Ranjit Rewinds: Movies For Healing

I write this with a bag of frozen peas resting on one wrist. In my passion to see Passion, the opening film of an enticing Hamaguchi season at the Close-Up Film Centre in London, the new street layout outside the train station played tricks with my perspective in the newly dark winter evenings and led to an unfortunate tumble in the road. Unlike Lee Majors in The Fall Guy, my plunge was not the type of stunt that “makes Eastwood look so fine” and did not attract the attention of hot-panted beauties with Farrah Fawcett haircuts. More like Oliver Hardy lying in a heap rueing yet another disaster and expecting a brick to fall on my head too. I had to skip my date with contemporary Japanese cinema and prioritise tending my wounds.

This is not the first time a bag of frozen peas and cinema have coincided in my life. In my excited haste to catch a train and pick up my wedding suit many years ago, I banged a toe getting out of bed. (Another rejected episode of The Fall Guy.) As the pain gradually increased, I purchased a bag of frozen peas from a supermarket and, as I had a few hours to kill, popped into Curzon Soho for an empty midweek matinee screening of whatever was on with the primary purpose of slipping off my shoe in the dark and soothing my foot. The ‘whatever’ just happened to be Tarsem Singh’s The Fall: a lavish painkilling delight itself dealing with the therapeutic use of epic storytelling as its characters hurt and eventually heal.

I can deal with such physical injuries. Stoicism and proven methods kick in. I just follow the steps: wash and tend to the cuts; place ice on the swells and bruises; down a painkiller or two; perhaps ask for an x-ray for anything of concern. What frustrates me much more is being under the hex of common colds and flus. Do you starve a fever and feed a cold or the other way around? And is it a cold or a flu or a bug anyway? Better to rest and catch up later? Or battle through it so as not to fall behind? Having finally shaken off a chest infection and lingering cough after six exasperating weeks, stumbling ungracefully headfirst onto the tarmac in front of a bus is something I am better prepared to handle.

I used to have a working method for the cold-flu-bug chimera. At least, my mum did. An effective ritual. I don’t believe I was sick any more than the average schoolchild but it was frequent enough for a comforting ritual to develop around the specifics of my local geography. First, a walk to the family doctor: a kindly Bengali man who knew me from birth providing immense reassurance with his convivial smile and homely family photographs hanging on the wall of his office. Next, a walk with the prescription to the pharmacy named after and established by the grandfather of a boy in my school and run by his father, providing apothecary confidence through generational experience. Then home, laden with medicine and Lucozade.

But by a fortunate coincidence of both fate and street geometry, this rectangular journey also passed by CC Video, surely the most popular of our local VHS rental stores. It was here that the real healing began.

The 1980s VHS boom in Leicester was driven by the Indian immigrant population just as the Chinese community influenced VHS culture in Liverpool and Turkish Gastarbeiter propelled rentals in West Germany. All of the VHS stores in my neighbourhood were Asian-run. CC Video conveniently just off the main shopping road, the larger Jyoti Video tucked away in a back street, and the mysterious one right opposite the doctor’s surgery which we never went into for unexplained reasons. Our journey also took us past the Pan House selling gossipy movie magazines like Stardust and the latest Indian soundtracks on cassette and vinyl.

Working class Indian-heritage families prioritised the purchase of a VHS player despite the considerable initial cost. Our more well-to-do neighbour got one first though. I was invited round for the premiere rental and remember it better than many trips to the cinema. We all gathered round one weekend afternoon and took in Raj Kapoor’s 4 hour classic Sangam in their living room. By the following year, we had our own matt grey, top-loading JVC and trips to CC Video and Jyoti Video became continuous with bunches of films taken out and returned on a weekly cycle for what seemed like the entire decade.

Not the latest Hollywood films in fancy cases though; we usually waited for them to come on the television or saw the most enticing ones in the cinema. I’m talking about the films kept behind the counter on shelves that reached all the way up to the ceiling. Cassettes in anonymous cardboard sleeves with the title written in felt-tip pen on a plain label. Films starring Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman, Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Dilip Kumar, Nadira, Ashok Kumar, Madhubala and of course every film of Amitabh Bachchan & Hema Malini. Films we would watch again and again.

