Both films will give the critic searching for a standard class-focused reading a headache. We have to admit that the kidnapper exerts an imposition on the success of “the other.” In modern social theory, the other is seen as the marginalised, the working class, the impoverished. But this theory can easily be inverted. What happens when we reconfigure it? Kurosawa and Lee present men of wealth and dignity who are being “othered” by those of lower social rank, and who are expected to shoulder the burden of this ressentiment and even accept the imposition placed on them.
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There are many interesting similarities and differences between Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) and Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (2025). But for any perceived differences in Lee’s adaptation, he does keep something central from Kurosawa’s version that makes it so intriguing – namely, a critique of class-based antagonism from the lower end of the “high-low” socioeconomic scale.
Ethnographic Dazzle
The broad strokes of the films are the same. In the middle of making a risky and financially life-changing decision, a wealthy and successful man is told that his son has been kidnapped and a ransom needs to be paid. The crisis is deepened when it is quickly discovered that it is not actually his son but the son of his employee who has been kidnapped. A perfect narrative recipe for moral conflict!
Differences in time (the mid-1960s vs. 2025) and place (Japan vs. America) can give the viewer some insight into what is important about the story for each group. But let’s first consider the common bedrock. The anthropologist Robin Fox coined the term “ethnographic dazzle” to explain how some modes of cultural expression that may at first appear to be different from another actually operate on similar principles. In other words, things that seem different are sometimes not so different on closer analysis.
A good example of this was Kurosawa’s ability to absorb Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky and transplant it into a Japanese context. He was able to “read through” these figures, who were racially and culturally distinct from himself, and find the marrow so successfully that he adapted Shakespeare for the screen three times and Dostoyevsky once. Lee extends this tradition and treats Kurosawa in the same way Kurosawa treats Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky.
In High and Low, for example, the kidnapper feels small and wants to be powerful. In Highest 2 Lowest he wants to be famous. But what is wanting to be famous if it isn’t wanting to be powerful, or to not feel small? Similarly, Kurosawa’s factory executive at National Shoes might seem worlds apart from Lee’s music mogul at Stackin” Hits Records, but they are both master craftsmen at the height of their respective trades, proud of their legacies and insistent on quality. Only the most durable shoes for Mr. Gondo; only the most enduring songs for David King.
Denzel Washington as David King in Highest 2 Lowest
Ethnographic Clarity
It’s important to note here that although there are shared characteristics between groups across time and space, I don’t think that means these cultures are somehow “the same.” If ethnographic dazzle can occur, then so can a type of “ethnographic clarity,” where we see or feel that something really is distinct to a particular identity at a particular time and in a particular place.
In Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), his version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, there is something so wonderfully peculiar about seeing the story unfold in feudal Japan, something so spectral and weird about seeing Lady Macbeth with shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth, something so transporting about its Japanese theatrical influences.
The extent to which Spike Lee is able to transport us into ethnographic clarity will be up for each viewer to decide. But there is undoubtedly a cultural specificity to the African American culture on display in Highest 2 Lowest. We don’t get the pleasure, for example, of hearing Toshiro Mifune being called a “pussy-ass nigga” over the phone in High and Low like we do Denzel Washington in Highest 2 Lowest. There is a masculine push-and-pull during the conversations between protagonist and antagonist that is drawn from decades of hip-hop and rap culture.
In both films the assistant whose son is kidnapped is a driver. But it’s not really possible for this driver to be “friends” with Mr. Gondo in the same way it’s possible for the driver to be friends with David King. Hierarchy is present in the latter relationship, but in the former it is more severe, and plays out in painful and almost incommunicable ways. The assistant in speak-your-mind America is more ready to do just that, compared with the assistant of hierarchical Japan, bowed in hopeful desperation.
Solving the case in High and Low
Representations of the Police
We see more examples of this clarity of difference when we consider the way police are represented. Kurosawa’s film has the benefit of presenting a pre-internet mystery, but one that still involves serious technological sophistication. Solving the case involves wiretapping, studying train schedules, parsing through unreliable eyewitness testimony, analysing train whistle noises, narrowing the suspect field around certain public phone booths, and so on. It is easy to see how the film’s hyper-detailed second half, as police procedural, led to it being used as a training tool by the Tokyo Police for kidnapping investigations.
