Page 42 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 29

somewhat complicit in, the horrific events that transpire. At other
moments, we adopt the victim’s POV, staring helplessly through her eyes
as we are spun around and beaten. In still other instances, we are
seemingly removed from the visceral proximity of the film’s action,
viewing the victim in an extreme long shot as she rotates slowly within a
mesh sack dangling from a tree in the woods; this detached perspective
becomes the film’s visual refrain, providing a ‘break’ that extends the
respite afforded by the text’s inter-titles and, thus, allows audiences to
more thoroughly divest themselves from the visceral immediacy of the
brutally graphic images.
How, then, does this variable allocation of the viewer’s gaze
impact the experience of viewing Devil’s Experiment? In additions, how
might we understand the film’s content in relation to social
transformations in late capitalist Japanese culture?
Satoru’s careful manipulation of the film’s variable and
fragmented/fragmenting mise-en-scène, coupled with the aforementioned
recurring visual and aural motifs, ruptures conventional cinematic
processes of identification, as well as typical expectations of how a
documentary should function. In doing so, Satoru draws attention to the
film as artifice, as a deliberately arranged aesthetic ‘experiment’
comprised of a series of spliced and sutured images selected for both their
urgent visual impact, as well as their contribution to a larger, socio-
cultural meta-narrative informed by anxieties over the apportioning of sex
and gender roles in late capitalist Japan. One can comprehend Devil’s
Experiment, for instance, as contributing to a popular tradition of
sadomasochistic imagery within Japanese cinema, a pervasive visual
rhetoric that, as Maureen Turim reminds us, arises both as a result of
restrictions on the representation of male and female genitalia in Japanese
pinku eiga, and as a misogynist ‘appeal to desires’, within a transforming
social landscape, ‘to contain women socially, economically, and sexually’
(1994: 83). There is little escaping the film’s femicidal and misogynist
overtones; 7 the recipient of the sadistic attacks is, after all, a woman. In

7
For and extensive (primarily Western) historical and cultural analysis of the practice and
consequences of this most heinous form of misogyny, see Radford, J. and Russell, D. E. H.
(1992) Femicide: The Politics of Killing Women. New York: Twayne Publishers.