Kentaro Muira Was a Biter
UrbanDictionary.com defines a biter as:
...[] a person who steals or uses (bit off) a part (piece)of one's over-all performance or style, and uses it as their own.
Originating in the early days of rap and hip-hop, ‘biter’ was an ironic insult in a community where many artists’ backing tracks were sample-based.
(Sampling is the careful art of incorporating pieces of found sound or of other people’s music into an original composition.)
Artists and record labels have spent millions in court arguing against the following sentiment, but sampling isn’t theft. Done right, sampling is an homage— a loving act where the beloved is affirmed, honored, and acknowledged.
The sample is massaged, caressed, and finessed into a new context— giving it new life and fresh relevance.
When I say ‘Kentaro Muira Was a Biter’ I mean it as a joke, but the joke is intended to convey a point— the point being that Berserk, Kentaro Muira’s magnum opus, is sample-based.
Thesis Statement: Kentaro Muira crafted his postmodern Monster Slayer myth the way all great myths—and sample-based music—are crafted: by playing with archetypes and repurposing material he found or inherited.
Berserk is a gate to the underworld and a crossroads— one where serious art meets post-nuclear pop decadence.
In this respect, it might be appropriate to call Kentaro Muira the Andy Warhol of the Grim-Dark:
while Berserk is lauded as one of the most influential and original seinen mangas of all time, it is also a dank lasagna of literary and pop-cultural references that drip down in slabs so thickly that I wasn’t sure where to begin with this series—
The first volume of Berserk was published in 1988, and the franchise is widely regarded as having single-handedly set the bar for what qualifies as grim-dark.
But there is a film that got there first:
a largely unsung historical drama directed by Paul Verhoeven of Total Recall (1990) and Robocop (1987) fame,
1985’s Flesh + Blood.
A remarkable film in its own right, Flesh + Blood has been called the Game of Thrones before Game of Thrones — But Flesh + Blood is also Berserk before Berserk.
It’s a film that Kentaro Muira must have loved; it’s definitely one that he leaned on during the pioneering stages of his life’s work.
Set + Setting
Wikipedia describes Flesh + Blood as a ‘Romantic Historical Drama’. While this description is accurate, it doesn’t quite do the film justice.
As indebted to the life and crimes of Charles Manson as it is to the Gothic Horror of Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, Flesh + Blood is like a Shakespearean Clockwork Orange cut with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The parallels between Berserk and Flesh + Blood can be treated in the broad and in the particular;
Zooming out, we find in Flesh + Blood the mold that Berserk was cast in. Zooming in, we can find very precise details that were lifted by Kentaro Muira to help him flesh out the grim-dark mosaic of Berserk.
Beginning with set and setting:
The aesthetic trappings of Berserk appear to have been drawn directly from 16th century Western Europe. More specifically, they seem to be drawn directly from 16th century Western Europe as depicted in Flesh + Blood:
In Berserk, we see rank-and-file soldiers and the common rabble of mercenary armies outfitted in full plate armor. The late 14th to the early 17th centuries are the only historical periods in which this would have been conceivable; before the advent of the Bessemer process in the late 19th century, steel was considered a precious metal.
It wasn’t until the late 14th century that production techniques were refined to a point where steel swords and armor could be mass-produced.
At the turn of the 16th century, where the action of Flesh + Blood takes place, swords and armor were still out in force— though they were slowly losing ground to cannons and firearms.
If Berserk is set in a time and place parallel to Flesh + Blood, that means that Berserk, as well as being an homage to the Dark Fantasy Culture of the 80s, is also an homage to the Italian Renaissance.
THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE = THE GOLDEN AGE ARC
As an adjective, a ‘renaissance’ refers to any rapid paradigm shift—
though a renaissance is usually imagined as a time of scientific, social, and artistic progress.
A time wherein lofty ideals and a profound civic vision achieve the union of heaven and earth.
When invoking the Renaissance, people tend to think of the masterpieces of Caravagio, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Bernini, or Raphael;
But in 1501, the flames of war had surrounded the enlightened Florentine Republic in a sea of shit.
Flesh + Blood rolls out in the thick of the Italian Wars (1494-1559), wherein:
...[] The primary belligerents were the Valois Kings of France on one side, and their opponents in the Holy Roman Empire and Spain on the other … with limited involvement from England, Switzerland, and the Ottoman Empire.
This brief synopsis glosses over the influence and interests of the Venetian Merchant Cartel, the Genoese Duchy, The Vatican, and the other rival houses that would have contributed to the maelstrom.
In summary, though, all the major powers of Europe had converged to fight over the rich ports of Italy as advances in material science and weapons technology paired with the absence of a strong central government to terrorize the commons with violence that was both incredible and commonplace.
