THE SNACKALLAX VIEW

 

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #1: THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)

Prometheus done fucked up again!

MOVIE REVIEW: INTENTIONS OF MURDER (1964)

 

Directed by Shohei Imamura

Written by Keiji Hasebe and Shohei Imamura

From a novel by Shinji Fujiwara

Cinematography by Shinsaku Himoda

Edited by Mutsuo Tanji

Art Direction by Kimihiko Nakamura

Sound Recorded by Koshiro Jinbo

Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi

Produced by Masayuki Takagi and Jiro Tomoda

Starring

Masumi Harukawa as Sadako Takahashi

Ko Nishimura as Riichi Takahashi

Shigeru Tsuyuguchi as Hiraoka

Yuko Kusunoki as Yoshiko Masuda

. . .

"Oh no! The little mouse ate the big one. He must have been hungry."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

You grow up in a rural part of Japan. You find out about the big city of Tokyo, and all that it has to offer: jobs with decent wages; exciting nightlife; access to culture and learning; the prospect of romance played out against city lights; escape from stifling traditions-

But, alas, you're just a poor girl from a poor family. You'll be spared none of the monstrosity inherent within the deeply misogynist culture that envelops you, that closes in to suffocate you, to crush you, to besiege you on all fronts-

Sadako is a poor girl from the countryside who finds herself in a kinda-sorta marriage to a college librarian named Riichi. They still live quite a ways out from Tokyo, so there's a daily commute involved, but the train system is strong and reliable, if noisy to those who live near the tracks. Sadako and Riichi live near the tracks. Which is probably fine by Riichi who gets off on yelling at and assaulting Sadako. The roar of the train covers up no end of intimate crimes. 

I say that Sadako and Riichi are in a 'kinda-sorta' marriage because while they go through the motions of being a hubby'n'wifey due to the specifics of Japan's family registry system-which I do not claim to fully grasp-Sadako has been denied full acceptance into Riichi's family. The point is that a complex tradition with a force of law behind it is used to ensnare Sadako in an oppressive relationship to Riichi. Riichi gets to make all sorts of patriarchal demands upon Sadako while also fucking around on her with his subordinate library colleague, Yoshiko, and maintain the fiction that he is a perfectly faithful husband. Meanwhile, Sadako is treated as a live-in domestic servant by Riichi and his family. 

Riichi is a thoroughly despicable, nagging, condescending pest of a man-child who demands total submission from Sadako. He's constantly bitching her out for minor transgressions, and demanding that she show him the receipts for various financial expenditures. Sadako is the manager of the household's finances, despite Riichi's nagging. Riichi also forces himself on Sadako sexually, even while demanding that she minister to his chronic asthma. Sadako functions as a live-in nurse to the malingering, abusive Riichi on top of everything else. Riichi's career as a librarian isn't so much about a love of knowledge as it is about the pursuit of status. Riichi comes from a rural farming family who lost most of their men to the war. Presumably, Riichi's asthma saved him from military service and, therefore, death in battle. 

As if this all weren't bad enough, a burglar named Hiraoka attacks Sadako in her home, and rapes her. And then this rapist develops a sick notion that he's actually in love with Sadako and that she should love him back. This rapist stalks her, and Sadako, fearing for her life, tries to appease him. She feels trapped by shame. She has no one she can trust. Sadako even attempts to end her life, but this does not go as planned. Sadako soldiers on through the endless ordeal of her days and nights. 

Intentions of Murder is a kind of horror film wherein the horror springs from perfectly real causes: tradition, misogyny, violent crime, rigid gender roles, loveless marriages, the drudgery of domestic labor, and the stifling lack of choices available to impoverished victims of abuse. The moody black and white widescreen cinematography offers not open vistas but rather shadowy overwhelming enclosures through which Sadako wanders, guided by an all-but-extinguished will to survive. Sadako never quite fights back, but neither does she totally sink beneath her heavy fate. She comes close to poisoning Hiraoka, but cannot bring herself to follow through. Sadako is not a figure of bloody vengeance. Intentions of Murder offers no spectacle of payback to the audience as relief from oppression. Sadako just isn't a violent person even if We the Audience root for her to retaliate against her tormentors. Much of what Riichi demands of her is sanctioned by the larger society which confers unjust advantages upon husbands over their wives. Moreover, Sadako herself has internalized this putrid status quo due to a complex mixture of poverty, community indifference, trauma, and lack of access to information and money. Sadako knows that she deserves a better life even as she adopts a devastating fatalism regarding her suffering.

