Elegy for Takashi Miike

Part I
14 March 2007

My first encounter with Takashi Miike was watching a movie called “Gozu.” The grainy style of the film and the strangeness of the plot made me think it was a movie from the 60s or 70s (I was tired and didn’t notice the cell phones that cropped up in the first hour). The whole thing seemed to be filled with the kind of symbolism that filmmakers of that era felt compelled to put into their films: a car gets a flat tire from running over a bone in the road and a man with half his face painted white offers help; an old woman spurts milk from her breasts and whips her mentally disturbed brother in an attempt to summon a spirit that cries like a baby. In a central scene, a half-naked man with the head of a cow appears in the night and licks the face of a man in search of his missing friend.
It was fun and often humorous, but I wrote it off because I assumed that underneath it all, there was probably some easily deciphered statement being made. Maybe it was a political allegory (one character, the American proprietress of a liquor store, is featured in front of a prominent American flag and has to read her Japanese lines off cue cards) or an attempt at creating an ‘alternative’ view of reality like Salvador Dali tried to in “Un Chien Andalou,” a world that’s visually striking and memorable, but ultimately far too cool for the rest of us poor spectators to be invited into.
I have fun watching such things because they seem crazy and predictable, but it's fun at the expense of the filmmaker. Ultimately, I enjoy it only because it’s the product of a very predictable mind that thinks its own ideas are so original that they can only be expressed through an elaborate code of symbolism and myth that turns out, in the end, to be redundant.
But there’s another reason someone might make a movie as weird as “Gozu,” a reason much more honest and much more obscure. The filmmaker might be a person truly confounded and mystified by life. As I re-watched scenes of “Gozu,” and eventually the whole movie, I started to think maybe that’s what really was going on here. Or, even more radical, maybe the guy who made this movie was just fucking around in the most devilish way possible. And so this is how I first got hooked on the movies of Takashi Miike.

Part II
21 March 2007


So I was thinking the other day, is this Takashi Miike a lightweight?
How to define a lightweight? I think about someone like Woody Allen. I love Woody Allen, but when I read interviews in which he says he’s not going to make any films dealing with the Iraq war, I think he’s wussing out in some ways, especially when he’s so bold about talking about the war when he’s not behind the camera.
In his movie “Gozu”, Takashi Miike shows a middle aged woman filling bottles with her own milk to sell to children, and later a sexy young girl gives birth to a full-grown man. This definitely breaks some taboos about what it is we’re physically comfortable watching onscreen. But Adam Sandler breaks taboos about what we’re physically comfortable seeing, and that doesn't make his work especially interesting.
What I wanted to know is whether or not Takashi Miike has ever had the guts to make a political statement.
The closest answer I can find is in the movie “The Bird People in China” (“Chugoku no Chojin”), which follows a Japanese businessman on a trip into the mountains of Yunnan Province of China to evaluate a potentially rich vein of jade. This is the least violent of T.M.’s films. In fact, one of the major themes is the longing to escape violence, embodied by a psychotic Japanese Yakuza (gangster) who has been shunted into a low profile assignment in China that chafes at him.
A series of accidents leaves our party of businessman, Yakuza and Chinese guide stranded in a rugged and beautiful region of the world, and Takashi Miike does an incredible job at depicting the quiet way in which an encounter with a “primitive” culture can be simultaneously thrilling and unsettling for people who have never known an alternative to high-tech civilization.
What’s especially interesting is the idea, brought up early on in the movie, that Yunnan Province is actually the anthropologic source of Japanese culture. As the movie goes on we see how the main characters are tantalized by the idea that this remote, bucolic river valley is where they belong, and that their truest identity is to be found among the gentle, welcoming people who live there.
When the Yakuza finally blows his top at the end of the movie, he’s not like the blindly sadistic mobsters in T.M.’s “Ichi the Killer,” nor like the trumped up maniacs in “MPD Psycho” who have been genetically engineered to kill just for the sake of it. The Yakuza is determined that if the discovery of viable jade is broadcast, it will bring a wave of development, pollution and crime that will destroy this most unspoiled region of the world. And we actually stand by him because T.M. has let the natural scenery speak for itself in this slow-paced, luxuriant film.
And yet the indigenous people are the first to clamor for civilization. Once the vein of jade proves to be viable, they cheer, “Now we will get electricity!”
I’m not saying that the only way to become a worthwhile filmmaker is to go out and make clear, Al Gore-like statements on current issues ripped from today’s headlines. But “The Bird People of China” sheds light on ideas that seem to inhabit all Takashi Miike’s movies. In “Gozu,” the main character gets lost in the boondocks of Japan where logic seems to dissolve and a form of primitive, ritual magic seems to hold reality in its sway. In “Audition,” a comfortable television executive has a close and brutal encounter with a woman who inhabits a much harsher world of petty crime and sexual abuse. In both of these movies the friction between two worlds is handled like a drug trip, which is fine. It’s interesting to watch.
But in “Bird People of China,” T.M. visits a much more realistic intersection of worlds, and the results are impressive.

