Twenty Years On, 'Battle Royale' (2000) Still Screams OK Boomer The Loudest

Kinji Fukasaku's swan song, the cult classic Battle Royale (2000), will be twenty years old this December. Its former controversy has been neatly forgotten, now existing to most as little more than a Hunger Games prequel or Fortnite: The Movie. It seems pithy to even summarise the film, it has so successfully embedded itself in the popular conscious, but, for the uninitiated, it concerns a class of upstart schoolchildren who, after being trapped on an abandoned island, are forced to kill each other off until only one remains. And it's bloody fantastic.

It has an unrelenting pace that promptly sets about delivering exciting action sequences and compelling character vignettes and, of course, the camp, B-Movie gore and gratuitous violence is undoubtedly great fun for genre aficionados. Nevertheless, the film has always held more value than Asia Extreme-style fetishism would have you believe.

Based off of Koushun Takami's similarly controversial novel, the film adaptation skewed loyal, keeping the vast skeleton of the story and making very few deviations from its source material. Yet it is these small changes, the barely noticeable additions and omissions, that I find most interesting when comparing the two texts. These are differences that most commentators seem to have written off as the mere side-effects of adapting a story from one medium to another, yet these minor changes nevertheless set in motion a butterfly effect that significantly shifts the film's meaning, even as it rigorously adheres to all of the original's sweeping narrative beats. To take this further, I see these changes as a very conscious shift from one set of meanings to another; from the anti-authoritarian satire of Takami's novel towards a more specific examination of generational conflict from Fukasaku. Particularly, the film version concerns itself with the bitter lashing out of failed masculinities unto a scapegoated juvenile underclass.

We see as such in the divergence of meaning in the different Programs, as the titular contests are known. As written by Takami, the Program is an abstract evil that persists automatically through the state apparatus. It's true meaning and purpose is unknown, potentially forgotten, and only exists because no one dares to challenge the dominant ideology. So, no one believes in the program, but all feel that they must act as if they do, since everyone else does. As it is later revealed, the Program is in fact a vital part of the authoritarian infrastructure and a truly educational exercise; it serves as a transformation of the community into individuals, teaching the nation's populace that there can be no class solidarity. It is perhaps not the most subtle of political parody.

Drawing on his own experience as a young person in the waning days of World War II, director Fukasaku channelled instead the nihilistic violence which the older generations inflict unto their children. The satirical elements of the novel are pushed into the background in favour of a different meaning to the Program: spite. Adults fear the spectre of juvenile delinquency and see this act of total violence not just as discipline or punishment, but as karmic justice. In their eyes, it may be harsh, but certainly not cruel: it is a reactionary model, incurred by the transgression of rebellious children themselves.

This manifests itself most notably in the focal antagonist played by the enigmatic "Beat" Takeshi Kitano, the ex-teacher and current taskmaster similarly named Kitano (In the original novel, he was Sakamochi). Kitano, who was an old, disgruntled teacher of the class, bursts onto the scene with a military entourage, killing, displacing and denigrating the class's then-current, now previous, teacher, Hayashida, as a failure of an adult.

Kitano is perhaps the character who sees the most changes in the transition from the novel to the film, since his reign of terror is far more personal and far more vindictive than Sakomochi's. Originally, Sakomochi was a mere government agent and no teacher at all, though he effected the mannerisms of a particularly sadistic one. In addition to this, there was no personal connection between the 'teacher' and his class. Kitano, meanwhile, is indivisible from his torrid relationship with his former pupils. Where in the original novel the first killings are done so out of indifference (they score too low on the governments in-office betting pool), the film adaptation baptises the Program with two instances of revenge killing. First, a student undermines Kitano's authority by continuing to whisper, even as he had disciplined the class not to. She receives not detention, but a knife through her forehead. Subsequently, Kitano, who had taken a knife to his rear in his days as a school teacher, pays the offending student back with an identical slash, before detonating the explosive in his collar and killing him. Only after these personal killings are exorcised from his system does the game begin.

The teacher, Kitano, and his class.

The Program then unfolds as a realisation of his obscene, total power as an authority figure: both in a governmental sense and in the educational. One fascinating scene depicting the exercise of his absurdist teacher-patriarchal powers occurs when the female lead, Noriko Nakagawa, is ambushed by Mitsuko Souma, a merciless fellow student playing for keeps. Whilst the novel and other ancillary materials draw her as a far more haunting character, depicting her backstory as the tragic victim of the cyclical natures of violence and abuse, the film shows us a sinister, unsympathetic villain. She exerts her power indiscriminately and with a certain Machiavellian ingenuity; capable of dropping crocodile tears at any cynical moment. When she appears in front of Nakagawa, armed with weapons salvaged from her previous kills, the implication is clear: Nakagawa is the next to die.

However, Mitsuko's dreadful image is shattered on the sudden appearance of Kitano, who, armed only with an umbrella, swiftly sends her fleeing. Now that he is running the Program, even the most hardened killer will succumb to his abstract authority.

Kitano appears with his umbrella.

The ethereal, dreamlike quality of this scene is precipitated by the actual dream sequence- one where both Kitano and Nakagawa resemble children, eating ice cream and jumping by the riverside. In this moment, they are equalised and placed on the same infantile standing. In one sense, it works as a simple flashback which serves to establish the relationship between Kitano and Nakagawa, something set up by Nakagawa being the sole student not to disrespect him and that is paid off when Kitano reveals his perverse fondness for his student. But there is a definite notion that this is not just a shared memory, but a connected psychic experience endured by both Noriko and Kitano simultaneously. These disparate characters are allowed into each others intimate spheres, seeing each other in a state that social convention prohibits.

It is here where Nakagawa uncovers the central lie of Kitano's character, something that Nakagawa understands, but the other students fail to: Kitano is totally pathetic. His authority is totally abstract, as meaningless in a militarised death game as it was in the classroom and the man is as much a failure of an adult as Hayashida was. He's a bitter, capricious man, but also a pitiable one: a child trapped in a man's body.

Kitano, like the other figures of authority in the film, are emasculated, not so much by the insurgent youth who they place the blame, but by the denigration of their material conditions under their own watch (Significant, then, that the film shows us no female figures of authority). The film's opening exposition tells us as much, tapping into cultural concerns regarding the transition from capitalist boom into a new era of economic uncertainty, Japan's 'Lost Decade':

At the dawn of the millennium, the nation collapsed. At 15% unemployment, 10 million were out of work. 800,000 students boycotted the schools. The adults lost confidence and, fearing the youth, eventually passed the Millennium Educational Reform Act, AKA the BR Act...

It is not the children who have failed the adults, but instead the adults, their generational masculinity and their institutions who have failed their children. The addition of new backstory regarding Nanahara's father is testament to this: his self-loathing and masculine anxiety simmer in the precarious economy, until they bubble over and Nanahara comes upon the site of his father's undignified suicide.

On the other side of their shared dream, Kitano fails to reciprocate Nakagawa's truthful sight: provided with this rare moment of connection, he instead fetishises his student as an angelic emblem of perfect youth, the exception who justifies his hatred for the rest of her generation. She could perhaps play the role of surrogate daughter, considering how frayed his relationship is with his own: she repeatedly calls him up throughout the film to undermine him and remind him what a failure he is, both as adult and man, specifically. Alternatively, given how concerned the film is with its depictions of young love, at times playing out like a send up of school-based dramedy, their relationship could be seen as an addition to that: the unrequited love of one youthful spirit to another.

