Metal City - Hai Ina Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana

Warping my brain one movie at a time - Flower Of Flesh And Blood.

I was alone this weekend. My social life has flatlined through a disturbing two-pronged attack: a cancerous slew of girlfriends have afflicted my nearest and dearest, thankfully sparing me from their swarming, bacterial malaise. The result is, of course, most of my friends are strangely bedridden - and they feel that being quarantined until their treatment has ceased is the only humane thing to do. I tend to agree with them, having been privy to the madness that an acute case of girlfriend can do to a man, as he begins saying things like 'I'm a FEMINIST!', and talking about how much he loves dance clubs. Secondly, as I am currently 'between engagements' (Read: Finished uni, not yet gainfully employed), my options for meeting new and exciting folks are extremely limited. But, that's okay. Because this weekend, I decided to experiment with myself.

My dear friend Clare warned me against this kind of hideous behaviour several months ago when I announced my intention to watch nothing but Michael and Roberta Findlay's 1974 film "Snuff" for a straight week. Just to see what would happen. This weekend, though, I had nothing better to do - and I thought it was about time that I truly disturbed myself.

See, a lot of you pussies out there have a few problems with the idea of 'extreme entertainment'. You think that a Good Charlotte record and a copy of 'American Psycho' (the film, not the book), makes you a candidate for Intensity 101. Most of you simpering, namby-pamby mother's boys have no idea about the rollercoaster ride of stomach-churning nausea and existential wreckage that is the world of extreme cinema. I've touched on this subject in an earlier post, where I outlined my love of underground/grindhouse entertainment. This time, we're talking about the sick stuff. Things that aren't cute. You don't look at them and smile nostalgically at the timid special effects, and the limp-wristed attempts at violence. I'm talking about the kind of films that are the stuff of night sweats, involuntary urination, and a sensation of dread and malaise so intense that it causes one to cling to the nearest warm body, weeping at the carnage and depravity unfolding on the screen in front of you, which has been transformed with the press of a 'play' button into a portal to Hades.

Unless, of course, you're me.

I remember reading about it in the most excellent textbook Killing For Culture : The History Of The Death Film From Mondo To Snuff. And I remember reading about Charlie Sheen's ill-fated attempt to get the FBI to investigate and ban it, the sissy boy. I remember it spoken of in hushed tones on alt.horror - it was the film that went too far. The point where the horror genre finally achieved what must have been its ultimate goal since the early part of the twentieth century - to slowly decimate the very idea of a 'narrative', replacing the blocks that were amputated with mechanized, artificlal depictions of violence - usually revolving around damage taking place to a human body. The film in question was Guinea Pig 2: Flower Of Flesh And Blood.

You probably shouldn't click on the link I've provided above. If you're easily upset by violent images - or if you're basically a big chicken in general - keep away. For the rest of you, let me qualify my position on the subject of Za Ginipiggu - since I've already been accused today of trying to academically justify my reasons for even watching anything so totally depraved and vicious.

For those of you wimps out there who've never heard of Za Ginipiggu, and are too lazy/afraid to click on the link above, what we're talking about here is essentially a Japanese incarnation of the work of Ruggero Deodato/Umberto Lenzi/Niko Mastoriakis - an attempt to claim the title, once and for all, of Most Violent Film Of All Time. There have been many pretenders to the throne - the cannibal cycle, from Cannibal Holocaust to Make Them Die Slowly, for example. Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik is a little too arty to make the grade - and is more grotesque than violent, anyway. A few of you crybabies out there have been making waves in the media by claiming that Tarantino's Kill Bill may be a contender. To this, I laugh hysterically. I REALLY don't think so. And after seeing Za Ginipiggu - you'll agree with me.

So, basically - what you turkeys are in for if you decide to seek out Flower Of Flesh And Blood is 50-odd minutes of dismemberment. That's it. No plot, no characters... just a special effects workshop, in which a young woman is dissected by a deranged man with black teeth, wearing a samurai outfit. In very, very graphic detail. He cuts off her hands, her legs, and finally decapitates her with an axe - spouting off oddly poetic dialogue about 'flowers of blood' in the process. He lights a cigarette. He eats the girl's eyeballs - her 'jewels'. Then, he shows us his collection of body parts - and we watch as he adds his latest acquisitions. The film ends with our hero back out on the streets of Tokyo, stalking a new victim. Freeze frame on an innocent girl walking away from him. End. Fade out.