*the war-for-profit model that defines contemporary Western geopolitics might have its roots in the Italian Renaissance:
FROM THE 1490s THROUGH THE 17th CENTURY CRISIS
The calamitous wars that convulsed the Italian peninsula for some four decades after the French invasion of 1494 were not, according to modern historians, the tragic aftermath of a lost world. Rather, they were a further elaboration and intensification of a violent age whose self-definition was transition. War reflected the wider European rivalries that made Italy a prize for plunder and a defensive bulwark against the Ottoman Turks…
[] above all, war propelled all of Europe into a new economic and demographic expansion that was to shift the center of power from the garden of Italy in the Mediterranean to Northwestern Europe and its Atlantic world.
Flesh + Blood opens on the scene of a pitched battle. We are introduced to Lord Arnolfini, who has hired a rag-tag band of mercenaries, ‘the rabble of all Europe’, to help him re-assert his right to rule the city he was ousted from in a military coupe:
‘That was my city… They threw me out! Give it back to me and you can ransack the houses of the rich for twenty-four hours. I give you a free hand!’
The name ‘Arnolfini’ is our first clue that the film is set in Italy. The next is Arnolfini’s cuirass, which looks like it was modeled after those worn by the Holy Roman Emperors of the 16th century— with the Holy Roman Empire being named as a primary belligerent in the Italian Wars.
The leader of Arnolfini’s mercenary army is Captain Hawkwood, whose character is based on the historical personage of Sir John Hawkwood (1323-1394), a famed English soldier who had served as a mercenary commander on the Italian Peninsula a century before the events depicted in Flesh + Blood.
Like his employer, Captain Hawkwood is swagged out like a 16th century Holy Roman Emperor:
Then there’s the Zweihander Rutger Haur’s character wields during the siege:
The Zweihander two-handed longsword was the weapon preferred by the vanguard of the Landsknecht mercenaries.
The Landsknecht were German national soldiers of fortune who formed the bulk of the Holy Roman Empire’s forces during the Italian Wars:
Flesh + Blood serves its audience a Dutch (See: Germanic) actor leading the charge with a gigantic fucking Zweihander sword at the behest of a man wearing a gilded breastplate like those donned by the Holy Roman Emperors.
The historical accuracy is impressive; the filmmakers were invested in doing justice to their subject.
From the fall of the Western Roman Empire around 476 AD until the Resorgimento under King Victor Emmanuel II in the late 19th century, ‘Italy’ did not exist as a coherent political entity; the peninsula was organized as a loose confederation of city-states and monied interests all vying for dominance or independence for almost a millennia.
The kings of France, Spain, and Germany all had their hands sunk in the Italian honey-pot, and sell-swords from all over Christendom and beyond found employment in the the service of these many and sundry rival lords. This is the socio-political reality that informs Flesh + Blood.
This is also the political backdrop of Berserk, where the long war between the kingdoms of Midland and Chuder sees common mercenaries employed by emperors and incorporated into regular armies.
For centuries, the tactical advantage conferred by armor and horses allowed an aristocratic warrior caste to dominate the battlefields of Europe. The development of ‘pike and shot’ tactics and the mass production of steel goods had a democratizing effect — mercenary armies could unhorse the nobility with ease, posing a threat to the prevailing order. This places the ascendency of Griffith and his mercenary Band of the Hawk into a real-world historical context, and helps us understand the true gravity of Martin and Company’s actions in the latter half of Flesh + Blood:
In the lawless climate of the Italian Wars, the collapse of a central order meant that defected mercenaries could murder a noble family and occupy a hereditary estate as incumbent lords with the expectation of getting away with it.
A further examination of the parallels between the Band of the Hawk in Berserk and the cadre of mercenaries helmed by a villanous Rutger Hauer in Flesh + Blood reveals a deeper resonance:
In Flesh + Blood we follow a band of mercenaries and their charismatic leader down into a carnal and nihilistic hell. This basic plotting structure might sound familiar to those who have read Berserk, where we follow a band of mercenaries and their charismatic leader down into actual hell.
This is but one of many indications that Kentaro Muira lifted some of his most iconic set pieces directly from the Paul Verhoeven’s film.
Treating the Golden Age that was never the Italian Renaissance as a symbol, we can draw another line of inference between it and Berserk:
The Golden Age Arc of Berserk is a Renaissance: a time of hope, love, and lofty ambitions buttressed by noble pretensions.
It is the last glimmer of dying light before the dawn of an endless night.
When we pass through the zero point of the Eclipse, we re-emerge on a blackened earth — and every corner of it is under the thumb of powerful demons.
Looking back on the Renaissance, we tend to see it in eggshell tempura and polished stone— in the mind-blowing artistic achievements of the past that seem to outshine all that humanity has produced before or since.
In short, we tend to imagine a Golden Age Arc.
But ‘The Renaissance’ is like utopia, a word which means no-place in the original Greek; it is a crystal ball in which we scry the shape of a world that never was. The Renaissance signals the beginning of the Modern Era; correspondingly, it signals the beginning of the Global Western European Hegemony.
