“JAY MCROY

“The Dream Has Not Ended Yet”

“ Splattered Bodies and the Durable Orgasm
in Hisayasu Sato’s Naked Blood

I want to make a film which has the

influence,
to drive its,
audience mad,
to make them,
commit murder.
—Hisayasu Sato,

I. Introduction: Social (Dis)eases and

the Body Horrific
Japanese director Hisayasu Sato’s cinematic tural logics of contemporary Japan. Set within
vision, particularly as manifested in his 1995 late industrial landscapes where the flesh is at
film, Naked Blood, is often compared by Western once agonizingly immediate and increasingly
critics to that of Canadian-born director David anachronistic, Naked Blood engages both the
Cronenberg. Though rarely explored beyond extreme dread and the “extreme seductive-
the basic acknowledgment that both filmmak- ness” that, as Georges Bataille reminds us, may
ers blend “the visceral, the psychopathological constitute “the boundary of horror.”3 Indeed, it
and the metaphysical,”1 this association helps is my ultimate contention that while Sato’s film
indicate that Sato, like Cronenberg, is a “literal- engages a multiplicity of territorializing cul-
ist of the body.”2 Sato posits the body as an tural forces, his film revels in intensity until
indiscrete, transformative, and immanent what emerges is a narrative of social and physi-
space that reveals the potential for imagining cal corporeality that allows viewers to conceive
new economies of identity; his films explore of an alternative existence that “no longer
both the abject dread and infinite possibility of resembles a neatly defined itinerary from one
the human body in a state of dissolution, con- practical sign to another, but a sickly incandes-
tributing an important and unique perspective cence, a durable orgasm.”4
to familiar preoccupations in contemporary Even Hisayasu Sato’s most commercially
horror cinema. This essay examines Hisayasu accessible works, if such texts can be said to
Sato’s Naked Blood as a text that mobilizes exist, are exercises in generic and cultural
tropes frequently associated with the (by no cross-pollenization. Though influenced by
means mutually exclusive) horror and science Western literary and cinematic traditions,
fiction genres in order to imagine the human Sato’s films reveal a myriad of social and po-
body as an infinitely unstable nexus of often litical anxieties over the “appearance” of the
contradictory social codes informed by the cul- Japanese physical and social body. Emerging

34 Axes to Grind: Re-Imagining the Horrific in Visual Media and Culture

Harmony Wu, editor, Special Issue of Spectator 22:2 (Fall 2002) 34-44
 MCROY

at the intersection of horror, science fiction, sity akin to blinding light) creates the “ulti-
and Japanese softcore pornography, Sato’s mate painkiller” to “improve the happiness of
films present a mélange of motifs from mankind.” The drug is called Myson, a sub-
splatterpunk, cyberpunk, and erotic cin- stance that causes the human brain to feel
ema, imagining the body as a liminal pain as pleasure. Eiji sneaks his elixir into an
construction. Thus, rather than assigning intravenous contraceptive that his mother (an
Sato’s films to a single genre, it is most established scientist) administers to three un-
accurate to examine Hisayasu Sato as one knowing young women in order to test his
of cinema’s most famous (infamous?) practi- drug. The test subjects include two unnamed
tioners of “body horror”—a hybrid, and thus women—a vain woman whose “greatest
more inclusive, category that “recombines” pleasure[s]” are having an attractive body and
multiple “narrative and cinematic conven- wardrobe; a food-obsessed woman whose
tions of the science fiction, horror, and “greatest joy” is eating—and Mikami, a
suspense film in order to stage a spectacle of woman who hasn’t slept since she was in the
the human body defamiliarized.”5 A compre- fifth grade, when the “shock” of the onset of
hensive term like “body horror” is intensely menses “blocked” her “sleep cycle.” Eiji
appropriate in discussions of Sato’s films, chronicles Myson’s impact by videotaping
where the metaphoric implications of the each woman from a distance, but his anonym-
splattered or transfigured body are central to ity is compromised when Mikami catches him
his aesthetic and political agenda. Though spying on her. In part because Myson allows
frequently exploring the non-human topos of Mikami to experience her disdain for Eiji as
technology’s complex role in the social imagi- attraction, they become romantically in-
nary of Japan’s late capitalist political and volved, and Mikami brings Eiji into her
ideological terrain, Sato’s cinema simulta- private world, showing him her “sleeping in-
neously turns on foregrounded images of stallation,” a virtual reality unit that allows
endangered physiognomies and corporeal her to experience a dreamlike state by show-
disintegration. Even throughout the last ten ing her “the scenery” of her heart.
years, as the circulation of capital, information Inevitably, Eiji’s experiment goes horribly
and inter-personal communication has be- awry. The other two Myson test subjects be-
come increasingly invisible and electronic, come grotesquely self-destructive: the
Sato’s films have continued to turn and return woman for whom beauty equals “pleasure”
to the physical body, in all its visible, messy, slowly transforms herself into a bloody, albeit
and all-too-vulnerable splendor, as a site of orgasmic, human pin-cushion, and the
perpetual contestation. The body for Sato woman for whom eating is “joy” literally con-
provides a flexible and ever-encodable space sumes herself in what are undeniably some of
that again recalls Cronenberg’s cinema, where the film’s most unsettling moments. The
the body is “at once a target for new biologi- narrative’s climax occurs when Mikami, with
cal and communicational technologies, a site whom Eiji has forged an uneasy yet intimate
of political conflict, and a limit point at which relationship, first kills her fellow test-subjects,
ideological oppositions collapse.”6 then slices a gaping vagina-shaped wound
into Eiji’s mother’s stomach and, following a
II. The Seen and the Obscene: cyber-enhanced sexual encounter with Eiji,
Naked Blood and the Japanese Body kills the young genius by first injecting him
Naked Blood is one of Hisayasu Sato’s most with Myson and then cutting his throat. In the
complex and visually arresting texts. In the film’s final scene, set several years after Eiji’s
film, teenage genius Eiji, inspired by his dead death, we learn that Mikami and her young,
father’s scientific and philosophic aspirations camcorder-wielding son—also named Eiji—
(which included a desire to better the world are traveling about the land, spraying the air
by helping humanity achieve a form of inten- with a substance that might be herbicide or

