÖWY, Michel. The working day and the realm of freedom. Translated by Luiz Antonio Araújo. New York: Unesp Publishing, 2021.
BEAUVOIR, Simone. The Second Sex: The Lived Experience. Trans. Sérgio Milliet. São Paulo: European Book Diffusion, 1967.
COLETI, Caio. Perfect Days finds beauty and even variety in recognizing the cruelty of repetition. Omelets. February 20, 2024. Available at: https://www.omelete.com.br/filmes/criticas/dias-perfeitos.
COUTO, José Geraldo. Routine and enchantment. Cinema blog. February 22, 2024. Available at: https://ims.com.br/blog-do-cinema/dias-perfeitos-por-jose-geraldo-couto/.
FURTADO, Filipe. Perfect days. Letterboxd. December 12, 2023. Available at: https://boxd.it/5jzUbb.
GUEDES, Diandra. Review Perfect Days/Drama is the delicate portrait of the ordinary of life. Between Screens. March 4, 2024. Available at: https://www.terra.com.br/diversao/entre-telas/filmes/critica-dias-perfeitos-drama-e-o-retrato-delicado-do-ordinario-da-vida,4052b1fe6ab43c6d235c3601ab4a6a81hcqh5pqt.html?utm_source=clipboard.
HELLER, Agnes. Structure of everyday life. In Heller, Agnes. The daily life and history. Translation: Carlos Nelson Coutinho and Leandro Konder. New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 17-41.
JONES, Eillen. Perfect Days Celebrates Conscious and Economic Escapism. Jacobina. April 3, 2024. Available at: https://jacobin.com.br/2024/04/dias-perfeitos-celebra-o-escapismo-consciente-e-economico/.
LISBOA, Heloísa. In 'Perfect Days', time overwhelms suffering and routine becomes a source of happiness. Rolling Stone. February 28, 2024. Available at: https://rollingstone.uol.com.br/amp/cinema/em-dias-perfeitos-o-tempo-atropela-o-sofrimento-e-a-rotina-se-torna-fonte-de-felicidade/.
LUKÁCS, Georg. Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat. In LUKÁCS, Georg. History and class consciousness. Trans. Rodnei Nascimento. New York: WMF Martins Fontes Publishing House, 2018, p. 193-411.
MARCUSE, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud's Thought. Translated by Alvaro Cabral. New York: Zahar Publishers, 1981.
NOLASCO, Igor. 'Perfect Days' (2023), by Wim Wenders. Film Clippings. March 15, 2024. Available here.
PEIRÃO, Solange. Perfect days. the earth is round. March 9, 2024. Available at: https://aterraeredonda.com.br/dias-perfeitos/.
SILVA, Cristiane Valéria. Aesthetics clown in cinema: fantasy, reality and criticism. Doctoral thesis, Center for Philosophy and Human Sciences, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Santa Catarina, 2017.
SONTAG, Susan. Against interpretation. In SONTAG, Susan. Against interpretation and other essays. Translated by Denise Bottman. New York: Routledge, 2020, p. 15-29.
SOUZA, Jessé. 'Perfect days': Wim Wenders' social critique. ICL News. March 18, 2024. Available at: https://iclnoticias.com.br/dias-perfeitos-a-critica-social-de-win-wenders/.
Notes
[I] I would like to highlight Hirayama's care with his jumpsuit. After work, when he takes it off, Hirayama places it on a hanger and hangs it with remarkable reverence on the wall, where it is prominently displayed. If this could be yet another external sign of Hirayama's dedication to his work, of his identification with it and of his obsessive traits, the scene also refers to the care someone takes with their clown while storing his costumes. clowns.
[ii] In a search for the terms hobby e hobbies in the tool online Google Ngram Viewer (which allows you to graphically view the use of terms and expressions from a vast corpus of books), it is observed that between the years of 1930 and 1950 these words experienced their peak, then entered a notable decline. There has been a discreet increase observed in their use since the year 2000. This recalls the tendency to resurrect ideologies when their objective basis is already broken, making them even more toxic because they cannot be confronted with materiality, since they are manifest lies.
[iii] In the original German, Dummer August (Publisher Suhrkamp Verlag). In Spanish, Augustus Clown (Taurus Publisher). In English, Simple Simon (Verso Publisher).
[iv] By Marshall Shaffer, Interview: Wim Wenders on the philosophies guiding 'Anselm' and 'Perfect Days'🇧🇷 Available here.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
