Koroshiya Ichi/Ichi The Killer

[Aaron Gerow]

>> Miike,
>> who wants to avoid the title artist (at least in international film
>> festivals),
>
>Surely false modesty! (A discussion of the director)

As he said in an interview with me, Miike does seem insistent upon 
defining his own films as genre or non-art films. I'm sure he's happy to 
get all the attention he's getting (no false modesty there), but he is 
concerned about that attention defining him as an art film director, or 
turning his own work into art cinema. This is a different issue from 
modesty and does have a lot to do with how to deal with (and use) the 
international film festival circuit and the critics.  Perhaps we can 
compare this to Kurosawa Kiyoshi, who also has no problems with working 
in genre cinema, but who seems less reluctant to have his films defined 
as art cinema; or to Sabu, who is another genre director getting a lot of 
festival attention.

I wonder about the terms artist and auteur. Especially since I write 
newspaper criticism, I try to use them strategically, but there's always 
the danger of falling into categories you can't get yourself out of. In 
recent years, I've been a little bit more amenable to the auteur theory, 
especially when reconsidering its crucial relationship to popular cinema. 
At the same time, I can't help but be amazed at the consistency evident 
in the films of Miike, who makes 4 or 5 films a year with different 
script writers.  "Miike" seems a convenient word for strategically using 
the tendencies in his films that are important interventions in the 
contemporary film scene.

Still, one does wonder about the power of critics (like me, like others) 
who want to appropriate Miike for their own needs.  In the most recent 
issue of Eiga Geijutsu, all of the four critics reviewing Koroshiya gave 
it 4 or 5 stars out of 5, much better than any other Japanese film 
reviewed. One wonders what uses they intend to put Miike to.  Still, this 
is Eiga geijutsu, and one would never see Koroshiya hitting the best 10 
of KineJun.  There is a certain politics of opposition to an old guard of 
critics in the appreciation of Miike's more radical efforts.

>This is where I stumble. We're edging toward the reception context here. 
>Perhaps Miike challenges us. But perhaps, too, he is also "carried 
>away". Which is to say indulging in violence in ways that undercut any 
>critical edge. The irony I see doesn't work, although it might if the 
>violence itself were not so extreme. In other words, reading the critics 
>and listening to Miike's presentation of himself and his work, I wonder 
>if extremity is only a matter of degree and his violence is just as 
>utopian and "clean" as the next blockbuster for the multiplexes. Forgive 
>me if this is hypocritical!

I agree that the danger is always that the commodification of the image 
and other processes of consumption will reinscribe certain images into 
that continuum with utopian violence.  I think it is one of the roles of 
the critic to counter that in discourse. As I've always said, reception 
is a site of struggle and just standing there only saying "This could be 
appropriated in a bad way" is defeatist. At the same time, I think it is 
very important to recognize differences in the field of image production; 
even if they are not essential differences, and shift in unpredictable 
ways, they are potential differences that are important at certain 
conjunctures.  

Sorry to sound so serious about the Miike question, but it involves 
issues much larger that Miike. I too have to think more about the 
question of violence in contemporary pop culture (for everyone who liked 
or disliked Koroshiya, they should read Yamamoto's original manga: very 
violent, but also different from Miike's film).

Maybe we should all think some more.

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171