AXES TO GRIND 35
“THE DREAM HAS NOT ENDED YET ”

Science and technology are figured as both destructive forces and potential solaces in Naked Blood (Hisayasu Sato, 1995)

might be Myson. As Mikami drives off on a tenuous distinction between what constitutes
motorcycle equipped with a canister and reality and what represents a part of virtual
spraying tube (“I think I’ll go west today,” she reality’s “consensual hallucination.”12
tells her son. “It hasn’t spread there yet.”), the Manipulating audience understanding
child meets the viewers’ gaze and says, “the of what is real and what is imaginary is an
dream has not ended yet.” increasingly popular narrative gesture in
Controversial both in Japan and in the films that speculate upon the promises and
few Western markets and film festivals in pitfalls of an ever-emerging cyberculture.13
which it was publicly screened, Naked Blood What separates Naked Blood from many
continues to provoke strong (if, at times, comparable Western films, however, is that
bewildered) reactions by film critics, movie Naked Blood, as with many of Sato’s produc-
reviewers and cinephiles, some of whom have tions, was not backed by large budgets and
left written responses about the film on vari- extensive marketing strategies. Rather, Naked
ous on-line paracinema catalogues 7 and Blood emerges from Sato’s work both within
fan-based Internet websites dedicated to the and against the Japanese pinku eiga cinema,
celebration and circulation of “shock” and a largely uniform and highly regulated
“gore” cinema. Thomas Weisser and Yuko tradition of “soft core” films that, especially
Mihara Weisser, authors of Japanese Cinema: within the subgenres known as “Best
The Essential Handbook (1998), Japanese SM Pink” or “Violent Pink,” have become
Cinema Encyclopedia: Horror, Fantasy, and increasingly notorious for emphasizing par-
Sci-Fi Films (1998), and Japanese Cinema tial male and female nudity coupled with
Encyclopedia: The Sex Films (1998), label Sato’s narratives depicting “the rape and brutaliza-
filmmaking as “bitter” and composed in a tion of young girls.”14
“sledgehammer style,”8 and say Naked Blood In other words, unlike Western films with
rates “high on the gross-out level.”9 Similarly, comparable plots, Hisayasu Sato’s works arise
an online fan review called the film “an from a largely low budget cinematic tradition
incredibly transgressive horror film,”10 while with a distinctly formulaic, yet surprisingly
a reviewer for the “Sex Gore Mutants” flexible visual iconography. Yet, as I will
web site, while lauding the film for being discuss below, pinku eiga’s frequently violent
“one of the most depressing movies ever,” and misogynist tropes, coupled with prohibi-
also characterizes Naked Blood’s plot as “raw, tions enforced by Eirin (Japan’s censorship
existing to frame a raw emotion, not to tell body which rules on “decency” in film)
a story.”11 This last observation is not surpris- against the depiction of pubic hair and genita-
ing, especially given the film’s surreal lia, nevertheless allows for the possibility of a
imagery and complicated story line, as well as critique of dominant cultural power rela-
the movie’s intentionally disorienting and tions.15 Hisayasu Sato, however, stands out
ambiguous closing scenes that explore the among his fellow pinku eiga directors in both