Five hundred years on, every corner of the earth is under the thumb of powerful demons—
Check this out:
As Neiztche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Yea, I have drawn this conclusion; now, however, doth it draw me”.
The full quote is:
“There are no gods. Yea, I have drawn the conclusion; now, however, doth it draw me. God is a conjecture.”
This is one of the major themes underpinning both Berserk and Flesh + Blood.
In this world, is the destiny of mankind controlled by some transcendental entity or law?
Is it like the hand of god hovering above?
at least it is true that man has no control, even over his own will—
Cesare Borgia Goes Berserk
Flesh + Blood is an homage to the socio-political edifice of the Italian Renaissance generally; but the way the film discards viewer expectations to blitz the audience with such deviations from conventional morality (see: basic human decency) as movie-goers hadn’t witnessed since Stanley Kubrick dropped A Clockwork Orange in 1971 is a strong indication that Flesh + Blood is an homage to the legacy of Cesare Borgia in particular.
Remember when Arnolfini gave his hirelings a free hand to rape and pillage the city he was trying to take at the beginning of the film? Legend has it Cesare Borgia did the same thing during the ill-famed Siege of Forli on December 19th, 1499.
On this occasion the young lord is alleged to have rode into the city on a white horse with his lance at rest, a symbol of victory; and to have presided over what must have looked like hell on earth as his men plundered the wealth of Forli, raping its daughters and wives in the streets. Borgia made no move to restrain his subordinates, claiming to the distressed citizenry that the soldiers were acting in the name of his employer, King Louis XII of France.
The Siege of Forli is but one example of the black deeds attached to the Borgia name. The Banquet of Chestnuts is another one.
“The Sin” (1880) is perhaps the most famous painting by German pornographer Heinrich Lossow; it references the so-called Banquet of the Chestnuts, an orgy at the Vatican hosted by former cardinal Cesare Borgia on October 31, 1501— the same year as the events depicted in Flesh + Blood:
On the evening of the last day of October, 1501, Cesare Borgia arranged a banquet in his chambers in the Vatican with "fifty honest prostitutes", called courtesans, who danced after dinner with the attendants and others who were present, at first in their garments, then naked.
After dinner the candelabra with the burning candles were taken from the tables and placed on the floor, and chestnuts were strewn around, which the naked courtesans picked up, creeping on hands and knees between the chandeliers, while the Pope, Cesare, and his sister Lucrezia looked on.
Finally, prizes were announced for those who could perform the [sex] act most often with the courtesans, such as tunics of silk, shoes, barrets, and other things.
The Banquet of Chestnuts might never have happened.
The Liber Notarum by Master of Ceremonies Johann Buchard is the only surviving document detailing the life of Pope Alexander VI, father of Cesare Borgia — but it only saw the light of day in the mid-19th century, when it miraculously escaped from the Vatican Secret Archive. Some scholars are inclined to doubt its authenticity.
Assassination, poisoning, imprisoning political opponents without legal grounds, and age gap relationships all contribute to the charges leveled against the Borgia clan, but these were almost standard implements in the Renaissance power-brokers’ toolbox. It’s only the Borgias who remain notorious half a millennium on for their endless scheming and greasy conduct; applying the axiom ‘history is written by the victors’, the idea has been advanced that House Borgia’s real crime lay in its bold determination to undermine powerful rivals like the Medici Family and the Vatican.
Pope Alexander VI was in a dangerous situation. He and his family were surrounded by enemies who resented the Spanish House of Borgia and coveted its wealth, power, and influence. Seeking to secure his families fortunes through the military career of his son, Pope Alexander VI empowered Cesare to begin a campaign of conquest in the northern Papal states which had become semi-independent fiefdoms governed by recalcitrant vicars and barons.
Between 1499 and 1502, Cesare and his supporters seized seven cities in the Romagna region by force of arms: Imola, Forli, Rimini, Pesaro, Faenza, Urbino, Camerino, and Senigallia. The goal was to carve out an independent Borgia kingdom where Cesare reigned as sovereign.
Aut Caesar, Aut Nihil (“Either Caesar or nothing”) was his motto.
The activities of Alexander and Cesare, although they conformed very much to a pattern established by earlier 15th-century popes, aroused immense opposition within the Papal States and from the other Italian states.
The propaganda war waged against them was vitriolic and lastingly effective. Cesare was portrayed as a monster of lust and cruelty who had gained an unnatural ascendancy over his father after having supposedly killed his brother, the favourite son, Juan.
It seems likely, however, that the two Borgias worked very much in harmony. Alexander was by far the more astute politician and Cesare the more ruthless man of action. Ambitious and arrogant, he was determined to establish himself as an Italian prince before his father died and left him deprived of the political and financial support of the papacy.
The best-case scenario casts Cesare Borgia as a rebellious nobleman who cast aside law and custom (and possibly chivalric decorum) to make a prince of himself.
