It’s been a while since a journal entry of mine has been assisted by our friend Al Keyhole (or Al Cool, as I remember a biography of John Hurt describing his name for it), and I’d like to think I’m sufficiently on top of my craft for it not to show, but since I do come from the academic discipline in which the most sincere scholars of the late ’90s began their monographs by disclosing those aspects of their gender/age/ethnicity/family background that others might later wish critically to use against them, you’ll understand my need to disclose.
Hmm. Something tells me the seven line sentence above gives it away all on its own. No matter.
Were I a better-organised and less tired terrier club committee member, I would currently be out at the Yaldy debating the finer points of who should be the judge for the big show in spring of ‘ot-five, but instead I’m sitting at my ‘puter (with my terriers) listening to Supergroove. Back in their heyday–the early nineties–it was harvestbro who liked them rather than me (following some particularly vigorous headbanging at a concert of theirs, he ended up with scratched corneas after a mix of sweat and melted hair gel ran into his eyes when he later lay down to sleep), but there were thematic threads in their B-sides and album tracks that stayed with me, and which I’ve carried into the darker days of the twenty-first century. Listening to these catalogues of romantic disappointment that backed their more optimistic and up-tempo funk singles is not so much an exercise in nostalgia (despite being the band’s contemporary at the time of their ascendancy) but a reminder of something you can forget in a university, where if you’re young it’s likely you’re in the holding pattern of undergraduate study: that there’s insight you have in your late teens and early twenties that is indeed worth recording, and which (somewhat regrettably) forms a template for later life (unless, like Manon and Jean de Florette, you spy your partner for life somewhere in the last days of seventh form). What was new to me at the time “Fifth Wheel” was written has now been repeated in my life a few times over. Every so often I’ll hear a song or see a film or a painting, or read something, that pins that exit experience down, and it’s an exercise in unintended recall from which I can’t remove my attention:
Baby, this ain’t no joy ride
And the only way is down
Jump on this fifth wheel
And drive me into the ground
The thing about recognising such experiences is that, for me at least, they depend on recall for clarity. At the time, when something of which you had hope is thus disintegrating, there’s not much to do except hang on to your vestigial self and hope not to be made too lastingly cynical by the process.
As for sci-fi androgynous Japanese vampires (cited earlier today) and the films in which they appear, the internet is somewhat critical of them, even on populist sites, and they are not attended to by the usual snooty ‘zines which your author frequents. However, a brief googling did produce this unequivocally positive review (two tens out of ten!) which I liked as much for its writers’ enthusiasm for Japanese film more generally–and their affection (however staged) for each other–as for any particular comments about the film. Undoubtedly, its action scenes are mispaced (although you may argue that John Woo has wrecked the field for all those who wish just to give the choreography a go) and I was amused to read that the director, Takahisa Zeze, is attempting a transition to mainstream movies from Japanese, erm, skin flicks. This film bears no traces of such cinematic jiggery-pokery, unless you count the biker-chick kind of mural that one of the characters produces in the name of civic pride.
Western reviews of this film snigger about the homoerotic undertones (or overtones, depending presumably on the reviewer’s degree of Freudian adherence) in the relationship between the two main characters, a vampire/non-vampire pairing played by Hyde and Gackt (the latter’s pop-star moniker loses something in crossing cultures, don’t you think? It sounds rather onomatopaeic in English), but I am inclined to dismiss this as so much projection. Any such desire in the film is directed largely outwards, on to the handily mute character of Yi-Che, whom Kei (vampire) loves but Sho (human) marries. Did I mention that the male characters are Japanese and Taiwanese gangsters living in a dystopian tax-free fictional special economic zone in mid-twenty-first-century China?
Most reviews praise Gackt’s performance but are so-so about Hyde, but this is an attribution that I would reverse (although I should add that it’s my belief that there are few middling storyboards that can’t be improved with the addition of an attractive, conflicted vampire). Vampirism in this film becomes a substitute for a love that cannot speak its name–since what suitor could tell his or her vulnerable beloved, “I love you; by the way, I drink the blood of the living to sustain my life”, and not expect to be rebuffed? Likewise, the second allegory that inevitably emerges when you have a well-played vampire in your film is what Simon Critchley might call our inability to grasp our own finitude. No-one is better at understanding that humans grow old and die than the vampires who love them, since that’s what they themselves cannot do as long as they exercise their desire to live. The vampire is a kind of offshoot of the thought of eternal return: what if the things we have to do to keep ourselves alive actually kept us alive, forever? No wonder the character of Kei is so mopey.
