Page 165 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema
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152 Nightmare Japan
‘alienation’, the fact that Shibusawa endeavours to forge an
external/inter-personal connection with Mitsuko implies that a complete
surrender to information technology’s alienating inertia is avoidable if
each person simply reaches out physically and emotionally to those
around him and feels ‘the pain of others as he would his own’.
Image 16: School girls clasp hands before leaping in front of a subway in Sono
Shion’s Suicide Circle (Courtesy Internet Movie Database)
The spiralling chain of precisely sewn rectangles of skin found at the
location of mass suicides need not represent the only form of connection
possible in a late capitalist culture in which ‘communication
technologies’ ironically perpetuate isolation; while the wheels of flesh
may circle inward to nothingness, they also curve outward toward the
possibility of infinite connections that need not conform to those that
came before. In other words, while Sono’s film may present us with a
bleak, apocalyptic vision, the catastrophic events depicted throughout the
film need not be viewed as absolutely destructive. Though Sono leaves
the audience unsure as to the ramifications of the attempted connection in