Great. People use to think all us Asian people know Kung-Fu and dry-cleaning. Now add to that the ability to explode like a David Letterman watermelon every time our bodies impact something hard. While, Westerners in other movies merely hit the ground with an unprotesting thud, the sound Asian bodies make when they hit concrete in Sion Sono’s Suicide Club is halfway between an ornate Baroque (nee. taco-bell) flatulence and a Jackson Pollack drip painting made inside a mosh pit.
Show offs.
Sion Sono’s film Suicide Club, for me, is a film about the erosion of Japanese culture. While it gives a nod in the direction of Robert Bresson (mentioned in the script), it also draws from the work of Michael Haneke (A Bresson disciple). The speculation of cultures that are so steeped in rote repetition they have all but lost sight of their purpose in existence, is a driving theme behind Haneke’s 7th Continent (where a family who tries to break free of daily drudgery by suicide ends up applying the identical 9-5 formula to killing themselves).
A film that is not traditionally resolved by “answers” is bound to stumble audiences, but the Suicide Club shows many hints along the way. Consider the discovery of the “skin-scroll,” a scroll of human skin stitched together into a continuous riddle without words. The Japanese E-Makimono picture scroll is a tradition that presented storytelling in horizontal scrolls during the Kamakura period (11th-14h century) in Japan. The rich visual allusion to human flesh being incorporated into a scroll depicting recent event serves to illustrate how even the media of a traditional art form has changed. If anything, the Suicide Club is a story of time and the force of change. It’s no surprise that the greatest point of tension is a train station, where by definition, a schedule of an arriving train is defined by a clock.
The Suicide Club reminds me of Chan is Missing in that it tries to solve a mystery by inspecting peripheral evidence. It goes down many wrong leads, but those wrong leads inevitably turns up new insights into the problem at hand. Look at the first suspect: People with tattoos. The police first saw a suspect in people with tattoos. In airports in Japan, passengers with tattoos are often associated with the Yakuza (Japanese mafia) and consequently denied entry into the country. That lead – much like the tendency to blame all of society’s ills on the most convenient culprit: gangs- led nowhere. Next, a mysterious internet user by the name of “the bat” was traced down. But when the bat gets kidnapped by a bunch of rock-and-rollers, despite all their posturing of sporting blond hair, acting like a cross between David Bowie, Dr. Frank-n-Furter, and Mad Max’s Toecutter, they get caught, and it appears that neither the cultural imperialism from the West, nor the pervasive internet (the reduction of lives into mere dots, an allusion to the pixelated representation of the modern self online) had anything to do with the murders. (An observation here: Japanese guerilla films have a tendency to use Western motifs during tremendous acts of violence: witness opera and the music of Bach being utilized during execution style scenes in Battle Royale, blond-haired Asian villains in the films of Takashi Miike, and Gaelic jigs sounded right before the Suicide Club’s 54 students hop onto the oncoming train in the opening scene, no doubt a legacy of associating all things West with…*cough* Hiroshima… violence)
So who is killing the kids of Japan? I think all signs point to the youth of today. It eventually becomes apparent that the children, the up-and-coming generation, are the ones who are destroying culture as Japanese people have known it to be. The children are the gallery of peers even the heroine has to answer to in the climactic moment of self-realization. The child band “Dessart” separates Detective Kuroda’s family’s attention when he calls for a kitchen table meeting with wife and kids. A poster of the prepubescent pop group reveals an abstract code of numbers imparted by hand signs. The school kids egg each other on to suicide during a school lunch break.
Ironically, (and like Haneke’s 7th Continent) the model of traditional Japanese conformism is being outmoded not by individuality; it is being replaced by *another* form of conformism. So the route of escape presented by the new generation is nothing but a repackaged brand of group allegiance.
The utterance of “how much one is connected to oneself”- for example- is the moral of the story. Combining Japanese Kata (the correct and only way to do something”) and Japanese etiquette (hospitality consisting of sparing others inconvenience) one immediately sees how these traditional ways are rendered obsolete when the modern man selfishly considers his connection to himself (before his traditional Japanese consideration to his fellow man) and randomly jumps to his death from a balcony. Because he didn’t take the trouble to see if anyone was below, he lands on a girl, who, instead of being concerned about a dying friend in the street, rushes into a bar, gloating over how she may have been physically deformed from someone landing on her. The focus of the phrase “connection to oneself” is played out repeatedly in how the folks of present day are so self-absorbed, they have lost touch with the tradition of the Japanese Kata.
In the final scene, when detective Shibusawa runs to the train station to “save” Mitsuko. She rejects his hand and instead –on her own volition- steps into a train that takes her away (into the future). For me, the Suicide Club is both a critique of the conformity in Japanese culture, and an ethnographic inspection of how that culture is attempting to break away from the traditional codes.
However, is it really breaking away? After all, every train’s destination eventually leads to the station it departed from.
