Yield Yourself to Art
Yield Yourself to Art
Micah Rickard
On the film Drive My Car and the Invitation to Criticism
“You must become the person who is willing to change your life based on
the exhortations of art.” — A.O. Scott
Life and art are far too intimate to settle for imitation. Art is born of life; in turn, life is informed and reformed by art. Every work of art leaves us with a choice as to how we will be shaped by it, but the reality that we will be shaped by it is never in question. This reality confronts us with some pointed questions: In what ways will our lives be shaped? In what ways do we even want to be shaped? How does that affect our forms of engaging with art? Each question adds a layer of intention to the way we understand and engage with works of art.
This dynamic invites us in to new forms of participation and imagination, and to participate with clarity and purpose, to care about art and how it shapes us. It’s an invitation to criticism—not the criticism that we often (wrongly) associate with insular reviewers, but criticism as a cultivated, everyday way of being. Criticism is the reciprocal act of our encounter with novels, films, concerts, paintings. We should consider this invitation and purposefully join alongside art in the dynamic of our own formation.
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This interplay between art and personal formation suffuses Drive My Car, a film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi that observes the intimate, interweaving flow of grief, connection, and hope, all swept up within the current of art’s transformative power. It’s a long and tough film—but also one that finds a calm, substantive touch, trusting simple framing to express the emotional murkiness that its characters swim in. The camera—and the story—keeps the characters generously in frame, so long as they want to be. In the moments when they want to fade from sight, the film gives them that space, drifting to seascapes and mountainsides.
In Drive My Car, art is always near. Yusuke Kafuku is a successful actor and theater director preparing for a new production of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. Kafuku’s wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), is a screenwriter, and theirs is a marriage animated by story: she mystically crafts stories in an ecstatic state after sex, and Kafuku recounts them the next day to aid her writing; conversely, he memorizes the lines for his plays by using tapes that Oto records, with her performing the parts opposite him. But the comforting rhythm of their partnership doesn’t last for long. After a delayed business trip, Kafuku returns to his apartment to find Oto in a stranger’s erotic embrace. Not long after, he walks through the same door to find her dead on the living room floor. The first event rends their relationship, but the second causes it to vanish.
All of this is only the prologue, the stage that Hamaguchi sets, as Drive My Car stretches and settles to a calm pace that belies its devastating heart. Two years on, Kafuku is incapable of moving beyond these twin tragedies. Preparing for another production of Uncle Vanya, the tape becomes his way of crystallizing Oto’s presence and confronting her for her infidelity. He drives, he practices his lines, he accuses, he memorializes, and he subsists.
But his ritual and aching solitude are disrupted as he travels to Hiroshima to direct his new production. The first rupture comes as a loss of agency—his contract mandates that he be given a driver, even if he continues to use his own car. The second comes through the provocation of his cast. Made up of men and women of varying nationalities, each performing in their own language, the cast is nonetheless of one accord in how they prod and pull Kafuku out of his routine. Some do so with warmth, some with unflinching immediacy, but they gradually force Kafuku to confront his loss. Janice Chan (Sonia Yuan) pricks against his rigid approach to rehearsals. Lee Yoon-a (Park Yurim), a woman who speaks using Korean Sign Language, shows Kafuku an unfamiliar level of kindness. But the sharpest challenge comes from Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), a young, self-interested star—and one of Oto’s former lovers.
As time goes on, his grief compounds with the pains of his driver, the reticent Watari (Toko Miura), who’s evading her own tragic past. The two are hardly capable of expressing these intimate pains to others, let alone living fully with them. But even as they’re confronted by their inability to fully reckon with their past, art offers a path forward.
As his driving ritual is interrupted by the presence of Watari (and more forcefully by Takatsuki), Chekov’s lines begin to carry new meaning. Subtly but irrevocably, these words give Kafuku the means to weep, to lash out, to rage, and to calm. Just as Uncle Vanya gave voice to his confrontation of Oto, so it gives him a language for confronting his grief—even if those words aren’t his own. It also gives him and Watari space to acknowledge each other and to share the burdens that have weighed on them both for so long.
