The Undead Subject of Lost Decade Japanese Horror Cinema

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Jordan G. Parrish

August 2017

© 2017 Jordan G. Parrish. All Rights Reserved. 2

This thesis titled

The Undead Subject of Lost Decade Japanese Horror Cinema

by

JORDAN G. PARRISH

has been approved for

the Film Division

and the College of Fine Arts by

Ofer Eliaz

Assistant Professor of Film Studies

Matthew R. Shaftel

Dean, College of Fine Arts 3

Abstract

PARRISH, JORDAN G., M.A., August 2017, Film Studies

The Undead Subject of Lost Decade Japanese Horror Cinema

Director of Thesis: Ofer Eliaz

This thesis argues that Japanese Horror films released around the turn of the twenty- first century define a new mode of subjectivity: “undead subjectivity.” Exploring the implications of this concept, this study locates the undead subject’s origins within a

Japanese recession, decimated social conditions, and a period outside of historical progression known as the “Lost Decade.” It suggests that the form and content of “J-

Horror” films reveal a problematic visual structure haunting the nation in relation to the gaze of a structural father figure. In doing so, this thesis purports that these films interrogate psychoanalytic concepts such as the gaze, the big Other, and the death drive. This study posits themes, philosophies, and formal elements within J-Horror films that place the undead subject within a worldly depiction of the afterlife, the films repeatedly ending on an image of an emptied-out Japan invisible to the big Other’s gaze.

Keywords: Big Other, Death Drive, Gaze, J-Horror, Japanese Cinema, Lost Decade,

Psychoanalysis.

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Dedication

To my family.

5

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank my teachers, Ofer Eliaz and Erin Schlumpf, my family, David,

Jeannie, Jaxon Parrish, and Judy Randolph for their feedback, advice, and support. This thesis would not have been possible without them. 6

Table of Contents

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Dedication ...... 4 Acknowledgments ...... 5 Table of Contents ...... 6 List of Figures ...... 8 Introduction: Undead Subjectivity, J-Horror, and the Afterlife ...... 9 The Invisible Crisis of the J-Horror Movement ...... 9 Daddy Issues ...... 16 A Lost Decade ...... 23 Chapter Overviews ...... 31 Chapter 1: How to Cure an Invisible Wound: Kiyoshi Kurosawa and the Cure for Visibility ...... 35 Ethereal Subjectivity ...... 35 The Invisible Wound of Cure ...... 40 The Detective’s Locked Room ...... 45 Cutting Language Open ...... 51 The Invisible Emptiness of Pulse ...... 56 Face to Face with Facelessness ...... 62 Conclusion: The Bottled Message of Lost Decade Japan ...... 66 Chapter 2: False Histories and Guilt Complexes in Hideo Nakata’s Melodramatic Horror Films ...... 68 The Invisible Border between Horror and Melodrama ...... 68 Supernatural Guilt and Worldly Shame ...... 76 Removing the Boundary between Fiction and Reality in Ring ...... 79 Breaking the Fifth Wall ...... 85 Dark Water and the Return to Birth Trauma ...... 91 Framing the Law ...... 98 Conclusion: The Invisible Gift of Shame ...... 103 Chapter 3: The Screaming Point of History in Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge 107 Aphasia and the Screaming Point ...... 107 7

Atemporality and the Undead Father ...... 111 The Circularity of Space ...... 116 The End of Time ...... 127 The Muteness of Speech ...... 133 Conclusion: The Case of the Missing Mother Tongue ...... 138 Conclusion: Flight 7500’s Performance for the Blind ...... 141 The Transnational Flight of J-Horror ...... 141 The Invisible Passengers ...... 144 No One is Watching ...... 151 Embracing Emptiness ...... 158 Bibliography ...... 165

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List of Figures

Page

Figure 1. Empty Japan in Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)...... 9 Figure 2. Deserted Tokyo in Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)...... 10 Figure 3. The Empty Road at the End of Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998)...... 10 Figure 4. The Abdndoned Complex in Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002)...... 10 Figure 5. The Invisible Japan of Ju-On: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002)...... 11 Figure 6. The Cover of Japan after Japan (Ed. Harry Harootunian, et. al., 2007)...... 11 Figure 7. The Non-Space of Japan in Cure...... 44 Figure 8. The Separate Rooms of Cure...... 47 Figure 9. Characters Trapped with the Frame in Pulse...... 57 Figure 10. The Godlike Perspective in Pulse...... 67 Figure 11. Seen by an Invisible Gaze in Ring...... 83 Figure 12. “Don’t Look at the Camera.” (Ring)...... 85 Figure 13. The Gaze of the Complex in Dark Water...... 95 Figure 14. Being Viewed by a Stain in Dark Water...... 95 Figure 15. The Disembodied Gaze in Ju-On...... 121 Figure 16. The Stairs of Time in Ju-On...... 123 Figure 17. The Spiral Stairwell in Tormented (Takashi Shimizu, 2011)...... 124 Figure 18. The Penrose Stairs in Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2011)...... 125 Figure 19. The Opening Shot of Flight 7500 (Takashi Shimizu, 2016)...... 145 Figure 20. Jake’s Selfie Video with the Upper Class Corpse in Flight 7500...... 158 Figure 21. Liz’s Empty Room in Flight 7500...... 163 9

Introduction: Undead Subjectivity, J-Horror, and the Afterlife

The Invisible Crisis of the J-Horror Movement

A Japanese street, usually filled with people, now lies strangely empty, devoid of all signs of life. The people who once inhabited it have disappeared from sight, but not fully from sight; they are in-visible. Transparent and empty, translucent and invisible, these beings appear neither dead nor alive and persist on the street in spite of their invisibility.

Subject to a historical era and social setting that cannot see them, these life forms paradoxically emerge in turn-of-the-century Japanese horror films as new forms of the living dead. These conditions crystallize a new type of subject at this particular historical moment in Japan: one paradoxically defined by its inability to make itself visible through determinate images, words, or actions, only able to distort indirectly the space around it.

Despite these images connoting the apocalypse, this thesis argues that the undead subject of Japanese horror films illuminates new forms of life from the ruins of antiquated visual structures on which society traditionally bases itself.

Figure 1. Empty Japan in Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997).

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Figure 2. Deserted Tokyo in Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001).

Figure 3. The Empty Road at the end of Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998).

Figure 4. The Abandoned Complex in Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002).

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Figure 5. The Invisible Japan of Ju-On: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002).

Figure 6. The Cover of Japan after Japan (Ed. Harry Harootunian, et. al., 2007).

Japanese horror films released during Japan’s “Lost Decade” period abound with ghosts and other figures that exist in an equally ethereal state. The Lost Decade period occurs in Japan from roughly 1989 to the present, originally describing the first decade of

Japan’s recession to the year 2000. However, the period has expanded to the present day, as Japan’s recession has yet to end. These virtual, de-realized ghosts and ghostly characters emerge directly from Japan’s barren social conditions during this period, recession-era settings externally projecting Japanese subjects’ interior states. The films studied in this 12

thesis constitute a locally and internationally popular film movement known as “J-Horror.”

J-Horror originated as a Western marketing term designating a series of innovative and

original Japanese horror films released in the late 1990s and early 2000s. International

distribution companies such as Tartan Asia Extreme sold these films under the genre “J-

Horror” in order to profit from a global desire for these aesthetically and thematically

similar films. J-Horror films gained fame for common stylistic traits, particularly tending

to feature a ghost or character whose face remains hidden. Hiroshi Takahashi, the

screenwriter for Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998), offers a set of rules for effectively depicting a

ghost in a manifesto he wrote for the movement, the first insisting “Don’t show the face”

and the last echoing the first: “Show nothing.”1 Despite their face’s concealment, these ghosts nevertheless gaze back at the films’ characters from a position outside of visibility and history. This thesis argues that J-Horror films constitute a film movement, a generic cycle with shared thematic and aesthetic traits, reflecting the country’s deteriorated living conditions caused by the recession. The movement features films made by a series of directors well acquainted with each other who all aesthetically and philosophically deal with a central problem regarding an invisible figure’s gaze.2 How can an empty space

return one’s gaze as if it had eyes of its own? How can life in contemporary Japan continue

1 Takahashi, Hiroshi. Eiga no ma [The Demon of the Cinema]. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2004, p. 27. Qtd. in Kinoshita, Chika. “The Mummy Complex: Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Loft and J-Horror.” In Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, Ed. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009, p. 115. 2 For instance, Takahashi was Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s college roommate, and Takashi Shimizu, director of Ju- On: The Grudge (2002), originally studied under Kurosawa and Takahashi at Tokyo University of the Arts before first directing a short for the two’s omnibus film Gakko no Kaidan G (1998). Furthermore, this thesis is not alone in treating J-Horror as a film movement. See also Kinoshita’s insightful essay “The Mummy Complex,” as well as Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano’s helpful book, Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012. 13

without an absent structural figure overseeing it? How can history begin again inside Lost

Decade Japan? By asking these questions, the J-Horror movement produces a new type of

subject defined by its invisibility to a structural figure’s gaze.

Existing scholarship on J-Horror views the anxiety exuded by these films through

three main methodologies oriented around historical context, genre, and technological

changes in film production. The first approach connects J-Horror to Japan’s cultural

changes occurring since the beginning of the Lost Decade. Valerie Wee’s Japanese Horror

Films and Their American Remakes is the central text using this approach, closely

examining the complex social conditions surrounding the films’ production.3 The second methodology places J-Horror within the history of the horror genre, comparing and contrasting it with both Japanese horror history as well as Hollywood horror history. Jay

McRoy’s Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema is the most significant text on this subject, arguing that J-Horror constitutes a “new wave” of horror films from Japan, South Korea, and Thailand that he labels “New Asian Horror.”4 The third

approach reads J-Horror films through their use of digital video technology. Mitsuya

Wada-Marciano’s book Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age best encapsulates this

approach, describing how J-Horror films functionally call attention to the new media

technologies with which directors film and through which spectators view.5 These

3 Wee, Valerie. Japanese Horror Films and Their American Remakes: Translating Fear, Adapting Culture. London: Routledge, 2014. 4 McRoy, Jay. Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2008. Wee’s thorough book also engages extensively with J-Horror’s generic placement. 5 Wada-Marciano places J-Horror less within a new media context of Hollywood digital CGI than in one that “challenge[s] the long-standing flow of capital and culture, i.e. the centrality of Hollywood,” comparing it with other formally resistive regional movements beginning in the 1990s such as Dogme 95 and Sixth Generation Chinese Cinema. Wada-Marciano. Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age, p. 15. These movements 14

approaches accurately place the films inside various contexts; however, they do not engage

exclusively with the films’ central structural problem. The ghosts and ghostly figures

haunting J-Horror’s characters indicate a larger, hidden crisis that plagues Japan from

beyond visibility. Each of the films covered in this thesis defines subjectivity in relation to

this invocatory and unseen crisis, responding to the changes occurring in the world in

unspoken and unforeseen ways.

While J-Horror scholarship accurately places the films inside Japan’s unstable

economic structure, it has not yet expanded on the theoretical implications entailed by

“undead subjectivity.” This thesis combines historical approaches to J-Horror with

psychoanalytic theory in order to describe these same historical conditions in terms of a

structural shift in vision and subjectivity. J-Horror films approach this visual shift in

different ways featuring three common elements: corporeal evanescence, disembodied

gazes and voices, and an atemporal present. These factors expose an invisible dimension

between life and death, and the undead subject comfortably inhabits this world despite its

unrecognizable status. In this light, the undead subject of Lost Decade J-Horror films

crawls out of a social space devastated by Japan’s collapsed economic and social systems

use film form to burgeon nontraditional ways of looking, and therefore also explicitly oppose themselves to a structural figure’s gaze. Dogme 95 rallies against contemporary effects-based filmmaking conventions by taking on a “vow of chastity” against unrealistic cinematic elements, while China’s “urban generation” responds to increases in state censorship on filmmaking following the Tiananmen Square incident by filming on low budgets outside of the state-backed studios while blending documentary elements with fictional stories. For example, Thomas Vinterberg’s Celebration (1998) depicts a large family’s lavish party through the Dogme 95 minimalist aesthetic, featuring the family’s collapse after the son reveals that his father, whose birthday is being celebrated, abused him and his sister as children. Lou Ye’s Sixth Gen. film, Suzhou River (2000), centers less on an absent father figure than its inability to give body to its narrator protagonist, the entire film shot from his first-person perspective as he struggles to inhabit a consistent life narrative. For Lou, it is as if existing within post-Tiananmen China makes one the same unknowable, invisible person as J- Horror’s undead subject. 15

which leave no ground on which to stand. Yet, this subject takes up residence inside this

purgatorial space, affirming it as not a myth but truth. These vanishing bodies, ghosts with

hidden faces, and disembodied gazes and voices contagiously inhabit life after death inside

of “Japan after Japan.”6

Undead subjectivity develops along a trajectory, beginning in ethereal form in the late 1990s and gaining a face and a body through the 2000s. This thesis begins by locating this new subject as an internal question in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s genre-bending Cure (1997).

In this film, the detective protagonist leaves the clarity of his social position to enter the shadows of noir. Because the law no longer inhabits a structural center, its absence etherealizes characters as if they were ghosts, becoming an empty container for an invisible substance in Kurosawa’s J-Horror film Pulse (2001). Hideo Nakata’s films materialize these ghosts in the form of undead specters with obscured faces. The inscrutable ghosts of his films Ring and Dark Water (2002) inhabit spaces drenched with liquid and are neither smoke nor solid, indicating the decaying life narratives from which their protagonists must separate. These invisible gazes obtain a visible face in Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The

Grudge (2002); and yet, the invisible gaze still appears in the form of a disembodied voice wielding a further inscrutable message, this message actually emerging from within the characters themselves. By manipulating the cinema’s temporal dimensions, Shimizu’s ghost reveals a further undead fiction at the heart of Japan’s psychic structure in the form

6 This phrase “Japan after Japan” originates in the title of an anthology featuring useful social theory essays describing various phenomena during Japan’s Lost Decade period: Harootunian, Harry and Tomiko Yoda eds. Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. The book’s cover features the image described above that appears at the end of many J-Horror films: an urban street in Japan, typically brimming with people, now apocalyptically empty. 16 of a dysfunctional father figure. Through this trajectory, the J-Horror movement gradually materializes its ghosts, only to realize that doing so does not illuminate the real problem.

Instead, the films’ disembodied gazes and voices reveal that the real social problem remains ethereal, invisible, and unspeakable inside of Lost Decade Japan. This problem forms two different undead figures. The first discloses a structural father figure whose gaze still distorts the world in spite of its death, and the second an undead subject that dies for this figure’s gaze while continuing to live in an invisible afterlife.

Daddy Issues

J-Horror films are full of dysfunctional father figures and a community lacking what, for psychoanalytic theory, is the central signifier of the law. This invisible and unspeakable problem emerges from the fact that, throughout its history, Japan traditionally structures itself around a central patriarchal figure. This figure functions to exhibit a model image of power and responsibility from the political level to the individual level inside

Japanese homes. Whether incarnated by the emperor himself, one’s boss at work, or the father figure at home, this structure maintains a central figure in place regardless of its actual presence. In this way, Japanese society visually structures itself around an absent figure, filling the world with an unseen spectral gaze that oversees all. If this structure were to collapse, would this invisible gaze remain in its place? The J-Horror movement responds to this question by rendering different relations to this absent gaze presented as a visible absence.

Scholars often elucidate the significance of absence through a psychoanalytic 17

methodology. Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular gives a precise term for this invisible

structural figure: the big Other. The big Other indicates a figure whose mutually agreed

upon existence ties together a meaningful universe for a given group of subjects, acting as

an invisible guarantee of a social world’s consistency. Jacques Lacan himself defines the

big Other as “the locus in which everything that can be defined on the basis of the signifier”

- that is, in language as words or letters or in vision as an image - “comes to be inscribed.”7

Irreducible to God or to a God-like figure, the big Other can take virtually any visible or

invisible form for whose gaze subjects perform their actions: i.e. the father or the mother,

a paternal or maternal figure, a psychoanalyst, the Lady of courtly love, a figure whose

gaze one hopes to impress or fills one with anxiety, etc. However, the big Other must be

absent to function properly. If it is present, it is always too present, and appears either weak,

ridiculous or terrifying. Moreover, the big Other appears in these ways even in its absence,

and it remains up to the individual subject to find its way in relation to life’s absent

condition of possibility amidst a community structured by language. For these same

reasons, subjects can also only take up an absent relation to words and names. They

perform social customs and practices for this absent gaze in spite of these practices’

inconsistencies, contradictions, and lack of cohesion. Therefore, the big Other functions as

an absent gaze, irreducible to that of an actual person presumed to see them from a position

beyond visual capabilities.

In this light, the big Other’s gaze discloses a paradox given the fact that it does not

7 Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore 1972-1973, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1998, p. 81. 18

materially exist. While the subject performs its actions in order to gain this figure’s

recognition, it ultimately performs for a blind, invisible figure. Joan Copjec describes the

gaze in a similar way: “When you encounter the gaze of the Other, you meet not a seeing

eye but a blind one…. The horrible truth…is that the gaze does not see you. So, if you are

looking for confirmation of the truth of your being or the clarity of your vision, you are on

your own.”8 The J-Horror movement’s horror arises precisely out of this “horrible truth” rendering the subject radically invisible. These films abound with absent or ineffectual father figures, and its ghosts, invisible people, and inscrutable messages all emerge out of these figures’ real blindness.

This configuration of the big Other’s gaze differs from concepts of the gaze more generally seen throughout film studies. Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay on the male gaze incarnates this concept’s most cited source, but does not necessarily diverge from the concept as utilized in this thesis. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” argues that the cinema reveals unconscious ways in which society structures itself for an implicit gaze attached to an assumed male subject. Mulvey reveals that, within this visual structure,

“[t]he determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly…with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”9 The assumed male subject here embodies the big Other in this model, and the subject-supposed-to-be-looked-at holds the position of performer for this assumed figure. Michel Foucault’s work can be said to extend Mulvey’s

8 Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1994, p. 36, emphasis in original. This thesis heavily relies upon Copjec’s work on visual structure in this book and others. 9 Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, p. 11. 19

concept of the gaze from performance to surveillance, disclosing the patriarchal gaze that

structures the world from a hidden location as if at the center of a panoptic prison. He

places the big Other’s gaze at the center of what he defines as a “disciplinary society,” in

which “[o]ur society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.... We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism.”10 Foucault’s visual

model here argues that subjects have incorporated the big Other’s gaze to such a degree

that an actual person no longer needs to embody this gaze. The disciplinary society’s

invisible gaze fills the world with a permanent sense of visibility in which something ceases

to exist if nothing looks at it. Both of these paradigms posit a gaze that implants itself

within the subject itself, Foucault’s model relocating Mulvey’s male gaze inside an even

more widespread position. Both paradigms ultimately affix a pair of eyes to a structural

fantasy, an actual empty space.

Contemporary Lacanian psychoanalytic theory extends the gaze another step

further by unveiling its blindness. Mulvey and Foucault expose the gaze so as to reveal

how it determines the subject despite its fantastic nature, aiming to instill resistance within

this subject against unwittingly propagating this fantasy. Conceiving the gaze as blind

achieves a similar result to these approaches, only it fully illuminates the “horrible truth”

that these paradigms only imply. The male gaze and the panopticon offer the subject a

comfortable structure on which to base its psyche. If the subject imagines that the big Other

10 Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1978, p. 217. 20 stands firmly in its proper place, then it feels as if everything is under control. The big

Other’s watchful eye sees everything within these structures, both performance and surveillance supposing that nothing exists unless this gaze sees it. Therefore, when an invisible element enters the picture, when a blind spot appears in the world, the big Other’s ineffectiveness appears and its structural gaze disappears. The big Other does not so much disappear as it loses its vision, leaving behind an empty space, blind spot, or invisible distortion in its wake. Todd McGowan describes this “real” gaze as a traumatic object, a

“distortion in the subject’s visual field caused by the subject’s perspective on that field,” which gains awareness of the fact that no such privileged figure exists.11 For McGowan, the gaze as a material blind spot indicates the space that the big Other’s gaze previously inhabited, producing an empty space that returns the subject’s gaze as if from empty eye sockets. While Mulvey’s and Foucault’s visual models imply the big Other’s blindness,

Copjec’s and McGowan’s Lacanian models reveal blindness as central to its actual function. The empty space of the gaze distorts J-Horror films in the form of an absent or dysfunctional big Other. Only, this structure appears unaware of its non-existence within the world, and in this sense, the films’ invisible structural figures occupy an undead position between life and death.

In J-Horror films, the big Other and its gaze are not dead, but rather inhabit a position between two deaths. Lacanian psychoanalysis argues that everything that dies must die twice: once physically, and again for the symbolic order, for the gaze of the big

11 McGowan, Todd. The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007, p. 167. This thesis heavily relies on the many different ways films reveal visual structures that McGowan illustrates. 21

Other. Something inhabits a place between these two deaths if it has died in one register,

but not in the other. For example, someone can witness his or her own funeral from an

unseen location, and can also die completely unnoticed by anyone, yet remain alive for the

big Other. Inside of this purgatorial space, then, the mythical “undead” of classical horror

stories becomes a bona fide reality. A person becomes undead when they occupy this space between physical and symbolic death, thereby altering the psychic structure on which it exists. Slavoj Žižek describes this alteration as “one of the great lessons of psychoanalysis,” placing it in the same light as J-Horror films in the wake of a dead father figure as the big

Other.12 For Žižek, “[t]he only way to react to the haunting paternal spectre, to the undead father, is to treat myself as if I am already dead.”13 In other words, one must enter this space

between the two deaths and die for the big Other’s gaze. The J-Horror movement’s undead father figures create the films’ emptied-out spaces, as this figure is unable to recognize its own death or even witness its own funeral. For directors Kurosawa, Nakata, and Shimizu, subjectivity begins when one places one’s self inside the void left behind by this figure. J-

Horror’s undead subjectivity affirms the big Other’s death as necessary for the subject’s own birth.

The specifically undead “subject” of the J-Horror movement emerges after entering

12 Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. Second Edition. London: Verso, 2008, p. lxxxix. This thesis relies heavily on Žižek’s project exposing the world’s fantasy structures to decrease their hold on the world. 13 Ibid. Žižek describes Sylvia Plath’s famous poem “Daddy” with these terms. He argues that Plath’s poetry allowed her to inhabit this space between two deaths in that “Daddy” addresses a father unaware that he is dead, and that the poem reads as if Plath wrote it from beyond the grave. For example, she writes, “Daddy, I have had to kill you, / You died before I had time.” Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Harper and Row, 1981, p. 222. J-Horror films occur in the same space as Plath’s poem, needing to kill off a father figure supposedly already dead. 22

this empty space previously inhabited by the big Other’s gaze. This mode of subjectivity

contrasts with the usual sense of the word often used to connote one’s personal relation to

its socially constructed identity. While still involving a relation to this identity, the undead

subject views its social identity from a distance: viewing who it takes itself to be as a dead

person. The process involves becoming a subject of the death drive, which does not refer

here to someone who seeks death above all else. Protagonists in J-Horror films do not

commit suicide like those around them in Pulse or Suicide Club (Sion Sono, 2002), but

rather change their psychic structure so as to cease feeling as if already dead. Contrary to

this misconception, Sigmund Freud originally defines the death drive as not a literal return

to “an earlier state of things” in the form of death, but a figurative return to a place beyond

it.14 The death drive indicates a circular motion around an original moment of loss that constitutes the subject in ways in which a social identity insured by the big Other cannot.

Rather than seeking its literal death and annihilation, the subject of the death drive obtains immortality. Žižek describes it further as “not the mark of human finitude, but its very opposite, the name for ‘eternal (spectral) life,’ the index of a dimension in human existence that persists for ever, beyond our physical death, and of which we can never rid ourselves.”15 By becoming undead subjects of the death drive, J-Horror’s characters enter the real world as figures beyond the grave, while simultaneously burying the big Other in its own appropriate grave. The world itself transforms into the afterlife where the big

14 Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Ed. and trans. by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1929, p. 56. 15 Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999, p. 293- 294. 23

Other’s blindness frees subjects from the invisible emptiness which haunts them. The

undead subject becomes this haunting invisibility within the world, simultaneously

invisible to the big Other while finally visible to itself.

A Lost Decade

The undead subject further emerges from the historical context of Japan’s Lost

Decade. Japanese society historically structures itself around the gaze of a patriarchal

figure, and the undead father figure clearly haunts Lost Decade Japan in the wake of its

traditionally patriarchal structure. Anne Allison describes the social and sexual identities

that exist within this structure: “[f]or a man, this meant providing for [his] family; for a

woman, it meant raising children and running the home; and for a child, it meant studying

hard, excelling academically, and acquiring a job and family of one’s own as an adult.”16

At the onset of the Lost Decade period, this traditional structure became increasingly

difficult for subjects to uphold and invest themselves in. The 1990s in Japan witnessed

many previously successful companies file for bankruptcy and many consistent jobs,

typically held by men, disappear. Valerie Wee describes a further consequence of this

period, explaining that “[t]hroughout the 1990s, Japan was plagued by corruption scandals that severely undermined the Japanese public’s faith and trust in its government and instead exposed deep-seated political ineptitude and ineffectiveness.”17 The center of Japan’s

16 Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, p. 22. Allison’s informative book details the degraded living conditions inside of Lost Decade Japan, particularly how they worsened after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown in Sendai. 17 Wee, Japanese Horror Films and Their American Remakes, p. 16. 24

social structure now appears denigrated from its structural position, causing many Japanese

subjects to experience the ground give out beneath their feet.18 Thus, the big Other’s gaze vacates its separate position from the world and enters the world as if just another subject, throwing many people’s identities into disarray. In turn, Japan becomes an invisible space between the two deaths, as the big Other remains unburied while its death remains unacknowledged. The J-Horror movement presents Japan as an empty space returning the subject’s gaze. Its films reveal a national inability to see itself caused by Japan inhabiting an invisible historical moment: a gap within its own history, a “Lost Decade.”

In addition to the recession’s detrimental social effects, scholarship on Japan posits that Lost Decade Japanese subjects hold a fraught relation to patriarchal father figures.

Tomiko Yoda explains that this relation polarizes Japanese subjects against themselves.

Her essay “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society” describes this split occurring along lines of conservative and liberal political discourses. According to Yoda, some call for “the restoration of fatherhood” since a nation does not exist without it, while others push toward

structural shifts and changes relocating power away from Japan’s traditional patriarchal

structure. For the conservative approach, the paternal principle connotes “law, discipline,

objectivity, [and] the privileging of public virtues over personal desire,” while bemoaning

the rise of an excessive maternal principle “encouraging uncontrolled egoism, narcissistic

18 In this light, the 2011 events appear as if straight out of a big-budget disaster film. However, the real life situation has not inspired a new father figure to rise, as one often witnesses in these films. Furthermore, the Lost Decade period begins alongside another event involving a dead father figure: the death of Emperor Hirohito, emperor of Japan for sixty-three years from 1926 to 1989. Hirohito held a much less significant role inside Japan’s social structure following World War II, but his death’s timing still uncannily coincides with the onset of the recession. 25

and hedonistic consumer culture, and the hysteria of entitlement and victimhood.”19

However, Yoda points out that these two positions miss the truth of the situation: that the

actual paternal society has long since perished.

Yoda intervenes in this debate by arguing that the rising “maternal society” decried

by conservative approaches had actually ceased rising long ago and is currently in decline.

She takes the idea of Japan being a maternal society from Akira Asada’s work describing

Japan’s economy as structured like a children’s fairy tale. Asada argues that Japan’s

economic structure embodies a form of “infantile capitalism” in which the nation appears

as a protected and comfortable space under the watchful gaze of not a present and

prohibitive father figure, but an absent but equally powerful mother. For Asada, “[d]espite

frequent argument[s] about Confucian patriarchy, the Japanese family [on which Japanese

society is structured] is an essentially maternal arena of amae, indulgence, and both the

father and the children are softly wrapped in it.”20 Asada further argues for the need to grow out of this comfortable yet exploitative structure, mirroring a similar trajectory presented in J-Horror films like Dark Water. Yoda, via Asada, critiques the idea of Lost

Decade Japan as a maternal society “not because it is regressive, but because…it [is] a highly effective apparatus of exploitation in a capitalist society.” Furthermore, she urges that alternative calls for the restoration of fatherhood only pose reactionary responses to the changes in Japan’s social structure. Neither maternal nor paternal figures can embody

19 Yoda, Tomiko. “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary Japan.” In Harootunian and Yoda eds., Japan after Japan, p. 239. 20 Asada, Akira. “Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale.” In Postmodernism and Japan. Ed. Harry Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, Durham: Duke University Press, 1989, p. 276. Qtd. in Yoda, “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society,” p. 257. 26

the big Other’s function inside of Lost Decade Japan, and the J-Horror movement’s anxiety

over these structural figures expresses the need to separate from them, mourn them, and

move on.

