Miike's Imprint

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After crowing for months about how badly I wanted to see Takashi Miike's episode for Showtime's Masters of Horror series, titled "Imprint", I find it a little strange that I have yet to say a word about having actually watched the film about two weeks ago. What can I say, I've been lazy with respect to actually reviewing any films I've seen lately.

Anyway, my expectations were stratospheric for "Imprint," which I tried to temper beforehand by reading the few reviews around. The episode wasn't allowed to be played here in the States, due to its... graphic nature... so a lot of people haven't seen it yet, and reviews are rather scarce. It did get played in jolly ol' England, though, which is how I found a copy off Ebay.

The most helpful review I read was at Kaiju Shakedown, Variety's Asian Film Blog, by Grady Hendrix. Going into the film, I think it was important to, as Grady put it:

"if you look at this as a send-up of MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA it starts to make sense. The gorgeous visuals (and they are gorgeous - torture has never looked so fashionable), the heavily-accented and poorly delivered line readings by non-native English speakers, the idea of a Western man sitting down to force a geisha/hooker to tell him "the Truth" about her life, all of this is taken directly from GEISHA and it's an artbomb planted in the heart of the original book."

I still haven't seen MoaG, but I know the basic gist of the story, along with the criticism of the book and film as it being an "American White Male's point-of-view about Geisha." "Imprint", then, twists the story onto its head (Grady again):

"Maybe it's the gleefully twisted idea that Billy Drago is supposed to be playing Arthur Golden who sits down to get the memories of a geisha but, instead of a polite tale of rape and prostitution seen through a rose-colored lens and ready-made for American consumption, he gets a harrowing story about abortion, hatred, lies, incest, torture and rubber fetuses that not only answers the question of "What's under all that hair piled up on Japanese lady's heads?" but is, ultimately, unshowable to the very Americans who are supposed to watch it."

In actuality, Grady's review did my job for me; he sums up the film pretty much exactly as I would, in retrospect. One does wonder about Miike's point in pushing every single last button he can find - incest, rape, abortion, each drenched with copious amounts of every body fluid you can imagine - but is he just, as Grady put it, putting his id up on the screen, or is there more to it? Grady wrestles with the question, too, but I think, ultimately, there is more to it, and the film deserves some attention. It's a defiant slap against American homogonizing of Asian culture, as pretty tea ceremonies and billowing colorful kimonos; there's real ugliness underneath those piles of hair, brother.

It also got me thinking about the image of the Asian woman, and how that's been specifically fucked with by horror films the past ten years or so. If we look at (and critics of horror film do) the slasher films of the seventies being about creating a space for the image of woman to fight back, to be that "Final Girl" and survive Hell and come back swinging, then we have to look at the dominant image in horror of the past several years, of the Asian woman with long black hair hanging in her face, as a claim on their specific power, their strength. Because there really isn't, or hasn't been, a group of people in the world more identified by docility than Asian women. They are supposed to follow behind the man, be quiet and reserved at all times. And what better "Fuck you" to that notion than turning their image into one of absolute horror and intimidation. The head bowed forward, the hiding of the eyes... those are things to fear now.

And I'm sure that's an idea that's been forwarded more thoroughly already somewhere, and if anyone has any links to articles about that, please forward them here; I'd love to read up.

I should mention that I watched "Imprint" at 7:30 in the morning before a meeting here at work, and that, my friends, is not the way to watch a Miike film. There's something quite jarring about the sun rising on your back as you watch a girl being tortured until she urinates on herself... it is not the equivalent of a cup of morning coffee, in case you ever wondered. It felt wrong. Which may've influenced how effectively terrifying I found the film.