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Art holds a generative power, revealing ways of being that were otherwise unknown to us. Through Hamaguchi’s characters, we begin to see the multifaceted ways we relate to art: hiding beneath it as an escape, throwing ourselves into it in search of heightened experience, blindly being shaped by it, or yielding to it with purpose. But we do more than just watch—we also participate.
As we encounter works of art, we join in practices of hope and grief, of perseverance and lamentation. The dividing line between character and audience is always a tenuous one, and Hamaguchi shows us that we are always actors, always weaving our experiences into the narratives we encounter. We are invited to make the drama our own in some sense. In the process, we “put on” the characters’ emotions and “perform” their responses.
And so we participate with Kafuku as he processes the remnant of his pain, slowly coming to terms with Chekov’s encouragement that “we’ll patiently endure the trials that life sends our way.” Only as he enacts this arc of perseverance does he find a way through his own tragedy. Perhaps, as we join with him, we will also learn to live amid our own trials.
Adding to this, Drive My Car shows us that we need to be moved by and toward others for this dynamic to fully bear fruit. As long as Kafuku is trapped within himself, art is merely a means for escape. Despite years of reciting Chekov’s lines, he’s no closer to forgiving his wife or himself. He’s no closer to moving beyond his tragedy. It’s not until he’s forced to enter into the play with others that he recognizes a new possibility, not until the sacred space of his car is shared by Watari that the words begin to have meaning within relationship.
The transformative capacities of art are expressed and enacted communally, and even cross-culturally. Even if Kafuku’s actors don’t speak each others’ languages, the repetition and communal participation slowly changes them. Art doesn’t merely shape our ways of being; it shapes our ways of being together. The provocations, encouragements, and generosity of others are necessary for Kafuku to be able to appropriate Chekov’s redemptive power for his own life. Likewise, it’s only as he acts toward others that those changes are truly realized.
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In the midst of this arc of redemption, there’s also a note of warning that must be addressed: The transformative power of art is not necessarily a beneficial one. As Kafuku tries to coach Takatsuki (who’s taking Kafuku’s typical lead role), he gives him a portentous challenge: “Chekov is terrifying… It drags the real out of you… Yield yourself.” Such an exhortation is meant to bring out a truer performance, but it echoes forward in ways more violent than Kafuku intends. After their conversation, Takatsuki chases down and beats a man who tried to take his photo; a short time later, while rehearsing a scene in which his character tries to shoot another, the police arrive to arrest Takatsuki for murder. The mirror between the acted play and real events is intentional—Takatsuki does indeed yield himself, but his character is only further disfigured.
We cannot afford to be naïve. Art is seductive, and its power bears an inherent danger, which Tara Isabella Burton discusses in an essay for Aeon titled “Dark Books.” (Burton is here focused on reading novels, but her points can be reasonably extrapolated to other forms of narrative.) Burton points out that, as we yield to art, it “can erode at our sense of self.” Following Kierkegaard, she imagines the storyteller as a vampire who “infects a person’s sense of self and drains his life force by means of corroding influence.” If art, at its most intimate, constitutes a relational encounter—a thing we can yield to—then it follows that we return from such an encounter having given something of ourselves, having gained something, or having been marked by something. Otherwise, it would not be a true encounter—at least not an intimate or powerful one.
Burton’s metaphor of the vampiric capacity of novels can be carried further: the encounter leaves one not merely “infected,” but gradually and expansively transformed, such that one becomes an entirely new creature. As art reveals newly possible ways of being—and especially as it invites us to participate in them—it reorders our desires, thoughts, and practices. Over time, this reordering has the potential to imperceptibly change us into radically new people.
