Dodes’ka-den (1970)

On the heels of reading a real uplifting novel like The Grapes of Wrath, it was a much needed pick-me-up to be able to watch Akira Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den.  I’m kidding.  About the uplifting part.

This film takes place in what looks like a nuclear fallout zone. I imagined the setting as Hiroshima, a year later. It’s pretty much a slum.  The viewer is only given a glimpse of the dirty, run-down fragments of a community: there are no wide shots of the surrounding facets of the slum, or the larger city in the distance.  This is fitting because the viewer is treated to only fragments of the characters’ diegetic lives. 

Without knowing Japanese, it’s hard for me to guess what “dodes’ka-den” would be translated as in English. The boy is mimicking driving a trolley, and it’s hard to come up with the onomatopoedic (is that a word?) equivalent of a trolley sound, so I’m correllating it to our  English train sound of “Chugga chugga chugga chugga choo choo.” It doesn’t matter other than just knowing that the boy is repeating it over and over as he’s acting like he’s the trolley conductor (he’s shell-shocked or mentally handicapped).  Bless his heart.

The film shows glimpses into the home lives of the various residents of this sector of the slum: interestingly, many of them are doing work from home, assembling various items to sell like hair brushes or fake flowers.  Some of them are drinking, some of them are fornicating, some of them are starving, some of them are washing clothes and gossiping, some of them are dying, some of them are already dead.

Perhaps the most intriguing character in the film is the guy who’s pretty much already dead: he walks around like a zombie, his eyes bugging out, bright and wide open, but the lights are turned off inside. As the film progresses, his estranged wife returns and she seeks forgiveness from him for cheating on him (presumably MANY years ago). But he registers nothing. He is already dead. Killed years ago by that ravenous beast, the she-wolf, whose lusty hearts saps men of all their strength.

It’s sad, actually, that he wastes his life away. He gave up.  Is he a waste of space? He makes no effort to even talk to her, nor to anyone else in the film. He just stares out into oblivion. It’s no way to live. It’s not living.

Same thing goes for the homeless man with the little boy: idiocy and poor parenting gets them into a real fine mess. Their days were consumed with trying to stay alive, and trying to keep themselves motivated to stay alive by fantasizing about building their dream house.  They struggled for survival every day and it did not work out very well in the end for the boy.

Some of the characters in this film struggle with their daily existences, minute-by minute-sometimes. The mother of the Trolley Freak, as he’s called by the taunting kids, is desperate to keep her son happy because he does not seem to realize he is different; the girl who makes the artificial flowers struggles just to stay awake so she can finish her task, all-the-while she is just a pound of flesh without any enjoyment in life whatsoever.

There are other characters who do not struggle quite as much, like the gossiping wives around the water spigot, or the two couples who seem to be “swingers,” or the old man who is a positive, compassionate influence in the community. 

So what do all of these characters have in common?  Why is Kurosawa making a film about the slums and the various people that are living there?  Honestly, I don’t know. But I’m going to make a guess.

I think we all exist within a community with our own individual sense of reality. We all arrive at this moment in our lives with baggage of various sizes and weights. We all have capabilities for success and failure.  Just because we are who we are right now does not mean others are right there with us, though they may be standing beside us in the literal sense. I think Kurosawa was showing the viewer a community where hardship, gossip, violence, love, sex, compassion, death, and longing are all a part of daily life, and though we may be experiencing bliss or pain in our own realities, those around us might be experiencing something similar to or completely different than us. 

I think we are supposed to watch a film like this (and I also think that the horrible film, Babel, was an attempt at this) and recognize that we are part of a community of men and women who, behind closed doors and out in the public eye, lead individual lives, but also lead lives that we are all subject to seeing if we bother to open our eyes to them.

Two of the best examples of this in the film are when the bike delivery boy keeps noticing the flower girl is pale, weak, and sickly looking, and how he knows that her uncle is overworking her. But every time he confronts her about this, he only takes it so far as to tell her she’s in bad shape, but he never does anything to help her. The viewer is thinking he will somehow rescue her. But each time, he rides off on his bike with a smile having only pointed out the obvious.  This comes back to bite him in the end (in a way) because she later stabs him as a proxy for her uncle raping her. 