In a sense, vampire characters work in a film (even inserted rather awkwardly into a clumsily-choreographed sub-Yakuza film) because they invite these kinds of projections; they are stimuli for the imagination, vessels into which we read our feelings about relationships and death. (I am tempted to say, if they didn’t exist, we would have to invent them, but that is probably too postmodernly cute even for me.) You may wonder what it was about this film that facilitated that reading so well for your humble reviewer. This, I have to say, is because there is a green corner in my patchwork aesthetic that exists solely for slight, androgynous, fey-looking hommes et femmes. This matter of taste displeases numbers of my friends: Fiordi on my July visit to Wellington marvelled that I would pay money to see Beck (as I did, gladly, in London eighteen months ago) on account of his being “really thin and skinny” and Bill more recently spoke scornfully of “boy-men” (not to be confused with lady-boys), their spindly frames and big, vague eyes. And yet despite such disdain from those around me, these, gentle reader, are the kinds of forms and figures I particularly like. Any psychoanalytic conjectures why (which must, of course, be done in bad faith) are welcome in the comments box.
So, yes. Best sci-fi androgynous Japanese vampire flick I’ve yet seen.
Despite these diversions, my mood has not been so great these last few days, and I am thinking about making the small adjustments I am permitted to make at my own discretion in the small amount of medication I continue to take. A number of the academics whose blogs I read struggle with the effects of mental illness, either their own or that of others. (Emma Jane’s post on the recent death of her mother marks the end of part of a different kind of journey). In many ways I feel fortunate, which clearly isn’t the right word, to have had my worst depressive experiences (thus far) at the start of my adult life; I can’t imagine how I would be if I were negotiating now, mood-wise, what I lived through at eighteen. But in other ways I wish I could bring to bear the resources of my adult self on my depression without that adult self having been so thoroughly shaped–indeed, arguably, created–by the experience of that depression. What would it be like to have strutted on to the grown-up stage without the affective [note spelling] equivalent of the mark of Cain on me?
I’ll never know.
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Posterous
Sci-fi Japanese Androgynous Vampires (2) / Marks of Cain
24 November, 2004
in commentatrix,Diaryland
It’s been a while since a journal entry of mine has been assisted by our friend Al Keyhole (or Al Cool, as I remember a biography of John Hurt describing his name for it), and I’d like to think I’m sufficiently on top of my craft for it not to show, but since I do come from the academic discipline in which the most sincere scholars of the late ’90s began their monographs by disclosing those aspects of their gender/age/ethnicity/family background that others might later wish critically to use against them, you’ll understand my need to disclose.
Hmm. Something tells me the seven line sentence above gives it away all on its own. No matter.
Were I a better-organised and less tired terrier club committee member, I would currently be out at the Yaldy debating the finer points of who should be the judge for the big show in spring of ‘ot-five, but instead I’m sitting at my ‘puter (with my terriers) listening to Supergroove. Back in their heyday–the early nineties–it was harvestbro who liked them rather than me (following some particularly vigorous headbanging at a concert of theirs, he ended up with scratched corneas after a mix of sweat and melted hair gel ran into his eyes when he later lay down to sleep), but there were thematic threads in their B-sides and album tracks that stayed with me, and which I’ve carried into the darker days of the twenty-first century. Listening to these catalogues of romantic disappointment that backed their more optimistic and up-tempo funk singles is not so much an exercise in nostalgia (despite being the band’s contemporary at the time of their ascendancy) but a reminder of something you can forget in a university, where if you’re young it’s likely you’re in the holding pattern of undergraduate study: that there’s insight you have in your late teens and early twenties that is indeed worth recording, and which (somewhat regrettably) forms a template for later life (unless, like Manon and Jean de Florette, you spy your partner for life somewhere in the last days of seventh form). What was new to me at the time “Fifth Wheel” was written has now been repeated in my life a few times over. Every so often I’ll hear a song or see a film or a painting, or read something, that pins that exit experience down, and it’s an exercise in unintended recall from which I can’t remove my attention:
The thing about recognising such experiences is that, for me at least, they depend on recall for clarity. At the time, when something of which you had hope is thus disintegrating, there’s not much to do except hang on to your vestigial self and hope not to be made too lastingly cynical by the process.