Intentions of Murder exudes a smothering feeling of sinister fate that reminded me of the irresistible evil power at work in the movie Hereditary, but minus the supernatural. Like I said, it could be viewed as a sort of naturalist horror story. This naturalism is amplified by gritty location shooting accented with some eerie in-camera hallucination sequences as Sadako cracks up due to her traumas. 

Sadako does endure, though, despite the attacks from Riichi and Hiraoka. Whether she has any chance of escaping her situation is left ambiguous. Both of her tormentors are afflicted with serious health defects: Riichi's chronic asthma; Hiraoka seemingly steals to pay for heart medication. There's something approaching a Dick Tracy-esque moralistic logic at play here, wherein the villains have grotesque physical outer manifestations of inner failings, while our heroine, despite her descent into despair, retains a comparative vitality. These violent men are, ultimately, profoundly weak, and are only selected for survival by a bogus system of male supremacy-the same system that led the nation into a calamitous war, it should be noted. Sadako does start to earn some income as a seamstress by film's end, a task she has chosen for herself, but that's all we know for sure. In a world this cruel raw survival constitutes its own form of heroism.

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #15:

MOTHMAN AND CHUPACABRA EACH CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY FOR UFO FLAP TO PROMOTE RIVAL ALBUM SHADOWDROPS.

Now, you might be a kwisatz haderach IF . . .

. . . you no longer need to use a bookmark when reading. You just turn right back to the page where you left off by the power of intuitive touch. 

Sensation of hairs standing on end all over your body!

PEOPLE GET MAD . . . (#1)

. . . when you don't shoot down UFOs, and then they get mad when you do shoot down UFOs.

People get mad.

THINGS NEVER SAID #2:

"Alcohol is a Class One carcinogen. Drinking alcohol increases your risk of cancer. Alcohol consumption may also exacerbate depression, anxiety, and mood swings. Alcohol plays a significant role in vehicular crashes, injuries, and deaths. Alcohol consumption is also associated with various acts of violence, including intimate partner abuse, public brawling, sexual assault, rape, and homicide. Additionally, alcohol's interactions with other medications may lead to undesirable outcomes up to and including death. Some have said that all these effects conspire to shorten one's effective lifespan and therefore contribute to reduced financial expenditures. In other words, the shorter your lifespan the less money you have to spend on being alive. In this schema: The more you drink, the more you save! But this is obviously fallacious. Cancer treatments can be financially burdensome. Legal costs of defending oneself from charges of violence can quickly escalate. Not to mention emergency room visits due to alcohol poisoning and dangerous drug interactions can result in onerous debts. Not to mention costs incurred from vehicular crashes, lost work days, and fines for destruction of properties be they public or private. So to say, The more you drink, the more you save! is simply not convincing. It would be more convincing to say, The more you drink, the more money you have to spend cleaning up the rubble of your reckless existence, and therefore the more clout you build on the Conspicuous Consumption Scene! Which is where we all wanna be, right? I mean the brand endorsements are simply killer."

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #14:

 

J.G. BALLARD'S CRASH FORMALLY RECOGNIZED AS ORIGINATOR OF THE FAST AND FURIOUS FRANCHISE.

BOOK REVIEW: THE BOX MAN (1973, 1974)

by Kobo Abe

English translation by E. Dale Saunders.

Published in 1974 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Original Japanese language publication in 1973 by Shinchosha.

. . .

"It would be better for you not to forget that you are merely my scribblings. You say that I tend to cling too much to the box? As soon as I dispose of it as you advise, you too will completely disappear with the scribblings."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

In Tokyo, middle-aged men are abandoning their lives to become Box Men, which entails giving up their jobs and their families-if they had such relationships in the first place-to don modified refrigerator boxes and shoot at each other with airsoft rifles modified to shoot lead pellets. So, if you see a tall cardboard structure with a pair of legs and a rectangular opening at eye level-hey, it's a thing now, so know that you're not hallucinating.

