ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #48: AIRPORT (1970)

I kept waiting for a man in a giant monster suit to show up, but, alas, it’s not that kinda movie.

BOOK REVIEW: INTER ICE AGE 4 (1958, 1959, 1970)

by Kobo Abe

Illustrated by Machi Abe

English translation by E. Dale Saunders. Published in 1970 by Alfred A. Knopf.

Original Japanese language version serialized in Sekai magazine in 1958 and 1959. Novel published in 1959 by Hayakawa Publishing.

Publication information sourced from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, the Wikipedia article for Inter Ice Age 4, and the 1970 Alfred A. Knopf edition of the novel.

. . .

“This dog, can it catch fish?”

. . .

“The most fearful of monsters is the well-known friend slightly altered.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

One discovery leads to another.

A mystery is interwoven into other mysteries.

The more data you collect the more nuanced your overall picture of life becomes, until, inevitably, there’s no more mystery to it . . . right?

Hmmm.

Or is it more like you ask questions that just lead to more questions with no end in sight?

You’re asking me?!

Katsumi is a government computer engineer who works with a powerful forecasting machine in a near future Japan. This adorably retro predictive engine utilizes punch cards, presumably by the truckload, although the ability to reduce human nature to patterns of holes on paper could be a sly commentary on the vaulting ambitions of those who dream of totally reductionist quantification schemes . . . and/or the arrogance of novelists presuming to capture a convincing portrait of existence via language marks on pages. Science and literature make for quirky, dysfunctional comrades in Inter Ice Age 4. 

The Russians and the Americans also have predictive engines. Japan-a nation that’s already been nuked at Hiroshima and Nagasaki-is sandwiched between the atom bomb armed factions. Protracted Cold War Nuclear Jitters has everyone wondering about what’s around the corner. Is Communism the future? Capitalism? Can technology solve the problems created by technology? What about other horizonal crises? Resource depletion? Petroleum shocks? Carbon pollution? Global warming? Rising water lines? Can a future predicting machine be sustained by hard, unyielding quantitative facts and logic alone, or does it also require soft, squishy qualia? Also, if a machine tells us what’s going to happen next . . . is that the machine ordering us around or an infallible prognostication? What’s the difference? How do we know we’re not feeding prejudicial parameters into the system? Is it possible to counteract unconscious bias? Do the experts running these miraculous machines care about anything other than locking down their own domain of hyper-analytic power so governments and corporations have to come calling politely with hat in hand? Could this all be a pseudoscientific scam?

Meanwhile, parallel to the computer shit there’s a bunch of bio-shenanigans going down. Human and animal fetuses are being secretly harvested/kidnapped to be used as fodder for sinister genetic experiments. Two murders have seemingly been committed to keep the lid on this next level Frankenfuckery. 

Katsumi stumbles across the fetusnappings while running an experiment with the forecasting machine. At first, Katsumi dismisses the bio-shenanigans as delusional ravings but then his pregnant wife is coerced into what at first seems a forced abortion by mysterious people who managed to impersonate him. Katsumi receives threatening phone calls from someone able to perfectly impersonate his voice. In a world where everything can be totally quantified it may end up being a purely procedural endeavor to output copies of human beings. 

Narratively, Katsumi functions as a detective who grapples with mysteries outside and inside himself. His interactions with the forecasting machine resonate with our contemporary dilemmas of generative AI and its attendant hype and hallucinations. Katsumi begins as the technician maintaining the machine intelligence, but ends up facing his own obsolescence within its oracular insights.

Of course, Katsumi could be cracking up under work stress. Inter Ice Age 4 has a peculiar narrative hiccup wherein we find out sorta late about Katsumi’s personal life outside his job. Katsumi-who narrates much of the tale-describes his marriage and home life almost as though he were recounting a hypnotically repressed alter ego. I choose to interpret this as a satirical commentary on the notoriously grinding demands of Japanese work culture, but it may also be a consequence of an already complex narrative being imperfectly translated into English.

The forecasting machine develops some wild talents. It’s artificially intelligent. It can talk in convincingly human tones. If used in conjunction with specialized probes it can scan brains-even dead ones-to formulate semi-self-aware simulations of people that can communicate. That’s right: a computer as a medium in both the technical sense and the spooky sense. Technology even encroaches upon the realms of the occult in the world of Inter Ice Age 4, as it would seem supernatural/spiritual phenomena also submit to radical quantification. 