This is the same dream that drives Griffith, the uncompromising leader of the mercenary Band of the Hawk in Berserk:
Rutger Hauer’s character in Flesh + Blood does the same thing, more or less— casts aside law and custom to make a prince of himself—and, like in the legends attached to Cesare Borgia, there is little to admire in his conduct.
The worst-case scenario casts Cesare Borgia as a rebel angel who reigned in beauty and terror from the back of a white horse, lording his Satanic majesty over fields of rape and pillage. Acting in defiance of the Vatican, the Seat of God on Earth, Cesare and the rest of the Borgia clan became synonymous with the anti-Christ.
Some circles assert that the depictions of Jesus dominating the later centuries of Christian art in Europe are based on Cesare Borgia’s portrait. In this school of thought, Cesare and the Borgia popes went to great lengths to mock God and Christ:
This is all very compelling. I would accept it outright if the Borgia Clan hadn’t lost.
But we find in the dark legend of Cesare Borgia a loose sketch of Griffith, who dies and is resurrected as a rebel angel reigning in beauty and terror on a white horse over fields of rape and pillage; who returns to earth as a sort of Project Bluebeam Anti-Christ.
Apart from (maybe) inspiring Martin in Flesh + Blood and Griffith in Berserk and every Western depiction of Jesus since the mid-1500s, Cesare Borgia also inspired the writing of the much-maligned 16th-century Florentine political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli.
Cesare Borgia’s campaigns against the Northern Papal States are contemporary to the action in Flesh + Blood, suggesting that the film was conceived as a Machiavellian work in the darkest sense of the word.
‘The end justifies the means’ is an axiom commonly attributed to Machiavelli; indeed, the word Machiavellian is used as a synonym for this axiom. The Machiavellian world-view as it is thusly known is also called ‘consequentialism’: any action is justified so long as one achieves a desired outcome.
There’s just one problem:
Machiavelli never wrote these words.
What he wrote was:
Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result.
For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it.
...[for] in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.
There is perhaps no greater proof of the point Old Nick was trying to make here than the fact that the reputation of his axioms looms larger in the consciousness of the Many than what he actually said, but if Cesare Borgia inspired Machiavelli, and reductive approaches to Machiavellian philosophy inspired the writing behind Flesh + Blood…
demonstrating that Martin directly inspired Griffith would mean that we could se in Griffith an elaboration on Dark Machiavellian ethics.
Not that we needed to follow this convoluted chain of evidence to arrive at that conclusion:
Godhand of War
Beneath the stone ramparts of a walled city under siege, soldiers are taking what might be their last communion on a smoke-drenched battlefield. A pregnant whore waddles out of her tent rattling fists full of wine or liquor:
‘Forget the flesh of Christ! Let’s drink!’
Martin steps onto the scene. Grabbing a handful of communion wafers, he stuffs his mouth full of them and chases them down with a drink handed off by the pregnant hooker.
In Catholic rite the communion wafer represents the flesh of Christ, while the sacramental wine represents His blood. The audience is inducted into the world of Flesh + Blood by being baptized in sacrilege. The profaning of all that is holy is a thread that runs through the whole of Berserk, but it was not without precedent: once again, Flesh + Blood did it first. Paul Verhoeven was leaning unflinchingly into the gruesome military and political history of Catholic Europe; Kentaro Muira saw that shit and said,
Hold my Sapporo.
*By combining the orgiastic rites of Pan in the cave of Cesarea Philipe referenced in the book of Matthew with Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet, Muira binds the legend of the knights templar and the roots of western occultism with Biblical deep-cuts and the burgeoning heavy metal culture of the Satanic Panic era. See, it’s like I said: Kentaro Muira was a biter. And by biter, I mean that he ate.
In Berserk, the ongoing war between Midland and Chuder comes across as a macguffin which serves as little more than a mirror for us to see the ambitions of Griffith magnified and reflected. This is even more true in Flesh + Blood, where the Italian Wars are hardly referenced but produce the conditions wherein a gaggle of idiots led by a dunce feel comfortable kidnapping a princess and setting up shop in a stolen castle after killing everyone in it.
In Flesh + Blood, the chance discovery of an effigy of Saint Martin compels the mercenaries, at the behest of an itinerant priest, to follow Martin as their leader—for Martin was named for Saint Martin, the Saint with a Sword.
Tuesday is named for the Norse-Germanic god Tyr, who is symbolized by the Futhorc rune Tiewaz, which is shaped like an arrow— and wherever the statue of Saint Martin points, the mercenaries of Flesh + Blood follow:
Bel bows down, Nebo stoops low;
Their idols are borne by beasts of burden.
The images that are carried about are burdensome,
A burden for the weary.
In Spanish, Tuesday is called Martes. Martes translates to Mars, the proper name of classical antiquity’s favorite War God. Saint Martin of the Sword thus represents the canonization of the Indo-European war god Tyr/Mars.
