Head in the sand: the ending of Woman of the Dunes

A schoolteacher goes in search of entomological glory in a rural part of Japan, hoping to discover a new species of beetle. While combing a dune, a villager informs him that he’s missed the last bus, and offers him a place to stay for the night, in a house at the bottom of a huge sandy pit where a young widow resides. The man eagerly agrees and is guided to a rope ladder that leads into the hole.

The next morning he learns that the villagers have removed the ladder, trapping him at the bottom of the pit. As so many of the young people have abandoned the village for the city, he is being put to work, forced to dig sand for use in cement in exchange for rations of food, water and other items. While the hazard this poses, along with his austere living conditions, outrage the man, the woman remains stoically unconcerned. Though seemingly uneducated, she deftly cuts through the man’s deepest-held beliefs, forcing him to come to terms with the fact that the modern society he so loves in Tokyo is also hyper-focused on the transactional, limits personal freedom and requires faith to perpetuate itself.

Neither this epiphany, nor her constant care, is enough to prevent him seeing the woman as anything more than an animal. (In one sequence, there’s a match cut between her face and a piece of meat; in another, he attempts to rape her in front of the villagers, part of a deal he has struck to win himself a view of the ocean.) Animals, like the rest of the natural world, must be under his control, to be used as potential tools that can aid his escape.

The grotesque implications of this and of his disregard for the woman come to the fore at the end of the film. During a winter storm, the woman begins writhing in pain and the man summons help. One of the villagers (who has worked as a vet’s assistant) determines that she has an ectopic pregnancy, and they prepare to lift her out of the pit in order to save her life. The man stops an old villager in the midst of the chaos – he wants to show the elder a water pump he’s developed – but chooses to wait. In the villagers’ haste, they leave behind their rope ladder. The man tugs on the rungs as if to make sure the ladder is real and climbs out.

The weather has cleared up. The man wanders around the dunes and freely gazes at the ocean. Close-ups of his face are framed in a way that cuts off his mouth; in long shots, he’s a tiny figure against a landscape that seems like a body. Then there’s a shot of a trail of footsteps in the sand, and he’s suddenly back in the hole, gazing at his pump. A boy peeks at him as he watches the surface of the water ripple, distorting the man’s face and, implicitly, his selfhood. Is this boy a whisper of what the future will be – another child of his whom the woman will bear – or what could have been? Or is he, like the viewer, just fascinated by this little science experiment investigating a man in a pit?

“I’m bursting with the desire to tell someone about the pump,” the man says in voiceover. “And who better to tell than these villagers? If not today, maybe tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll end up telling someone. I can think about escaping the day after that.” As Takemitsu Tōru’s score grows louder, a report is superimposed over a shot of the dunes: we finally learn the man’s name, his date of birth and that he’s been missing for over seven years. While the woman’s fate is unclear, his has been sealed. He has chosen to remain in the pit.

At the time of its release, many Western critics read this as upbeat: having shed the trappings of materialistic city life, our man now proudly identifies with the villagers. But today, as we face an ever-proliferating number of inescapable ‘holes’ – the climate crisis, the repeal of voting and abortion rights in the United States – this conclusion feels unambiguously grim. In the aftermath of each new shock, we too are horrified and angry, determined to climb out. Over and over, that righteous energy fades, usually in tandem with the media outrage cycle – the onslaught of information, like the falling sand, collects and must be gathered up; fewer people show up to the protests. After a time, we may find the equivalent of our own little pump, gaze at our reflection and convince ourselves of a triumph, of agency. The human ego – the desire to be recognised for that stupid pump – can smooth the rough edges from any horror. This ending is a warning.