When Actors Do Double Duty

You can find this meta-commentary on acting embedded in Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge, which twice thematizes performance: first in its plot, about a Kabuki actor’s journey of vengeance for the death of his parents, in which he uses his theatrical skills to deceive and entrap his enemies, and second in the virtuosic dual role-playing of its star, Kazuo Hasegawa, who plays both the actor Yukinojo and Yamitaro the chivalrous thief. As Yukinojo, an onnagata (male actor who plays female characters on stage and presents as female off-stage), Hasegawa is composed and melancholic; as Yamitaro, he’s frank and jolly. Yukinojo’s restrained fierceness is thrown into relief by Yamitaro, who follows Yukinojo’s journey with ironic commentary, watching his theatrical machinations with aesthetic appreciation. Following a love scene between Yukinojo and Namiji, the shogun’s concubine who’s in love with him, Yamitaro appears on the palace roof: “What an actor,” he remarks. “Knew just when to end the scene.”

Though this doubling is used throughout the film in moments of irony and levity, it also creates an unsettling effect. Yukinojo, the emissary of the ghosts of his parents, is also a ghost himself: always inscrutable, present and absent, his detachment concealing depths of feeling. His androgyny captivates and destablizes both suitors and enemies. “There’s something creepy about that Yukinojo,” Ohatsu, the tough-talking female thief, remarks in an early scene, before falling in love with him, “you can’t tell whether he’s a man or a woman.” And his ability to embody the dead allows him to stage a dramatic return of the repressed. In the climactic revenge scene, Ichikawa films him in darkness, a strip of light illuminating just his eyes: “Do you not recall someone whose face resembled mine?” Yukinojo asks his victim.

The film depicts acting as a haunted and haunting art. However, at the end, Hasegawa’s duplication lands on a suave in-joke between artists and audience. Yukinojo’s resemblance to his parents terrifies his enemy, but Yamitaro’s “resemblance” to Yukinojo is played for winks, for instance in the final scene, as Ohatsu tells Yamitaro that he looks a bit like Yukinojo “from the side.” If Yukinojo figures the actor’s uncanniness as an artist, Yamitaro figures his knowingness as an entertainer.

This ironic doubling that leads us back to the recognizable actor tends to be an effect of multiple role-playing in comedy, in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, for instance, or Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets. In these comedies, the trick delights, not only because we’re privy to a joke unavailable to the film’s characters and thrill to our role in the irony, but because it’s a joke about irony itself: about the double talk of the artist who says one thing and telegraphs something else. If, for instance, in Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers is so funny as Group Captain Mandrake at the same time as he’s the President, it’s because the straight-man seriousness of his Presidential alarm is thrown into relief by the absurdity of Mandrake’s jolly Britishisms. The irony works because Sellers is wholly in control of the juxtaposition; we can’t see the President without hearing Mandrake, just as, later, we can’t see Dr. Strangelove without thinking of him as the evil twin of the President. The actor wins, and we win with him. Similarly, in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Alec Guinness’s performance as eight members of the D’Ascoyne family expresses not only the inbred stupidity and mediocrity of the aristocratic clan but also the self-assured savoir faire of the artist, running rings around his fictional analogs.