swallowtail according to SMAP

[Anne McKnight]

I saw a parody of *Swallowtail* on TV a year or so ago that was quite acute
and extremely funny in the way that it wallowed in the high artiness of ST.
 It was on one of the SMAP variety shows; if you haven't seen them on TV,
it's a show composed of a bunch of skits, which often breaks down the
"fourth wall" between screen & audience when the band members mess up their
lines &/or start improvisationally cracking jokes, sometimes about the lame
quality of the material itself.  Their general frame is the carnivalesque,
and a lot of their skits tend to cite (i.e. take potshots at through
parody) items of popular culture and deflate them with an extremely
vulgarian aesthetic.  In this case, the object of vulgarian parody was the
highly stylized embedded sequence where Ageha and the butterfly flutter
around the toilet-room.  

In SMAP's reading, the poignance of her captivity (seen as pretentiousness)
derived largely from the fact that Ageha was a female character, and that
the poignance of the destruction of her innocence came from a kind of
aestheticism which could only be portrayed in an adolescent girl (ruination
of potential, cutting her off in larva stage, etc.).  The skit's
protagonist, rather than being the wispy human-chrysallis of Ageha, was a
sloppy pudgy boy with a big jagged magic-market portrait of
convenience-store *karaage* (fried chicken, the total opposite of delicate
butterfly, conjuring up images of greasy yuckiness after hours under a heat
lamp in a *konbini*) bouncing off the walls of the room.  If there is a
developmental/evolutionary teleology of *karaage*, I shudder to think what
it is... I can't remember what the boy was chasing, it may or may not have
been a butterfly.  What this parody pointed out to me was how the film
depended on the viewer to be invested in figures of beauty (Ageha, but also
Guriko) which could sustain the contradiction of innocence/experience,
beauty/damage.  

Guriko may be a prostitute, but she's got a sisterly heart of gold.  The
rhetoric of sisterhood actually seemed quite important to this film,
another feature which became apparent when the progatonist of the
butterfly-in-toilet scene was depicted as a boy (i.e. a slob with little
aesthetic potential in the film's p.o.v.) and short-circuited all the
fantasies of sisterhood.  The combination of heterosexualized experience
(prostitution, an economy of money) and sisterly homosocial innocence (the
community of prostitutes telling war stories, performing various
pedagogical roles for each other, fluid barter economy of favors) seemed to
tap interestingly into a whole history of narratives (literary & cinematic)
where women are seen to be forced into sexual experience but nonetheless
retain a space away from it.  This allows the viewer to mourn the
destruction of her innocence but be reassured she is finding compensation
for it somewhere, at the same time the boundaries between heterosexual &
homosocial are managed quite nicely.  Actually the structure of ST reminded
me very much of a less self-ironic version of Diderot's hoax captivity
narrative *The Nun*.

Come to think of it, the sibling space of innocence/integrity surfaces
again with the My Way tape at the film's end.  Something makes me think
that, like *Boogie Nights*, *Swallowtail* has rather a sweet wide-eyed
longing for family structures & family values, or the affect of family
anyway in an untraditional structure.

The compatability of innocence & experience in Guriko, I thought, owed a
great deal to the way that the discourse about *jugun ianfu* (comfort
women) has been articulated in the last 5 years I thought.  There seem to
be many elements of neo-colonial co-prosperity redux in Swallowtail; the
Fukuzawa connection may not be irrelevant to the sorts of pan-Asian
incorporation in ST.  Given that Fukuzawa Yukichi is not only the picture
on the ichiman en note, but the bad guy one (if so inclined) could peg for
advocating the policy of getting out of Asia & turning technologically &
ideologically towards "the west," it does not seem too farfetched to read
some investment of a critique by the film regarding western
modernity/modernization, the corruption of an ideologically purer space of
"Asia" via a money economy.  Then again, the money-copying operation also
seems highly reminiscent of the famous incident by XXXX Gempei (whose
famous last name I forget!) who made art with copies of Japanese currency
in the 70s & was subsequently shut down, arrested, due to his work being an
anti-statist critique.  

Even given all of the features of ST I find highly dubious, I have to say
that its stylistic similarity to the MTV frenzy of images & sounds recalled
a very specific escapist fantasy, which I like despite not "liking" the
film much any of the, uh, three times I saw it -- the common MTV logic that
at any given moment, anything might turn into a backstage musical.

Sincerely,
Anne McKnight
UCB