Takashi Miike's cinema of outrage.

Williams, Anthony

Despite Western art cinema audiences' appreciation of canonical works of Japanese cinema as represented by Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu, most devotees tend to forget that a popular cinema existed during the same period, apart from Toho's original Godzilla series, which never gained Western attention until fairly recently via cable and DVD/VHS distribution. This cinema co-existed with those prestigious works chosen for screening abroad at film festivals and art house cinemas. They also had much to say about changing social movements within Japanese society in ways similar to those revered works. Takashi Miike's films represent the contemporary incarnation of this vital populist tradition.

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Takashi Miike was born in 1960 and has operated entirely within the excessive realms of a populist Japanese cinema not commonly known to the Western world. Miike grew up in the working-class Kawachi District of Osaka whose multicultural associations contrasted with the usual image of Japanese society as a homogenous world of salarymen and demure wives and daughters. Film was not his first career choice. Enthusiastically devoted to pachinko, motorcycles, and rock music, Miike wished to become a rock singer. However, after attending Shohei Imamura's film school in Yokohama, he began working as assistant director on Imamura's Zegen (1987) and Black Rain (1989) before gradually cutting his teeth as director on direct-to-video films such as Eye Catch Junction (Topuu! Minipato Tai 1991) and making his feature film debut with The Third Gangster (Daisan no Gokundo 1995). Miike has worked continually in film, video, and television, changing from one format to another in a manner inconceivable in the West, where talents are usually confined to a particular area and those who combine multiple artistic aspirations are regarded with suspicion. He often takes over recognized genres within Japanese cinema such as gangster movies, historical dramas (Sabu 2002), and rock movies (Andromeda 1998), working quickly and delivering distinctive excessive touches due to his high speed adrenalin mode of direction. By 1999, Miike had gained international cult status with Audition and Dead or Alive (both 1999), whose western DVD distribution owed much to screenings at international film festivals, gaining him the notoriety of acclaim by "fan boy" audiences. However, despite the fact that he is regarded both at home and abroad as a director of "bad taste" films far removed from the art cinema circuit of his more distinguished predecessors such as Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu, there is much more to his films than the over-the-top qualities hailed by his "fan boy" following. (1)

Takashi Miike's films contain excessive features of cinematic outrage similar to those found in the work of his contemporary Shinya Tsukamoto which often offend Western sensibilities. Born in the same year (1960) in the Shibuya area of Tokyo, Tsukamoto's films such as Adventures of the Electric Rod Boy (1987), Tetsuo (1990), Tetsuo 2 (1991), and Tokyo Fist (1995) extend "body horror" features associated with the films of David Cronenberg to their most grotesque conclusions with lurid, cybernetic images of bodily tranformations evoking contemporary Eastern images of the logical consequences of Freud's worst nightmares. It appears more than coincidental that Miike has cast his contemporary in two of his own films, Dead or Alive 2 (2000) and Ichi the Killer (2001), playing magician Higashino in the first and the devious controller of the title character in the second. Like Miike, Tsukamoto's films have always focused on the family as his recent erotic excursion A Snake in June (2002) reveals. (2) Both directors belong to a popular realm of Japanese cinema using lurid styles and themes in an outrageous manner. Yet, unlike the debased figure of Quentin Tarantino, these directors belong to a specific cultural context suggesting that their chosen style is much more serious than most audiences might believe.

Although Miike's films may appear gratuitously violent and pornographic to most Western audiences, they represent a particular cinema of outrage that symbolizes a rapidly changing world facing the Japanese population today in which the worst aspects of globalization and postmodernism have called former values into question. Rather than retreat into the values of past Japanese cinema, Miike's films confront the nihilistic aspects of cultural change by recognizing their dangerous implications. Although the director may appear to condone or enjoy the personal and social chaos he cinematically depicts, his goal involves making his audiences confront these aspects rather than retreat into now anachronistic realms of ideological denial. Miike's films, with certain exceptions, represent a cinema of excess and outrage. But they often contain more than meets the eye on a visceral level.

Miike's films represent a changed world in which the visual overtones of a different type of cinema have expanded and destroyed the former certainties of that once dominant classical Japanese canonical cinema. Although the director has attracted a cult following due to his deliberate employment of a cinema of outrage designed to offend civilized sensibilities, it is important to view his work against a broader cultural and social context.

