“So I Found Another Form of Expression”: Art and Life/Art in Life in Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Paul Schrader says Mishima, like Taxi Driver’s hero, “is an example of a certain pathology of suicidal glory that transcends education and culture.” But for Schrader his task is “exploration” of such pathology, while critics tend to take it as endorsement. This chapter shows that Schrader’s tactics in Mishima in fact invite misreading, through their aesthetic distance. Although the present tense of the film is carried out in what might be called a near-documentary neutral naturalism, most of the film works in other ways: the biographical flashbacks in more expressionistic black and white; the three segments of adapted novels both in lush color, and presented as deliberately, anti-naturalistic staged, in a kabuki-inflected style. The result of such aestheticizing tactics, in combination with the direction of Mishima’s own life—toward the “final action” as new “form of expression,” toward life as art—in its very Wildean tenor, strikes an “art for art’s sake” tone, suspending moral judgment. This aestheticism tends to bury the real (as opposed to Mishima’s intoned voiceover) final outcome: that this is a failed coup and a deluded act.