An Idiot Or A God: Attempting to Solve “The Mystery of Mamo”
Let me pitch three hypothetical films to you.
- A man is publicly hanged to death, only to be discovered alive a year later in a coffin in Transylvania.
- A thief steals the Philosopher’s Stone from an Egyptian pyramid so he can get laid.
- Evil Paul Williams owns an M.C. Escher nightmare island in the Caribbean inhabited by famous historical leaders such as Napoleon, Lao Tzu and Adolf Hitler.
What I’ve actually done is describe one film to you: 1978’s The Mystery Of Mamo.
I’ve also only summed up about the first half hour.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Lupin III franchise, or its most famous entry, Hayao Miyazaki’s directorial debut The Castle of Cagliostro, the general premise follows the globetrotting adventures of a veritable Scooby-Doo Gang of criminals: master thief Lupin III, sharpshooter Jigen, samurai Goemon, cat burglar Fujiko, and Inspector Zenigata, perpetually taking up the rear. Outside of raucous car chases, wild treasures, and petty squabbling, your best bet with any good entry in the series, currently celebrating 40 years onscreen, is to expect the unexpected.
(Including, but far from limited to: A mob organization responsible for killing JFK hiding in a city under Alcatraz! A mind control doomsday cult using the Brazilian soccer team to bomb a skyscraper! Leonardo Da Vinci, but he’s a clone, and he’s jacked!)
And for Lupin’s first animated foray into film, the unexpected was just what was in store — the wildest, raunchiest, globetrotting-est adventure for the character yet, a cartoony caper which takes a wild left turn into science fiction that dips into the existential. It is indeed about a mysterious hanged man, the Philosopher’s Stone, and a strange island in the Caribbean, but even after that insane setup, the film is all gas, no brakes: a mastermind named Mamo claims to have the secret to eternal life, and he’s bringing Fujiko along for the ride unless Lupin has anything to say about it.
“All gas, no brakes” is also a great way to sum up this essay, as there are very few resources about this film online, so I’m gonna be running on fumes for most of this endeavor.
I may be slightly insane.
I cannot even begin to scratch the surface of how buckwild Mamo is on paper. The Mystery of Mamo (or The Secret of Mamo, or Lupin III, or Lupin III: Lupin Vs The [Big Giant Spoiler]) is a James Bond pastiche. And also a Mad Magazine strip. And also softcore porn. Occasionally you can really feel those elements tugging at one another, like kindergartners impatiently holding hands in a line: contemplative sequences carried by the series’ trademark funky jazz score are frequently flanked on both sides by zany Looney Tunes chases, or satirical interludes about the US government. I can’t stress enough that however much you think I mean by “a lot going on in this movie”, there is double that. What makes the film as a whole succeed, however, is precisely the secret ingredient to Lupin III’s long term success: that the threshold for chaos is so high that anything is possible, and nowhere is that more true than Mamo.
A pitcher of water in the middle of the desert bursts into flames. A man gets caught in a nuclear missile strike and swims across the ocean back to shore with only slight damage to his jacket. A helicopter flies down a construction shaft to chase a car through a sewer, only to be sliced open in one stroke by a samurai sword. Characters travel from Paris to the desert to Spain on foot, with no sense of distance or the passage of time. Why does anything happen in this movie? Hell if I know. Did you know this movie has four English dubs? Did you know that they’re all nuts for entirely different reasons? Watching Mamo, no matter how many times you’ve already seen it, is the closest you’ll come to playing chicken with a film, daring it to one up every strange new gag. Which it will. Giddily.
The choice to hew closer in visuals and tone to the source manga (inarguably the series at its most misanthropic) gives Mamo a look far removed from its better known little brother, Cagliostro — unlike that film, which used every trick at its disposal to mask its short production time and lower budget with proto-Ghibli results, Mamo embraces grit and choppiness to create the sensation of watching a living comic book, in a similar technique Into The Spider-Verse would perfect 40 years later. Frames pop in black and white as often as they do in intricate colors. Frenzied expressions practically leap off the characters’ faces, which contort to fit the needs of each scene rather than adhering to any strict model; their scarecrow anatomies snap into place for optimal comedic posing. By deliberately leaning into the limits and breaking the rules of the medium, Mamo conjures a style so of its time that it transcends its time.
