In Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, whose current Broadway revival was nominated for five Tonys this week, a small-town doctor, now played by Succession’s Jeremy Strong, discovers that the natural springs on which the town depends for its livelihood have become contaminated with waste from the local tannery. As a result, the people who travel for days to bathe in the town’s waters for their health have instead been sickened by them. He rushes to print his findings in the local paper, but once the paper’s editor, a self-styled radical, discovers what the doctor’s report would mean—namely that the springs would be closed for years, throwing people out of work and depriving them of the income they use to buy his newspapers—he and the town’s leaders agree on an alternate plan of action: to put it to a vote. Instead of simply presenting the townspeople with the truth, why not call a public meeting, and let them decide whether they want to hear it? The results go just as the leaders intend: The doctor is shouted down, branded a traitor, and publicly attacked, barely escaping with his life. Some time before that, the people who will orchestrate the doctor’s fate wax poetic about the importance of democracy. Society, they argue, is like a ship, and everyone should have a hand on the tiller. It takes an out-of-town visitor, a sailor, to point out the flaw in their analogy: “That actually wouldn’t work at all well on a ship.”
In theory, a community meeting is democracy in its essence, the way the ancient Greeks did it. In practice, it’s messy at best, and infuriating at worst, a forum for NIMBYs and book-banners to shout down more moderate voices until they get their way. Sometimes, especially in fiction, there’s a lone voice of reason who overwhelms everyone with their command of the facts.
But more often, that lone voice ends up like the good doctor, quivering on the floor as angry villagers cover him in filth. Not even The Simpsons’ Marge can out-talk the Harold Hill–esque traveling salesman who sells her fellow Springfieldians on the idea of an extremely expensive monorail. “But Main Street’s still all cracked and broken!” she cries. “Sorry, Mom,” Bart retorts. “The mob has spoken.”
Having gritted my teeth through, and rolled my eyes at, a few such meetings in recent months, I’m surprised to find that my favorite scene of the year involves a group of concerned citizens, a PowerPoint presentation, and several dozen folding chairs. The scene in question comes from Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, his follow-up to the Oscar-winning Drive My Car. The movie takes place in a small Japanese village called Mizubiki, whose placid rhythms risk being disrupted when a Tokyo company puts forth a plan to build a luxury camping site in the neighboring forest. Matters come to a head at the public forum where representatives from the firm—a talent agency called Playmode that has for some reason decided to pivot to glamping—present their proposal to the townspeople for the first time. And for 20 virtually uninterrupted minutes, that’s all we see: villagers and would-be developers going back and forth about the minutiae of septic runoff. It’s riveting.
As opposed to the screaming free-for-all we’re used to seeing (or living through), Hamaguchi’s community meeting is virtually free of aggression. One young hothead tries to lunge out of his seat, but he’s restrained by older, more temperate hands. That’s not to say it’s without conflict. As the duo from Playmode lay out their plans, the townspeople start to question them, particularly on the matter of waste management. The capacity of the site’s septic tank is exceeded by the number of people it’s scheduled to serve, and while the developers argue that its average occupancy will be around half-full, the townspeople see right through them. Any waste that’s not properly processed, they argue, will flow into the town’s water supply, fouling the dazzlingly clear lakes and streams on which the camera lingers elsewhere in the film. The owner of the local udon shop pipes up and says she moved from Tokyo specifically because of how the town’s water makes her noodles taste. Alter that, and her business could dry up overnight.
The people of Mizubiki have other objections: the risk of wildfires started by careless city dwellers, especially since the developers aren’t planning to pay for overnight supervision, and the disruption to the migration of local deer. But they keep circling back to the subject of water, as the two people from Playmode grow more and more flummoxed. This wasn’t the issue they expected to be pressed on, certainly not in this much detail, and besides … it seems like these people might have a point?
The title of Evil Does Not Exist might seem a tad ponderous, but I think Hamaguchi means it in the most straightforward way possible. This isn’t a world where people are innately one thing or another, certainly not in any moral sense. They behave according to instinct and incentive, a drive toward individual achievement or communal protection. The people from Playmode aren’t bad, and their actions do have a cause: a post-COVID subsidy from the Japanese government for new construction projects. Perhaps it was well-intentioned, and doubtless much-needed, but in this case it’s prompting a company with no experience in the field to plop down a potentially destructive development in a sensitive area, on a deadline too short and a budget too strained to evaluate its impact. And the townspeople don’t treat them like villains. They argue their case with calm persistence, rarely even raising their voices. The udon-shop woman doesn’t demand that the outsiders keep their hands off her water supply. She just asks.
Perhaps it’s the understated assurance with which Evil Does Not Exist’s community meeting plays out that makes it so engrossing. The movie trusts us to understand what’s at stake without needing to heighten the drama or vilify the ignorant. An Enemy of the People points to the faults in the system as well, but its conclusion feels profoundly undemocratic. There’s the wise man who knows best, the powerful manipulators who look out for their own interests, and the largely unseen rabble whom the latter faction bends to its will. The doctor may seal his fate by comparing educated men like himself to elegant purebreds and the masses to mangy curs, but he’s not exactly wrong, just bad at small-town politics. In Mizubiki, it’s the ordinary people who have the most knowledge, but even they’re acting more out of self-preservation than the devotion to any higher principle. Like the wild deer who populate the town’s unspoiled forest, they’re peaceful until they’re threatened, and when they are, there’s no telling what they’ll do.
Maybe, after years of watching people turn every public forum into an audition for social-media stardom, it’s just a balm to watch the process work the way it’s meant to, with people arguing toward a common goal rather than simply wearing their opponents down to a nub. Life’s dramatic enough as it is.
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May 04, 2024 at 11:00PM
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Evil Does Not Exist has the most riveting movie scene of the year. - Slate
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