Page 86 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Cultural Transformation 73

screens. Despite Sato’s obvious admiration of Pasolini as a sexually
liberated social critic with an enticing visual style, the destruction of the
imported video cassette of Pasolini’s final film, coupled with Ryuzaki’s
previous inability to attend one of its few screenings, ultimately frees
Ryuzaki, like de Sade’s libertines, to define his sexuality and desire on
his own terms. Hence, anticipating Naked Blood, Muscle promotes
identity (and the human body itself) as infinitely (re)codable, surpassing
the parameters of a ‘normal’ising culture. Attending Lunatic Theater’s
masquerade is voluntarily, and the erotic potentialities enacted within the
cinema at once resemble and extend Ryuzaki’s quest for corporeal
intensity. ‘[T]he domain of eroticism’ that Sato’s Muscle finally posits is
one that, in the words of Georges Bataille, exposes viewers to a model of
identity formation that comprehends ‘[t]he whole business of eroticism’
as obliterating ‘the self-contained character of the participators as they are
in their normal lives’ (Bataille 1957: 24). The film, therefore, resists the
compulsion ‘to limit ourselves within our individual personalities’ (24);
in the process, Muscle, like Naked Blood, embraces an ecstatic intensity
that positions physical disfigurement as a model for corporeal and
ideological re-configuration.