Lost Decade Japan’s problems surrounding paternity extend onto one widespread

amongst turn-of-the-century Japanese cinema in general. Many Japanese films released in

the 1990s and early 2000s work through the big Other’s position inside a Japan between

two deaths, often centering on an absent father figure, an ineffectual one, or one that

explicitly abuses its power. For example, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Maboroshi (1995) revolves

around the empty space left behind by the sudden suicide of its protagonist’s husband,

while his After Life (1998) allows an engaged husband killed during World War II to finally

enter the afterlife. Takeshi Kitano’s Fireworks (1997) similarly exists at the border between

life and death. The film follows a husband with a murder-filled past as a gangster while he

tries to make his mortally ill wife briefly happy before vengeful characters from his past

hunt them down. Shohei Imamura presents the father figure as a reformed criminal in The

Eel (1997). Imamura’s film admonishes this figure, played by Koji Yakusho of Kurosawa’s

Cure and Pulse, to take up an absent fatherly position while returning to prison in actuality, suggesting that this position functions best in an absent, figurative form. Several contemporary Japanese directors also take the father figure to task for not holding up its structural position, exposing hidden corrupt actions and abuse of its power. Takashi Miike foregrounds this figure’s abusive actions as the underlying cause for his films’ famously

violent content. His films Audition (1999), Dead or Alive (1999), Ichi the Killer (2001), and Visitor Q (2001) all center on father figures and representatives of the law who engage 27

in illicit activities, causing mass chaos to erupt throughout their world. Kinji Fukasaku’s

Battle Royale (2000) continues this line of dysfunctional father figures, portraying a dejected teacher, played by the aforementioned director Takeshi Kitano, secretly entering his former class of ninth graders into a brutal fight to the death. The film begins after one of the students’ fathers commits suicide, and the entire scene plays out for the vengeful gaze of the teacher overseeing the bedlam from a hidden location. The problematic father

figure also pervades other J-Horror films not discussed by this thesis, such as

Higuchinsky’s Spiral (2002), Masayuki Ochiai’s Infection (2004), and Norio Tsuruta’s

Premonition (2004). The father’s strange obsession with spirals in Spiral leads to his

unexplained suicide, causing a curse to pervade the town that produces similar spiral

obsessions and suicides. Infection’s conclusion reveals that the chief doctor of a

dysfunctional hospital only existed as an imaginary scapegoat figure for the irresponsible

young doctor protagonist, and Premonition leads its father figure to assume his neglected

family’s future death as his own present situation after forcing him to see the dismal future

awaiting them in response to his ignoring them. Much of contemporary Japanese cinema

circles around the dysfunctional big Other in the form of a father figure, and the J-Horror

films studied in this thesis prove no exception to this theme.

In addition to these contemporary trends, many scholars also historically study

absence as a central element within Japanese cinema history. Scholars generally argue that

Japanese films produced during the postwar U.S. occupation exhibit this absent presence.

These films needed to pass through heavy censorship by the occupiers in order to gain

distribution. Unlike Italian neorealism’s on-location settings and present-day situations, 28

Japan’s directors often filmed historical dramas about Japan as a lawless warzone so as to

comment on the nation’s wartorn present ultimately forbidden by the censorship laws to

portray the atom bomb explosions directly. Firstly, Akira Mizuta Lippit’s book Atomic

Light illuminates this trend throughout Japanese cinema history in terms of invisible

aesthetic traits, disclosing repeated instances of shadowed lighting, surface writing, and

invisible figures appearing throughout Japanese films.21 Lippit describes invisible presences that repeatedly appear in different forms throughout Japanese cinema history, as if the atom bombings tattooed shadows onto Japanese films in the same way as they did the Japanese landscape. Secondly, David Deamer’s book Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb reveals a similar invisibility surrounding atom bomb depictions at the heart of Japanese cinema.22 Deamer argues that this absence critiques common perceptions of

history, memory, and time, as Japanese postwar cinema from the 1950s to the present

revolves around the bombs’ detonation point as an impossible specter. Thirdly, Adam

Lowenstein further posits the atom bomb’s absence from representation as haunting

Japanese cinema in his book Shocking Representation.23 Lowenstein argues that horror films emerge out of national trauma, unmasking Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) as expressing a national identity crisis existing in postwar Japan. Fourthly, Linnie Blake’s book The Wounds of Nations similarly argues that horror films indirectly exhibit traces of historical trauma. Blake describes Sadako (Rie Ino’o) from Nakata’s Ring as indicating a

21 Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 22 Deamer, David. Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 23 Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 29

national wound left over from occupation colonialism within the contemporary Lost

Decade, “[o]ccupying the subaltern position of one whose history has been skillfully

concealed and who thus ‘cannot speak’ for herself.”24 This thesis exposes a different form of absence prominent among turn-of-the-century Japanese cinema that involves the big

Other’s gaze. This absence emerges from another form of national trauma: the onset of the recession and the Lost Decade, as well as the undead persistence of social structures from the past.

Despite many scholars studying Japanese cinema through western-oriented approaches, others often object to studying non-western cinema through western methodologies such as psychoanalysis.25 This objection correctly points out that significant

differences exist between eastern and western cultures that disallow a single universalizing

theory from assimilating the two. Instead, this thesis argues that the J-Horror movement

actually creates its own concepts that resemble, but do not necessarily conform to, existing

psychoanalytic paradigms. It draws upon psychoanalytic concepts to place the undead

subject within an already-existing field, but these concepts do not reflect this field in

exactitude. This thesis does not simply apply psychoanalysis to the J-Horror movement,

but rather shows how the J-Horror movement itself creates different relations to

24 Blake, Linnie. The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma, and National Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008, p. 54. 25 This thesis is not the only scholarly work to connect Lacanian psychoanalysis to a Japanese social context. See also Blondelot, Xavier, and Marie-Jean Sauret. "Japanese and Lacanian Ways of Thinking: An Invitation to Dialogue." Trans. John Holland. Japan Review 28, 2015, pp. 173-189; Shingu, Kazushige, and Tetsuo Funaki. "'Between Two Deaths': The Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Japanese Buddhism." Theory and Psychology, vol. 18, no. 2, 2008, p. 153-167; and Parker, Ian. Japan in Analysis: Cultures of the Unconscious. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. See also Lacan’s own essay on the way language functions in Japan, where he renames the nation after Roland Barthes’ “empire of signs” as an “empire of semblances.” Lacan, Jacques. “Lituraterre.” Trans. Dany Nobus. Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 46, 2013, pp. 327-334. 30

psychoanalytic paradigms.

In this way, the J-Horror movement ultimately forms its own cinematic concept

from within the films themselves, not by the directors applying existing theories to them.

While this thesis approaches J-Horror largely through a psychoanalytic visual model, this

model is not set in stone. Rather, each film presents its own particular relation to the gaze

in a way tied to the director’s other works, all of which nevertheless center on the gaze of

an invisible, central figure. Gilles Deleuze defines a cinematic concept as an idea that

emerges within a film itself, not from using the film as an example of a pre-existing theory

or philosophy. For Deleuze, “no technical determination, whether applied (psychoanalysis,

linguistics) or reflexive, is sufficient to constitute the concepts of cinema itself.”26 This

thesis’ psychoanalytic methodology does not so much determine but open a new

perspective on how subjectivity relates to a gaze. Deleuze further argues that filmmakers

become theorists or philosophers themselves in their particular uses of film form and

content. In this way, this thesis extrapolates how J-Horror directors’ own theories and

philosophies center on a dysfunctional structural figure and actually challenge and

reconfigure paradigms from psychoanalysis. J-Horror films’ form and content extend these

pre-existing concepts to the point where they become different concepts of their own,

twisting psychoanalytic models into new and invisible forms of subjectivity.

26 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 280. 31

Chapter Overviews

Each chapter in this thesis discloses a variation of the undead subject from the most

significant J-Horror films: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure and Pulse, Hideo Nakata’s Ring and

Dark Water, and Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge. This subject forms along a trajectory moving from a faceless emptiness in Kurosawa’s films, to a ghost with an obscured face in Nakata’s films, and concluding as a fully materialized face in Shimizu’s film indicating that the subject’s face is not actually its own. The first chapter, “How to

Heal an Invisible Wound: Kiyoshi Kurosawa and the Cure for Visibility,” charts the undead subject’s origin at the point where it etherealizes in the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, becoming invisible to the big Other’s gaze as a living ghost. It describes how an empty space haunts his films’ protagonists, only Kurosawa leads them to incorporate this emptiness rather than interrogate it or fill it. The chapter portrays how an amnesiac criminal in Cure throws its detective protagonist’s identity into question by revealing the gap that the detective actually inhabits between his social roles. It argues that this situation unleashes an internal crisis within the detective, exposing an invisible wound hidden within his psyche. The film presents the cure for this wound as the act of detaching from one’s over-reliance on the law, psychology, and language, indicating that subjectivity appears within the gaps of these elements and is not their full embodiment. The chapter extends this argument to the way that Pulse fills its world with a similar form of emptiness, trapping its young characters inside of an invisible space in which they disappear from the social world. It suggests that the film leads its protagonist to recognize her own invisibility to this world and come to view the empty space haunting her as a friend. In Kurosawa’s films, the 32

protagonists’ problems become their own solution, and the first chapter expresses how the

undead subject comfortably inhabits its world as an empty container holding an unread and

unreadable message. Shadows further saturate the noir world of Cure and the digital reality of Pulse because the big Other’s gaze is absent from them. The chapter concludes by extending the gaps inhabited by these subjects onto Lost Decade Japan itself, the films implying that the nation ceased fearing the similar void it inhabits within its own history.

The second chapter, “False Histories and Guilt Complexes in Hideo Nakata’s

Melodramatic Horror Films,” illustrates how Nakata’s films exhibit anxiety surrounding

Japan’s relations to the big Other as its history. It argues that a ghost from the past with a hidden face haunts his films Ring and Dark Water, and that this ghost indicates a self- destructive attachment to the past in the form of fantasy structures and guilt complexes that protagonists fail to see. For instance, the chapter reveals how the mother protagonist in

Ring cannot see the ways in which her attachment to past fantasy figures distorts her situation in the present. These fantasies appear as the big Other via her absent ex-husband as well as her son embodying a mythical “pure child” unaffected by its family’s changing situation. The chapter further posits how the film’s cursed video tape leads her to discover and mourn the death of these fantasies, moving into a freshly opened future incarnated by falsifying her life story and telling a new one. It further connects Dark Water’s concealed ghost with the big Other’s over-presence, which floods the present time with affects from the past. The film suggests that its young protagonist must similarly recognize herself in the abject figure that haunts the leaky apartment complex overflowing with guilt in which she and her mother reside. Dark Water’s ghost ultimately points toward this protagonist’s 33

need to experience shame by detaching from her mother’s guilt complex and entering the

social world. By additionally removing the generic boundary between horror and

melodrama, Nakata’s J-Horror films produce a further generic tension of close proximity

which mirrors the characters’ own attachments to the big Other and guilt. Nakata envisions

this tension as Lost Decade Japan’s own nostalgic attachment to a womb-like historical

moment unblemished by the recession, and the chapter’s conclusion suggests that the

nation spawns undead subjectivity by separating from these false histories and past

complexes.

The third chapter, “The Screaming Point of History in Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On:

The Grudge,” examines how Shimizu’s film presents the undead subject as trapped inside

of a hole in time. The father figure in Ju-On perverts its function by acting violently against his family, an action that in turn makes movement in space, progression in time, and

communication in speech impossible for all Japanese subjects. The chapter exhibits how

space takes on a circular form and disallows forward movement, instead permitting only

backwards movement through time. Time’s progression in Ju-On also mutates when the big Other abuses its function, and the film suggests that time inhabits characters amidst this situation, rather than the characters inhabiting time. Moreover, the chapter explains how these factors also prevent language and speech from functioning properly. A disembodied voice from the past distorts the present by extracting each of the characters’ voices by leading them all to a “screaming point,” ultimately draining the world of its communicative capabilities. The chapter concludes by describing Ju-On as a political expression through the film’s absent voice, expressing the Lost Decade Japanese people’s own inability to 34

collectively speak as well as the nation inhabiting a historical screaming point outside of

space, time, and language.

The thesis concludes by adapting the J-Horror movement’s invisibility problem to

a contemporary American context. The conclusion, “Flight 7500’s Performance for the

Blind,” argues that the big Other’s gaze in Shimizu’s Hollywood horror film Flight 7500

(2016) distorts characters’ vision in similar ways seen in J-Horror films. These visual

distortions reveal secret attitudes pertaining to American subjects on the verge of Donald

Trump’s election as president, disclosing hidden forms of racism, classism, and

perfectionism. It argues that the film leads its characters to realize that the world already

encapsulates the afterlife, changing their perspective toward their hidden subjectivity in

response. The big Other’s gaze does not see the subject within J-Horror’s afterlife, and this

notion frees the undead subject from its traumatic position within a Lost Decade outside of

space, time, and speech. Inside this empty space, the undead subject of the J-Horror

movement ceases to appear alive, but neither does it physically die. Instead, it dies the

second death, a symbolic death for the big Other’s gaze. It finally becomes visible to itself

and the real world it resides in, rather than to the big Other and its false idea of a heavenly

world always yet to come. Where the big Other’s gaze was, there the undead subject’s gaze must become.

35

Chapter 1: How to Cure an Invisible Wound: Kiyoshi Kurosawa and the Cure for

Visibility

Ethereal Subjectivity

Near the conclusion of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997), Detective Takabe (Koji

Yakusho), having finished eating his meal in a diner, contentedly lights a cigarette. This scene repeats an earlier one featuring Takabe in the same diner only, in the previous scene he does not touch his food and leaves his plate full. Takabe appears identical in both of these scenes, suggesting that the difference between the two exists on an internal level, invisible to the eye. His now empty plate suggests that he encompasses a state of internal fullness despite the plate’s appearing externally empty, while the earlier scene implies the opposite: a state of internal emptiness while appearing externally full. These paradoxes surrounding emptiness and visibility pose the central problem spanning Kurosawa’s filmography: how can subjects experience internal fullness while appearing externally empty? His films Cure and Pulse (2001) originate the J-Horror movement’s interest in invisible figures, and represent his most direct engagement with this problem among his work.

Characters in Kurosawa’s films feel invisible because a big Other figure cannot see them. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the big Other inhabits a structural position whose gaze supports a subject’s psyche through viewing it from an invisible point. It can take any number of forms that ensure a universe that makes sense, including God, a father or mother figure, a psychoanalyst, or a love interest as a significant “Other.” Virtually any subject can fill this empty place, so long as a group of subjects supposes this figure’s privileged 36 status and perform for its gaze. Most importantly, this big Other figure can only exist indirectly in spectral form in order to function properly. If, however, a subject does not, will not, or cannot suppose this figure’s existence, then its empty position reveals itself in reality as a visual distortion. The big Other’s empty space then begins haunting reality via characters seeing ghosts, these ghosts illuminating a blind spot in this figure’s vision. The big Other’s blindness in Kurosawa’s films makes it appear in spectral, ethereal form as if unaware of its own non-existence. This undead subject’s blindness fills Kurosawa’s films with visual elements expressing this problem, these elements often inducing characters to commit socially destructive acts such as murder or suicide. Rather than resorting to these measures, Cure and Pulse’s protagonists assume the big Other’s emptiness and ethereality as their own, and this assumption cures them of the invisible maladies being transmitted throughout Japan. For Kurosawa, the cure for this undead subject’s haunting lies in the subject embodying a similarly invisible substance, suggesting that the Lost Decade

Japanese subject similarly identify with its own symptomatic emptiness in the wake of

Japan’s social structure.

Many of Kurosawa’s films revolve around ethereal subjectivity: characters haunted by emptiness as if they exist invisibly as ghosts. However, the films never state this problem outright; instead, the characters’ invisibility distorts their interactions with others and the world in unseen ways. Ethereal subjectivity causes subjects to feel invisible because the big Other cannot see them, marking the first step on the path toward undead subjectivity. Kurosawa’s films not only abound with ethereal ghosts and characters that only the protagonist can see, but also externalize the characters’ internal states through 37 locations filled with smoke, fog, and mist. The problem first appears in his early film Sweet

Home (1989) through its abandoned mansion’s shadows coming to life, these shadows distorting the family’s attempt to move in and forcing them out into the wilderness. The family must make their new home in this wilderness in order to avoid becoming shadows themselves, the mansion as home containing an invisible force emerging from an invisible figure’s gaze. Charisma (1999) extends Sweet Home’s problematic substance to the wilderness setting, covering the polarized forest with fog to indicate the presence of a situation the protagonist cannot immediately see. Dense fog also accompanies Loft’s

(2005) author protagonist as she writes a dead woman’s story as her own while trying not to re-live her death. Furthermore, Kurosawa ends the protagonist’s revenge plot in Penance

(2012) by depicting her wandering aimlessly down a densely foggy street toward nowhere, her post-revenge life now devoid of all meaning. The protagonist in Journey to the Shore

(2015) must reach the point where she can mourn her dead husband, who still lives beside her as an ethereal figure. However, none of Kurosawa’s films features these visual problems as much as Cure and Pulse. These films present similar ways of dealing with the gaze of the big Other, and both imply incorporating and assuming its empty space as a part of themselves instead of trying to fill it.

The big Other within Kurosawa’s films visually distorts the world as a father figure presented as either a structural absence or a visual distortion. Father figures fail to function as the big Other in his films, embodying less a structural empty space and more a weak figure who cannot live up to its present function. For example, the father in Sweet Home chooses to hide in fear while the mother and daughter face the house’s ghost. The surrogate 38

father in Bright Future (2003) proves unable stop the protagonist’s venomous jellyfish pet from reproducing and overrunning the public’s water supply. These jellyfish sting the

father to death in the end, and the film concludes with the youth of Tokyo wandering

aimlessly through the streets as if personifying these fatherless jellyfish. The father in

Tokyo Sonata (2008) pretends to work in a high-end business while actually working as a

shopping-mall janitor. He unleashes chaos onto his family after they discover his lie,

brutally lashing out at them in a pathetic attempt to realize the big Other’s position. These

father figures’ weak presence overwhelmingly distorts the characters’ psychic structures

as well as the world around them. Cure presents its father figure through an equally

ineffective psychiatrist and the young protagonist’s father in Pulse does not appear at all.

Kurosawa’s films not only transform characters into immaterial substances, but

also affirm this spectral subjectivity as a cure. This change extends scholars’ readings of

his J-Horror films, indicating a “compromised subject formation” and “a metaphor for the

centrality of disconnection amongst the younger generation of Japan.”1 These arguments describe the truth, but do not connect these problems to the father figure’s dysfunction or absence. Nor do they correspond to the fact that Cure and Pulse conclude by affirming these forms of ethereal subjectivity as solutions rather than problems. Cure and Pulse propose becoming comfortable with one’s invisibility, vacancy, and solitude in the world as a cure for the aforementioned sense of subjective lack, ambivalence, and disconnection among contemporary subjects. Subjects’ lingering connection to father figures causes the

1 Bingham, Adam. Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015, p. 90, and Balmain, Colette. Introduction to Japanese Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008, p. 183. 39

aforementioned “compromised subject formation” because subjectivity actually forms

after a constitutive loss occurs for the subject, and Japan’s younger generation experiences

disconnect because it simultaneously experiences too great a connection to its structural

figure.

For Kurosawa, this over-proximate connection to the big Other encapsulates the

invisible wound inside Lost Decade Japan as well as the ones found in his films. The social

upheaval of Japan’s Lost Decade inspired significant changes to the country’s notoriously

patriarchal history. Nevertheless, many call for a return to the strong father figures of the

past, and Cure and Pulse remain haunted by this figure’s actual absence. Both cope with the empty space left over within their protagonists’ psychic structures after the big Other ceases to function for them. Cure leads detective Takabe to confront the emptiness haunting him from outside himself, as depicted through Kurosawa’s aesthetic use of film form throughout. Pulse bleaches its urban Japanese setting with shadow as fatherless subjects begin de-materializing in thin air, while a mysterious call for help saturates the scene that no one knows how to answer. Kurosawa’s J-Horror films are part of an ongoing debate within contemporary Japanese cinema concerning how society can and should continue in the big Other’s wake. They address a fundamental problem involving an absent structural figure cutting and distorting the fabric of reality, producing an invisible wound.

Cure and Pulse argue that leaving this wound open and untreated, as well as spreading this wound throughout the world, paradoxically allows it to heal.

40

The Invisible Wound of Cure

Kurosawa’s Cure follows detective Takabe as he attempts to solve a mysterious string of murders occurring around Tokyo. These murders appear tied together by the facts that each victim has an “X” carved into their neck and each perpetrator remembers nothing about committing the murder. The investigation occurs alongside Takabe’s wife Fumie

(Anna Nakagawa) visiting a psychiatrist for an undisclosed form of mental illness, and

Takabe often consults his psychiatrist friend Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) for advice on both his wife’s situation as well as the murderers’ possible motivation. The film also follows the trajectory of an amnesiac drifter named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), who appears to hypnotize people into committing the murders with his claimed internal emptiness and by repeating the question “Who are you?” Takabe cannot understand how Mamiya appears to have no motive for his incitements to murder, and Mamiya’s lack of interiority leads him to question his own interior situation. Takabe eventually kills Mamiya inside an abandoned

psychiatric hospital and appears to rejoin the police force like normal afterward; however,

he now embodies the same empty internal space as Mamiya, and becomes the empty figure

inciting people to cut others open through his lack of interiority.

Like most films in Kurosawa’s oeuvre, Cure depicts a single character’s struggle with its distorted vision. It initially depicts Takabe as lacking any visual inhibitions; his vision appears exceptionally acute when he inspects the film’s first crime scene. Kurosawa begins the film this way as if to suggest that Takabe’s pretensions toward visual clarity

create the subsequent visual distortions that arise throughout the film. This clarity grants

him an ability to detect the underlying motives of every action, an ability that makes him 41

sick unbeknownst to himself. Following Cure’s success, Kurosawa himself spent a year

writing the screenplay for another film in the U.S. and revealed a story from that experience

that reflects Cure’s anti-motive position. He recalls, “[m]any of the Americans there kept

bothering me, kept saying, ‘What's going on with this character now? What's his intent?

What's his motive?’ And I would have to say, ‘He doesn't have any intent. He's just being.’

They found that very strange and odd.”2 Kurosawa locates the cure for Takabe’s sickness

in identifying with and as the visual problem rather than trying to solve it, the world’s

problem becoming the subject’s own problem that it projects out onto it. In this way, Cure

introduces Takabe when he arrives at a murder scene and identifies himself at the police

checkpoint as “Takabe from headquarters,” his name and title granting him free access into

the most gruesome of visual scenes. Cure’s first scene subtly equates this unlimited visual

access to that of another gruesome scene, an internal one that Takabe cordons off and that

Mamiya easily uncovers later. After Takabe inspects the scene, Kurosawa cuts to a shot of

several policemen scrambling over the perpetrator’s potential whereabouts in the

foreground while Takabe slowly walks down the hall in the background. Despite the

commotion, Takabe coolly opens a small compartment in the wall revealing the culprit’s

hiding place, as though his exceptional skill as a detective makes the killer magically

appear. Takabe can see what no one else can see, and his acute vision originally makes him

an insightful and valuable appendage to the law.

2 Kurosawa, Kiyoshi. Interview by James Emanuel Shapiro. “Emerging Cinema Master - Kiyoshi Kurosawa.” Undated. Accessed January 2017. http://www.dvdtalk.com/interviews/004275.html. 42

However, Takabe’s position as a detective, both within and beyond the law,

provides him with access to other scenes that most others also cannot see: and for good

reason. The murderers all cut their victims open by carving an “X” into their necks, an

element both uncovering what’s inside the victim as well as revealing this inside as an

unknown and unknowable “X.” The carvings echo Takabe’s plight being unable to find a

meaningful connection between the string of crimes, and the “Xs” visualize the violence

inherent to his own ability to make motives magically appear. His trade also requires him

to pry people open through interrogating them so as to bring to light what they hide and

keep secret. Yet, this particular case visibly distresses Takabe because he cannot find any

motives or reasons underlying the string of murders. Hence, Mamiya’s literal appearance

out of nowhere immediately after Takabe talks with Sakuma about how some crimes lack deeper meaning. For Takabe, Mamiya gives body to his inability to understand the crimes just as the crimes externalize his own actions as a police detective. Mamiya is an antithesis to Takabe’s claims of being able to see every crime’s motive, especially through his incessantly asking the question “Who are you?” In this way, Mamiya effectively reverses

Takabe’s usual detective tactics back toward him as if revealing Takabe to himself in a

distorted mirror, the distortion actually expressing his interior truth.

Kurosawa introduces Mamiya in a way connecting him to Cure’s time and place of

production: Lost Decade Japan. Following Takabe and Sakuma’s conversation about

meaning, the film cuts to a long shot of an empty beach, then to a shot of a future perpetrator

looking out at the beach. It then cuts back to the same long shot where the amnesiac

Mamiya now stands in the center gazing blankly up toward the sky. In this shot, Kurosawa 43

encapsulates the Lost Decade Japanese subject’s plight in 1997, a few years before the

“Lost Decade” gains its name. Japan’s economic recession caused many subjects’ social

settings and identities to fall into disarray, causing their names and identities to become

null and void, as if the nation suffered from a form of national amnesia. One example of

this identity crisis appears through the Aum Shinrikyo incident occurring in March 1995,

where a group of otherwise upstanding young students unleashed sarin gas throughout a

well-travelled subway, killing twelve and wounding hundreds. The incident left many

Japanese subjects shaken, but most of all spread confusion across Japan as to whom one could trust, given that even the most upstanding citizens could reveal themselves as terrorists. This national crisis causes the big Other’s absence to appear, and Mamiya incarnates the very opposite of this meaning-binding figure. Moreover, Takabe’s identity

crisis in Cure emerges as much out of the nation’s identity problem as does Mamiya. That

Takabe kills Mamiya appears to instate Takabe as the big Other figure taking control of

the situation; however, Cure depicts the exact opposite trajectory. Instead, Takabe becomes

Mamiya in the end and takes up his position as signifier of the big Other’s lack. In this

way, Cure suggests that Japanese subjects acknowledge and accept that the big Other

cannot cover all the world’s inconsistencies, and that this knowledge of a point of non- knowledge ensures that one does not fall apart as the world around them falls to pieces.

44

Figure 7. The Non-Space of Japan in Cure.

Kurosawa uses film form to present Mamiya and Takabe as interchangeable in

several instances. They first meet in a particularly expressive scene in which Takabe finds

Mamiya hidden inside a dimly lit storage room. Takabe, however, cannot see Mamiya

inside this dark space, and Kurosawa only shows Mamiya as a shadow smoking a cigarette.

The two exchange dialogue as Takabe inspects the room, but his inability to see Mamiya makes Takabe appear in conversation with himself, with a part of himself located inside an

unknown storage area within his psychic structure. The scene’s interior nature increases as

Takabe himself becomes more of a shadow as he further explores the room, Mamiya’s

questions clearly touching a nerve as Takabe begins running into objects and knocking

shelves over. Takabe interrogates Mamiya after this scene, and Kurosawa films the two in

a shot-reverse shot structure in which the back of each character’s head partially covers the

other’s face. This shot setup resembles those found in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966)

and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), where two characters’ faces overlap each other so as to indicate their transforming into each other. Kurosawa’s use of lighting, sound, 45

and framing further accentuates Takabe’s connection to Mamiya, binding them to a form

of truth only found in the shadows of film noir.

The Detective’s Locked Room

Joan Copjec describes the classical detective as if explicitly apropos of Takabe. She

argues that the classical detective has a closer relation to truth than the law that it

supplements because of its ability to see what the police cannot. She explains this situation

through what she calls the “locked room paradox,” connecting the detective’s job with the

illogical possibility of finding something new inside of an apparently airtight situation. For

Copjec, the police usually claim to have searched every corner of the crime scene, a fact making the classical detective’s later discoveries seem magical, as though they are superhuman. However, she equates this paradox to an inherent aspect of language, namely its inability to prevent the meaning of words from slipping into other meanings. She states that “[i]f the locked room is always breached, this is not because every private space has always already been intruded upon by the public power of the symbolic, but because within the symbolic the real always intrudes, limiting the symbolic from within and producing its infinite commodiousness.”3 In light of this point, Cure’s Takabe appears haunted by the very paradox that his occupation founds itself on. He interrogates criminals incessantly until they crack, producing an excess that bleeds over into his relations outside of his work.

On the other hand, Mamiya apparently sees even more than Takabe can see, presenting himself as an open and empty room rather than a locked and infinitely full one. He responds

3 Copjec, Joan. Read my Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994, p. 176. 46

to police interrogations with equally interrogative responses, voiding Takabe’s ability to

make something appear in an airtight situation. Mamiya does not speak as if he has

language and behavior completely under control, and he does not ultimately hide anything

behind his words and actions. Instead, he forces those who attempt to pry him open for

meaning beneath his words to encounter an emptiness within themselves, and this

emptiness indicates not the big Other’s absence from the world, but its internal, structural

weakness.