By the film's climax, Kitano has realised that merely killing the children that he despises will never grant him the satisfaction he seeks. He is consumed by bitterness, by hatred and by his own masculine failings, eventually giving himself up to suicide by cop. He threatens to shoot Nakagawa, getting himself shot down before the gun he was holding was shown to only fire water and, in his dying moments, he tells his daughter: "If you hate someone then you have to live with the consequences." He, of course, has no intention of living at all.

Exhausted from his own implacable rage, incapable of living with his own ineptitude, Kitano's involvement with the Program, his relationship with his students and his death mirrors the suicide of Nanahara's father: both are faced with challenges to their generational authority which each refuse to take responsibility for, instead shunting said responsibility onto the shoulders of the young. Here, Fukusaka's final film provides a critique of the elders, the entrenched and the empowered, who demand that their children either act out an idyllic fantasy of youth, or die. They who perform this masquerade to obscure their own failings. And are these not the same people today who, lording over economic decline and a nigh-terminal housing crisis condemn that excessive luxury, avocado toast? Twenty years on, no film screams 'OK Boomer' like this one.

If the film has staying power, it is in how much it lends itself to rewatchability. Only once you get past that first encounter with its camp violence and black humour can you begin to embrace its rich tapestry of meaning and the deep humanity at its core. On my latest rewatch, combined with the Making of Battle Royale feature accompanying the Arrow Film release, I noticed something threaded throughout the film that I had previously missed: an ongoing critique on the romanticising power of distance. There is a puzzling moment at the end of the film, where Nakagawa looks back on the island she's escaped saying, "It's beautiful... Even though it's where everyone died". It is the encapsulation of a subplot well hidden in the film's fabric, one mostly told through the language of the film. Shots are taken from across the island, with locations that saw scenes of tragedy and death (such as the infamous Lighthouse) rendered as picturesque snapshots of an island in serene peace.

The most telling instance of this occurs when a slow zoom out transforms a death scene into what could easily pass for a romantic one. That the preceding deathbed conversation left one participant disappointed at the platonic nature of their relationship marks ever more clearly a dissonance between action and meaning.

Chigusa dies beside Sugimura.

After his biting critique of the older generation, here, it would seem, is Fukusaka's message to the youth: Be wary of memory, and how easily repression can transform the harrowing and unimaginable into something effable, even desirable. Rather than a patronising commentary to denigrate those who have not lived through war, it is instead a warning against how a glamourising, romanticisation of violence belies the true nature of living through it; a sentiment made all the more pertinent in the age difference between the director and his cast.

Twenty years later, the cult film's legacy has endured: Quentin Tarantino considers it the best movie he's seen since he began making films and the one he most wishes he was responsible for; casting one of the film's actresses, Chiaki Kuriyama, in Kill Bill.  Of its litany of imitators, there's the obvious, and aforementioned, Hunger Games franchise and a wave of multiplayer video game experiences, but also a surprisingly pleasing run of superhero comics in Dennis "Hopeless" Hallum's Avengers Arena.  Arena, admittedly, has a far lower bodycount than Battle Royale, instead honing in on what makes its predecessor an enduring triumph: not the indulgence in violence, but the exploration of character and the failure of generational masculinity.

On a personal note, I have to say that favourite films are always hard to pin down, since we often have preferred films for a variety of different moods and purposes. Whilst I don't know whether Battle Royale is my favourite film, it is also never not my favourite film.

Now Departing

I had this dream last night. And the night before that. In it, I’m standing alone, in the city at sunset. The air is thick and warm. And when it starts to rain everything folds into tender flame. The water forms little lakes in the concrete vista, which blaze alight as she walks towards me. Something pushes down on my chest and there’s a whisper in my ear.

“You worry too much”.

I dream it again and again. But I never turn my head quick enough to see her face. She walks away and I can’t keep up. The rain starts to come harder. Harsher. Each drop starts to bruise and my feet sink deeper into each puddle on the floor. Until I see the air aflame again, reach out and leap forwards. Only then, after I have fallen and submerged myself entirely, do I wake up.

Julija wiped the water off her face and looked up to the mirror. In it she saw a cramped bathroom, almost medicinally clean, but, where she should have seen her own face, she saw only the cruel decay of time. Her real face was hidden somewhere beneath that haggard mask. She slapped it, pulled on it, perhaps hoping to finally tear it off, and noticed that even the bags under the bags under her eyes were tired. Her body, too, was near breaking point. The weight of two decades of overwritten texts, obnoxious students and the mind-numbing bureaucracy of Academia was pushing down on her shoulders. She cracked her back and finished washing her hands, where the skin between her fingers burned and peeled. She had ignored the inflammation for the past two months and did not intend to stop doing so now.

When she exited out of the bathroom, she inadvertently bumped into a tray of drinks and the attendant who was pushing them along. She apologised instinctively and moved past, without even thinking to look back. It would be easy to blame it on her post-nap drowsiness, but really she simply didn’t care to look. A moustached man pulled a bag out of the overhead, cursing as it fell and she did not turn to see. A raucous young boy ran straight at her, arms stretched out for his wingspan, but her eyeline never once took notice. She did prefer to imagine herself as a busy person, rather than a misanthropic one, yet it remained that the lives of the people around her held nothing to spike her interest. The chaos of everyday human life abounded, yet for all of it the flight itself was unnaturally smooth. It seemed to calmly slice through the clouds. You could barely even hear the engines. It may have been a nicer flight than Julija had ever been on, if it wasn’t for all the other people.

Once she had reclaimed her aisle seat, she took some time to readjust to it. Regardless of whatever material it was once made out of, it now mostly consisted of her own back sweat. Some slight fidgeting aside, she fit back into the grooves her in-flight nap had left behind. The old woman next to her had drifted off before she did, but was still sleeping, undeterred. She seemed serene. Peaceful. Her appearance belied quite a rancid body odour, but Julija was not displeased with this travelling companion. Idle chit chat and small talk could only frustrate esteemed academics like herself. She always had something more important to think about and the slightest distraction risked making her lose her train of thought. And, really, what was the point of talking anyway? If Julija wanted to get to know somebody, she’d read their book and, if they didn’t have a book about them, they couldn’t really be all that much worth knowing, could they? She remembered the last time someone tried to speak to her on a plane. An older man; leering and lecherous. She was well into her forties at the time, but he still seemed oddly concerned with her youth, vitality and virility. He had spouted all those vacuous sentiments about how, compared to him, she was still young. That she had to seize the world, or the day, or whatever it was that needed seizing. That she needed to smell the roses, or that she should smile more. After that, she felt that she had served her small-talk duty for a lifetime.