Martin is an acolyte or avatar of the God of War:
After the mercenaries elect Martin as their leader, everyone in the squad wears red for the rest of the film. Red is the color classically associated with Mars; for the planet shines red in the night sky with the color of dried blood, of rusted iron, or of copper— copper being the first metal used by men to cast blades, axes, and arrowheads— the implements of organized warfare.
Red is also associated with the Root Chakra, the node of the subtle body concerned with basic survival drives.
It isn’t until the end of the film that the viewer is left with a real impression of Martin’s divine or semi-divine status.
Just before the credits roll, the final moments of Flesh + Blood show Martin walking away from a smouldering pile of death and misdeeds with a smirk:
Most everyone else has died of the plague for merely touching water contaminated by the flesh of a dead dog, but Martin up and walks away from the carnage after being submerged in the same plague-contaminated water that killed everyone else in a matter of minutes for several hours.
Like Teflon Don, he’s untouchable— long exposure to the bubonic plague didn’t kill him, and the girl he r*ped and kidnapped appears to run interference for him. As immune to the bubonic plague as he is to justice, Martin must be a god— or a demon.
Griffith as Femto is also an untouchable War God— or a demon, or the God of Demons. He looms large over the world of Berserk as a dark angel that leads the reader to question the existence of God’s Justice in the universe.
The nauseating parallels between Martin and Griffith, or between Flesh + Blood and Berserk, are nowhere better illustrated than in the scene where Martin rapes Princess Agnes.
Everyone is dressed in deep scarlet, except for the princess, who is dressed in white. A grinning child bangs on a drum like a devil-shaman, watching eagerly as the Princess’s helpless body is held aloft by Martin’s other gremlins.
They all participate, men and women alike— holding the princesses arms fast, they pry her legs apart. Martin forces his way into Agnes’ body as tongues of flame lick the sides of the night.
An impassive statue of Saint Martin stares blankly down at the proceedings, and the whole scene mocks the strut of a religious rite. Where have I seen something like this before?
Oh, right. In Berserk.
The rape of Casca by Griffith during the Eclipse is one of the most memorable scenes in Berserk — memorable because it’s so traumatic. The same can be said of the R*pe of Agnes.
Our good will for Martin’s troupe curdles and evaporates in an instant, just like it does for Griffith.
For Agnes, the ordeal seems to act as a trauma-bonding ritual. Flesh + Blood leaves open the possibility that she was really into it; of course, that’s how Stockholm Syndrome works — the mind tries to ensure physical survival by tricking the victim into fauning for their aggressors.
Still, the shades of grey that Flesh + Blood paints the relationship of Agnes and Martin in are uncomfortable to sit with— perhaps even more uncomfortable than Casca’s demon-rape.
When Casca’s mind shatters to bits in the aftermath of the Eclipse, Berserk sends a clear message:
RAPE IS HORRIBLE!
It’s a genuinely refreshing take coming from a culture where sexual abuse and the psychological enslavement of Stockholm Syndrome are routinely sold as fantasy entertainment and peddled to consumers as fair game for the spank bank.
I have long thought Muira was making a brilliant statement about Japan’s endemic rape culture by wryly inverting tropes seen too often in manga, doujinshi, and hentai when he authored the R%pe of Casca. That he did so by recreating a scene from 1985’s Flesh + Blood is perhaps the most meaningful revelation of this piece.
'GRIFFITH DID NOTHING WRONG'
Of course, not everyone thinks Casca’s broken mind was an indication of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve heard it treated as a joke: Griffith dick game too strong. Demon dick too good, made her go gaga. There are also those who say:
GRIFFITH DID NOTHING WRONG!
This is a spin on the 4chan classic ‘Hitler Did Nothing Wrong’, an old-time favorite of internet edgelords barely out of middle school and full-grown adult cave trolls. How I feel about both statements is that:
- Neither joke is funny, especially because:
- You can never really tell if the person saying it is joking or not.
It’s called the halo effect; the human mind’s tendency to associate beauty with goodness. It’s such a potent force that people will say shit like ‘GRIFFITH DID NOTHING WRONG’ and mean it. It’s so strong that people still think DXXxld Txxxp is on their side.
Phrased another way, the halo effect can be broken down like this:
If evil, why hot?
The halo effect exerts such a gravitational pull on the reptilian portion of the human mind that we can watch Martin orchestrate a violent rape and spearhead the murder of innocents and we will still like him better than Steven.
Steven is Lord Arnolfini’s son, who risks everything to rescue Agnes from the cruel brigands. He’s the only decent person in the film, yet his boyish charms and cloistered innocence make him so boring that we don’t even think of him as a protagonist — some fucked up part of is eager to see the forceful and charismatic Martin win.
When he does, we hate ourselves as much as we hate the bare-faced triumph of human evil we’ve witnessed— an evil we are stuck feeling that we were direct participants in.
