Page 170 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Spiraling into Apocalypse 157

inside the washing machine, a grotesque vision made even more
disturbing by the sudden opening of his eyes and mouth, from which a
monstrously elongated coiling tongue emerges. In keeping with the
narrative’s perpetual (and cyclical) deferment of a stable visual referent
regarding the vortex’s initial victim, Higuchinsky once again removes the
potential for an absolute comprehension of events by immediately
consigning this first-person perspective to the realm of dream. The
opening eyes and curling tongue become aligned with Kirie’s
unconscious and, thus, Shuichi’s father’s ‘actual’ death remains ‘unseen’.
Lastly, by building upon an economy of frustrated vision amplified by the
videotape that obscures as much as it reveals, locating this hand-held
POV shot within the realm of fantasy further exploits the film’s internal
recursive structure, heightening the work’s surreal tone.
Engaging in a close reading of the sequence described above
provides an avenue by which one might begin to analyse this strange and
convoluted film. As Tamura discovers during his investigation into
Shuichi’s father’s suicide (depicted via montage), not only do spirals
appear continually throughout nature (from galactic formations, to
weather patters, to fingerprints, etc.), but they have been immortalised in
art works dating back thousands of years and bridging multiple cultures.
In this sense, the chaotic system that is Higuchinsky’s Uzumaki intersects
effectively with works like Benoit Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of
Nature (1982) and John Briggs’ Fractals – The Patterns of Chaos:
Discovering A New Aesthetic of Art, Science, and Nature (1992). Chaotic,
non-Euclidean formations that mathematicians initially pathologised as
capable of unleashing a ‘gallery of monsters’ (Mandelbrot 1982: 3),
vortexes are ‘scaling’, ‘self-similar’ configur-ations seemingly ‘invarient
under certain transformations of scale’ (18). As such, each successive arc
in a spiral functions as a subtle occlusion upon the curvature that precedes
it, a ‘self-organising’ and ‘self-similar’ pattern ingeniously illustrated by
Higuchinsky’s persistent return to, and visual/narratological modification
of, Shuichi’s father’s suicide. Additionally, the spiral as image ‘appears