Still, she didn’t know how much time she had left on this flight. So, with no idle chit chat on offer and no world-changing idea coming to mind, she started to fiddle. First with the brochures affixed to the seat in front. Quickly passing through the company propaganda, (although the allure of in-flight alcohol drew her attention for marginally longer), she soon put the material back where she found it. Next she looked through her backpack. There was her research paper encased in a plastic folder, a book she regretted committing to review, a stick of roll-on deodorant and her boarding pass. She looked at the ticket:

From: Brussels                          FLIGHT SN502                             TERMINAL 1

To: New York                                Vanitas Air                                      SEAT 24D

But its content wasn’t likely to change anytime soon, so she put it away again. She considered looking over the paper she was presenting in two days time. A pity, then, that even she found that work boring. Doing her Political Science BA, she thought she was going to change the world. Doing her Social and Political Theory MA, she thought she was going to change Academia. It was somewhere between writing her PhD and her third book, On The Viability Of An Ethnographic Study Of Bureaucracy, that she gave up on change altogether. She’d written for hours a day, every day, for the past twenty-three years. Sometimes she liked to think about how many words that actually added up to and how not a single one of those had resulted in any material change. So now she visits conferences, manages dissertations, holds classes, all without the hope that any of her work is actually worthwhile. The nature of work, though, doesn’t particularly care if you like it or not. It always seems to multiply regardless.

Further down the plane sat another passenger, similarly concerned with the mundanity of his work. For the past decade, Scott had languished in pathetic, emasculating middle-management work and it was only now that he was reclaiming the passion of his youth: writing science-fiction stories. A writing holiday of course sounded like a good idea at the time, but sat here now he started to wonder why he was even bothering. He suspected that he would reach his destination, unshackle himself from the yoke of work, and find himself wholly unable to start. His imagination had grown rusted, stale and he doubted that even the heat of a Summer’s beach could restore him to what he once had been. But, when it happened, it happened so suddenly that Scott was wholly unprepared. Out of nothingness came an idea. A good idea. He had yet to reach his destination, but already he was scrambling in his hand luggage, desperate to grant the fleeting thought a safe refuge in his mostly empty notebook. He put pen to paper, and realised he had run out of ink.

Julija could feel herself drifting off again. When your work goes beyond the constraints of work hours and starts to seep into every moment of your day-to-day life, this almost seems like an occupational hazard. She longed for the sleep, to go peacefully into a world where her imagination was not to be curtailed by a list of references, but she knew well enough that she’d slept too much already. Still, when the heavy eyelids set in, it's very hard to resist. Her eyes started to shut, but they didn’t make it all the way; as any of the professionally sleep-deprived will tell you, that moment between the eyelid starting to come down and when it finally shuts is when your brain decides to play tricks on you.

When it came, it flitted across her line of sight so suddenly and so briefly that she was convinced it was such a trick. If not a trick of the mind, then a trick of the light. She thought it could be something to do with the plane being that much closer to the sun, perhaps. After all, she had studied a social science, not a hard one. But, whatever the cause, for the briefest second she saw a fire walk by. Not a real fire, of course, but flame made hair. Something straight out of a dream. Or a memory. But it couldn’t have been. Because it was twenty-three years later now. And she was long-gone. And yet...

The nearest flight attendant was now trying to convince the young boy to stop making his laps of the plane and to return to his seat. She wasn’t doing a very good job. As soon as she would corner him he would run around her legs, continuing unimpeded, and the attendant would have to start over. Julija waited for him to make another pass and, once the aisle was clear, she took this moment of furor as an opportunity to investigate. She traced where the apparitious woman had walked and found where she was sitting. They were mere rows apart. She wondered if she could have been here all along, right under her nose. And how wonderful that would be. Then she reminded herself how ridiculous and impossible a thought like that was. It was hardly as ridiculous or impossible as the apparent reality, since there she was. Sitting, on a plane seat. As if she was just some normal person. She was there. Not some tepid simulacrum of a figure from her dreams and memories, but a perfect replica of the woman she was once so madly in love with. She had her eyes covered with a black sleeping mask but Julija could tell that every half-forgotten memory was present, from the way her red hair fell to the tattoo on her shoulder and the birthmark on her left cheek.

Julija had loved that birthmark and said so frequently, talking often about how it made her stand-out from everybody else, how it perfectly summed up her determination to be meaningfully different. My Lina, you were the one who could have changed things, she’d often thought, only you died and left me in this world alone. Julija wasn’t ready to see it all again. Because, somehow, it was her, Julija knew it. Not a mind trick or illusion or some Hitchcockian lookalike. Her skin didn’t just look soft. It looked as soft, as soft as it ever was. Her lips likewise, though perhaps they looked even more enticing now. It wasn’t the skin of a dead girl. Just by reaching out, Julija could change everything. But she didn’t. Despite everything, or because of everything, she just stood, in the aisle, agape, to no response, left to wonder whether this was a miracle or some new form of cosmic torture. She wondered if she ever did wake up from her nap.

Emily, a neophytic woman freshly emerged from schooling, was seated in between two other passengers: on her right, a man of similar age was staring out of the plane window, headphones affixed. But her neighbour to the left, having only returned to her seat moments ago, was now beset by what Emily could only presume was unwanted company. Even as her neighbour attempted to sleep, there was a strange woman just staring at her. It made Emily feel uncomfortable, like an unwilling voyeur or a witness to some event about to turn ugly, but she had previously been in such tremendously high spirits that she looked instead to her right and attempted to push all else out of her mind. She was recently married and now, as she felt she was finally properly entering adulthood, wanted to reconnect with the Jewish heritage and history that as a teenager she had attempted to leave behind. Her trip was equal parts pilgrimage and honeymoon. She thought happy thoughts. She thought of the vow her now-husband had made. She thought of their love story, the official one that they had told their parents and the unofficial one that only they knew. And it made her feel warm inside. Even as she explored and experimented with her identity, he was never anything short of supportive. With no prompt from her, seemingly from nowhere, it was he that suggested they honeymoon in Israel. It was the happiest Emily had ever been. But, however much she tried to ignore what was going on in the corner of her eye, however much she tried to think on all those reasons to be happy and excited, that strange woman remained. Staring. Not moving. The attendant who was previously shepherding some overly energetic child now came to the strange, staring woman and, whilst clearly exasperated, was imploring her to return to her seat. The woman never looked away, but after wiping a tear from her eye, obliged nonetheless. The attendant turned to Emily next.
“Excuse me, ma’am, but we’re expecting a little excitement up ahead, so could you please ensure that your tray is placed upright and ensure your seatbelt is fastened. Thank you.”
Emily hadn’t felt any change in the flight, it was as calm as it had been, but she did as she was told.
“Yeah, sure…”, she responded, but stopped midway. She had made eye contact with the attendant and felt a shiver of dread run down her spine. She suddenly had the funniest feeling that she wouldn’t be making it to Israel after all.
“Could you tell your partner also?”, the dread attendant said, signalling the man to Emily’s left.
The honeymooner turned, furrowed her brow and gave the only response she could muster, “That’s not my partner, I’ve never met this man in my life.”

