Page 75 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

62 Nightmare Japan

to which Naked Blood exemplifies this ambivalence is evidenced when
one considers how technological advances constitute both a destructive
force (Myson – the ultimately destructive pain killer ‘tested’ upon
unsuspecting human guinea pigs) and a potential solace (the ‘sleeping
installation’ – the only way that, given her permanent insomnia, Mikami
can attain the rest she needs). Technology, then, functions paradoxically
in Sato’s film. Despite its destructive effects on the various characters,
Myson was seemingly created with the best of intentions. In contrast,
Mikami’s virtual reality ‘sleeping installation’, like Eiji’s ever-present
video camera, provides yet another barrier to conventional interpersonal
contact, thus heightening the film’s theme of postmodern alienation.

Going Too Far: Intensity and the Body Horrific

Sato Hisayasu’s Naked Blood weds horror with science fiction, or, more
specifically, splatterpunk with cyberpunk. As such, this conflation of the
biological and the mechanical reveals the oppressive exercise of those
systems of disciplinary power that endeavor to control how people think
and act. While acknowledging the tyrannical and alienating potential of
video, pharmacological, and virtual technologies, Naked Blood does not
completely disavow the possibility that these technologies may provide
alternatives to traditional notions of identity. True, Myson’s side-effects
have disastrous results, and often what characters see and remember is
presented as mediated by lenses and screens, including those containing
filmed or recorded images. Nevertheless, it is also possible to understand
the mixture of the physical and mechanical in Naked Blood as revealing a
space where holistic, humanist notions of corporeal (and, by extension,
social) embodiment collapse. As Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner
suggest, ‘technology represents the possibility that nature might be
reconstructable’ (1990: 58). In this sense, then, Sato’s film explores what
Scott Bukatman calls ‘terminal identity’, that ‘unmistakable double
articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new
subjectivity constructed’ through technology and media (Bukatman 1990:
9). Thus, Naked Blood, like that hybrid cinematic genre known as body