On recognizing the Western lens
Last night I stumbled across a new addition to the Criterion Collection on Hulu: the Japanese film Fall Guy (1982). By happy coincidence it happened to be based on a play by the playwright I’ve been researching--Tsuka Kouhei (つかこうへい), who seems to be a Neil Simon-y type figure. It’s been difficult to find anything on him since very little seems to have been written on him in English and Japanese language books aren’t exactly easy to come by. But my difficulties in geeking out on research are neither here nor there; the reason I bring this up is that the film got me thinking about context.
The Japanese title of Fall Guy is 『蒲田行進曲』 lit. The March of Kamata, referring to Kamata Film Studios where the action of the film takes place. The film follows three characters in and around Kamata: a past-her-prime heroine, her lover the fading hero, and a stunt man who loves her. This stunt man is the one singled out by the English language title, despite the fact that the heroine gets top billing and a large share of the main narrative thrust. It just seemed so ridiculously Western Film Guy to impose a single male “underdog” narrative on a film that is actually about much more than that. And, unsurprisingly, the divine actress Matsuzaka Keiko who won a handful of awards for her role as Konatsu gets relegated to a few lines at most in the English language reviews I found.
It’s all context--the title signals that the film is about a stunt man and the (let’s be real) men reviewing have no need to challenge that because of course the film has to be about a man, right? That’s their context.
The context question came up for me a few months ago when I watched another Japanese film called The Happiness of the Katakuris (カタクリ家の幸福, 2001), directed by Miike Takashi. And, oddly enough, this film also stars Matsuzaka Keiko; she plays the de-glam mother of the titular Katakuri family who run a guest house up in the mountains where TRAGIC THINGS happen to those who visit. After watching The Happiness of the Katakuris, I found it difficult to categorize, though that hasn’t stopped my Western Film Guy nemeses from lazily placing it in the horror-musical genre and evaluating it as such.
But framing the film as The Sound of Music with Zombies erases, yes, the context of the original. I don’t see how anybody could attempt to critically watch the film without understanding that the music is rooted in 歌謡曲 or kayoukyoku, a nostalgic genre of music loosely equivalent to the German Schlager or perhaps to the 1980s and early 1990s era of Bollywood songs. And, perhaps even more importantly, that the main male actor in the film is the extremely well known pop star Sawada Kenji aka “Julie” aka a gender-bending David Bowie style artsy sex god. Watching former sex god Sawada Kenji play a schlubby father is a far different thing from watching some actor play a schlubby father--and Miike knows it, which is why he included an old school “Julie” style television showcase in the film. Yet, Sawada Kenji gets barely a parenthetical mention and the kayoukyoku none at all. Nope, as far as the West is concerned: SOUND OF MUSIC WITH ZOMBIES WHY IS THIS SO WEIRD LOL.
Can you say you’ve seen a film if you don’t know the context?
I certainly include myself in this question. I’ve mentioned this a handful of times in various places but watching Dil Se in 2004 when I had just started watching Indian films was a far different experience than watching it again five years later when I had seen a lot of Indian films. I had completely misread what Preity Zinta’s character had to offer to Shahrukh because I was still unfamiliar with the wedding tropes of all the 1990s films it was referencing--and I had mistook mundanity for exoticness. And one certainly has to question the glowing reviews to mediocre films on both sides of the Bolly-Holly divide along the same lines--how much of that praise can we attribute to a lack of familiarity and context? Of seeing only what you want to?
The last little tangent I’ll lead you on relates to the rise of the Youtube Clip. This morning an Indonesian friend of mine sent me a clip of a JR NTR song--this song from Shakti--that had been overdubbed with an anime theme song. She wanted to know what “Bollywood” movie it came from. (YES, I KNOW! It’s a Telugu film.) I quickly identified the track for her, though I hadn’t seen Shakti, by guesstimating the year based on JR NTR’s weight and then checking to see what fantasy films he was in that I hadn’t seen. *Bingo* It took me all of about five minutes.
But the disembodied film song remains a pet peeve of mine.
I don’t like the disembodied film song and I like even less the contextless mocking they receive from contextless dummies. Not that every film song is serious business but some of them used to be… but those don’t play well in the clubs or on youtube. The film song ripped from the context of the film it’s in just becomes another MTV video--and, sadly, that’s the direction more and more Bollywood films seem to be taking, with filmmakers who don’t take songs seriously and corporations who seem them only as promotional tools. And what promotes better than a hit song at the clubs?!
It’s the same direction American pop has taken over the last 15 years or so and it’s really depressing, to be honest. What I wouldn’t give for a lovingly picturized lament or a folk song or sisterly bonding song or a political anthem… so many other things other than soppy romance numbers or items. Well, at least we still have the Southern industries, right?
ETA: I also wonder what role the lack of empathy plays--do foreign viewers see actors that don't look like them as real people? That might be worth writing about later. And I'd also like to ETA that in the handful of reviews I read on Fall Guy, it's rather disturbing that a rape scene was almost universally written about as "he watches her get raped" versus "she is raped while he watches"--in other words these critics were primed to read "HE" as their POV character even when the heroine is the main character in the narrative.
(Originally posted September 15, 2013)