Several moments in Cure invoke Takabe’s anxiety toward his relation to words, and the film’s overall aesthetic emerges directly out of this extended verbal crisis.

Kurosawa depicts him holding many conversations with Sakuma, whose name in Japanese invokes both “truth” and “evil.”4 Takabe’s conversations with Sakuma express his close relation to truth’s evil side; in other words, his relation to truth unleashes an evil side within himself that enjoys figuratively prying people open as much as a pathological murderer.

Kurosawa further depicts this violent visibility through lighting, as several scenes juxtapose lit and unlit spaces inside a single scene. This lighting scheme associates Mamiya and the hidden truths that he illuminates with light and Takabe’s interrogations and cloaking mechanisms with shadows and darkness. Kurosawa’s stylistic choices here express each character’s relation to the big Other. Mamiya reveals this figure’s actual emptiness, while Takabe, as an instrument of the law, must cloak this emptiness by discovering truth through questions. Furthermore, Mamiya uses a cigarette lighter to

4 Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 192, n. 6. 47

hypnotize his victims, and Takabe uses a similar lighter to explore Mamiya’s unlit

apartment. There, Takabe finds nothing but more questions, as well as strange books on

animal magnetism and psychoanalysis.5 Cure’s lighting juxtaposition connects Takabe’s relation to truth with Mamiya’s, and the film’s trajectory leads Takabe to shine this light within himself to reveal not something, but nothing.

Figure 8. The Separate Rooms of Cure.

Takabe and Mamiya’s third encounter most clearly juxtaposes the two antithetical perspectives toward truth. Takabe enters Mamiya’s cell at a psychiatric ward as the cell appears empty, the camera located behind Takabe and revealing nothing inside the dimly lit room. Mamiya then appears not as a bodied character but rather, as in their first encounter, as a voice.6 Kurosawa next cuts to reveal Mamiya inside a small chamber attached to the cell, as if Mamiya’s voice of truth creates another visual space that attaches

5 The subtitles on the DVD from Home Vision Entertainment only identify two of these books by analysts Carl Jung and Otto Kernberg, but none by Freud or Lacan. 6 Cure extends Mamiya’s existence as a disembodied voice despite his visible body in a later interrogation scene in which Mamiya says to Takabe: “Detective, do you hear my voice? You do, don’t you? That proves you’re a special person.” 48

itself to the immediate one. This space only appears once Takabe responds to this interior

voice emerging within himself. Kurosawa also lights the attached chamber with a single

light bulb hanging from the ceiling, so that the light only exists inside this appended space.

Moreover, Mamiya begins the scene inside this room, but Takabe subsequently trades

places with him as their dialogue unravels. This movement occurs after Takabe admits to

the identity crisis that Mamiya brings to light. “It’s hard to be a detective with a crazy

wife,” says Mamiya to Takabe, “you do it by keeping your work and your home life

completely separate. The detective or the husband…which is the real you? Neither one is

the real you. There is no real you. Your wife knows that, too.” This revelation fully brings

Takabe’s situation into the light, and after this point, he can no longer contain his interior

crisis. From then on, Takabe becomes the ethereal subject he previously contained within

himself. The following scene features him assaulting another police officer for the first

time on screen. Even when he picks up Mamiya’s lighter and attempts to hypnotize him, a

downpour appears out of nowhere, drips down from a ceiling leak and puts out the light.

These ethereal substances, the fire, water, and smoke from the two’s cigarettes, indicate the same immateriality that Takabe experiences between his social roles, and they repeatedly get the better of him until he becomes them in the end.

Cure’s many deep-focus long takes also support its proposition that vision makes subjects fundamentally blind. The full visual field of deep focus cinematography often functions as a mode of ironic concealment, and in this sense Kurosawa’s technique invokes those of other deep-focus directors such as Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, and Béla Tarr.

Despite these directors’ inclination toward revealing everything with their cameras, 49

something always escapes its depth of field, their films often structuring around this absent

point through a naïve, unknowing character’s blindness. For example, “Rosebud” in

Welles’ famous Citizen Kane (1941) embodies not a meaningful signifier, but the ultimate precariousness of all signifiers and the explanations that they support. Even when the camera reveals the word on the sled from the protagonist’s childhood, this connection

immediately vaporizes into thin air. Welles’ deep-focus cinematography reveals everything

in the scenes except for this signifier’s ultimate meaning, and the film presents its

characters as foolish for believing that they can discover the truth. Renoir’s Rules of the

Game (1939) also predominates with deep-focus long takes depicting the characters of

different classes all equally suffering from a central problem. This problem lies in the fact

that each character performs its actions for an absent gaze that cannot see them, this blind

spot embodying its chief unwritten “rule.” From the opening radio host to the concluding

gunman’s fatal misrecognition, Renoir’s deep focus only reveals confusion and chaos as a

result of following this rule. Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) further conceals a

significant element in spite of its deep focus, this element being a verbal explanation for

the film’s events and a character capable of giving one. The film features another naïve

protagonist who witnesses all of the film’s disturbing events, but cannot understand them,

including why he ends up in a psychiatric ward in the end. In the same vein, Cure leaves

Mamiya’s underlying motives empty in spite of its deep focus, leaving them absent from

the film.

Takabe’s wife Fumie suffers from a form of mental illness tied to Takabe’s interior

crisis, creating problems in his home life that he equally fails to comprehend. The film 50 begins with Fumie at a psychiatrist’s office reading from Bluebeard, the story of a wife killer being killed by his wife, and throughout the film Kurosawa cuts between Takabe chasing the crimes around the city and her reverie-like wanderings to and from this doctor’s office. This juxtaposition connects the two characters’ actions so that they lead to the same end. Takabe wants to come home to a normal life after spending the day investigating disturbing criminals, but he ends up returning to the same situation in having to interpret

Fumie’s own unexplainable actions. Cure eventually implies that Fumie’s mental illness arises from her own similar knowledge to that of Takabe. Just before the first scene in the diner occurs, Kurosawa includes another seemingly inexplicable scene describing

Takabe’s changing relation to his name. This scene features Takabe picking something up from a dry cleaner, repeating a scene occurring near the beginning of the film. In the earlier scene, the dry cleaner recognizes Takabe’s name, but does not do so in the later one.

Whatever Takabe leaves there, the cleaner makes it clear that “it’s not here,” and that

“[m]aybe you [Takabe] gave it to your wife.” The “it” referred to here conflates both

Takabe’s name given to his wife in marriage as well as his interior crisis. His wife’s mental illness in this case externalizes the illness caused in his fervently denying an empty space to exist between himself and his social roles. Despite their apparent differences, Takabe and Fumie both move toward the same location in the end: the psychiatric ward. Only,

Takabe’s path allows him to avoid becoming trapped inside it by transforming the world into this space devoid of interior meaning.

51

Cutting Language Open

All of these factors lead Takabe to the point where he transforms from a classical detective of the locked room to a noir hero of the “lonely room.” Copjec later extends her

argument about the classical detective to the noir hero, differentiating the two through the

spaces they inhabit. Both characters depend upon their knowledge that the big Other does

not exist, and thus they both hold an external relation to the law. Yet, the detective still

supplements the blind big Other’s law by revealing what it cannot see, always revealing

the crime’s location as this blind spot. The noir hero, on the other hand, decides to “crook

the house” itself instead of catching others in the act of doing so, therefore forfeiting its

relation to the presumed element tying a meaningful community together. This decision

causes the noir hero’s world to transform from containing an absent presence in the form

of the big Other to one in which this invisible figure no longer solidifies it, space becoming

a vacuum where words lack all substance. Copjec describes the noir world’s transformative

process as adding emptiness to the world that previously existed only in private. For

example, Takabe’s hidden distance from his various social roles externalizes inside the

abandoned psychiatric ward’s empty rooms. She argues that “the intrusion of the

private…into phenomenal reality…is registered in the depletion of this reality. Lost,

thereby, is the sense of solidity that ordinarily attaches itself to the social field, as well as

the illusion of depth that underwrites this solidity.”7 The shadowed space surrounding the noir hero thus reveals the big Other’s solidity and depth to incarnate mere “sense” and

“illusion,” moreover setting free the invisible forces functioning within its psychic

7 Copjec, Read my Desire, pp. 193-196. 52

structure from the law binding them to the social world. In this way, Takabe as detective- turned-noir hero cures himself by entering the distance between himself and the world.

The concluding diner scene marks Takabe’s passage from classical detective to noir hero by morphing the film’s early “locked room paradox” into a “lonely room paradox.”

Instead of depending on the big Other’s law in the guise of transgressing it, “in film noir the reign of the Other has been superseded,” making its crimes invisible to even the most skilled law-respecting detective.8 Detectives in noir films can thereby only solve their

allotted crimes after entering into the very big Other-less space that their suspects inhabit.

Now, this evacuated space produces the noir film’s own paradox of the lonely room, given

that no one else, and therefore no big Other, exists capable of seeing these characters. In

contrast to the infinitely interpretable space of the locked room, the noir hero’s lonely room

“indicates less that there is nothing in them than that nothing more can be gotten out of

them…they will never yield anything new and cannot, therefore, hide anything.”9 The

trajectory of Cure brings Takabe to inhabit this lonely room in the form of the abandoned

psychiatric ward at the end. No longer able to bring anything new out of his job or his

marriage, he can only sit and listen to the empty words emerging from an old phonograph.

Language’s meaning disappears within this space, but Kurosawa presents this

disappearance as Takabe’s alleviative cure.

The lonely room paradox further explains Kurosawa’s oft-discussed penchant for

filming inside Japan’s non-places. He suggests his awareness of the big Other’s non-

8 Ibid. p. 191. 9 Ibid. p. 192. 53

existence inside the country when explaining his preference for the self-described “ghost

town effect” during an interview, this effect having “something to do with my

understanding that many of us, although we may live in physically crowded areas,

existentially we often find ourselves alone and adrift in empty space.”10 His preference for empty spaces connects to the way in which Copjec describes the big Other-less lonely room, placing Takabe inside “one of those vacant…buildings, those plain and…uninhabited spaces that constitute the characteristic architecture of film noir.”11 After killing Mamiya and finally dispensing with the big Other’s law, Takabe’s world becomes one large lonely room. He sits anonymous and alone inside the diner at the end despite it being filled with people, but this prospect no longer haunts him the same way it did through

Mamiya’s questions. Takabe finally achieves satisfaction by filling himself with emptiness in addition to the food on his plate.

Against all appearances, Takabe does not murder his wife as Kurosawa has stated in interviews, but rather finally understands her situation.12 Fumie’s mental illness indicates her mode of ethereal subjectivity, her way of responding to the gap between herself and her social roles. Cure indicates Takabe’s original confusion toward her through his constant return to the laundry room in their apartment, unable to understand why Fumie leaves the dryer circulating despite nothing being inside it. The dryer’s circular motion here connects

10 Desjardins, Chris. Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005, p. 213. 11 Copjec, Read my Desire, p. 191. 12 For instance, Kurosawa states: “Certainly, I’m not advocating that people go out and do this in their real lives. But, seeing as how we are in the realm of fiction, if we were to posit a person finding true, unmitigated freedom, I think you would have to agree that that person would find himself outside the confines of the law. What I wanted to suggest is that, for him, this is hope, and that at the end of the film he is definitely walking very clear-eyed toward what is hopeful.” Desjardins, Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film, p. 214. 54 to Mamiya’s inquisitive circularity, both indicating Takabe’s own empty interior that he cannot acknowledge. Takabe’s only choice at film’s end lies in ceasing his belief in a possible vacation from repeating his problem, as the one he and Fumie plan to take ironically leads them both to the lonely room of the psychiatric ward.

Ultimately, Cure posits Lost Decade Japan as the privileged location for Takabe’s transformation from classical detective to noir hero. The big Other vacates the national scene after its social structure crumbles, unveiling this absent protective gaze to reveal no man behind the curtain. In the same way, Cure’s criminals cut an “X” into their victims to reveal not something but nothing: the same absence of an interior space found in

Kurosawa’s aesthetic “ghost town effect.” The non-externalizable crimes further exteriorize Takabe’s own inability to see inside his mentally ill wife. He eventually realizes that Fumie’s mental vacancy does not hide a solvable problem underneath, but rather presents nothing but their own inability to make anything new appear inside their relationship. When Cure’s criminals cut others open, they only find the inscrutable “X” that they themselves inscribe into these others. The same fate applies to those who seek to uncover the world’s secrets by cutting people open through language. Revealing the world’s interior only exposes the seeking subject’s own interior emptiness, and Cure suggests an alternate path toward truth through cutting language itself open instead.

Instead of projecting language’s emptiness onto others via cutting real people open,

Takabe, at Cure’s conclusion, becomes content with the emptiness existing inside and outside. The smoke he puffs into the air transmits his emptiness problem to the external world, albeit, for him, it no longer constitutes a problem. Takabe identifies with the 55

insubstantial substance emerging from inside him just as his wife does - hence Fumie’s nominal relation to smoke and fumes. As the credits roll, the empty Japanese street contains a large slash through it constituted by the credits’ kanji, the now-dead letters of the Japanese language distorting the nation as an invisible wound. This conclusion appears as if the cured subject’s world now contains an indiscernible laceration, language’s emptiness cutting open the entire world. Aaron Gerow describes how Kurosawa’s filmography, particularly Cure, takes a unique approach to cutting and editing that he labels

“dis/continuity.” For Gerow, Kurosawa’s cuts produce “a rupture in the film’s ontology, asking how much of what happens ‘really’ happens.... It is as if montage is a ghostly presence, suggesting connections and knowledge while disrupting them at the same time.”13 This description of Kurosawa’s editing style strongly relates to Cure’s perspective on language, words ultimately inhabiting the same ghostly presence that internally ruptures

Takabe. Kurosawa’s vision of a cured Japan thus comes about through this invisible wound as the defining principle of ethereal subjectivity, this wound embodying the film’s ghost distorting space through Takabe’s empty relation to language, psychology, and the law.

Language’s secret meaning may hide problems for others, but not for Takabe, for he has already performed the autopsy of language, and, by interrogating it to its breaking point, knows that it has nothing to hide.

13 Gerow, Aaron. “Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Dis/Continuity, and the Ghostly Ethics of Meaning and Auteurship.” In The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema. Ed. Seung-Hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, p. 349. 56

The Invisible Emptiness of Pulse

Kurosawa pushes subjective ethereality to its limit point in Pulse. The central characters, Michi (Kumiko Aso) and Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato), struggle to maintain a sense of their own solidity alongside their friends’ mysterious disappearances. Pulse begins with Michi discovering the suicide of her friend and coworker Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi), and his death lingers over her and her other friends, Junko (Kurume Arisaka) and Yabe

(Masatoshi Matsuo), like a dark cloud. The group attempts to figure out the reasoning behind Taguchi’s suicide, but only find instructions in his apartment for building a

“forbidden room” as well as a strange floating message repeating “help me.”

Simultaneously, Kawashima attempts to connect his computer to the internet for the first time, but the technology malfunctions, instead asking strange questions and showing unexplained images. He consults a computer student at the university, Harue (Koyuki), for help, and the two become friends through trying to comprehend the strange activity of

Kawashima’s computer. Junko and Yabe begin acting strangely after encountering their forbidden rooms, and the two ultimately disappear from Michi’s life. Similarly, Harue grows increasingly gloomy before disappearing altogether into her forbidden room.

Kawashima eventually crosses paths with Michi, the two taking it upon themselves to continue living together despite the rest of Japan apparently disappearing. The film ends as the two climb aboard a boat with few passengers following the last remaining communication signals at the other side of the world, and Kawashima disappears as Michi grows comfortable within her forbidden room.

57

Figure 9. Characters Trapped within the Frame in Pulse.

Pulse’s central problem occurs through the characters feeling invisible, and

Kurosawa expresses this invisibility through his use of film form. The film takes this invisibility to the point where all life disappears from urban Japan: a space usually filled with people, now appearing empty. The big Other’s gaze is totally absent from its characters’ lives, and as a result, Pulse contains an inherent lethargy that saturates its apocalyptic setting. Every interaction takes place as if the characters were out of breath; as if invisibility drains them and their world of life energy. Furthermore, Kurosawa fills Pulse with many frames within the frame that trap characters within computer monitors, window frames, and doorways. This entrapment bleaches the camera with shadow, draining the world’s colors of all vivacity and spreading the setting’s lifeless appearance across the whole of Japan. Like Cure’s lighting and depth of field, these formal elements stem from the big Other’s absence, its missing gaze causing the characters to feel invisible and subsequently draining the world of its livelihood. While Pulse appears to present this absence as the cause of the apocalypse, the only way for life to continue necessitates not only this figure’s absence, but also this absence’s presence. 58

Pulse’s title in kanji (回路) forms a matrix around these connotations of emptiness.

Kurosawa colors the first kanji’s interior radical in red to connect it to the film’s recurring

“forbidden room” sealed off with red tape, this kanji visually resembling the many

computer monitors present throughout the film. The title also visually resembles the

aforementioned framings entrapping characters throughout the film.14 The Japanese title actually translates as “circuit” instead of “pulse,” and this mistranslation takes away the title’s close connection to the film’s content.15 The first character “回” (kai) translates “to turn, go round; revolve, rotate, spin” and the second character “路” (ro) as a “road, route, path,” and the two combined indicate a circuitous or circular path: a circuit.16 Michi’s

name, the film’s only surviving character, also translates as road, while embodying an

alternate meaning for the kanji “路.” Therefore, the title in kanji foreshadows the

conclusion by connecting Michi’s name to an empty character as well as indicating her

change in psychic structure that accompanies viewing the big Other as this empty figure.

The “回” kanji appears as an empty frame inside of another empty frame, further indicating

not only the title’s circuitous pathway, but also the big Other’s empty frame that

Kurosawa’s characters incorporate within themselves. The theme of the forbidden room

connects to Copjec’s lonely room found in Cure, further entrapping characters inside their

14 According to Steven T. Brown’s analysis of Pulse, Kurosawa speaks about his desire to give the film a title that particularly features the kanji kai for its connotations of rotation and turning. Kurosawa, Kiyoshi. Kurosawa Kiyoshi no eigajutsu. Tokyo: Shinchosha. 2006, p. 238. Qtd. in Brown, Steven T. Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 212, n. 12. 15 Another film titled Circuit was released the same year as Kurosawa’s in the U.S., forcing distributors to invent a new title in apparent ignorance of any reference to the film’s content. 16 Nelson, Andrew. The New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary. Ed. John H. Haig. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1997, pp. 241 and 1047. 59

invisibility to the big Other’s gaze. The circular road around a void, entrapment inside of

an empty time frame, and union with an empty figure all lead Michi to inhabit a death drive

structure that necessitates her invisibility to a big Other figure.17 Pulse’s Japanese title, and

the way that Kurosawa presents it, both advocate this structure’s necessity for surviving in

a big Other-less world.

As if to preclude this blindness revealing itself, Pulse contains many instances

where an invisible entity appears from a location beyond the characters’ vision. This entity

implicates the presence of ghosts; however, the film takes a rare approach to its ghosts, the

characters reflecting Kurosawa’s own belief that “the essence of human beings is ghosts.”18

Instead of foreign spirits invading from another world, Pulse focuses on the ghosts inherent

in the real world itself: what elides subjects’ vision within it. The film begins on a black

screen before any visuals appear, presenting the sound of a dial-up internet handshake that

suggests invisible entities connecting with each other. However, this sound can only

suggest a connection, for it lacks an accompanying visual. Similarly, invisibility and

emptiness do not only fill Pulse’s characters through the film’s shadow-drenched aesthetic

and dreary pace of life; these affective formal elements also suggest that an invisible entity

attaches itself to this world, existing alongside it as its accompanying shadow. Kurosawa

17 Todd McGowan extends the death drive subject’s circular relation to space as presented in Pulse to a similarly circular relation to time. For McGowan, “[t]he subject of the death drive becomes atemporal in the sense that time can provide no hope for an alteration of the fundamental problem animating it.” McGowan, Todd. Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. xi. At Pulse’s conclusion, Michi ceases to expect anything different to occur than what repeats throughout the film: those around her being unable to help her, they disappear from her life. She finds happiness alone with her last friend, albeit this friend does not embody a solid person in Kawashima. Rather, this friend seems to embody an invisible one, a shadow on the wall. 18 Kurosawa, Kurosawa Kiyoshi no eigajutsu, p. 234. Qtd. in Brown, Tokyo Cyberpunk, p. 213, n. 19. 60

refuses to give body to this entity, instead permeating the film with its indirect distortions,

such as the film’s computers turning themselves on and the phrase “help me” repeatedly

spoken by an unseen entity. Additionally, the camera sometimes views the characters

through distant camera angles without connecting these viewpoints to a particular character

in the film, as often found in a traditional horror film.

These calls for help and disembodied gazes become the film’s horror element, and

every distortion and disappearance that occurs in the film grows out of them. For example,

when Michi and Yabe approach Taguchi’s apartment in separate scenes, Kurosawa films

them from a perspective partially hidden behind bushes. After Harue fails to escape with

Kawashima, an unknown perspective appears on her computer monitor, apparently

viewing her from inside her bedroom. However, no one appears when she turns on the

bedroom light, and yet the camera viewing her on the screen continues to do so. She then

walks toward the invisible perspective and hugs it, emotively realizing “I’m…not alone…” and embracing the empty space watching her from inside her forbidden room. These scenes indicate the presence of something watching the characters, but never fill it in with anyone or anything. Pulse’s refusal to fill in this perspective suggests its positioning the big Other’s non-existence as the film’s ghosts, the characters embracing their own solitude in the world. Of course, calls for help do not necessarily require a direct addressee. Many often

intend to create such a figure through their formation, floating in the ether until someone

provides an answer. Pulse’s ghostly voices and gazes give form to these figures-supposed-

to-answer calls for help; however, these figures ultimately never materialize. 61

The strange news report on Michi’s television early in the film produces Pulse’s

floating call for help. As Michi sits watching the television but facing away from it in

disinterest, a news report describes a message in a bottle released “ten years ago” in Japan

being recently found in Malaysia. The report seems to cause Michi to get up and turn her

back toward the television, moving toward her sink to make tea. As the report continues,

its image and sound both increasingly distort until the screen freezes completely. Michi

turns around at the sudden silence to find the news reporter’s headless image frozen on the

screen, causing her to anxiously run to the set and turn it off, gasping for breath afterwards.

The prospect of the big Other’s failure, as presented by the failed news reporter, fills her

with anxiety in this scene, making the disembodied call for help that drifts throughout the

film become more and more her own. Furthermore, Kawashima first appears immediately

following this scene, as if Michi creates him as someone capable of understanding her

messages better than she does. The two possess a fated trajectory and appear as “star-

crossed lovers,” given that Kurosawa films the two’s storylines separately until connecting

them after both suffer interminable losses. However, Kawashima’s sudden reduction to a

shadow at film’s conclusion suggests that he may embody a figment of Michi’s

imagination, her playing out the possibility of someone answering her inscrutable call to

its endpoint.19 Kawashima’s failed relationship with Harue would supposedly fill

Kawashima with a void that Michi would fill via their relationship together. After introducing Kawashima, Kurosawa returns to Michi’s storyline in a scene introducing her

19 That Kawashima himself appears as an empty character with no desires of his own supports this theory of his being an imaginary figure. The film gives no details of his life prior to joining the internet other than him offhandedly mentioning that he studies economics. 62

separated parents, her mother (Jun Fubuki) suggesting that Michi make contact with her father. Michi then resists this suggestion, stating “he’s out of the picture” and that her friends will help her if she needs it. Kurosawa then cuts to the first scene featuring the mysterious “help me” message, as if it appears in response to Michi’s refusal to contact her father.20

Face to Face with Facelessness

Pulse’s invisibility problem generates a new and intangible setting: the internet.

Kurosawa filmed Pulse as the internet first gained popularity, existing more as a fad than the life support it embodies in the present day. Much like Pulse’s world, no big Other exists on the internet, even as a ghost that previously functioned but no longer does. Subjects experience total freedom online to the degree that they can interact with others while remaining “anonymous,” totally avoiding responsibility for their words and their actions.

Pulse comments on this freedom through its many enclosed framings, lifeless trajectory, and cries for help, implying that this freedom actually embodies a more widespread form of a prison. Kurosawa describes the film’s relation to the internet as antagonistic, filling the characters with loneliness instead of real human connection.21 This emptiness occurs because interpersonal interaction requires a third figure to accompany it, a constitutional ghost figure that remains missing within online interaction. Interacting on the internet removes this third invisible element from the picture. Kurosawa even goes so far in Pulse

20 Despite not explicitly saying so, this reading suggests that the ship captain who bookends the film may embody Michi’s absent father, although the film gives no explicit clues to substantiate it. 21 Kurosawa, Kurosawa Kiyoshi no eigajutsu, p. 234. Qtd. in Brown, Tokyo Cyberpunk, p. 213, n. 20. 63

as to give the various computer monitors their own face, while causing characters to

disappear upon their encounter with its gaze. However, this face remains inscrutable,

appearing blurred on Taguchi’s screen and as a dark shadow covered with a black plastic

bag when appearing on Kawashima’s monitor. By seeing this face, Pulse’s characters not

only fail to achieve a real connection with others, but also successfully connect with

something much more disconcerting. In contrast to the characters’ connection failures in

real life, online connection actually succeeds in connecting to an empty space: the big

Other’s empty space. In other words, this connection reveals that, while the subject can continue to interact with the world, no one can ultimately answer its inscrutable calls for help. These calls remain inscrutable to others as well as to themselves, and in this way

Pulse presents the potentiality for connecting with others online as a mirage.

While Pulse, on the one hand, gives the internet a face, this face subsequently visualizes the characters’ own facelessness. The beginning’s invisible sounds transition to a mute image of a faceless person. A medium shot views Michi on a boat in the middle of the ocean, her back turned so that the camera can only see the back of her head. She blankly looks out over the boat’s side, directly facing a turbulent wind and a darkly overcast sky.

The ship’s captain (Koji Yakusho) emerges on deck and stops to notice Michi, though she does not indicate that she sees him. Pulse, then, associates its invisibility problem with

Michi’s inability to be seen by the big Other as the ship’s captain. Instead of acknowledging the captain, she begins telling her story in voiceover. Before her story begins, Kurosawa cuts to the boat she stands on from an extreme wide shot at a high angle directly above it, as if this story begins with the state of being totally visible by an unseen entity. This 64

unknown perspective indicates the big Other’s supposed ability to see the situation entirely,

knowing exactly what to do in response to it. However, this perspective cannot see what

happens below the ship’s deck just as no one throughout the film can read anyone else’s

implicit cries for help or see what occurs inside the characters’ forbidden rooms. In this

way, Pulse haunts its characters with their true face’s invisibility. The ship captain cannot

see Michi’s face in this opening scene, and the film will ultimately lead Michi to the point

where she no longer relies on this gaze to ensure her happiness, her identity, or her being.

By separating her from the world of the big Other, Pulse leads Michi down the same path taken by Takabe in Cure: toward the lonely, forbidden room. The film’s titular connection to Michi’s name further speaks to its being a story about her specific “road” to this point. For Kurosawa, relating to one’s name involves a circuitous road to nowhere akin to the one Michi drives down at the film’s conclusion: an empty road on which no one exists to acknowledge her. She and Kawashima take this road “as far as it can go” as they say in the film, stopping the car at a “KEEP OUT” sign just before reaching the ocean. For

Kurosawa, in Pulse as in Cure, the characters’ cures involve a form of transgression, whether it involves entering forbidden and uncharted territory in Pulse or a form of internal murder in Cure. Rather than the external law, these characters transgress an internal one.

Kurosawa’s films call this internal law into question in order to ensure the subject’s survival inside of a post-apocalyptic setting. Pulse further quotes Cure by repeating the same close-up of a police siren blaring on top of the police car Michi rides at the beginning.

Takabe begins the film inside the same car in Cure, and Kurosawa films him through the same shots as he films Michi. These connections express Kurosawa’s interest in changing 65

his characters’ perspectives on their world in relation to the big Other’s gaze. For

Kurosawa, this change involves the apocalypse - with the proviso that this event becomes

positive in curing characters of their invisible ailments.

Like Takabe’s repeated diner scene in Cure, Pulse’s conclusion depicts Michi’s incorporating the big Other’s empty space instead of remaining traumatized by it. The earlier scene featuring Michi’s malfunctioning television ends with an empty bottle inexplicably falling behind her, causing her to jump in fright. Another bottle appears again at the film’s conclusion as Michi unpacks inside her cabin on the boat, only this time it contains water, an invisible substance making it appear empty while actually being full.