Another example is when a burglar invaded the old man’s house and was about to walk away with his tools. The old man woke up and asked him to please not take his tools, but to take his money instead. He got up, gave him the money, and told him to come back if he needed more. Later, when the police caught the burglar, and the burglar confessed to the burglary, the old man denied ever having given him the money. 

The old man has a code of honor that I believe is highly valued by Kurosawa.  He was the only “old man” in the film, and he was always dressed traditionally, while the other men were dressed variously. A clear statement about old/new.  He was also the person that seemed to be able to alleviate various tensions in the film: like an old Sage.

Ultimately, I think this film was about paying attention to the world, and the people, around us.  And more than that, behaving compassionately in all that we do.

That’s possible, but not for everyone.

This film is really a lot more than just that but I can’t possibly fathom the film’s cultural meaning from a Japanese standpoint because I am not Japanese.

Twin Peaks, Season 2 Episode 9 (1990) & Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)

I’ve been watching Twin Peaks.  I haven’t written about it until now because I was thinking maybe I’d write about it at the end. But, something’s come up that I want to talk about.

Warning: Spoiler Alert!!!!!

On Season 2, Episode 9, the viewer learns who killed Laura Palmer. I had my hunch when her father’s hair turned white. I was right. But, of course, there are still 3 more discs and a film to get through so clearly the “who” isn’t limited to Mr. Palmer.  Well, we know Bob is involved. We know Bob jumps from person to person.  We just have to find out the more complicated “why,” as the Log Lady says.

And this is where the fun part comes in. What I realized, after watching Season 2 Episode 9, is that David Lynch has pretty much ripped off Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist. In 1982 he published A Wild Sheep Chase, which is the third in the “Trilogy of the Rat” series.  Twin Peaks aired in 1990 and 1991.

Now, for any die-hard David Lynch fans:  sit back, relax, and don’t have a cow, man.  Or in this case, a sheep!

In A Wild Sheep Chase, the protagonist is blackmailed into locating an individual sheep in the Japanese countryside. The sheep is special and definitely otherworldly.  The sheep posseses individuals (you have to “let” it in), it then controls and manipulates the individual’s life, and then leaves its host to find a new parasitic human inhabitant when the body of its host is deteriorating.  The thing is, when the sheep leaves you, you die, because in the meantime a huge brain tumor has developed in your head as a direct result of the sheep being inside of you.

Hmm…..

So I realized this was what Lynch was doing: taking the idea of Murakami’s mystical sheep and appropriating it into the idea of “Bob” in Twin Peaks.  Clever, but certainly not original.  When the Sheriff and Agent Cooper have successfully captured Leland Palmer (through trickery), Bob reveals himself and spills the beans.  Then, when Bob leaves Leland, Leland tells the men that when he was young, Bob asked to “come inside of him” and he let him in. Hmmm…sounds sheepy to me!  Before he leaves his host, Bob tells the men that when he leaves Leland, he will remember all of the horrible things he has done “in Bob’s name” so to speak and he will die. And, he does. Same thing when the sheep leaves you: you die.  In Twin Peaks, we do have the character of Mike, who has cut his arm off in order to get Bob out of him; otherwise, he would have died eventually as a result of Bob.  Mike tells us that he killed many in Bob’s name, just like Leland. So we know the “m.o.” on Bob: he jumps from person to person wreaking havoc. Same thing with Murakami’s sheep.  The trick, of course, is figuring out the allegory behind the Sheep, and Bob.

The other clue that Lynch is appropriating Murakami is in the scene when Agent Cooper assembles his suspects in the Road House: Ben Horne, Leland Palmer, Leo Johnson.  Agent Cooper has connections with the mystical other world, and once they’re all assembled, he says one person is missing that he didn’t invite because he didn’t know who to invite.  Nonetheless, the meeting “had been called.” Then, immediately after, the old man from the Great Northern Hotel is brought in by Major Briggs and he is the other, expected/unexpected party.  He is an integral piece of the puzzle, and without him, the Giant wouldn’t have been able to tell him who murdered Laura Palmer.

