The Coffee Marxist

I have made quite a disturbing discovery lately-Takashi Miike’s work is extremely reactionary. Yes folks, I’m afraid it’s true. My favorite dark horror director from back in my Satanist individualist days was a right-winger all along.

For those not familiar with his name or his work, Miike is best described as the Japanese Quentin Tarantino, though his works are much more about unbelievable violence and confusing non-linear plots than even Tarantino’s. American audiences who have not seen Ichi the Killer, Audition or The Happiness of the Katakuris may recognize him as the sunglasses guy from the movie Hostel.

Miike’s films often are a mixture of horror, sexual allegory and comic book gangster and superhero flicks. They often are very surreal and cartoony while at the same time being gritty as can be while never losing an ironic touch. There’s also usually a guy being cut in half or a woman being raped as well. This is the sort of pointless violence that is featured in all of his films.

I was contemplating his film Visitor Q the other day and it occurred to me that the film boils down to nothing more then a conservative endorsement of the traditional Japanese “family unit.” The violence and taboo-bashing contained within the film is not so much to celebrate the crumbling of the society that produces the family unit as a product, as I originally thought, but rather a validation of the necessity of family roles. Through the catharsis of violence and sexual deviancy, eventually everyone in the movie resumes their “proper” household place. The father goes back to being a provider, the mother a nurturer, the son and daughter as loyal, obedient offspring.

The sick images that Miike has indulged the audience in thus render themselves not as representations of the harmful psychological side-effects of bourgeois society, but as the moralist warnings of WHAT COULD HAPPEN and what has happened to disrupt that society. Things like this only make it more apparent that I can never go back to being a non-Marxist. There is simply no way I can forget what I have learned.