The bottle filled with invisibility indicates Michi’s own filling herself with an invisible material at film’s end in the same way indicated by Takabe’s empty plate. Both characters’ trajectories lead them to the point at which the big Other’s gaze ceases to function for them,

Takabe through his excessively law-abiding vision and Michi’s road leading her to become

a message in a bottle floating in the ocean. The two become invisible while still maintaining

a solid physical form. If Michi finds happiness alone with her “last friend in the world,”

the film does not depict this friend as either Kawashima or the ship captain who offers her

reassurance just before this scene.22 Her last friend in the world instead appears as the

empty space, Michi inhabiting the bottle containing a message that no one will find for

another ten years. Despite the earlier overcast skies, a bright beam of light now shines

through her porthole, illuminating the shadow on the wall left by Kawashima as if granting

22 Kawashima becomes a shadow as she speaks these words, and the boat’s other crewmembers seen in the opening scenes disprove her being alone with the ship captain. 66

Michi a moment of visual clarity. Instead of cutting to black, Pulse concludes by diminishing the earlier God’s-eye view of the boat in size until it, too, disappears. The screen turns off like a television screen, as if Michi’s concluding statement turns off the omniscient, disembodied gaze she believed capable of seeing her truth.

Conclusion: The Bottled Message of Lost Decade Japan

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s J-Horror films depict a world in which characters turn into

ghosts. Cure and Pulse utilize shadowed lighting, deep focus cinematography, and empty, invisible characters to illustrate how the big Other appears as a ghost inside of a big Other-

less world. This world embodies a single lonely, forbidden room, but this setting no longer

fills Takabe and Michi with anxiety. Rather, this room becomes their home, no longer

relating to emptiness in a way that provokes their anxiety. Cure and Pulse turn these noir and horror settings into remedial, coming-of-age stories. The experts, doctors, and computer geniuses do not have the answers to subjects’ hidden problems in these films. In this way, the protagonists embrace their subjectivity and become subjects to their loss of the big Other. One does not commit suicide by inhabiting this room, and Kurosawa’s films suggest that life continues there as a form of the afterlife, floating freely as a specter once one turns off the big Other’s gaze.

67

Figure 10. The Godlike Perspective in Pulse.

On a larger scale, Kurosawa describes Lost Decade Japan as inhabiting a cut in

history through this process. Its social structure forever distorted by the recession, Japan

now embodies this very room in which the big Other cannot see it. The empty spaces

inhabited by Takabe and Michi further connect with the “lost ten years” of the Lost Decade,

Japan’s missing history producing an unseen national wound and a bottled message for help floating aimlessly throughout the world. Filmed in 1997, Cure’s task lies in leading

Japan to recognize that it inhabits this wound. Pulse appears after the turn of the century, looking toward the future through Michi leaving her now-empty home. She leaves behind the gaze of Japan’s Lost Decade by becoming a specter herself as a message in a bottle living regardless of her message being discovered. Pulse’s ending places Japan within

Michi’s very position at the turn-of-the-century, floating contently outside of history without requiring a gaze to read it. 68

Chapter 2: False Histories and Guilt Complexes in Hideo Nakata’s Melodramatic

Horror Films

The Invisible Border between Horror and Melodrama

Unlike the big Other’s absence in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films, Hideo Nakata centers

his J-Horror films on the presence of an ineffectual big Other. The big Other ensures a

meaningful universe for a community by creating an external source of signification for

them. However, this task often proves too much for individuals, whose weakness,

fallibility, and contradictions eventually come to the fore and cause the subject’s universe

to fall apart. Without a figure anchoring a meaningful world, ghosts and other absent

presences distort subjects’ vision. For Nakata, these distortions indicate that the subject

must take it upon itself to intervene in this world, rather than relying on a big Other to

ensure its consistency. In Ring (1998) and Dark Water (2002), the big Other’s ineffectuality

creates a void within the protagonists’ psyches that appear as specters taking various forms

such as faceless ghosts, fantasy structures, and guilt complexes. These ghosts indicate the

characters’ unwillingness to live independent of the big Other, despite this figure no longer

functioning for them in reality. Nakata’s J-Horror films cut protagonists off from this

dependence, affirming this action as necessary for their psychic life to not only continue

but ultimately begin.

Many of Nakata’s films present the big Other’s gaze in the form of a curse or cursed

entity. This curse determines whether a character lives or dies based on its relation to the

big Other’s meaning-binding power, and Nakata’s Don’t Look Up (1996), Chaos (2000), and Kaidan (2007) all doom their male protagonists to misunderstand their situation’s 69

truth.1 Male characters in Nakata’s films suffer from an affliction preventing them from

successfully achieving their goals. The female characters often see the hidden or occluded

truth of these goals that often involve the male characters unwittingly destroying them.

Kaidan’s (2007) protagonist Shinkichi (Takaaki Enoki), for example, holds an unconscious

tie to a curse placed upon his father by a man his father robbed and murdered centuries

past. Shinkichi unknowingly exhibits a similarly fraught upward trajectory by marrying a

series of women, only to see each quickly die, as if his attempt to marry into his father’s

powerful position only causes others’ deaths. Nakata suggests that the women Shinkichi

believed himself to be deceiving actually controlled the situation by concluding the film with a low angle-shot of Shinkichi’s first dead wife gazing at and embracing his now- decapitated head. Nakata further manipulates the big Other’s blindness in Chaos (2000), in which one actress (Miki Nakatani) plays two different women involved in a kidnap-and- murder plot similar to the one famously found in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Chaos’ conclusion echoes that of Vertigo by having another big Other figure appear just as the

couple finally consummates their love: the veiled nun for Hitchcock and a police car for

Nakata. Like Hitchcock, Nakata’s films show the male protagonist from a low angle

looking down at the scene where his female love interest just jumped to her death, as if the

1 Even Nakata’s biographical documentary on British director Joseph Losey, Joseph Losey: The Man with Four Names (1998), expresses his interest in eluding the big Other’s gaze. The title originates in the various pseudonyms under which Losey worked, given the big Other’s refusal to acknowledge his existence. The Hollywood industry blacklisted Losey during the Cold War period as one of the infamous Hollywood Ten, a notion best exemplifying the big Other turning a blind eye toward him. Losey’s films often reflect this predicament through characters experiencing estranged relations to their names and positions in society, as seen in the branded criminal in his remake of Fritz Lang’s M. (1951), the master and servant exchanging roles in The Servant (1963), and the protagonist viewing his Jewish identity as another person in Mr. Klein (1976). 70

male figure in these sexual relationships unknowingly occupies a heightened position of

success that simultaneously kills its female partner. Don’t Look Up also features this visual

hierarchy by its film director protagonist’s blindness to the fact that, while he controls the

set’s action at ground level, a female ghost actress actually pulls the strings from above

while remaining hidden in the studio’s rafters. The film begins with close-ups of puppets

behind which the director’s face suddenly appears sporting a large grin, as if thoroughly

pleased not only with his film’s potential scene but also with his position of power. Nakata

treats this elevated position with recurrent disdain throughout his films, a rule to which

Ring and Dark Water prove no exception.

While addressing the big Other through tropes of the horror genre along the lines

of Kurosawa, Nakata’s films can more usefully be viewed as melodramas. Nakata himself

often sidetracks interviewers’ questions concerning his ties to the horror genre by

expressing his actual affinity for melodrama.2 Several scholars connect the melodrama

genre to the big Other’s ineffectiveness, both in a particular historical context and in terms

of a general psychic structure. Peter Brooks locates melodrama’s origin in the aftermath of

the French Revolution, a historical moment that “marks the final liquidation of the

traditional Sacred and its representative institutions.”3 For Brooks, melodrama emerges

2 Nakata mostly shot his first two feature films, Ring and Don’t Look Up, in order to fund his Losey documentary. “I had never intended to become a horror film maker. I was just a film student who loved melodrama and musicals by directors like Max Ophüls and George Cukor.” Nakata, Hideo. Interview by Daniel Benson. HorrorTalk, April 29, 2011. https://www.horrortalk.com/features/1352-hideo-nakata- interview.html. “I wouldn’t mind making more interesting and really scary horror movies, but I’m not such a huge fan of the genre. I’d rather direct straight drama or melodrama.” Nakata, Hideo. Interview by Jason Gray. The Japan Times, August 3, 2007. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2007/08/03/films/ring- directors-spooky-tales/. 3 Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976, p. 15. 71 from post-revolutionary France as “a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question,” and therefore work toward resolving the social crises that follow removing the big Other from its structural position. Joan Copjec expands on Brooks’ history, arguing that melodrama indicates a structural shift in the way subjects relate to the big Other’s gaze. This visual shift creates a “new autonomous world, which relates to nothing but itself…[and] that has cut its ties to any transcendent divinity” so that “[t]he beholder becomes visible in an all-seeing world when the place of an all- seeing agent is vacated.”4 The melodrama’s post-sacred world relocates the gaze from its original place beyond vision that sees everything because of this position, to a much less acute and worldly one capable of being deceived. Nakata’s formal hierarchies open up this space for its protagonists by creating distance between characters and their investment in the big Other. The films alleviate their curses by reducing this figure’s power over them and, at this decisive point, seem to transform from horror films into melodramas.

Many classic melodramas feature visual and spatial hierarchies as common themes, all indicating an interest in problems surrounding the big Other’s ineffectuality and blindness. One thinks of this motif throughout Hitchcock’s work but most centrally in

Vertigo, in which the protagonist’s guilt over the law’s death for himself manifests in the famously recurring “vertigo” shots. Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) also features this trope in the dead titular character’s pedestal space that the protagonist fails to fill, the film also skirting the line between melodrama and horror. Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood melodramas

4 Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002, pp. 112 and 114. 72 also work through anxiety surrounding an elevated figure, and feature many similar instances of visual hierarchy: the frozen clock tower overseeing the town during All That

Heaven Allows’ (1955) credits sequence, the godlike figure overseeing the doubtful doctor’s operating room in Magnificent Obsession (1954), Dorothy Malone killing her father through her famous “dance of death” upstairs as he descends the stairs in Written on the Wind (1956). The big Other haunts Nicholas Ray’s 1950s melodramas as well, most significantly through the law’s functional failure for James Dean’s character Jim in Rebel without a Cause (1955). Ray depicts Jim’s investment in elevating his father to this position through his awe at the stars in the famous observatory scene, as well as the father in Larger than Life (1956) abusing the cure for impotence and the constantly shifting power relations beneath Joan Crawford’s feet in Johnny Guitar (1954). Rainer Werner Fassbinder re- appropriates many of Sirk and Ray’s stylistic traits in his films, but none as much as their interest in the big Other. He often depicts his own characters gazing upward toward a lofty social standing only he takes this perspective to its extreme, causing them to wind up alone, perpendicular to the ground, and as good as dead in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

(1972), Fox and His Friends (1975), and In a Year with Thirteen Moons (1978). The big

Other’s ineffectiveness also appears in many of Michelangelo Antonioni’s melodramatic films: for example, the guilt-inducing elevator shafts in Story of a Love Affair (1950), the male protagonist’s final jump from the tower in The Cry (1957), and the camera’s downward descent in the credits sequence of The Night (1961). Nakata is moreover explicit about Max Ophüls’ influence on his work. Ophüls’ films predominate with alienated characters separated from the world by great heights: the protagonist’s viewing her 73

unknowing love interest from atop the stairwell in Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948),

the woman’s jump from a balcony for her neglectful lover’s gaze in Pleasure (1952), the titular character’s staged fall for the circus audience in Lola Montès (1955). Overall, many melodramas express crises over these blind and inadequate structural figures, and Nakata’s films fit well within this criterion.

It is thus useful to reconsider the definitions of horror and melodrama in relation to their differing positions toward the big Other’s gaze. The fear aroused in the horror film is due to the over-presence and dominance of the big Other. Horror’s figural elements such as ghosts, vampires, and undead zombies not only pose the problem of this figure’s actual futility, but also indicate the subject’s own problematic relation to it. Julia Kristeva connects horror films’ interest in the abject to the big Other’s over-proximity, the abject being an element requiring exclusion from a social world in order for this world to function.5 The abject figure emerges from an exclusionary prohibition, installing a

privileged superego figure on the opposite side of a border. This border produces a

remainder as something that the subject cannot incorporate into its psychic structure, and

the remainder continually haunts the subject until it takes up a different relation to it.

On the other hand, the melodrama’s tragedies stem from this border’s non-

existence, the subject’s world being seen by an impotent gaze unable to solve its problems.

Copjec describes the melodramatic world’s relation to this invisible plight as “one in which

masks proliferate as masks, as disguises that flaunt their thinness.”6 Melodrama’s masks

5 Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. 6 Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, p. 117. 74

and disguises fill the same space as horror’s borders and prohibitions, producing a void-

oriented anguish instead of horror’s often proximity-oriented fear. Several scholars have

studied this connection between melodrama and horror. For example, Linda Williams

defines horror and melodrama as two examples of what she calls “body genres” for their

direct effects on the spectator’s body via fear and other emotions.7 She relates these affects

to castration anxiety in horror and nostalgia for lost origins in melodrama, both implying

problems surrounding the big Other’s presence and absence. Annette Brauerhoch

illustrates how the two genres intertwine when a mother figure’s role appears as an

unnatural social construct through her analysis of the film Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry,

1981).8 Sarah Arnold further splits the genres by presenting mother figures as either

demonic or self-sacrificing, featuring a chapter that analyzes Ring and Dark Water within this framework.9 These scholars connect horror and melodrama together through their content centered on the family, and thus implicitly tie them both to the big Other as a structural figure. Nakata’s films maintain traits of the two genres, and this generic tension largely accounts for the films’ own tension and unease surrounding a necessary separation.

Their resolutions often involve a shift in generic register from horror to melodrama that occurs by the protagonists separating from the big Other, whether the father or the mother figure. This eradication produces a melodramatic ending solving the problem of Ring and

Dark Water’s “unknown women,” as the big Other’s over-present function absents itself.

7 Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1991, pp. 2- 13. 8 Brauerhoch, Annette. “Mixed Emotions: “Mommie Dearest.” Between Melodrama and Horror.” Cinema Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, 1995, pp. 53-64. 9 Arnold, Sarah. Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 75

The “unknown woman” as a concept stems from Stanley Cavell’s work on

melodrama. He uses the title from the Max Ophüls film Letter from an Unknown Woman

as a way of defining the genre in its Hollywood context. For Cavell, melodrama “recount[s]

interacting versions of a story…or myth, that seems to present itself as a woman’s search

for a story, or of the right to tell her story.”10 Melodrama, therefore, makes the truth appear

in the guise of a fiction, and so many fictions colliding with each other imbue the world

with confusion over one’s true life story. By combining melodrama with horror, Nakata

turns this unknown woman’s story into a horror element itself haunting both his films’

female protagonists as well as their children. Ring and Dark Water visually obscure their

ghosts to a great extent, leading one to surmise that the ghosts do not indicate a particular

person returning from the dead so much as a parasitic life narrative attached to the

protagonists, a self-effacing life story in which they nevertheless remain invested. The

films’ trajectories lead the protagonists to extricate themselves from these fictions. For

Nakata, the big Other’s condoned life narratives exist in an undead, purgatorial state, and

his characters’ goal lies in mourning these fictions and allowing them to finally proceed to

the afterlife: in other words, to die for the big Other’s gaze. The afterlife of Ring and Dark

Water does not encapsulate a supernatural paradise apart from the given world, but rather

transforms the given world into a hereafter alleviating the heavy burden of acting for a

blind gaze. At this remedial point, Nakata’s films transform from horror films into

melodramas and allow their protagonists to begin conjuring their own life narratives.

10 Cavell, Stanley. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 3. 76

Supernatural Guilt and Worldly Shame

Nakata’s generic transformations further emerge from a Japanese context to suggest

that life itself changes from the horror genre to melodrama at a precise point: when one

becomes subject to a loss. This psychic metamorphosis occurs when subjects experience

shame instead of guilt. Copjec defines these two affects in a way mirroring the

aforementioned generic definitions’ relations to the big Other. On the one hand, guilt arises

from an unseen figure’s gaze looking downward upon a subject from a position beyond an

invisible border, “seeing oneself through the Other.”11 Experiencing guilt implies the big

Other’s visual clarity seeing the subject from outside of the subject’s visual field. Shame,

on the contrary, indicates a lack in the big Other, “since there is no Other who sees.”12 This affect involves “making oneself seen” inside a world where one exists as visible within it, not beyond it. Therefore, one experiences subjectivity alongside shame because it reveals the big Other’s ineffectuality and one’s need to act in accordance with this lack. One does not become a subject because a privileged figure bestows subjectivity upon it, but rather at the moment when this figure disappears from the world. This disappearance then instills the subject with a loss that it returns to throughout its life. Shame, in fact, indicates one’s own need to acknowledge and enter the world itself, because the beyond can provide no alternative to one’s worldly isolation but only increase its magnitude. Like Kurosawa’s films that fill characters with an empty substance, Nakata fills his characters with the radical solitude of shame.

11 Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, p. 213. 12 Ibid. p. 128. 77

Therefore, Nakata’s melodramatic horror films fit into a Japanese historical context

potent for producing shame through the big Other’s dysfunction. Western scholars often

view Japan as an example of a culture structured on shame, as opposed to traditional

western cultures that center on guilt. Ruth Benedict famously makes this claim in her study

of Japanese society immediately following World War II. She argues that “[s]hame has the

same place of authority in Japanese ethics that a ‘clear conscience,’ ‘being right with God,’

and the avoidance of sin have in western ethics.”13 This cultural independence from God, however, does not make Japan a lawless frontier, and Benedict extends this point by arguing for the immanence implied in experiencing shame. Instead of God or a god-like figure, “any man watches the judgment of the public upon his deeds,” “therefore, a man will not be punished in the afterlife…[and Japanese subjects] do not recognize post-death reward and punishment or a heaven and a hell.”14 For Benedict, Japan does not contain an

afterlife beyond it, nor does it house a privileged figure keeping tabs on one’s actions from

this beyond. Instead, Japan’s emphasis on shame places the big Other’s all-seeing gaze

within the world itself, so that the subject becomes accountable for its actions through the

eyes of actual people rather than an imaginary figure. In this vision of Japan, the afterlife

becomes the real world itself. Shame, for Copjec, leads to “a kind of group sentiment, a

feeling of solidarity with others” that fills the subject with its own emptiness when this

13 Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. London: Secker and Warburg, 1947, p. 224. 14 Ibid. 78 solidarity is broken.15 This affect relates the subject to worldly others and turns the big

Other’s traditionally all-powerful position into a weak one requiring the subject’s support.

Lost Decade Japan, moreover, denotes a particularly shame-inducing moment in the nation’s history.16 The country’s deteriorated social conditions constantly produce moments when the big Other’s non-existence becomes clear in the form of rampant unemployment, homelessness, massive amounts of suicide, and public terror attacks. These conditions cause a desire for the big Other to appear in the world, leading subjects shamelessly to abuse this power granted to them by others. Instead of structuring themselves around a foundational loss assumed by everyone, these subjects take advantage of the big Other’s blindness for their own ends, and thus imply that one exists. This action, however, only solidifies the big Other for them as a figure of horror, leading guilt to appear as a real specter from beyond an otherworldly border. Guilt emerges from shame’s absence in the subject’s visual field, and Nakata’s films constantly show this border breaking down

15 Copjec, Joan. “The Censorship of Interiority.” Umbr(a): Islam, 2009, p. 167. Copjec writes this essay on shame in a contemporary Islamic context, one historically connecting to that in which Benedict writes her book via the United States’ similarly bellicose reactions toward each. Copjec writes in response to U.S. government officials basing their methods for torturing Arab POWs on a book arguing that “shame would be the most effective device for breaking down Iraqi prisoners psychologically” (166). Benedict writes in the war torn context of World War II, in which Japan seemed to embody the U.S.’s absolute opposite, herself describing Japan as “the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle.” Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 1. These contexts mirror each other in that the contemporary U.S. continues to hold a similar hostility toward middle-eastern cultures, as if guilt and shame cannot coexist without going to war with one another. 16 The experience of shame does not solely appear within contemporary Japanese cinema. Yasujiro Ozu’s late silent film I Was Born, But… (1932) embodies a product of another recessionary period in Japanese history and features a clear example of a subject emerging from its encounter with a lack in the big Other. Late in the film, the young boy protagonists witness their father, who to this point embodied a strong, respectable figure for them, making a series of comical faces on a projected film so as to entertain his boss. This moment completely alters the boys’ relation to the world and the frame through which they view it, allowing them to re-enter this world as mature subjects instead of naïve children. Nakata’s Dark Water leads its young protagonist to a similar conclusion in relation to her mother by similarly changing her relation to the structural fantasy frame separating her from the world. 79

and a supernatural figure emerging through its ruin. His films’ horror elements originate in

the over-proximity of guilt. They suggest that contemporary subjects must emerge from

this conflict by detaching themselves from their relation to the big Other’s gaze and

entering the social world. Instead of performing for an invisible gaze that sees it, this gaze

becomes blind, and the subject begins performing instead for the gaze of real people.

Removing the Boundary between Fiction and Reality in Ring

Nakata’s Ring leads its protagonist down a disconnecting trajectory. The film famously tracks a curse that attaches to subjects after they watch a mysterious video tape, at which point the nearest phone rings to inform them that they will die in seven days.

Several young people from around town disappear after watching this video, leading Reiko

(Nanako Mitsushima), a news journalist for local television, to conduct a report on their disappearances. She watches the tape and receives her own phone call afterwards.

Beginning to fear for her life, she calls on her ex-husband Ryuji (Kiroyuki Sanada) for help, and the two carefully study the tape’s content. Reiko’s young son Yoichi (Rikiya

Otaka) manages to view the tape as well, doubling Reiko’s immediate need to solve the curse’s mystery. She and Ryuji travel to the island where the curse first began, and discover its history originating with a psychic woman and her paranormal daughter, Sadako (Rie

Ino’o). The tape begins with a long shot of an underground well, and the pair eventually uncover Sadako’s rotten corpse at the bottom of this well, down which her father pushed her as a young girl. Reiko lives past her predicted moment of death, but Sadako still emerges out of Ryuji’s television set and kills him. Reiko discovers the reason for her 80

survival: she copied the tape and showed it to someone else whereas Ryuji did not. Ring

ends as she drives down an empty highway to save her son in the same way.

Given Nakata’s interest in the big Other’s ineffectiveness, obvious reasons exist for

why he would decide to adapt Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring (1991) into a film. He shares with

Suzuki a similar interest in Japan’s dysfunctional big Other function, as Suzuki’s novel centers on a mysterious curse inflicted upon women by father figures. Suzuki believes “that there is no preexisting paternal instinct [in Japan]. Under the traditional patriarchal system, fathers never assumed any true responsibility to their families - they were basically just symbolic figures.”17 This statement reveals Suzuki’s awareness of the big Other’s virtual existence as a social function, no real person actually incarnating it. Given the aforementioned hierarchical form and content in his films, Nakata clearly shares this awareness with him. Nakata even takes things a step further by changing the protagonist from male to female, as if a father figure successfully solving this mystery no longer seems possible as Japan’s recession advances further into the Lost Decade.

Furthermore, Nakata often presents Ring’s content in an originally false way to suggest the big Other’s blindness. The gaze exists in Ring’s world as the fallible gaze of other people. One breaks the rules of this world when it exhibits themselves and reveal too

much to this gaze, discretion and delicacy governing the truth rather than brute honesty.

The J-Horror movement’s predominant feature lies in concealing its ghosts’ faces, but it

ultimately goes farther than this in also revealing that the big Other does not anchor a

17 Qtd. in Kalat, David. J-Horror: The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge, and Beyond. New York: Vertical, 2007, p. 30. 81 truthful world separate from fiction, that the truth itself best appears through a veil. Ring’s gaze pushes the horror genre toward a more melodramatic relation to the gaze, and in this way attaches it to misdirection, masks, and the lie. Nakata fills Ring with false images that expose the spectator’s investment in truth’s explicit presentation, consistently suggesting that it not trust what it sees. He does this not to moralistically decry deception as corrupting a pure and original truth; this would involve a relation to the big Other that Nakata clearly does not condone. By depending on an original truth, the subject maintains a relationship to something always otherworldly and supernatural. The subject can never reach or incarnate this concept of the truth, the truth always remaining one step ahead of it. Rather,

Ring refuses to invest itself in such a prohibiting border between lies and the truth or, in turn, a guilt-inducing failure to live up to an authentic cultural ideal.

The film presents these cultural ideals through Reiko, who struggles to act as both a full-time news journalist and single mother. Through her social function as a journalist, she forms the narratives that explicitly structure reality, a notion mirroring her other function as a parent forming a structuring fiction for Yoichi. Reiko translates reality for the public’s gaze in the form of news reports. Through this process, she can only access reality indirectly via word-of-mouth and stories told about it, keeping herself separated from actually living in it. However, in Ring, her task lies in translating a story that does not reveal itself to the naked eye. Her alienated relation to the world appears to her in distorted form through the mysterious video tape. Viewing this tape implicates Reiko within the very incomprehensible fiction in which she lives, and Ring’s trajectory leads her to see clearly the truth of her psychic life. No one can illuminate the truth of this fiction for her; instead, 82

she illuminates it herself by paradoxically plunging into its own impenetrable darkness,

into the well where the big Other places what it does not wish to see. Ring’s mysterious fiction, in the form of the cursed video tape, turns into Reiko’s own reason for being in the end, forging a different perspective on truth and the world in which the curse becomes the cure.

Ring’s opening scenes exemplify Nakata’s deceptive strategy toward revealing truth. When the film begins, two young girls tell each other stories about their experiences with friends that hint at sexual liaisons. The girls’ stories include one about the cursed video tape, but the stories playfully waver between truth and falsity to the point where a phone ringing fills them with dread, as if one of their stories’ proving true poses something to be feared. Ring’s curse embodies nothing other than this prospect of a strange fiction, foreign to the speaker who speaks of it, integrating itself into the speaker’s life story as if a foreign character with a life of its own. This story takes the form of a “ring” through this phone’s ringing to inform characters of their death, only the most obvious of this word’s

English connotations ultimately remains absent from the film entirely in the form of the wedding ring.18 Yet, a wedding ring nevertheless structures Ring via the film’s ties to the mysterious curse. The wedding ring haunts Ring’s characters as if in response to their undisclosed amorous endeavors, invisibly distorting their vision, images, and photographs after having sex without the intention of producing a child. The girls from the beginning disappear from the film after telling their stories, as the fictional curses they comically

18 Nakata would be aware of the word “ring”’s English language connotations. He spent several years living and studying in England before making Ring in Japan and speaks fluent English, not requiring a translator in his interviews. 83

disclose become real. They disappear when something unseen materializes in front of them

and causes their images to turn into a negative freeze frame after looking into the camera,

the camera’s perspective indicating an invisible spectator: the big Other. However, nothing

materializes in such a way for Reiko, as if she survives the curse because the ring’s

distorting fiction does not appear for her. Reiko still feels alive at the end by avoiding being

trapped in the big Other’s “ring,” and thus affirms the distance she experiences between

herself and the social world’s fictions.

Figure 11. Seen by an Invisible Gaze in Ring.

Ring often points out the unspoken distance its characters feel toward their social roles, most significantly in the former couple of Reiko and her ex, Ryuji. Moreover, the film does not cast blame or responsibility for this gap’s existence on anyone in particular.

Instead, it aligns with a melodramatic perspective by recognizing this gap as an inherent component to a big Other-less world. Distortion permeates the melodrama’s world in the form of real people’s deception, masks, and disguises instead of horror’s ghosts, monsters, or other otherworldly characters. In melodrama, the ghost is not a fiction, but rather the fiction itself is the ghost: in other words, in melodrama, real people embody unreal fictional 84 characters that experience themselves as a gap between social identities. Therefore, while horror illuminates the imaginary elements that invisibly distort an otherwise comprehensible reality, melodrama illuminates reality as itself an incomprehensible fiction.19 A decomposed corpse lies latent beneath the structure of the world in Ring, and once Reiko realizes this, she can enter this world as subject to the loss of its pre-written meanings. Ring becomes a melodrama after Sadako’s distorting fiction finally enters the world through the television screen, killing the big Other figure for Reiko’s son in the form of his absent father. Reiko then begins adding to the stories she hears instead of simply reporting them verbatim for the public’s gaze. Fiction here crosses the line barring it from reality, and believing otherwise nevertheless reveals the subject to a guilt-inducing gaze viewing it from a position separate from its own vision.

19 This is not to say that the horror genre does not or cannot present a symbolic fiction as an ineradicable ghost: it often does so, as exemplified by the tagline for Jennifer Kent’s Australian horror film The Babadook (2014): “you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” In other words, subjects of traumatic events remain attached to the life narrative that haunts them. However, when this occurs, horror seems to intertwine itself with melodrama and melodrama’s non-relation to the big Other, as in The Babadook’s dead father figure haunting the single mother’s domestic sphere where she, like Reiko, struggles to raise her young son. This film’s female protagonist is a former children’s book author, a writer who has stopped writing. “The Babadook” book eternally returns to her front doorstep to indicate the protagonist’s need to begin writing again: to merge reality to a different fiction than the one attached to it via her husband’s death. See also Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Loft (2005) for another horror film holding a close relation to melodrama, which also features a female fiction author as its protagonist. 85

Figure 12. "Don't Look at the Camera" (Ring).

