2025 Essays

How To See A Ghost: Interpretation, Cinema, And The Internal/External Divide Through Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Cure (1997)

Cook, Nik Owen

In Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Cure (1997), detective Takabe investigates who committed the crimes, how they did it, and why. Meanwhile, it begins to seem less and less likely the answers to any of these questions can be comprehended. The hypnotist Mamiya produces ghosts: indelible encounters with sensed presences that call the status of reality into question. Kurosawa uses cinema to do the same. Answering the detective’s questions, on the one hand, has the stakes of understanding the narrative and resolving uncertainty. On the other hand, there can be an opposite purpose: to understand how cinema can produce ghosts, holding experience above meaning and fighting the reduction of reality into intelligible terms. I address the detective’s questions using the relationships between interiors (self, personality, psychology, consciousness) and exteriors (forces, environments, systems, influences) to investigate how cinema can produce ghosts and remediate experience. First, investigating who is responsible shows us how our own interpretive drive makes us vulnerable to noticing ghosts and losing our sense of identity and reality. Second, investigating how this interpretive state escalates to crisis shows how cinema spectatorship can sensitize us to a ghostly presence that blurs the boundaries between self and other. Finally, investigating why Mamiya and Kurosawa want to create ghosts shows how ghosts might address a sense of cinema’s destiny as a medium and present a challenge to the modern subject, a provocation that, whether constructive or destructive, is valuable in propagating the continuity and mystery of direct sensory experience.