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After 1945, Japan changed rapidly with accelerated developments of cultural and industrial modernism. These changes eventually resulted in the manifestation of a particular form of "crisis cinema" related to the breakdown of economic and traditional modes of behavior. Several directors, such as Juzo Itami (1933-1997) and Takeshi Kitano (1947-) have commented on this trend which may be seen at its most devastating in Kinji Fukasaku's critically misunderstood Battle Royale (2000). Itami has spoken of problems facing the parochial nature of a Japanese social structure which encloses itself in a very narrow circle avoiding everything outside it. You try to get along with others inside the circle and ignore those who are outside it. That's the Japanese way. It makes for a society that is peaceful and orderly. If there are disputes, they can be resolved relatively easily. The weakness of this society is that it has no real connection with the outside world. (3)

Itami believed the solution involved breaking the circle and looking to the world outside. However, the outside world also involves an ideological arena influenced by post-war models of American culture and industrialism affected by negative as well as supposedly positive democratic ideas as Takeshi Kitano notes. Commenting on the end of a high-growth era following the post-1945 period, Kitano recognizes that imitating the American model has resulted in reproducing its worst features. When we look at Japan today and wonder why we have all these problems between parents and children, with drug use--well we just have to look at America and see what kind of country its become, where their form of democracy has taken them. Parents have become scared of their own kids. It used to be that adults would scold kids who were running around and making trouble on the train, but now no one does that. When I was a kid I used to get scolded by adults all the time but that doesn't happen anymore. We've lost the ability to distinguish between right and duties. Now the emphasis is totally on rights--no one talks about duties any more and we're going in a very strange direction as a result. (4)

Japanese-based American critic Mark Schilling has also noted changes in Japanese cinema and society during the 1990s where younger directors "began taking an new interest in not only Asians, but all minority groups in Japanese society, including Okinawans, burakumin (outcasts), gays, and AIDS victims. The obsession of a previous generation of filmmakers with the meaning of Japanese identity in the wake of postwar cultural upheaval and spiritual malaise was giving way to a new awareness of the diversity among Japan's ostensibly homogenous masses." (5)

However, this recognition did not entirely disavow issues of social malaise as many of Takashi Miike's films reveal. In fact, due to the influence of American culture on postwar Japan, several of his films exhibit a globally influenced awareness of a postmodernist aura of nihilism and despair transcending national boundaries.

According to Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard in A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and the Rise of Postmodern Cinema, the contemporary era has seen the rise of a particular form of postmodernist cinema characterized by a paranoid vision of a society "shaped by total surveillance and institutional controls obliterating the realm of privacy, free spaces, and social autonomy historically championed by American liberalism." (6) Associated with a pessimistic turn in social and political life, this global postmodernist discourse offers no answer to the deepening crisis in post-capitalist society but instead displays images of Hobbesian disorder characterized by certain disturbing imagery. Trapped in the social immediacy of the present, images attached to media culture tend to eviscerate a collective sense of both past and future. A culture thriving on fabricated images and sounds detached from historical context and meaning, it subverts a deeper understanding of social patterns as they unfold over time. Whether the cinematic moment is Star Wars or The Truman Show or Titanic or Pearl Harbor, all attention is riveted on the momentary, fleeting, and spectacular even where possibly intended social content is somewhere assimilated into the whole. Personalities. melodramatic scenes, surface images, outlandish actions, and technical flourishes easily crowd out historical narrative, whatever the purported ideological substance. The much celebrated information revolution ends up short-circuited by the colonizing power of all-consuming images intrinsic to contemporary media culture -and to much of what we refer to as postmodern cinema. (7)

This description could also apply to the cinema of Takashi Miike should we focus exclusively on stylistic outrage and less on certain other features. In that case, his films would form exploitation companion pieces to postmodernist Hollywood counterparts such as Wag the Dog, Bulworth, and Primary Colors (all 1998) which give us "a trenchant critique of a corrupt, decaying social order without any sense of possible alternatives to it" as Boggs and Pollard comment. (8)

Superficially, Miike's films appear firm candidates for inclusion within this category. But, at the same time, his cinema of outrage often focuses on the dark aspects of Japanese society now emerging after the economic and social collapse of the post-war boom, especially those dealing with the oppression of minority groups involving aberrant forms of sexuality and violence used as vicious forms of social control.

