Page 209 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

196 Nightmare Japan

cousin, cyberpunk. Representations of the human body as a site of
cultural and ontological contention clearly permeates contemporary
Japanese horror cinema, from the notorious Guinea Pig films, to Sato
Hisayasu’s keenly subversive Naked Blood and Muscle, to the
apocalyptic scenarios in recent works by Higuchinsky and Kurosawa
Kiyoshi.
What sets Vital apart from other horror films, however, is more
than Tsukamoto’s persistent return to the human body’s abject
materiality, a thematic recurrence that, paradoxically, necessitates serious
reflection upon the master-narratives we fabricate (and advocate) in
response to our inescapable mortality. What differentiates Vital from
other genre-bridging works of filmic terror is Tsukamoto’s recognition of
the ‘human condition’ as a liminal state. Moreover, Hiroshi’s amnesia,
like his often tenuous grasp on ‘reality’, makes him the ideal protagonist
for this narrative. In the tradition of Voltaire’s Candide and other
variations on the trope of the ‘impartial observer’, Hiroshi brings the
illusion of objectivity to Tsukamoto’s exploration of human mortality.
Hiroshi’s cool precision and initially impassive demeanour in the medical
school’s pathology lab, rather than conveying a callous perspective,
discloses a profound and very ‘human’ desire for meaning that steadily
intensifies until it erupts in melodramatic bursts of emotional hyperbole.
Thus, far from conveying an attitude of ghoulish prurience, Hiroshi’s
expressions of childlike wonder as he cracks his cadaver’s chest plate and
exposes the nexus of organs below suggests a complicated relationship
towards the corporeal at once accentuated and compounded by his
collection of finely detailed charcoal and ink drawings reminiscent of
illustrations by both the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564)
and the Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger (1940 - ). Like these European
artists’ meticulous renderings of human physiology, Hiroshi’s sketchings
stress the human body as mechanistic in its complexity.
Tsukamoto’s accentuation of the body’s mechanics in Vital, then,
depicts human physiology as at once cold and sensuous, discretely
material and warmly erotic. Extending important conceits that have long
dominated his oeuvre, the human and posthuman (or variably
biomechanical) entities populating Tsukamoto’s filmic universe