Last man standing

As opening sequences go, few films can rival Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’ for instantaneous atmosphere creation.

It begins with a lone Samurai wandering into what initially looks like a ghost town. We quickly learn that it’s not fully abandoned: villagers eye him suspiciously from above through barred windows. Already, however, there is a sensation that something is deeply amiss. And this vague impression is dramatically confirmed by the first living thing to meet the Samurai’s gaze: a stray dog, walking towards the camera, with something indistinct in its jaws. 

As the dog approaches, the object becomes discernible. It is a severed human hand… and Kurosawa makes damn sure we all get a very good view of this grisly detail, by making the dog walk right up to the camera for a close-up.

OK, now for the necessary spoiler alert. If you haven’t already watched the film, the rest of this article will ruin it for you utterly. But then again, you may have already watched one of at least two remakes: Sergio Leone’s plagiarised 1964 version, ‘A Fistful of Dollars’; and, more recently, Walter Hill’s ‘Last Man Standing’, starring Bruce Willis (1996).

All three centre on the same basic plot, albeit transposed to different settings. The village in question is terrorised by two rival gangs, whose violent feud makes normal community life impossible. The nature of the factions themselves differs from movie to movie: in Yojimbo, they are warring Samurai clans; in Fistful of Dollars, they are feuding families in the Old West; and in Last Man Standing, it’s a clash between the Italian and Irish mafias in prohibition-era USA.

Significantly, however, there is no real fundamental difference between the two in any of the three films. All share a common objective – power, which can only be achieved through elimination of the other – and all their actions are dictated by this sole dynamic, in the absence of any discernible moral compass.

Naturally, our hero immediately understands that ‘survival’, in this setting, hinges on one’s ability to gain the trust of both sides. And this he does to such effect, that he ultimately manages to play them off against one another until – here’s the spoiler – they literally wipe each other out.

Hence the title of Hill’s remake… and its uncanny relevance to everything that’s going on in Malta today.

Take, for instance, Joe Cassar’s resignation as PN culture spokesman this week. Ostensibly, the former health minister resigned over revelations that he had accepted free construction work on his private residence, worth over 8,000, courtesy of one Joe Gaffarena, in 2012. There was also the ‘purchase’ of a second-hand car from Gaffarena’s son, against a €1,000 donation to the Nationalist Party. 

Both transactions clearly violate the code of ethics for MPs and Cabinet ministers; and it didn’t help that the Nationalist Party was at the time calling for the resignation of parliamentary secretary Michael Falzon, over his alleged rapport with exactly the same person.

Already, then, we have one foot in the Yojimbo universe. Cassar’s resignation is a classic case of ‘one man down’ for the PN… just as it was ‘one man down’ for Labour last year, when home affairs minister Manuel Mallia likewise resigned over the actions of his personal driver.  

There is a war of attrition going on here: an eye for an eye, and a member of parliament for a member of parliament. But the analogy goes well beyond the most obvious detail shared by both settings. 

It is not just that Malta’s political feud is indistinguishable from the central feud in Yojimbo. It’s also that, in both scenarios, the animosity between these two largely identical factions has a unique logic all of its own… which determines not just how the two political parties behave, but also how the rest of the country operates at almost every level.

This logic could be appreciated in all its bizarre glory on Monday night’s Reporter: where representatives of the two warring clans ‘discussed’ the issue. Labour’s Deborah Schembri accused Busuttil of ‘weakness’, for refusing to fire Joe Cassar from the party… overlooking the teenie-weenie detail that her own Cabinet colleague Falzon has been embroiled in a similar controversy with the same Gaffarena… only involving much larger sums of money, and without (to date) losing his Cabinet position.

On her part, the PN’s Terese Commodini Cachia repeatedly called for Falzon’s resignation… seemingly oblivious to the fact that her own party has absolutely no right to occupy the moral high ground on this (or any analogous) issue.

Watching this exchange from the perspective of an outsider – like the wandering Samurai in Yojimbo – what are we left with, exactly? A frank admission that both sides view ‘ethical’ issues uniquely through the logic of their own private gang warfare.  If an issue applies to a political rival, he must be eliminated. If the same issue applies to a political colleague, he must be defended. Nothing more, nothing less.