By the time Julija had returned to her seat, her elderly flight companion had awoken from her rest.
“Is everything alright, dear?” she asked when Julija sat back down, but Julija was still too transfixed to avert her gaze. She never once moved her head from the direction where she had found her lost Lina. Is lost really the right word for a thing that you’ve just found again? She started to rub her fingers together, scratching the skin between them. It was all wrong. It was all so impossible. How could she be here? What’s she been doing for twenty-three years? Why does she look the same as then, when I’ve had to grow so old? And…
“Where the fuck is my backpack?”
At her expression, Julija’s elderly neighbour stirred. “I’m sorry?”, she exclaimed.
“My backpack. It’s gone”, Julija snapped, whilst furiously and frantically searching around her seat. She checked again and again. But the truth was that, somehow, her bag had totally, inexplicably disappeared. Julija wanted to die.
“Oh, well. These things happen”, the old woman said.
Julija’s eyes narrowed, “No, they don’t.” You old hag, she wanted to say.
“No? Well, I suppose not.” And Julija’s neighbour gently nodded back to sleep. She couldn’t understand. No one could. No one else would be as stupid, as myopic, to store so much of their life in a fucking carryon. Christ. What would she present in New York now? She didn’t have the time to rewrite it, and even if she did, Julija knew she could never write like that again. The recreation would never be perfect. She felt panic setting in. She needed it back. Desperately. Fuck everything else in there. Fuck the review book and her boarding pass or even the bag itself. Julija just wanted her life back. And maybe the stick of roll-on too.

Perhaps, she thought, perhaps I am just losing my mind. It was here, I left it here, I know I did. Did someone take it? No one looks suspicious. Maybe. Maybe I’ve finally pushed myself too far. She sought out the nearest flight attendant and wondered what exactly she would ask them, going over the conversation in her head, have you seen a bag? Did you see anyone take something from here? Oh yeah, and why is my dead girlfriend sitting a few rows over?

“Excuse me? Excuse me?” she asked on her response, though no response came. She tapped the attendant’s shoulder. When no reply came, she tugged on their shirt. Only then did the attendant turn around. Now Julija wished she hadn’t. It was the first time that she truly looked upon the flight attendant’s face. It was human enough, except for the eyes. The eyes were featureless. Each one seemed eternal; no iris, no pupil, just an abyss to stare into. You can imagine that the poetics of it were lost on Julija. Her relative composure belied a fear that ran deep, one that upset her in the spaces between her bones.
“Oh God. What the hell are you?”, Julija said.
“Please take your seat, ma’am,” the attendant said to her, in a voice sweet as honey and as cold as ice. What could she do but as she was told? Still, if she hadn’t figured out that something was deeply wrong from the apparition of Lina, long lost to her, or the disappearance of a year’s worth of research, then she knew now. She had to get off this plane. The immediate problem being, of course, that the plane still happened to be thirty-six-thousand feet in the air.

She tried to think about it all, but her head was fried, working overtime in an attempt to reconcile the information surrounding her. There were too many parts, and none of them seemed to fit together. She couldn’t organise what was going on in any kind of rational way. But she needed to get to her conference and she knew deep down that this plane wasn’t landing in New York. So she just started moving. To the rest of the plane, it would have just looked like she was returning to the bathroom. But she just kept moving, past the lavatory and right up to one of the plane’s doors.

Near it, Julija rummaged throughout the space around, but she couldn’t find much of anything, let alone the parachute she would need to make her daring escape. Would she even know how to operate it? It couldn’t be too hard, surely. But such an escape was mitigated by the fact that she simply didn’t know where planes kept parachutes. Would there even be one here? One on the plane at all? Julija knew a lot about a lot of things, but she didn’t know about planes and she really didn’t know anything about this particular plane. She thought there might be a parachute in the cockpit but, when she looked to walk in that direction, she saw a small group of those eyeless, soulless flight attendants striding to her location. She knew she couldn’t hesitate. This was her one chance to escape. She had to keep moving. And, sure, she’d probably plummet into oblivion. But why shouldn’t she? She lived, now, only from conference to conference, from project to project. Without that, what did she have? She thought she had known- thought she had been- lost before; without her Lina she lived for the work and the work alone. Now that she was returned, and her work lost, the certainties of Julija’s world crumbled around her. Beyond the plane door, there was at least some certainty. She had no idea what the plane’s crew had in mind for her. She had no intention of finding out. She looked at the door and its small window, from which you could see the sky outside. The clouds were thick and endlessly white; you couldn’t even see through to the blue. She felt sick. But she knew she had to keep moving. She pulled the handle to “Open” and pushed and pushed.

But the door wouldn’t budge. I mean, sure she wasn’t the strongest, but she should at the very least be able to open a door, right? She didn’t care what was on the other side at this point. She just kept pushing. Her hands tore as her skin rubbed against the metal, oozing pus and blood as she pushed. Still, she never let up. She’d have pushed until her arms broke, and then kept going, if the attendants hadn’t finally surrounded her. And even though they grabbed her from both sides, she resisted, perhaps not realising that she had already blown her one chance.

“Stop it! Get off of me!” she shouted to no avail.
She was still attempting to wrest the door open. It was a futile attempt. There were three of them, she was but one, and they soon managed to pull Julija away. Her screams adapted to that futility.
“I want to know where you’re taking me!” she shouted instead. Then, as the attendants pulled her down the plane aisle she swapped her demand for a plea, “Where’s this plane going?”
There was a sound of plastic whirring against itself, as Julija felt her hands restrained behind her back. She was really causing quite a fuss. Even the passengers who had first ignored the commotion in favour of their own business, felt compelled to look as the attendants forcefully escorted the hysteric back to her seat. Julija could hear the rest of the flights passengers as they made a series of sounds expressing their serious, collective disgruntlement. They huffed, heaved and tutted at the idea of someone trying to escape.

Paul fidgeted in his seat. He was one of the many older passengers who were jilted awake from their naps by the one-woman revolt. His trip, particularly, was very important. He should have made it a long time ago, but he had put it off time and time again. At first, he resented his son for leaving. He cared little for the wife he had found and thought that his move away from Philadelphia was some petulant sign of rebellion against the father. It was sometime after the birth of his first child that he softened, and longed to visit, but felt too anxious to take the plunge and do so. He could not bear the thought of a grandson who resented him for his absence, or worse one who loved him in spite of his distance. Finally, in his twilight years, he felt wholly embarrassed of his past feelings. Ashamed that he took the actions of his own son as a slight. Even more ashamed that he had let his own fears stand between him and his family. He didn’t know what in him had changed, what had allowed him to finally make the trip, but, as you can tell, he was wholly concerned with a lot more than the emotional meltdown of some strangely accented woman. See, he too had noticed that there was something deeply wrong going on. There was not only no sound from turbulence or the engines, but seemingly no wind at all. He had noticed also, some time ago now, that the passengers all seemed to be heading in different directions. All this was stewing in his head and, whilst he didn’t quite know what was going on, he knew one thing: it was not yet the time for crying and screaming. There would be a time to act, eventually, an opportunity would no doubt arise. So he would not help the woman. Certainly at this point to be on her side would simply alienate the other passengers. And, of course, the screaming woman was already dead. She just hadn’t realised it yet. Paul flagged a passing attendant, who was rushing to aid her crewmates in their attempts to defuse the chaos and restore normalcy. He caught her cold gaze, looked into those featureless eyes and said:
“You don’t have any more of these peanuts back there, do you?”