This is reminiscient of a scene late in A Wild Sheep Chase when the protagonist is “on to” the Sheep Man’s identity and tells him that his friend, known as The Rat, will be coming at 10pm.  The protagonist didn’t know if his friend would show up, but he announced the meeting to the Sheep Man (because he suspected the Sheep Man was The Rat).  This, after The Rat had been eluding him for quite a while. Turns out he was right and the Sheep Man was The Rat.  What ensues, in the dark, is that The Rat tells him the story of the Sheep trying to “enter” him and the only way he could keep from being taken completely over by the Sheep was to kill himself. The Rat was already dead and he was coming to visit his friend using the Sheep Man identity. Keep in mind that the Sheep Man and the Sheep (that possesses people maliciously) are actually different entities.

Anyway, the point is that Lynch has appropriated this scene of suprise identity and a mystical meeting straight from Murakami’s novel.

I’ve taken the liberty of searching online for instances of “murakami and twin peaks” and “lynch and murakami” and I’m sad to report that instead of Twin Peaks being linked back to Murakami, you find many instances of descriptions of Murakami’s books as “the Japanese Twin Peaks” or Murakmi listed with Lynch as an influence.  I wonder if he knows this and is pissed off. I would be because it is clear to me that it’s the other way around.

While I’m really enjoying Twin Peaks, I’m a little dumbfounded by how blatant these appropriations are.  Of course, there is no original art, but you’d think by now (2009), someone would have pointed out that Lynch took some bits from Murakami, NOT the other way around.

I’ve done some research on Japanese “postmodern” fiction and it is a complicated issue to call anything ‘Eastern’ by a ‘Western’ title such as postmodern due to the difference between the cultural and historical definitions of “postmodern.”   In the West, we try to label things based on our own definitions of things. For instance, we have determined that postmodernity, in the historical sense, began post WWII in the WEST, and in the cultural sense, it began in the WEST when we started to become aware of the over-bombardment and discombobulation-effects of our cultural consumption-driven practices. BUT, what we Westerners label as postmodern (let’s just throw out the concept of the simulacrum) has been written about in Japan for more than 200 years, and we can’t forget Plato….  My point is that the actual elements of what the West calls postmodern literature and theory didn’t begin with Don DeLillo or William Gibson or Fredric Jameson.  We have claimed it but we didn’t originate it (albeit Plato is “Western”).

My roundabout point is that we naturally say Lynch influenced Murakami because we closedmindedly see things only from our own perspective without considering true origins.  But, that is not the case. The timeline clearly shows otherwise.  We try to claim everything, but we are late.

Because I haven’t read all of the known literature or watched all of the films in the entire world, I cannot possibly know what other works have elements of Lynch’s work or Murakami’s work in them, or vice versa. I am merely pointing out that 8+ years before Twin Peaks, Murakami had a Sheep.

Pinocchio 964, a.k.a. Screams of Blasphemy (1992)

This might not have been the best movie for someone like me to watch. I say that because I typically do not like racket, or cacophony, or din (thank you GRE!) especially in music. I can’t stand the sound of endless clashing cymbals or frantic guitar leads (I’m thinking of heavy metal riffs here). And, as the title suggests, there’s a lot of screaming in this film. There’s also a lot of incessant moaning and grunting, usually not associated with sex acts, but rather with methods of communication.

What’s clear in this film is that there is a ”reprogrammed”  or brainwashed sex slave who has been let loose into the world. He runs into a girl, Himiko, who apparently has problems too. She is making a map of the world around her so she can find her way around easily. She apparently has amnesia.  She drags him back to her subterranean “apartment” (she’s really a squatter in the basement of a building) and tries to teach him to talk. She discovers a tattoo that says “Pinocchio 964″ on his back and so she figures his name is Pinocchio. She tries to teach him to be normal.