The same warped logic also underpinned Cassar’s initial defence. He claimed to have fallen victim to a ‘Labour Party manipulation’… as if his real wrongdoing was not the violation of the code of ethics at all, but only his naivety in not realising he was being ‘framed’.

Naturally, this doesn’t change the fact that it was ultimately his own decisions which proved to be his undoing. He could, after all, have said ‘no’ to both offers. But his argument also exposes the mind-set of the warring gang member for all to see. Actions are viewed as ‘ethical’ or ‘unethical’, only on the basis of whether the outcome is beneficial to one party or the other. 

From this perspective, Cassar’s only mistake was to be ‘caught’… thereby embarrassing his party and ceding territory to the enemy. Had he not been caught, on the other hand, everything would presumably have been hunky-dory.

As for any real ethical considerations – such as, should a Cabinet minister accept ‘gifts’ or ‘favours’ that may create the impression of an obligation? – these were nowhere to be seen throughout the episode. We are now fully immersed in Yojimbo logic... and individual ethical behaviour has absolutely no place in this paradigm.

This brings us to the role of the Yojimbo character himself. If two parties are evidently so willing to blind themselves to ethical issues, in their never-ending struggle to score political points against one another… who can possibly blame that wandering Samurai from taking advantage of the two sides, and hastening their demise?

It is now palpably obvious that the Gaffarenas have a deep hold on both Labour and Nationalist parties… and the more the two gangs try to use that name to tarnish each other, the more they unwittingly expose their own dirty linen. This in turn confirms the first of the major parallels i.e., that our two rival ‘gangs’ are just as indistinguishable (and mutually indefensible) as the ones in the movie. 

But what ‘Cassar-gate’ also illustrated – or ‘Falzon-gate’ if you prefer, it doesn’t make any difference – is that the entire political system we have created in this country is spectacularly prone to such abuse… precisely because it was designed through the logic of party warfare, as opposed to the logic of nation-building. 

In drawing up this country’s public administration laws and procedures, Parliament has consistently used as its yardstick the exigencies of the parties represented therein… and not the exigencies of the state as a whole. And what do warring parties need, anyway? They need resources to conduct their warfare. This means that they also need loopholes to enable them to accept ‘campaign donations’ that would be illegal in almost any other democracy. 

In a word, they need access to the Gaffarenas of this world, just as much as vice versa.

What political parties certainly do NOT need, on the other hand, are any functional anti-corruption checks and balances. As a result, they have designed a political system that is deliberately as corruptible as possible, on the basis that – viewed from the Yojimbo universe logic – corruption is actually a good thing, if it strengthens one party at the expense of the other.

In this sort of environment, duplicity of the kind exhibited by Yojimbo in the film – and Gaffarena in real life – becomes not only understandable, but entirely unavoidable. The entire system is rigged in such a way to make it as easy as possible for the likes of Gaffarena to forge a stranglehold on both sides. We can hardly claim to be surprised, then, when such people inevitably play the part that was all along scripted for them to play.

All that’s left is to find a correlative for the severed hand in that opening shot. And it’s not too hard, because – in the movie as in real life – the image can easily be interpreted as the consequence of this reign of absurdity on the rest of the population. 

Just as it is not possible to lead a ‘normal life’ in a village where stray dogs feed on the dismembered corpses of feud victims… so too can there be no ‘normal’ democracy, when the logic of a pointless, internecine political feud becomes the logic underpinning the entire country. 

The ‘loser’ in this game is the ordinary law-abiding citizen, who has no interest whatsoever in cultivating shady rapports with politicians. In a society where advancement depends so heavily on political patronage, such people are left powerless. It is their hand that has been metaphorically cut off. 

There is, however, one major difference from the movie. In all three version of Yojimbo, the wandering hero remains the titular ‘last man standing’, after the two rival gangs annihilate each other in a final conflagration.

In the local version, however, the two rival parties actually annihilated each other long ago. Not literally, perhaps… but on the level of political credibility, in terms of their ability to convince us that there is anything remotely salvageable at all about either of them… 

On that level, there is literally no one left standing in this movie.