Breaking the Fifth Wall

Nakata frequently separates truth and fiction by abruptly revealing a film being

made within his films. For instance, Ring first introduces Reiko during a strange scene in

which a young girl is being interviewed about the curse. When asked “Have you heard

what’s on it?” the girl does not respond, but instead looks directly into the camera. The

camera then cuts to reveal Reiko and a film crew interviewing the girl as the cameraman

says “Don’t look at the camera,” implicitly suggesting that the reality viewed in news reports embodies the result of an invested fiction. Here, Nakata does not so much break the fourth wall to address the spectator, but rather expose a fifth wall in the psyche behind which lies the big Other. One finds a similar moment in Don’t Look Up, in which a scene begins with close-ups of a woman painting a landscape overlooking a peaceful river. The camera reveals the water slowly turning red, and the woman reacts with horror until an unseen voice suddenly yells, “Cut!” The camera then cuts to a wide shot of the scene in which a film crew appears tearing down the set. Nakata lists one of his favorite films as

François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), a film about the tumultuous relationships 86

between members of a film crew over the course of a production, the characters steadily

transforming into the roles they play in the film.20 Truffaut’s films repeatedly reveal the line between performance and reality in a way described by Fabio Vighi as not undermining the situation’s artifice and constructedness, but “increasing [their] investment in fiction” in a way that reveals how the characters perform their actions for a gaze.21 For

Vighi, Truffaut’s investment in artificiality, staging, and the “magic of cinema” in no way diminishes his films’ affective power; rather, they enhance it by exhibiting how investing in fiction makes these experiences possible. This staging effect performs a similar function in Ring, only it introduces Reiko as feeling a separation between truth and fiction implying her lacking investment in the world. Rather than investing in the fictional world seen on television, Nakata’s characters climb out of this television to enter the real unseen world.

The most obviously fictional element of Ring lies in Sadako’s mother Shizuko’s

(Masako) visionary abilities. Shizuko’s psychic powers originally gain her national fame for predicting a volcano’s eruption, but the public’s disbelief in these abilities lead her to commit suicide out of shame. Without the belief of others in the fictions that it creates, the psychic’s own non-belief overwhelms it with its lack of a structuring fiction. The psychic’s ability to see hidden truths does not lie in actual supernatural powers. Instead, these

“powers” indicate the psychic’s knowledge that the big Other is a fiction, and its awareness of the creative power of words causes truth to appear out of nothing. The psychic reads other people’s desires and not their minds, relaying to them the fictions that they

20 Kalat, J-Horror, p. 28. 21 Vighi, Fabio. Sexual Difference in European Cinema: The Curse of Enjoyment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 35. 87

unknowingly wish to hear. Sadako appears from offscreen at this point, as if to take the

blame for one of the doubtful crowd members’ subsequent death, appearing as if born out

of Shizuko’s shame. Shizuko sees the world so acutely that she cannot coexist with it, and

this fact ironically causes others to reverse her ability on herself by seeing through her own claims to supernatural abilities.

While Shizuko creates Ring’s curse through her excessive vision, the film never presents the curse’s agent as anything but a visual distortion. Ring refuses to reveal Sadako

in her entirety, always veiling her face behind her hair or indirectly alluding to her presence,

as in the opening scene’s unknown gaze appearing for the two girls. This decision by

Nakata subtly presents Sadako as a fiction, only existing through others’ speaking about

her. This fiction, of course, contains nothing but moments of unveiled secrets leading to

affective shame, as in Shizuko frightening the fishermen by her ability to see beneath the

surface of the sea, the public’s denouncing Shizuko at her demonstration, and the scientist

throwing Sadako down a well following her mother’s suicide. Sadako’s name translates

into English as a chaste, pure, or socially upright child, and her indirect presentation

insinuates that Ring’s curse not only originates in a pure child, but that this child embodies

a fiction itself.22

Therefore, when Reiko unearths Sadako inside the well, she only finds her as a putrefied corpse. The fantasy of a child exempt from impurity and loss died long ago and lies awaiting the act of mourning. This fiction obviously connects to the fantasy frame

22This definition comes from the kanji sada “貞” seen inside an eye in Ring’s cursed video, as defined in Nelson, Andrew. The New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary. Ed. John H. Haig. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1997, p. 1030. 88

through which Reiko views her son Yoichi, whom she typically leaves home alone given

his father’s absence and her need to work for a living. Sadako appears as an abject,

excluded element for Reiko; and yet she embraces this corpse despite the decay oozing

from its eye sockets, its empty gaze explaining the unknown perspective killing victims of

the curse. Reiko’s image of her son as unblemished reveals how she ignores him in reality,

placing him on the other side of a border outside of the world’s boundaries. Treating

someone as the big Other makes them abject, treating the actual person as “what [one] permanently thrust[s] aside in order to live,” needing to do so again and again to ensure its identity.23 Instead of feeling guilty for not being a good mother, Reiko must vacate this

pure figure from her fantasy frame entirely, and instead experience shame from the fact

that a dead person structures her life. Mourning this fiction’s death allows Reiko to view

her son as a copy of this fantasy, allowing a new fiction to emerge in connection to her real

son instead of a mythical pure child or “Sada-ko.”

Nakata further uses film form to indicate Reiko’s ultimate need to separate from

her attachment to this fantasy. Once inside the well, Reiko looks up at Ryuji from a low

angle, locating Ryuji among the other failed big Other figures that occupy this position

throughout Nakata’s films. He then cuts to a graphic match of Sadako’s murderer looking

down at Reiko from the same position. These shots further connect Ryuji to a historical

fiction in Japan of failed father figures that repeats itself throughout history, one that only

appears to those who identify with the position of a pure child fantasy. Fittingly, Sadako

emerges from the bottom of the well immediately after Ryuji’s gaze disappears from above

23 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 89

and after Reiko unties the rope around her waist tethering her to him. Here, Reiko locates

where the undead fiction hides within her own psychic structure, and by mourning its death,

she can then intervene within her own life story and ultimately re-write its ending. Once

she reveals the fiction that structures her world, she instantly becomes the author of that

world, and this moment begins her subjectivity as a subject to the loss of a true and original life story.

In the end, Nakata not only falsifies Ring’s images, but Japanese history as well.

By emphasizing the masks, fictions, and false realities pertaining to melodrama, he creates

a cinematic time-image affirming the power of the false. Gilles Deleuze argues that this

falsifying image in cinema holds a creative power by invoking “that the ideal of the true

[is] the most profound fiction.”24 The cinematic time-image causes distinctions between fiction and reality to collapse, revealing, for instance, a subject’s experiencing a distance toward its life story or a nation relating in a non-identical way to its history. By disrupting a linear progression of time in this way, the time-image “ceases to be truthful, that is, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying.”25 Ring’s use of falsifying images leads Reiko to uncover the fantasy structure she does not immediately recognize that she no longer believes in. The film follows her and her ex-husband frantically travelling

throughout Japan to solve the curse of Sadako; however, Reiko ultimately solves the curse

by simply detaching from him and her structural fantasies surrounding him. At this point,

the match cut slices into time’s linear progression by revealing Ryuji to reincarnate a past

24 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 149. 25 Ibid., p. 131. 90

murderer, and this all occurs at the moment in time of her prophesized death. Here, Reiko

actually dies, only to become an undead subject of a false life. It is not insignificant that

the law appears for the first time only Reiko conjures up the law herself instead of relying

on the big Other of the past to do so. In this way, she affirms her new position navigating

her own life, and the open road she drives down in the end leads to her taking up a real

place in the social world’s fictions.

Through Reiko becoming an undead subject, Ring excavates a similar need for

Japan to separate from its own history during the Lost Decade period. It extends Reiko’s

false relation to her life story to present Japan inhabiting a similarly false position within

historical progression. Michel Foucault appears to describe Ring’s relation to Japanese

history by defining an “Effective” mode of historical writing. This mode “deprives the self

of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported

by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending.”26 In this way, Ring affirms Japan’s

new place in history by “uproot[ing] its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt[ing]

its pretended continuity.”27 The Lost Decade, for Nakata, forms the aforementioned “fifth wall” between a subject and an invisible element, this element being one’s identity, history, and truth connecting the subject to its consistency. Ring breaks this wall of continuity at

various points: through Sadako emerging through Ryuji’s television after the curse was

supposedly solved, through the characters freezing into negatives when they look directly

at the camera, in the interviewee at the beginning being told not to look into the camera,

26 Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p. 88. 27 Ibid. 91

and even through Ryuji’s ghost appearing to Reiko through her television screen. The film

suggests that Japan can break through this invisible wall and re-enter history by

fictionalizing its place within history through distributing tapes, videos, and films. Lost

Decade Japan drives away from its prophesized ending on the horizon by telling new

stories about itself that do not necessarily involve the tragic death of an abject figure. The

film concludes with the date and the horizon for this reason, as Reiko was supposed to be

dead at this point in time, but instead drives toward this future horizon knowing how to survive. Ultimately, Nakata proposes that recreating Reiko’s trajectory is the task of the J-

Horror film: excavating Japan's secret historical narratives, fictionalizing them, and entering a new voice into them while copying and distributing the new national narratives to the world.

Dark Water and the Return to Birth Trauma

While Ring forces a single mother to encounter her investment in an abject maternal fantasy, Nakata’s Dark Water tells a similar story from the child’s perspective. The film depicts another single mother, Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki), struggling to balance her social roles while simultaneously going through divorce proceedings with her husband. She and her daughter Ikuko (Rio Kanno) move into a new apartment together, Yoshimi planning to work as a proofreader for a book publisher while Ikuko attends school. However, Yoshimi repeatedly arrives late to pick her daughter up from school, and begins breaking down emotionally during the divorce hearings. Furthermore, a large water stain appears on their apartment’s ceiling that grows along with Yoshimi’s troubles, and she and Ikuko begin 92 seeing a mysterious young girl around the complex whose face and identity remain hidden.

A young girl’s red bag also appears and reappears after being disposed of several times.

These elements synthesize when the “unknown child” attempts to drown Ikuko, finally appearing as an abject, monstrous child strangling Yoshimi while calling her mother.

Yoshimi eventually admits to being the unknown girl’s mother as Ikuko watches in confusion, Yoshimi then disappearing, leaving Ikuko completely alone. The film concludes ten years later as Ikuko returns to the apartment complex to find her mother still there along with the abject girl, ultimately walking away from the complex on her own in the end.

By focusing on the child instead of the mother, Dark Water takes up a different relation than Ring to the subject’s barrier and the big Other beyond it. While Reiko needed to break the boundary between herself and her real child, Ikuko in Dark Water needs to constitute a boundary between herself and her mother. Therefore, like Reiko in Ring, Ikuko must constitute her own fantasy, doing so by separating from the one that haunts her mother. Yoshimi’s mother abandoned her at Ikuko’s age, and the film indiscernibly cuts to and from scenes of Yoshimi’s past as a child causing them to appear as if reoccurring in the present. The film begins with a flashback of Yoshimi as a girl, and Nakata cuts from the young Yoshimi to the current one in a way that emphasizes her current situation’s resemblance to that of the past. He films Yoshimi’s flashback as it rains heavily outside a window, then cuts to a graphic match of the grown Yoshimi in a similar position looking out a window at heavy rainfall. The rainfall on the window suggests that the rain affectively falls directly on her despite her being indoors, as if her mother’s absence leads her to encase herself within an insulated shell failing to function socially. The window here constructs 93

an invisible barrier between Yoshimi and the world, although this barrier does not shield

her from the rain, but rather increases its effect on her. Furthermore, the past and the present

merge in this scene, introducing Dark Water as a film about this experience of the past leaking into the present. Just before these cuts occur, Dark Water’s opening titles roll over a shot inside of another enclosed space, only this time a space filled with a dense and viscous liquid resembling the darkness and obscurity of the womb. This womb-like space haunts Dark Water’s protagonists like Ring’s curse as a story of past fullness re-emerging in the present. The film envisions the desire to return to this lost space as what distorts its characters’ vision.

While the womb embodies the film’s implicit horror element as a lost object, Dark

Water surrounds this element with several other horror elements that all relate to and emerge from the need to separate from it. The water motif drenches the film with a melancholic nostalgia for the womb. The film’s incessantly leaking water suggests a variety of related elements: amniotic fluid, a woman’s “water breaking,” and birth. Dark

Water’s supernatural elements appear because Ikuko becomes aware of the big Other’s inability to account for her, her mother suffering this function’s disappearance when she was precisely the same age. The film illustrates how Yoshimi unwittingly sets up the same narrative trajectory for her daughter that she suffered as a child, repeatedly leaving her to fend for herself after school as the rain falls in the same way that it fell in the past.

Cavell describes Dark Water’s crisis well despite writing about melodramas of a different era. He argues that “melodramas of unknownness,” such as that of Yoshimi in relation to her absent mother, define themselves by lacking a central structuring big Other 94

figure. In the Hollywood films he studies, “the woman’s father, or another older man (it

may be her husband), is not on the side of her desire but on the side of law, and her mother

is always present (or her search for or loss of…a mother is always present), and she is

always shown as a mother (or her relation to a child is explicit).”28 In other words, the unknown woman of melodrama cannot relate to the law in whatever form it manifests, and cannot assume its nominative function toward her child as a result. She cannot anchor her child’s identity because she lacks a structural figure of her own who relates to the law and the big Other’s function, particularly the mother’s function in the case of female subjects.29

Cavell further defines the unknown woman melodrama by the “presence and absence of

parents and children,” connecting these relations to a specific interest in the “role of the

past and memory.”30 “[I]n melodramas the past is frozen, mysterious, with topics forbidden

and isolating,” the films often returning to and concluding in “the place from which it began

or in which it has climaxed, a place of abandonment or transcendence.”31 Nakata presents

the past and memory in a similar way in Dark Water, as Yoshimi’s absent mother figure

effectively freezes her within her past life narrative. Yoshimi never sits down with a

psychiatrist or doctor to speak about this past; instead, it returns on its own via flashbacks,

dreams and ghosts, as if unable to verbalize itself in Yoshimi’s speech.

28 Cavell, Contesting Tears, p. 5. 29 One can easily imagine a similar film being made about ghosts appearing because of a male character’s lacking a structural father figure. Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1980) depicts a young boy’s father dying early in his life, only for it to return in spectral form throughout the film. The film’s trajectory consists of the young boy encountering variations of this structural figure, ranging from a brutal, sadistically religious surrogate father to a giant puppet of God speaking to him in the middle of the night. 30 Ibid., p. 6. 31 Ibid. 95

Figure 13. The Gaze of the Complex in Dark Water.

Figure 14. Being Viewed by a Stain in Dark Water.

Nakata externalizes Yoshimi’s verbal failure by distorting the film’s setting in various ways. He suggests this by often filming her and Ikuko walking toward the building from an intimidating high angle. This framing performs a similar function as the low angles in his other films, but instead of a specific big Other figure, Yoshimi’s “big Other complex” forms an anonymous gaze looking down on her from a point eluding visibility, the same one causing characters in Ring to disappear. The stain on her ceiling inhabits a similar elevated position, also gazing down at Yoshimi from the same heightened angle. In addition, the complex’s structure appears about to fall apart, further tying Yoshimi’s own psychic structure to the building’s dysfunctional elements such as the constant leaks, faulty 96 elevator, and the indolent old man acting as its manager. All in all, Nakata’s mise-en-scène and motifs express Yoshimi’s internal state in which the big Other does not function for her, despite all her attempts at correcting it.

Dark Water depicts Yoshimi’s constant return to her birth trauma, an idea held by psychoanalysis as the truth of subjectivity. This concept refers not to her physical birth, but her social birth, or more particularly the fact that Yoshimi feels that she was not socially born but irresponsibly left to fend for herself. Dark Water’s connection to Yoshimi’s past creates the water stain appearing on the ceiling of her and Ikuko’s new apartment. This stain begins leaking water, as if creating a similar space to where Yoshimi looked out the window as a child. The stain grows larger as the film goes on and leaks more and more water, as if the apartment were slowly becoming the womb-like space from the title sequence. This stain further fills Yoshimi with anxiety, albeit in a way suggesting that the water itself does not pose the real problem, but only alludes to it. The entire apartment complex effectively stands for Yoshimi’s own “complex” surrounding her fraught relation to her big Other position as a single mother.

Like Ring, Dark Water originates its visual problem in fiction and storytelling by distorting the visible world through specters and ghosts. Like Ring’s Sadako, Dark Water ties Yoshimi and Ikuko to a past fiction that seems to take over their lives from the apartment next door. The local myth describes how a young girl named Mitsuko Kawai

(Mirei Oguchi) disappeared after her mother decided to abandon her, obviously relating to

Yoshimi’s own life narrative. Yoshimi unknowingly repeats this narrative with her own daughter, causing it to continue eternally as if the past never ended. Also like Ring, this 97

fiction involves a myth surrounding a particular type of child. “Kawai” translates as “river”

and aurally resembles “kawaii” which means “cute,” while “Mitsuko” suggests a child,

“ko,” of “overflowing beauty.”32 Mitsuko’s nominal etymology makes sense for externalizing Yoshimi’s psychic structure, as Yoshimi more than likely views herself as this young girl on whom great tragedy perpetually befalls. The dirty water that overflows inside the apartment complex, then, points to these qualities’ being tainted by her mother abandoning her.

Furthermore, Yoshimi’s occupation connects her to storytelling just as Reiko’s connects her to the way she overlooks her own investment in the story she tells about herself. While Reiko reports on a fictional story circulating throughout Japan, Yoshimi proofreads fictional novels for mistakes and errors. These fictions used to contain disturbing and sadistic content before her daughter’s birth, and these stories became so traumatic for Yoshimi that she required psychiatric assistance. This disturbing content describes the truth of her big Other complex in which she repeatedly returns to the moment where her mother abandons her, apparently unable to stop acting in such a self-effacing way. Through these factors, Dark Water reveals that Yoshimi controls her relationship to her life story as an invisible force, unable to see how she herself embodies that very force.

32 These translations come from combining the kanji in Mitsuko’s name, 美津子河合, as defined in Nelson, The New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary. The tsu echoes the same kanji found in the Japanese word tsunami, a notion further relating to Dark Water’s endlessly gushing water. 98

Framing the Law

If Yoshimi’s psychic structure lacks a big Other figure, it is not for her lack of trying to substantiate one. At one point in the film, she breaks down after physically altercating with her husband outside of a divorce hearing. As the two argue, a man (Shigemitsu Ogi) stops to watch the scene, and afterwards moves over to offer counsel to Yoshimi now crouched on the floor in grief. The next scene introduces him as a lawyer, and his reassurance visibly improves Yoshimi’s demeanor. Nakata then cuts to a rare shot of

Yoshimi walking outside with the complex nowhere in sight. She further returns home to find her sociable aunt watching Ikuko. The film did not mention the aunt’s existence before this point, seeming to indicate Yoshimi’s new confidence in raising her daughter as a social being. Yoshimi’s meeting with the lawyer, therefore, substantiates her attempt to merge with the structural big Other as such: not any character in particular, but a placeholder for the law within her psychic structure. The lawyer being a man of the law, then, proves no contingency and it makes sense that he appears at the moment when Yoshimi feels most alone.

Despite appearing content after the constitution of the law, Yoshimi remains tethered to her past trauma. After she inspects the severely waterlogged apartment upstairs, the lawyer emerges from a taxi outside the complex in the following scene. He inspects the upstairs apartment and the rooftop water tower accompanied by the complex’s manager and real estate agent, reprimanding them both for not responding to Yoshimi’s maintenance requests. All in all, the lawyer appears to finally incarnate the big Other for Yoshimi, telling her to call him if anything further happens. He insists, “You must not act on your own,” 99

effectively smoothing over her anxiety over the difficulty surrounding single parenthood.

However, Yoshimi calls upon the lawyer and the law again when Mitsuko’s red bag

reappears, but the law offers no reply. Unable to rely on the lawyer or the law to ensure her

world’s meaning, Dark Water necessitates that Yoshimi make the risky venture into taking

responsibility for her situation.

As a filmmaker interested in melodrama and shame, Nakata in no way intends to

resolve his characters’ worldly isolation. The gaze always remains blind in his films, and

he fills Dark Water with several instances of blindness and impaired vision to indicate that

the big Other does not see Yoshimi or Ikuko. The most obvious instance lies in Nakata’s

refusing to reveal Mitsuko Kawai’s face, resulting in a similar visual obscurity to that

accompanying Sadako in Ring. She appears in the blink of an eye, only for an instant, and

usually for a half-second from behind a tightly framed border. For example, Yoshimi sees

Mitsuko through the elevator door window just as it begins moving downward, as well as

for a brief instant through the rooftop door standing slightly ajar. Nakata even blurs

Mitsuko’s face on the “missing child” flyers posted around Ikuko’s school, as if the film

deals more with a mythical “unknown child” than an actual missing person. The security cameras in the manager’s office pick up a shadowed presence with long hair only this gaze cannot see Mitsuko, either, as she disappears after the manager blinks his eyes. The manager’s faulty vision further indicates how Yoshimi feels that she lacks someone watching over her, and the film extends this fear onto Ikuko who disappears several times from Yoshimi’s own sight. 100

Furthermore, Dark Water often views Yoshimi from perspectives indicating her

visual crisis. The camera often views her from a low angle off to the side while she sits at

a desk in an official conversation with representatives of the law, either the divorce

mediators or the lawyer. In this way, Dark Water suggests that Yoshimi cannot acknowledge something that sits alongside her when she deals with the law, this excess element being her own guilty relation to the big Other function. Yoshimi’s guilt looks back at her and distorts her world as she struggles to maintain the right to embody the big Other function for her daughter, the gaze here reminding her of the absent presence attached to her in the form of her mother’s abandonment. The film also contains instances where the protagonists’ movements freeze because an invisible presence distorts space. As Yoshimi and Ikuko go up the elevator, it stops at the floor above their apartment. The two step aside to make room for whoever requested it, but no one appears. Furthermore, Ikuko speaks to an invisible person while she takes a bath, and a pair of anonymous hands tries to drown her later as the bathtub later overflows with dirty water. This invisible person indicates the abject and “unknown” young girl to whom Yoshimi attaches herself without realizing it, and that into which Ikuko finds herself transforming.

To abate this transformation, Dark Water utilizes another formal element often seen in horror films: the barrier between the protagonist and the abject. The film’s first scene begins with a similar scene from Ring, in which the camera reveals itself as a frame. It first shows mothers picking up their children from school on a rainy day, and then tracks back to reveal this scene as viewed through a window by a young girl. Slavoj Žižek argues that 101

the “reality we see through a window is always minimally spectral.”33 Viewing the world

through a frame exposes the presence of a fantasy frame supporting that world, a notion

that explains the strange experience that occurs “when driving a car or looking through a

window of a house, one perceives the reality outside in a weirdly de-realised state, as if

one is watching a performance.” Dark Water’s first scene similarly presents what it shows as a mediated way of viewing reality by revealing the frame through which Yoshimi views the world in the present as the past. Subsequently, this frame also bars the subject from the outside world, and the film’s task lies in allowing Ikuko to reach a point where this boundary between herself and the world collapses. However, Dark Water cannot imagine a world completely free from boundaries. Instead, it shows the importance of re-locating this boundary from where one’s parents, as the big Other, construct a structural barrier to where the subject constructs its own.

After introducing Yoshimi’s barrier tethering her to the past, Dark Water leads

Ikuko to build her own to separate her from the past and connect her to the future. This invisible wall first appears as Yoshimi thanks the lawyer for his help and reassurance.

Nakata evenly frames the two sitting at a table, while Ikuko sits in the background between them playing with toy blocks. The next shot reveals Ikuko building a large wall, disconnecting her own constructed scene from the stage play enacted in the foreground of the previous shot. This wall exists between Ikuko and the adults despite their apparent proximity, implying that Ikuko intuits the true stakes of her mother’s “big Other complex”

33 Žižek, Slavoj. "Notes on Performing, Its Frame, and Its Gaze." In Žižek and Performance. Ed. Broderick Chow and Alex Mangold. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 242. 102 without being able to put them into words. Yoshimi constantly returns to her own invisible wall between her and the big Other’s law, and the climactic events that follow this scene lead Ikuko to form her own wall between herself and her mother. As seen in the film’s opening camera movement, the fantasy frame through which Yoshimi views the world simultaneously separates her from that world. Yoshimi can only return to the structuring loss of her mother and thus imbues her own daughter with the same narrative trajectory; in other words, she treats her daughter as immutably already dead.

Dark Water’s concluding scenes transform Ikuko from this dead child into an undead subject. The film centers on an undead and unknown child who cannot move beyond the age of six, a figure envisioning how Yoshimi’s own world remains stuck inside the past while she reproduces the same temporal structure within Ikuko. Nakata conveys this further temporal complex through the apartment complex’s elevator not moving past the sixth floor until the end of the film. Upon reaching age seven, Japanese culture expects children to spend less time with their parents and more time in the social world, following their first year of elementary school beginning at age six. Dark Water dramatizes this rite of passage as six-year-old Ikuko runs the risk of reincarnating the same guilt complex from which her mother suffers. Yoshimi never moves up to the wide-open space of the rooftop on the seventh floor, this space marking where one inhabits the gaze of the world and looks downward rather than looking up from ground level at the gaze of the supernatural big

Other.

However, Ikuko does not suffer from the same fate because she experiences shame.

Upon viewing the unknown child strangling her mother, she recognizes the fantasy figure 103 attached to her mother and thereby recognizes the lack in the big Other that Yoshimi incarnates for her. Yoshimi avows that she is, in fact, this fantasy figure’s mother, Ikuko recognizing the lie and her position outside of it. A new wall then appears between Ikuko and her mother in the form of the elevator doors closing between them, simultaneously producing a barrier between the two as well as Ikuko’s own fantasy frame. The elevator also moves up to the seventh floor for the first time, but when Ikuko goes up the stairs to meet her mother inside it, the elevator contains nothing but a surge of dirty water dousing her with affect. In this way, Dark Water implicates Ikuko’s separating from the big Other’s fiction as a necessary element of her maturation. This figure cannot see the subject, but can only misrecognize it as an undead corpse left over from its past. At the point where she views the big Other through her own fantasy frame, Ikuko is born as a subject of the social world, sodden with life fluid as if fresh out of the womb.

Conclusion: The Invisible Gift of Shame

Dark Water’s epilogue mirrors that of another famous melodramatic ending, that of Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937). Stella Dallas ends as the mother, Stella (Barbara

Stanwyck), walks away from her now-married daughter toward an unseen space behind the camera’s gaze. Dark Water appears to quote this scene with the now high-school aged

Ikuko (Asami Mizukawa) walking away from her mother’s apartment complex toward this same offscreen space. Just before this ending, Stella views her daughter getting married and entering society from behind a gated barrier outside a window, effectively producing a similar effect to Nakata’s frames by encapsulating Stella’s own maternal fantasy frame 104

taken to its end point. This frame simultaneously provides her life meaning while

maintaining her separation from the world in the same way Yoshimi’s does in Dark Water

only Nakata’s film changes the trajectory to feature the daughter walking away from this

framing device. In this way, it becomes possible to locate Dark Water within a psychic

structure often found in melodrama that Copjec describes as hysteric.

The hysteric’s world lacks authenticity because it can find nothing but lack inside

of it. Its implicit goal lies in “respond[ing] to the absence of any limit [in the world] by

imposing imaginary limits on it.”34 In other words, constructing flimsy fantasy frames in

response to the law’s inconsistency. In the process, the hysteric’s imaginary boundaries

create a meaningful universe, “but it does so by spatializing time, freezing it in rigid

constructions.”35 This description locates melodrama’s hysteric structure within the frame

of the unknown woman’s frozen temporality as described by Cavell. It also relates the

hysteric to the abject’s necessary location behind a border as presented by Kristeva. The

hysteric abjects itself from the social world in order to imbue this world with meaning,

remaining quite aware of doing so while remaining unaware of this action’s temporal consequences. This notion re-locates Yoshimi to a knowing position within Dark Water’s scenario, albeit not all knowing. She sternly orders Ikuko to not enter the elevator where she is embracing Mitsuko’s corpse, revealing her wish that Ikuko separate from her in a creative, non-sacrificial light. Stella does this in Stella Dallas by filling her daughter with

34 Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, p. 123. Copjec further argues that hysteria is often misunderstood in being applied to the history of melodrama. For her, “the hidden or misunderstood virtue so dear to melodrama is not best approached as that of a passive victim of forces the victim cannot control but of an active manipulation.” 35 Ibid. 105 shame after showing up in extravagant garb where her daughter hangs out with her friends.

