one of the nice things about streaming netflix is that i can revisit a bunch of movies i was really into in high school and see if they hold any water on second viewing. there was a good long period where i was really into takashi miike and his brand of bizarre. so with that in mind i plugged in my xbox360 and gave ichi the killer another try.
watching a takashi miike movie is sort of like taking a knife and poking the soft part of your stomach (all of it in my case) and seeing how far you can go before giving up. but in a good way? it's easy to dismiss ichi the killer as a mindless gore-fest. i don't know how to talk about this movie without being explicit, and with that said, if you are the faint of heart i invite you to skip this post entirely. it has been rated s, forsquirm-inducing and sensational and sick (and sexy?). but also consider that the violence mentioned is so over the top that it's obviously meant to be a farce: a man being cut in two down the middle by a bladed heel kick, a face sliding down the wall as if its been filleted from the head, a man having a phone conversation seconds after he cuts off part of his own tongue, etc. if we can laugh at a cheap kick to the balls like i know we all can, why can we also not laugh at a man pouring burning oil over another?
traditionally, japanese films, even ones about the yakuza, have a sort of understated subtlety about them. they value order, honor, restraint. a takashi miike movie is a sort of protest against the conformity of those values. they're excessive on all fronts: violence, imagery, editing, sound, the senses, so on and so forth. they have all the subtlety of an atomic...well, you get what i mean.
believe it or not there is a character in the movie named ichi, and yes, he is a killer. but he's not your prototypical killer for hire. he's an extremely vulnerable and mentally deteriorated young man who cries while he's slicing off limbs. due to the trickery of a foul old man, poor ichi comes to relate killing and pain with sex and love. he's the very embodiment of sadism. the thing about sadism is that it highlights an already existing connection between death and sex. without getting too above the pg-13 line, if we understand that the french term la petite mort (meaning "the little death") is a metaphor for orgasm, and that it's often thought as an escape from or transcendence of life through the expenditure of your "life force", then the leap isn't that large of one to make (for more on this, please refer to tatsuya fuji's in the realm of the senses). it's especially significant when examining gender roles and male dominance, which is a rather large and grotesque focus of the film. to be male in a patriarchal society means having power and in the act of sex we lose that power. for sex is the ultimate expression of giving and taking. its a perfect union. that is until violence is added into the equation and once again dominance is tossed either way. when ichi sees a man brutally raping and beating a girl he's not angry or disgusted. he's excited. very "excited" (see title image above). he doesn't understand the mutual relationship in the act of love.
another interesting, and parallel, dichotomy in the movie is the relationship between sadism and masochism. if ichi is the embodiment of sadism then kakihara has masochism on lock-down. he is pain obsessed. he just can't get enough of it. his face is full of scarring. his mouth has been extended well into his cheeks. he cut off his own tongue. through pain there are moments when we escape reality - when we lose ourselves. i'm thinking specifically of the scene in i heart huckabees (weird movie to be mentioning here) where jason schwartzman and mark wahlberg hit each other in the face with the big red balls in order to experience themselves outside of the world of self. speaking of which, it's remarkable how spiritual some of the ideas in this movie are considering the subject matter. it could be that im also re-reading siddhartha. anyways, if the act of sex is the ultimate in giving and taking, then ichi and kakihara's relationship can be seen as a sexual one - ichi the giver of pain, kakihara the grateful receiver. which makes the ending more than a little funny. like the ultimate in sexual frustration let-downs.
after that i feel like i need to take a shower. i find it difficult to really recommend ichi the killer to anyone, but it's still an interesting film and if you're ever feeling like you need a good punch in the gut maybe you should give it a try. to be honest it wasn't even the most disturbing movie i saw all weekend. that honor goes to (500) days of summer. this coming from a guy who adores zooey deschanel (such an anomaly, i know), but talk about masochism...still, i think the best introduction into the work of takashi miike is audition, which is also on netflix instant play. so maybe in a month or two, when im good and ready, ill give it another shot too.
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