Filed under: Art & Culture, Oddities, Reactionary Watch, Women's Rights | Tags: Audition, Horror films, Ichi the Killer, Japanese films, Marxism, Marxist analysis, Marxist criticism, Marxist reading, Takashi Miike, Tarantino, Visitor Q
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.
Filed under: Anti-Colonialism, Art & Culture, Literary Criticism, Women's Rights
The main character Oothoon in The Visions of the Daughters of Albion is a liberation figure challenging not only male chauvinism and marriage but the institution of slavery and imperialism in general. The female protagonist Oothoon, a sex slave who is raped by the slave driver Bromion, is clearly made to represent both the fertile, virginal and innocent lands of the pre-colonialism New World and the oppression of the women of Blake’s time, who were, like slaves, treated as property of their husbands. In the course of his poem Oothoon becomes the ultimate symbol for liberation both as a woman and as a slave. Even though the author slyly created Oothoon as a European woman whose skin is described as “snow white” in order to elicit sympathy from European readers that a dark-skinned woman might not have received so heartily, she still becomes the voice of subjugated races.
Social conditioning is also examined as a force in society, since all three characters are chained (literally on the accompanying plates) by the conventions of the society they inhabit and the patriarchal, property-oriented and colonialist attitudes thereof. Bromion says explicitly to Oothoon, “Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south: Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun: They are obedient, they resist not[.]” The double meaning here is transparent.
The idea of people and land as property is also examined, since Theotormon as a lover and owner cares not whether Oothoon as a person is harmed, but rather about his own possession of her and what his failing to obtain such a prize means for himself. He symbolizes the insecurity and oppression of colonialist man—specifically his feeling that for himself to have any value he must enslave and oppress others. It is also not a coincidence that Bromion is sketched as being very masculine and powerful, the idealized man who delights in domination. Like most of Blake’s more revolutionary works, Visions of the Daughters of Albion communicates the social and political ills of the time without having a traditional ending or clear resolution—Blake ultimately places the responsibility for true change upon his observers of the Visions, his readers.
