It's funny. I was browsing around at Borders the other day, when I sat down and read most of "Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael." It's a very short book. They go into all sorts of directions. They get talking about Forest Whitaker, which transforms into a comment about how he was good in The Crying Game but was ignored once the film went through its infamous mid-movie twist. Kael then said that she hates dread, which is different from suspense. Like in Boys Don't Cry, when you are waiting to see Brandon Teena get gang-raped and murdered. She said that dread is an awfully primitive way to make a movie. The word "primitive" is one that she uses a lot when criticizing a film. I remember her using it to describe Seven Beauties and As Good As It Gets.

It seems to me that Kael should know better than anybody that several of the best effects in films are primitive ones. She liked Young Frankenstein, but I don't think that she would argue that it was not a primitive film. What's she really seems to be saying, sort of in an underhanded way, is that if we are going to be manipulated in a very basic way it ought to be towards pleasurable ends. What she's also saying is that primitive ugliness ought not to be regarded as anything less but primitive ugliness.

That latter thought reflects much better on her, and I think that I agree with it. I recently saw the film Brazilian gangster film City of God at the art house. I sort of liked it. It had an electricity to it, especially in the scenes that play on what Kael calls dread. But I knew that it wasn't a very good movie. There were problems, namely that the protagonist is not a hood and doesn't belong to either gang. And so he is looking outside of everything. He doesn't have a lot of stake, and is literally telling us other people's stories. Even when he loses his virginity he admits that the details don't matter because it's not his story that is important. He tells us instead the story about a raid. Also, City of God was sort of an obvious, flat piece of work. There was nothing to deconstruct, and not a lot to get out of it. I realized that if I were to complain about it among film buffs, I may be accused of not being able to stomach or absorb fully the film's "toddler-on-toddler" violence and see that City of God is a masterpiece. I actually sort of liked the "toddler-on-toddler" violence, but I think people need to understand that just because a film is unpleasant or hard to watch, it doesn't mean that it's necessarily good.

Audition, if you know anything about at all about it, operates on primitive dread. There is a tad of suspense. I mean, we want to see "what's in the bag," and the killer comes behind a teenage boy while his incapacitated father vainly tries to warn him. That latter sort of scenario is a staple in Hitchcock, and the Scream films used it pretty well. It's fun to see things like that with an audience, because they'll scream at the screen. That's suspense. Dread is when the killer has drugged her boyfriend and is slowly pushing acupuncture needles into his eyeballs, and you're dreading to see him flopping around with those things stuck in his face. This is even stronger than the shooting of the little boy's foot in City of God. Audition is a better film than your typical "primitive dread" film, however. The effect goes beyond just dread or shock, and it develops into a genuine, ideological discomfort.

Audition is going to be best known for how the villain purrs "kiri kiri" as she pushes the needles in. Later she saws off his foot with piano wire, writhing in ecstasy as she saws back and forth. We realize that she is getting off on it. Later she throws the foot against the wall, splattering some blood onto the window. Then she straddles his other leg and gets to work on the other foot. It's very important to understand that she is doing it because she enjoys it. We aren't enjoying it, we actually like this guy, and we're cringing when we see him being tortured. But she is having a blast.

The tortured and the torturer are lovers. Shigeharu Aoyama has been widowed for seven years, and has been encouraged by his son and his producer friend to date again. The producer suggests that they hold an audition for a non-existent film and let the widower have his pick. Aoyama reluctantly agrees. And that's how he encounters Asami Yamazaki, a former ballet dancer who had to quit when she injured her hip. She felt that her entire identity had been lost, and compared the development to death. Aoyama finds this extraordinarily poignant. They begin dating, and Aoyama gently explains to her that the financing seems to have fallen through on the film or something like that and it probably won't get made. She is not very let down, as she didn't expect to get the part. Aoyama brings her to a retreat to propose marriage. She shows him her scars. They have sex. And then she is gone, only to return to torture him.