Is it Brechtian? Is it inane? Am I inane? All of these are entirely plausible.
Sprinkled amidst the madness are moments of quiet pathos; a fountain of extinct butterflies spouts from a tower in a colorful dance across the sunset. The revelation of what fuels Mamo’s master plan is revealed in stark, silent cuts: Lupin, who can hardly get through any scene without a comic holler, is rendered speechless. A vast museum of human culture, a collection accrued across centuries, is slowly, deliberately burnt to the ground by its teary eyed curator. The gravity of these scenes, stunningly, never lands with a dull thud. There is something awe-inspiring about these visuals, the wild and titanic scale of the film, when it stops laughing at itself and takes a moment to simply look.
And Mamo really shoots the moon when it comes to scale. Mamo himself is played without any trace of irony: after appearing first as a deep, menacing voice, he is revealed to be a small, shriveled man with a long shock of hair and blue skin, a setup for an obvious joke about his size which the filmmakers deliberately ignore.
(He also strongly resembles Paul Williams in Phantom Of The Paradise, which, according to my research, was intentional on the filmmakers’ part — but if this turns out to be untrue, I apologize in advance for dunking on Paul Williams for no good reason. He seems nice.)
He has a god complex, albeit one he can actually back up with tricks which seem to defy all logic. His plan isn’t bad, either: a practical dissection of every philosophical definition of “eternal life”, from cultural and historical influence, to hoarding famous art pieces and statues, to using mad science to resurrect dead icons for his entourage. It’s genuinely fascinating to see such a thorough exploration of what it means to live forever, and what that level of pride would drive a man to do, even if his opponent refuses to take him seriously.
If not for those beats of sincerity, an earnest desire to make something poignant and striking, it might be easy to write Mamo off as a simple Bond riff; an Austin Powers-esque romp around the conventions of the spy genre, deliberately sapping the archetypal sexy, dangerous hero of any charm or professionalism. Starkly contrasting The Castle of Cagliostro, which posited that Lupin — a mischievous lothario who merrily indulges his own vices — would eventually have to grow up, Mamo’s Lupin is physically incapable of enduring maturity for more than thirty seconds. He petulantly bitches and groans when people try to kill him, he complains about his friends criticizing his flaky behavior (five minutes before he flakes on them), and he is, to put it delicately, a bit of a sex pest when it comes to Fujiko. At the end of the film, once he finally gets the big kiss he’s spent the entire movie itching for, he immediately undercuts the moment by beeping her nipple. In terms of on-screen portrayals, this is the character at his wickedest, to the point where I actively dissuade making this one’s first exposure to Lupin if possible.
The Mystery of Mamo only slightly dips into exploring Lupin’s deeper motivations, leaving his nature…well, a mystery. How much of his ghoulish behavior is a facade? How sober is he, really, beneath the wisecracking and leering? Is he deliberately unlikable, or did a bunch of men in the 70’s genuinely set out to create a cool, devil-may-care dude with predictable results? Not having a conclusive answer on which is the intended read is frustrating, but leads to fascinating interpretations of his character arc, if you think there even is one: there’s an argument to be made that by the film’s end, he’s gotten wise and learned to stop trying to coerce Fujiko to validate their feelings towards one another with sex, but there’s an equally strong argument that his concept of love is still childish, only a tool he uses to justify his obsession with her body.
Speaking of love — every other member of the main cast, even the persnickety Inspector Zenigata, are almost exclusively driven by their love for Lupin. None of them would ever so much as let the word cross their lips, of course, but without fail they all follow him everywhere he goes, joking about how he drives them crazy while they hurry to his rescue. When offered eternal life without Lupin, Fujiko flatly refuses it: when told he can go home with a bonus (after narrowly avoiding the aforementioned death by nuke) Zenigata tears up the check, quits on the spot, and resolves to hunt Lupin down as a private citizen. Though the language they have to express their feelings towards one another is limited — this is still a 70’s farce, after all — this is one of the most revealing explorations of the gang’s dynamic to date, a bunch of idiots chasing the biggest idiot of them all to hell and back for reasons they refuse to articulate.