36 FALL 2002
 MCROY

his detached, almost ambivalent cinematic ness,” also functions to “protect what
vision of postmodern alienation (what Paula is ‘real’”—that is, “unique to Japanese
Felix-Didier calls the “exposition on the exis- culture”—from “outside contamination...from
tential emptiness of modern life”16), and the being infiltrated and deformed by Western
extent to which his splattered bodies function influence.”18 Some of the most heated debates
as subjects for political/cultural inquiry. about censorship in Japan have arisen in
In Naked Blood, Sato questions not only the response to the controlled importation and,
politics of censorship in Japan and the cin- in several cases, subsequent visual alteration
ematic tradition within, and against which, of Western films and other media depicting
he toils, but also the impact of changing genitalia and pubic hair. 19 In this complex
gender roles and the emergence of virtual history of negotiation over cultural meanings,
technologies in late capitalist Japanese society. pubic hair and genitalia have come to resonate
beyond their prurient indexical value,
III. Decontextualized Lips: signifying a set of privileged discourses
Censorship and the National Body embodying questions of cultural authenticity
To fully comprehend the ways in which and anxieties about Western contamination.
Sato’s Naked Blood functions as a critique In Naked Blood, Sato operates within and, in
of Japanese censorship policies, though, it is some important ways, exceeds the conven-
first necessary to explore how these regula- tions of pinku eiga cinema, including the
tions came to be established. In Permitted foregrounding of nudity and graphic
and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and violence, to illustrate that censorship’s func-
Censorship in Japan, Anne Allison locates the tion to territorialize “national and public
origin of contemporary standards regarding space according to body zones” is far more
what can and cannot be shown on Japanese important than whether “covered or uncov-
screens as originating from a nexus of con- ered sex organs are prohibited” 20 in Japan.
cerns about national identity and the By violently altering bodies in scenes that wed
“appearance” and “purity” of the Japanese conventional signifiers of sexuality (such as
physical and social body. Much of this moans of pleasure and ecstatic postures) with
national focus on appropriate bodily repre- violent images of the human form turned
sentations, she argues, stems from a reaction horrifically against itself, Sato invests the
to Western orientalist imaginings of the body with the kind of “radical otherness” that
Japanese biological and social body, particu- Jean Baudrillard locates at the “epicenter” of
larly as they developed in the 19th century: “terror;”21 the body is dis-/re-figured in a way
It was as a corrective to this western perception that at once exposes (makes “naked”) and ex-
of Japanese “primitiveness” that the modern plodes (splatters) the social codes that inform
laws against obscenity were first imposed: its socially prescribed shape and meaning.
they were a means of covering the national The oppositional politics behind Naked
body from charges that it was obscene…in Blood’s scenes of body horror is perhaps best
part, acquiring such an identity meant adopting illustrated by a consideration of the scene in
Western standards of corporeal deportment. In which one of the most memorable instances
part as well, it meant developing a notion of the
of self-cannibalization in film history is per-
public as a terrain that is monitored and admin-
formed by the Myson test-subject who
istered by the state. Thus, the behavior of the
Japanese, as state subjects, in this terrain is equates joy with eating. Sitting naked upon
regulated and surveiled.17 her kitchen table, her body surrounded by
plates and cutlery, she slowly moves a fork
Of course, policing (and prohibiting) certain and knife into her genitalia, which is care-
modes of behavior and visual representations fully concealed by the mise-en-scène. As she
of the human body and human sexuality, moans in ecstasy, her arms move in a manner
especially in reaction to a perceived “dirti- that suggests that she is slicing something.