Here we can loop back to Cesare Borgia at the ill-famed Siege of Forli:
The citadel at Forli was held by the formidable Caterina Riario Sforza de Medici, an alchemist and a huntress who ruled in her own name. After the city of Forli had fallen, Caterina refused to sue for peace; instead, The ‘Tigress of Forli’ fought valiantly, leading the defense against a twenty-four day siege by Borgia and his French troops from atop the walls of Fort Ravaldino.
In the end, the walls of Ravaldino were overcome and Caterina Sforza was taken prisoner. Before she was consigned to the dungeons of Castel Sant’Angelo, it is alleged that Cesare Borgia raped her repeatedly.
“[…] For all the pain, misery, and humiliation that Cesare’s rape inflicted on her, he could not get the better of Caterina. Although the next morning he boasted to his men, “She defended her fortresses better than her virtue”
[…] He kept Caterina prisoner both day and night in the Numai palace, never letting her out of his sight, sharing meals and allowing visitors to see her unshackled and ostensibly unharmed in the bedroom. […] Trivulzio, the governor of Milan, crudely stated “certainly [she] wont want for a fuck” […] while Bernardi lamented “the injustices to the body of our poor, unfortunate countess”
Some scholars wonder if all these chroniclers weren’t merely parroting juicy rumors based on hearsay. It is said that the French soldiers were so impressed by Sforza’s character they acted as her personal guard during her transport to the dungeons of Sant’Angelo where she was imprisoned for a year, until being freed under pressure from French envoys.
But the rape of Caterina Sforza by Cesare Borgia has been treated as a fact since it was a current event. I have to wonder if the legend didn’t inspire the gnarly scene in Flesh + Blood— and in doing so, indirectly inspire the Rape of Casca in Berserk.
...[] For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly.
She is, therefore, always woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.
…yikes!!!
The Hawk and The Nun
Rutger Hauer stars alongside Michelle Pfieffer in another medieval romance from 1985. It’s called Ladyhawke, and it features the acting debut of a young Matthew Roderick:
Hauer’s character in Ladyhawke is named Navarre; which was the name of the kingdom that Cesare Borgia died in.
But this isn’t the Ladyhawk we are going to talk about.
Remember when Lord Arnolfini promised to pay Hawkwood’s men in rape and pillage?
After the Landsknecht mercenaries win the nameless city for Lord Arnolfini, the good Arnolfini changes his mind about paying them. With their pockets full of other people’s gold, the celebrant mercenaries are corralled into a closed courtyard by Captain Hawkwood. Their smiles drop when guns are trained on them from the ramparts, and Hawkwood strips his men of their paychecks under threat of death:
I thought for sure this scene would turn into the prototype of G.R.R. Martin’s Red Wedding. I held my breath waiting for the mercenaries to go down into death in a volley of arquebus fire unleashed by Hawkwood’s treachery, but Game of Thrones wasn’t the only Dark Fantasy franchise this scene made me think of.
Once again, I caught a whiff of Berserk drifting in— I thought of the scene where the Band of The Hawk is used as a blood sacrifice to pay Griffith’s membership dues to the Godhand:
Count Griffith, the Hawk the Band of the Hawk is named for, and Captain Hawkwood in Flesh + Blood are both mercenary captains who betray their subordinates in grand fashion— and the remainder of both works are taken up with cycles of bitter vengeance as the deceitful masters are harried by those who had formerly served them. This is yet another striking overlap between Flesh + Blood and Berserk, and it’s driven home by the fact that both the mercenary leaders’ names make reference to the hawk.
Instead of being used as a blood sacrifice like the Band of The Hawk, Martin and his friends are turned out of the city. This gesture of forbearance would end up costing Arnolfini and Hawkwood dearly; I am going to guess neither of them had read Machiavelli.
Arnolfini had coaxed Hawkwood into betraying his men by offering him the life of a beautiful nun—the same nun Hawkwood had almost killed in the first fifteen minutes of the film.
The nun was a brave and intrepid woman who had rallied to her city’s defense; she was sniping the Landsknecht from the second-story window of a convent before Hawkwood dashed in and valiantly split her skull open. She almost died but Hawkwood took one look at her face and fell in love. He called in a field medic instead of letting her bleed out, and as Dame Fortune would have it, they were able to stabilize her condition and save her life —to everyone’s detriment.
I can’t find any statement from Kentaro Muira to support the following claim, but I’m going to go out on a limb and claim it anyway—like Captain Hawkwood, Kentaro Muira took one look at the sexy nun dying on the floor and fell in love.
The dark skin, the elfin features, the close-cropped hair— the nun played by the charming Blanca Marsillach, whose otherworldly beauty sets the events of Flesh + Blood in motion on accident, might very well have served as the design template for Casca, the tragic heroine of Berserk:
Casca is like the nun played by Blanca Marsillach in more ways than one. The unsung actress is one of the best things about Flesh + Blood, and she gets exactly zero speaking parts and less than two minutes of screen time. Casca gets a little more play than that, but she spends the better part of the manga in a catatonic state.
