Porco Rosso - DISTANCE

Words by Curmudgeon Film Talk

There’s this scene in Porco Rosso (1992) wherein the protagonist, Marco, dines in solitude with his childhood friend, Gina. She relays a recently-acquired anecdote: a boisterous yet conceited seaplane pilot named Curtis - whom she’d just met - asked to marry her. “I’ve married three pilots,” she tells him, “one died in the war, one in the Atlantic, and the third in Asia.”

I recall, upon watching Porco Rosso for the first time, this line irked me. “Here are two people who’ve been friends for many years. Why would she tell him this? Surely, he would already know,” I thought to myself. An excuse for exposition, I imagined. My criticism came too soon, though. As Marco hesitates, his face gone blank, it becomes clear – in the most indirect manner possible, Gina discloses her husband’s death. The solemn words follow: “they found him?”

Their subdued manner keeps them composed. And yet, something in director Hayao Miyazaki’s detailed eye for idiosyncrasy betrays their sadness. A hint of vacancy to Gina’s gaze, a life-long sense of sorrow which has settled in her soul. Marco silently serves her a glass of wine. “I’ve got no more tears left,” she confesses. No toast, no hint of mourning.

What interests me more than the dialogue itself is its delivery. In their muted responses and dignified resolution, Miyazaki captures two old souls, intimately familiar with life’s propensity for the tragic.

Porco Rosso is the wildcard in Miyazaki’s celebrated repertoire. Set in the 1930s – right on the brink of WWII – the film centres upon Marco Pagot, an ex-military pilot-turned-bounty hunter, cursed to look like a pig. His appearance, and the striking red coat of his signature plane, have earned him the (perhaps derogatory) title ‘Porco Rosso’ – ‘The Red Pig.’ Contrary to Miyazaki’s typical fixation upon the whimsical, Porco Rosso is much more grounded and atmospheric. It’s more of a Casablanca (1942) than a Howl’s Moving Castle (2004). Miyazaki, turning his gaze from fantasy, provides an engrossing, mature character study. Princess Mononoke (1997) is often heralded as his magnum opus, and Spirited Away (2001) won him an Oscar, but Porco Rosso is regretfully forgotten. This is a travesty, since Porco Rosso is – to my eye – his greatest movie.

There is a point to my outlining of Marco’s above exchange with Gina. In such a short scene, the essence of Porco Rosso’s story is evoked – that of a bunch of people, so familiar with their own sadness that they hold their emotions at an arm’s length. Such is the nature of adulthood, I suppose; damage to the heart is sure to form calluses.

When we understand this, we understand Marco’s condition, why he looks like a pig. Miyazaki keeps the mechanics of the curse as obscure as possible, although it isn’t beyond comprehension if you’re looking in the right direction.

There’s really only one occasion where we see Marco’s true face, excluding flashbacks, of course. Under the light of a gas lamp, Marco sits awake, counting duds in his ammunition stock. His engineer, Fio, sleeps on the ground beside him. Momentarily regaining consciousness, she gazes upwards at Marco - in that moment, his humanity is revealed. It isn’t until he realises he’s being watched that he reappears in his animal façade. Fio can’t help but wonder if she was dreaming, or tricked by the light.

But a façade is exactly what it is. It is a face with which he engages others. The fact that he reveals himself only when he believes he’s alone suggests as much. See, the curse is self-imposed: this is how he distances himself from those around him.

If Marco isn’t human, he has no reason to participate in humanity.

“How about making a contribution to the people with a Patriot Bond?” asks his banker. “I’m not a ‘person’,” he replies glibly. “Laws don’t apply to pigs,” he tells his black-marketeer gunsmith. In a public bar, he dines in solitude. In the middle of the Adriatic ocean, he lives alone – secluded upon a small island, far from civilisation. He’s even scratched his face out of every remaining photograph of his human self. Miyazaki creates a framework of detachment upon which Marco clearly wears the face of a pig to cement his disconnection.

Is this what it takes to survive trauma and tragedy? Is this emotional distance a healthy way to navigate adult life? To answer this question, I’d like to return to that scene whereby Marco checks bullets by gas light. Unable to get back to sleep, Fio asks her compatriot to tell her a story.

Marco recalls the last days of The Great War – before he was a pig. Caught up in yet another meaningless dogfight, he watches everyone around him die. Soon, he loses consciousness. When he awakens, he finds himself gliding above the clouds. Occupying some haunting liminal space between life and death, he watches as dead pilots – allies and enemies – rise into the heavens. “I’ll go instead,” he yells to his deceased comrade, but to no avail. It is at this point that Marco’s ‘curse’ really begins to make sense.

As he muses on this vision, he confesses: “I feel like He [God] was telling me to just keep on flying alone forever…the good ones are the dead ones.” His trauma is tangled up in a genuine feeling of shame - a real, personal failure. Perhaps, in this sense, the face he wears – that of a pig – and the emotional distance which comes with it is his way of reconciling with his own damage. But he’s still sad. He’s still broiling with sorrow, emotionally stilted.

Naturally, the only way Marco can lift the curse is by eroding that distance between himself and others. He must accept the love – platonic or otherwise – from those around him.

Let’s return to Gina for a moment - Marco’s life-long friend.

Gina has a bet with herself. She waits at her hotel - in the gazebo in the garden - with the vain hope her friend will come to her. In the garden, they’ll find love. Every day she waits, and every day she loses the bet. Marco is too pig-headed and stubborn to realise she loves him; the distance is too great.

As bounty hunting is outlawed by the end of the film, living on the margins of society is no longer an option for Marco. It necessitates his return to humanity. Nevertheless, it’s hinted that Marco has returned to normal in the end, shedding the façade with which he abandons the world. But there are two essential caveats. Firstly, Marco has (somewhat begrudgingly) accepted Gina’s affections. Secondly, and no less importantly, Fio offers him a platonic kiss in a last-ditch effort to peel back his callous exterior. A simple gesture, yet poetic – a “frog prince” sort of thing, a reintroduction to affection and emotional vulnerability. We don’t see Marco’s face ourselves, but his rival’s reaction is enough: “Hey, your face,” he says, looking on in shock.

Porco Rosso is a mature film; it understands heartbreak, it understands regret, and it understands the walls we build to defend ourselves from an increasingly brutal human condition. It understands how people become jaded with the passage of time, and it understands why people distance themselves from the whole thing. More importantly, however, it understands why the distance must be effaced.

“Whether Gina won her bet or not,” Fio narrates in the closing seconds of the film…

… “is our secret.”

See more: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Living Prose

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