AXES TO GRIND 37
“THE DREAM HAS NOT ENDED YET ”

Challenging official images of the body through radical decontextualization

It is at this precise point in the film that the orientalist notions of embodiment. The poli-
Japanese censors’ prohibition against the tics of censorship and (controlled) nudity in
depiction of human pubic regions is radically Japanese cinema is laid bare, exposed in a
and horrifyingly recontextualized and sub- frenzy of the visible that ultimately discloses
verted: she slowly raises the fork and the how the concerns over maintaining a consoli-
camera focuses upon the bloody, quivering dated social body are at once partially
genital lips pierced on its tines. It is only at informed by, and yet ideally resistant to, West-
this point, when her lips meet lips that the ern and other non-traditional concepts of
audience fully realizes the extent of her social and cultural identity that inform how
orgasmically self-destructive action. Her self- the human body is visually portrayed and
consumption continues with a nipple and an ideologically invested. The quivering flesh at
eye, too, but it is the woman’s consumption of the end of the fork both is and is not genitalia;
her own vulval lips that most viewers will Sato is both reveling in the dangers of the
remember long after the film is over. body obscene and playing by (or maybe creat-
This scene offers what is perhaps Sato’s ing new) rules. Naked Blood, then, pushes and
most explicit example of how the violent deconstructs the boundaries of what can be
dismantling of the human body provides seen—both making the logics of cultural
a metaphor for the ways that disciplinary negotiation visible and in so doing contesting
power in Japanese culture both grants and them. Naked Blood skillfully directs the
restricts personal expression, maintaining a viewer’s gaze, guiding his/her experience of
notion of a cohesive national and cultural this film about detached characters caught up
identity. By blatantly displaying that which in extreme events that within the diegesis
cannot be shown (human genitalia) through unfold almost completely before the lenses of
a removal of the “obscene” object from photograph and video equipment—including
its traditional context, Sato simultaneously the meta-lens of Sato’s own camera. As
shocks as well as reveals some of the logics at such, the film provides a commentary on
work in late capitalist Japanese culture. bodily experiences, mediated visions and the
By revealing, through an ingenious process eroto-politics of the gaze.
of decontextualization, the very corporeal
features rendered invisible by national IV. Mothers and Sons; Women and
censors, Sato forces his audience to con- Work
front the nationalist logics behind Sato’s depiction of the splattered body
contemporary representations of the recognizes social anxieties accompanying
human body within Japanese visual culture, changes and continuities in gender roles and
an image system designed to maintain a spe- expectations as they relate to contemporary
cifically “Japanese” physical and social body Japan’s transforming social and economic
free (at least theoretically) from Western, landscape. Manipulated by the euphoric

38 FALL 2002
 MCROY

effects of Myson, the violence that the vain and support her husband’s “dream” that
woman and the gluttonous woman perform Eiji cites as a contributing factor to his
against their own bodies can even be under- emotional distance from his mother. The
stood as a proto-feminist critique of the social implications of her refusal to blindly
destructive impact of patriarchal authority comply with gender expectations derived
and beauty ideals: the women literally self- from a traditional patriarchal economy are
destruct in a frenzy of body modification intensified when one considers that Eiji’s
taken to near fatal extremes. In addition, mother, as a scientist working towards the
Naked Blood addresses what Anne Allison rec- development of a more effective method of
ognizes as cultural apprehensions over the contraception, is in a position to further
steadily emerging presence of women in the usurp conventionally masculine cultural
workplace and, by extension, the occasional roles by literally controlling biological, and
reconfiguration of domestic space: “In Japan by extension ideological, reproduction.
in the 1990s…domestic labor is losing its Additionally, throughout the majority of
moorings. Women are working in greater Naked Blood, Eiji, like his father (and like any
numbers, for more years, and with less incli- member of a capitalist society), is denied the
nation to quit at the point of marriage and satisfaction he seeks: by consistently assum-
motherhood.”22 This gendered transforma- ing the role of voyeur, his observations
tion of the social body finds cinematic are perpetually mediated by technology,
articulation in the character of Eiji’s mother. either in the form of cameras or virtual reality
It is her position as a legitimately employed equipment. This, too, speaks to changing
scientist, coupled with her son’s familial, so- gender roles in Japanese society, given that, as
cial, and professional alienation (her son, after formulated by Allison, “situating the male
all, is still a teen and, thus, still under intense subject as viewer and voyeur is not necessar-
pressure to succeed in school), which results ily or unquestionably a practice of scopophilia
in the unauthorized delivery of Myson to the that empowers him.”23 Consistently removed
unwitting test subjects. This bodily chaos, from the objects of his desire by cameras and
engendered by the mother’s Myson tests and other technological devices, Eiji looks but
mapped across explicitly feminine bodies, does not actually reach out and touch. Even
seems to suggest that women’s participation his act of sexual intercourse towards the film’s
in what was conventionally a masculine conclusion is mediated by virtual reality
sphere can only result in catastrophe. goggles that project surreal images upon his
This social anxiety over women’s transgres- retinas, resulting in a conflation of generic
sions of traditional feminine roles plays out signifiers that provides the closest thing to a
in the oedipal politics at work in Eiji’s dys- “money shot” in Sato’s film—the image of
functional family. Eiji’s desire to become a Eiji’s arterial blood spraying Mikami’s breasts
scientist and develop the aptly named Myson and euphoric expression.
stems from his desire to follow in his deceased
(thus, “absent”) father’s footsteps. Like his V. Technology, East/West Border
father before him, Eiji longs to achieve a form Crossing and Cyberpunk
of intensity; his desire to create a drug to “im- Like many Western works of speculative
prove the happiness of mankind” mirrors his fiction, Naked Blood engages cultural trepida-
father ’s quasi-scientific quest for a form of tions surrounding rapid increases in
immortality through intensity—“We’ll break technological development. In its extensive
through time and space,” his father wrote depictions of computers, video equipment,
prior to his disappearance, “and head for the designer drugs, and virtual reality, Sato’s
kingdom of light.” Consequently, it is Eiji’s film has many similarities with the tropes
anger over what he perceives as his mother’s that have come to constitute the genre of
failure to assume the traditional female role cyberpunk. As scholars like Joshua La Bare

