Propaganda cinema fascinates me for the same reasons that differentiating oneself from a perceived enemy fascinates me. When fighting a war, who is right, who is wrong? I'll return to this question in a moment, but allow me to preface some things with a personal detour. 

Growing up in a staunch religious organization made it easier when I was younger to believe in a kind of unwavering patriotism. For many years I was conditioned to believe that my values, my family, my religion and my country were promoting the ethical and the good, while dissenting voices were promoting the unethical and the bad. From the perspective of tribal solidarity, this posture made a lot of sense as a child, but as I got older it also started to strike me as profoundly insular, exclusive and dangerously serpentine. 

At church, I was amazed at how earnestly certain everyone on my team started to sound, many who were using clear-cut rhetoric to describe circumstances that were, in fact, not so clear. It wasn't even necessarily the opinions I heard that disturbed me. It was the impressive, ironclad, "We can't be wrong!" certainty that was used to support those opinions that got under my skin. When this kind of certainty is combined with a brand of religious fundamentalism that needs to be right, needs to be cocksure, and needs to hold an ethical valence over others as patently wrong if they disagree, it becomes very easy to get blind-sighted, to otherize, to demonize, and to create an oppositional axis of "good" vs. "evil." 

What I'm trying to say is: I understand how powerful the pull of propaganda is. I know what it's like to march in lockstep unity with religious orders, to work harder, to sacrifice more, to intensify my resolve, and to buy into a narrative that places my team at the center of the universe. 

While watching Kurosawa's most evident WWII propaganda film, I started to think about the patriotic and religious fervor I once had for my country and church. I thought about how enduring my devotion used to be, how hungry I was to win hearts, to evangelize my team's story, and to feel like I was part of something larger than myself. It was really interesting to watch these factory woman press on through injury, illness and family disaster, in a way do anything they could to fulfill the service of their country's cause. They were engaged in an effort to destroy America and its allies, yes, but the nobility of their service and the purity of their commitment made a lot of sense to the person I used to be. So much sense, in fact, that it got me thinking about the old adage, "One man's truth is another man's propaganda." I might even update the adage to hit home a little closer: "One man's church or country is another man's oppressive totalitarian regime." 

It's easy to call this film pejorative propaganda when you aren't on the team that helped build its worldview. It's also easy to label government sanctioned propaganda aimed at imperial ends evil, especially when you aren't the one brainwashed from birth believing that your values, family, religion and country are on the right side of history. Truth is determined by our perspective, and our perspective, if we're lucky, changes over time, it steps out of Plato's Cave. I'm not saying I believe in some kind of scary moral relativism where everything goes, but when it comes to complex cultural artifacts like war, politics, ethics and propaganda, I'm very wary of who's calling the settled shots on what's right and what's wrong. Crafting a defense in support of wartime loyalty to one's country might be a hard point for any neoliberal to understand who's never been beguiled by the spell of a conservative, communal certainty. But I'm telling you, on the inside it feels like you have the approval of God on your side, while on the outside it feels pretty obvious that you were duped by one of Friedkin's Pazuzu demons. 

Kurosawa made a propaganda film that in many ways doesn't even seem like the imperialist achievement his puppeteering government was after. It's more solidarity-based, more focused on feminine cohesion, personal improvement, and the lengths people will go to be obedient to a higher cause. I like how my friend Darren put it: "It may have bad intentions, but it's actually a decent film, and honestly a more benign form of imperialist propaganda. It's an enabler, not an abuser." 

I like that. It enables a problematic paradigm without being explicitly offensive in the process, and to that effect its depiction of wartime assembly is quite understandable. 

If viewed as a film, it most likely will disappoint, but if viewed as a cultural document, it's one of the most fascinating ones out there.

Kurosawa Ranked