Fans of the series already know that Jigen in particular has been implied on more than one occasion to be attracted to men, but even without that context, his interactions with Lupin are all absolutely ripping with that one unspoken thing. When they’re together, he begs his partner to stop putting them all in danger just to please a woman who only betrays him; when they’re apart, he’s trying to close the gap between them. “[The world’s] lousy with women,” Lupin tells him, before departing alone to save Fujiko again, “but not with love.” Jigen is left without words, the obvious contradiction hanging in the air — Lupin is surrounded by love, but for whatever reason, whether out of obstinance or naivete, he cannot or chooses not to acknowledge it.
This is the same movie where someone accuses Jigen of using his trademark hat to hide a “bald spot as big as [his] ass”, by the way. I just figured I should reiterate that for both of our benefits, because I’m worried that if I go too deep into Mamo I will not be coming out.
Again, let’s be clear, this is still one hell of a cluttered movie. One of the co-writers on Mamo had prior credits in the Japanese pink films industry (i.e. films which predominantly sold themselves on sex appeal), which means Fujiko gets put in compromising positions, or just flat out naked, rather frequently. The US government hovers over the edge of the plot, waiting for somebody to point them in the direction of whomever they need to bomb into oblivion. Twice. At one point, Mamo pulls a Prestige on Lupin to seed doubt in his mind about whether he is the true Lupin III, or a clone made to replace the Lupin who was hanged to death — only to anticlimactically reveal that no, ours was always the real Lupin, and Mamo was just screwing with him as a last minute jape.
There are moments as the film progresses where it feels as though the plan was to throw everything at the wall, and it’s just out of luck that everything fell into place in such a fascinating way, but I hesitate to follow that line of thought when so many other scenes are crafted with such precision. This isn’t “weird” for the sake of “weird” — at least I don’t think it is — but can we really call it experimental or absurdist? Is it a profound movie with comic set pieces, or a comedy with intervals of visual stoicism? Is it simply taking advantage of the medium of animation to be both at once?
It’s kind of fun not knowing, in a way — it makes for a fascinating viewing experience, rowdy or sober. I’ve found it’s especially funny to inflict on an unsuspecting audience, at least in a way which won’t cost you any friends. I want to know more about Mamo, but secretly, I want to keep some questions unanswered. It’s like a book without a sleeve or title on the binding: I know what’s inside, but nobody else can tell unless they read it themselves.
And once they read it, they run the risk of never really being the same. Or at least being as down bad as I am.
So what is The Mystery of Mamo, really, if we have to sum it up? A happy accident? A secret masterpiece? A mess? A relic, left in the dust by Hayao Miyazaki’s inimitable stamp on the Lupin franchise?
We find our best answer, ironically, within the text of the film itself: in an attempt to unmask Lupin as a boor and win Fujiko’s affection with facts and logic, Mamo ensnares him on a crucifix-shaped medical table (don’t read into it) and uses a device to project his consciousness onto a screen. The results are predictable — photos of bare breasts, Fujiko posing seductively, Zenigata posing seductively, Pop Rocks — and assured of his own victory, Mamo goes deeper, peering into the part of the brain responsible for dreams to see all of Lupin’s subconscious, dirty secrets which will surely drive Fujiko away from him.
Instead, he finds a void.
The monitor flashes angrily as it searches for something that isn’t there; Mamo’s composure instantly breaks as he recoils in horror at the revelation that a man as seemingly simple as Lupin doesn’t dream at all.
He howls;
“It’s the characteristic of a complete idiot…or a god!”
And, unlike the Prestige riddle he poses at the end of the film, which of the two Lupin is will never be answered.
