Page 201 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema
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188 Nightmare Japan
Shimizu’s obsession with engaging not only the forces that compel us to
consume cinematic texts depicting horrific events and scenes of physical
trauma, but also the very cathartic release that makes film and other art
forms appealing, and quite possibly indispensable, in the first place. The
correlation between ‘F’’s blood consumption and her increased (though
by no means complete) acclimation to human society is not simply a
convenient plot device. Masuoka literally feeds ‘F’ blood and carnage to
sustain her most vital systems, but is this not what humans do figuratively
everyday in a media(ted) culture saturated with, and ideologically
buttressed by, images of corporeal trauma? To this extent, Shimizu
provides his audience with an initial gesture towards an archaeology of
horror. By identifying horror film as a cultural product in a manner that
avoids the trite self-referential game-playing of far too many works of
‘postmodern’ terror, Shimizu, in short, recognises the power that images
(including those generally deemed ‘abject’ or ‘horrific’) have upon
contemporary culture. Through the fabrication, consumption, and
perpetuation of visual representations of the body as a sight of biological
crisis in the visual arts, we – as viewers – devour ourselves; we
cannibalise ourselves through images. Moreover, these framed and
otherwise occluded depictions evidence a socially constructed desire to
codify and categorise our ‘selves’ and, perhaps more importantly,
‘others’.
Masuoka’s quest to experience intensity through an encounter
with ‘unspeakable’ fear should not, however, be understood as an
exclusively negative quest, but as a potentially liberating sojourn that
frees him from narrow, dualistic convictions. It is, in Masuoka’s own
words, a kind of “mad’ness that drives him to seek out alternatives to his
existence within an alienating postmodern terrain. Like the decentred
network of rhizomic subterranean tunnels reminiscent of Borges’ ‘garden
of forking paths’ (1964: 19) in their unexpected and possibly infinite
bifurcations, mortal fear’s intensity is, for Masuoka, a way of breaking
free from ‘all that stifles’ (Bataille 1994: 19). Shimizu likewise articulates
this privileging of an ideological position grounded upon an embrace of
multiple corporeal and cultural possibilities in his broaching, and eventual
dismissal, of what Francois Lyotard calls ‘modernist grand narratives’