Tag Archives: Japanese

Getting back on the horse with Onibaba

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I’ve got to stop beginning every post by apologizing for the length of time since the last. And yet, here I find myself. Honestly, without going into too much detail, since publishing at the beginning of February, it has been a difficult time – family crisis, and ultimately, a terrible loss – an experience and a grief unlike anything I’ve known before, and honestly, I just couldn’t point my brain in this direction for a while. Recent months have featured too much real horror and sadness and death and I just wasn’t in the mood.

But this exercise is valuable to me; what I’ve built on this site thus far is important to me and I really want to come back to it. So that’s what we’re trying today…

So, what to talk about? As always, it’s hard to engage with the new. And I don’t feel like indulging in some manner of oft-watched comfort food. But just the other day, someone had asked me what my favorite horror movies were and as I expounded on the poetry and intelligence of Candyman (1992), I was left thinking about how all of my favorite horror works maintain a tension between some good and some bad: dream and nightmare, love and obsession, brutality and beauty, and if I’m going to be able to focus on something to write about right now, it should offer something stirring; I want it to be beautiful.

So, I hope this will satisfy – I saw that streaming on Max, at least here in the States (where I am temporarily), I could catch Onibaba, a Japanese piece from 1964 about which I’ve heard wonderful things. So let’s check it out, take care of some horror homework, and hopefully take in something darkly gorgeous. And as I really want to get back on that horse and publish sooner rather than later, thus avoiding a rabbit hole of trying to choose content, I’m going to write something whether I love it or not, so here’s hoping…

Onibaba (1964)

Wow, that was quite a movie. I’m not sure if under normal circumstances, I would have exactly termed it “horror” such that I would discuss it here, but I set myself homework so I should do it. And it was an impressive piece of work: haunting, intense, unsettling, and rich in feeling and thought; and while I didn’t find it “scary,” it is to do with fear and folklore and there is a definite horror to it, though more existential than supernatural. In recent years, there has been no small amount of discussion of “liminal horror” (which often seems to just mean lots of empty hallways), and this surely qualifies, existing in a perpetual state of inbetween-ness.

It is historically set (taking place during a period of civil war in Japan in what I believe to be the 14th century). But it also feels ahistorical, more of a fable or folk tale. It seems like a psychological parable, but also a work of myth or philosophy. It is a morality tale, but one which is essentially amoral.

And then there is its setting: an endless marshland of tall reeds (empty hallways, eat your hearts out). We are only ever among the reeds and we never see the world beyond them. They are like a sea, in a constant flow, blown about by the wind, their lashing an omnipresent white noise (startlingly punctuated by the jazz score). It feels like a no-place. A space that must be passed through if one wants to go from someplace important to someplace else, not a destination in and of itself. But now, with the war, which we only catch peripheral glimpses of, having destroyed so much, having totally upended society, humanity, the world, it feels as if all the stable places outside of the reeds have fallen. This inbetween, this purgatorial landscape is all that remains.

In this space, we meet a very small cast of main characters. At the core are two women, one young and one middle aged. They are unnamed, but we understand them to be mother and daughter-in-law and the husband/son has been away at the war. In a place of waiting, with all farming and other life giving work disrupted, they survive by waiting for samurai after a battle to get lost in the reeds, and then they murder them and sell all their goods for grain.

At the beginning of the film, in a stunning, wordless ten minutes, we see them living an animal existence: killing, stealing, drinking water, shoving gruel into their faces, and falling down dead tired. They do this day in and day out, and though they live together and kill together, they seem to have very little relationship. They don’t speak – what is there left to say? In this empty space, there is nothing of the humanity that sustains – they are reduced to pure, material survival.

Then their dynamic is disrupted when Hachi, a friend of the missing husband/son, returns with news of the husband/son’s death. Hachi shows an interest in the younger woman, sparking on one hand fear on the part of the older woman that she will be left alone and, without her partner, unable to kill and steal, and therefore, unable to survive.

On the other hand, the older woman is simply jealous of the attention, of the physical pleasure, of her daughter-in-law having something that could make life better, if only fleetingly, something that makes life more than simply eating in order to continue breathing. Though she has scoffed a previous offer of giving her body in exchange for grain, there is a striking scene where she has spied on the young lovers and is so overwhelmed with madness and lust that she throws herself on a gnarled tree, grinding into it in desperation, in hunger.

And I think that hunger, that sense of need is what’s at the heart of the whole picture. The very first thing we see in the film is a shot of a deep pit, the place that the women have been hiding the bodies of all their victims. It is accompanied by three lines of text:

The Hole

Deep and Dark

Its darkness has lasted since ancient times

And then, with a jarring jazz stinger, we get the title card: Onibaba (Devil woman).