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So where do we go from here, if art is vital to our lives, yet bears the capacity to either form or deform us? I believe the situation reveals two things: first, a need for redemptive art; second, and more crucially, a need for intentional criticism. It would be easy to focus on the former, calling for works that depict only clear arcs of positive growth. But to do so would severely limit the multitudinous capacities of art. Not all art is redemptive, nor does it need to be. Some works find vitality in satire. Others intentionally aim at the destruction of idols that have been blindly praised for too long. Still others leave redemption hinted at in the negative space of the story. The critical, satirical, and deconstructive modes of art can’t be cast into the outer darkness—we need these works as much as any others.
This guides us to the second revelation—the need for perceptive, rightly grounded reflection and criticism. And, if all modes of art are indeed vital, then this exhortation bears even more weight.
The call to criticism is not a call to a lofty ideal, but an intentional, daily way of being. As New York Times critic A.O. Scott writes, “It’s everyone’s job, and I believe it’s a job we can actually do.” He further clarifies that our response to a work of art is an exercise of freedom, and the aim of criticism is “to figure out what to do with that freedom.” We can be formed in dialogue with art as we carefully reflect on it; or we can be blindly moved by it, with no regard for the direction it takes us. In this way, Kafuku and Takatsuki act as guides along each divergent path.
Our reflection must be perceptive, by which I mean nuanced, discerning, and aimed. Without nuance, we are prone to overlook the mode that a given work is operating in. If we mistake satire for positive description, we may leave the encounter misshapen; if we interpret provocation as prescription, we will dismiss a work outright, missing the good that it offers us. We must also be discerning, seeking to identify the new ways of being that a work creates. And we must always have an aim, a telos—an idea of how we want to be formed. What values do we want to cultivate, or what ways of being do we want to reject?
Similarly, criticism must be rightly grounded. We walk into any museum or movie theater with a complex web of stories that have already shaped our understanding of the world and of story itself. We are not only potentially formed by this new encounter; we are always already formed by the stories we’ve previously encountered. We must understand this grounding, for by it we posture our encounter for this new story, whether that leads us to accept or reject, to interrogate or blindly adhere.
This is particularly vital for People of the Book, people whose lives are fully grounded in a specific story that gives us both ontology and telos. We have a narrative—and a reality understood by that narrative—against which we inevitably measure new stories. Some stories hearken to this arc, encouraging us to recall God’s truth in ways direct or oblique. Other stories may critique us, often pointing to ways we have failed to live in accordance with Scripture. A cultivated perception and right grounding work together to orient the practice of criticism. Cultivated criticism—whether in response to a twenty-minute sitcom or three-hour Japanese movie, a brief poem or War and Peace—practiced as an everyday way of being can be a powerful tool for formation.
We are always in the midst of transformation, even as it moves in the undercurrents of our experience. Even as it ever erodes what we thought was impenetrable about us. Drive My Car is expansive and patient enough to bring such subtle movements into relief. Kafuku’s grief is enfolded within layer after layer of memory, performance, literature, and language, until it all unifies into a desperate, redemptive whole.
Drive My Car is a film of stillness, even as we move in time and place. It’s also a story of our subtle, meaningful transformation, even when we feel we’re stuck. To use its own phrase, it extends into “an amplified silence.” As the film concludes, a final scene of Chekov’s play is performed wordlessly, as Lee Yoon-a incorporates Kafuku himself into her sign language. It is a momentous embodiment of art’s immersive, communal, and cross-cultural power to reform us.
“Yield yourself.” Despite the inherent danger, Kafuku’s instructions still call us into this imaginative play, albeit with a deeper awareness of the invitation and call. For we must go a step further than he acknowledges: We are not ever only actors, we are also always critics.
Micah Rickard
Writer & Engineer
Micah is an engineer and freelance writer focusing on how film and literature connect to theological and existential questions. His work has also been published at Think Christian and The Curator.
Photography by Jefferson Sees