AXES TO GRIND 39
“THE DREAM HAS NOT ENDED YET ”

The body as nexus of contradictory social codes: horrific self-mutilation as proto-feminist critique of patriarchal ideals of beaty in
Naked Blood.

and Takayuki Tatsumi have illustrated, The cross-cultural transfusion of science

Japanese science fiction and its Western coun- fiction tropes extends back at least to post-
terpart have existed in a strange state of World War II Japanese importations of “a
symbiosis in which each tradition borrows huge variety of Anglo-American cultural
from the other, with various orientalist products,”25 including numerous literary and
and occidentalist consequences. The scope of cinematic works of speculative fiction. In
this ideological cross-fertilization is quite turn, this new and, given Japan’s steady
extensive, however even a perfunctory survey re-emergence as a global economic power,
of Western and Japanese cyberpunk texts re- increasingly expansive consumer base im-
veals the degree to which these traditions pacted how numerous Western and Japanese
inform one another. William Gibson’s novel, authors and filmmakers imagined the shaped
Neuromancer (1984), and Ridley Scott’s film, and content of multiple genres, especially
Blade Runner (1982), are merely two examples those dealing with the fantastic. Takayuki
of well-known Western cyberpunk texts Tatsumi describes this symbiotic relationship
that are particularly rich with orientalist in his overview of Japanese science fiction:
imaginings of Japanese culture as simulta- Given that science fiction is a literature reflecting the
neously mysterious, seductive, apocalyptic frontiers of techno-capitalism, it was inevitable that
and technophilic. When these motifs find Japanese writers of the 1960s would follow the
their way into contemporary Japanese original literary examples produced by the Pax
science fiction, a recursive pattern of cultural Americana in the West. In the 80s…a revolutionary
inflection occurs, in which Japanese works of paradigm shift took place: Anglo-American writers
speculative fiction simultaneously perpetu- began appropriating Japanese images as often as the
ate and condition operant tropologies. reverse, while Japanese writers came to understand
that writing post-cyberpunk science fiction meant
Certain familiar motifs emerge, but they are
locating the radically science fictional within the
frequently invested with cultural codings that semiosis of “Japan.” Of course, Anglo-American
often confound Western viewers. Thus, while representations of Japan appeal to readers largely
many Western cyberpunk narratives tend by distorting Japanese culture, much as the Japanese
to adopt a largely cautionary, if not outright people in the 50s and 60s…unwittingly misread
pessimistic view towards the conflation their Occidentalism as genuine internationalism.26
of the “human” and the “technological,”
To this day, science fiction and horrific texts
the “extrapolative tendency” in Japanese
emerging on both sides of the Pacific
science fiction “seems more oriented to-
frequently reflect complex economic, cultural,
wards enthusiasm for the benefits or
and historical tensions. Analyzing representa-
potential consequences [of technology] than
tions of human (and posthuman) embodiment
for any social changes likely to be caused
within these texts provides a method for
by that technology.”24