That torture scene. It seems to come completely out of left field. We think that Yamazaki has been passive and injured throughout the film, and so this sudden bout of aggression doesn't make much sense. We see Yamazaki being abused as a child, and we hear her explain that she has been abused. Is this abuse the cause of her psychotic behavior? I don't think so. It's not clear that the abuse that we see is really happening, or if Aoyama is imagining it. It's plausible that he is imagining it. He wants to see her as being hurt, shy and lonely. But if he isn't imagining it, I don't think that it has turned Yamazaki into a hurt, shy and lonely person. Rather she learns quite the opposite. It's better to be a perpetrator than a victim. In fact, the role of the perpetrator is the ideal one and the one of the victim the most degrading.

Miike is brilliant in giving us a hint, just one shot mind you, that Yamazaki is faking her role as a passive shy Japanese woman. Aoyama calls her and as she listens to the phone ring, a smile forms on her face. Aoyama had been warned not to give her a call by the producer friend, but he doesn't heed the warning. The implication is that Aoyama's crime was falling in love with this girl and taking her seriously as a human being. He genuinely wasn't as interested in her sexual qualities as he was in what she wrote in her resume. If he regarded her more distantly, as more of an object, it is implied that this may not have happened. Those needles she pushes into him might not hurt as much if this guy wasn't so damn sensitive. That seems to be the message of Audition. Its view of gender relations is that it's a kill-or-be-killed sort of sport.

Yamazaki goes on during this torture sequence about how Aoyama is one of those men who audition girls and then has sex with them. This is a smokescreen. She initiated the sexual encounter, far after he told her that the movie probably wasn't going to be made. The idea that it's revenge for the power dynamic of the auditioning process may have some thematic or symbolic relevance, but it doesn't make a lick of sense as far as the plot goes. Yamazaki genuinely doesn't seem that interested in getting the part. She isn't one of those girls who would do anything for a role. And so in that respect Aoyama doesn't have much control over her. But the whole idea of the audition provides a situation where the women are meant to be subservient and passive actors. To do what is asked by the male producers and directors. This is the traditional Japanese feminine identity distilled. Yamazaki despises it, and she despises Aoyama for falling in love with it.

I think that it's occurred to me that people aren't liking City of God because it's a brutal endurance test, but because it's Brazilian and it massages their social activist side. It's saying that we need to clean up this place. That's a nice sentiment, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in City of God, which trades off poetry for effect. Personally, I have a difficulty justifying social activism until I can develop some sort of solid ethical foundation in identifying what I should do and why I should do it. For example, I believe that racism stems from economic inequality. Other races are oppressed so that the dominant race can benefit, or rather so the other races are not much of a threat to the dominant race. And so the only way to defeat it is through a communist system where the state is everything and the individual is nothing, and there are no African-Americans or Asian-Americans or whatever, only Americans. Which sounds sort of nice, except that communism obviously has its own problems, and it may be better to be an African-American rather than just an American. Race and racism is an all-or-nothing deal, you see. And so defeating racism provides all new problems. I think that this sort of thinking is exactly why I didn't get into that social work program. I learned to think like this from social work training, but somehow we didn't get to go that extra mile. I'm too doubtful to be a Red-Doper-Diaper baby, as they call them on the Savage Nation program.

This is especially intriguing when dealing with the concept of "feminism." I've been told that "feminism" means that a woman should be able to become whatever she wants to become. It's like a Sartre-ian existentialism where we "become" instead of simply "being." Similarly, it implies that all ethics is arbitrary and all identity is arbitrary. I'm far from an expert in Sartre, or even fluent in him. Would ethics and identity be a threat to our freedom, or is freedom simply a fact, meaning that ethics and freedom can never be adequately defined? I think that it's the latter. In logic, we would say that the statement "Either the word 'woman' has a specific meaning or the word 'woman' does not have a specific meaning" is a tautology. As in, there is not one instance in which that phrase can be false. I think feminists would prefer to use the latter one, as whatever definition they provide to the word "woman" would exclude other possibilities. And so I think that the idea that a woman should be able to be whatever she wants to be, is probably an accurate description of the concept of feminism.

If they use any ethical framework, they are of course betraying this foundation and establishing a new one. Feminist philosophies then do not share anything in common, except, of course, they have something to do with women. This concept does of course allow for Yamazaki in Audition; who is a sadist and hurts people because she enjoys it. This is, again, penis envy where the penis is a weapon of destruction. This woman wants to be a monstrosity. A real monstrosity. In Mother's Day, the women were getting revenge for being raped and tortured, finding their status beyond girlfriends, daughters and sexual playthings through war. They had masculine rites of passage. But Yamazaki has been completely removed from the role of passive victim. She doesn't hurt rapists; she hurts pretty much completely innocent people simply because sawing off limbs makes her come. And why not?