In this hopeless, lost place, that is no place, the only real feature is the pit, the hole. It seems without bottom, eternally swallowing all that falls into its gaping maw. And the whole film is concerned with that same endless need, the never-ending needs of the body – food, water, air, rest; the needs of the flesh and spirit – lust, companionship, novelty; and the needs of pride that have fueled this seemingly endless civil war (according to Wikipedia, it lasted 50 years – which could feel eternal to a poor peasant whose whole life has only known that war).

With the world so disrupted, there is no love, no joy, no poetry. The older woman says at one point that she has never seen something beautiful, something that could take her breath away. She clearly holds such anger for the proud nobles who have caused this state of war and it’s hard to fault her for killing them and taking what she can when the opportunity comes her way.

The samurai is such a figure of honor and nobility, but those qualities come across as nothing but empty posturing, justification for feeding a generation of peasants into the mill of battle, and it is striking to see so many of them fall to the blades of these two simple, underestimated women.

But for all that her contempt for the ruling class feels earned, even righteous, no claim can be made that she is. Specifically, she is a terrible mother-in-law, trying to trap the young woman with her, scaring her about “sins of the flesh,” and the hell and demons that await those that give into it beyond the bounds of marriage, seeking to manipulate her into unending, mute servitude.

In the final act, which does approach horror, though it is more folkloric than made-as-genre, the older woman takes a devil mask from a samurai lord she has doomed to the pit. Thus adorned, she torments the young woman, trying to terrify her away from her dalliance with Hachi. I won’t go into detail here, but it does not go well for her, and after all her moralizing talk of punishment, she seems punished herself for her greed and cruelty.

The mask refuses to come off – sometimes taking on the role of a devil is indistinguishable from truly being evil. But though everything she does is monstrous and petty and self-centered, I have trouble really judging her, and I didn’t feel the film was judging her either.

If anything, I felt the film was portraying how when all is stripped away, people can be reduced not only to animals, but in fact to monsters. The hole is always open, always wants and needs, and if it is not placated, that endless need will drive people to do terrible things. And it never can really be satisfied, so that is the world; it is a terrible, unforgiving, cruel place, and I don’t feel any negative judgement towards those that suffer in it, even as they, in turn, exacerbate the suffering of others.

There are some horror notes later on, once the mask is introduced, but more than anything, I felt the real horror of the piece to be the bleakness of the worldview, to be the hell these figures inhabit, to know that on some level, it is the common hell of life and humanity in extremis.

It is a harsh film, gorgeous to look at, striking in its soundscape and wonderfully performed. An impressive piece of work, and though it seems like the reeds never stop waving in the wind, the setting and vibe and sentiment all conspiring to trap the viewer in the most hopeless of hells, it is engaging from start to finish. But a cheerful little popcorn flick, it is not.

Hey, but this here blog is about horror, not rom-coms, so being a downer loses it no points and this was a significant piece of cinema, really worth checking out. But go in expecting a “great film with flavors of horror” more than a “horror film.”

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And that is Onibaba.

Now, I must admit, having stated at the outset that I was going to write about what I was watching come rain or shine, that I’d actually set myself two pieces of homework: Onibaba and also from 1964, Kwaidan. But while the more I think about Onibaba, the more I love it in all its desolate glory, regardless of the fact that I don’t think it was particularly made with this target genre in mind, sadly, I just don’t feel compelled to write much about Kwaidan.

This anthology piece, featuring four chilling tales of the supernatural taken from Japanese folklore, is beautiful and poetic and virtuosic and artful, and highly respected – it was nominated for best foreign film at the Academy Awards and won the special jury prize at Cannes. It is ambitious in scope, striking in execution, and takes its issues and characters seriously, all a meditation on humanity and spirituality and nature and justice.

But I just couldn’t get into it. I respect it. I have absolutely nothing negative to say about it – this is not a bad review. I just, for whatever reason, couldn’t connect. Onibaba had felt so small and scrappy and exceptional in how much significance its visual poetry could carry, how much it could make me feel with a handful of actors and one big set, and in contrast, Kwaidan just felt big and expensive and “culturally important” and, I don’t know, it just felt more like homework.

But I often have trouble getting into anthologies. So maybe this is about my current mood. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not up for short works (not so short though, telling all four tales takes upwards of three hours). Maybe in a few years I’ll try it again and absolutely love it, but for now, I guess that’s all I have to say about this worthy, artful film. Sorry.