Miike's films often feature diverse nationalities "that the mainstream regarded as scum on the Japanese social pond but who were nonetheless more vital than the gray-suited masses who surrounded them. Among them were young Asians who related to their Japanese counterparts on a basis of equality, including their acts of sex and violence." (9)

Takashi Miike is one of those directors who has benefited from the development of OV Cinema, or direct-to-video cinema, resulting not only in a highly productive output to date but also a creative energy displaying excess and outrage. One could easily label him the "Ken Russell" of Japanese cinema were it not for his interrogation of the social world of his culture often having a serious perspective as well as a mischievous desire to offend as many people as possible. Both Russell and Miike aim at extending the visual boundaries of their national cinemas by stylistically excessive means. While Russell attempted to deconstruct the traditional biopic, Miike cinematically undermines the genres and social taboos of his own national cinema visually and thematically by reworking them in challenging ways. His films and interviews reveal him as a cinematic prankster. He welcomes the prolific opportunities allowed him in film, television, and OV-cinema since 1991 to gain relevant experience by engaging in diverse forms of cinematic outrage which are not entirely iconoclastic.

Significantly enough, his cinema of outrage operates on a similar level to the pessimism contained in the comedies of Juzo Itami who also engages in national provocation. Japanese like getting what you call in English 'reinforcement.' They like to be told that Japanese are wonderful people and that things are just fine the way they are. I'm the opposite. I want to make movies that destroy existing values. My movies have a dose of poison in them--they say that Japanese are no good [laughs]. So I have to make them as comedies, or the dose of poison would be too strong. (10)

Characteristically, most of Miike's work contains vast doses of poison without the benefit of Mary Poppins's "spoonful of sugar" to make "the medicine go down in the most delightful way"! However, the poison may also contain alternative medicinal values suggesting in the minds of audiences different directions that his contemporary Blade Runner society could take.

During several of his interviews contained on DVD issues of his work, Miike has spoken of the role of the family in his work in terms paralleling comments of fellow directors such as Itami and Kitano. Although a film such as Rainy Dog (1998) follows the gangster film format of his first cinematic feature The Third Gangster while extending the sex and violence excesses of Shinjuku Triad Society (1995), it also contains a serious undertow. Takashi sets his alienated Japanese hitman (played by generic regular and favorite actor Sho Aikawa) in Taiwan. One day, the loner finds himself a reluctant parent when his ex-girlfriend leaves him with a little boy she claims is his son. Although initially treating him as a stray dog, he ends up by forming a family with the boy and a woman as he is hunted by a rival gang. Shot before Kitano's Kikujiro (1999), the theme exhibits a common cultural concern. Ironically, Miike's dark iconoclastic version of Pasolini's Theorema, Visitor Q (2001), has the outsider reuniting a dysfunctional family rather than dispersing it. This concept of attempting a return to former values also occurs in Takashi's second installment of the Dead or Alive trilogy, Dead or Alive 2: Birds (2000), whose sub-title evokes his 1998 fantastic feature The Bird People in China. This film dealt with a Japanese salaryman and yakuza who discover a utopian society in southwestern China populated by a tribe whose children grow wings. As Schilling comments, it evokes themes contained in one of the earliest films dealing with outsiders in Japan--Nobuhiko Obayashi's Beijing Watermelon (Pekinteki Suika 1989), namely "that, in their pursuit of prosperity, Japanese have somehow lost sight of the values that made them human, and that it is up to other poorer Asians, whose hearts are still unsullied by materialism, to remind them of what is important. By the end both the salaryman and the yakuza have begun to spread their own wings. In the land where Japanese culture began, they have finally found their spiritual home." (11)

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However, Miike's perspective is highly multifaceted. His one musical to date, The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), celebrates his own dark version of dysfunctional family values. But it reaches a transcendent musical utopian climax with the family outside society celebrating the natural death of the grandfather. His well-known Dead or Alive trilogy has its own specific perspectives.