Audition may be identified as a perversion of what we may call "traditional" feminism. Or concepts of "traditional" feminism taken to absurd extremes. Yamazaki has rejected her hated traditional feminine role as being a sweet and kind nurturer to the ends where she is downright unhumanitarian. After cutting off his feet and blinding him, Yamazaki seems to plan on making Aoyama into her lapdog. We see a dream sequence or something where he trips over a moving sack, and a guy with just a couple fingers and half a tongue crawls out. Yamazaki brings him a bowl of soup to lap up. The director Takashi Miike says that he thinks that she wants to keep him forever so that he can never leave her. He makes it sound like she does it out of obsessive love, but I don't quite think so. I think that she does it to degrade him. The needles in the eye thing. As I said in my review of Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, the eye is a symbol of omniscience. Jason kills people that way to rob them of their omniscience. To take them down a notch. This is more interesting than a simple castration as it does not mythologize Aoyama's masculine identity, but implies that his masculine identity is arbitrary and meaningless and she is going to destroy him purely as a human being as opposed to destroy him as a man. There's a feminist nihilist for you!

After all is said and done, and the son pushes her down the stairs snapping her neck, Aoyama looks longingly at her, watching her corpse mouth sweet words to him. Certainly if this was made with the sexes reversed, this would have been quite unacceptable and there would be charges of misogyny. Could you imagine a guy cheerfully cutting up a woman so he can make her his pet, being killed, and then the woman looking longingly at him while still bleeding, still in love? That last bit is really the kicker. The rest could be justified, it would still be really sick, but it could be justified. That ending could not. That's sort of the point of the film. Women, even strong women, have been the protagonists of horror films and thrillers constantly while at the mercy of men. It's the implication that because they are women they are more vulnerable. (But we also identify with them more, whereas we don't identify as much with the men who are at best clueless and at worst the psychotic madman.) The only way to really overcome this hated role of vulnerability is to turn the women into the psychotic madmen.

The violence in Audition can possibly be attacked as operating on "dread" or shock value. It certainly seems like the film is excessive "ooh-ooh-look-at-me-I'm-being-controversial" trash, especially after seeing the DVD's interview with Takashi Miike. Miike only does an audio commentary for the last half hour of the film where most of the violence takes place, and most of that is explaining what it is that we are seeing. He doesn't offer a whole lot of explanation or insight into what he is doing. At age 40, he wears blonde hair and dark sunglasses, coming off as an aging hipster. It seems that at best he is working from instinct, and at worst I am overestimating what he has done.

Miike says that women especially are disturbed by the film, and I think that it provides some serious problems for the progressive feminist viewer. If you are a progressive feminist viewer and you cringe at the violence or turn away from it. If you react with anything less but jaded boredom, that implies that you don't have the balls to play Miike's macho little game. You can call it a macho little game, but it still implies that you don't have the balls to play it, and you have been corrupted by your feminine identity.

Power dynamics, self-interest, Darwin, Hobbes, de Sade; I've thought for a while that they really represent the way that things are in the world and I'm pretty sure that I trust them. This is why I think that this film has really hit a major artery and has me worried. What Yamazaki does in this film is unpleasant and horrifying. And you get upset at her; you sort of cheer on her demise in a way. But she is never really evil. This is her trip, and you can't really criticize her trip unless it's happening to you. I sort of fell in love with Yamazuki. I find sweet, feminine, needy women attractive (although to be sure, her "feminine" side is rather overly sweet, feminine and need; she seems to be practically a doormat). And I really did sympathize with Aoyama. It's upsetting to see that it's all bullshit. Yamazuki certainly doesn't want to be saved as she hasn't any weaknesses. She just wants to cut off limbs and come. The strong live on and deserve to live on, and the weak die off and deserve to die off. And there is nothing but those with power and those without. It's an airtight philosophy and there is nothing we can do about it, no way to look beyond it.

If I don't watch out, I may begin sounding like a sensitive male. Then I'm chum for the sharks.