What seems to unite the vignettes is the sense of alienation that seems to pervade life in this modern capital. The emotional bonds that would seem to connect people are torn asunder under the pressures of modern life, pressures that manifest themselves frequently in destructive forms.
In the first story we have a young couple who arrives for the first time in Tokyo, in search of new opportunities. The young man is an aspiring film maker, while his girlfriend lends him emotional support. However, their relationship is not stable (an ongoing theme in the film), and the cracks become evident as this couple struggles to find an apartment and gain an audience for the film they have produced. Incidentally, the film is a vaguely futuristic fable which is couched in gimmicks (smoke billowing around the audience), and visual tricks that quite frankly stress the ridiculous as well as the vaguely menacing.
This first vignette takes a sudden turn into fantasy, one that leads to a vaguely unsettling ending. The girlfriend, who has come to feel more threatened and undervalued while in the city, seems to suffer a nervous breakdown and becomes, quite literally, a chair. There are humorous scenes in which her character dashes around the city naked, only to assume the form of an inanimate object when people approach too closely. She is finally taken in by another man, and she learns to accomodate herself to his needs, having abandoned her previous relationship.
The irony is, she no longer has a relationship with anyone. She has retreated into solitude, acting as a passive observer, taking the guise of a chair which lends support but does little else. The city has served, in this case, to dehumanize her, robbing her of any vitality other than as a woman who is reduced to a sense of yearning rather than realization and participation in an active lifestyle. What might have been meant as whimsical becomes unsettling, and this quality is transmuted necessarily to the city, one in which people are similarly transformed into cogs who assume their places. The creative types (her former boyfriend) will readily assume a new guise, and it is speculated that he will gain the recognition that he desires, filming perhaps commercials and thus, perhaps, sacrificing his creative vision in the interest of a career. She, however, has been swallowed up entirely.
In the second vignette we have the story of Mr. Merde, an unusual man who emerges from the sewers to threaten bourgeois society. He will walk along the sidewalks with a curious stride, grabbing flowers which he stuffs in his mouth. He also eats cash.
Mr. Merde has also secluded himself in the sewers, and he also seems to lead a very solitary life. He is hidden, and seems unable as well as unwilling to communicate with others. Perhaps we are supposed to view him as the embodiment of the isolation that defines all of modern and urban life, in which we all seclude ourselves in our private caccoons, unwilling to engage in a vibrant community life.
Much has been said about urban life, and about the way in which our cities dehumanize us, with an architecture that overwhelms us with scale, and that frustrates any attempt at intimacy. Perhaps this is a stretch for communities emerge in cities as well, and isolation is perhaps more pervasive in the wide and open landscapes of our rural regions. However, the thesis seems to be that Mr. Merde stands for the energy of repression, of urges that are never expressed, and of a sense of self-loathing that is irrational. This quality is especially evident in his communication of the idea of obeying the "God" who has created him and demands that he carry out a mission.
Mr. Merde hates people. He will ultimately engage in an episode where he throws grenades at the crowds of observers, killing them mercilessly. As a zealot, he claims to obey impulses that derive from a hidden entity, and professes to be religious. If so, it is certainly a mocking portrayal of the zealotry and the literalism that characterides so many of the fundamentalist groups, from the Islamic groups that are so much in the news and that engage in terrorism in the name of religion to the fundamentalist Christians who murder abortion doctors.
However, the religious aspect does not seem to be especially noteworthy. If anything, the tone seems to suggest a wry take on the traditional monster movies that Japan has produced since the 1950s. Indeed, the terrifying cry of Godzilla is echoes from time to time, as if to suggest that these impulses emerge from a cultural substrate that reflects on the irrationality of man's destructive capacities. This tone makes for a vignette that is uneven and seems, at times, to be somewhat amateurish. The characters are too extreme, as was the case with the old characters in the monster movies, who reveal no subtlety but are instead subordinated to spectacle. In the end, it is suggested that Mr. Merde will proceed to haunt all major metropolitan areas.
And finally, the last film deals with a phenomenon that is receiving more attention both in Japan as well as in South Korea. This has to do with the Hikiko-mori, the adults who have withdrawn from modern life and who refuse to emerge from their houses or their rooms.
Their situation is one that has received more attention during the past years, and is held to be symptomatic of a new form of psychosis that is rooted in a deep sense of alienation. As such, this urge to withdraw is part of the trend we see in the three stories, where withdrawal is made manifest in all the characters.
We have a man who has lived in a small house for ten years, and who spends his time reading as well as organizing the detritus that enters into his life. He will gather the debris of his life and organize it, making evident a supreme obsession with orderliness. He seems to live outside of time, watching as he does the light and the movement of the hands of his clock. If not for the money he receives from his father in envelopes that are sent to him (his lifestyle is subsidized by this man, with whom he would seem to have a conflictive relationship), he would not have been able to engage in this movement of retreat.
The mood and the slow, languid pace suggest meditation but also melancholy. He is unhappy, and would seem to be stuck in a prison, however much he may couch it as a refuge. But one day, when he is receiving his weekly order of a delivered pizza, he makes eye contact with the person who delivers it, a young woman with select tattoos. He gazes at her, and remarks that this is the first eye contact he has had with someone else in ten years. The earth then proceeds to shake, and she faints in his apartment.
The man is helpless, and doesn't know how to react. There has been a disruption in the social bonds that define all human relationship, and the codes are inscrutable. Luckily, she has tattoos which consist of button, and which would seem to suggest reset buttons or ways in which to communicate messages. He presses the one that is labeled "coma", and she wakes up.
This is another parable of difficult communication, as was evident in the other vignettes in which the characters seem unable to reach out to others. These are all stories that have to do with distancing and alienation, and in this case, the hikko-mori suffers a change of heart, as if this touch has energized something within him. He takes the momentous step of emerging from his cave (as Mr. Merde had emerged from the sewer, but with less destructive tendencies) and looking for this girl.
And he comes to the surprising realization that he is not alone. The whole city seems abandoned, and everyone seems to recoil from contact with others. He sees an empty city in which everyone has secluded themselves, and thus, we have these haunting vistas of streets and avenues and people behind windows, passively looking out. This image would seem to reflect something about the modern human condition and the way in which intimacy has become an impossible prospect. We lead vicarious lifes, in which we observe others, too afraid to participate.
The temblors serve to impel people to consider their situation. These temblors seem to reflect the energies of the psyche, and the way in which emotions and deep internal processes need to find tangible expression. The man finds the woman and, after another episode of shaking, he manages to touch her again. This time he touches the button that is labeled "love", and the story ends with her gazing back at him with a fixed expression. Have we all become emotional automatons?
All in all, I enjoyed the emotional resonance of the last story the best. I look forward to seeing more films by the South Korean director of this vignette, Bong Joon-ho.
Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011
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