Sh�gun’s Class Clown

Photo: FX

Allow me to recall the precise moment that elevated Cosmo Jarvis’s John Blackthorne into my personal canon of all-time great TV characters. It comes about a half-hour into the first episode of Sh�gun, “Anjin,� when Blackthorne is dragged before local lord Yabushige after his crew is extracted from their ship. Scraggled and presumably scurvied after months stranded at sea, Blackthorne bursts into rage when a stationed Portuguese Catholic priest disingenuously translates their conversation with the intent of having him executed. Blackthorne, an English Protestant sailor whose empire is at war with the Portuguese, rips the priest’s cross off his robe, throws it into the dirt, and stomps on it, yelling, “I WILL NOT. BE SPOKEN FOR. BY CatHoLiCS!!!� It’s an utterly ridiculous moment, not just because Blackthorne’s screaming at a group of men who cannot understand him, but because Jarvis looks funny as hell flailing in the mud. As will become standard throughout the series, the man is giving 1,000 percent in this scene. His neck veins bulge. His body rattles as he pounds the cross. His matted hair whips rainwater in every direction. Yabushige, who lacks the context for these two idiots, can’t help but crack a smile. I’m smitten.

It should go without saying that the “white guy in the Japans� of it all presents Sh�gun with a challenge. The FX series adapting James Clavell’s best-selling 1975 historical novel about the political machinations of feuding Japanese lords and the English sailor stuck in the middle, itself already adapted into an acclaimed 1980 TV miniseries, tackles source material naturally vulnerable to claims of being a white-savior narrative. While I haven’t read the novel, I broadly agree with my colleague Matt Zoller Seitz’s review that the 1980 TV iteration doesn’t fully lend itself to that critique — without spoiling things, how the story resolves fundamentally challenges this reading — though it does primarily run the narrative through the eyes of its European protagonist, a kind of failing in its own right. Similar charges can be levied at Ed Zwick’s The Last Samurai, in which Tom Cruise plays an American army general swept up in 19th-century Japanese politics and becomes a samurai in the process. I also found that film to be more complicated than the white-savior critique suggests, though the nature of Cruise’s star power back then makes it hard to think of the 2003 movie much beyond the central white guy’s story.

The new Sh�gun heads off this critique entirely by portraying Blackthorne as the unambiguous fool. This adaptation ultimately belongs to its political players, in particular Hiroyuki Sanada’s Lord Toranaga, who starts the series from a precarious position after the death of the previous ruler kicks off a power struggle that places him in the crosshairs of Takehiro Hira’s Lord Ishido. (It’s great to see Hira on my television again after his turn on the excellent Giri/Haji.). Blackthorne enters the stage at a pivotal moment in the growing conflict and stays alive due to simple political expediency. Yabushige doesn’t execute Blackthorne after identifying his value as a bargaining chip. Later, when Blackthorne enters Toranaga’s orbit, his presence becomes a handy force of destabilization in the latter’s mortal chess game against Ishido and the Council of Regents. In this Sengoku-era Game of Thrones, Blackthorne is neither a Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, nor even a Tyrion Lannister.

At best, he’s a Gendry — and a buffoonish Gendry at that. Every single choice Jarvis makes as Blackthorne is pitch-perfect. There’s more than a bit of Venom Tom Hardy in his performance, which swings wildly, but precisely, between gruff and unhinged. The guy oozes unkempt comicality. When garbed in a yukata, he cuts an unflattering silhouette. His gait isn’t so much a walk as a trundle. His speech cadence is punctuated by grunts. (“Mm. Mm.�) And that voice — it’s reedy and trained, like a dude who’s been smoking a pack a day since grade school but went on to dish out sonnets at the Globe Theatre. Compounded by a fascinatingly incongruous pearl-clutching affect (you can practically hear him walk into a casino and cry, “Gambling? In this establishment!?�), Jarvis’s performance produces a kind of mythical being: ye olde Englishman as sensitive blowhard. I could listen to this man speak, and yell, for hours.

Blackthorne may be a fool, but he isn’t a moron. In fact, it’s his naval prowess that becomes a form of currency in his struggle for agency within the larger political game around him. He’s smart enough to know how to internalize his new environment; Blackthorne might start out the series with the air of an unbending American tourist who barges into situations and thinks yelling loud enough might produce cross-lingual comprehension, but as the episodes roll on, he comes to acknowledge, and occasionally honor, the rules and structures of his captors. He even becomes something of a proto-Bourdainean traveler in the process, as reflected in a little beat when he’s served natt�, the notorious Japanese dish of overly fermented soybeans: “Mm. Mm. A bit like cheese. Very stinky, possibly spoiled cheese. But quite enjoyable.�

FX’s Sh�gun sticks to its complex texture by never truly playing down the distance between Blackthorne and the world he’s moving through. He may seem to drift toward the beginnings of assimilation at times, but he still very much possesses the programming of his time and background. In the fifth episode, “Broken to the Fist,� Buntaro’s violent treatment of his wife Mariko, while emblematic of Japan’s gender politics in the era, fully clashes with Blackthorne’s own era-specific values. Sh�gun is particularly smart in how it capitalizes on the mechanics of these cross-cultural moments, often using that clash to draw out beats of comedy and character while never quite surrendering to placing either culture too high up on a pedestal. These are also the occasional instances where Blackthorne gets to buck against his positioning as a fool by playing the fool. I’m still chuckling over the bit in the third episode, “Tomorrow Is Tomorrow,� when he aids in a plot to smuggle Toranaga out of Osaka. As a guard comes close to spot-checking a carrier containing Toranaga, hiding inside and posing as a woman, Blackthorne, feigning moral hysteria, wails, “A woman’s virtue is her glory!� “Am I the only man present who treasures the purity of a woman?� Incredible stuff. This is what a white ally looks like, you know?

Blackthorne still has a ways to go in his quest to survive the political intrigue around him, but part of what’s so interesting about Sh�gun so far is its subtle insistence that his survival is ultimately secondary to everything else going on. There’s a much larger game at play in which Blackthorne has been rendered little more than a pawn, and there’s only so much he can do about that — aside from being entertaining. When Yabushige decides not to have him executed in the first episode, it’s not just because he identifies Blackthorne as a bargaining chip. He also seems genuinely amused by the guy. Why not keep him around? Who knows what he’ll do next? Watching Jarvis onscreen, that stance is hella relatable.