Perfect Tuesdays: How Wim Wenders Taught Me It’s Wrong to Watch Movies on a Weekday Morning

Keiko reveals two traumatic truths, both in the form of questions to Hirayama, that cause us to fundamentally rethink our perceptions, namely (1) do you ever intend on visiting our dying father in the nursing home? and (2) do you really clean toilets for a living? These questions cast a devastating new light on Hirayama’s quiet, solitary life, which far from representing an ethical, intentional “return to simplicity,” instead appears as a basic, and somewhat cowardly, dereliction of social obligation.

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During a brief, halcyon period of unemployment earlier this year, I made a regular habit of visiting Dendy Cinemas every Tuesday morning for discounted flicks. For about a month, these solo excursions, usually followed by lunch with my better (more productive) half at a nearby pub, punctuated my ramshackle of a weekly routine. As luck would have it, a string of excellent mid-year releases – Love Lies Bleeding (2024), Challengers (2024), Late Night with the Devil (2023) – quickly elevated this pointless tribute to the killing of time to a much beloved institution affectionately dubbed “Jobless Tuesdays.” But the magic of Jobless Tuesdays, the true source of jouissance, was not in the quality of the films nor the luxury of the empty cinemas, but in the secret knowledge of how fucked-up and absurd it was to be watching a movie, alone, on a weekday, at this stage of my life (I’m thirty-two years old).

Fittingly, it was in this context that I encountered Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023), a film ostensibly about the subtle pleasure of solitude and beauty in the mundane. The quiet everyday life of protagonist Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), a Tokyo toilet cleaner, is rendered gorgeously in a naturalistic, contemplative style reminiscent of Kore-eda. Slowly, we are introduced to the various small pleasures that colour Hirayama’s humble existence: his collection of vintage cassette tapes; an affinity for the works of Faulkner and Highsmith; his favourite bathhouse, bars, and eateries; his interest in photography and assiduous care for maple seedlings. His life is neither strenuous nor idle but ambles at a calm, even rhythm.

But what should we make of Hirayama’s modest yet seemingly full, contented life? It is possible to conceive of Hirayama as an ideal alternative to the stereotypical corporate elite, the sterile technocratic class that dominates modern business and government. Do we not find in Hirayama’s small ambitions, rejection of conformity, and broad intellectual and aesthetic interests an almost perfect inverse of the myopic and unproductive, professional manager/ administrator type? It is certainly tempting to attribute a positive intentionality to Hirayama’s humble lifestyle, to construe it as a wise and deliberate rejection of the excesses of modern life. Understandably, many critics consider the film an ode to mindfulness and simplicity: “Wim Wenders’s zen meditation on beauty, fulfillment and simplicity is . . . an achingly lovely and unexpectedly life-affirming picture.”1

Yet, tempting though this interpretation is (made all the more seductive by the film’s beautifully minimalist aesthetic), it seems to somewhat miss the mark. Instead, there is a persistent, uneasy feeling that something pathological lurks just below Hirayama’s peaceful facade.

In a key scene, Hirayama’s affluent estranged sister Keiko (Yumi Aso) arrives in a luxury chauffeured vehicle to retrieve her daughter Niko (Arisa Nakano), who has run away from home to live with Hirayama. Keiko profoundly disrupts the measured repetitiveness of Hirayama’s daily routine and, for the first time, violently rouses us from our “zen meditation.” Why is her mere presence felt as such an acute, forceful intrusion? A simplistic explanation might be to consider Keiko an avatar of the shallow, materialistic social elite that Hirayama wisely rejects.

However, it is perhaps more useful to take a trick from Zizek’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) and adopt a Lacanian approach. Through this lens, we can conceive of Keiko as representing the “Big Other,” “the symbolic order, with a traumatic element at its very heart,”2 embodying the complex network of societal rules, norms, and language against which Hirayama must judge himself. Keiko reveals two traumatic truths, both in the form of questions to Hirayama, that cause us to fundamentally rethink our perceptions, namely (1) do you ever intend on visiting our dying father in the nursing home? and (2) do you really clean toilets for a living? These questions cast a devastating new light on Hirayama’s quiet, solitary life, which far from representing an ethical, intentional “return to simplicity,” instead appears as a basic, and somewhat cowardly, dereliction of social obligation.

If indeed a dark kernel underlies Hirayama’s solitary lifestyle, why is it portrayed so charmingly and elegantly throughout the film? Why does Wenders encourage, even entice us to conceive of it as a celebration of wholesome equanimity?

Here it is useful to introduce two further psychoanalytic concepts, the “ideal-ego” and the “ego-ideal.” The former refers to one’s identification with their idealised self-image, while the latter refers to identification with broader “symbolic” ideals. This distinction is neatly illustrated in Elia Kazan’s classic On the Waterfront (1954). Protagonist Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) initially strives to uphold his idealised self-image as a formidable prize fighter, loyal brother, and reliable member of Johnny Friendly’s (Lee J. Cobb) corrupt labour organisation. On the other hand, his murdered friend, Joey Doyle, represents the “ego-ideal,” an upstanding, honest, and beloved pillar of the community who is killed for attempting to testify before the Waterfront Crime Commission. The narrative is essentially driven by Terry’s efforts to realign the ideal-ego and ego-ideal, with local priest Father Pete Barry (Karl Malden) giving voice to the Big Other.

Hirayama, by contrast, makes no such attempt to bridge this gap and instead derives comfort and enjoyment by overidentifying with his constructed self-image. This decision is symbolised by his embrace of his truant niece Niko (similarly on the run from Keiko), whom he easily assimilates into his modest, pleasurable lifestyle. Here the film’s beautiful aesthetic quality and meditative, almost hypotonic tone take on a new meaning, representing Hirayama’s idealisation, even fetishisation of his own austerity. This is epitomised by the (almost) implausibly cool and artistic designer toilets that Hirayama services as a “lowly” toilet cleaner.

Meanwhile, his meticulous work ethic and diverse palette of tastes and interests (photography, literature, gardening, music) all seem to take on a more obsessional, neurotic quality. Hirayama is “frantically active in order to prevent the real thing from happening,”3 that is, he must vigilantly avoid any disturbance in his daily rituals and routines that might require him to confront the traumatic realities of his ailing father and abrogation of familial duty. In a rather telling scene, Hirayama diligently sorts through his freshly developed photographs of various trees and leaves, which he compiles into boxes. He then stores these boxes in a closet, alongside at least nine other volumes all marked “2023.”

The fragility of Hirayama’s idealised self-image is definitely laid bare in the film’s captivating final scene, a three minute closeup of Hirayama driving his van while listening to “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone. Here, Koji Yakusho exhibits an astounding depth and range of expression, as a profound emotional struggle plays out across Hirayama’s visage. Deep sadness intermittently breaks through Hirayama’s joyful grin, like the sunlight which leaks through the trees in his photographs, while Nina sings so that the truth can, for now, remain unspoken. It is no coincidence that the “Japanese word, ‘komorebi,’ which was the original title of the film, means ‘sunlight leaking through trees.”4

And yes, it is somewhat ironic that I came to this realisation on a Jobless Tuesday, and yes, probably more than a little projection went into this interpretation. But as a huge proponent of small, solitary pleasures, I can attest to the sheer enjoyment derived from occasionally eschewing one’s social responsibilities. Equally though, I felt the brute force of Keiko’s condescending interrogation, as if she’d burst through the fourth wall to reprimand me directly – “are you really watching this movie at 10am on a Tuesday?”

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All images are screenshots from the film.