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Featuring generic stalwarts Sho Aikawa and Riki Takeuchi, Dead or Alive (1999) might appear to be another entry in Japanese cinema's prolific yakuza-eiga gangster genre. But the opening sequence bombards viewers with an MTV visual cocktail suggesting that the film will be "something completely different." After this beginning in the Kabukicho district of Tokyo (the Japanese equivalent to the Triad- dominated territory of Tsimshatshui in Hong Kong cinema) mixing violence, sexuality, and food to visually Rabelaisian excess, Miike then "appears" to offer his unsuspecting viewer traditional generic fare. The narrative deceptively seems to employ the usual melodramatic forms employed by the gangster film interspersed with moments of mischievous excess. Dead or Alive contrasts Aikawa's honest cop to Ryu'ichi/ Riki Takeuchi's gangster grandson of a Chinese "war orphan." But, like City of Lost Souls (2000) and his other films, Miike recognizes that changing times have affected the image Japan normally presents to the world. One of Miike's most outrageous scenes involves a gangster drowning a female in a tub filled with her own shit as a result of a deliberately engineered drug overdose. Although this appears offensive to the tastes of most audiences, Miike's modus operandi in this example of his cinema of outrage involves taking the yakuza-eiga's traditional treatment of women to its logical conclusions and confronting his audience with the dark implications of this theme. As Schilling comments, the Japanese gangster movie is generally regarded as a "disreputable genre whose real-life models are mainly thugs with retrograde ideas about women, minorities, the emperor, and nearly everything under the sun." (12) This is one of several disturbing features in Takashi Miike's cinema of outrage making it much more than a postmodernist mindless celebration of excessive violence.

Both of the protagonists in Dead or Alive care for family members but lose them in a world of arbitrary violence. Ryu'ichi greets his younger brother Toji/ Michisuke Kashiwaya who has returned from a college education in the USA which he has funded. On his return, Ryu'ichi takes Toji to his parents' graveyard located in a muddy industrial wasteland. However, Ryu'ichi sees the eventual contamination of his brother by the yakuza way of life which eventually leads to his death. Toji vainly attempts to break away from his brother's violent world.

The films of Takashi Miike never operate on a didactic level. But, sometimes, significant sequences exist within his work suggesting different directions for characters trapped within an urban hell that not only makes them violent beings but also destroys a younger generation who have no hope of breaking away. (13) Tojima, Dead or Alive's honest cop, struggles to raise 20 million yen to send his teenage daughter for a heart transplant operation in the United States. He succumbs to temptation when he borrows the money from a local yakuza oyabun before Ryu'ichi's revenge enables him to break free of his obligation. Before this happens, Toji's return to help his brother during this violent attack leads to his death. Similarly, Tojima becomes responsible for the death of his partner in the incident leading to the bereavement of the latter's wife and young son. Violence begets violence leading to the poignant destruction of the most vulnerable characters. Tojima's hopes for the future are also destroyed when he sees his wife and daughter blown up by a car bomb planted by Ryu'ichi.

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The final moments of the film initially suggest a formulaic Dirty Harry combat between cop and villain. Yet Miike not only implodes the confrontation from within but explodes his entire narrative moving from generic convention to excess until dark fantastic imagery finally overpowers the sequence. On one level, it appears like a retreat to manga. But it is much more serious and better developed than Tarantino's gratuitous distracting excursion in Kill Bill: Volume One (2003). The final movements never appear arbitrary. They form part of a changing generic dimension that can only end in Miike's own version of Jean-Luc Godard's "Fin du Cinema." The antagonists face each other in a scenario which moves continually from one apocalyptic level of violence to another until cosmic destruction represents the only logical way in which this particular crisis cinema narrative can end. Dead or Alive's excessive elements of male violence have disastrous global consequences.

Miike understood that he could not make an actual "sequel" to Dead or Alive. Instead, he pursued its implications in other directions. Featuring his stars in different roles, Dead or Alive 2: The Birds (2000) represents the director's iconoclastic appropriation of a style resembling Latino "magical realism." This explains his deliberate departure from the excessive features of the earlier film. Miike's cinema of outrage occasionally appears in this film. But it becomes subordinated to a more muted narrative which might disappoint viewers expecting another excessive Dead or Alive sequel repeating the apocalyptic elements contained in the original film's climax. Opening sequences show a young boy who mysteriously changes into hit man Mizuki/Sho Aikawa. But the opening caption of the film, "Where are you?" is one of many graphic interrogative inserts'. It questions Mizuki's adult involvement in his deadly profession after juxtaposing two images of his youthful self and a cosmic landscape showing the moon and the earth. Gangster boss Higashino/Shinya Tsukamoto significantly performs a magical routine involving two cigarette packs representing warring factions of yakuzas and Triads as he commissions Mizuki for an assassination. But his mission becomes usurped by Shu/Riki Takeuchi. Pursued by both sides, Mizuki and Shu leave the urban landscape in fantastic imagery evoking the final scenes of Dead or Alive until they meet each other on a ferry going to a rural south Japanese island.

