Page 43 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

30 Nightmare Japan

scenes that merge what Jane Caputi identifies as ‘pornographic and
gorenographic images’ (1992: 213), the female victim’s body is
continually reduced to an object, a ‘thing’ to be abused and butchered. As
a result, Devil’s Experiment depicts ‘an extreme expression of patriarchal
“force”’ (206). A demonstration ‘of sexual politics’ and ‘male
domination’, the film is a visual ‘form of terror that functions to maintain
the power of the patriarchal order’ (206).
This is not to suggest that Satoru’s film is explicitly
pornographic (or porno-graphically explicit), though its visual rhetoric
repeatedly adopts the fragmentation of human body as its central
metaphor. Nor am I claiming that Devil’s Experiment is irrevocably
misogynistic. Given Satoru’s aesthetics of disruption, in which everything
from the text’s deconstruction of its initial claims of documentary
authenticity to the director’s manipulation of the audience’s gaze is
designed to undermine conventional viewing practices, we can also
understand this text as providing a politically charged meditation on
cultural dynamics akin to the practices of world cinema’s more
accomplished experimental, and politically-progressive, filmmakers.
Through its vacillating POV, Devil’s Experiment collapses subjective and
objective vision in a manner that resembles the ‘dissolution of the
boundary between inside and outside…private and public’ that Elaine
Scarry locates in the practice of torture. As such, the film can be
understood as a complex study of power, specifically the ‘regime’ of
violent male authority wielded against the feminine form.
Thus, the ‘experiment’ that Satoru’s film offers viewers is a
distinctly cinematic one, approaching, at times, a level of socio-cultural
critique most frequently attributed to experimental or avant-garde
filmmaking. In the film’s climactic moment, for example, the three
torturers push a needle into the woman’s temple, angling it until it
emerges through her eye. Immediately reminiscent of the famous eyeball
slicing scene from the Luis Buñuel – Salvador Dali collaboration, Un
Chien Andalou (France, 1929), the retinal puncturing in Devil’s
Experiment is a seemingly inevitable yet powerful moment of ocular
horror, its immediacy providing an ultimate corporeal violation of the
female victim, as well as a final, visceral intrusion upon the spectator’s