Of course, a Box Man might be hallucinating. It's possible that one could be quite detached from reality in order to become a Box Man. And if you are indeed a Box Man yourself, and you start seeing Box Men everywhere, well, maybe you're just seeing what you want to see. Or you're just picking up the signal of other Box Men from the noise of mainstream existence because you're focused on hanging around other people who are like you. 

There's also this thing where when someone sees a Box Man they may be filled with a kind of cryptic fear and loathing at the sight of such a strange being, and so they seek to attack a Box Man . . . but then the attacker finds themselves compelled to become a Box Man themselves, perhaps upon finding the remains of a modified refrigerator box abandoned by an injured Box Man. Every shell needs a snail, right? 

The Box Man is a novel which starts out describing what seems to be a bizarre but semi-plausible social phenomenon. But read into it deeper and it spins out into a fractured yet recursive narrative that gives one the sensation of a novel in the process of rewriting itself. The Box Man starts with a news article about the oppressive cycle of police round-ups of homeless people in Ueno. This article comes across as an inspiration for what follows-what if disenfranchised people made their own way of life as Box Men as a fuck you to respectable society? But then the narrative seemingly collapses down into the mind of some authorial figure-Kobo Abe himself?-who burrows deeper into the labyrinth of his own imagination. This author seems obsessed with a pair of recurring figures in his ongoing narrative: a doctor whom he considers a Fake Box Man and the sexy stripping nurse who is the doctor's consort. We get variations on themes of voyeurism, guilt-ridden masturbation fantasies, and endless arguments over who gets to be a 'real' Box Man as opposed to a fraudulent Box Man. Abe once studied to be a doctor but never practiced medicine, so perhaps this is the author confronting some leftover regret about abandoning a mainstream life to become a weirdo artsy writerly type. 

All of this is, according to the author-or one of the identities assumed by the author-being meticulously scribbled all over the inside surfaces of the modified refrigerator box. Occasionally, addenda are written upon different colored sheets of paper, and there are also various marginalia scribbled between and among different blocks of text. 

The Box Man is a restless, frustrated text that starts out as social satire about capitalist alienation, drifts into ruminations upon sexual fantasy and sexual humiliation, and seemingly recapitulates themes of postwar identity abandonment from other Abe works such as The Woman in the Dunes. And then it changes the ground rules. It spins variations on the idea of being a Box Man. It glories and/or despairs in the absolute solipsistic power of an author endlessly re-authoring his own tale. Dreams, nightmares, and tawdry pornographic stroke-off fantasies collide. The authorial presence flies free into abstractions and visions and animal transformation fantasias only to come crashing down into peeping tom scenarios worthy of Letters to Penthouse. To don the armor of the Box Man is to enter into a state of transformation both powerful and isolating. Think of the towering anthropomorphic battlesuits from future war anime mecha franchises such as Mobile Suit Gundam, Armored Trooper VOTOMS, and Neon Genesis Evangelion, wherein humans gain power but suffer psychological trauma on the battlefield. Now think of the contemporary phenomenon of the hikikomori-people who isolate themselves by seldom leaving their rooms, sacrificing normal relationships and careers as they are disabled by extreme social anxiety. The Box Man could well be adapted into an anime titled Mobile Suit Hikikomori, in which one achieves an ambiguous freedom from the rat race by merging with a bizarre kind of armor that marks one as an outcast even as it facilitates grandiose visions and hallucinations.

PHOTO #1:

Two figures. Human by all standard indicators. One male. One female. Fully tricked out in party armor couture, so, sure, signals are being broadcast, images carefully in place, and some might say that renders it just one more duplicitous artifact of a frivolous age gone by-but no. The fantastically oppressive layers of plating on the armor. The impenetrability. The artfully squalid blank-0 style of the kitchen. The eyes set to dead aim. The casual way that ornately personalized Samsara-6 Revolver has been abandoned upon the countertop between the two. If you dig into the deep meta, you'd discover that the male figure had uploaded this picture, tagged himself and the female figure, and that within the week she had untagged herself. Geolocationally, this was all within a designated cut-loose zone, a domain of sanctioned frivolity, so no duty parameters were being violated by a picture such as this which was meant to put across a certain drunken insouciance, an air of hipstery incongruity, and with just enough grime to suggest misbehavior worthy of a music video. At the time, a gun-an official gun-placed on a table between two armored figures evoked a capricious death duel, or something along those lines; a personal-an unofficial-weapon was even more of a provocation, usually with the figures in question wholly disguised-and not because an actual law was being broken-not in a duly designated cut-loose zone-but it was more about the image-the performance-of the outlaw behavior. Personal weapons were, at the time, clearly named and embellished so as to leave no doubt as to the identity of the owner-and that owner was almost never either of the two armored figures positioned on either side of the displayed personal weapon in this style of photo. This signaled that the two armored figures in question were fighting for the entertainment of the Samsara-6's owner, who is, in all probability, the person taking the picture. The significance of the woman untagging herself is that she is signaling that she won the duel, and therefore the other one is most likely dead. The dead one-the presumed loser of this orchestrated duel-remains "forever tagged," a vague and spooky notion linked to various alleged beliefs to do with photography being able to trap souls or ensnare ghosts or what have you-the dead man is captured within the photo, while his slayer is freed of the pictorial prison, if you like.

