Page 145 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

132 Nightmare Japan

violence of desire’ that French cultural theorist Georges Bataille links
with the potentialities of ‘radical transformation’ (quoted in Menninghaus
2003: 367). Seen in this light, the cinema of Miike Takashi in general,
and Ichi the Killer in particular, contributes to a ‘science of [that which]
is completely other’ (347), a mode of thought allowing for new ways of
approaching understandings of human identity and the relation of the self
to the physical body and its inevitable trajectory towards death and decay.
If one understands mutilated and/or mutilating bodies as flexible
arrangements that embrace multiplicity, indeterminacy, and the seduction
of extreme physiological configurations, then it is possible to understand
Ichi the Killer as a text that, while eliciting fear and revulsion on some
levels, stimulates the imagination on others. Mutilated and mutilating
bodies (including those that, like Kakihara’s, undergo sacrificial self-
mutilation) are intensive and heterogenous physiologies; they are
corporeal formations that hold tremendous promise for those wishing to
escape stifling cultural paradigms. Like the variously monstrous bodies
populating countless works of horror cinema from around the globe, the
masochistic Kakihara can be understood as resisting categorisation
through infinite self-creation. Like the Body without Organs described by
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, Kakihara embraces his own ‘monstrtous’ becoming,
rejecting the concept of the group in favor of seeking extreme pleasure
through extreme corporeal modification. In the end, his orgasmic
plummet from the rooftop is not so much a suicidal leap as one last
attempt to ‘get off’ in a world bounded by ideological structures that all-
too-frequently and, perhaps, all-too-sadistically allows for ‘alternative
identities’, if only to the point that forces of ‘law’ and ‘order’ can be
mobilised to contain them.