fuck the GIs; they're just men. you're a man too, aren't you?
paints an image of post-war Japan as a nation dispossessed of will and repossessed of a relentless individualism. the psychological elements don't really cohere into anything identifiable beyond broad strokes, the same sort of strokes with which the film is crafted. the big-swing stylistic flourishes serve more to create a broad image of the film as an unreal pulp object than they do to accentuate anything about the text itself - again, same for the psyches of the characters - but they provide a good baseline for understanding these things.
