Page 78 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Cultural Transformation 65

Sato’s more overtly experimental works, its dominant aesthetic defined
by the collision of meticulously crafted scenes intended to frustrate
conventional viewing strategies through a filmic discourse oscillating
between spectator engagement and estrangement. In other words, Sato’s
film by turns immerses the viewer within an atmosphere of visceral
carnality, and distances her through markedly theatrical sequences that
foreground the work’s artifice. Such an approach prepares the audience
for the film’s larger, meta-cinematic dialogue with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Italy, 1975). Allowed into Japan by
Japanese Customs and subsequently “rubber stamp[ed]” (Weisser 1989:
24) by Eirin, Salò’s critique of the abuses of power had a profound
influence upon Sato’s development as a filmmaker. While clearly a
‘loving salute’ (467) to Pasolini, Sato’s Muscle has more expansive aims,
namely interrogating the narratological and socio-political efficacy of
aligning Sade’s libertines with 1940s fascism. Consequently, a close
reading of Muscle reveals Sato to be a director far more invested in
exploring Sadeian body politics as a mode of ontological terrorism – and,
thus, as potentially liberating – than in merely deploying them as a simple
and ultimately ineffective (and inaccurate) metaphor for totalitarianism.
As a film that takes the aesthetic and ideological implications of
cinematic representation and reception as its primary focus, Muscle’s
deceptively spare and intractably linear narrative may surprise some
viewers. However, it is the plot’s minimalist settings and largely
straightforward action that affords Sato’s meta-filmic exercise the
foundation from which to launch the text’s larger interrogations of the
intersections between visual prohibitions in Japanese cinema and the
liberating potential inherent within images of corporeal excess. Beginning
with a highly-stylised montage of muscular male bodies lensed in close-
up and medium shots, the well-toned physiques glistening beneath flaring
theatrical spot lights immediately evocative of flash photography, Muscle
chronicles the sexual and biological transformations of Ryuzaki, an editor
for a body-building magazine titled – appropriately enough – Muscle.
Entranced by the sinuous build of a male model named Yukihiro Kitami,
Ryuzaki embarks upon a sexual relationship that takes an unexpected turn
when Kitami turns sadistic, randomly slicing Ryuzaki with the blade of a