40 FALL 2002
 MCROY

gaining insight into identity politics on the effects of the circulation of late capitalist disci-
local, national, and trans-national level. plinary power within Japanese culture and
Furthermore, in both Japanese and Western the oppressive exercise of those systems that
science fiction, the dominant tropology of endeavor to control how people think and act.
scientific extrapolation provides compelling While acknowledging the tyrannical and
insight into larger societal concerns related to alienating potential of video, pharma-
technological advancement. If, as Elizabeth cological, and virtual technologies, Naked
Anne Hull and Mark Seigel argue, modern Blood does not completely disavow the possi-
Japanese industrialization occurred “as a bility that these technologies may provide
defense” against Western “exploitation,” 27 alternatives to traditional notions of identity.
then the cyberpunk aspects of Naked Blood True, Myson’s side effects have disastrous
reveal not only cultural concerns over the results, and often what characters see and
extent to which technology has impacted remember is mediated by screens and lenses,
and/or may impact how Japanese people or experienced through filmed or recorded
view both their own bodies and their relation- images. Nevertheless, it is also possible to
ship to the larger social body, but also a understand the mixture of the physical and
compelling ambivalence towards the infusion mechanical in Naked Blood as revealing a space
of technology in society. As Thomas Weisser where holistic, humanist notions of corporeal
and Yuko Mihara Weisser have noted, “elec- (and, by extension, social) embodiment col-
tronic tools and media gadgets” are crucial lapse. As Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner
props in many of Sato’s films. “Besides being suggest, “technology represents the possibil-
critical of…‘dehumanizing pop culture,’” they ity that nature might be reconstructable.”29 In
argue, “[Sato] is fascinated by it.”28 The extent this sense, then, Sato’s film explores what
to which Naked Blood exemplifies this ambiva- Scott Bukatman calls “terminal identity,” that
lence is evidenced when one considers “unmistakable double articulation in which
how technological advances constitute both a we find both the end of the subject and a new
destructive force (Myson—the ultimately subjectivity constructed” through technology
destructive pain killer forced upon unsuspect- and media.30 Thus, Naked Blood, like that hy-
ing human guinea pigs) and a potential solace brid cinematic genre body horror, challenges
(the “sleeping installation”—the only way the very notion of limits, exposing the borders
insomniac Mikami can attain the rest she mobilized to delineate genres, bodies, and na-
needs). Technology, then, functions paradoxi- tions as not only constructed, but far more
cally in Sato’s film. Despite its effects on the permeable than previously imagined.
various characters, Myson was seemingly cre- Consequently, a discourse of intensity
ated with the best of intentions. In contrast, informs both the film’s plot and presentation,
Mikami’s virtual reality “sleeping installa- from Eiji’s father’s quest to achieve immortal-
tion,” like Eiji’s ever-present video camera, ity through becoming light to the narrative’s
provides yet another barrier to conventional collapsing of pain into pleasure and sexuality
interpersonal contact, thus heightening the into violence, from Eiji’s desire to attain
film’s theme of postmodern alienation. “eternal happiness” to Sato’s use of corporeal
mutilation as a springboard for political
VI. Going Too Far: Intensity and the inquiry. The multi-generational, (father-son-
Body Horrific grandson[?]) pursuit of eternity through
Hisayasu Sato’s Naked Blood weds horror intensity (“Eiji,” we are told, means “eternity’s
with science fiction, or, more specifically, child”) runs parallel to the violent, orgasmic
splatterpunk with cyberpunk. As such, it is destruction of the human body, that most
a text that reduces the biological and the basic locus of societal control; images of
mechanical to an infinite set of surfaces upon apparent limitlessness—oceans, static-filled
which it is possible to recognize some of the screens, the blinding light of the sun or of