There’s a big twist, of course. Everything’s connected. Inter Ice Age 4 seems to suggest that humans operating under high tech nation states will have extreme difficulties adjusting to global crises that demand massive changes in how we all live. This is due mostly to rigid hierarchies and overspecialization. Each of us has our job, our role. We go to work secure in the knowledge that we have our chosen/imposed thing that we do. But if a big enough crisis threatens to overturn this order, how do we get everyone on board to make necessary changes to prevent disaster? Inter Ice Age 4 assumes that the powers that be would act coercively-that, in fact, a new power base would secretly emerge from within the established order to make otherwise impossible decisions for all of us. The reality disrupting crisis is just too severe to realistically expect squabbling atomized individuals to make effective democratic decisions. Even totalitarian Communism is too rigid, too stratified by the dictates of its cumbersome party elites to react in time. Inter Ice Age 4 is a provocation, in this sense, asking us to look beyond our current limits and roles to consider what lies beyond our specializations, our professionalisms, our nationalisms, our bigotries.

Inter Ice Age 4 also takes perverse joy in describing an aquatic mad science facility and what all it is doing to those human and animal fetuses. These passages are grotesquely comical in the way one expects from the cynically deranged Kobo Abe-a writer famously disillusioned with Japanese Imperialism, Soviet Communism, all forms of nationalism, and capitalism. I’m sure these passages describe impossible things . . . and yet there's so much detail that it’s weirdly convincing. Inter Ice Age 4 functions well as a pitch black science fictional comedy of errors. It even has a happy ending. Sorta.

MANGA REVIEW: BOMBA! (2022)

 by Osamu Tezuka

English translation by Polly Barton

Edited by Daniel Joseph

Proofread by Micah Q. Allen 

Production by Risa Cho, Shirley Fang, and Evan Hayden

Published by Kodansha USA.

Original Japanese language publication in 1970 as a serial in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine.

. . .

"Oh, shit, there's a horse in the hospital!"

-Dr. Octagon, "General Hospital," from the good doctor's album Dr. Octagonecologyst (1996).

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

CLIP CLOP CLIP CLOP-

Tetsu is a boy who is terrified by the sound of approaching horse hooves.This boy is horrifically bullied by one of his school teachers, a macho authoritarian asshole. He's also mistreated by his mother, who seems to resent his very existence. His father is a doormat, and offers no protection to his son. The boy's only solace is his hopeless crush on a kindly and beautiful female teacher. All the while, there is the sound of a horse approaching, which seems to be an omen of doom for Tetsu. As it happens, it's not just Tetsu's doom. 

BOMBA! is, to be cute about it, Equus as written by Harlan Ellison, a saga of an adolescent male whose burgeoning sense of sexuality crashes into a hostile, traumatized/traumatizing world in which people haunted by the legacies of World War II-empire, sexually enslaved comfort women, Imperial Japan's atrocities against Asia, firebombings, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, defeat, occupation, reconstruction, politically convenient historical amnesia-inflict neuroses and psychoses upon the postwar generation. These historical traumas constitute a curse which manifests as a spectral horse that both oppresses and liberates Tetsu. Tetsu fears the horse as a bringer of death . . . and then Tetsu revels in the horse as a bringer of retribution against his enemies when he realizes he can summon the beast to serve his desires. 

BOMBA! offers atmospheric black and white art that stalks back and forth across the past and the present. We begin in an eerily desolate train station, where the CLIP CLOP CLIP CLOP sounds find and afflict young Tetsu, and then, through his point of view, we start to unpack the impossible burdens of World War II that have fallen upon his shoulders. Tetsu's mother-as awful as she is-has powerful reasons for resenting her offspring. Tetsu's father-a veteran of World War II-comes to embody the disillusionment of many men who fought for a government that tossed them into an infernal meat grinder of death, atrocity, defeat, and profound shame. 

BOMBA! comes down to Tetsu's choice: can he let go of his vindictiveness, or does he pursue his vision of unlimited conquest with the aid of the spectral doomsday horse? Will Tetsu become Death, Destroyer of Worlds, or can he forge a path of his own? BOMBA! dramatizes the plight of a generation of young people caught between a devastating past of total war and an uncertain future that might well be more of the same. 