The Child of Gambino
Flesh + Blood, like Berserk, is a spiral staircase of encroaching darkness where the audience is propelled along a gradient that moves from Bad to Worse until reaching the absolute nadir of the human experience. The backstory of Guts is like listening to that first SWANS album, which I once saw described as
‘[being like] having a flowerpot drop on your head from a third story window, getting knocked out, pissed on by stray dogs, mugged, stripped, and then pushed down into a sewer through an open manhole’
That Berserk was at least partially cast in the mold of Flesh+Blood is something Kentario Muira publicly acknowledged. In a 2003 interview, he said Guts was modeled after Martin from Flesh + Blood.
Might we also say that the mercenary leader Gambino, who took an orphaned Guts under his dubious wing, was also modeled after Martin? I mean, just look at him:
I hate to contradict the creator’s statement, but we have to face it:
Gambino is a much closer approximation to Martin than Guts is, in every metric that means anything.
For one thing, Gambino was the de facto leader of a band of mercenaries, while Guts was only the Captain of the Raiders. And although Guts is kind of a dick sometimes, underneath the massive chip on both his shoulders he’s got a soft touch. Overall, he is a sympathetic character. Gambino, on the other hand, is a despicable fucking human. The same can be said of Martin.
Still, Gambino is the only father Guts ever had — and if Gambino is based on Martin, then Guts was raised under the tutelage of an Avatar of the War God.
A Miscarriage of Justice
In the first volume of Berserk, Guts finds his way into a prison cell. It is here we first meet the malformed chunk of aborted flesh that haunts the darkest corridors of the suitably dark dreams of our long-suffering hero:
Remember the pregnant hooker from the opening chapter of Flesh + Blood?
After Martin and the other mercenaries are spurned by Captain Hawkwood and set outside the city to fend for themselves, she gives birth under a roof of shattered masonry. Rain is pouring down from a slate grey sky as she passes her child into the world, but when the child comes, it doesn’t cry. The child is stillborn, and the fruit of her womb is death.
While digging a hole in the mud where they will bury the newborn corpse, an icon of Saint Martin emerges from the flooded earth. Saint Martin, the saint with the sword; the mercenaries’ in-house deacon interprets this discovery as a divine portent:
I perceive the hand of god! I see a dead child being received into the earth, and a living statue rising from it! I see Saint Martin sharing his cloak with a beggar, and I see soldier Martin, getting richer all the time []…
For a flicker of a moment a sense of hope overtakes the grim specter of betrayal and dead infants— until Martin buries what may well have been his own child by using his foot to press it’s tiny blue corpse down into the flooded pit left by the exhumed image of the saint.
The infant Guts is discovered mired in filth beneath a gallows-tree on a rainy day by a woman who adopts him because she is mourning the death of her own children. Her name is Shisu, and her hairstyle and overall vibe match that of Daryl Hannah’s character in Bladerunner (1982):
In Bladerunner Darryl Hannah plays Priss, Roy Baty’s ( see: Rutger Hauer’s) love interest and counterpart.
Meanwhile Shisu is Gambino’s partner in Berserk, begging the question: is the design of Guts’ adoptive mother a reference to Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner?
I’m telling you… Kentaro Muira was a biter!
I’ve developed this head canon where the miscarried child in Flesh + Blood was pressed down into Saint Martin’s puddle like a seed into the loamy and receptive soil of Kentaro Muira’s subconsciousness; and that Muira, who was a big softie just like his esteemed hero, passed the dead child through the clouded mirror of that puddle so that it could come out the other side and be reborn as Guts, The Sufferer.
Canonically, Guts fell from the womb of a hanged woman. Shisu found the infant Guts mired in filth and spilled entrails and afterbirth, presumably still attached to his dead mother by the umbilical cord. It’s been reported that not cutting the umbilical cord immediately after birth may boost a newborn’s health— which would explain alot where Guts is concerned.
The Mandrake Root
For all that the circumstances of Guts’ birth beneath the gallows-tree are so cliché as to beggar belief, they are memorable — about as memorable as the scene with the gallows-tree in Flesh + Blood.
When Steven first meets Princess Agnes it’s on the road from Prince Niccolo’s court; Agnes is to become Steven’s mystery bride, but Steven is less than accommodating.
Lord Arnolfini had arranged their marriage as a political and financial expedient. Although the princess is stoked on it, Steven is reluctant; he is more interested in science.
Her lips were red; her throat was bare And white;
her long, blonde, curly hair Sent forth a silken glow.
If it should even cost my life, I would not let her go.
Her pretty arms were slim and were Just as white as ermine fur.
