My first kiss. I was so happy. I cried.
I miss Mike.
Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.1118 Contemporary Japanese Cinema
Professor Jung Bong Choi
October 10, 2009
Miike’s Legacy of Shrilling Violence
Needles (male-sized for Kakihara; female-sized for Asami), knives (fancy handknives belonging to Wong’s underage sexual partner; secret blades sticking out from Ichi’s heels), hooks (piercing Suzuki’s back side so as to hang him from the ceiling), sabers (that almost chop down Suzuki’s head), and metal wires (Asami’s favorite slicing weapon) are the signatures of Takeshi Miike’s films. Because of the extreme shrilling sensations that they produce, in the same films, glasses, wine bottles, and baseball bats are rated secondary, whereas gun-shootings, car-chasings, and fistfights simply do not compare. What leads to the use of such vicious weapons in Miike’s films? How do such tortures happen? What ends do they achieve? Based on three of his films, Ichi the Killer, Shinjuku Triad Society, and Audition, this essay explores Miike’s legacy of shrilling violence.
The skeletons of the three stories have one thing in common, that is, their characters often commit violent acts out of revenge and hatred; however, there is an additional flavor in Ichi the Killer, which is a perverted sense of sadomasochist pleasure. In Audition, Asami, a ballet dancer, tortures Aoyama, a film company executive, as a form of punishment. Probably once a victim herself, she is reminded of her pains by men that flirt and sleep with several women. In Shinjiku Triad Society, a more nuanced form of hatred and revenge is played out by the characters’ complex backgrounds. Kiriya is a corrupt cop who is tipped by yakuza gangs. He is determined to eradicate Wong, a generous gangster leader who donates his money to his poor native village in Taiwan. Even though Kiriya is half Japanese and half Chinese, his feelings towards Chinese seem more inclined to the negative side because he used to be physically humiliated as a Japanese war orphan in China. Being Taiwanese and thus Chinese, Wong becomes Kiriya’s enemy doubly. The plot of Ichi the Killer also is fraud with hatred and revenge, but the film’s sadomasochistic undercurrent often gains an upper hand. Ichi is mentally ill. Even though most of the time, he kills because he is told to avenge his bullies, when sufficiently provoked, he kills for pleasure too. For examples, he slices both Karen’s and an unknown prostitute’s throat after seeing these women becoming tantalizingly weak and fearful. Kakihara shares Ichi’s love for pain and violence. Uninhibited by guilt as in Ichi’s case, Kakihara devises as many different ways as he can of torturing his victims; he then performs these tortures with an audience, not lease bothered if anyone should have a similar appetite.
Violence not just happens in Miike’s films, it rarely happens unplanned. The party that inflicts pain must be in total control of the situation while its victim must be totally vulnerable. Ichi is trained in karate; theoretically he only needs people to spread out nicely in an open space to conduct his surprise attacks. However, Kakihara plays with completely immobile and defenseless bodies. He ropes one to a chair and hooks another to a ceiling, all according to his whim. In Audition, Asami poisons Aoyama before she goes on to cut off his foot and pierce his innards and eyeballs. InShinjiku Triad Society, Kiriya slams a chair on the face of a prostitute who is a threat to no one at the moment that it happens. In another occasion, Kiriya rapes her with her hands cuffed. To summarize, unbalanced power dynamics tunes the violence in Miike’s films one notch up, making it shrilling. When two parties’ strengths are evened out, nothing is as exciting anymore. For example, the numerous gunfight scenes in these three films actually do not leave a strong impression on anyone at all.
The questions of why such violence happens and how such violence happens shall finally be tied with the more important question of the significance of such violence. On one level, shrilling violence is sensational; it helps make Miike’s films fairly distinctive among other directors’ works. Having such an edge over his competitors is necessary to survive in Japan’s film industry in the 1990s, as Miike mentions so himself in an interview in the DVD of Shinjiku Triad Society. On a second level, the shrilling violence can have a deeper meaning because it is both a gesture of offering and of cautioning. Miike is like someone who hands out heroine while disseminating information about the awful consequences of inhaling this pernicious substance. There are more than just a few opportunities in Miike’s films where spectators can sympathize with the characters. While it is tempting to identify with them, the will to distance from them is made present by the shrilling violence too, though I believe that the reason to pull back is well extended beyond the shrilling violence per se.
