i’ve become more than a little lackadaisical about posting regularly to the blog. not sure why, but i’ve been more regular with comments on existing threads on movies i’m watching than with new posts. perhaps some blog-weariness? or just inertia since so few of us are making new posts? mark urged recently in a comment that we not hide posts about movies that don’t yet have topics of their own in comment threads for topics from years ago, and since it is rare that mark makes sense, here i am to post briefly about battle royale, which sunhee and i watched last week (on mark’s recommendation).
i have to say that this film completely defeated me. i enjoyed it thoroughly–mostly as a thriller comedy, but i’ll be damned if i can put my thoughts about it into any sort of explanatory frame. the setup seems obviously allegorical, but what is the allegory? sunhee suggests that it may be a critique of a hyper-competitive society, and the way in which the children’s society is revealed quickly to have never been innocent bears that out (the children are no more or less innocent or venal than the adults). but i think we might as well see it as an exploration of ethical choices. either way, the film’s payoff is not particularly complex thematically (unless i’ve missed something entirely) but it is a blast formally, though i do wonder if it would be as much fun if it were not schoolchildren but adults on the island–some of the cinematic “pleasure” seems to come from the shock of seeing children killed and killing (oh no, i’m never going to be able to run for president).
anyway, if any of you’ve seen it can suggest better reads of the film, have at it and me. (there are a couple of brief comments about it from last summer in the “japan” thread–should i move those here?)
I cannot say that this movie was “fun” for me. I was riveted and very much intrigued but always with some discomfort. I was shocked that this movie was even made.
At an intellectual level, I’d call the film a satire. As I’ve said to Arnab, it takes the idea of competition and survival to an absurd level to comment on the kinds of pressures that exist for young people. And there’s a clear moral in the film: don’t compete, care for each other. But the catch is that competition has become a norm (law) and caring for each other has become a crime–so the couple at the end could exist only in hiding.
Now, what about the gut response to the film? Why is it so fascinating? One answer could be the video game aesthetic and logic. Making a game life-like or making life game-like–so the pleasure comes from crossing one conceptual framework to another, or mixing the two. Another answer is somewhat obvious, showing what is unimaginable, children killing children. The more sadistic reason could be that the film plays out certain repressed desires in adults.
The part that I can’t really understand is the dream sequence between the main female character and the teacher, for that matter the teacher in general. Also the pitting of adults against children doesn’t make sense either. Even in a satirical situation, why would adults force children to play this kind of a game?
The idea of adults setting children to kill children is what sets ‘Battle Royale’ above the usual escapist action movie for me. The taboo of wrenching children from innocence to death in a matter of hours. And there is a ‘Lord of the Flies’ quality to the movie as we see which of the children adapts to the battle situation and how.
Earlier this year I saw a preview for ‘The Condemned’ which is the same idea, but it is adult prisoners. I immediately thought that it was a re-make of ‘Battle Royale’ but, from the preview at least, the aesthetic is entirely different. That and the fact that Vinnie Jones and Stone Cold Steve Austin are in it. In fact, I can’t call any of them to mind now, but isn’t there is a venerable tradition of movies in which prisoners are left to kill each other on some remote island, and we learn that there is nobility among thieves while the warden is a heartless bastard?
the ones with adults are only good when jean-claude van damme is among the hunted.
I was thinking about your post while watching Sion Sono’s disturbingly creepy yet ultimately disappointing Suicide Club, a film about a rash of youth suicides in contemporary Japan (groups of teens throwing themselves off buildings and in front of oncoming trains) which soon spills out into the rest of the “adult†population. Of course, the source of such dissolution may or may not be a popular girl-group composed of five Japanese pre-adolescents (their catchy, innocuous tunes are perfect paeans to post-industrial, technologically-enhanced isolation and they appear to have colonized the minds and hearts of most every major character). I was reminded of Battle Royale, which was released two years earlier in 2000 and assume Suicide Club to be a calculated response to the aforementioned film’s popularity. In these films and many others (not to mention anime, manga and contemporary Japanese pop art) representations of childhood and youth are rendered as dangerously other, sometimes as erotic objects of desire (for instance, lolicom girls, pre-pubescent Lolitas who pop up in all forms of cultural production . . . see Mr.’s stab at art making) but, more often than not, intimidating reminders that such signifiers are fluid/unstable entities—beings in the process of becoming—who stave off yet stridently reach out for the illusion of wholeness and community. In short, childhood and youth serve as potent cultural signs which mark the adult’s corrupt complicity with institutional conformity and the machinations of the state. I’ve always read Battle Royale as an allegory of contemporary Japanese corporate culture: resistance is futile, conformity is inevitable, kill or be killed the only ideology worth ascribing to, etc., etc. But seeing that my interests in representations of childhood and youth are often tied to issues of national identity (the child as microcosm of the state), it is understandable why I might choose such a reading.
Japanese popular culture is full of children in peril or youth asked to fight for their (and often their country’s) survival. Think of such sci-fi television series as â€Speed Racerâ€, “Astro Boy,” “Neon Genesis: Evangelion” or “Time Bokan”. Two films which speak most clearly to me are Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows (2004) and Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988). Kore-eda’s film appears to be a new-millennial response to Takahata’s anime classic about two WWII orphans who struggle to survive as American bombs obliterate the landscape. Nobody Knows, on the other hand, is about a family of children abandoned by their mother and left to their own devices. Both films are brutal condemnations of adult capriciousness and the decline of the state. Interestingly, Nobody Knows owes a great debt to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which is probably the template for late-twentieth century coming-of-age narratives (both films conclude with a boy running and running and running as if in search of something that will never materialize). Indeed, I might argue Turffaut’s film is an allegory about post-war France distancing itself from itself; a nation left scarred and morally uncertain after the Vichy regime’s gamble with history. But I digress . . .
More on lolicoms here and here.
Something naughty from Mr.