The thing that struck me while I was watching this second installment in Za Ginipiggu was that I found myself wondering 'Why am I watching this? What is this?' So profound is the effect of the film that even as I write this, I feel guilty - and almost ashamed of myself for watching such an utterly grotesque and savage spectacle. Surely this is a film with no redeeming features - a sleazy voyage into the most debased and diseased elements of the human condition? Does the Za Ginipiggu series represent the ultimate decadence of contemporary film - providing viewers with what they have been hinting that they have wante4d for decades: an immersive experience in pornographic violence, which fetishizes both the act and the physical damage to the body? Should we be ashamed of ourselves for allowing such an awful thing to exist - and is my friend right? CAN one academically legitimise an ostensibly indefensible film?

Well, I'm gonna try my damned best.

Like I said, I almost feel ashamed of myself for admitting that I saw Flower Of Flesh And Blood. Am I a truly sick maniac? Is this why I don't have a girlfriend? Have my own private neurosis finally coalesced in the form of an unhealthy obsession with cinematic violence? The film is an attempt to recreate our imagined idea of what a 'snuff film' would look like, should one exist. Indeed, to add resonance and veracity to the film - it looks like the producers cooked up a story about Za Ginipiggu being based on a real snuff film that one of the directors recieved from an over-imaginative fan. I can find no record of the case, and since Killing For Culture reiterates that not a single frame of a snuff film has ever been found. Not one. I don't care what your friend's friend's friend's uncle's friend says about how he saw one at a biker party one night - he didn't. It was fake. Let me say this one more time: There is not a single reported case of a snuff film existing. I don't want to get into the legal issues, let alone the artistic and cultural ones associated with the very idea of snuff films - if you want to know more about that, read Killing For Culture, or ask your local priest. For the purposes of this article, all you need to know is that a 'snuff film' - according to the term coined by Ed Sanders in his seminal Manson biography "The Family" - is a depiction of a murder on film, a murder specifically committed for the purposes of entertainment through film. So, Faces Of Death is not a snuff film. Nor is Executions or Mondo Cane or any of their exploitation brothers.

Where am I going with this?

If we are to assume - and rightly so - that the very idea of a snuff film is the most repellent, insidious, sinister, and abhorrent mode of filmmaking - then the recreation of a snuff film is, by association, just as odious. If that is true, then Flower Of Flesh And Blood is not simply unpleasant - it is immoral. It is a film which actively seeks to profit from the suffering of others. Even if snuff films are an urban myth - the possibility that they are not renders any attempt to trivialise their existance an exercise in the worst kind of exploitative nihilism, and a gesture which actively invites criticism and denouement.

As always, I have to get in the ring and defend the work's right to artistically - and legally - exist. 'Flower Of Flesh And Blood' is a nasty piece of work, yes. It certainly isn't for the squeamish - and it is a film which contains such phenomenal levels of sheer visceral, muscular power that even it seems unsure of what to do with them. It has the power to disturb dreams - and is a brick in the face of cinemagoers across the globe, an antagonistic gesture which lays down several gauntlets. On one level, it is a snarling attempt to provide an ultimate realisation of cinematic violence - every frame drips with a teeth-bared, nihilistic slime, as the images howl in the viewer's face: "Okay, you motherfuckers - if you want to watch something violent, then HERE is something violent. Here is violence, and nothing else. I hope it was worth it."

I'll probably get a whole bunch of mail from you turkeys, in which i'm vilified as a deeply sick soul - but I'm going to say this anyway. 'Flower Of Flesh And Blood' is a beautiful film.

