Page 76 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Cultural Transformation 63

horror, challenges the very notion of limits, exposing the borders
mobilised to delineate genres, bodies, and nations as not only artificially
constructed, but far more permeable than previously imagined.
Consequently, a discourse of corporeal and psychic intensity
informs both the film’s plot and presentation: from Eiji’s father’s quest to
achieve immortality through becoming light to the narrative’s collapsing
of pain into pleasure and sexuality into violence; from Eiji’s desire to
attain ‘eternal happiness’ to Sato’s aforementioned use of corporeal
mutilation as a springboard for political inquiry. The multi-generational,
(father-son-grandson [?]) pursuit of eternity through intensity (the name
‘Eiji’, we are told, means ‘eternity’s child’) runs parallel to the violent,
orgasmic destruction of the human body, that most basic locus of societal
controls. Images of apparent limitlessness – oceans, static-filled screens,
the blinding light of the sun or of bulbs burning through celluloid –
correspond with gruesome instances of corporeal destruction that, in the
quintessential splatterpunk tradition, evokes the notion of ‘going too far’
(Skipp and Spector 1989: 10), of re-imagining physiology as a ‘field of
immanence’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 157) that rejects technocratic
control over the subject. As Georges Bataille notes in his ruminations
upon the power that rests within visual representation of the physical
body (in this case the eye) punctured and slashed, horror ‘alone is brutal
enough to break everything that stifles’ (Battaille 1994: 19).
In its exploration of intensity as a discontinuous and non-
totalisable phenomenon, Sato’s film advances an oppositional politics. It
is in these moments that Sato reveals the potential of imagining an
identity outside of culturally prescribed parameters, or, at the very least,
gestures towards the potential for the conceptualisation of such a space.
In their quests for eternal happiness, a philosophical (and biological)
mission to literally discover ‘the blinding flashes of lightning that
transform the most withering storm into transports of joy’ (69), Eiji and
his father embody those ‘impulses’ that Georges Bataille describes in his
essay, ‘The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade’, as having ‘social revolution
as their end’ in that they ‘go against the interests of a society in a state of
stagnation’ (100).