The Lynch Meditations 3: The Grandmother (1970)

Mixture of live action and animation. Some live action sequences are shot as stop motion using human performers giving that weird herky-jerky effect to their motions-people become monsters out of a Ray Harryhausen fantasy sequence.

A man and a woman are secreted and processed by the earth until they reach the surface where they make animal noises, and crawl and fight upon the forest floor. The man brutalizes the woman, forces himself upon her, and a son is born, also secreted and processed upwards by the earth. The son is brutalized by the father, neglected by the mother.

Soon, the son is pissing the bed. The father punishes the son for this, rubbing his face in the bright yellow piss stains, reminiscent of how some dog owners abuse their pets.

The son goes to another bedroom-which might exist only in his imagination-where he piles dirt on the bed, adds water, and a large, spiny plant grows. The plant births an old woman, whom the son loves, and she loves the son. It is not clear if this is actually happening, or if this is a dream of the boy. The old woman-the grandmother-might also be drawn from some memory the boy has of his grandmother from earlier in life, but this is not certain. Personally, I think this grandmother springs wholly from the boy's imagination. He knows there are kindly, loving grandmothers out there in the world, even though he himself has never met one, and so he has created one in his imagination, and has brought her to life through green-thumb magick.

One thing I find interesting here is how the earth is portrayed as a crazy machine manufacturing miserable humans. Is this what human cruelty has done to the earth? Are we on another planet? My take is that this is what we have done to the earth. We humans have brutalized mother earth into a factory specializing in the manufacture of broken, abusive souls.

Animation and surrealism are used to go beyond the mundane surface of miserable lives. If this had been staged in a wholly realistic way, we would have no distance, and we would be deeply depressed. The movie's weirdness gets us into an investigative frame of mind: why are these people so fucked up? Is there a way out? Is fantasy any kind of salvation? Why must so many fathers be abusive, predatory pieces of shit?

I no longer hate The Grandmother, but I think I know why I disliked it so much when I first experienced it. This film is a harrowing portrayal of child abuse, and how a boy suffering abuse uses fantasy to imagine someone who loves him unconditionally in a world without love. The movie, interestingly, isn't trying to get you to fall in love with it-The Grandmother is meant to be difficult, bizarre, unpleasant, and nightmarish. I now have respect for it as a work of cinema, and I hope it does not reflect personal experiences on the part of David Lynch; but if it does portray personal experiences, then I hope this movie was part of some healing process. Either way, it is a challenging experience, and I'm glad I ventured into its frightful world one more time.

NEXT: 1/11/18 The Lynch Meditations 4: The Amputee Version One and Version Two (1974)
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MANGA REVIEW: THE BOOK OF HUMAN INSECTS (2011)

by Osamu Tezuka

Originally published in serial form in Japanese in Play Comic, 1970-1971

English Translation by Mari Morimoto, 2011

Published by Vertical, Inc.

...

"Why not be Number One?"

-Goro Hanada, Number Three Killer (Joe Shishido) in Branded to Kill (1967)

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

How does one survive in a corrupt world? Does one meet corruption with integrity and honesty? Do you resist the sources of corruption--government, corporations, big media, organized crime, the family, religious institutions, power brokers, violent political extremists--and if so, how does one resist? If the corruption of the world is pervasive, who can you trust? Maybe a few close friends. If the corruption of the world is total, then you can only trust yourself.

If you can only depend on yourself, then you better be tough, smart, and resourceful. Ethics are strictly optional, to be used only as they can give you an advantage in a given situation. That is to say, only do the right thing if it's to your advantage. Do the right thing if it'll elevate you in the eyes of those whom you would seek to manipulate to your advantage. Even in a world of absolute corruption, appearances are everything. People still have their vanity even in the absence of ethics. No one, even at their most dishonest and self-serving, truly thinks of themselves as evil. Sure, they might have some guilt, but nothing they can't live with, nothing they can't explain away, and anyways they were just doing what had to be done.

Massive wars have been perpetrated on the basis of lies, delusions, and self-serving rationales. If those that wage wars of folly can sleep at night, publish bestselling memoirs, and collect generous speaker's fees to cultivate more lies and more folly in the hearts and minds of the next generation of highly placed perpetrators . . . well, why shouldn't everybody have a piece of the game? What's a little graft, a little theft, a little murder now and again? Didn't some villain with a British accent in some movie say, "Kill a dozen people, you're a murderer. Kill a million, you're a conqueror?" And didn't someone else, maybe a grand philosopher, say, "Nature is organized murder?" Surely, as biological entities, we are all a part of nature.