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But before I sign off and cross my fingers that it doesn’t take me another 3 months to get back here, I do want to give an honorable mention to one other film, really the first “horror” movie that I was able to pull the trigger on after my long, emotional dry spell. I’d heard good things about Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, but I was wholly unprepared for how much I was going to love it.

Its predecessor, 28 Years Later was fine, but for me, relatively un-notable, following the beats I’d pretty much expected, but this was different. It was a bit shambolic I suppose, following a number of different threads, but I was so completely into each of them, I loved the performances, and Ralph Fiennes’s big Iron Maiden spectacular just gave me so much joy. It is full of infected monstrous killers, chilling human murderers, rough body horror, and post-apocalyptic doom, but more than anything else, I felt it had such a big heart and it just warmed mine. Easily the most fun I’ve had with a flick in a good long while.

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And now that’s that. Hope to see you soon…

Identity, Image, and the Right to Self-Exploitation: Perfect Blue

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After three weeks exploring the work of the Italian “godfather of gore,” Lucio Fulci, I thought it was time for something completely different – time to move away from twistingly plotted, sometimes exploitative gialli thrillers and dreamy, atmospheric gore films, time to dig into the cultural production of a totally different culture. I had long heard that Satoshi Kon’s and Sadayuki Murai’s 1997 anime, Perfect Blue, was a fascinating, impressive piece of work and thought this might be the right time to finally take in this animated, artful, and socially incisive film (also, who knows how long it will stay on Shudder – I should watch it while I can).

First off, wow. It does not disappoint. This is a rich, layered piece of psychological horror, an interesting glimpse into an utterly culturally specific context in which many parallels can be found with today’s (western) internet/fan culture, and an emotionally moving exploration of one woman navigating the choppy waters of gender roles, her own sense of self, and a tension between a kind of liberation and exploitation in terms of her own image/presentation/identity. There’s a lot to dig into, and on top of all that, it is just an engaging, exciting, tightly constructed, funny, sad, and disturbing film, captivating regardless of how you engage with its deeper themes.

Secondly and ironically, given my intentions, the way the story plays out, as well as the line it walks between a stalker-thriller and a gory and psychological work of horror, would fit in just fine with most giallo films, and furthermore, it is shockingly similar to last week’s Fulci film, A Cat in the Brain – I mean, in many ways (though certainly not all) it is almost the same story. Sometimes no matter how you try to shake things up and bring the variety, continuity asserts itself.

That said, this is a story that can be spoiled. I’ll try not to completely reveal the ending, but there will be references to other details throughout, so if you suspect you might want to watch it, go do so now. I think it’s worth your time…

Perfect Blue (1997)

Based on the book by Yoshikzu Takeuchi, Satoshi Kon’s and Sadayuki Murai’s film follows a young woman named Mima as she attempts to transition out of a career as a J-Pop “idol” and be taken seriously as an actress. This is a hard move to make, and just as some of her fans are unwilling to accept this new identity, she herself struggles with leaving her old image behind. Over the course of filming a TV crime thriller in which she takes on an increasingly prominent (victimized and victimizing) role, her sense of self begins to unravel, what is film and what is life comes unmoored, and people around her are targeted in a series of gruesome murders which Mima suspects she may be responsible for. The viewing experience reflects her disassociation, the editing and circular scripting contributing to a surreal, disjointed, mysterious state in which nothing feels certain or solid, other than the emotional tension of her identity, mental stability, and agency being so cast into doubt.

Central to the story is the concept of the Japanese “pop idol,” as while there are parallels, I don’t think there’s anything like it in the American/European context (and I had to read up on it as I’m not fluent in Japanese pop culture). When I think of an American pop star, I think of someone who is already, on some level, famous, “a star” – a person who has made it to some kind of big time. It seems that (especially in the 80s and early 90s, when there was an explosion of “idols” in Japan) this is not true for idols. According to Wikipedia, in Japan today, approximately 10,000 teenage girls work as idols, and there are over 3,000 active idol pop groups. For many, this is a job like many others, offering none of the perks of fame and fortune (for example, Mima lives in a cramped, little apartment, with a poster on the wall of her pop group CHAM! and a few fish).

The way this differs from many “normal jobs” is in the extreme restrictions placed on the girls’ self-presentation. Managed by their respective agencies, the idols are sent on jobs with no real input into what they’re doing, and they at all times, in every interaction, must exude a kind of girly-girl sweetness and innocence. If they actually find success and rise to the top, there can be benefits, and many enjoy the work, but it can be constricting, even suffocating.