AXES TO GRIND 41
“THE DREAM HAS NOT ENDED YET ”

bulbs burning through celluloid—correspond “go against the interests of a society in a

with gruesome instances of corporeal destruc- state of stagnation.”35
tion that, in the quintessential splatterpunk This is not to suggest that Naked Blood is by
tradition, evoke the notion of “going too far,”31 any means an exclusively progressive body
of re-imagining physiology as a “field of im- horror film. Although Naked Blood advances
manence”32 that rejects technocratic control an oppositional politics of identity, the film
over the subject. As Georges Bataille notes in does not necessarily end on an optimistic
his ruminations upon the power that rests note. In the film’s final moments, when little
within visual representation of the physical Eiji tells us that “the dream has not ended yet”
body (in this case the eye) punctured and and raises his camcorder to follow Mikami’s
slashed, horror “alone is brutal enough to progress as she rides her motorcycle west-
break everything that stifles.”33 ward, the audience feels a palpable sense of
In its exploration of intensity as a discon- dis-ease well in keeping with the discomfort-
tinuous and non-totalizable phenomenon, ing tone of the film’s prior unfolding. Social
Sato’s film advances an oppositional politics theory has long contended that “the growth
wherein the potential to imagine an identity of civilization requires simultaneously the
outside of culturally prescribed parameters is restraint of the body and the cultivation of
articulated, or, at the very least, beginning character in the interests of social stability;”36
gestures towards conceptualizing such a texts that render human corporeal and social
space are made. In their quests for eternal formations indiscrete—displaying, in the
happiness, a philosophical (and biological) process, the various ideological veins and
mission to literally discover “the blinding cultural sinews that keep the fragile, and
flashes of lightning that transform the most yet alarmingly resilient, physiognomies
withering storm into transports of joy,”34 Eiji intact—disturb, if only momentarily, this “sta-
and his father demonstrate/embody those bility.” Confronting heterogeneity—that first
“impulses” that Georges Bataille describes in step towards attaining Bataille’s “durable
“The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade” as having orgasm”—is a messy business. Sooner or later
“social revolution as their end” in that they you’re bound to “get some on you.” s

Jay McRoy is an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Parkside. His writing on horror literature and film have appeared in numerous
journals, including Paradoxa, Scope: The Online Journal of Film Studies, Science Fiction
Studies, Delirium: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Culture and Criticism, and the Journal of the
Fantastic in the Arts. He is currently editing a collection of essays on Japanese horror cinema.

NOTES
1
Jack Hunter, Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood, and Madness in Japanese Cinema (Creation Cinema Collection, Vol. 9) (London
and New York: Creation Publishing Group, 1999) 139.
2
Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 128.
3
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1994) 17.
4
Ibid., 82.
5
Kelly Hurley, “Reading Like an Alien: PostHuman Identity in Ridley Scott’s Alien and David Cronenberg’s Rabid,”
PostHuman Bodies, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1995) 203.
6
Shaviro, 133-4.
7
“Paracinema” is Jeffrey Sconce’s term for a set of reading practices clustered around a variety of film texts that lend
themselves to ironic and/or counter-hegemonic reading protocols in the hands of viewers who focus their
sophisticated reading skills on texts usually ignored by “legitimate” taste cultures. In his words, paracinema is