THINGS NEVER SAID #1:

"Goddamn you, Gallagher! You swung your Sledge-O-Matic and broke my glittery little heart for the last time!"

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #13:

COSBY AND ROILAND SETTLE BEEF; SINGER IN TALKS TO DIRECT HOUSE OF COSBYS MOVIE.

YOU (DON'T) KNOW #1:

. . . I think Blu-Ray is it for me. Not buying 4K. No way. They're still manufacturing DVDs, for Christ's sakes. I'm good. I still like DVDs.  I'll make my stand with Blu-Ray. 

Uh-oh.

Here comes 4K. Ultra-Def, even. Begging for that attention. 

But I stand strong. Everyone cheers me on in my strength.

4K is shameless. I can't even describe the depths of its indignity as it performs this . . . shall we say . . . show of the abject.

Just for me. How special. 

I stand strong. All the same. Bask in the glory. This, too, is a trifle. I've already forgotten it, in fact, in fancy, in perpetuity.

And so I take my bows. I send my laurels off to my Laurel Storage Facility-it's just for me, whole facility, we broke ground-what?-four years ago? 'Bout time we came online. Operationally, I mean. Big investment. Hate seein' it sit idle, y'know-

And, y'know, I like to linger in the afterglow. Backstage. Sure it's an indulgence. I've never been that strong-

I'm lingering in the afterglow. And who should enter my dressing area? It's 4K, of course. Ever more shameless. Ever more debased. Oh, the discounts. Oh, the warranty plans. Oh, the financing. Oh, baby. 

I stand strong, of course, of course, my kingdom for a horse . . . but not in 4K Ultra Def. 

I do it in standard. Just as a topper.

Ha!

Oh, 4K. Oh, no. Not in this world. 

And there it is. 4K in the slunky depths of defeat. Down it goes. 

But a spark still burns. I toss a rescue donut, as it were.

I say, "Hey now. You played the game. You lost the game. But here's me leaving the door open a crack. You get back to me, babe, once you're 69K."

Boom!

Ha!

It was pretty good.

OPTIONAL RULE #6:

If you are trying to decide on a book to read, and you're browsing the shelves of a used bookstore or a library, or just sorting through your own collection, and you flip through pages to see what's going on, and if you find something between the pages-an old bookmark, a receipt, some stamps in a plastic sleeve, baseball card, religious hellfire tract, cult indoctrination pamphlet, Pokemon card-then that is the book you shall read. And you'll use whatever you find between the pages as your bookmark when you're reading. 

Now here's the interesting part.

If, for whatever reason, you find yourself browsing books again even though you're already reading the one book and you find something between the pages of one of these books you're browsing through then you must start reading this book alongside the book you're already reading. 

Essentially, any time you're looking at books and you find something between the pages you have to add the books with things between the pages to your readerly toils. The only way to guarantee you won't have to add books to your active reads is to stop browsing books once you're already reading just the one book. 

Now, you may already have sensed the hidden danger within this scheme. Which is as follows:

If people stop putting things between the pages of books, then you may not be able to ever read a book again. Also, if books go completely pageless-like with e-books-then you may not be able to read books ever again.

Because of the hidden dangers, this scheme is strictly optional.

LOADING SCREEN WISDOM #10:

ONCE THE BATTLE IS WON YOU MUST SURVIVE THE CELEBRATION.