Page 208 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema
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New Terrors, Emerging Trends 195
is, in Tsukamoto’s words, ‘somehow ambiguous as to whether it’s reality
or a dream’ (2004).
Another important sequence locating Vital as a film concerned
with conceptualisations of corporeality, as well as the assorted lengths to
which humans will go to invest the body’s material existence with
culturally- and historically-coded constructions of a transcendent
‘humanity’, transpires early in Hiroshi’s graduate studies. In a
meticulously composed montage of professors advancing theories
regarding what it means to be a sentient entity, Tsukamoto cuts between
depictions of faculty members from multiple academic disciplines (lensed
as if from a student’s POV) speculating on the metaphysical connotations
of being alive, and medium shots of an attentive Hiroshi:
SHOT ONE: A Biology professor standing before slides depicting human ova. The
professor states: ‘The ovum, a product of almost pure chance. By means of cellular growth,
divergence and migration creates an organism.’
SHOTS TWO and THREE: The film’s amnesiac pro-agonist, Hiroshi, listens (SHOT
TWO) as a different doctor lectures on head injuries: ‘This person experienced trauma to
the frontal lobe section. This area is responsible for personality and memory.’ Tsukamoto
then cuts to SHOT THREE, in which the lecturing physician gestures towards a large
illustration of the human cranium. The doctor continues: ‘From this we can conclude the
following: human character is not a constant.’
SHOT FOUR: A neurologist lectures while tapping his chalk nervously against the
classroom’s blackboard: ‘The brain and spinal cord form the central nervous system. Nerve
cells are concentrated in this area. I wonder, then, where the soul lies?’
SHOTS FIVE and SIX: A psychology professor sits on his desk as he discusses Freud
and the subconscious: ‘Beneath this, however…there is the vast realm of the
subconscious.’ Tsukamoto then cuts to another medium shot of Hiroshi listening intently.
The camera dollies in to accentuate his immersion. In a voice over, we hear the professor
as he remarks: ‘It is here that our suppressed desires can cause deep mental conflict as they
strive to realise themselves.’
This diverse panoply of theoretical postures ranges from the scientific, or
‘secular’, to the philosophical, psychological, or ‘religious’. This contest-
ation between the body and mind has been a primary concern for
Tsukamoto throughout his career and reveals strains of a latent humanism
in Tsukamoto’s aesthetic vision. This recuperative inertia is by no means
rare in works of postmodern body horror, or in the genre’s not-so-distant