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Dead or Alive 2 not only evokes the brief idyllic world of Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine (1993), or "gangsters at the seashore" as it is popularly known, but also an alternative world of magic having much to do with an past world of non-violent childhood both major characters have left behind. As Higashino significantly comments, "The whole world loves magic, you know." Dead or Alive 2 provides a magical alternative to the excessively violent world represented by Miike's other films such as Fudoh: The New Generation (1996), Full Metal Yakuza (1997), and Ichi the Killer (2001). As in Dead or Alive, both men are alter egos. They also represent different historical incarnations of the yakuza gangster figure as well as being boyhood friends from the same rural island. Mizuki wears the anachronistic aloha shirt seen on gangsters in earlier yakuza films while also incongruously having his hair dyed blonde in modern fashion. (14) In contrast to Shu's more adult modern attire, the shirt also represents the world of childhood Mizuki has supposedly left behind. As Higashino notes, "You're not a kid anymore, jerk." Both Mizuki and Shu are mistaken for the same person by the Japanese underworld in the opening ten minutes of the film evoking the blood brotherhood bonding begun in Dead or Alive which Dead or Alive: Final (2002) will continue.

The film intersperses flashbacks to the earlier life of the main characters who often transform back into their younger selves. They also sport angelic wings in one scene. Mizuki and Shu begin as isolated individuals who later recognize each other as former childhood friends. Both characters have been "branded to kill" by their adult professions and have no other destination except hell. They finally decide to use their skills to aid starving children throughout the world--a humanitarian gesture which may seem unusual in this director's cinema but having a particular relevance here as documentary shots of starving African children reveal.

Rather than again recreate his imaginative urban Kabukicho fantasy world, Miike uses beautiful location scenes of a rural southern Japanese island where the two characters grew up together in a Catholic orphanage before the young Mizuki mysteriously left for Osaka. It is an Edenic world they have lost after becoming adults in an urban jungle. They encounter a childhood friend (played by Kenichi Endo who portrayed the warped father in Visitor Q). Unlike his later urban counterpart, he is happy in his surroundings and is an expectant father. His role reinforces Miike's frequent comments about the important role of the family in his films. It certainly occupies a key position here. While Mizuki, Shu, and others perform a children's pantomime in their innocent rural world, Miike uses obvious Eisenstein-influenced montage cuts to reveal the bloody urban activities of their counterparts. During the performance, Shu appears as a lion with Mizuki as a water imp--two figures from the gentle non-urban world of Japanese mythology. The contrast between different worlds is as deliberate as the October-like influence of the frequently interspersed graphic question, "Where are you going?" throughout the film. It last appears after the shot of a new baby boy who may soon grow up to be "branded to kill" like his deceased adult uncles. When Mizaki and Shu finally return to their idyllic island paradise to die, Miike again juxtaposes images of their past youthful and adult appearances before the final shots show their younger selves reunited again in a utopian non-urban community before dying.

The final scene also complements those touching progressive values contained in Miike's most positive and unusual work The Bird People in China. Although the director may belong to the late baby boomer phase of post-war Japan who benefited from the economic miracle, his views concerning the changes capitalist values have made on his society are by no means celebratory.

Dead or Alive: Final (2002) concludes the trilogy in its own distinctive way. Opening with sequences from old silent South East Asian fantasy and martial arts films, Dead or Alive: Final displays Yokohama's post-apocalyptic world of A.D. 2346 where nothing has really changed. Far from celebrating the future as a utopian arena of globalization, Miike depicts it as a bleak environment where the same oppressive forces dominate the landscape as they do in his contemporary yakuza films. He contrasts the naive futuristic visions contained in the opening scenes with a grim reality calling into question utopian visions of a future in which things supposedly will get better. Miike presents his leading actors as opposing figures as in the first film. But, they are again complementary opposites. Riki Takeuchi's "Deckard" character Takeshi Honda now pursues Sho Aikawa's "Roy Batty" replicant surrogate Ryo in a world dominated by the Tyrell figure of corrupt Mayor Wu/Richard Chen. (15) They exist in a world in which past and present co-exist in bleak postmodernist imagery. For example, Miike includes a bullet-trajectory homage to Ringo Lam's Full Contact (1992) but allows Ryo to deflect the threat in a traditionally generic manner. When a bullet moves towards Honda, he deflects it with a wooden handled samurai sword similar to actions performed by actors Bunta Sagawara and Takakura Ken in classic yakuza movies of the 60s and 70s.