“Ma’am, please calm down.”
Julija’s kicks and screams remained ineffective as she was dragged down the aisle and pushed back into her seat. Her face smacked against the overhead as she was pushed forwards; she had acted impolitely and was treated so in return. The world had seemed muddled even before she was hit. Now there was a ringing in it too. Through it, she could barely hear the attendants instructing her, or the other passengers jeering at her. When the restraints were applied, Julija no longer fought- it was taking all her strength just to stay conscious. Julija, who was being tied down by an assortment of attendants, cared little what they thought. Though she would admit that the disdain in the eyes of a woman she had once loved stung. She could see her now. Lina’s looking right at me, she thought, she can see me. She wondered if she was disappointed. Leather belts kept her from moving her body, or kicking her legs, or lifting her arms, and whenever she moved, it became harder for her to breathe. She sat in those restraints (she had no other choice really) resigned but still distressed. Tears ran down her face.
“Tell me,” she cried, “Please tell me where this plane is going.”
“Don’t worry ma’am,” the attendant said. When the voice came, it poured into her ears like thick oil and was punctuated by a tightening of one of Julija’s belts, “We’ll make sure that you get there.”

At this point, Julija no longer had control of her breathing. Short, sharp breaths were all that she could muster and she felt her heart beating harder and faster to compensate. Adrenaline pushed throughout her body and rushed back again and her face was hot, so incredibly hot. Her insides were tearing themselves apart.

Oh God, Julija thought, and the colour of the world began to fade away, but I still have so much more to do. The plane started to shake and all that she saw turned to white.

Is ‘Stealing’ Love Island’s Cash Prize Even Possible?

Who is left to defend Love Island? As the sixth series has dwindled to its conclusion, its final weeks have perhaps been mired by controversy more so than ever before. The tragic death of former host Caroline Flack lingers over the final episodes, transforming the trashy, guilty pleasure into a true exercise in guilt, only now with no corresponding pleasure. The deeply uncomfortable ‘tribute’ episode may have opened with a sombre, reflective eulogy in place of a witty recap, but that which followed played out exactly the same as any other episode, with the same tone and the same sardonic commentary as ever. Bar the tribute to Flack, it was, in fact, the exact same episode that was pulled from air after the news of her death broke. Jarring is certainly an understatement. It has left the remainder of the series limping to the finish line, but tonight’s finale will see its young, not-so angsty contestants participate in a climactic ritual to wash away people’s cynicism, albeit temporarily.

Flack’s replacement, Laura Whitmore, will enter the villa and whichever couple has enamoured themselves most in the eyes of the public will then be faced with one final challenge: Will they split their cash prize with their Love Island partner, or will they steal the full amount, no doubt dumping their partner in the process?

Last year's winners face their Split/Steal dilemma. 

It is, admittedly, less of a challenge, and more of a formality, as over the past five years, no contestant has managed to channel enough pure chaotic energy to gift us with the TV moment that we all secretly yearn for. As such we have to ask: is stealing the £50K even possible? 

Yes, yes, the prize money is paltry in comparison to what their minor celebrity status will bestow upon them in the show’s aftermath, and perhaps marking themselves as a villain will remove some financial viability to their post-show careers (though how much I do wonder…). Maybe there is, in fact, a moral line some are unwilling to cross. There are valid reasons contestants simply wouldn't want to steal the money. Still, reasoning such as this belies the specific function the ‘choice’ and prize money serve in the show’s design: it is not that the cash money is a lesser prize, it is that it is no prize at all. The money has to be forsaken as a final legitimisation of the performance of love. Perhaps their attraction has seemed false, perhaps we do not believe their confessions of love, but by refusing the prize money they have allowed selfless love to conquer over personal self-interest and we, the audience, can now believe in them unironically. Even more than this, after having restored or encouraged our faith in the (now-deserved) winning couple, the choice justifies the series as a wider product. 

It functions as our one true moment of ‘romance’; the dates and the gestures which precede it, where couples enact bizarre proposal scenarios simply to make their coupling official, constitute only a surrealist performance of romance. It is not one which we are expected to engage seriously with. It is a show put on for the audience, not representative of these character’s own truths. But, in this final, guaranteed story beat, Love Island itself is orientated away from pleasing the court of public opinion and into the gauging of love’s authenticity. You are allowed to doubt the show at any point except this. Everything up until this moment can be faked, scripted, overly edited or staged, but this has to be read as authentic. Going back to the earlier seasons we can see this more explicitly; we should recall that in place of the 50K envelope there was instead a Golden Balls-esque decision between ‘Love’ and ‘Money’. The key assumption being that the former was as material and as quantifiable as the latter. Is it not true that were someone to elect not to split the cash then the show would cease to be Love Island? It is an option never to be picked: freedom of choice, so long as you choose correctly.

Then, let us imagine that tonight one of our darling 20-somethings is revealed to have been a Machiavellian gameplayer all along. What do we expect to actually happen? The audience will jeer, Laura Whitmore will swoon and, no doubt, the heartbroken partner’s face will melt as if they had looked into the Ark of the Covenant. The producers will panic, frantically attempting to reconcile their celebratory tone with the anti-romantic horror taking place in front of their cameras. The same planned music may well play or, perhaps, the final episode of Love Island will fade out with awkward silence. Some days of media furore will follow, as each tabloid rushes to abandon any lesson they might have learned from the maltreatment of Flack to hound winner and loser, villain and victim, alike. 

And, once the winner is sat back home, checking their mobile banking app, they would see not a deposit of £50K, but a deposit of £25K, twice. 

Film Review: Weathering With You

Spoilers Follow.

Weathering With You (Original Title: Tenki no ko), Makoto Shinkai's 2019 follow-up to his preceding mega-hit Your Name (Original Title: Kimi no Na wa), is much more effective as spectacle and viewing experience than it ever is as a film. It should come as little surprise to those familiar with Shinkai's previous work that the production values are stellar, but fans of Your Name may find this new story to be an overall less affecting affair.

Your Name was, of course, such a sweeping, international phenomenon that Weathering With You begs comparison to its predecessor. The film itself does little to dissuade this. It is clearly set-up as a spiritual successor to Your Name (and, as eagle-eyed fans have noticed, as a pseudo-sequel as well), and similarities between the two frequent: they are both bildungsroman, coming-of-age stories, both depict characters moving from the country into Tokyo, both feature light fantasy elements, stunning animation and music by Radwimps. There is a tragic loss, that is promptly undone in time for a happy ending. Weathering With You goes through these motions by way of a romance between Hodoka, a runaway, and Hina, a young orphan girl with the fantastical power of atmokinesis, of weather manipulation. Hijinks ensue.

Shinkai's films are often praised as timeless, or ageless, or whatever superfluous adjective confers his work rewatchability, yet I think they are rather the opposite. Whilst there is a universal romance to them, both Your Name and Weathering With You are expressly concerned with contemporary youth anxiety. This film, in particular, addresses the relationship between Generation Z and the environment- more specifically, the lack of any such relationship. Reflecting Japanese youth apathy to ecological disaster, the anthropocene takes a backseat in the lives of our focal young protagonists. Instead, for much of the film, it is the police, perhaps repressive society at large, who are depicted as the antagonistic force and enemy of young people. The police are repeatedly shown as inadequate, foolish and incompetent; frequently harassing the undeserved, at one point prioritising the pursuit of runaway children over the prosecution of a paedophile; incapable of performing their jobs, as they are repeatedly outwitted and outran by children; and, as you would expect, are proven wholly ignorant of the grander, fantastical elements at play. It is in resistance to the police that the core family of runaways is both formed and lost, and it is the abdication of ecological responsibility that allows the family's return at the film's climax.

