I got that feeling after the Japanese restaurant scene. Anyone else feel this way?
I felt the director wanted us to think he was also a victim and wanted us to empathize somewhat for Yee.
To a certain degree. I would definitely not excuse what he's doing, but it was definitely in response to the war and likely a survival mechanism for him.
But this is not to say that without the war he would have been a fine, upstanding citizen. And in the context of the war he was still very much as evil as the resistance made him out to be.
If anything, the scene where Lee might perhaps be inclined to imbue Yee with some tiny shred of humanity comes near the very beginning of the film when Yee and his underling are walking through the prison/dungeon and discussing a prisoner who they are about to hand over to the Japanese, Yee tells his flunkey:
"They didn't say dead or alive. Give him a quick one."
Such compassion! :-<
Great question.
Sure. But it also pays to looks at the contrasts. You see those street scenes with the hoi polloi--weak, everyday folks getting treated like dirt by the Japanese--and it sheds light on the idea that... There's survival, and then there's *survival*. For Yee, "survival" doesn't just mean waking up the next morning and saying, "Well, whaddaya know, I'm still not dead." It means being able to maintain the physical trappings of middle-class success; a nice house, a dog, a wife who can invite buddies over to nosh and gamble the days away.
Come to think of it, it sort of sheds light on Chia Chi's last encounter with Chinese civilians, before she's captured and killed; the pedal-coach driver (with the colorful pinwheels), and the lady who needs to get through the blockade so she can cook (whose face Le An shows us only obliquely, fleetingly; nice touch!). They've managed to find niches in a very unstable, dysfunctional social system where they certainly didn't attain to the valhalla of middle-class, but did manage to hold on to their humanity. Chia Chi smiles to hear that woman taking her household duties so seriously; to her, it's a sound of hope in humanity. Perhaps it was heaven sending a message to her... and to us.
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And I'd like that. But that 5h1t ain't the truth. --Jules Winnfield
Yes, I agree; most infamous collaborators in history (Wang Jingwei, Philippe Petain, etc.) did what they did not necessarily for the sake of being evil, but possibly either out of desperation or in order to (in their minds) reduce the level of damage done to their own occupied country by helping the occupiers manage it.
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