Like Blade Runner and Heroic Trio 2: The Executioners (1993), the causes of the apocalypse remain mysterious until Wu informs Honda that overpopulation led to a war which destroyed the environment. "We must not make the same mistake again." Wu manufactures a drug aimed at controlling the population. But his chosen subjects are Chinese rather than Japanese. Since Cantonese speaking characters such as gangleader Fong (played by Los Angeles-raised Amerasian actor Terence Yin, Miike's equivalent of Hong Kong cinema's Michael Fitzgerald Wong), who also speaks to Ryo in American-accented English, are outsiders in this society, the director suggests that the apocalyptic war may have echoed that earlier period of Japanese expansion into China. This history is still a taboo topic in contemporary Japan. Such meanings appear possible in a director whose social insights often resemble those contained within Kinji Fukasaku's earlier generic and historical explorations in the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (1973-1974). Mayor Wu exerts his own form of population control upon the Chinese population of Yokohama who are not only treated as a despised underclass but also subjected to atrocities reminiscent of war crimes perpetuated during the infamous Rape of Nanking in 1937. Furthermore, although Miike's future world contains multi-cultural features as in City of Lost Souls (2000), his vision undermines one of the celebratory images of the postmodern condition. Cultural and linguistic mergers do not necessarily guarantee human freedom as violent apocalyptic imagery in City of Lost Souls and Dead or Alive 3 demonstrate.

Miike's revelation concerning the "blood brother" identities of his two leading stars makes explicit elements contained in the trilogy's earlier installments. Like their former counterparts, Ryo and Honda are father figures in several ways forming deep bonds with their adoptive and actual sons. Ryo understands that he belongs to an "old world" in which his opponents were both humans and replicants. But, like Roy Batty, he has human feelings. "Although I'm a robot, I still wish the battle would end and I could go home." While Honda finally discovers that his revered family life is merely a programmed lie, Ryo eventually forms a touching nuclear family bonding with Fong's bereaved girlfriend Jun. But this cannot last. After repeating a montage of scenes from the earlier films, both Ryo and Honda move towards that final confrontation towards which they have been programmed. Both finally return "home" when they ironically recognize that "destruction is our source of life." They battle each other and become reincarnated symbiotically. The final scenes reveal a deadly avenging robotic angel giving those briefly-seen angelic figures in Dead or Alive 2 a new twist as Miike concludes his trilogy with his reunited heroes about to take revenge on Mayor Wu.

Like the rest of Miike's films, the Dead or Alive trilogy can not be entirely defined as either self-indulgent or a nihilistic postmodernist celebration of cinematic excess. Global blurring of boundaries never involves positive utopias. Yet the future direction of Miike's work remains ambiguous. It may suffer recuperation by nihilistic postmodernist discourses if style, rather than substance, takes center stage. As Art Black comments, critics generally tend to concentrate on "Miike's bravura sequences, his stark surreality and apocalyptic vision, his tour-de-force rapidfire editing that makes the opening of the film look like an amphetaminized trailer for itself, and the bold, imaginative violence that has become Miike's trademark. The surface, the gloss, the astonishingly graphic showmanship was so striking--and still is--that it tends to mask Miike's subtexts and abiding personal concerns." (16)