Eventually they have sex. He is a sex slave and is apparently wired that way. The film description says he’s a “lobotomized, cybernetic sex bot” but in the film I failed to see any proof of the cybernetic bot part other than the basic concept of brainwashing/reprogramming.  But still, this film is labelled Cyberpunk.  It’s Japanese-weird, if that’s a genre, so I guess that counts as Cyberpunk….;)  Well, when they have sex, pretty much all hell breaks loose because Himiko goes way past bonkers.  Pinocchio also goes through some sort of very bizarre Blob-esque transformation with tentacles of slimy ooze (reminded me of Japanese horror-porn with the always incredibly long gellatinous phallus chasing people) that he is stuck to the floor with. The metaphor is pretty clear here. At some point, Himiko truly snaps because she runs around throwing up LARGE quantities of what is clearly oatmeal or rice but is, from what I can gather, a metaphor for male ejaculate.  So both of them have a similar experience associated with this substance, from their different perspectives.

Himiko, after purging herself to infinity and beyond, goes off to the local hardware store and picks up a cart full of supplies that she uses in a very sinister way. She takes Pinocchio out to the junk yard and shackles him into these metal neck, arm and leg braces and then welds him shut so he’s permanently “in the stocks,” so to speak. Worse, she chains him to a huge weight that he then has to drag around. 

She basically tricks him and now has control over him.  We must stop at this point to consider what just happened. 

Himiko’s trauma was clearly realized when she had sex, willingly I might add, with Pinocchio. But there was something in her past that she had been blocking out that was then violently reopened with that act. It sent her into insanity. I’m guessing she was sexually abused in some way.  And if we consider Pinocchio, his whole life consisted of sexual abuse because his only function in life was to be a sex slave; he had no autonomy, no agency. When people are sexually abused, they are stripped of their autonomy for sure. So both of these characters are bound by their programming in their various ways: Himiko by her mysterious past, Pinocchio by his programmed present.

It seemed pretty clear that Himiko was reacting to her earlier abuse by enslaving Pinocchio and taking back that autonomy and agency she had lost.  But it was a VIOLENT retaking. It was unethical to the n’th degree. But it does seem to coincide with the cycle of abuse that is perpetuated when people are abused: they in turn abuse others some percentage of the time. It is sad, but true.  But just because Pinocchio seemed mentally incapable of functioning in the real world due to his “cybernetic” reprogramming, there were glimpses that he still retained some of his former self/mind because at some point (before Himiko chained him up) he was actually talking, and asking “What is happening to me?” and “Why is this happening to me?” and “Help me.” Things like that. 

But by the end, it became a real face-off of dueling insanities because Pinocchio eventually broke free of his weight, killed a few people along the way (including his creator and the creator’s secretary) and in a bizarre twist, he and Himiko morphed.

It’s hard to say exactly what was going on with all of this because as a non-Japanese speaking viewer, I can’t rely on the subtitles for all the subtext or cultural references.  You can’t even rely on subtitles to be accurate translations of the dialogue.

But, by the end, it seems to me that this film was about how we abuse each other, and the extent to which we’ll go to hold power over others and exploit them. But, it’s also about the power of the human will to overcome such obstacles. In Himiko’s case, she had forgotten about her past abuse, so her own mind had protected her. In Pinocchio’s case, his mind was trying to peek through to tell him that something bad had happened to him. And that’s why he was going insane: because he didn’t have the capacity to right the wrong done to his mind. All he could do was kill the people who did it, and hope that eventually his mind would heal.

The fact that Himiko was making a map of her surroundings was an indicator of the cyberpunkish/postmodern theme, I suppose. With the map, she would no longer need the territory, as Baudrillard would tell you. But, if we translate that into the frame of the mind, there can be dire consequences when the map of the mind replaces the territory of the mind.  Pinocchio’s mind was “remapped” and the territory of his Self was almost nearly gone, all so that he would be a sex slave and could be sold to rich old horny ladies. And with Himiko, her memory had wiped the mental slate clean in order to protect her from the atrocities of her past abuse, and the new map of nothingness was the only thing keeping her sane.

