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Films

Perfect Days

Thomas E. Wartenberg focuses on a path to happiness.

Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho), the Japanese toilet cleaner protagonist of Wim Wenders’ 2023 Academy Award Winning Film Perfect Days, is the anti-Sisyphus.

Sisyphus, you may recall, is the hero of Albert Camus’ philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). According to the Ancient Greek myth Camus draws up on, Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus to rolling a huge stone up a hill every day, only to have it roll back down to the bottom of the hill each evening. Annoying, right?

For Camus, Sisyphus’s unflagging yet futile attempts to hoist that rock to the summit represents the essence of human life, which is its absurdity. For Camus, life’s absurdity is the result of a conflict between our need for meaning and the world’s indifference to us.

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