But on a day off sick from school, the most effective VHS medication was Japanese animation. Two restorative films, in particular. The first was Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, directed by and based on the manga of Hayao Miyazaki. The VHS was called Warriors of the Wind and was a butchered version that steeled Miyazaki to no longer accepting any edits to his work by foreign distributors. The second film was Firebird 2772: Love's Cosmozone based on Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix manga series and released in the UK on VHS as Space Firebird 2772. A film with perhaps one of the greatest openings ever: 11-and-a-half minutes of dialogue-free bravura animation depicting a futuristic, fully-automated process of child-rearing from conception to adulthood with no human intervention. A sequence both soothing and chilling. A colourful dystopia set to beautiful orchestral music.

Once back home with both pharmaceutical and video cassette medication, the next stage of healing involved a sofa, a pillow and a duvet. Maybe even some chips in a metal plate drenched in so much vinegar they floated. Press play, get cosy and let the treatment begin. Despite the English dubbing and vicious cuts, there was enough of each masterpiece on the whirring spools of magnetic tape to make a profound impact on me.

These films were made at a time when James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis was published. Radical science and futuristic fantasy were converging on ideas of the interconnectedness of our planetary ecology and atmosphere. Ideas also rooted in age-old mystical beliefs and mythic narratives. Lovelock proposed in 1979 that “the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts."

Lovelock saw human pollution as an inevitable consequence of life and Gaia supremely positioned to cope with it. Even the threat of nuclear devastation would be shrugged off by the great goddess. In Nausicaä, the future Earth has indeed been devastated but by enormous, fiery warriors created by humans as biomechanical superweapons. Yet Miyazaki depicts the development of vast, ever-expanding ecosystems that detoxify the soil and water, protected from misunderstanding and meddling humans by swarms of easily-angered, giant insects.

In Firebird, humans have stripped the Earth of resources so much that the only energy source left is to drill down into the core of the planet causing earthquakes that disintegrate the entire continental crust. Tezuka’s holy Phoenix guides the life-giving spirits of dead planets back to their homes. Yet even she calmly states, before her restorative powers are invoked, that the Earth will flourish again if given enough time.

Neither Lovelock nor these films endorse a bomb-happy, resource-stripping, no-worries irresponsibility; they merely show that the discomfort, marginalisation, or even outright destruction of humans may well be neutral to the survival of Gaia for whom a few million years to reach a new state of equilibrium is but a blink in the goddess's serene eye. In both films, a sacrifice is made by one who truly sees humanity’s capability for both self-destructive ecocide and self-protective biophilia. A sacrifice that leads to rebirth.

In both films, the humans want a shortcut to recovery: whether technological or magical. Perhaps, as Lovelock explores, the development of a species with technological prowess and intelligence is itself a way for Gaia to take advantage of such shortcuts. In Nausicaä, the quick solution of burning uninhabitable ecosystems with the very technology that destroyed the world is appealing to both warring sides involved. Not to the princess of the Valley of the Wind though, who through intuition and scientific research sees those ecosystems for what they are: complex biocybernetic recovery systems. In Firebird, the immortal Phoenix implores the empathetic human Godo not to sacrifice himself in return for a shortcut to Earth’s renewal, but Godo’s aching heart for all living things cannot bear to wait and so renewal is immediate.

It seems that the sacrifice and resurrection of Nausicaä within the context of teaching species to value each other’s roles in planetary homeostasis is a more sustainable approach. The renewal at the end of Firebird, whilst equally moving and cathartic to me as a child recuperating on a day off school, seems doomed to repeat the cycle again just as in the manga the Phoenix and the characters of each story re-appear throughout the ages. As an adult, I want the same futile shortcuts to good health as the foolish humans in these films when faced with the impact of “unproductive” days lost to illness. As a child, I accepted the time needed and routines required for healing, not that I had much choice in the matter anyway.

These films had a cathartic effect on me like no other. They entertained me with their creativity. They amazed me with their beauty. They comforted me with their familiarity. They released me from suppressed emotions. They healed me with hope.

My daughter was also ill recently. She has heard my folklore tales of the medicinal properties of certain films and has already established a repeat self-prescription of Kiki’s Delivery Service for such days. The active ingredient of cathartic Japanese animation seems to work on her genome too. In her case, it is the creative renewal and growing self-knowledge of the young witch rather than the ecological renewal of a planet through touching self-sacrifice that does the trick. I hope she continues to use the film as she grows up. Some movies reach parts that other treatments can’t, especially when the precise ailment is unclear.

I always remember to use a bag of frozen peas when needed, but perhaps I shouldn’t forget my proven childhood remedies for a much deeper sense of healing. Mother and movies know best.