In contrast to the previous perspective viewing Yoshimi as unable to intervene in her situation, she works to create the boundary between herself and her daughter in the end by indirectly presenting herself as a lacking being and not the big Other.

Despite their apparently opposite endings, Dark Water and Stella Dallas create the same result for the daughters via their mothers giving what they do not have: the unexpectedly fecund gift of shame. The world pales in comparison to something more true and authentic in Yoshimi and Stella’s hysteric structures, and this fact leads them to imbue this world with guilt. Copjec describes the hysteric as the “superego to the world” through its “withdrawal to the heights of moral disdain from which she feels justified in proclaiming the inferiority of all she surveys.”36 Yoshimi exhibits these traits in Dark Water through complaining about the “rickety” structure she lives in and proofreading fiction novels for mistakes. Yet, the film justifies her complaints by extending them onto the difficulty for a single mother of functioning inside recessionary Japan. The nation’s own social structure appears itself outdated and filled with holes, and in this way, Dark Water recognizes a need for Lost Decade Japan to similarly separate from the structures of its past.

As stated earlier, Japan’s Lost Decade poses an ideal period for producing shame.

The big Other’s ineffectuality reveals itself amidst the nation’s deteriorated social conditions, and Dark Water presents a similar moment occurring in its epilogue taking place “ten years later.” Released soon after the Lost Decade surpassed a ten year period,

Nakata’s film attempts to return to a womblike historical moment before the recession set

36 Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, p. 127. 106 in. In attempting to do so, it places shame back within its world-creating function by creating a scene in which Ikuko sees this historical moment from the point where it lacks.

She, like Japan, embodies an undead figure from the past. This notion leads Ikuko to make herself “visible not merely from some specific point…but from all sides” as a social being: not from a specific historical point, but from the point where history breaks open anew.37

She experiences shame upon finding herself alone inside of an empty room, returning to the same space between two deaths found in Kurosawa’s films. As an affect, guilt remains turned backwards toward the past while this past leers downwards on the subject experiencing it. Shame, by contrast, reverses this gaze to look forward toward the future, returning the big Other’s gaze upward and outwards onto the social world. As in Ring,

Dark Water opens up a new space for its protagonist, this time in the shadow of the now- abandoned guilt complex, as if the world itself becomes the open rooftop space instead of the cramped and waterlogged apartment interior. Fittingly, Ikuko’s name combines the

Japanese word iku, “to go, to leave,” with ko or “child,” indicating that the path she must take lies in realizing her own name. Every step Ikuko takes away from this complex causes her to grow in size to the point where she exceeds it, presenting a clear moment of maturation. She becomes an undead subject of shame who does not reincarnate a lost figure from the past, but rather locates itself in the present as the subject it is.

37 Ibid., p. 129. 107

Chapter 3: The Screaming Point of History in Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The

Grudge

Aphasia and the Screaming Point

The big Other in Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) inhabits a position outside of space and time. While Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water (2002) presents this figure

as a past moment from which the subject must detach, Shimizu’s J-Horror cinema renders

attempts to separate from the past futile. Characters in his films repeatedly return to a past

trauma emerging from the big Other perverting its meaning-binding function. Its functional

perversion places it in an eternal position within time, so that this past trauma repeats itself

to infinity. Shimizu often references his previous films within his films and tends to

conclude them all in strikingly similar ways, converging spatially and temporally around a

central problem. This problem lies in the fact that space, time, speech, and vision are all

out of joint as a result of the big Other’s eternal presence. This chapter contends that the

atemporal structure, disembodied gazes, and verbal malfunctions found in Shimizu’s films

originate in this dysfunctional presence. Ju-On locates these crises inside of Lost Decade

Japan, in which time no longer moves forward but remains within the same decade.

Dissimilarly to the noir-like spaces of Kiyoshi Kurosawa where the big Other is absent and

the melodramatic spaces of Hideo Nakata where it is weak, the big Other’s undead presence

places Shimizu’s films clearly within the horror genre.

Like Kurosawa and Nakata, Shimizu’s films predominate with dysfunctional father

figures. These characters fail to bind together a meaningful universe for subjects, and thus

create the claustrophic spaces, disjointed temporality, and mental illness that typically 108

pervade his films. The central characters typically suffer from psychic disturbances due to

a traumatic historical event repeating itself. For instance, Shimizu directed six Ju-On films

between 2000 and 2006, all of them returning to the same traumatic past occurrence of a

father murdering his wife as their son watches from upstairs.1 A similarly repetitive violence occurs in his Tomie: Re-birth (2001), this time owing to a father figure’s absence throughout the film. The film features a group of friends living with single mothers who must kill and re-kill a young woman who invades every woman’s body whom they encounter. Marebito (2004) follows a divorced father on the verge of psychosis as he

wanders with his camera around an alternate universe beneath Tokyo in search of the

greatest horror that the eye can see. He ultimately finds it after slicing his mouth open so

as to feed his mute daughter who survives only by consuming blood, the scene disturbingly

condensing into a vampiric and incestuous kiss. A father murdering his family similarly

haunts Reincarnation (2005), which depicts a film set staging a fictional retelling of

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) as if it were a real historical event. The young actress protagonist suffers from visions where she sees the film director as the murderous father, preventing her from acting out her role properly and ultimately causing her to be placed inside of a psychiatric ward. Shimizu’s Shock Labyrinth (2009) and Tormented (2011) further depict protagonists rejecting the big Other’s structuring fiction as well as the mental

1 These include Ju-On: The Curse (2000), Ju-On: The Curse 2 (2001), Ju-On: The Grudge, Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003), The Grudge (2004), and The Grudge 2 (2006). While other Ju-On films continue to appear, Shimizu himself has not directed any of them following the Hollywood sequel in 2006, arguably the weakest film of the series. This chapter focuses solely on the Ju-On films directed by Shimizu, and will henceforth refer to the 2002 Ju-On: The Grudge as simply “Ju-On.” Each film in the Ju-On series features its own particular stories while centering on the central trauma, and when referred to, the other films in the series retain their full titles. 109

illness that follows. The protagonists continually return to their moments of rejection to the

point where their sense of reality irrevocably intertwines with this past moment, the films

unraveling these pathways alongside the protagonists’ sense of psychic stability. Overall,

Shimizu’s films never depict the big Other functioning successfully as an absent presence,

consistently returning to its moment of failure and, thereby, making it eternally present.

Ju-On’s perspective fits well within this tendency by suggesting, like Kurosawa, that

speech and language lose their meaning when this function fails.

As its condition of possibility, the big Other provides meaning to speech by

embodying an external form of signification for subjects of language. In Lacanian

psychoanalysis, the big Other as father figure typically guarantees that language has

meaning by prohibiting the child from using a private, imaginary language and forcing it

to enter the social world. This social entrance necessitates a language shared with others,

for without this shared function, meaning remains solitary and impossible. Therefore, the

big Other founds a community around its absent presence, every instance of language

assuming that the same big Other functions for other subjects. When this function fails,

this invisible figure distorts the subject’s speech as if a bone in its throat, as often seen in the phenomena of aphasia. Shimizu shows a keen interest in aphasia and distorted speech throughout his filmography that stems from his equal interest in eternally present father figures. His films often feature mute characters or characters haunted by a disembodied voice, as in Kayako’s (Takako Fuji) death rattle in the Ju-On series. Muteness also appears in the protagonist’s catatonic girlfriend in Tomie: Rebirth, as well as the father in

Marebito’s voiceover saying “from now on I’ll never speak” after his mute id-like daughter 110

consumes his voice along with his blood. Tormented’s mute protagonist stops speaking after she pushes her pregnant stepmother to her death, and her dismayed father authors

Little Mermaid pop-up books in solitude so as to fictionalize her recovering her voice.

Shimizu connects the absence of speech not only with the big Other’s failed function, but

also to how this failure repeats across time. This failed social function appears in Ju-On as

if unaware of its own death, eternally silencing people because it cannot speak itself.

Revealing this fact embodies the true horror element of Shimizu’s cinema, causing voices

to separate from characters’ bodies and float throughout the films like ghosts.

Ju-On reveals the voice as its horror element specifically at a “screaming point.”

Michel Chion defines the screaming point in cinema as a position in the film existing

outside of language. He argues that “[t]he screaming point is a point of the unthinkable

inside thought, of the indeterminate inside the spoken, of unrepresentability inside

representation.”2 Subjects enter the screaming point when they find themselves in a situation where the big Other does not function, and the scream, yell, or cry presents language’s way of indicating its own failure. Shimizu’s films often lead up to a scream being extracted from a character, as if the films lead up to this extraction to fill a requirement, performing a ritual sacrifice for the big Other. One sees this in the Ju-On series’ tongue and jaw removal, the father’s ending scream in response to Marebito’s

“greatest horror,” the actress’ unscripted screaming fit in Reincarnation, and Tormented’s mute protagonist finally finding her voice only by screaming as she falls to her death. In

2 Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Ed. and trans. by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 76. 111

Ju-On particularly, this scream first appears in the form of the disembodied death rattle emerging from an unseen source. However, the voice also functions as a form of the gaze when appearing offscreen. Henry Krips argues that the gaze manifests itself through a

hidden sound as well as an unseen object, both indicating a bind spot in the subject’s visual

field and that a gaze exists despite one’s inability to see it. He specifically describes “noises

off,” or offscreen sound, to indicate “a hole, a lack, in [the subject’s] visual field - a

something that, because it is present but cannot be seen, functions as a point of failure of

the visual field.”3 Ju-On’s death rattle makes itself heard throughout the film from this offscreen position, concealing a message haunting its characters from outside language, incarnating the “nothing, [the] blank, [the] absence” of Chion’s screaming point.4

Therefore, the voice as gaze exposes an invisible problem that its characters cannot speak

about in the same way as seen in Kurosawa’s empty shadows and Nakata’s obscured

ghosts. Despite fully revealing Ju-On’s ghost and breaking the first rule of J-Horror, doing

so actually allows Shimizu to add another dimension to it by emphasizing the ultimate

failure of language in the traumatically materialized face of the big Other.

Atemporality and the Undead Father

In turn, the ineffectiveness of language produces Ju-On’s disoriented temporality.

Chion further defines the screaming point as a particular position in time that breaks and

disrupts it; “[i]t occupies a point in time, but has no duration within” and “suspends the

3 Krips, Henry. “The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan, and Žižek.” In Culture Unbound, vol. 2, 2010, p. 94. 4 Chion, The Voice in Cinema, p. 77. 112

time of its possible duration [as] a rip in the fabric of time.”5 The screaming point creates a lesion or a gash within a standard line of temporal progression that gushes forth a painful sound incorporable by language. This screaming point remains muddled throughout Ju-On at the same time as its temporality remains disoriented. The film jumps from the present to the future and back without warning, while also continually recreating a traumatic moment occurring in the past within each of its various times. In this way, Ju-On fits in with another of Shimizu’s themes: the serial nature of time, or the way that past traumas remain inseparable from both the present and the future. His films continue the conclusion found in Kurosawa’s and Nakata’s films by often concluding on a shot of the protagonists silently alone inside of an empty room. The examples are numerous: Kayako inside the attic in Ju-

On, Marebito’s mute father and daughter alone in the underground cavern, the actress fitted with a straightjacket inside of a padded cell in Reincarnation, the protagonist embracing the fun house mannequins in Shock Labyrinth who silently walks into his future life in

prison at film’s end, as well as the mute protagonist from Tormented now silent again as

she lies dead and in pieces on the floor. This moment repeats throughout Shimizu’s films

because his characters enter the temporality of the screaming point. Once the characters

scream, the big Other ceases to function for them, and their experience of space and time

transforms into “a black hole,” “the exit of being” “where speech is extinct.”6 Speech’s ineffectiveness in Ju-On locks its characters inside of an atemporal space where movement in time becomes impossible.

5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 79. 113

In this way, Ju-On inhabits a trend within world cinema during the 1990s and 2000s

known as “atemporal cinema.” Todd McGowan defines atemporal cinema by its structure

of time mirroring that of the death drive: not moving forward through a linear chronology

but moving backwardly forwards in a circular motion toward its point of origin. For

McGowan, this phenomenon emerges when cinema on a large scale depicts temporality so

that time “approximates the experience of the digital world,” “the digital threat (embodied

by videogames, virtual reality, the Internet, and so on)” leading to the “restructuring of

cinematic time.”7 The atemporal film “views past, present, and future on the same plane,” removing time itself from the picture “[r]ather than looking forward to a future where desire might be realized.”8 McGowan’s definition of atemporal cinema extends the argument made by Gilles Deleuze that the time-image of modern, postwar cinema presents a direct image of time. For Deleuze, the time-image causes different layers of time, the past, present, and future, to intertwine, becoming indiscernible from each other in a way not found in the movement-image of classical cinema. The movement-image spatializes time by forming clear trajectories from one point in time to another. In contrast, the time-image temporalizes space by throwing this centered trajectory into disarray; in this way, “[t]ime is out of joint” in time-image cinema for Deleuze, and “Hamlet’s words signify that time is no longer subordinated to movement, but rather movement to time.”9 Deleuze connects

7 McGowan, Todd. Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. 7. McGowan mentions Ju-On explicitly in this book as a prime example among other films made around the turn-of-the-century that feature this circular death drive structure, such as Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, 2001), and 2046 (Wong Kar-Wai, 2004). 8 Ibid., p. xi. 9 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. By Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. xi. 114

the experience of disjointed time to the appearance of Prince Hamlet’s dead father in

Shakespeare’s play. In this way, he binds temporalized space to the presence of an undead

father figure. McGowan’s atemporal cinema emerges out of the lawless space of the digital

world, in which no big Other’s authority exists to limit the experience of time.10 Both

Deleuze’s and McGowan’s temporal studies of cinema therefore emerge out of the big

Other’s ineffectiveness, and Ju-On proves no exception to this experience.

Joan Copjec extends McGowan’s argument to a broader psychic shift and an earlier moment in cinema history. Copjec illustrates this “general historical transition” from desire to the death drive as emerging within film noir in the 1940s. In these films, it becomes clear that “the old modern order of desire, ruled over by an Oedipal father, has begun to be replaced by a new order of the [death] drive, in which we no longer have recourse to the protections against [enjoyment] that the Oedipal father once offered.”11 In other words, the big Other’s ineffectiveness removes the limits from the world that it previously supported, leaving subjects vulnerable and prone to social destruction and denigration. This shift appears within films made at the same time that Deleuze marks the break between the movement-image and the time-image: in the wake of World War II. Copjec’s break aligns with the one Deleuze uncovers in Italian neorealism, as the father’s ineffectiveness in films like Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) and Germany: Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini,

1948) entraps characters both in space and time while also filling them with anxiety. J-

10 This situation explains why many people find it difficult to disconnect themselves from the internet: to simply get up from the computer and do something else. The internet embodies an atemporal and big Other- less space that features endless possibilities, therefore revealing how this completely limitless space and time actually produces a form of paralysis. 11 Copjec, Joan. Read my Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994, p.182. 115

Horror films previously depicted a direct experience of time, as seen in the lethargy

saturated throughout Pulse (2001) as well as the past’s convergence with the present in

Nakata’s Dark Water (2002). They also transformed space along with time, Kurosawa leading protagonists into their respective “lonely rooms,” while Nakata envisioned a way out of these rooms into the contemporary social world and the movement-image again.

Shimizu’s Ju-On takes J-Horror’s interest in temporality to another level by setting the entire film within the screaming point’s black hole within space and time where speech fails to function. The film incarnates a death drive structure to the point where an original trauma warps space, time, and speech so that they can only reproduce this trauma in different variations of its first occurrence.

Through this purgatorial position, Ju-On acts as a symptom of Lost Decade Japan’s own historical location outside of temporal progression. Japan’s economic recession began in roughly 1989 and continued through the 1990s and 2000s, the term “Lost Decade” appearing near the turn-of-the-century after ten years of consistent economic turmoil. This term, however, remains the descriptive term for Japan’s present situation, in spite of the recession actually covering a nearly thirty-year time frame. Through this terminology,

Japan has remained within the same historical moment for the past three decades.

Therefore, the nation inhabits the same hole in temporal progression as Ju-On, and thus poses an ideal location for an atemporal film. Shimizu repeats the past and explores memory throughout his filmography, significantly beginning to direct films at the same time when the term “Lost Decade” began to appear. His films often connect to a traumatic moment occurring specifically “ten years ago,” as in the death of the protagonist’s mother 116

in Shock Labyrinth and the protagonist pushing her pregnant stepmother to her death in

Tormented. Ju-On and its many reincarnations return to an incident of domestic abuse

occurring in the early 1990s, roughly ten years before the film’s production and release in

the early 2000s. Unlike Nakata’s Dark Water, detaching from this historical trauma is

impossible for this film, a notion causing all its characters to disappear and the world to

ultimately end. For Ju-On, the Lost Decade’s atemporal situation houses an undead father

figure responsible for this temporal entrapment by perverting its function, and the film’s circular space, claustrophobic time, and aphasic symptoms revolve around this larger, hidden problem, as if encircling the singularity of a historical black hole.

The Circularity of Space

Ju-On depicts a series of vignettes featuring characters encountering the ghost of

Kayako Saeki. The film depicts various characters as they enter the house where the Saeki family lived, each becoming haunted by the family’s ghosts, losing their ability to speak,

and disappearing. Ju-On begins with a short montage of Kayako’s murder by her husband,

Takeo Saeki (Takashi Matsuyama), only suggesting the violence through offscreen sound,

quick cuts, and close-ups. The protagonist Rika (Megumi Okina), a volunteer social

worker, arrives at the house in order to care for a sick elderly woman, Sachie (Chikako

Isomura), who lives there with her son’s family. Kayako eventually appears to Rika there

and causes her to faint. The film then cuts a few days backwards in time to depict Kayako

and her son Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) appearing to various members of Sachie’s family as well.

Rika recovers in the present while the police investigate, and they enlist the help of Toyama 117

(Yoji Tanaka), a former detective who is now retired because of his work on the Saeki

murder case. Toyama eventually attempts to burn the house down in exasperation, but has

a future vision of his daughter Izumi (Misa Uehara) inside the house, and he disappears

along with the police after Kayako then appears to them. The film next moves forward

several years in time to when Izumi enters the house with her friends, leaving the house

before her friends disappear because of a strange feeling she is being watched. Her friends’

disappearance haunts Izumi along with visions of her now-dead father, and she shuts

herself in her bedroom until Kayako appears and pulls her away. The film then concludes

a few days before Izumi disappears, as Rika re-enters the house to realize that she in fact

was Kayako all along. Takeo then appears to her and cuts out her tongue as she screams, the film cutting to black after fully creating Kayako’s story anew.12

The Saeki house holds a privileged place in Ju-On, marking where the traumatic

event originally takes place. Despite Kayako appearing in various locations outside of the

house, each person she appears to holds some connection to the house or enters it at some

point. The “house” holds a multi-layered structural position within Japanese culture,

embodying both a physical structure that houses a family of subjects as well as a psychical

structure binding together a larger community. The “ie (家) system” traditionally structures

Japan in a way meant to make the country act as a large family, in which the father figure,

12 Incidentally, another originary moment in time uncannily connects Ju-On’s director to its lead actress. Shimizu recounts in an interview how, long after he first casted Takako Fuji as Kayako, he read in her profile that he and she were born in the same year on the same day. Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “An Interview with Takashi Shimizu.” In Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 22, no. 1, p. 6. Also incidentally but reflecting Ju-On’s themes, Fuji remarks in an interview how neither she nor Shimizu talk very much, taking them seven years of working together to finally begin conversing. Fuji, Takako. “The Grudge 2: Interview with Takako Fuji.” Interview by Staci Layne Wilson. Horror.com. April 7, 2006. http://www.horror.com/php/article- 1198-1.html. Fuji plays Kayako in each of Shimizu’s six Ju-On films. 118

mother figure, and children all inhabit traditional social functions. Shimizu’s interviews

connote that he holds no interest in breaking from this structure by repeating Ju-On’s

familial trauma; rather, his film’s recurring domestic abuse suggests that this structure itself

breaks down when individuals manipulate the big Other’s function for their own ends.13

As a result, “the heart of Shimizu’s haunting is,” according to Michael J. Blouin, “less a

particular house as it is a wider Japanese community,” whose big Other figures increasingly

abuse their function within the Lost Decade’s precarious social conditions.14 Ju-On’s house hides an invisible figure at its center that extends outward to Japan’s social structure as a whole, causing everyone to remain within the same circular movement tied to this dysfunctional figure.

Shimizu further takes the idea for Ju-On’s house location from Polish director

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue (1989), which holds a similar structure centered on the big Other. This television series features ten episodes that loosely interpret the Ten

Commandments. Each episode deals less with God’s presence in the world than with its absence and silence while simultaneously exploring the ramifications of someone or something taking its structural place in the contemporary world. Shimizu states his interest in Decalogue’s centering on a single communal space, as all ten episodes take place inside of a large apartment complex: “I was really impressed by the setting and situation of

13 Shimizu describes his life growing up in a positive light contrasting heavily with the domestic violence pervading Ju-On. “My family got along very well. This is just as true now. In Japan and in the U.S., families sometimes experience divorce or some dark cloud, but my family environment was very cheerful and warm. I am very grateful to my parents for that.” Dixon, “An Interview with Takashi Shimizu,” p. 2. 14 Blouin, Michael J. Japan and the Cosmopolitan Gothic: Specters of Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 132. 119

different people, parents, couples, friends, who live in the same building, illustrating the

theme of the bonds between people. I believed that the structure of Dekalog could be applied successfully to a horror film.”15 In this sense, Decalogue and Ju-On put forth a

similar generic divide as seen in Hideo Nakata’s melodramatic horror films, as well as

revealing a further social “complex” to that of his film Dark Water. Shimizu not only

applies Decalogue’s setting to Ju-On; he also pushes Decalogue’s relation to the big Other

further in ways fitting for the horror genre. A religious melodrama turns into a horror film

when the godlike figure itself directly appears in the field of vision. In Decalogue, the big

Other as God never directly appears, placing the series more within the melodrama genre.

On the other hand, Ju-On directly reveals the big Other at its climactic point, and thus

inhabits the horror genre through this figure’s appearance. Decalogue’s characters struggle

to decide how to act, given that God remains silent and never answers their questions and

prayers in a straightforward way. In Ju-On, by contrast, the characters’ actions seem to

occur for them without their input, their decisions already made for them in advance as if

by God. Its father figure maintains an undead presence whose narrative trajectory pulls the

strings on the world behind the scenes. This lack of a choice poses a horror element on its

own, and in this way, Ju-On presents the reverse side of Decalogue through the horror of

a realized God.

Shimizu further quotes Kieślowski by filling Ju-On with several scenes where an

empty space indicating where the big Other does its work.16 When Rika first approaches

15 Dixon, “An Interview with Takashi Shimizu,” p. 12. 16 Kieślowski presents God as an absent presence throughout Decalogue: for instance, an unseen robber steals the prized stamp collection that belonged to the now-dead father of the protagonists in Decalogue 10, only 120 the Saeki house, an invisible force stops her at its threshold. The camera quickly tracks back from her as if making room for another presence to enter the frame, though nothing visibly does. Shimizu then cuts to a shot-reverse shot sequence between Rika and the house’s empty upstairs balcony, as if the empty space contained a pair of eyes looking back at her. This scene provides another instance where Ju-On connects the space of the house to the presence of a blind gaze. The film even materializes a disembodied pair of eyes when

Kayako first appears to Rika. In this scene, Sachie begins speaking for the first time since

Rika arrived at the house, addressing someone whom Rika cannot see. Shimizu pans the camera to the right as Rika looks out of the corner of her eye, but nothing appears there.

Soon after, however, a shadow appears in this empty space accompanied by Kayako’s death rattle, the shadow taking on a woman’s shape. As it often does, Ju-On’s horror element here appears indirectly as an empty space looking back at Rika that causes her to faint. This empty space, its gaze, and its voice distort the fabric of space throughout the rest of the film, introducing its problem not only hidden deep within the realm of vision, but also at its perimeter: the space where the material and the psychic, the visible and the invisible, meet and overlap.

to inspire them to take up their father’s lifelong work of collecting stamps themselves. 121

Figure 15. The Disembodied Gaze in Ju-On.

Shimizu’s films often connect vision with circular imagery and movement. Ju-On’s parametric spaces and movements function in this way to enclose characters within the aforementioned visual problem caused by the over-present big Other. The close-up of an eye presents the most obvious example of this motif. This shot appears in many cases throughout Shimizu’s films: in Kayako’s paralyzed gaze that concludes Ju-On’s opening montage, in the titular character’s whited-out eyes in Tomie: Rebirth, through the father’s video footage looking back at him in Marebito, as well as the eye drawing forming a hole inside Kayako’s diary in The Grudge, which further concludes on a close-up of Kayako’s eye. The Grudge even quotes the famous extreme close-up shot of an eye from

Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1991), reflecting a mortified character’s gaze inside

Kayako’s pupil after he finds her dead body inside the Saeki house attic. These shots

express Shimizu’s interest in distorted vision, as characters are often plagued by and

literally enclosed within the disturbing events they witness. Ju-On’s characters also often

move in a circular trajectory, simultaneously fleeing from and returning to the house and

its traumatic events. Rika returns to the house at the precise point where it seems furthest

from her memory: during her lunch date with her old school friend, Mariko (Kayoko 122

Shibata). The former detective Toyama quits the police force so as to never return to the

Saeki house, but only ends up returning to it so as to burn the building down. No matter

what happens in the outside world, everything in Ju-On ultimately returns to the house

where the big Other originally distorts its function. The film moves its characters around

an empty space that leads them back to the point at which they began, revealing how an

empty space can alter the laws of physical reality.

Ju-On’s stairwell also indicates this reversed spatial progression by further

repeating across Shimizu’s filmography. Ju-On’s most famous scene presents Kayako

slowly and decrepitly crawling down the Saeki house stairs toward Rika, and the scene

appears so important to Shimizu’s project that he repeats it at the end of Ju-On: The Curse,

Ju-On: The Curse 2, and The Grudge as well. Much of Ju-On occurs on or near the stairwell of the Saeki house, infusing these stairs with a larger function than a mere setting. For Bliss

Cua Lim, “space has a memory” in Ju-On, and this memory alters the possible trajectories for movement within space and time.17 On Shimizu’s stairwells, one does not so much move upwards in a forward progression, but rather backwards in time toward a past trauma.

If anything descends these stairs, it never inhabits the same form that it held going up.

Rather, the stairs tarnish these characters with the mark of an original traumatic moment that they remain trapped within, engraving into them a life narrative trajectory from which they cannot detach. Ascending the stairs in Shimizu’s films transforms the character into a

17 Lim, Bliss Cua. Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, p. 205. 123

reincarnation of the past, and this notion imbues Ju-On’s stairwell space with a temporal

dimension.18

Figure 16. The Stairs of Time in Ju-On.

The stairwell’s circularity fills spaces with atemporality throughout Shimizu’s

filmography. The stairwell connects his characters to the father’s undead presence,

constituting their subjectivity in a way that tethers them to the past. In this way, the past

merges with the present and the future so that they become the same, creating the forward-

moving backward trajectories that haunt the characters of his films. For instance,

Marebito’s father figure declares his muteness as he descends a spiral staircase with his

daughter into the tunnels of history and mythology layered beneath Tokyo, and the actress

in Reincarnation becomes paralyzed on the hotel stairwell as the film crew revisits the

original scene of the crime they are re-enacting. Shimizu even adds a stairwell scene in The

18 Ju-On’s elevator scene constitutes another of Shimizu’s memory-spaces, although the elevator as a space does not noticeably repeat across his other films. In this scene, Sachie’s daughter Hitomi (Misaki Ito) returns to her apartment complex in fright after Kayako appears to her in the bathroom. On her way up the elevator, Toshio appears on each floor outside of the elevator’s window. This repetition functions in a similar way to the stairwell, effectively transporting Hitomi both upwards in space toward her apartment and backwards in time toward the past trauma of the house, as if the elevator were an atemporal time machine repeating the same moment in time on every floor. 124

Grudge soon after repeating the elevator scene from Ju-On, in addition to repeating its

ending scene where Kayako crawls down the stairs toward the protagonist. However, apart from Ju-On, the most significant stairwell in Shimizu’s filmography appears in Shock

Labyrinth’s fun-house spiral staircase. Shock Labyrinth’s ending credits roll over a character slowly ascending these stairs and conclude by repeating this movement in reverse, depicting a paradoxical backward movement forward in time as the character lies in the center of the circle at the bottom of the stairs in the end. Shimizu returns to this setting in Tormented as the protagonist climbs this same staircase, only to end up falling from the top to her death: the original past trauma, her long-dead and unborn younger brother, residing at the top. These temporal stairwells maintain a past within the present and prevent the characters from moving beyond this moment, as seen in Shock Labyrinth’s clock whose minute hand oscillates back and forth. This temporal oscillation illustrates a similar trajectory in Ju-On, externalizing the film’s disjointed temporality onto its space.