The Book of Human Insects is about a person uniquely suited to survival in a totally corrupt world, a young woman named Toshiko Tomura. She's an acclaimed novelist, actress, and graphic designer. She's also a woman in a man's world, Japan in the 1970s. You would think she would be a role model to the young women and girls of Japan, a feminist icon of achievement and empowerment. Maybe she is, but she's an icon with a lot of baggage if that's the case.

You see, Tomura has a preternatural ability for mimicking her fellow human beings and absorbing their talents. All she has to do is spend time with someone, say they're an actor, and observe what they do in minute detail. Tomura goes to rehearsals, studies the script, and learns the lines. She starts out as the understudy, but soon she's the star. Well, that's not so unusual in the world of theatre.

But after she conquers the world of theatre, Tomura has fantasies of becoming a great novelist. So she latches onto an up-and-coming female novelist, finds out what she's researching, and then studies the same research materials. Tomura gets her novel to press before the up-and-comer can do so, and bingo. Tomura's an award-winning novelist.

The up-and-comer hangs herself in a hotel room. Call it collateral damage. Hey, life is struggle. Life is war. War isn't about making nice with the enemy. War is what George C. Scott talked about in the beginning of that movie Patton. The speech in front of the flag. Youtube it. It's about slaughtering the enemy. And not getting all broken up about it on the inside. You do your murder, and you move on to the next battle.

And so Tomura progresses through society, seeking out unwitting role models to mimic so that she can absorb their talents and co-opt their would-be success and achievement. Along the way, she meets others who are more like predators than mimics: an anarchist terrorist for hire, a right-wing yakuza who's a behind-the-scenes fixer, a corporate executive who would no doubt dig dropping sake bombs with the Goldman Sachs and Enron crowds, and others, all of whom have trouble seeing the moral forest for the ethical trees. Or maybe it's the other way around. What's the sacrifice of one tree when the whole forest is still standing? But what if you're not satisfied with cutting down just one tree? Just one more. And one more after that, there's plenty left. Now let's clear cut this mother . . .

The Book of Human Insects is a comic book, a manga, by Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka was the Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Harvey Pekar, Alan Moore, Akira Kurosawa, Shohei Immamura, Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, and Walt Disney of Japanese manga all woven into one, singularly driven man. He wrote superhero comics for kids, like Astro Boy. He pioneered girls' comics with Princess Knight. He did talking animal stories, like Kimba the White Lion. He wrote horror, science fiction, historical drama, Shakespearean adaptations, crime stories, satire, and hard-boiled crime fiction, and sometimes he wrote stories that combined elements of all of these things. He created an anti-heroic surgeon, Black Jack, who became, along with Astro Boy, Kimba, Princess Knight, and others, one of the iconic characters of Japanese manga. Tezuka also did slice of life, confessional material, and experimental works. He told all kinds of stories using the conventions of manga storytelling: text and panels and sequential images.

Tezuka's broad interests as an author seem to be tied to a voracious appetite for all manner of culture, high and low. The man went to medical school, could've been a doctor, but, no, he decided to do what he loved and draw funny books. Here's a man with enough of a grasp of hard science to hack it at a Japanese medical university, and yet also has a fine appreciation for what makes a good story. His comics are filled with allusions to movies, Disney cartoons, and classic literature. Film noir, samurai epics, spaghetti westerns, Dostoyevsky, ancient mythology, history, tabloid sensationalism, new age pseudoscience, surrealism, neorealism, tragedy, comedy, humor, and gore are all present in his works.

Tezuka also pioneered the distinctive manga look: big eyes, simplified faces and bodies, but with dynamic scenic layouts, and a cinematic sense of pacing, and montage. American comics have traditionally gone for muscular figures in highly compressed stories taking place within morally simplified worlds. Tezuka's protagonists are sometimes short and stout, sometimes thin and lithe, and sometimes grotesque and deformed, but they are almost never simplified. Even his unabashed heroes, like Astro Boy, end up dealing with life, death, and complex moral quandaries. Tezuka approached his comics like an auteur filmmaker, paying attention to every last detail of production, and he even created his own stock company of characters who take on different roles in different stories, sometimes even breaking out of their usual casting to show a new side of their acting chops.

