Page 69 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

56 Nightmare Japan

response to the controlled importation and, in several cases, subsequent
visual alteration of Western films and other media depicting genitalia and
pubic hair. In this complex history of negotiation over cultural value,
pubic hair and genitalia have come to resonate beyond their prurient
indexical value, signifying a set of privileged discourses embodying
questions of cultural authenticity and anxieties about Western
contamination.
In Naked Blood, Sato operates within and, in some important
ways, exceeds the conventions of pinku eiga cinema, including the
foregrounding of nudity and graphic violence, to illustrate that
censorship’s function to territorialise ‘national and public space according
to body zones’ is far more important than whether ‘covered or uncovered
sex organs are prohibited’ (Allison 2000: 161) in Japan. By violently
altering bodies in scenes that wed conventional signifiers of sexuality
(such as moans of pleasure and ecstatic postures) with violent images of
the human form turned horrifically against itself, Sato invests the body
with the kind of ‘radical otherness’ that Jean Baudrillard locates at the
4
‘epicenter’ of ‘terror’ ; the body is dis-/re-figured in a way that at once
exposes (makes ‘naked’) and explodes (splatters) the social codes that
inform its socially prescribed shape and meaning.
Such oppositional politics behind Naked Blood’s scenes of body
horror is perhaps best illustrated by a consideration of the scene in which
one of the most memorable instances of self-cannibalisation in film
history is performed by the Myson test-subject who equates joy with
eating. Sitting naked upon her kitchen table, her body surrounded by
plates and cutlery, she slowly moves a fork and knife into her genitalia,
which is carefully concealed by the mise-en-scène. As she moans in
ecstasy, her arms move in a manner that suggests that she is slicing
something. It is at this precise point in the film that the Japanese censors’
prohibition against the depiction of human pubic regions is radically and
horrifyingly recontextualised and subverted: she slowly raises the fork
and the camera focuses upon the bloody, quivering genital lips pierced on

4
See Baudrillard, J. (1990) The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. London
and New York: Verso.