There.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let me just qualify that statement before you finish dialling the number for the police. When I say that it is a beautiful film, I don't mean that the sight of a girl being chopped to bits is beautiful. Although, I suppose - technically - it could be. What I am referring to is the kind of beauty that the images of Pasolini's masterpiece Salo offered us: Wonderfully textured, dense, evocative visual images achieved through colour, shape, and the breathtaking monolithic energy that total symmetry can provide. And, among these incredible, penetrating images - a vomiting up of all of the putrid evil that humanity is capable of. In the case of Salo, a litany of outrages perpetrated on a group of youngsters, beginning with sexual humiliation, moving into cophrophilia and other scatological scenarios, and ending in physical torture, dismemberment, and execution, in an attempt to give us an impressionistic portrait of Italian facism at the end of the second world war. The construction of 'Flower Of Flesh And Blood' presents us with a fascinatingly kaleidoscopic vision of death and dismemberment. Hideshi Hibino seems hell-bent on reminding us that this is a film by continually experimenting with various coloured gels on the lights, working in primary and secondary colours associated with disease and death - namely, green and red. The samurai himself wears some kind of strange kabuki makeup - and his performance is oddly detached. Remorseful. He postulates endlessly on the significance of what he is doing - and describes the girl's demise in quite touching, poetic terms. He talks of 'flowers of blood' as he tears her apart, and intimates that what he is doing is borne not out of hatred - but out of love. He loves her so much that he is going to assist her in her journey to the other side.

I'm quite willing to accept this. But, at the same time, I'd argue that there is something slightly more socially relevant at work here - when the samurai talks of committing his acts of violence out of love, not hate - he is clearly referring to the directors, and the creation of 'Flower Of Flesh And Blood' itself. Bear with me - I'm going somewhere with this. It isn't out of the question to view 'Flower Of Flesh And Blood' as a postmodern splatter film - I'd think of the entire Za Ginipiggu series as a collection of metafilms. And perhaps, that is their link - a link which seems lost on most film scholars and other academics of various stripes. At the same time as 'Flower Of Flesh And Blood' is violent - it is also about violence. Think about this - the film is not a snuff film. It is a snuff film presented as entertainment - and YOU ARE WATCHING IT. WHAT THE HELL KIND OF SICKO ARE YOU? WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM?

This is what the film is, essentially, attempting to say.

It's a trap. If you watch the film, you are implicating yourself in the creation of the film, because you are creating a demand for it. But, like the ill-fated Barry Convex in Cronenberg's infinitely relevant Videodrome says - why watch it? Why would ANYONE want to watch something like 'Flower Of Flesh And Blood'? Through the samurai's dialogue, we see a character who is a mouthpiece for the filmmakers. They are doing this awful thing - creating a foul, repellent piece of cinema - out of love for us. They are giving us violence - raw, ugly, vicious, and exposed. It isn't stylised or clean - and it certainly isn't in a work which can ever be deemed 'entertainment'. It is simply an exercise in stomach churning brutality - an excercise that YOU ASKED FOR. Now, aren't you ashamed of yourself? Don't you feel dirty?

I'm going to shoot for a Baise Moi moment here, if I may. By this, I'm referring to an infamous article that I wrote for the DUSA magazine that earned me a few stern words from the chief editor, because I was suggesting something that she deemed as outlandish and 'irresponsible'. I would argue that a film like 'Flower Of Flesh And Blood' is, in fact, psychologically healthier to view than - say - Lethal Weapon.

No. I'm serious.

Take 'Flower Of Flesh And Blood'. A girl is murdered in graphic detail. She is in pain. She is afraid. She is degraded and humiliated by a sick, dangerous creature. She is a victim of his abhorrent affections - and will be ripped apart by him onscreen, in a vulgar display of severed extremities and separated offal. It is very intense, very upsetting, and very, very real.

Now - take Lethal Weapon. A good-looking-yet-crazy cop spends at least 75 of the film's 90 minutes of running time engaged in the act of shooting people. He shoots them in the face, chest, legs, arms, and back. The bodies pile up - and death is treated as a joke. Mel can cap off as many rounds as he likes, and he can kill as many people as he wants, as long as he flashes us that winning grin as he does it. In the film, an endless parade of people are murdered by Mel's character - but that's okay. They were 'bad'.

That's pretty much an accurate overview of both films. Which one seems to have a more healthy, realistic attitude towards violence? Which one could even help to prevent violence by showing it as a gruelling, harrowing, inhumane display of viciousness - which is ultimately self-destructive? And which one shows the very idea of ending the life of another human being as a game - a stunt which is custom-made to help you get the girl and pull of the awesome acrobatic move with your unlimited-ammo-clipped dual-pistols? Which attitude would you rather embody? Murder as an experience laced with disgust and revulsion, or murder as a game?

Now, guess which of the two films have a right to legally exist in this country. Which one of us is the sick freak with no respect for human life, again?

Posted by David at April 13, 2004 02:43 AM | TrackBack