Page 122 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

A Murder of Doves 109

about, Lily Chou-Chou. Additionally, although his Lily Chou-Chou site
at once provides Yuichi with an otaku-like retreat from real world
confrontations, and functions as a temporary respite from his
overwhelming loneliness, such a virtual space is ultimately paradoxical;
while the film’s many characters construct identities both on- and off-
line, and while Yuichi’s web site seemingly allows for substantial and
apparently heart-felt interchanges, internet relationships effect little to no
change in the characters’ increasingly hostile material existence. As the
elegant crane and tracking shots of individual characters standing alone in
expansive green fields and listening to Lily Chou-Chou’s music on
portable CD players suggest, although Lily Chou-Chou’s art and persona
permits the recognition of beauty in the midst of socio-cultural
dissolution (aware), a rudimentary, profound and all-too-real alienation
continues unabated. Each character in these memorable sequences is
overwhelmingly alone, their isolation rendered even more acute by the
breadth of negative space their solitary physiques engender within the
mise-en-scène.
Given this paradox, ‘The Ether’, the phrase Lily Chou-Chou fans
use to describe the nebulous power and/or mystical essence surrounding
the pop idol’s art and ‘soul’, is a particularly appropriate descriptor since
many of Lily Chou-Chou’s fans experience her music as a kind of opiate
through which they reduce the pain of the emotional scars accrued over
the course of their lives in a transforming and highly competitive
capitalist culture. Like many religions or powerful narcotics, ‘The Ether’
that Lily fans construct provides the illusion of hope and a sense of
something that transcends the grim social realities and hierarchies
awaiting them the moment they ‘log off’ of their computers’ internet
services or press stop on their portable CD players. In a sequence that
makes this dynamic chillingly explicit, the ‘real world’ and the virtual
world of the internet and ‘The Ether’ collide with a force that
momentarily obliterates the façade to which the Lily fans we encounter
throughout the film cling. This crash occurs when Hoshino (who, we
discover, has been posting on Yuichi’s Lily Chou-Chou web site as a Lily
fan named ‘BlueCat’) steals Yuichi’s prized ticket to a Lily Chou-Chou
concert, a theft that finally pushes Yuichi too far. Creating a diversion by