These concerns certainly exist as Miike's recent outrage Gozu: A Yakuza Horror Story (2003) reveals. While fastidious viewers might react in a manner recalling earlier reviews of Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), this would lose sight of important connections between style and substance. Miike has displayed an iconoclastic version of closet homosocial elements common to classical Hollywood gangster films such as Little Caesar (1931) and later examples such as The Pawnbroker (1965) as well as the traditional yakuza movie. In many ways, it is a dark cinematic version of elements contained in Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's 1980s study of homosexual elements in classic literary texts appropriately titled Between Men. Like the rest of Miike's work, Gozu reveals new directions. If he can develop the stylistic forms of his cinema of outrage into the type of social critique represented by Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity and Battle Royale, some significant achievements may result. His recent films suggest some promise. During 2002, Miike remade Fukasaku's bleak classic 1975 gangster film Graveyard of Honor, updating it from the original war and postwar era to reflect the equally dehumanized and violent era of the Japanese economic miracle and the unexpected recession of the 1990s. Miike also shot a humanistic comedy, Shangri-La in the same year, about the residents of a homeless camp who help an unemployed printer return to his business and former life. The title of this film also echoes themes within The Bird People of China, as well as Miike's stated concerns of the necessity of returning to a more humane form of society while at the same time expressing a deep awareness of how problematic this goal actually is. (17)

Dedicated to Oyabun Weisser of Florida and Kobun Lewis of Illinois.

NOTES

1 For a good introduction to Miike's work see Tom Mes, Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike. London: FAB Press, 2004. I express thanks to Ms. Gabrielle Kang for loaning me her copy.

2 See Tom Mes, "Shinya Tsukamoto Interview," http:www.MidnightEye.com. 10.23.2002; Mes, "A Snake in June," op.cit.

3 "Juzo Itami," Mark Schilling, Contemporary Japanese Film. New York: Weatherill, 1999, 76. Significant comparisons may be made with certain Western forms of "crisis cinema." See here Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Washington, D.C.: Maissoneuve Press, 1993.

4 Schilling, p. 100. Kitano's comments equally apply to Nikkatsu Studio's Subway Serial Rape series (1985-1988) which often contrast graphic assault on females with passengers who passively sit and watch the proceedings. Despite the unwholesome nature of these scenes director Suji Kataoka clearly condemns the passengers who never intervene to help the women. See Thomas Weisser and Yuko Mihara Weisser. The Sex Films: Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia. Miami, Florida: Vital Books, Inc. 1998, pp. 421-422.

5 Schilling, p. 45.

6 Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and the Rise of Postmodern Cinema. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2003, p. 13)

7 Boggs and Pollard, 29. However, for an excellent critique of the nihilistic dimensions of postmodernism see In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda. Eds. Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997.

8 Boggs and Pollard, p. 129.

9 Schilling, p. 50.

10 Schilling, pp. 81-82.

11 Schilling, p. 50.

12 Schilling, The Yakuza Movie Book: A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films. Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press, 2003, p. 11.

13 Fudoh: The New Generation (1996) is another grim example of this theme which drastically destroys the traditional myths of family loyalty to exhibit instead a grim social Darwinist world which violently consumes the younger generation.

14 Such merging of traditional and contemporary styles is obviously deliberate. As Schilling comments, the dyed blonde hair represents the mark of defiance on the part of a Japanese Generation X figure "whose interests were often intensely, even bizarrely, personal, rather than being group-orientated and socially sanctioned. Their resistance to the conforming pressures of Japanese society manifested itself more in small individual gestures of defiance--dying one's hair blonde or eating fast food on commuter trains--than in organized acts of protest." See Contemporary Japanese Film, p. 37.

15 For the influence of Blade Runner on contemporary Japanese cinema see Schilling, 36, pp. 47-48). For its role as a cultural symbol of contemporary American postmodernist malaise see Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear. New York: Henry Holt, chapter 7; p. 363, Boggs and Pollard, p. 247. In their review of Blade Runner, the authors note a key feature that will have later relevance both to contemporary Japanese cinema and Dead or Alive 3. "Deckard is cold and detached by nature, having inspired the name "sushi" given to him by his ex-wife." (p. 254) Mayor Wu and the new female recruit in Honda's team later criticize him for his workaholic tendencies which distance him from an appropriate loving relationship with his actual family.

16 Art Black, "The Films of Takashi Miike." Japanese Cinema Essential Handbook. 5th edition. Eds. Thomas Weisser and Yuko Mihara Weisser. Miami, Florida: Vital Books, 2003, p. 416.

17 See "Takashi Miike Interview (August 2000)," Mark Schilling, The Yakuza Movie Book, p. 81.

Tony Williams is Professor and Area Head of Film Studies in the Department of English at Southern Illinois University. He has recently written The Cinema of George Romero (Wallflower Press, 2003) and Body and Soul: The Cinematic Vision of Robert Aldrich (forthcoming).