Page 155 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

142 Nightmare Japan

Japanese corporeal and social body by ‘Western hegemonic discourse
allows for an exploration of the hybrid, monstrous, cyborg subject from a
sympathetic, interior point of view rarely found’ in North American and
European ‘cultural products’ (240). Accompanying the horror of the
physical body rendered indiscrete in its multifarious hybridity, then, is the
notion of the Japanese social body as ‘monstrous’ both to itself and to an
Orientalist Western imagination.

Fashioning Apocalypse: Sono Shion’s Suicide Circle

Among Suicide Circle’s primary themes is the seemingly paradoxical
dilemma of alienation and interpersonal dis-communication in an age of
proliferating information technologies and ‘mass communication’.
Infused with allusions to literal and figurative assaults upon Japanese
society, the film is a kind of cultural rescue action. It is, in other words,
an attempt to direct the audience’s attention towards what Sono perceives
as an impending dissolution of personal and cultural identity. Hence, the
epidemic of self-annihilation driving Suicide Circle’s intentionally
convoluted storyline provides a powerful, reactionary metaphor for some
of Japanese popular culture’s more alienating components. In the process
of articulating his gruesome, eclectic, and, at times, highly satirical
vision, Sono asserts the need for creative individuation and dialogue in a
socio-historical moment informed (and mediated) by commercialism, the
propagation of vacuous pop idols, and an understanding of national
history and social identity that rarely extends beyond the immediacy of
the ever-emerging present and the latest pop-culture craze.
With a complex narrative structure that requires viewers to
acknowledge and embrace their roles as active participants in the creation
of the film’s meaning, Suicide Circle’s plot unfolds through strategically
placed digressions, frustrating ‘red herrings’, and the conflation of
conventions from multiple film genres, including the splatter film, the
police procedural, the family melodrama, the music video, the thriller, the
high-camp/cult film, and the pseudo-snuff film. From the film’s
notoriously grisly opening sequence, in which fifty-four teenage girls