Degrees of degradation - love, bodies, blood and more! P1

Part 1 of 2, pending commentary sufficient to establish a relevant direction for the rest.


There is a scene in Yoshihiro Nishimura’s 2008 film Tokyo Gore Police in which the sadist villain, peering down twin gun barrels that have replaced his eyes, power drills into the shin bone of a screaming man strapped to a chair. This is followed by a scene of staggeringly extravagant gore, all in the back halls of a fetish club whose performers, genetically modified and mutated, include a snail woman with tentacle-mounted eyes and a breathing, heaving, flesh-and-bone chair, presumably sentient, though doomed to a chair's-life-long sentence of inner imprisonment à la Johnny Got His Gun. 



Whence the horror? Oh, from just about everywhere - the prolonged existential anguish of the deformed, the dark hell of solitary confinement for one's natural life, the degradation and obliteration of the flesh, the sordid pleasure of the degrader... The body and soul tremble at the sight and thought of it. And yet certain Japanese film-makers, as perhaps best demonstrated by Takashi Miike's Ichi The Killer, seem easily able to take these vast horrors for granted, move immediately past their initial visceral shock, and playfully manipulate their excesses on the plane of aesthetics, entertainment, idea. 


I think of the controversy fired by the 2006 film Shortbus, in which graphic sex was similarly taken for granted and used for the expression of idea or feeling (which of course includes titillation), and I see both a connection and a great, great distance. Connection? Both sex and gore threaten the boundaries of the body, forcing its extension well past the isolated, integrated wholeness that we're surprisingly still good at believing is our natural condition in the world. Difference? Gore in general, and Japanese hyper-gore in particular, take this extension and stretch it well past our thresholds of tolerability, understanding, "taste." (By "our" and "we" I refer to audiences who remain sensitive to these excesses - i.e. not those "Western" viewers who have inured themselves through repeated viewings, and so appreciate the aesthetic of the genre, nor those Japanese viewers who have been with the genre from its beginnings.) Sex can smudge the line, but stays on the near side of it - a fountain of blood from a julienned neck puddles and froths well past it, wiping it out entirely. 


That the directors are able to start with the gore, and use it for story - rather than use the story to lead the audience to some more-or-less-justified, more-or-less artless splattering, as in much American cinema - speaks volumes about some things usually frustratingly outside the reach of language. They seem able to take for granted that audiences won't get hung up on the appearance of the grotesque, but will happily follow its contours as it takes on a bigger shape. For many reasons, American audiences seem less able to accomodate bodily horror except as a spectacle unto itself; there's no American film tradition that operates with such ease so far past our taken-as-natural thresholds of mutilation, transgression and organic breakdown. (Certainly, there are exceptions, many of which perhaps take their cue from the distinct Japanese style - e.g. Tarantino's Kill Bill.) Which makes me wonder about the Japanese experience of the body - "experience" in its full sense of feeling (speakable or ineffable), certainty, doubt, perception of its boundaries, forceful abundances and lacunae, expectations of its abilities and failures, its organic natural history and inevitable decay. This is, of course, no new or lone wonder. If you don't mind, I'll shimmy laterally across some strange terrain.


For the overwhelming majority of humans' existence as social creatures (continuing in many cases into the present day, despite contagious urbanisation), family members lived and slept in close proximity and so children were exposed from the beginning to the snuffling grunts of copulating parents, the expulsion of bowels and bladder, etc. Equally, in communities that lacked or lack the medical advantages of anesthetic, antibiotic, and specialized surgery, administered at a distance from one's peers, life was punctuated by brutal accident without sanitizing treatment, and infections, loss of limb, swellings and burstings, rots and festerings, were common sights. Without hospitals in which to closet away our illnesses, the body's wholeness and integration is a fragile and threatened thing. Faced with death, disease and injury, and raised in an environment teeming with carnal activity, how might the experience of such a person's body differ from our own? The sense of fixed boundary, that our selfhood and agency properly begin and end at the border of our skin, is a peculiar one, and would certainly be punctured by the most quotidian social experience in an environment like I've described. Seeing one's fluids spill outwards, one's silhouette permanently change after the lopping off of a limb, one's peer succumb to madness and speak words that are "not his own," one's seniors penetrate one another sexually or medically, etc., etc., would perhaps underscore permeability, porousness, the integration of individuals with each other as opposed to as single units... And how, then, would this affect the immediacies of nausea, disgust, horror at the sight of dismemberment? Would the loss of a part feel like a reduction of the whole in the way it does for us? (I think of amputation and the enormous anxiety related to it; perhaps the best example being castration.)


I am deeply partial to a Frenchwoman whose childhood was full of physical contact, of loving rubs of the head and warm hugs and siblings sleeping happily in a bed together. The thought of this as a lifestyle makes me uncomfortable, requiring as I do significant buffering from prolonged contact with others in this way. As a child, I slept in my own bed, received warm attention from my parents but neither expected nor received such high-intensity affective reinforcement. How might the concrete physical sensation of a back-rub be different for her now, as an adult, from my own? How might they compare?

A prisoner subject to the surveillance and discipline of a penal regime endures constant exposure, bodily regulation, corporal punishment, visceral and scathing verbal abuse, constrained movement, forceful and routinized schedules, and so on. For that matter, so too do most soldiers and school children (though with much-reduced severity nowadays), which will be no surprise to those of you familiar with Foucault. One's habits, structures of expectation, most intimate inner workings (the timing and means of erotic release, the timing of one's hunger and satisfaction, the moving of one's bowels, and so on), are all coordinated and enforced, so that the system they comprise is not the expression of a given inmate's individuality but is instead an orchestration of many bodies, all of which are forced to participate but no single one of which contains the whole. Now connect this to teamwork, committee, joint paper-writing, online message boards, open source software. Coherent systems that are constituted by but not reducible to individual brains or bodies. (Full text of a very interesting book that runs along these lines: Mind and Nature, by Gregory Bateson.) These last examples are certainly familiar to most of us. But what if the entirety of your life was subject to this sort of trans-individual system? (With the necessary caveat that there ever remains some deep individual recess in which private passions are nurtured, if not expressed; a very modern-Romantic idea, though not to be dismissed entirely.) Habits, desires, sleep, hunger, posture, perambulations - all prescribed and controlled according to a system that extends far, far beyond the single body. So what shape does an inmate's self-knowledge take? How differently do I feel when my stomach is filled, choosing as I do when and what I eat?


Anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously described the Western experience of the self as a "bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background." Against this, consider the brain tumor that triggers the onset of pedophiliac behavior until it is removed, and the "bounded agent" who is inhabited by this new desire, who feels it libidinally but is unable to identify himself as its ultimate source, and is torn frustratedly between lustful trembling and confused self-loathing.


More to come, but by all means comment or question the above; it'll be useful to consider as I wrap this all back together.