In 1991, two years after laying the final touches on his apocalyptic piece Dreams, Akira Kurosawa sat down with author Gabriel Garcia Marquez to discuss what many consider the film’s most haunting sequence. After spending his life capturing both the grace and violence of human nature, the filmmaker reached a conclusion:
“In the event of a mistake in the management of nuclear energy, the immediate disaster would be immense and the radioactivity would remain for hundreds of generations. On the other hand, when water is boiling, it suffices to let it cool for it to no longer be dangerous. Let’s stop using elements which continue to boil for hundreds of thousands of years.”
For someone who spent half a century telling humans to “act more human”, Kurosawa understood that indifference was its own kind of radiation – invisible, accumulating, passed from person to person until entire populations become contaminated with apathy. His camera pulled back when others pushed inwards, showing not just the disaster but the slow erosion of compassion that made it possible. The landscape that was behind each individual tragedy.
There was a time when neighborhoods left their doors unlocked, when every adult was authorized to feed or scold or bandage a child’s scraped knee. Now streets are trained to see threats in every shadow, to treat connection as a vulnerability, to view caring itself as a kind of weakness. In short, they are protecting themselves from being human.
Every morning, we wake up and care deeply, passionately about something - a sports team’s record, a celebrity’s marriage. The capacity for attention and devotion exists in endless supply, flowing freely toward things that can’t love back, that won’t heal what’s broken, that don’t feed the hungry or shelter the cold. The radioactivity of indifference may remain for hundreds of generations, may continue to boil for hundreds of thousands of years.
Water knows when to cool, when to settle, when to return to its natural state. The landscape behind every individual tragedy is simply unaware of its capabilities. Of both destruction and healing. Of both scalding and soothing. Of both boiling away into nothingness, until coming back tomorrow as rain.