Figure 17. The Spiral Stairwell in Tormented (Takashi Shimizu, 2011). 125

Figure 18. The Penrose Stairs in Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2011).

Shimizu’s spaces resemble the atemporal dream worlds of another of his favorite

directors: Christopher Nolan.19 Nolan’s blockbuster film Inception (2011) features a similar circular stairwell to those found in Shimizu’s films in the form of the Penrose stairs.

These stairs signify an architectural paradox where one walks up the stairs only to return to the point where they began. Shimizu shares Nolan’s interest in father figures as well, the atemporal situations of Nolan’s films emerging from the invisible problems caused by the death of the protagonists’ wives. For example, Memento’s (2000) protagonist cannot create new memories after his wife kills herself, and Prestige’s (2006) two magician protagonists remain trapped inside of a repetitive drive to out-perform each other after one kills the other’s wife. Inception’s father protagonist remains locked outside of the real world and away from his family after his wife’s suicide, and Interstellar’s (2014) widower protagonist journeys to the widest reaches of space only to find there a prison of his own memories.

Like Nolan’s films, Ju-On indicates an empty space distorting space from its unseen point,

19 Shimizu lists Nolan as one of his favorite directors along with Kieślowski. Shimizu, Takashi. Interview by Andrew Heskins. Eastern Kicks, February 8, 2011. http://www.easternkicks.com/features/takashi-shimizu- interview-not-all-shock-and-gore. 126

only for this film, the father figure materializes inside this space. Nolan’s films often lead their father protagonists to accept the big Other’s function as an absence, themselves inhabiting the very empty space haunting them after their wives die. Therefore, Ju-On’s

problem is unsolvable and does not contain its own solution as it typically does for Nolan.20

For this reason, Shimizu works within the Japanese horror genre and Nolan in the

Hollywood blockbuster, Shimizu ultimately unable to envision a solution to Japan’s Lost

Decade.

Ju-On concludes by depicting two different empty spaces: an empty Japan filled

with missing person flyers, and the empty attic in the Saeki house containing only Kayako’s

corpse. The first situation implies that Kayako has appeared to Japan’s entire population,

her story recurring throughout the present and condensing it within an undead past. Here,

Japan’s historical moment, the Lost Decade, creates the same emptied-out image of Japan

as seen in Kurosawa’s and Nakata’s films, blanketing the world under history as a present

absence. The Saeki’s narrative trajectory stains this space with a past trauma occurring

roughly ten years ago. The second space places Kayako where the big Other abandons her,

and characters find themselves recreating it in a variety of guises. Here, Ju-On’s characters

disappear inside solitary spaces where they fall into a catatonic state. The film features

20 Todd McGowan formulates this Hegelian reading of Nolan’s films in his book The Fictional Christopher Nolan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Blouin also connects Nolan to Shimizu in Japan and the Cosmopolitan Gothic, tying the atemporality of Shimizu’s films to a similar trajectory layered within Nolan’s Inception. Blouin reveals that Inception’s characters begin inside Japan as the first location appearing inside an inescapable space of memory, and strive throughout the film to return to the “real world” of the United States. The transnational Inception, therefore, poses a worthwhile comparison to Shimizu’s own Flight 7500 (2016) about a plane flying from the United States to Japan. Furthermore, Shimizu filmed Flight 7500 in the same year that Nolan filmed Inception, the majority of Inception’s dream sequences taking place as the characters sleep on an airplane flight from the Pacific to the United States. 127

many examples: Sachie’s room with its eternally soiled sheets, under the bedsheets in

Hitomi’s (Misaki Ito) bedroom, the bathroom in her apartment complex where the police

officer disappears, the cramped space under the sink where Rika’s boss is found dead, the

shower where Rika feels an unknown hand on her head, and the memorial space of

Toyama’s altar in which Izumi disappears. The Saeki attic poses the most significant of

these enclosed spaces, as several characters disappear here, including Kayako, on whose

image the film concludes. Ju-On’s eternally present big Other stains these spaces with a

memory infecting all who encounter it. Japan traditionally structures itself on the house,

but Ju-On’s house renders this tradition impossible.

The End of Time

Ju-On’s failed big Other function distorts the film’s temporality as well as its space.

The unbearable presence of this failure produces Ju-On’s atemporal, “out of joint”

structure. This structure manifests in three major ways: atemporal editing, cyclical actions,

and fantastic visions of the past and the future. Firstly, Shimizu edits Ju-On so that its various vignettes repeat scenes shown earlier as well as foresee events yet to come. For example, Hitomi calls the Saeki house in two different instances, but leaves the same message during Rika’s vignette as she does during her own as if leaving the exact same

message both times. Izumi appears to her father Toyama as a teenager when he attempts to

burn down the Saeki house, despite her being only ten years old when introduced in a

previous scene. Shimizu illuminates the darkened Saeki house at night when Izumi appears,

time’s absence from the house coloring its space with a disjunctive luminosity. 128

Furthermore, Izumi’s unresponsive mother watches a news report on television that describes Rika’s death, despite the film not showing her death until the film’s final vignette.

Shimizu’s atemporal editing style here makes distinctions of the past and the future irrelevant, as its traumatic past incessantly repeats itself without regard for temporal classification. Instead, Ju-On presents time itself as undead, the past persisting instead of ceding to the present. The film’s atemporality incarnates the psychoanalytic space between two deaths in the same way produced by its empty spaces. However, the characters themselves do not disappear from the big Other’s gaze as do the detectives of film noir, nor do they provoke it like the hysterics of melodrama. Rather, the big Other’s gaze itself occupies this space between two deaths, causing the entire world under its scope to enter the empty, atemporal space of its dysfunction, eternally repeating there the traumatic moment of this gaze’s death.

Within this moment outside spatio-temporal coordinates, Ju-On’s characters find themselves repeating gestures and actions from the past outside of their own willpower.

More accurately, Ju-On’s past moment acts for the characters, invisibly taking over their bodies as if The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956). However, the invaders here do not embody science fiction aliens so much as parts in a play, roles in a scene restaging itself as if it has a mind of its own. For example, the Saeki family ghosts often appear when a character covers its face with its hands, unwittingly mimicking the last gesture Kayako makes just before she dies. Many characters also end up by either disappearing at the foot of the Saeki stairwell or being found locked in the attic, these two spaces causing the empty world seen at the end. Slavoj Žižek describes this object with a 129

life of its own as the undead partial object of the death drive, an object that the subject

believes once belonged to it but that detaches to create an eternal lost object returned to

throughout the subject’s life. He presents the red shoes of Powell and Pressberger’s film

The Red Shoes (1948) as a descriptive example, the shoes standing for the ballerina

protagonist’s insatiable desire to dance. This desire appears foreign to the protagonist as if

a foreign body inhabiting in her, and the film evokes Shimizu’s own films by leading her up a spiral staircase where she falls to her death at the top. Žižek argues that the shoes, like

the death drive, function “as a kind of impersonal willing” persisting in its repetitive

movement at all costs.21 Ju-On forms its own historical death drive, returning characters to a traumatic moment from the past where a husband murders his wife. It argues that this violence repeats so frequently inside houses because it happened once, this lone occurrence inhabiting an “impersonal willing” within time that causes time to stand still.

Sachie’s childless son and daughter-in-law illustrate this historical death drive, while also explaining the exact nature of Ju-On’s curse. Kazumi (Shuri Matsuda) and

Katsuya (Kanji Tsuda) resuscitate the Saeki murder scene by finding themselves acting out

Takeo and Kayako’s precise movements and actions. For example, after Katsuya leaves for work one day, Kazumi naps in the living room. She is tired because strange footsteps running throughout the house have kept her up all night. Shimizu’s camera moves slowly toward her as if an unidentified character, and when the gaze centers on her, she immediately jumps awake. This empty perspective suggests that Kayako’s cursed narrative is what prevents Kazumi from sleeping, as if Kazumi’s lacking a child of her own forms a

21 Žižek, Slavoj. The Abyss of Freedom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 81. 130 void in her psychic structure around which this past narrative appears on its own accord.

Kazumi only sees Toshio’s ghost indirectly: through handprints on a door, hearing footsteps run behind her, and feeling his gaze watching her from the stairs. Toshio increasingly materializes as Kazumi moves up the stairs: becoming a gaze at the bottom, a pair of hands in the middle, and running feet at the top. Finally, the camera does not depict him appearing to her at all, but rather as an offscreen sound that causes Kazumi to scream.

Ju-On’s screaming point here marks where Kazumi ceases to be Kazumi, transforming into

Kayako through this foreign fantasy extracting her voice.

This scene, however, only depicts half the story, as her husband Katsuya undergoes a similar transformation by becoming someone else. The difference between the two transformations lies in the fact that Toshio fully appears for Katsuya, the gaze fully materializing once he personifies the big Other. Significantly, Katsuya himself appears unaware of his own position in time, forgetting what day it is before leaving for work and muttering “I think it was like this yesterday…” as he walks out the door. He later returns home to find his house unresponsive and Kazumi lying on their bed in a catatonic state.

She tries to speak, but no words come out. At this point, Toshio emerges but also cannot speak, instead meowing like a cat in response to Katsuya’s broken questions regarding his identity. In this way, Toshio embodies a hole in the couple’s speech just as he indicates a hole in time, and Shimizu emphasizes Toshio’s atemporal position by painting his mouth completely black. He indicates another black hole distorting Ju-On’s space and time, an eternally unknown ten-year-old indicating the absence of its origin point as well as Japan’s historical position. Not knowing how to react to these verbal aberrations, Katsuya begins 131

nervously biting his nails in the same way Takeo does in the film’s opening montage. A

shadow descends over his face, and his expression turns from frightened to malevolent.

Katsuya ceases to be himself here and becomes Takeo in response to the appearance of the

unknown child. The desire for a child appears as a foreigner with a mind of its own, giving

body to a larger incommunicable situation appearing between couples that causes domestic

abuse to repeat inside houses everywhere. Fantasies run amok, ghostly gazes materialize,

and communication fails in response to Katsuya’s own failure to see what keeps his wife

awake at night.

Ju-On, therefore, ties its atemporality to a failure in the big Other’s vision. Ghosts

often permeate time-image films, as the past fills in the blind spots located within

characters’ vision. Deleuze describes a “kind of mutant” character appearing in early time-

image films, calling them “seers” who “saw rather than acted” given their inability to

respond to their destitute situations after the war.22 He provides examples of these seers through Roberto Rossellini’s postwar films, in which the protagonists’ acute vision makes their situation unbearable. Rossellini’s postwar films often emphasize a Christian perspective on the impoverished state of this world, in the sense that Christianity deals with belief in the world following the death of God, God’s silence, and God’s ultimate absence from the world. Rossellini’s early time-image films, therefore, originate in a profoundly disoriented state caused by the characters’ invisibility to the big Other. Examples appear as the boy protagonist inhabits the space between two deaths in Germany: Year Zero, in the sublime emptiness of the volcano’s afterlife space in Stromboli (1950), and through the

22 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. xi. 132

protagonist of Europa ’51 (1952) finding God in the world only by locking herself up in a

psychiatric ward. These time-images characters suffer from an excessive ability to see

which stems from their experienced invisibility, and Ju-On’s atemporality rises from its

characters being similarly unseen.

Ju-On ties its own characters’ excessive visual capabilities to their experience of

atemporality in several instances. Instead of a direct experience of time as found in

Rossellini, Shimizu presents atemporality, or an experience outside of time, through

recurring fantasy scenes flattening time onto a singular plane. These scenes present Ju-

On’s characters as Deleuzian “seers” or “visionaries” equally unable to react to the ghosts of the past who appear before them. They see the future as the past in response, and the past as the future. For example, Kazumi and Katsuya see their future appear before them in the form of their house’s past, their bodies taken over by the Saeki’s undead narrative trajectory. Toyama and Izumi both see their future and their past in connection to this house as well, the two appearing for each other in complete disregard for temporal progression:

Izumi appears to Toyama as a teenager despite her appearing as a young girl in an earlier scene, and Toyama appears later to the teenaged Izumi despite his being several years dead.

Rika, moreover, embodies the film’s most visionary seer, literally seeing her future self as a murdered housewife and physically reincarnating Kayako’s past position in space. These characters all see ghosts where they cannot react to their situation, the situation acting for them in their stead: when the days start repeating themselves for the childless married couple, when the father and daughter must separate as the daughter grows older, and when words fail for the single young woman when asked to describe who she is. Ju-On 133 prognosticates Japan’s future as well, these moments all leading to an afterlife where vision becomes so powerful that nobody sees anyone anymore. Vision gains a socially destructive, nuclear function rendering it best to stay inside one’s room and out of the gaze’s sight. In this way, Japan’s Lost Decade throws the nation’s traditional social structure into disarray, and Shimizu presents this structure in time as an atemporal grave.

The Muteness of Speech

In addition to space, time, vision, and history, Ju-On’s perverted big Other function most of all distorts speech and language. The film’s characters often reach the point where words can no longer describe their situation. These points produce a scream and create

Chion’s “screaming point” described earlier. Shimizu’s screaming points often cause characters to lose their ability to speak entirely, as if their own empty interiors, now devoid of a voice, create the film’s concluding empty space. Ju-On’s vignettes often terminate after a character screams, these screaming points appearing where the character loses control over their life’s trajectory. The film features its vignette structure in order to tell how each character loses its voice, each story ending when the cursed narrative trajectory speaks for characters and causes them to scream. Their voice ceases to matter because the story speaks itself, and Takeo cuts out their tongue and Kayako drags them into invisibility.

Ju-On’s big Other, therefore, reverses its typical function from giver of speech to taker of speech, changing its social position from a condition of possibility to a negation of possibility. The film here echoes Jacques Lacan’s famous statement about the big Other’s function in the modern world, arguing that, if “God is dead,” then “[n]othing is permitted 134

anymore.”23 Spatial movement, temporal progress, comprehensible vision, and verbal

communication all become impossible in the big Other’s wake, and Ju-On envisions this

deadlock as a product of its dysfunctional big Other’s refusal to die.

The impossibility of speech also produces Ju-On’s many failed communication

devices and corporeal forms of speech. These elements coincide with the big Other’s

ceasing to fulfill its social function, ensuring that language is the most widely used form

of communication technology. Ju-On abounds with broken phone conversations in

addition to many instances of unsuccessful dialogue. For example, Hitomi repeatedly calls

her brother Katsuya after he gruffly kicks her out of the house, but he never answers. She

leaves him the same message whenever she calls him, and the film repeats this scene as if

her message becomes lost in the ether, floating aimlessly through time and space like the

“help me” message from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001). Katsuya sounds normal when he finally returns her call, and appears normal when Hitomi looks through the peephole of her front door. Yet when she opens the door to greet him, no one appears, and the phone begins emitting Kayako’s undead voice. The voice, in this case, designates that Katsuya has ceased being Hitomi’s recognizable brother and that he now speaks with a voice that she cannot understand. As if in response to their vocal failure, characters’ bodies in Ju-On also communicate in incomprehensible ways. For instance, Both Hitomi and Rika experience an intense ringing in their ears at the foot of the stairs in the Saeki house, as if

23 Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969-1970. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007, p. 120. Lacan here reverses a line from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) stating that, “if God is dead, then everything is permitted.” Without a big Other figure, no one can permit anything, making all actions impossible despite all appearing within the realm of possibility. 135 someone were speaking about them from an unseen point. After Kayako appears and causes her to faint, Rika’s face inadvertently twitches throughout the rest of the film when reminded of this experience. Here, Ju-On suggests that the human body itself sends off messages of its own after the big Other fails to function properly, its tics and other bodily symptoms embodying a form of mute speech signifying that a foreign element is in control.

These moments of communicative failure emerge within a world where nothing functions properly: phones, bodies, or even communication itself, the ground of social life.

Ju-On’s most significant tie to the failure of speech, however, lies in Kayako’s death rattle. Throughout the film, this sound presents a mystery. It appears as a voice caught in someone’s throat, and the film fittingly refuses to explain in words why it recurs throughout the film. This voice appears to Rika in multiple moments of the film, and pinpointing these instances helps clear up the mystery surrounding what it actually indicates. Rika first hears Kayako’s voice after interacting with Toshio, and their brief dialogue is worth repeating here:

Rika: Little boy. What’s your name? Toshio: Toshio. Rika: I see. You’re called Toshio. My name is….

The moment Rika begins to say who she is, Toshio breaks her off by looking away toward the other room where Sachie finally begins to speak. Kayako then appears in the empty space to which she speaks as the disembodied gaze and shadow described earlier. Kayako’s voice, however, appears before both the shadow and the gaze. The latter two materialize around something caught in Rika’s own throat, her absent identity creating a further empty space within her sentences. The voice here emerges from Rika’s sudden inability to 136

verbalize her name, her voice trailing off before she can identify herself. Thus, the scene

illuminates a distortion in Rika’s identity caused by Kayako appearing as a future version

of herself. The disembodied gaze sees the insignificance of her nominal signifier in the

face of the house’ undead narrative. Rika’s name embodies a dead letter because, for Ju-

On, all names ultimately become either Kayako or Takeo, each presenting a pre-determined trajectory for both sexes. This scene, therefore, illustrates how Rika’s voice fails to function because her future is already written, ultimately remaining trapped inside of the isolated space of Japan’s failed big Other function.

A later scene in Ju-On further connects aphasia to the absence of a future by returning Rika to the unrealized screaming point originally causing her to faint. Despite much time passing since then, her experience in the Saeki house continues to haunt Rika until she returns to it, surrendering her voice to the undead presence of the big Other. In this scene, Rika goes out to lunch with her old school friend Mariko, and the two enjoy themselves as they discuss their lives, troubles, and plans. Rika’s voice gives out again at a precise point in their conversation, and their dialogue again demands repeating:

Rika: That’s funny. Mariko: What? Rika: Mariko, you’ve turned into a real teacher. Mariko: What about you, Rika? Rika: Hmm…I wonder about that. I don’t really understand….

Rika then feels something brush against her ankles, and screams as she lifts the tablecloth to find Toshio gazing at her from underneath the table. Here, Ju-On revisits Rika’s screaming point just before she identifies herself; her position in society, as well as her name, incarnate yet another dead letter. Rika screams in this scene because she failed to 137 scream earlier, and Toshio appears as a messenger from the house sent to redeem her debt.

Before eating lunch, Mariko sets Rika up on a date with a former crush from her school days. In this sense, Toshio’s appearance also betrays Rika’s anxiety over potentially re- enacting Kayako’s narrative in this potential relationship. A housewife murdered by her husband appears the only option for Rika’s future, and lacking an alternative trajectory causes her to repeat Kayako’s voice just before her husband removed her tongue.

Moreover, Rika’s aphasia connects her to the truth of Kayako’s death rattle in a way placing her in the afterlife as an undead subject. Rika learns that the voice haunting her throughout the film has been her own, that she herself has been Kayako all along.

Shimizu depicts this knowledge through Rika seeing Kayako gazing back at her from her reflection in a mirror, and also by featuring Kayako and her death rattle literally emerging outward from Rika’s own body. Kayako then crawls down the stairs toward her in the film’s trademark scene; however, Kayako’s voice begins to transform as she moves closer.

The death rattle changes into a cry for help at this point, and Kayako’s face transforms from bloody and disturbing to clean and knowing. The two share a wordless moment of eye contact that reveals why characters disappear after meeting Kayako’s gaze. These elements appear at the screaming point where subjects realize that they are already dead, because the big Other now disables life rather than enabling it. Rika further sees Kayako shed a solitary tear before Takeo approaches with his knife, this tear mourning not only

Rika’s pre-written death but also the death of civilization as such. At this silent screaming point, Japan’s traditional social structure of life reverses into an immediate assurance of death. Lost Decade Japan, therefore, harbors this silent scream deep within its social 138

structure, this voice warning those who hear its cry of their undead status. Deciphering the

mystery of this voice only reveals the futility of language and speech, and Ju-On ultimately envisions this unspeakable moment in Japanese history as one in which life is ultimately impossible. The only possible communication in this space occurs in this unspoken but knowing eye contact between undead subjects, creating a disquieting image of the world

as an afterlife. Kayako makes eye contact with the audience in the final image before the

screen cuts to black, as if they, too, disappear upon re-entering the world outside the

cinema.

Conclusion: The Case of the Missing Mother Tongue

Ju-On’s ending depicts a time-image presenting Lost Decade Japan after the end of

time. The film depicts Japan as an atemporal space that turns subjects into missing person

flyers, dead letters that litter the now-empty streets unseen by the big Other’s gaze. Western ideas of heaven and the afterlife generally describe a peaceful paradise separate from the real world and overseen by a benevolent Godlike figure. In this utopian paradise, the subject no longer lacks, loses, or misses anything, spending eternity in bliss and comfort.

Shimizu’s image of the afterlife contrasts heavily with this idea, instead viewing the afterlife as a present reality and a product of an unending series of malicious big Other figures. This alarming situation appears in contemporary Japan while not containing any of the paradisiacal traits of the Western afterlife. Rather, this scene depicts eternity as the empty space and time of the present, Japan’s Lost Decade revealing a realized heaven for one as a dystopic hell for all others. Ju-On further connects this circular progression to the 139

meaninglessness of language, causing subjects to unwittingly repeat past traumas in the

same way that Japan repeats its ten-year time frame. Trapped inside its traumatic historical

moment, Kayako crystallizes the Japanese subject’s situation, inevitably becoming a victim

to a big Other figure eternalized in its perverted function. The only way to enter the future

lies in recognizing how one already inhabits the afterlife, and Kayako’s missing tongue

expresses Japan’s own inability to speak about itself and the impossibility of social life that

results.

In this way, Ju-On gives body to a political statement lying dormant inside of Japan following the end of time. Deleuze describes a political dimension inherent to the time-

image in ways relevant to Ju-On’s ending: “if there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet…the people are missing.”24

Deleuze writes here regarding the cinema of the third world, colonized subjects unable to

communicate or narrate their situation within the foreign language that the colonizers force

them to speak. However, this image nevertheless emerges directly from Ju-On’s own

apocalyptic conclusion for Japan as well through the separation and death of the nation’s

own “mother tongue.” J-Horror cinema reveals the nation’s Lost Decade problem to

resemble that of a third world country, its subjects inhabited by a space, time, and language

they can no longer call their own. The political cinema’s people are missing because they

cannot formulate new speech-acts about their situation as well as because the big Other

does not see them. This cinema’s task is “not that of addressing a people, which is

presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people,” and presenting

24 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 216. 140

them to an absent and functional big Other’s gaze.25 Ju-On’s people appear under the single mutual image of Kayako. She embodies the Japanese people and their missing speech-act that refuses to die inside their home inhabited by an uninvited big Other. Shimizu turns

Kayako’s inaudible cry into a collective utterance by suggesting in the end that all of Japan has become this brutalized figure trapped within its own muteness. With Ju-On, he invents a mythology for Japan’s social situation and forms a defining image of it in the form of an undead subject. This subject’s voice continues to speak after its death and disappearance, indicating that Japan’s voice cannot be silenced despite authority figures perverting the nation’s traditional structure. In this way, Ju-On gives a voice to the undead Japanese people, albeit one that must speak in a new way separated from the mother tongue of its past. Ju-On concludes by gazing at the spectator to propose that J-Horror cinema embodies

the only mode of true communication possible inside of Japan’s historical screaming point.

25 Ibid., p. 217. 141

Conclusion: Flight 7500’s Performance for the Blind

The Transnational Flight of J-Horror

As the popularity of J-Horror began to spread globally and address audiences not affected by Japan’s Lost Decade, the films continued to focus on the big Other and its blindness. This fact suggests that the questions at the heart of the movement speak to a broader, more global situation. Hollywood distributors remade several J-Horror films soon after their release, including Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998), Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001),

Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002), and Ju-On: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002), all featuring popular acting talent and rewritten stories catering more toward Western audiences. The films’ popularity in Japan translated into Western cultures well enough that the copies outperformed their originals in terms of popularity and profit, a meta-textual event prefigured by the narrative of Ring. Ju-On’s remake, The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu,

2004), ballooned its $10 million budget into a $187 million profit at the box office, and

Ring’s remake The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002) popularized its curse for global audiences while receiving five times its own budget in box office profits. While altered for different cultures, these films feature the same structural problems as their originals, visual distortions produced by the big Other’s absence, ineffectiveness, and presence. While the

J-Horror movement decreased in popularity following The Grudge’s success, Takashi

Shimizu later directed another horror film in the U.S. that marks the movement’s most relevant connection to the visual distortions permeating life in the contemporary U.S. His 142

Flight 7500 (2016) reveals that the big Other’s blindness similarly haunts the United States, which now suffers from a recession of its own.1

J-Horror’s central figure of absence has articulated the anxieties of other social groups in various ways. It inhabits a larger trend in Asian horror cinema at the turn-of-the- century period that similarly predominates with visual distortions from the past returning to haunt the present. For instance, Kim Jee-Woon’s South Korean horror film A Tale of

Two Sisters (2003) mourns the absence of its protagonist’s younger sister whom she thought was still alive, connecting this confusion to the protagonist refusing her father’s big Other position in the present. Bliss Cua Lim describes the film as inhabiting a similar temporal disjunction to that of Ju-On, historically allegorizing South Korea as a comparable “house full of memories.”2 The Pang Brothers’ Hong Kong-Thai horror film,

The Eye (2002), features a blind woman regaining her sight from an eye donor only to become haunted by visions of past and future traumas. Sophia Siddique argues that the protagonist’s traumatic vision emerges in her receiving an eye transplant from an ethnic

Chinese woman living in Thailand, the ghosts she sees allegorizing “the personal and collective forms of trauma located within Thailand’s ethnic minority Chinese population.”3

Even the Hollywood remakes successfully utilize the big Other’s blind gaze to express

anxieties culturally specific to the United States. Linnie Blake argues that Verbinski’s Ring

1 Hereafter referred to as Flight. 2 Lim, Bliss Cua. Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, p. 236. 3 Siddique, Sophia. “Embodying Spectral Vision in The Eye.” In Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque. Ed. Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 224. 143

remake, The Ring, further throws into question traditional American ideology surrounding

the nuclear family and the American dream, its undead child’s gaze “reveal[ing] the

mediation of American family life by the machinations of the state.”4 These films adapt J-

Horror’s central absent figure to express how the past haunts the present, each appropriating this visual problem within its cultural context: an undead other half for South

Korea, a distorted gaze in transnational Thailand, a discrepancy between being and appearance for the George W. Bush-era United States. Lim provides two main reasons as to why Asian horror films speak so soundly across cultural boundaries, being simultaneously “well-written, rooted in mythology, and different from all other generic fare” as well as “exceptionally rootless, deracinated, [and] globalist.”5 In this sense, this thesis has added another reason, in that the big Other becomes dysfunctional within a transnational age in which language no longer ties communities together in the same way as in the past. An original Hollywood horror film directed by a Japanese director, Flight translates Japan’s anxiety over faulty big Other figures to an American context experiencing a similar problem with its position in time.

Flight’s path to distribution presents something of a mystery. Trailers for the film first appeared in 2010, which set the film for a 2011 theatrical release. Its production company, CBS Films, then pushed its release to 2012, then 2013, 2014, until finally releasing it in spring 2016. CBS Films provided no reasoning for the delay, but online message boards affirm that the film’s original distributor filed for bankruptcy and the film

4 Blake, Linnie. The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma, and National Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008, p. 58. 5 Lim, Translating Time, p. 224. 144 could not find another. Flight also suffered copious censorship in many noticeable areas that left many holes in its plot, its final running time inexplicably shortened by over fifteen minutes. Part of the film’s aura of taboo comes from its scenario’s close resemblance to real events that caused mass confusion across the globe. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared in mid-air on March 8, 2014 while flying from Malaysia to China, and currently remains missing. The missing flight caused a sensation throughout the world’s media, inspiring a torrent of news coverage and speculation, primarily in Western countries, that continued long after the plane disappeared. The story’s extensive coverage ultimately revealed less about the missing plane itself than the anxiety caused by an absent presence within one’s visual and psychic field. Through its absence, the plane’s presence paradoxically increases in magnitude. Shimizu’s Flight prophetically uses this paradoxical scenario to illuminate other invisible problems that distort subjects’ vision inside the U.S. from a place beyond visibility in the form of racism, classism, and perfectionism.

The Invisible Passengers

The film’s opening sequence effectively introduces its central problem. It presents close-up shots of radar screens accompanied by disembodied voices from the planes appearing on the screens. These voices declare their status and position for a gaze overseeing the entire world from a separate position. The film consequently begins from the big Other’s perspective, a factor immediately connecting it to the censorship it received, censorship always occurring for an assumed yet insubstantial gaze watching the film.

Moreover, the radar inhabits another one of Shimizu’s circular spaces, its characters 145

trapped within the claustrophobic space of the airplane’s cabin and their own secretly

harbored problems. The disembodied voices all present their information for the gaze

watching them, but the camera focuses on a single plane initially failing to respond to it.