Her figure was both slight and small, and Well-proportioned over all…
Agnes darts away on horseback. This seems to trigger Steven’s hunter instinct; suddenly, he’s interested. He gives chase to his query.
Agnes dismounts near two rotting corpses that are hanging from a tree limb. The princess begins rooting around in the dirt beneath where the bodies hang.
Agnes: I read a book in the convent library. About love and black magic. There was a passage I found fascinating.
Steven: What was it about?
Agnes: A Magic Root… Mandrake. It grows in a place like this. If a man and woman eat of it, they will love each other forever.
Steven: Did it also say why you have to dig in this particular spot?
Agnes: The nuns inked out that passage very carefully.
Steven: When a man is hanged, he cums. And his semen spills to the ground; that’s where your mandrake sprouts.
Agnes: Explains why the passage was inked out.
She does find a large root there; one shaped remarkably like a tiny homunculus or misshapen human. One shaped remarkably like this thing:
The Mandragora is the Mandrake of the Bible, of Rachel and Leah. []... Its magical properties have been proclaimed in fable and play from the most archaic ages. From Rachel and Leah, who indulged in witchcraft with them, down to Shakespeare, who speaks of shrieking—
'...like mandrakes torn our of the earth,
that living mortals, hearing them, run mad"
—the Mandragora was the magic plant par excellence.
these roots, without any stalk, and with large leaves growing out of the head of the root like a gigantic crop of hair, present little similitude to man when found in Spain, Italy, Asia Minor, or Syria. But on the Isle of Candia, and in Karamania near the city of Adan, they have a wonderfully human form; being very highly prized as amulets. They are also worn by women as a charm against sterility, and for other purposes. They are especially effective in black magic.
Steven and Agnes eat the mandrake root together, and it’s disgusting to watch. They are eating a child born of the union of the earth and a hanged man’s cum.
This is the second hint to the viewer that Agnes is completely unhinged. The first was when she forced her maid to fuck a knight so that she could watch, but we’re going to swing the camera back to Steven:
Steven would have been a contemporary of the Florentine inventor, artist, and polymath Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519). We find Steven, a man of science, tinkering in his workshop when Duke Arnolfini comes to tempt his son out into the light of day with a nice round of falconry:
Arnolfini: Would you care to join us?
Steven: Yes, falcons are marvelous! Da Vinci studied their flight!
QED: Steven was aware of Da Vinci’s work and was very likely emulating it. In the foreground we see something like the frame of a crossbow; Steven might have been working on building the better mouse trap. The field was wide open for that kind of thing during the Renaissance.
Rickert is a member of the Band of Hawk; one of only three to survive the Eclipse. Rickert is also a self-taught machinist; he built Guts’ post-eclipse weaponized prosthetics from scraps laying around a blacksmiths shop, one of them being a rapid-fire crossbow attachment.
Did Steven inspire Rickert’s design? By inference, Rickert becomes the Da Vinci of the Berserk universe:
Final Thoughts
Jesus, what a mess.
Congratulations if you made it this far. I wish I had a prize for you. Maybe like, subscribe, or comment, to help incentivize my efforts? I’ve got more for you— much more! But it might be a waste of time and money— the jetpack monthly report tells me that no one actually reads this shit. Boohoo, right? Be like Guts, I tell myself. Don’t seek pity; seek solutions. In the name of love, be the long-suffering.
I hope by now you are as convinced as I am that Kentaro Muira cut up Flesh + Blood and worked many of its constituents into Berserk, the world’s premiere Grim-Dark Fantasy Manga Experience. Here’s why this is awesome:
Collage and sampling are respected postmodern techniques. Kentaro Muira was a samplerist, a collage artist, a mangaka dadaist.
Some scholars believe the epic poets of the pre-literate Mediterranean worked in like fashion— that The Illiad and The Odyssey were composited over centuries from brilliant hooks crafted for the express purpose of being memorized and repeated. In this framework, slabs of story were handed down mnemonically from one generation to the next, taking on a final form under the mantle of HOMER before going on to inspire even more generations from there.
Even if that isn’t how the great historical epics were composed, Berserk could be treated as commentary on the viability— and potency— of such a process; for Kentaro Muira was an alchemist who transmuted base substances into heavily inked lines of genius by borrowing tropes, motifs, and archetypes from the wide berth of fantasy culture and arranging them like instruments in an orchestral pit.
Berserk was hammer-welded like a Bronze Age epic, but the results are distinctly modern: it’s a monster-slaying myth that speaks to us in an age of disintegrating value systems, collapsing attention spans, and escalating emotional, physical, environmental, and psychological degradation.
By heavily referencing Flesh + Blood, a film set in the Italian Renaissance, Berserk might be drawing our attention to the historical wellspring of the nightmare conditions which prevail on Earth—
for ideas of Hell are one of Italy’s primary exports…!
Stay tuned for ‘Kentaro Muira was a Biter, Volume 2: The Black Swordsman of Brethil’!!!
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