So what is this telling us? Leave the territory intact and natural. Don’t disturb the delicate balance of the mind. Don’t abuse and exploit. A powerful message, really, told in an intense manner. Like I said at the beginning, the incessant screaming and moaning throughout the film really fill the viewer with a sense of high anxiety while watching this.  I suppose we’re supposed to internalize this and react in a way that keeps us from perpetuating such violence and abuse on others. To watch someone enslaving someone who’s already enslaved by their mind is dreadful. But things like that happen every day, in every culture.

Sadly, if we trust Baudrillard, at the moment the map is made, the territory is obliterated. So we can never return. We must stay in insanity. There’s no more Shire as you knew it, Mr. Frodo!

Last Life in the Universe (2003)

I’ve been holding off on writing about this film because I wasn’t quite sure what to say about it.  It’s a film about perception of reality, though on the surface it is about suicide, love, life, living & relationships.

This film reminded me of a Haruki Murakami novel because of the mystery that unfolds for the viewer.  As the film progresses, the viewer sees that what was presented before has now changed, and what this new reality is, is an unstable one for the viewer but maybe not for the characters. Or maybe it is just as unstable for them as it is for us.  It is very much in the same vein as another film I wrote about on this blog, Open Your Eyes (and of course, Vanilla Sky, Mr. McG!)

The film is set in Bangkok, Thailand and the protagonist is a Japanese man (Kenji) who works as a librarian, and a Thai girl (Noi) who is a call girl/prostitute.

Reality comes into question when the viewer gets a glimpse of Kenji’s brother’s full-back tattoo, and later Kenji has this same full-back tattoo. Whether the brother ever truly existed is a matter up for debate, I suppose.  Also, when Noi and her dead twin sister become interchangeable to Kenji without a second glance from him, it becomes clear that something is rotten in the State of Kenji’s mind. 

All I know is that sometimes it’s nice to watch a film and at the end of it I look at D and say: what’s that supposed to mean?!

In many ways, I think this film has some loose intellectual ends, though it was creatively done.

Sayonara Jupiter (1984)

I love Arthur C. Clarke’s Odyssey quadrilogy, and the 2001 film was truly remarkable, so when I saw that this Japanese film was intentionally made to somewhat mimic the 2010 sequel, I couldn’t resist.  Perhaps that was a mistake….

It’s hard to say whether this was a “bad” film or not.  It is what it is:  a cheesy Sci Fi B-movie.  There is a play (i.e. twist) on almost every convention in Clarke’s 2010 book sequel (not to mention on the poor film version of 2010, which I’ve seen but didn’t bother writing about on this blog….).

In Sayonara Jupiter, there was  a very unexpected sex scene in which Eiji and Maria float naked through space (on tables covered with black sheets that you can see, of course), which turned out to be a very long and floaty sequence.   Matter of fact, there were quite a few scenes that were too long and should have been eliminated or reduced.  Barbarella came to mind during this long, drawn out sequence of floating, naked bodies (for the naked bodies part, not the long, drawn out part).

The narrative action throughout didn’t always answer logical questions about how we got from A to B, etc.  And, it wasn’t necessarily a low-budget film because of the elaborate sets, models, explosions, etc. So one has to wonder about a lot of things, like why did they waste time on certain scenes and not tie up narrative loopholes that they otherwise could have covered, etc.  But, it’s a B-movie.

And the addition of the hippy singer (Peter), his dolphin named Jupiter, and his cult group of rainbow-painted & overly tanned followers added a bizarre twist (on the space theme), especially when there were moments of folkish kumbaya pastoral montage, very much like music videos you would expect from John Denver, only sung in Japanese. 