The Book of Human Insects is Tezuka telling a serious story with quite a bit of restraint. Usually, his manga are filled with visual puns and gags, even in serious stories. In his epic Adolf, which deals with Nazism, Hitler, and genocide, one of the main characters has a candle growing out of his head, and , no, it wasn't exactly meant as comedy. But Insects has only a few visual oddities that I noticed. During one scene, someone makes reference to Yukio Mishima's spectacular suicide, and a guy in the rather tacky uniform of Mishima's notorious private army appears to put in his two cents. No, there aren't that many visual gags. Tezuka also foregoes using his stock company of characters for this story. No guys with candles in their heads, no Astro Boy or Black Jack.

But Insects is rife with wild and bizarre imagery which establishes a kind of eerie mood and helps illustrate the nature of Tomura as a mimic. Tomura is graphically compared with bugs that mimic owls, and metamorphose into other forms. Such transformations are understood as natural, as the consequences of evolution and survival mechanisms in action. No one would accuse an insect that mimics the appearance of another creature of being a liar. Such creatures have taken on deceptive appearances in order to survive in a hostile, murderous world. By that logic, Tomura isn't evil. She is merely adaptive.

Remember, Tomura is a woman in 1970s Japan, a patriarchal society that, for all its progress, still views women as subservient to men. Even a woman who is artistically inclined, and accomplished and acclaimed at that, will often be expected to give all that up when she gets married to some corporate executive. All of the giant corporations are run by men. All of the government leadership is exclusively male. A woman either accepts this, or has to go her own way.

Moreover, the society is thoroughly corrupt. Bribery, graft, assassination, deception, and betrayal are all business as usual. And all the major players are men. A woman could very well look at this state of affairs and ask, "Why not get my end? Why not be number one? A man in this world wouldn't even think to ask the question. He would just proceed on the basis of stark reality."

But Tomura, as Tezuka tells it, isn't so much coldly calculating as she is following her nature. Yes, she plots and schemes and has a callous disregard for others, but it's not always clear that she is consciously cruel or destructive. This is what makes Tomura such a fascinating character. Is she evil, or is she just following her own nature? Is evil something that objectively exists, or is it something that we project onto reality? That is to say, is there a way to define evil scientifically, or is it more of a fuzzy, mystical-religious notion? And, once again, how do we define evil within a totally corrupt society? By definition, in such a society corruption is inescapable. Try as one might, one cannot get away totally clean.

You could show up to work every day, pay your taxes on time and never steal, murder, lie, or cheat. But your tax dollars go into the coffers of a corrupt government that hires dishonest corporations with sweetheart deals to build projects that may never be properly finished. Organized gangsters and right wing extremists exert their influence and demand their tributes in the form of bribes and hush money. Intimidation, murder, and disenfranchisement are used against those that step out of line, resist, or try to bring about reforms. This is the world that Tomura must navigate.

Along the way, journalists try to get the scoop on her past, and oppressive men try to conquer her. As I read, I asked myself, "Where is Tomura going? Is this a story of self-destruction? Will society punish Tomura for her survival adaptations? Or is she the perfect organism to negotiate this labyrinth of lies?"

I was surprised where the story went. I don't want to give away too much, but it definitely does not cop out even as it takes some rather unlikely melodramatic hairpin twists and turns. I say unlikely, but not necessarily impossible. Tezuka is never one to shy away from outrageous melodrama, even downright bathos, and fantasy, but Insects is disturbingly credible for all its dramatic license and exaggeration.

The Book of Insects is another triumph of book design from Vertical, Inc. Vertical has become the primary publisher of Osamu Tezuka's manga in English in the USA, and each new volume is handsomely turned out with evocative collages of resonant images drawn from the manga themselves. Insects is no exception. Vertical seems to approach Tezuka's books like another publisher would approach the latest Johnathan Lethem or Johnathan Franzen novel: with utmost respect and seriousness. And also, a sense of using Tezuka's distinctive illustration style as the basis for eye-catching covers and dust jackets. Insects is well worth reading, but it'll also look good on the shelf once you're done. But don't just let it sit there. Loan it to a friend.