Part III

28 March 2007

One theme that keeps coming up in Takashi Miike’s movies is family. Even in his Yakuza movies, there’s a sense that there’s a familial bond between the gangsters. In “MPD Psycho,” the main character is a detective whose mind is home to a family of personalities who are sometimes at odds but ultimately have an affinity with one another. Two of Miike’s strongest films deal explicitly with family.
“The Happiness of the Katakuris” is about a family that buys a house in a remote part of Japan, right at the foot of an active volcano. At first it looks as though they won’t get any guests at all, but the real problem turns out not to be a lack of guests, but the fact that the guests keep dying. The funniest of these death scenes is one where a famous sumo wrestler comes in with his underage girlfriend. You don’t need to be too imaginative to guess how it ends up.
TM has always had a talent for throwing comedy into places you wouldn’t expect it. The comedy is what elevates his movies over their various genres. “Katakuris” is different because it’s intrinsically a comedy. At the heart it’s about the pretensions of the characters. The father wants to reunite his family while getting rich quick. The grandfather wants to ennoble himself by taking the blame for all the dead customers. The daughter falls in love with a con artist who is obviously Asian but is passing himself off as a British serviceman and member of the royal family.
It all gets pushed over the top when, about a third of the way in, it becomes a musical comedy. When the Katakuris find their first dead customer, they break into an 80s style video. The mother and father do a karaoke number complete with a shimmering disco ball. The con artist Richard Sagawa and his victim do an amazing number about the glories of falling in love.
It’s not a deep movie, but it works because there is a sense that Takashi Miike means what he’s saying. The myth of a happy family that can muddle through is as ridiculous as the phony story of Prince Charles having an illegitimate Japanese cousin who’s flying over Iraq, but for some reason we all buy into the former myth while seeing right through the latter. It’s only by falling for ridiculous delusions that we’re able to survive, so let’s go ahead and be happy.
“Visitor Q” is a much scarier movie that touches on the same topic. We’re brought into the troubled life of a tv reporter who’s career has been ruined after he broadcast a man-on-the street interview in which he gets sodomized by a group of teenage boys. Now his world is a nightmare. His wife is a heroin addict who gets beaten by her son, who in turn is beaten up by bullies. His teenage daughter is a prostitute, and in the opening scene he pays her for sex. His ex-lover, a news reporter, can barely stand being around him, but he continues to harass her with his new idea: a reality show based on the ruin of his own life.
This is not easy stuff to watch, but it’s not exactly gratuitous. As in Camus’ “The Plague,” the goal here seems to be to show what happens when the things we dread invade our “normal life.” As in “Gozu,” one of the chief images of “Visitor Q” is an older woman—the mother, in this case—who finds that her breasts can miraculously produce huge quantities of milk. By the end of the movie, she’s transformed into a goddess-like figure.
I suspect that both of these movies are about the Japanese recession of the 1990s. There is a game afoot, and both of these families are clearly the losers—losers in the global economy, losers in the Japanese social hierarchy, losers in the search to satisfy one another. But they have been trained to try and make the best of things, to act optimistic, and this leads them to a strange sort of Hell where humiliation and death become the only sacraments left.