For the majority of the film, nature is quite playful: it affects mood, rain makes people miserable and the clearing of the sky alleviates it. Hina can bring temporary relief from the rain, at the cost of a later, heavier downpour, something which the entrepreneurial youths utilise to charm the Tokyo citizenry out of their cash. Only in the film's epilogue is nature's destructive potential played out. Offscreen, in a time-skip. Refusing to sacrifice Hina to restore typical weather behaviour, rain continues to fall until half of Tokyo is submerged entirely in water. Typing it out makes it sound like such an obviously disastrous outcome, but this is presented to us as a happy ending. With half the city drowned, the film's resolution is one of its biggest curiosities.

If we perhaps view the character of Hina as representative of the anthropocene, as it is her atmokinetic powers which incur the calamitous weather conditions and her sacrifice which abates them, her decision to prioritise herself is pseudo-Randian; with the world pushing down on her shoulders, she shrugs. It's unexpectedly provocative material from Shinkai, considering the film is a mostly lightweight affair. One particular piece of dialogue resonates: "Who cares if we can't see any sunshine? I want you more than any blue sky." Hodoka confesses this to Hina at the film's climax, declaring defiantly that human will and human love should be prioritised over the relationship between people and nature.

Were the ending played differently, it would seem that the film is condemning a selfish, lackadaisical youth. But, in the film, there is no tragedy or horror to the ending. Life in Underwater Tokyo is presented as an undeniable improvement, as businesses expand, city infrastructure adapts and hopeful optimism abounds in the populace. For a film that starts off seemingly sympathetic to the vagabond, this ending shows little to no curiosity as to the wider effects of the lovers decision on the poorest of the city. Real world climate change, of course, will not affect us all in the same way: whilst the older, richer citizen is able to move out of her drowned house into high-rise apartments, many poorer people would be unable to do so. The mass displacement of people in the event of such a calamity would be a humanitarian crisis, not to mention the potential loss of life that may well have occurred in the transformation of Tokyo into Atlantis. The notion that the film's ecological disaster can be accepted as a return to the natural order actually serves as little comfort in this light. The anthropocene eventually rolling back is hardly something to look forward to, so long as the 'anthropo' still walks the Earth.

As such, it is a very strange film to view in 2020. It presents us a narrative wholly concerned with ecological calamity, but not with its prevention; the total antithesis of the messages of Extinction Rebellion, the Climate Strike and likely many of this year's Oscar acceptance speeches. In an otherwise easily consumed, whimsical fantasy, the ending proves a bitter pill to swallow. It must be said that, for all my gripes, it has certainly been the point where I've been most forced to grapple with the film, and its wider meaning. I do wonder if my failure to enjoy the ending is rooted in the void between Japanese youth sentiments towards ecological disaster and my own, Westernised perspective. As defeatist as it is, the suggestion that we (and young people, specifically) are actually powerless in the face of climate disaster may be closer to the truth than we'd like to admit. And maybe, if that is the case, then narratives of hope in the aftermath of climate calamity are a necessary, if unfortunate, tonic, to the rhetoric that suggests that our failure to prevent climate change signals the end of our species and planet.

Nevertheless, where I found the story unwieldy and alienating compared to Your Name's triumphant melodrama, I felt the animation and music were clearly of the same, if not higher, calibre. When Shinkai said that he found himself disappointed with Your Name, feeling that the studio hadn't managed to push the potential of the animation far enough and deeming the film "incomplete", I was shocked. My puny, prosaic brain couldn't imagine something surpassing Your Name, at the time. Weathering With You must have been what he was envisioning. How many films can you think of where one of the most startling sequences features someone eating a Big Mac? Where you will gladly watch long sequences of just rain, because each and every drop is stunning? Everything from sequences of food preparation to the sequences of Hina's atmokinesis are rendered with a level of care and dedication that makes nearly every frame desktop wallpaper material. The score and J-Rock musical accompaniments from Radwimps are of similar quality. It imbues the film with kinetic energy when it needs to, whilst never missing an emotional beat. Whilst some of the deployment of the J-Rock songs may be questionable, particularly with regards to the aforementioned offbeat ending, the songs themselves are a lot of fun.

Roger Ebert once referred to animation, particularly Japanese anime, as a form which "releases the imagination so fully that it can enhance any story, and it can show sights that cannot possibly exist in the real world." Weathering With You lives up to that potential and embodies spectacle-film in its purest. As the screening ended, I felt a sensation that this is what cinemas are still here for. Now, wide-release of international cartoons are not going to solve the woes of every dwindling multiplex or just-holding-on indie venue, but if you want an example of a film experience that cannot be simulated outside of a cinema, look no further.

I'm interested in seeing this film again! It just also seems like a crime to see it on any smaller screen. I don't want to watch it on my laptop screen, which I've never been able to get fully clean for very long, nor do I want to watch it on my TV, with its cluster of dead pixels in the bottom right. I want to see every detail of the animation blown to gargantuan proportions. I may be satisfied if we could screen it on the White Cliffs of Dover, but nothing less than that. That the film has received such a limited UK release is a deep shame. Everyone deserves to be able to see films like this on the biggest screen possible.

I Played Kingdom Hearts 3 And Then I Cried And Then I Wrote About It

In school, I was a massive, embarrassing crybaby. If someone looked at me the wrong way, if a teacher shouted at me or even if I just wasn't receiving enough attention that day I was liable to burst into tears. Yet, for all that sensitivity, I rarely cried at movies. Or books. Or music. Or video games. I didn't really laugh along with comedies and never found horrors all that horrifying. And whilst I still had a deep love for the stories I engaged with, that love was logical and cold. More obsessional than sincere.

Nowadays I cry about 'real' life considerably less. In those terms, in matters solely relating to my own personal experiences, I can think of just one time I was reduced to tears in the past five years. And I was drunk, besides. It would seem that maybe I've totally closed myself off, or gone numb, or just finally grown up. Yet those tears do still come. Only now it is the slightest moment of sentimentality in an episode of The Simpsons that can have me blubbering for minutes on end. Some of the moments when tears have decided to flow have left me incredulous; seemingly mundane, unimpressive shows of hope, optimism and love.

Recently, the media experience that affected me in such a way was during my play-through of Kingdom Hearts 3. I was roughly a year late to the party, but still found myself moved by its sincere performance of the inner goodness of all, the possibility for everyone to be redeemed. Reflecting back, it's almost a sickly sweet idea. But, hey, it worked at the time.

As it turns out, brutal authenticity is the theme of this post.

For those who don't know, the Kingdom Hearts franchise consists of a video games, movies and complex depicting a crossover between the intellectual properties of Square Enix and Disney. Angsty emo teens partake in anime-esque battles alongside Donald Duck, Goofy and Mickey Mouse. It is exactly as absurd and surreal as it sounds. It is that precise absurdity that places the series as a premier space from which to unpack nostalgic sentimentality; this is a franchise most shrewdly and conspicuously designed for you to purchase your childhood back. You might go as far as to say that Kingdom Hearts is one of the preeminent commodities of postmodern capitalism, but people would probably call you boring if you did so.