At the beginning of the film, Mima consistently speaks and behaves, on or off stage, in public or in private, as the absolute archetype of an “excitable, squeaky, cutesy, young girl” to an extent that borders on irritating. It’s interesting to note how slowly she comes to carry herself differently, to use her voice in a more “naturalistic, mature” way. It takes time, well after she’s declared her “graduation” from CHAM! to leave behind this infantilized affect which she had embodied professionally for years.

Of course, a significant element of how she resets her public identity as a “serious” actress is to take on sexually explicit work (a familiar occurrence in the West where former Disney channel stars occasionally make appearances in Playboy). She does a nude spread for a magazine and, most controversially, films a scene for her TV show in which she’s gang raped in a strip club, her manager explaining that this is what you have to do to establish yourself – “even Jodie whatsername did it” (referencing Jodie Foster in The Accused).  After agreeing to this, her role is enlarged and her career begins to advance.

The scene in question carries a kind of ambivalence. On one level, everything is totally professional and above board. No one treats her in any way roughly or disrespectfully or does anything not previously agreed to, and while one of her managers tries to get her out of it, can’t bear to watch, and leaves the studio in tears, Mima consciously, willfully chooses to do the scene. Going from a close-up in which we see Mima screaming and struggling, only to have the director call “cut!” before we pan out to see the crew standing around, the actor formerly assaulting her apologizing for what his job is and Mima apparently fine, before “action!” is called and she starts screaming and crying again creates a disturbing, intriguing cognitive dissonance. Is this a horrible, scarring experience for her or is it ‘just a job’ and she’s a professional, an adult woman who has made a calculated professional choice?

Either way, it seems that making this choice starts something unravelling in her own psyche. On the train home from her manager’s office, she sees reflected in the window her former idol self, what will come to be known as “the real Mima,” who is appalled at what she’s agreed to do and refuses. Over the course of the days and weeks to follow, this apparition comes to seem more and more real, and is maybe responsible for the bloody murders of one of her managers, the photographer of the nude shoot, and the writer of the TV show who’d proposed the rape scene.

This coincides with her discovery of “Mima’s Room” a blog ostensibly written by her, filled with intimate details that no one else would know about, such as which foot she puts into the bath first, or what she bought at the shop on the way home today. At first she’s tickled by the novelty. The internet is a new thing and she had to buy a computer and have a friend teach her how to use Netscape to even be able to see this site. But it quickly becomes threatening and unsettling. Is someone following her? She suddenly seems alone and vulnerable, her curtain flapping in the open window. Even worse, is there a “more real Mima” out there blogging and she is somehow the imitator, she who is doing things professionally that “the real Mima would never do.”

And we do know there is at least one stalker, Me-Mania, a super-fan and regular reader of the website who is in regular e-mail contact with “the real Mima” and will do anything to “protect her.” Does that mean he’s behind the killings? Maybe. Maybe not. The film maintains a tension of uncertainty such that it feels possible that he’s the killer, the idealized doppelganger is the killer, or that maybe Mima herself has been behind it all as she descends into madness.

And descend she does. Mima just comes apart at the seams. In one moment she is clearly filming a scene for the TV show, speaking with another character about her terrifying dreams, and the next moment she is stabbing the photographer in the eye, before waking up in her bed, before being back in the same scene of filming, discussing the same nightmares, before waking in her bed, unsure of what day it is, of what has happened or not. She can’t hold on to what is real or fiction and neither can we.

Somehow it feels strange to speak of live action filmmaking terms like camera work or editing in terms of an animated piece (though it probably shouldn’t), but how this film is cut plays such a large part in its success. It is a very rhythmic piece as we slide, hop, or march from one reality to the next, from the present moment to a memory, to a fantasy, to the brutal present again, and back into a life of the mind. Bursts of sound and silence accentuate these beats, these changes. All of this serves an effective tension, tight as a drum, as ready to snap as Mima.

By the end, all is revealed, more or less. I won’t go into details here, but she comes to understand who has been behind all this violence, and why, and after a final confrontation, Mima emerges, again fully herself. Without revealing the agent of these killings, everything has been tied up in the given image that Mima has chosen or rejected. Some people – fans, friends, even parts of Mima  – have not been able to accept change, and their desperation to protect the innocence and sanctity of “the real Mima” led them to brutal acts.

Significant here, is the presentation of fan culture. These days, it’s not uncommon (I’ve written at least one post on it) to hear of “toxic fandom,” that supposed fans of given works can be so demanding and unforgiving of the work and creators they claim to love, that it results in a dark, cruel pettiness, an ugly, often racist, misogynistic attack on any artistic choice that deviates from their idealized perception of what the work is “supposed to be.” Whether Star Wars, Marvel movies, or even, sadly, horror flicks, the internet is full of trolls complaining about how one thing or another has “ruined their childhoods.” Situated as it is today in social media, this feels like a contemporary dynamic. Thus, it’s interesting to see it presented so clearly in this film produced in the mid-nineties, just as the internet was starting to take off.