The big Other’s voice identifies it as “Flight 7500” and incites it to respond, and the plane

does so in another of Shimizu’s screams.6 At this point, the radar screen disappears and the film cuts the all-seeing perspective to one only capable of seeing brief images for a mere half second. These images consist of an airplane interior in chaos and disarray, under severe turbulence with baggage and passengers flying and crashing into one another. Flight’s immediate problem lies in something eluding the gaze of the big Other, therefore exposing its position as fallible and containing a blind spot.

Figure 19. The Opening Shot of Flight 7500 (Takashi Shimizu, 2016).

Shimizu organizes the next sequence around the characters’ different forms of secret knowledge and attitudes, as well as their attempts to hide them. Each of the

6 Planes send a message indicating “code 7500” to indicate a hijack situation. By naming the film this way, Flight 7500 sets itself up for a hijacking situation, the hijackers being an invisible force emerging from within the characters rather from without. In other words, the truth of the characters’ desires will commandeer them as well as the plane throughout the film. 146 characters begins the film by falsely performing for a gaze that it knows does not see it; if it did see the character, this character’s situation would worsen significantly. The visual distortion first appears on the flight attendant Suzy’s (Jamie Chung) distressed face in her photos with her fiancé. She secretly dislikes him despite his being a “safe choice” for a successful marriage, as opposed to one based on a more passionate relationship. It then passes over Brad (Ryan Kwanten) and Pia’s (Amy Smart) faces as they exchange hesitant glances despite going on the “trip of a lifetime” with their friends. They have secretly ended their marriage, only going on the trip to keep up appearances for the others. Another passenger, Lance Morrell (Rick Kelly), shiftily looks around him as he puts his baggage away, while Jake (Alex Frost) makes no attempt to hide the fact that he eyes every young woman walking past him. These hidden secrets distort characters’ behavior to various extents, but the invisible distortions all indicate their hiding something from the big Other’s gaze. Flight’s goal lies in exposing these invisible forces to the point where the big Other reveals its self as a non-existent entity.

The newlywed Liz (Nicky Whelan), however, poses the film’s most focused case of this visual distortion by fearing this absent gaze so greatly. She holds the closest relation to an absent gaze by obsessively performing for one that does not see her. She and her husband, Rick (Jerry Ferrara), board the plane on their honeymoon, and Liz incessantly expresses her desire for “everything to be perfect.” She describes her rules for riding on a plane, “I don’t want to sit next to people eating Chinese, Indian, Kimchi, fat people, babies, snorers, dribblers, you know, people with lice, gingivitis...” For Liz, any minor imperfection ruins her situation’s perfect appearance, assuming a dubiously original state 147

of perfection that an invisible gaze can see. However, perfection only appears by

subtracting absence, lack, and loss from the picture: in other words, by remaining blind to

its condition of possibility. The perfectionist achieves its goals by denying that these

imperfections exist, while experience reveals that these elements actually constitute one’s

subjectivity. One becomes a subject following a constitutive moment of loss, and Flight

leads Liz to finally experience this subjective moment she so deeply fears.

Flight further correlates this obsessive denial of subjectivity with another visual

distortion in the form of racism. The film introduces Liz when she stops Rick as they seek

out their seats, offhandedly saying, “Oh, God, I hope I’m not sitting next to that,” pointing to a black passenger eating Chinese food. Rick responds, “He’s hungry, not homeless,” however, the film does not immediately describe Liz’s phobia toward people eating. Flight implies here that the reason behind Liz’s reaction is the man’s skin color. Despite not

saying so directly, Shimizu suggests that Liz’s obsession with cleanliness holds racist

connotations as well, combining a political commentary on the way racism creates visual

distortions within the film’s larger one on visual perfectionism. The racist believes that

skin color connotes inherent traits in particular subjects, but fails to see the way in which

it places these traits within these subjects instead. Race does not distort a previously pure

and clean world; rather, the racist’s own distorted fantasies surrounding these races make

this world more and more distorted. Racism appears in another scene before the plane’s

takeoff, when Suzy asks Jake to turn off his video game. He responds, “No prob-rom,”

openly mocking Suzy because of her Asian descent. These scenes connect racism to an

invisible big Other figure overseeing the scene and silently laughing at the jokes these 148

characters make to themselves. Instead of viewing actual people, Liz and Jake only see

others through their fantasy frames, and Flight reverses their jokes back toward them by depicting the empty space they address actually looking back at them.7

Through his investment in the gaze, Jake fails to see the ways in which he

nevertheless relies on the big Other’s gaze to ensure the consistency of his identity. He

further believes that the need to turn electronics off when on an airplane is an urban myth,

indicating “the man trying to keep us down, controlling our thoughts.” This statement

reveals Jake’s belief in the big Other’s gaze despite his apparent interest in thwarting this

gaze, attempting to reveal its weakness while simultaneously relying on it for his

enjoyment. He shamelessly reveals to others what most would keep to themselves as long

as the big Other does not actually appear, while his actions all cause it to appear via others

scolding him, reprimanding him, etc. Jake and Liz hold opposing relations to the big

Other’s gaze, and yet they both act as if something watches them at all times from an unseen

point. Flight reveals how these paradoxical perspectives lead to racism, the racist subject

remaining blind to the way in which it relies on the world’s supposed imperfections for its

own subjectivity, going so far as to perpetuate these imperfections as itself. In other words,

the perfectionist embodies the most unclean subject of them all, and the racist’s own racism

poses the very stain it wishes to eradicate from the world. Instead of embracing and

assuming these constitutive imperfections as their own reason for being, Flight leads Liz

and Jake to encounter their actual invisibility as a horror element.

7 The film puns on this word through Jake’s shirt featuring several eyeglass frames on it. 149

Jacinta (Scout Taylor-Compton), the goth, embodies the antithesis to Liz’s problem

as someone openly giving body to a visual distortion. It proves no coincidence, then, that

Shimizu introduces her just as Liz begins celebrating that the seat next to her is empty.

Jacinta sits down in gruff silence next to her as if to specifically thwart this celebration of

her perfectionist success. The goth’s excessive makeup, tattoos, piercings, and clothing

stand out among the normal field of appearances, and its excessiveness reveals how this

field constructs itself for a gaze.8 The normally-dressed subject, in this case, assumes its appearance in order not to provoke the gaze of others. It does not try to appear perfect in order to appease the evaluation of an imaginary gaze, but rather does not try to appear at all. This subject’s imperfection defines it, but also fills it with shame. The normal subject experiences shame because its imperfection produces a subjective excess equivalent to a form of nudity, and in this way, feels the need to conceal itself under its normal appearance.

Liz, however, structures herself around guilt because she presents herself for a gaze that does not exist anywhere around her. As a perfectionist, she acts as if she has nothing to hide, but this performance actually belies a more profound imperfection than that of the normal subject. Acting for an invisible gaze actually reveals to real other people that a

8 Shimizu does not introduce Jacinta with the other characters boarding the plane, but instead introduces her spike-covered high-heel shoes walking in absence of a body. Mark Fisher describes gothic footwear to indicate a similar bodily imperfection that the capitalist mode of production, or “brutilitarianism,” attempts to destroy. Capitalist representation, like Liz, attempts to eradicate any trace of imperfect appearances, presenting a shiny and clean appearance for a consumer’s gaze as the big Other. Fisher argues that with “their flagrant anti-organicic angularity, their disdain for the utilitarian criteria of comfort or functionality, Goth shoes and boots bend, bind, twist and extend the body. [Goth] clothing recovers its…symbolic role as a hyperbolic supplement to the body, as that which destroys the illusion of organic unity and proportion.” Fisher, Mark. “For Your Unpleasure: The Hauteur-Couture of Goth.” K-punk. June 1, 2005. Unpaged. http://k-punk.org/for-your-unpleasure-the-hauteur-couture-of-goth/. The close-up of Jacinta’s shoes introduces her as less a character in the film than this very hyperbolic excess haunting Liz from inside, further indicating Flight’s anti-capitalist stance. 150 powerful subjective excess resides within her that she fears, and pretending that her subjectivity does not exist poses a blatantly obvious form of misdirection that fools no one, least of all the big Other. On the other hand, the goth not only wears its own subjective excess on its sleeve for all to see, but crucially acts indifferently toward it, as if its excess does not really distort the space around it, as if there were nothing excessive about its appearance. Like Liz, Jacinta also acts as if her subjective stain does not exist; only her actions and appearance clearly speak to the contrary. The goth’s cold indifference toward its subjectivity thus opposes the perfectionist’s incessant covering it up, and both instances of subjectivity originate in differing relations to the big Other’s gaze.

On top of all this, Flight offers a clear representative of the big Other in the form of the plane’s captain and pilot (Johnathan Shaech). He fits well within J-Horror’s tradition of corrupt and non-functioning father figures as seen in the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and

Hideo Nakata, as well as Shimizu’s other films. Like in Ju-On, Shimizu introduces him as the film’s only visible horror element, albeit in an originally indirect and subtle way. Before takeoff, the lead flight attendant Laura (Leslie Bibb) calls the captain with an urgent message from ground control, only to have an unknown hand land on her shoulder, causing her to jump in fright. The camera reveals the hand as belonging to the captain, with whom she is having an affair despite his being married. Laura hopes he will leave his wife for a relationship with her, but his awkward response to his wife calling him while the two embrace fills her with doubt. Furthermore, Laura informs him that “an important check was overlooked,” but the captain continues treating the situation as a joke, not taking his big Other duties seriously for both Laura and the rest of the passengers. The plane ends up 151

going down, of course, for this very reason, as if the captain’s lack of seriousness toward

his appearance embodies the actual cause of its downfall. The captain fails to see the

seriousness behind the way Laura interacts with him, and his failed vision characterizes

him next in line among the J-Horror movement’s blind big Other figures.

No One is Watching

However, the captain only indicates Flight’s visible horror element, as the film

more prominently features an invisible one. This invisible figure haunts the film through

visual distortions and disembodied voices that all arise out of a collective encounter with

death. Death, in Flight’s case, causes the characters to see their own future death, but this

vision leads them to a new perspective on life that views it as the afterlife. Flight treats seeing one’s dead self as its invisible horror element; however, it treats this element as something other than it appears in the same vein as Kurosawa and Nakata’s films, something to be embraced rather than feared. As in Cure, Pulse, Ring, Dark Water, and

Ju-On, the characters must assume the horror element as themselves and become undead subjects. The specter of death actually points toward a profound separation between the

characters’ experiences of themselves that correlates with their various secrets hidden from

appearance as described earlier. These secrets reach exposure to the point where the subject

must die for the big Other’s gaze so that it can continue to live its problem to its fullest

visual manifestation, becoming an external truth instead of a hidden secret. This problem

actually indicates the characters’ forms of undead subjectivity lying dormant in fear of the

big Other seeing them, and the film exposes these problems as their own solutions by 152 revealing that the big Other does not really exist. Unlike Ju-On which bemoaned the big

Other’s eternal presence, Flight implies that this figure’s absence as a cause for rejoicing.9

Flight presents disembodied voices floating throughout the plane that remind characters of their potential transformations following their encounter with death. As in Ju-

On, the characters cannot immediately understand what these voices say, and their content only becomes clear once they assume what they do not put into words, or what evades their own speech. Following Lance’s death, Jacinta describes death’s fundamental connection to life in the film’s most important piece of dialogue. Her words hold so much significance to Flight’s project that they haunt the plane as the disembodied voice from the opening scene. She discomforts Liz in arguing that “death is a part of life,” and Rick agrees with her in spite of Liz’s perfectionist retort, “a part of your life maybe, but not a part of mine.”

After Liz leaves the argument, Jacinta and Rick’s dialogue gives voice to Flight’s perspective on death in connection to life:

Jacinta: But if you remember that one day you and I, all of us, we’ll all be dead, then you won’t want to waste one second of whatever time we have left. Rick: I…I wish I could live like that. Jacinta: But why can’t you? People get all tied up in what they think they should do. But when you die, you die. No one’s gonna give you gold stars in heaven for going to business school or marrying a hot wife.

Here Jacinta indicates her structural proximity to the death drive, as well as the death drive’s disconnected relation to the gaze of the big Other. Rick acts entirely for this gaze and disregards his own enjoyment in the process, and in this sense can only dream of living his life without wasting time. This fact explains why he makes an ideal partner for Liz, as

9 The fact that the film can only imply its glee over this figure’s death reveals a possible point of censorship. 153

the two both invest themselves in performing for the gaze to the point where they fail to

see how they can only look backwards at the past or forward toward the future, never at

the present. In separating death from their life, Liz and Rick therefore eliminate the

possibility of experiencing immediacy, instead opting to recreate an imagined perfect

moment from the past in the future. Jacinta, however, embodies a subject of the death drive

because, as a goth, she remains indifferent to the gaze of the past and the future looking at

her from their virtual positions. Todd McGowan argues that the death drive subject lives

an “atemporal” existence because “time ceases to be the horizon through which it

experiences itself or the world.”10 The past, present, and future all exist on the same plane for Jacinta since she structures her psyche around death. Flight emphasizes this fact by her words’ gaining an ability float throughout the plane of time as well as the plane itself.

In addition to these voices, Flight’s visual distortions also connect to the invisible forces underlying each of the characters’ faces in the introductory scenes. Strange things begin to occur and appear on the plane as the characters move closer to exposing the secrets that they hide from the big Other. For example, the plane shakes its way through turbulence soon after taking off, and this occurs at the point where an uncomfortable silence pervades all of the characters. Shimizu uses parallel editing here to show the characters sitting in silent discomfort as if the awkward silences cause this turbulence to occur, externalizing their interior emotions onto the plane itself. This turbulence causes the unexpected death of Lance, and his death causes a further disturbance amongst the plane’s passengers. His

10 McGowan, Todd. Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. xi. 154

death causes them to reorganize their life’s priorities in response to the prospect of

themselves dying. They begin seeing something terrifying that the camera refuses to

directly reveal. The characters also disappear from sight as soon as they see it, the gaze

visually functioning here in the same way as the curses found in Ring and Ju-On. As seen throughout the J-Horror movement, this visual distortion incarnates the space where the big Other should be but does not appear. Flight presents this empty space gazing back at its characters until they make the perspectival change of seeing themselves from the absent big Other’s point of view.

This distortion most significantly appears to Liz after the second, more intense, wave of turbulence occurs. This turbulence happens in response to another uncomfortable silence emerging among the passengers. Throughout the film, Liz exhaustively shows her wedding pictures to everyone nearby, and tries to show them again to Rick in the wake of this turbulence. However, the sleeping Rick does not respond to her, and neither does

Jacinta seated on her opposite side. Liz then turns off her laptop to see Lance reaching out from behind her in the screen’s reflection. She whirls around, but sees nothing there. At this moment, no one sees Liz’s perfection, and this notion unveils the big Other who she performs for as a corpse looking back at her from the empty screen. With no one there to see it, the perfectionist does not exist.

With this scene, Flight confronts a larger problem distorting people’s vision within the contemporary U.S. in the form of a “Big Brother” complex. However, “Big Brother” does not embody a substantial, corporeal gaze inhabited by an actual person hidden from sight as it may first appear. This complex originates in George Orwell’s novel 1984 (1949), 155

and the novel’s crucial point lies in the fact that this gaze is actually inhabited by the

protagonist’s closest peers, rather than an all-seeing big Other figure. The protagonist never meets Big Brother itself, but is tortured instead by his closest friend. The big Other as Big

Brother does not secretly run the show within Orwell’s universe; it is a brother, not an

Other. Instead, Big Brother embodies an empty space concealing the fact that everyone runs the very show that controls him or herself.

Paul Verhaeghe and Eline Trenson describe this contemporary Big Brother complex as emerging from the collapse of patriarchal society’s father-centered structure.

They envision Liz’s complex by illustrating how “the world is increasingly experienced as

one big stage with an omnipresent, anonymous, and watchful eye, covering the scene

nonstop. Our body has to be perfect, our smile has to be genuine, and our enjoyment has

to be total.”11 They do not argue for a return to “the good old days” of patriarchal culture, but rather explicate the different problems that this culture’s death leaves behind in its wake. The J-Horror movement’s undead father figure illuminates its own facets of this cultural change, and Flight utilizes Japan’s invisible gaze to reveal the U.S.’s own Big

Brother complex. In this light, the fact that Lance appears to Liz through her blank computer screen is not insignificant in reference to Orwell’s concept. 1984 features so- called “telescreens” inside every room that display propaganda but secretly operate as security cameras even when turned off. These screens resemble the many screens that pervade contemporary subjects’ places of residence, places of work, even their own

11 Verhaeghe, Paul and Eline Trenson. "Hysteria between Big Brother and Patriarchy." In Juliet Mitchell and the Lateral Axis: Twenty-First-Century Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Ed. Robbie Duschinsky and Susan Walker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p. 161. 156

pockets, as if these screens hold a similar function overseeing everything that contemporary subjects do. Flight incarnates the gaze of the big Other with a corpse looking back at Liz through a screen, and in this way reveals her own investment in the very invisible figure haunting her.

Flight further reveals this complex’s class-based origins during the scene in which

Jake disappears. After Lance dies, the plane’s captain does not want to cause a panic, so he decides to hide the dead body in the plane’s first class section located upstairs on its upper level. This decision causes those in first class to relocate to the same level as everyone else, placing in first class a dead man with a veil over his face and equalizing everyone else. The passengers’ relocation creates the exact situation described above in which a Big Brother complex forms around a corpse. The plane’s levels now indicate a hierarchical structure in which everyone subordinates him or herself to a central figure; however, this figure is dead

and seems to embody death itself, this world separating itself from death in the same way

as the perfectionist. Again, Big Brother as the big Other does not incarnate an actual

person’s gaze, but rather a gaze assumed to exist in this figure when, in actuality, it does

not. This gaze actually embodies the gaze of other people, and realizing this fact transforms

the subject from a subject of a power structure to a subject of a social world. In this way,

Flight reveals that the supposedly privileged figure in first class overseeing the world only

embodies a blind and invisible corpse.

Jake’s dependence on upper-class appearance leads him to first encounter this

structurally absent figure. Shimizu depicts this encounter when Jake sneaks into first class

to steal Lance’s Rolex watch, again depicting a stairwell as a pathway to another temporal 157 dimension. Jake knows well that an absent figure resides at the heart of traditional class structure through statements like “Look around, it’s a global financial crisis. Boomers screwed the pooch, man, they ain’t helpin’ out Gen Y. Gotta make a living somehow.”

However, his willingness to transgress the captain’s order in order to steal the watch indicates his own dependence on this standard, class-centered power structure, its outdated temporal position, as well as the gaze at its center. He has not yet broken from this structure entirely, and this fact leads him to witness firsthand the undead figure looking at him from the heart of his own psychic structure. Moreover, the fact that Jake specifically steals a watch indicates his attempt to literally “steal time” back from the big Other who has stolen it from him; however, his attempt to increase his lifetime through class mobility ironically ends his life immediately. After peeling the watch off of Lance’s already decaying skin,

Jake decides that just possessing the expensive watch is not enough; he needs someone to recognize that he possess it as well. He takes out his phone to record a selfie video with him talking to the covered corpse, but in the process fails to notice the corpse’s head turning to face him. Jake then lifts the veil covering the dead body, but Shimizu ends the scene by cutting to Jake screaming in response to the invisibility that he unveils, again extracting a scream from him inside this atemporal location. Here, the anonymous gaze of his phone for which Jake performs looks back at him from a position outside of space and time, reducing his speech to a meaningless sound. Jake here actually uncovers the fact that no gaze is there to see him, making it not insignificant that this blindness looks at a character sneaking into first class to steal an expensive watch. In this way, Flight critiques Jake’s 158

keen desire for class mobility by showing that this desire seeks an impossible end located

outside of spatio-temporal coordinates.

Figure 20. Jake's Selfie Video with the Upper Class Corpse in Flight 7500.

Embracing Emptiness

The case of Jake aside, Flight changes its characters’ psychic structures to the point

where they cease performing for the gaze and become subjects of the death drive. In doing

so, the film extends the J-Horror movement’s investment in the afterlife as a space where

one does not die, but continues existing invisibly, or in-visibly. Kurosawa, Nakata, and

Shimizu previously depicted the afterlife as a space in Japan devoid of people, but actually

containing invisible people who do not exhibit themselves for the same imagined gaze.

Shimizu’s Flight takes a plane filled with overly visible and distorted subjects from the

U.S. and places them within this invisible setting of Japan, aligning their psychic structures

with the death drive in the process.12 Jean-Luc Nancy echoes Jacinta in describing death as

12 While the report on the news says that the plane will crash into the pacific, the film’s ending scene indicates that this is not necessarily the case. He significantly states that “the chances of survival are slim,” but not impossible. The film contains no sound of plane crashing, either, further suggesting that the plane does not crash in the end. 159

an invisible component of the subject’s look. He argues that “[d]eath is part of life, instead

of making life part of (or parted from) something other than itself…it is itself the blind spot

that opens up the looking, and it is such a way of looking that films life…, a way of looking

through which we have to look but that is not to be seen itself.”13 Flight cinematically presents death as an empty space that similarly appears and looks at its characters, acting as this blind spot that opens their eyes to themselves. Instead of performing for an imaginary big Other’s gaze, the characters finally act so as to see themselves with their own eyes. For Shimizu, this transformative gesture leads these characters to the afterlife.

They can no longer tether themselves to their hidden distortions, and in this sense find themselves in the invisible space between two deaths. The gaze turns out to be their own, and separating from their previous conception of it allows this separate self to die while the subject itself continues living invisibly.

Flight emphasizes embracing death, and in this way connects to the J-Horror movement’s repeated theme featuring a character embracing a corpse. As in Cure, Ring, and Ju-On, the ghost in this film embodies a part of the subject that it cannot acknowledge.

While Lance’s ghost appears as a visual distortion for everyone, it leads them to both realize that the particular big Other they performed for does not have their best interest in mind, and also that this fact necessitates their own staging their death for it. The characters see themselves as dead in the end because they cease performing to please the big Other and henceforth become invisible to its gaze. Significantly, Liz is the first one to open the

13 Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Evidence of Film. Trans. Christine Irizarry and Verena Andermatt Conley. Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001, p. 18. 160

pilot’s cabin to witness that the captain flying the plane is actually dead. She realizes here

that there is no one “flying the plane” for her, so to speak, that the big Other has not seen her perfectionist performance at all. This moment frees Liz from her perfectionist impulse and the invisible gaze haunting her throughout the film.

Furthermore, it is also significant that Jacinta joins J-Horror’s lineage of corpse- embracers, given her own close relationship to the death drive. Shimizu films her in a shot- reverse shot sequence looking at an empty space, like Rika at the beginning of Ju-On. Then, a shadowed figure appears in that empty space with a strong resemblance to Jacinta, again repeating Rika’s first encounter with Kayako. Jacinta walks slowly toward this figure and hugs it, yet Shimizu offers no indication as to who the figure actually is, aside from it looking like Jacinta. Unlike the others who are revolted at seeing themselves dead, Jacinta embraces her dead self from this inscrutable visual point. She does not fear the position between the two deaths, and not fearing one’s invisibility grants the subject a rare form of freedom.

At the point where they see themselves dead, Liz and the other characters enter the realm between two deaths where the subject of the death drive locates itself. The big Other deems them dead to the world on the television screen, but yet they have not physically died. They exist within an undead, purgatorial state between the two, as well as an invisible space between the big Other’s gaze and their own. The characters here witness their symbolic death within this empty space, and thus become undead subjects. Shimizu echoes his mentor Kiyoshi Kurosawa in having characters embrace their subjectivity when they become the empty space haunting them from outside. Like Cure’s Takabe and Pulse’s 161

Michi, the plane’s space transforms for the characters when this change occurs,

transforming into a paradoxically filled yet empty space: the “lonely room” where the big

Other is missing. This space further resembles the cramped locations found in Ju-On where characters disappear. For instance, the blind gaze appears in the darkness of the cargo hold after Laura breaks up with the captain, in the cramped airplane bathroom where Raquel

(Christian Serratos) relievedly learns that she is not pregnant with the child of a man she does not love, as well as when the camera cranes upward as Suzy removes her engagement ring, as if doing so lifted an immense, yet invisible, weight from her psyche. They disappear inside spaces where no gaze exists to see them, as if finding this space solves their visibility problems introduced at the beginning. Flight does not argue that the characters isolate themselves away from the world, but rather that the world itself transforms for them for the better when they change their relation to the big Other’s gaze. Furthermore, the two most troubled couples enter this realm when the plane’s main cabin becomes a frozen moment of the past. Rick ends his eternally perfect moment with Liz, while Brad and Pia cease wasting time and fully devote themselves to each other instead of trying to “be cool and hip” by performing for the gaze. The past, present, and future come together in this space between two deaths, and the absence of the big Other’s gaze frees the subject spatially, temporally, and vocally. Therefore, Shimizu creates another clear instance of a time-image in this scene, only this space becomes a much more ideal version of the afterlife.

Flight concludes by placing the perfectionist Liz within her own version of this afterlife, thus by making her, too, into a subject of the death drive. She finds herself within 162

the space between two deaths, which incarnates a particular process for her that Shimizu

extends to its logical conclusion. This space grants her wish from the beginning and

provides her with an empty space on the plane next to which she can sit; however, the film

takes her wish to its limit point, evacuating everyone from the plane and turning the world

into the “lonely room” inhabited only by big Other-less subjects of the death drive. In this

scene, Liz confronts the truth of the perfectionist’s desire; she achieves the perfect scene.

However, this perfect scene not only comes about by eradicating all subjectivity and therefore all potential for a structuring loss to occur. This fact also entails that no one is there to see this perfection, again implying that the big Other does not see perfection when one achieves it. Shimizu even takes this revelation a step further in giving body to this empty space in the same formal way as he does in Ju-On. The camera moves to the right in the same tracking shot around Liz’s head as the one moving around Rika’s as she hears

Kayako’s voice, only Liz hears the sound made by the Shinigami doll she earlier threw in the plane’s waste compartment. Shimizu’s cinematography indicates that the perfectionist actually views its audience and its end products as garbage that it eternally throws away, but that returns its gaze from this abject viewpoint. The gaze always returns the perfectionist’s look, but never from the position that it wishes. In forcing Liz to encounter the empty space that she seeks, Flight reveals the crux at the heart of perfectionist striving as a paradoxical wish for its opposite.

163

Figure 21. Liz's Empty Seat in Flight 7500.

Moreover, Flight reveals the truth of Liz’s desire in order to exorcise a visual distortion haunting the contemporary U.S. and the entire Western world in general.

Shimizu combines this perspective’s various prejudices, phobias, and paranoia into a single perfectionist figure. Liz encapsulates a subject marred by the disease of difference: others’ difference from herself as well as her own assumed difference from the world. The world appears unclean to the perfectionist, as it believes in a pre-existing world untainted by loss and unstained by subjectivity. In believing so, the perfectionist misses the way in which one becomes a subject in the world. Subjectivity does not arise by returning to a frozen moment in the past untarnished by loss, but rather by continually changing with the situation.

The year Flight became visible in the U.S., the country elected famous billionaire

Donald Trump as president. He promised to return the nation to a past moment of greatness and glory, his running slogan proposing to “make American great again.” However, as seen in the case of Liz, this perfect past moment does not actually exist. The American greatness to which he purports to return actually realizes a historical time constituted by vicious prejudice, widespread phobias, and contagious paranoia. As seen through Liz’s wish 164

fulfillment at Flight’s conclusion, Trump’s promises really strive to entirely eradicate

subjectivity from the picture. His exhibitionistic lifestyle, anti-immigration laws, removing

sexual orientation from the national census, and openly advocating white supremacy,

sexism, eugenism, and ableism, all illuminate his true desire to not only remove all

possibility for people becoming subjects, but also to color himself as an undead father

figure from the patriarchal past unaware of his own death. His famously orange skin color

from excessive tanning literally realizes his hidden desire, making him appear more as an

embalmed mummy than a living person, as well as revealing an implicit investment in

death that his “pro-life” stance conceals. Instead, Flight brings its distorted Americans to incarnate an alternative, “pro-death” perspective creating a national image interested less in unearthing a buried past than in letting this past die. It advocates an afterlife within life in which subjects can comfortably sit next to others regardless of their appearance, cease

to waste time parading their perfections and pretending to enjoy, and live in passionate

coagulation against the big Other’s gaze. Through Flight’s transnational connection, the plane finally reaches a spatial destination allowing time to begin again inside both the recession-era U.S. and Lost Decade Japan. Ultimately, the contemporary world for Shimizu constitutes a horror film featuring subjects suspended within space and time and haunted by an undead structural figure. This world, however, proves redeemable when subjects realize that the plane has already crashed, the pilots have been dead for some time, and that its passengers, too, are all in fact dead. Here, the undead subject enters the afterlife without physically dying, where life does not end, but where it truly begins.

165

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