Throughout the game, you play as Sora, or some other spiky-haired protagonist, chasing after an ill-described macguffin (In KH3, this is the 'power of waking', which apparently isn't just an alarm clock) through the worlds of different Disney movies. Your true goal, of course, is to make the casts of these films happy. It is a simple joy. Dance with Tangled's Rapunzel, take selfies with Toy Story's Buzz and Woody, inexplicably yeet yourself off a mountain because Elsa told you to and so on. The game empowers you to fulfil the happy endings of the movies you loved growing up.

A scene from Kingdom Hearts 2 depicting what I can only describe as 'Goth Mickey'.

So it's a deeply nostalgic experience and its emotional resonance seems indubitably rooted in that nostalgia. Only here we hit upon a certain complication. I wasn't a Disney child. I wasn't even a Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy child. The vast majority of this content I only experienced for the first time two years ago. It may well be nostalgic. But it isn't for me. So why did its follow-up garner from me such a visceral, emotional response?

Of course, no doubt part of it was down to the craft of the game itself. It is good. Really good. The music is heavenly and the fact that the ostensible third game in the series is actually something like the ninth does hold you somewhat emotionally hostage. But that aforementioned delight in optimism, the joy of experiencing a happy ending for a change (you will note that I am writing a blog post about a video game, and not the ongoing Labour Leadership Election), still stops somewhat short of an adequate explanation for me. I feel that it is in the delivery of this sentimentality as much as the message itself. Similar to the viewing of Disney movies themselves, playing Kingdom Hearts is a practice in infantile regression. In that the player willingly takes on the role of a childlike actor and experiences nostalgia not in the literal sense, but as a genre unto itself: we aren't so much feeling the pain of a past that we can never return to, so much as we are entering into that past for the first time.

And is this nostalgia genre not what we are endlessly barraged with, in multiplexes and on streaming services? Texts we know are nostalgic before we partake in them, concerning brands and experiences that we have no investment in. It seems that a key feature of nostalgia today is that the nostalgic text professes to exist, regardless of your own personal investment in it. Perhaps, Star Wars was the seminal moment for this genre. Perhaps this is some inherent form of human storytelling. Still, I think most of us can tell there is some difference between George Lucas' nostalgic pulp space opera and J.J. Abrams' Star Wars by way of Star Wars. 

Whilst I'm not interested in blanket-disparaging escapist fantasy, there is a danger in this wider nostalgia-qua-genre, both in that it's a creative dead end of glorified reruns and in that nostalgic experiences like KH3 are perhaps too sweet, too optimistic, provide too much hope. These are naturally not inherently bad qualities, but in so far as that these sentiments are directed not towards our future lives, or our present conditions, but to our non-existent pasts, they keep our imaginations dull and limited: to hope is the infantile fantasy of Disney movies and video games.

I'm now posed with the exceedingly difficult question of how to end this blog post without adulating the inherent cynicism in these products, without talking down, even betraying, my own personal experiences. Sure, I could lie and say that I've only ever been moved by old social realism films, and that cheap sentimentality produced by unconquerable media corporations has no effect on me, but what would be the point? Instead, I think I'm just going to go and cook a meal with my friend, Remy. The rat chef. From Ratatouille.

Argento Against Andre: Surrealism as Anti-Neorealism

Both emerging from the Italian film industry, albeit at different epochal contexts, the neorealist movement and the cinema of horror/giallo auteur Dario Argento begs comparison. Whilst they ostensibly seem worlds apart, these two distinct perspectives on film exist in dialectical conversation with one another, with Argento clearly decrying the foundational ethos of the preceding generation of Italian cinema.

Where film critic and theorist Andre Bazin saw realism and immersion as film's ultimate goal (1967a), Argento is far more interested in providing a cinema of spectacle and whilst Argento's early films in the giallo sub-genre (the proto-slasher films that often invoke the works of Agatha Christie) are certainly more tame than his later experimentation with technicolor intensity and supernatural storytelling, they possess a disregard for stern realism all the same. For example, the passage of time, which in Bazin's formulation should be continuous and naturalistic (1967a), is played with particularly in Tenebre (1982). Scenes play out of order as flashbacks disguised as dream sequences slowly unveil the film's secret.

The flashback-qua-dream sequence in Tenebre (1982).

This is perhaps the most transgressive instance of that giallo trope which emerges perennially throughout Argento's films, wherein which an element shown early in the narrative becomes pivotal to solving the core mystery. This is more obvious elsewhere in the film, particularly when the young Gianni attempts to remember the telling detail he had repressed from viewing one of the murders, but in the flashback-qua-dream sequence particularly the flow of naturalistic time is disrupted.
This echoes similar moments in Argento's directorial debut, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (Argento, 1970), and his wider oeuvre, even playing a role in the supernatural gialli Suspiria (Argento, 1977) and Inferno (Argento, 1980). In Suspiria though, Argento disrupts normative time in another way: by utilising the soundtrack. Goblin's prog-rock accompaniment blares out "Witch" for the audience, long before the story the character's suspect the secret of the Tanzakademie, ensuring that Suspiria presents itself as a non-chronological experience. I think we can say that the use of music in Argento's cinema is also decidedly anti-realist in its implementation, as often the line is blurred between diegetic and non-diegetic sound (notably in Tenebre's use of classical music).

Rose is attacked in Inferno (1980).

Whilst Suspiria and Inferno are both anti-realist in their supernatural subject matter, I think that's less relevant to the Argento rejection of the neorealist tendency than a wholesale commitment to "simultaneous cohesion and incoherence" (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 19) that permeates the giallo and its supernatural counterparts alike. That being said, the supernatural subject matter, and the intention to cultivate a Gothic fairytale aesthetic, accommodated a space for Argento to push against realism in fiercer ways, with Suspiria arguably being the zenith: "Every facet of Suspiria is laced with a knowing self-awareness that not only shuns but also aggressively mocks any attempt at realism" (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 14).

Reflecting on the "pure" cinema of De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Bazin highlighted that there was "[n]o more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema" (Bazin, 1967b: 60). Suspiria doesn't cast non-actors, in fact it casts actors with a subtextual specificity. Arguably bringing an audience out of the immersion, but operating in a sphere of recognisable consciousness and signifying meta-narrative traits, Argento cast Jessica Harper as Suzy Bannion, who has become known for presenting "characters that straddled innocence and experience" (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 33), a relative neophyte to co-stars and cinematic icons Joan Bennett and Alida Valli. There is potentially something to be said about the resemblance between Harper and a young Joan Bennett, but both of the older women are utilised to play homage to the noir genre and their roles within it (Schulte-Sasse, 2002).

However, interestingly, Argento doesn't seem to reject the realist ethos with regards to location shooting so vehemently. He utilises some shots on location, notably Berlin's Königsplatz, but it's important to note that even here the reality we see is distorted and warped, akin to the meticulous set design that elsewhere invokes surreal, dreamlike qualities.

The iconic line in Suspiria, suggesting that "bad luck isn’t brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds" (Argento, 1977), is considered by Heller-Nicholas to be rendered totally false by the subsequent discussion with an occult expert and the 'reality' of the film's witches (2015); I would disagree, as I think the line instead operates as one face of the film's duality, and a key component in the blurring of the fantastical realm and the real one. That the witch of Suspiria appears to be real belies how fundamentally unreal the rest of the film is designed and, from her first steps into Berlin, protagonist Suzy Bannion is confronted with a warped fairytale world of artifice. Meticulously designed sets and non-naturalistic lighting choices can be read as eschewing the idea that any of this is really happening.