The film opens with a CHAM! concert (in which Mima announces her retirement), intercut with scenes of her coming home to her tiny apartment and discussing career prospects with her managers. It’s striking how the audience for this pop “girl band” consists solely of young men. Before the concert starts, we pan through the crowd, overhearing critical discussions of different idols, gossip about Mima’s pending retirement, and conflict between fans who have come just to stir up trouble and troll everyone else. It is the comment section come to life. I can only assume that there were women and girls at the time who listened to pop idol groups, but we don’t see them. Only present are “otaku,” mega fans obsessing over one aspect of pop culture, and it seems that at least in these public gatherings, these otaku are all males.

Given the uniform gender of the audience, it casts a certain shade over the performance of the idols themselves. Sure, there is a presentation of childish innocence (later in the film, the scene of Mima doing her nude photoshoot is intercut with the remaining girls from her group singing about how they want to wear comfortable clothes and read comic books and never have to change), but in their short skirts, watched only by young men, that presentation is clearly sexualized, the fetishization of the cherished chastity no less exploitative than the explicitly sexual presentation Mima later takes on. Notably, they also sing a song encouraging the listener to “Be much more aggressive and you’ll get a chance – the angel of love is smiling at you!”  

Late in the film, Mima is thrust into a confrontation with Me-Mania, who has been sent to destroy her by “the real Mima.” He speaks of how he would do anything to protect his “beloved Mima”, but in trying to stab Mima, he is also ripping her clothes off and climbing onto her. None of his lines explicitly state this, but it just feels that if his goal is her destruction, this sexual assault is an obvious part of that, suggesting how this kind of sexually possessive and violent mindset runs like a current through this male-oriented fan culture, not to mention “Culture”-writ-large. Of course, this is a film made by Japanese filmmakers about what they observed in their own society and I’m not qualified to judge the trends of a place I’ve never been, but I think that anyone who’s ever encountered a Youtube video complaining that Captain Marvel or the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot signify the downfall of society at the hands of “SJWs” will find this sentiment grossly familiar. To cast a critical eye on myself, earlier in this very text, when I wrote of how Mima’s squeaky girlie persona “bordered on irritating” I was probably unfairly disparaging a certain presentation of femininity as well (and/or I was guilty of a cultural chauvinism in my denigration of “kawaii,” a cultural value which is not my own). For either or both, I apologize.

In the end, it is all about image – Mima can either exploit her image in one way or another, but there doesn’t seem to be an option wherein exploitation is absent. I think when she reacts to filming the rape scene, crying in the bath later that night, it seems more that she is reacting to putting a certain image out into the world than she’s reacting to an unpleasant filming experience. When certain figures respond with violence, it’s because in their eyes, she doesn’t have the right to tarnish the image they had so obsessed over, and they are willing to destroy her, and, as a part of that, to violate her, to save her image from violation. By the end of the film, though, she does regain some degree of autonomy. She may be exploited, but how she exploits herself is at least her own choice to make.

Does that make it a happy ending? I don’t know – she seems happy. She’s a working, famous, respected actor, theoretically more free now to portray her own image differently from one role to the next. Her final line, to herself, in the mirror, is “Yes, I’m the real thing.” Has she landed on her feet, or is this a case of a more insidious commodification of her sense of self? However you read the moment, I think the film that precedes it is undeniably rich in its exploration of the fraught position of a young woman in Japan in 1997, and more broadly, women, and even more broadly, humans in the web of profit, commerce, and industry, in which we all reside in our current era of social media, self-promotion, and personal branding.

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So that’s Perfect Blue. One could argue whether or not it is exactly a horror film. Some might prefer to call it a thriller, but I think the distinction here is not helpful, and for me, between the tense thriller elements, the momentary bursts of bloody violence, and most significantly, the horrifying loss of personal identity and autonomy, it clearly qualifies as a standout, unique, effective horror film.

Also, to return to an earlier point, it is wild for me just how similar it is in structure and plotting to A Cat in the Brain. In both cases, we have a main character experiencing existential ambivalence regarding their relationship to their art and how they present themselves to the world, going crazy as they slip back and forth between what is “reality” and what is a “scene being filmed,” taken advantage of by a trusted figure who preys on their mental instability to kill a bunch of people and makes them think they may be doing it. And both have a ‘happy ending,’ with them going on with the once doubted career in question, newly confident in their choices. Otherwise, they’re as different as can be, but the coincidental similarity is fun.