As for sci-fi androgynous Japanese vampires (cited earlier today) and the films in which they appear, the internet is somewhat critical of them, even on populist sites, and they are not attended to by the usual snooty ‘zines which your author frequents. However, a brief googling did produce this unequivocally positive review (two tens out of ten!) which I liked as much for its writers’ enthusiasm for Japanese film more generally–and their affection (however staged) for each other–as for any particular comments about the film. Undoubtedly, its action scenes are mispaced (although you may argue that John Woo has wrecked the field for all those who wish just to give the choreography a go) and I was amused to read that the director, Takahisa Zeze, is attempting a transition to mainstream movies from Japanese, erm, skin flicks. This film bears no traces of such cinematic jiggery-pokery, unless you count the biker-chick kind of mural that one of the characters produces in the name of civic pride.
Western reviews of this film snigger about the homoerotic undertones (or overtones, depending presumably on the reviewer’s degree of Freudian adherence) in the relationship between the two main characters, a vampire/non-vampire pairing played by Hyde and Gackt (the latter’s pop-star moniker loses something in crossing cultures, don’t you think? It sounds rather onomatopaeic in English), but I am inclined to dismiss this as so much projection. Any such desire in the film is directed largely outwards, on to the handily mute character of Yi-Che, whom Kei (vampire) loves but Sho (human) marries. Did I mention that the male characters are Japanese and Taiwanese gangsters living in a dystopian tax-free fictional special economic zone in mid-twenty-first-century China?
Most reviews praise Gackt’s performance but are so-so about Hyde, but this is an attribution that I would reverse (although I should add that it’s my belief that there are few middling storyboards that can’t be improved with the addition of an attractive, conflicted vampire). Vampirism in this film becomes a substitute for a love that cannot speak its name–since what suitor could tell his or her vulnerable beloved, “I love you; by the way, I drink the blood of the living to sustain my life”, and not expect to be rebuffed? Likewise, the second allegory that inevitably emerges when you have a well-played vampire in your film is what Simon Critchley might call our inability to grasp our own finitude. No-one is better at understanding that humans grow old and die than the vampires who love them, since that’s what they themselves cannot do as long as they exercise their desire to live. The vampire is a kind of offshoot of the thought of eternal return: what if the things we have to do to keep ourselves alive actually kept us alive, forever? No wonder the character of Kei is so mopey.
In a sense, vampire characters work in a film (even inserted rather awkwardly into a clumsily-choreographed sub-Yakuza film) because they invite these kinds of projections; they are stimuli for the imagination, vessels into which we read our feelings about relationships and death. (I am tempted to say, if they didn’t exist, we would have to invent them, but that is probably too postmodernly cute even for me.) You may wonder what it was about this film that facilitated that reading so well for your humble reviewer. This, I have to say, is because there is a green corner in my patchwork aesthetic that exists solely for slight, androgynous, fey-looking hommes et femmes. This matter of taste displeases numbers of my friends: Fiordi on my July visit to Wellington marvelled that I would pay money to see Beck (as I did, gladly, in London eighteen months ago) on account of his being “really thin and skinny” and Bill more recently spoke scornfully of “boy-men” (not to be confused with lady-boys), their spindly frames and big, vague eyes. And yet despite such disdain from those around me, these, gentle reader, are the kinds of forms and figures I particularly like. Any psychoanalytic conjectures why (which must, of course, be done in bad faith) are welcome in the comments box.
So, yes. Best sci-fi androgynous Japanese vampire flick I’ve yet seen.
Despite these diversions, my mood has not been so great these last few days, and I am thinking about making the small adjustments I am permitted to make at my own discretion in the small amount of medication I continue to take. A number of the academics whose blogs I read struggle with the effects of mental illness, either their own or that of others. (Emma Jane’s post on the recent death of her mother marks the end of part of a different kind of journey). In many ways I feel fortunate, which clearly isn’t the right word, to have had my worst depressive experiences (thus far) at the start of my adult life; I can’t imagine how I would be if I were negotiating now, mood-wise, what I lived through at eighteen. But in other ways I wish I could bring to bear the resources of my adult self on my depression without that adult self having been so thoroughly shaped–indeed, arguably, created–by the experience of that depression. What would it be like to have strutted on to the grown-up stage without the affective [note spelling] equivalent of the mark of Cain on me?
I’ll never know.