For Kurosawa, a big point is made of the tireless efforts undertaken by law enforcement and how apprehending the suspect is a matter of honour in service to the city at large and the victims in particular. We don’t get this same attention to detail with Lee, whose story instead has our civilian protagonist getting fed up with the cops and deciding to take charge of the case himself. Although honour is still the focal point, it is more personal than collective.
It’s impressive to behold how many people Kurosawa can fit into a frame – sometimes upwards of 20 people during the investigation scenes, all cramped together in the police briefing room, smoking, sweating, at one point frozen in dutiful attention, at another point moving together in excitement like one great organism trying to solve the case.
By comparison, the transition from kidnapping to police involvement in Highest 2 Lowest feels perfunctory. It may have actually been better if Lee had just copied this part from Kurosawa and tried to match it beat for beat. The police, so vital to Kurosawa’s film, are throwaway clowns in Lee’s film. Is this poor writing or a display of animus toward law enforcement that we might come to expect from African American culture?
Antagonism from below
Class Conflict
We might also expect a more obvious critique of class disparity. However, what we get is a change of course from the slew of “eat the rich” films of recent years. Highest 2 Lowest does not imagine all rich people to be like the dragon Smaug sleeping on a pile of gold. It follows Kurosawa faithfully in this regard, even while it may have been more fashionable for it to settle for that easier target.
Those further away from poverty on the wealth-poverty spectrum are frequently denied serious personhood by those wishing to make the class critique. For such critics, it will be a cruel irony of the story that the central conflict, although circling around class, ends up making the figure of wealth and success the figure of maturity. Mr. Gondo and David King are clearly changed by their encounter with “the low.” By the end of the film they appear wiser, as if they have really learnt something. By contrast, the respective kidnappers appear more foolish, as if they have learnt very little.
The kidnappers do not win some moral victory for being on the unfortunate end of the socioeconomic high-low line. And although not without pity, Mr. Gondo and David King do not allow themselves to be emotionally hijacked by these figures either, who appear to us as warped by hatred by the time the denouement arrives. When the kidnappers express their final cries of entitlement (with visible shaking in High and Low, with the ghetto barrage of insults in Highest 2 Lowest), they are met with dignity and composure.
In perhaps the most crucial exchange in High and Low, the kidnapper says, “It’s amusing to make fortunate men taste the same misery as the unfortunate.” Mr. Gondo replies, “Were you really so unfortunate?” The question is not an invitation, but rather sharply rhetorical. This scuppers the possibility of a straightforward Marxian analysis of the film. Kurosawa, the acolyte of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Akutagawa, doesn’t really trade in that anyway. I would urge those committed to such a reading to revisit the film and to meditate on that crucial line of dialogue.
Ransom or humiliation ritual?
The Moral Inadequacy of a Class-Based Essentialism
Both films will give the critic searching for a standard class-focused reading a headache. We have to admit that the kidnapper exerts an imposition on the success of “the other.” In modern social theory, the other is seen as the marginalised, the working class, the impoverished. But this theory can easily be inverted. What happens when we reconfigure it? Kurosawa and Lee present men of wealth and dignity who are being “othered” by those of lower social rank, and who are expected to shoulder the burden of this ressentiment and even accept the imposition placed on them.
A shorthand description of High and Low would mention a wealthy businessman, a botched kidnapping, and class inequality. This sounds about accurate, but it ignores the real substance of what the film has to say about class. The stance taken is that any appeal to class inequality does not excuse committing indignities against another, and does not justify the imposition of ressentiment. Kurosawa’s moral view in the film, which Lee follows, is more in line with a type of commonsense conservatism than it is with any form of class radicalism.
Although Kurosawa makes it clear that Mr. Gondo is no class tyrant and the kidnapper is no mere victim of circumstance, the misunderstanding persists. This is surprising, given that Kurosawa’s body of work shows him to be a tragedian or great dramatic humanist. Perhaps unsurprisingly from an article in the Jacobin, critic Eileen Jones furthers this misunderstanding. Her main claim is that Lee’s film downplays or ignores class in a way that Kurosawa’s film doesn’t. Class may be a key element of the drama of the story, but that does not make the story a critique of class structure in the way she imagines.
I don’t think Kurosawa had any argument to make here about class revolution or even reformation, and I suspect he would have found many of those arguments naive. We are certainly meant to view the kidnapper as an unfortunate creature, but beware the devil who demands too much sympathy. If anything, as I have tried to show, Kurosawa makes the case that people can be corrupted in very menacing ways by their obsession with what they think is class-based justice, as typified by the film’s villain.
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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.
