I want so much more out of the life I'm living, but I often feel stuck inside the same slow, mechanical motions of everyday busyness. If I'm being honest with myself, most days I feel like I'm not even living at all, but simply existing. There's a big difference between living and existing. Existing is the guy who does everything necessary and sufficient to maintain the status quo: he eats, sleeps, breathes, shits, and earns a living while developing enough hobbies to keep his mind distracted from the middling airs outside. Existing feels like a convenient way to settle for mediocrity. Existing lacks the enlightenment and conviction to make radical choices, to make radical changes, ones that lead to intensely personal acts of self-transformation. This all sounds like philosophical mumbo-jumbo, am I right? That is until you hit rock bottom, or grow tired with being average, or crave meaning, or in extreme cases, "chance upon death" in order to discover the beauty of life.

IKIRU (meaning, "to live") is the seminal existential film, up there with THE 400 BLOWS, STALKER, and THE SEVENTH SEAL. It is so thoroughly existential to the bone, precisely because of how wedded its worldview is to the value of choice-making, meaning-making, shown through its protagonist who takes responsibility for his life despite how cold, harsh and absurd the universe treats him. What is the meaning of life? Is the answer hedonism, seeking one pleasure after the next? Is it securing platonic or romantic friendship? Climbing social or financial ladders? Being responsible for others? Achieving a self-sacrificial act of creation? IKIRU explores all these options. It sees human existence as meaningful only if we choose to see it as meaningful. No objective interpretation of the meaning of life exists. We have to make it. We have to act, not just wish, or think, or intend. We have to become active participants, bring parks and dreams into existence, endow the universe with the kind of meaning where perhaps the meaner did not mean to mean, know what I mean? 

What fascinates me most about IKIRU is the way in which Kurosawa takes a secular approach to the problem of suffering and the problem of living, then oddly alchemizes them through an act of enlightened trauma. In this liminal space paradoxes naturally abound. If Watanabe wants to take ownership of his life, he will have to confront death. If he wants to discover his strengths, he will have to face hardship. If he wants to find peace, light and happiness, he will have to endure pain, fear and darkness. Paradox —or the doctrine of opposition in all things —is the ethical terrorist inside us all that inflicts tragedy so that we might triumph. Paradox is the great moral agitator that uses the terror of death to awaken us to the power of life, even transforming failure into fortune, cesspools into public parks.

"I realize what they say about the nobility of misfortune is true because misfortune teaches us the truth. Your cancer has opened your eyes to your own life. We humans are so careless. We only realize how beautiful life is when we chance upon death," the novelist declares.

On a personal note, I have lived with clinical depression since being diagnosed at the age of nine. I have sought all sorts of help from psychiatrists to holistic healers, family and ecclesiastical leaders, and have swallowed who knows how many white, yellow and orange-colored goof pills to help equilibrate my chemical imbalance. Depression is a bitch of a thing, but also strangely a gift. Thom Yorke once called his depression the most creative force in the universe. I think I understand what he means. Not always, but often when I'm feeling weighed down by unbearable, crushing pain, or even pain that quietly nags at me like static on a television set, I enter an ontological frame of mind that allows me to reflect deeply, exquisitely and tenderly on things that gentler times don't afford. There is a link, in other words, between depression and creativity. Personally, I think I get my best insights when I'm depressed, which leads me to write. I'm not sure exactly why this is, but my thoughts become so ultra-heightened and aware of everything when I'm depressed that I want to plumb every angle, every corner, trying my damndest to give birth to the moods I feel but struggle to articulate. 

In this way, Watanabe and I are a lot a like. If his vindication is to transform a wasteland into a park, my vindication is to transform sadness into inspiration. Watanabe is a passionate crusader for children, I am a passionate crusader for words and shared expression. If we were both slaves to our challenges in the past, we are now going to be their masters in the future. Watanabe is way ahead of me in the game of life, he's already found his peaceful playground with ideal snowflakes falling around him. I'm just trying to play catch up, trying to do something that really matters, but not always knowing how to do it. I still have so many fears that trap me and keep me mindlessly perpetuating the status quo, but I also believe that hell has an entrance and an exit. No one stays in hell longer than is needed to shape their existence for the better. We get epiphanies in life, whispers that pull us upward yet cause us to confront difficult things. We fall, we stumble, we face extreme, unusual, or life-threatening experiences, but these encounters can serve an ethical purpose. They can reveal the true nature of our souls. 

IKIRU is existentially relevant only if we choose to see it in relation to our own life, incorporate its thematic content into our blood, and become passionately involved with personal acts of creation as a consequence of its message. Such knowledge or self-awareness cannot be communicated in words, thoughts, wishes or intentions.

It must be lived.

Kurosawa Ranked