Page 72 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Cultural Transformation 59

achieve a form of intensity; Eiji’s wish to create a drug to ‘improve the
happiness of mankind’ mirrors his father’s quasi-scientific quest for a
form of immortality through intensity – ‘We’ll break through time and
space,’ his father wrote prior to his disappearance, ‘and head for the
kingdom of light.’ Consequently, it is his anger over what he perceives as
his mother’s failure to assume the traditional female role and support her
husband’s ‘dream’ that Eiji cites as a contributing factor to his emotional
distance from his mother. The social implications of her refusal to blindly
comply with gender expectations derived from a traditional patriarchal
economy are intensified when one considers that Eiji’s mother, as a
scientist working towards the development of a more effective method of
contraception, is in a position to further usurp conventionally masculine
cultural roles by literally controlling biological, and by extension
ideological, reproduction.
Additionally, throughout the majority of Naked Blood, Eiji, like
his father before him (and like any member of a capitalist society), is
denied the satisfaction he seeks: by consistently assuming the role of
voyeur, Eiji’s observations are perpetually mediated by technology, either
in the form of cameras or virtual reality equipment. This, too, speaks to
changing gender roles in Japanese society, given that, as formulated by
Allison, ‘situating the male subject as viewer and voyeur is not
necessarily or unquestionably a practice of scopophilia that empowers
him’ (2000: 29). Consistently removed from the objects of his desire by
cameras and other technological devices, Eiji looks but does not actually
reach out and touch. Even his participation in sexual intercourse towards
the film’s conclusion is mediated by virtual reality goggles that project
surreal images upon his retinas, resulting in a conflation of generic
signifiers that provides the closest thing to a ‘money shot’ in Sato’s film:
the image of Eiji’s arterial blood spraying both Mikami’s breasts and her
euphoric visage.