I suppose what this film was trying to convey was that humans need to do whatever it takes to survive, and if that means blowing up Jupiter to either provide energy to the outer colonies, or to throw a black hole off course, then we will do what we have to do.  And, of course, Peter’s resistance movement created a nice counterpart to the domination of space theme.  Peter’s Jupiter Church wanted to preserve the natural state of Jupiter (the planet, not the dolphin), and so acted as a Greenpeace-in-Space, trying to sabotage Eiji’s plans to blow up Jupiter and turn it into a sun (this is one of the twists to the 2010plot, where it was the Monoliths who managed to turn Jupiter into another sun).  But, it turns out, the blowing up of Jupiter plan had an emergency use: to save the entire solar system from the growing black hole.  So all’s well that ends well.

Despite the constant, silly, B-movie moments and a mixture of Japanese, English, French, and German language, this film was probably worth the time just to say I watched it. Though I doubt there’s much to be extracted in the ‘profound’ department on this one.

Woman in the Dunes (1964)

Hiroshi Teshigahara directed Woman in the Dunes in 1964, and while I haven’t read Kobo Abe’s novel, on which this film is based, I have recently been reading a lot more Japanese fiction, notably Haruki Murakami.  Murakami led me to this film.  One of the things that keeps me coming back for more Murakami is his persistent placing of his protagonists (or others) into holes that they seemingly cannot get out of.  Something usually happens:  a rope ladder is dropped from above, a guide helps him out through the dark, or some other cyber-punkish narrative twist ends the character’s in-ground (even if it is within the terra firma of the mind) exile.

I’ve known that Abe’s book deals with the same, I suppose psychological, phenomenon of “holes,” and I’ve thought of the novel often, hoping to read it.  But, I decided to watch the film first. The screenplay was written by Abe so perhaps I’m safe in choosing that order. 

What is interesting to me about the film is not necessarily how diabolically the villagers tricked the entomologist, but the cultural reasoning behind keeping the woman down in the dunes.  And, as a second point of interest:  why, ultimately, the entomologist does not leave.

At some point in the film, the woman tells the entomologist about the work that she does and how it helps the village survive.  Well, the work she does is repetitive, tedious, and seemingly un-needed, realistically speaking–because the villagers could just let her out and let the sand cover over her house.  But instead, every night she shovels sand from around her house that has been blown by the wind.  She shovels the sand into buckets and the villagers (who are essentially keeping her prisoner down in the pit so that she will fulfill this utilitarian purpose) hoist up the buckets of sand all night long.  The woman is essentially forced to toil every night at this.  She also does other “woman’s work” in order to earn money.  To add insult to injury, despite the hard work she does every night, she is only given rations of food and water every so often, and not nearly as often as needed.  Needless to say, her life is hard.  And, apparently, without a husband, she gets less from the villagers.

Based on my experience with Japanese fiction, I know that Japan experienced a significant cultural shock when western culture began invading, and that shock is manifested in fiction, film, etc.  I see the woman’s daily shoveling as being indicative of a fear (the villagers’, Japan’s???) of a way of life (the old, non-western way) being overrun by forces (the sand, the west) beyond their control.  Perhaps the novel sheds more light on this, but from what I gathered from the film, the woman was the only person having to do this. It’s unclear as to whether anyone else is having to live such an enslaved, ridiculous life as she.  There were many villagers–they even came around to mock their two captives with a sadistic, sexual taunt–but no other instances of others down shoveling out their holes in the dunes.

What might be happening is that the villagers represent a new way of doing things that requires enslaving or perversely maintaining the old way of doing things (i.e. the woman’s shoveling of the sand).  So while they still live out in the country, and they technically represent the ‘old’ way of life, versus new city life, they almost keep a grossly-exaggerated feudal control over the woman–perhaps this is their last-ditch effort to maintain their cultural identity.  But this reflects very poorly on the villagers if their cultural identity is dependent upon exploiting a poor, innocent woman.  Perhaps this is the message–that it’s a poor reflection on “us” that we have to exploit others so needlessly.

This film is very perplexing to me and I don’t think I’ll be able to answer my second question above (why the entomologist stays) until I can figure out why the woman is even there in the first place.  I suppose I’ll need to get the book.  I’m sure I’ll be updating this posting at some point….