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“less a distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol, a counter-aesthetic turned subcultural sensibility
devoted to all manner of cultural detritus…[T]he explicit manifesto of paracinematic culture is to valorize all forms
of cinematic ‘trash,’ whether such films have been either explicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate film
culture” (“‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen 36:4 [Winter
1995] 372). In her recent book, Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), Joan Hawkins extrapolated on Sconce’s insights on the taste and cultural politics of
paracinema by looking at the video catalogues that sell bootleg versions of paracinematic titles. With its reveling in
horrific body spectacles and its exclusion from mainstream distribution outlets, Naked Blood is a decidedly
paracinematic text.
8
Thomas Weisser and Yuko Mihara Weisser, Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films (Miami, Florida: Vital
Books, Inc., 1998) 463.
9
Ibid., 417.
10
white pongo, “Essential Viewing,” Internet Movie Database (User Comments), 3 October 2000. (Accessed 5 July
2002) <http://us.imdb.com/Title?0217679#comment> para. 1.
11
Harald Gruenberger, “Naked Blood/Splatter,” (Accessed 5 July 2002) <http://www.metamovie.de/> para. 4.
12
William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Berkeley, 1984) 51. In keeping with this metaphor of the incoherency of
dream logic, Naked Blood, in its narrative ambiguity, fits into the tenets of what Paul Wells calls “incoherent
cinema.” Contrary to negative connotations often associated with the term “incoherent,” this kind of “incoherent
cinema,” as Wells defines it, “is a mode of cinema which works to challenge the dominant characteristics of
classical Hollywood narrative, using the camera or the editing process to draw the audience’s attention to other
possibilities in the narrative or in the aesthetic use of the medium. This often leads to quite surreal and arbitrary
effects which almost demand that the audience watch ‘cinema’ for its own sake, rather than get down into ‘story
telling’ or other kinds of visual orthodoxy which have come to characterize film-making practice” (Paul Wells, The
Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch [London: Wallflower Press, 2001] 115).
13
Movies organized around this theme include such high-profile films as Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995),
Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor (1999), Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre Los Ojos (1997) and its 2001 re-make,
Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix (1999), David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), and
Tarsem Singh’s The Cell (2000). This theme is also refracted through the Gothic horror template of ghost story films
like The Others (also by Amenábar, 2001) and The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999). The theme of “illusion”/
“hallucination” versus “reality,” though more frequently articulated through the metaphor of drug use, also
appears in Hisayasu Sato’s Genuine Rape (1987), the film from which many of the concepts behind Naked Blood
eventually developed, and The Bedroom, a.k.a. Promiscuous Wife: Disgraceful Torture (1992).
14
James R. Alexander, “Obscenity, Pornography, and Violence: Rethinking Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses,” July
2001 (Accessed 5 July 2002) <http://www.pitt.edu/~zander/Obscenity&Oshima.html> para 8.
15
Paula Felix-Didier argues that such erotic and pornographic cinema can frequently function as a weapon for
interrogating traditional cultural values (“Cine y sexo en Japón,” Film: On Line, 15 April 2000. [Accessed 5 July
2002] <http://www.filmonline.com.ar/40/dossier/40dossier3.htm> para. 3).
16
Ibid., para. 21. My translation.
17
Anne Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
California: University of California Press, 2000) 163.
18
Ibid., 164. I must add that it would be a mistake to assume that this reactionary internal and external “othering” is
limited to visual culture. Identities are, after all, constructs with borders that are often reified/reinforced, some-
times violently so, when exposed as illusory. As such, when cultures come into contact, there are bound to be
varying degrees of appropriation, reactionary attitudes and, as Takayumi Tatsumi suggests, “fabulous negotiations
between Orientalism and Occidentalism” (“Generations and Controversies: An Overview of Japanese Science
Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies #80, 27:1 [March 2000] 113). It is also important to note that certain behavioral
prohibitions related to sexuality were already in place long before the 19th century: prohibitions related to
sexuality and the human form were long a part of Shinto mythology (Allison, 163).
19
One Western film that sparked such a controversy was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo: 120 Days of Sodom (1975).
Allowed into Japan by Japanese Customs and subsequently “rubber stamp[ed]” (Weisser and Mihara Weisser, 24)
by Eirin, the film’s critique of the abuses of power, as well as its extreme impact upon the Japanese viewing public,
had a profound influence upon Sato’s development as a filmmaker. His movie Muscle, a.k.a. Mad Ballroom Gala,
a.k.a. Asti: Lunar Eclipse Theater (1988; 1994) is a “loving salute” (467) to Pasolini. For an extensive investigation of
some of the more pronounced challenges to Japanese obscenity laws, see Thomas Weisser and Yuko Mihara
Weisser, “Fogging, Editing, and Censorship: Japanese Cinema is a Dichotomy of Artistic Freedom and Repression,”
in Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films.
20
Allison, 161.
21
See Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (London and New York: Verso, 1990).
22
Allison, 174.
23
Ibid, 49.

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“THE DREAM HAS NOT ENDED YET ”
24
Elizabeth Anne Hull and Mark Siegel, “Science Fiction,” Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture, Richard Gid Powers
and Hidetoshi Kato, eds. (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1989) 262.
25
Tatsumi, 113.
26
Ibid.
27
Hull and Seigel, 245.
28
Weisser and Mihara Weisser, 463.
29
Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, “Technophobia,” Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction
Cinema, Annette Kuhn, ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1990) 58.
30
Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1990) 9.
31
John Skipp and Craig Spector “On Going Too Far, or Flesh-Eating Fiction: New Hope for the Future,” Book of the
Dead, John Skipp and Craig Spector, eds. (New York: Bantam Books, 1989) 10.
32
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 157.
33
Bataille, 19.
34
Ibid., 69.
35
Ibid., 100.
36
Bryan Turner, Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology (London: Routledge, 1992) 14-15.

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