Meticulously constructed set design delivering an eerie, dreamlike visage in Suspiria (1977).

As the film delivers an eerie effect of the nightmarish unconscious brought violently to the forefront, Professor Milius, who seeks to disprove his cynical colleague Mandel, does not go against the earlier statement, but rather aligns himself with the broken mirror, rather than the broken mind. Suzy is trapped in a nightmarish hellscape, caught in the battle between philosophies of the real and the fantastical; she is free from the nightmare only once she synthesises both viewpoints, that it may well be the case that nothing is real, but she must act as if it's real nonetheless.

If Argento's films are concerned with making sense of that which cannot be understood then they are in direct conflict with the neorealist desire to be immersive and its dealings with understandable, even universal, experiences. In fact, in Tenebre (Argento, 1982), Arthur Conan-Doyle is invoked to this effect: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth". This, perhaps, is Argento's manifesto, his guiding principle, in his surrealist approach. If the approaches differ, I think we should look to where the contexts converge, particularly with the politics of fascism. To the neorealists, fascism was pertinently present, always only slightly out of view. For Argento though, enough time had passed for a Europe in thrall to fascist fervour to transition into history and, then, into fantasy. Where neorealism sought to explore societal redefinitions in fascism's wake, Argento invokes fascistic (both Italian and German) historical context to blur the lines of the actual and the macabre. In the aforementioned Königsplatz, the fantastical invocation of history turns a blind man's dog upon him, murdering him brutally. Witchcraft is linked to the natural in Argento's two supernatural classics, with the possessed dog and maggot-infestation in Suspiria and murderous cats and rats in Inferno; it is the consigning of fascism to regrettable, but naturalised, history that is at the core of its re-emergence in violent form. This elucidates a key difference in the two cinematic portrayals of fascism: neorealism is concerned with the structural violence committed on the subject of (post-)fascism and the scars it leaves behind, where as Argento invokes it as a fearsome return of the repressed.

"[I]t is clear that if we wish to remain on the level of art, we must stay in the realm of imagination. I ought to be able to look upon what takes place on the screen as a simple story, an evocation which never touches the level of reality, at least unless I am to be made an accomplice after the fact of an action or at least of an emotion which demands secrecy for its realisation. This means that the cinema can say everything, but not show everything. There are no sex situations-moral or immoral, shocking or banal, normal or pathological-whose expression is a priori prohibited on the screen, but only on condition that one resorts to the capacity for abstraction in the language of cinema, so that the image never takes on a documentary quality."

(Bazin, 1967b: 174)

Berlin's Königsplatz in Suspiria (1977).

Bazin decried the making visual of sexuality and violence, if films were to possess the qualities of art. I'm sure Argento would disagree. The differences and divergent points continue: where the neorealists looked towards new, post-war configurations of masculinity, Argento seems more concerned with femininity. Neorealism took its inspiration from the streets, embodying documentary quality, and Argento took his inspiration from literary works and high art. "Argento's narrative universe is one where logic and reason are destabilised and subverted," (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 32), where as neorealist filmmakers, such as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, had depicted the logical, sequential consequences to actions. Through all the minutia, Argento has placed primacy on the spectacle, an act that any neorealist would consider perverse.

Works Cited:

Bazin, A. (1967). What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bazin, A. (1967). What is Cinema? Volume 2. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Heller-Nicholas, A. (2015) Devil's Advocates: Suspiria. Great Britain: Auteur.

Schulte-Sasse, L. (2002). The "mother" of all horror movies. [Online] kinoeye. Available at: http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/schultesasse11.php [Accessed on: 07/04/2019]

Films Cited:

Suspiria (1977) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: SEDA Spettacoli.

L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo (1970) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: SEDA Spettacoli.

Inferno (1980) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: Produzioni Intersound.

Tenebre (1982) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: Sigma Cinematografica.

Ecoporn: For Pervert's Eyes Only?

Increasingly, images fetishising nature seem indivisible from everyday digital life. Critics, such as Lydia Millet, highlight the failure of these digital images to provoke substantial discussions regarding environmentalism (2004). Coining the term 'ecoporn', she described the consumption of these images as delivering:

“picture-book nature, scenic and sublime, praiseworthy but not battle-worthy. Tarted up into perfectly circumscribed simulations of the wild, these props of mainstream environmentalism serve as surrogates for real engagement with wilderness, the way porn models serve as surrogates for real women.”
(Millet, 2004)

Yet, it may not be as perverse an action as this dramatised commentary would have us believe.
If we take pornography to mean a distortion of reality for pleasurable consumption, when locating the pornography of ecoporn, we find it not in the corrected, artificial images themselves. Instead, it is their captions, the anchors to reality, which always accompany an image with the name of the place they supposedly represent, and which credit the photographer akin to an artist, from where pleasure is derived.

Consuming ecoporn is less an act of naively enjoying the fine-tuned, cherry-picked image, and more of a willing disavowal of one immediate reality for another constantly detached fantasy.
The perversity of reframing and the voyeuristic tendency is found throughout photography as a form itself and is not unique to images of ecoporn (Berger, 1972). Yet what I think we can see is a juxtaposing of place, a clear distinction between the Here and There. If we look to the caption attached to this prominent and popular /r/EarthPorn image, Texas is the monotonous, prosaic Here, where Alaska is the detached, fantastical There, ever separated from our everyday experience of a natural world.

At its core, ecoporn exists as a fantastication of the mundane and everyday; an escapist promise for those trapped in post-industrial urban melancholia of nature's magical qualities. That it is a longing for something more real than reality is similarly important- what's the point in a heaven, not on Earth?

 
Ecoporn may be cynically developed by the wealthy, those who possess the time, skills and high-grade equipment required to produce such images, but its consumption occurs at the popular level. The "gratification without social cost" (Millet, 2004) may prove insulting to the environmentalist, immersed in nature, but to those who see nought but concrete, ecoporn can take on a form of popular imaginative liberation. Though the fetishisation of the natural world absolves us of guilt for the human role in environmental destruction, it is rarely targeted towards the people in positions of transformative power. No one's tagging the Fortune 500 in their holiday pics.

When we read ecoporn as merely a mediation of nature's reality, we deny this imaginative potential. Beyond personal liberation, activist movements have drawn off the principles of ecoporn in spite of this contemporary cynicism towards it. Historically, pre-digital ecoporn had yielded significant victories for green movements long before the Instagram filter: notably, in the campaign for the 1964 Wilderness Act in the US (Meisner, 2010). Similarly, is it not the convergence of biophilic fantasy, of mass anthropomorphism and the proliferation of widely accessible and emotionally moving ecoporn that has yielded a modern, resurgent green movement? If we look to the recent youth climate strikes, this sentimentality abounds. Concerned with the failings of humanity as nature's paternalistic caretaker, progressive views on the natural world have come about not in spite of ecoporn, but because of it.

Photo from the Youth Climate Strike, by Ting Shen.

Works Cited:

Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: Harmondsworth: British Broadcasting Corporation ; Penguin.

Meisner, M. (2010). Blinded by Ecoporn. Alternatives Journal, 36(1), 7.


Millet, L. (2004). Ecoporn Exposed. Utne, (125), 34-35.