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Two Shades of Black
Feb. 1st, 2012 01:18 pmSome time back, I got hold of the Criterion copy of a classic 1960s Japanese horror film called Onibaba by Kaneto Shindo—for ten bucks or something, because people are stupid. (This is also how I got my Criterion copy of Videodrome, BTW.) Onibaba is set during what Shindo calls the “Warring Period” of Japanese history, the civil wars of the 16th century, when constant feuds between city-states and samurai clans made things particularly crappy for everybody who wasn't a samurai—you see this in Kenji Misoguchi's Ugetsu, too, as I recall, whose protagonists are a pair of peasants who sign up in order to gain power by becoming samurai themselves, and end up destroying everything they want to save. This is the way it works; not so much that there's no stepping across class lines as the general impression that to gain power is, by nature, to abuse it.
Anyhow. Onibaba tells a similar story from the point of view of the women who get left behind—a mother-in-law and her son's wife, left to fend for themselves in the middle of a great grass sea after their mutual son/husband is drafted into some lord's army. The implication is that he dies, but they'd have no way of figuring out if this is true or not—these ladies live their lives down on the ground, like the insects in Jeffrey Beaumont's backyard, with utterly no idea of the larger political context that keeps sending wounded men in armour armed with swords blundering through their territory, aside from the fact that said men must be treated either as threats or—increasingly—prey.
In the middle of the field, near the women's house, is “a hole...dark and deep”. And that's where mother- and daughter-in-law dump the bodies of the samurai they kill with pikes they must have gotten off of previous dead bodies—using the grass sea as cover, they stalk these larger, more experienced men, rush them and slaughter them like animals, then strip them of armour and weaponry, which they barter in town for rice. It's a Brechtian subsistence existence, each woman left naturally dependent on the other: The wife on her husband's mother for strategy and impetus, mother-in-law on daughter- for sheer muscle and the sexual attractiveness necessary to lure their prey, when guerilla tactics fail. A static, repetitious life literally built on a heap of bones, with no hope of change or growth.
One day, a virile young peasant who was drafted along with the son/husband turns up. He's deserted from the army, and needs a place to stay; he claims he doesn't know what happened to his friend, though the mother-in-law suspects he's lying. He and the daughter-in-law immediately hit it off, and run off by night to screw feverishly in the grass. The mother-in-law, sexually frustrated, pleads with this man not to take the girl away, because she needs her in order to keep killing samurai; he only promises not to marry her, but says otherwise, she'll do what she wants.
Previously, we watched the old woman kill a samurai who wore a helmet with a hinged mask in the shape of an oni devil covering his entire face; though he claimed to be ”beautiful” underneath, when she took the helmet off, she saw that his face was actually scarred and disfigured. On impulse, she kept the mask, which her daughter-in-law doesn't know about. Now she uses the girl's native fear of ghosts and demons to guilt her into staying, appearing suddenly out of the grass with the mask on...but when she tries to take it off again, she can't. It almost seems to be stuck to her face...
With its air of stark daylight horror (Shindo was unable to film by night in the region where it was shot, because it was located on the bank of a river; every evening the grass would flood, and the entire rea would be infested by crabs. He was forced to specify that anyone who left mid-filming wouldn't get paid, so that his crew didn't simply run off) and its fleshly concentration on sweaty sex, ravenous eating and blood, Onibaba seems to take place in a world without supernatural influences, good or bad: All its worst plot twists come purely out of human psychology, human impulse, human venality and weakness. But Shindo would revisit a version of the same story with his later film Kuroneko, an overtly supernatural riff on the classic bakeneko or “goblin cat” ghost/vampire/demon scenario.
I got hold of Kuroneko last week, also as a Criterion release, and believe me, it didn't cost $9.99. But that was okay—I'm more than willing to pay for quality, if I have to. The film begins with what almost looks like an alternate version of the Onibaba scenario, except that the people emerging from the grass sea are samurai so down-and-out the look like peasants, descending on the unsuspecting house of yet another mother-in-law/daughter-in-law pairing like grim locusts. They kick in the door, eat everything in sight, gang-rape the women 'til they're dead, then set fire to the house. The next morning, as the women's charred corpses lie forlorn in the smoking ruins, a small black cat comes skulking out of the grove behind them, licks the delicious flesh of the mother-in-law's neck, and purrs.
Because Shindo's assumption is that everyone in the audience knows what's going to happen next, there's very little build-up before getting right to the meat of the story: A finely-dressed young samurai, dozing on his horse, passes through the Rashomon Gate around midnight and is startled by the cry of a cat. Immediately, a court lady dressed all in white emerges from the darkness, seemingly lit up from within, almost cartoonishly bright. She explains that she has to go home through the grove, but is afraid, because it's rumoured to be haunted, Naturally, he volunteers to escort of protect her, which turns out to be a bad idea on his part (to say the least).
Shindo sketches in the legend with fascinatingly palpable detail—the way our demure young ghost skips across puddles in slow motion, revealing black-furred ankles, or how her mother-in-law's beautifully-groomed ponytail will suddenly flip up at the end, twitching, like a cat's tail. The vision of the mother-in-law lapping water from a bowl, while behind a nearby screen, her son's wife tears a drunken samurai's throat out with her teeth. Peasants in life, their status as ghosts seems to have suddenly elevated them to the nobility: They occupy a massive mansion made from sliding paper and fog, constantly playing on the way that “sexy” Heian court makeup makes everyone who wears it look like a Noh play actor—blanched, impassive, those smudge-brows lifted in constant surprise, hairline plucked impossibly high. We don't feel too bad about their prey, either, since every samurai we meet is a bastard, to one degree or another. It simply seems a great pity that in a country this unstable, real justice can only be delivered through unnatural, toxic means.
And then...we switch over to the son/husband, drafted just like the guy from Onibaba, but still alive—surviving a massacre, triumphing over incredible odds, gifted with the samurai status he thinks can “save” the mother and wife he doesn't know are already dead. Shaved, bathed and dressed in the best his lord has to offer, he is nigh-unrecognizable by the time he's sent back to investigate this string of supposedly-supernatural murders in the grove, not knowing that the monsters he's agreed to slay are the only things left of the two people he loved best in the world. A series of decisions ensue, all of them tragic. There is no way to get out of this situation that isn't going to hurt.
In the original bakeneko legend, there's always an implication that the goblin cat ghost/vampire may only take on the appearance of a human being, along with their reasons for seeking revenge—that they eat the original person entirely, becoming a perfect facsimile that is nevertheless not really them. And while I'm not sure if believing this makes what happens in Kuroneko better or worse, watching it and Onibaba in quick succession makes for a very interesting experience. In both, Shindo's world-view is extraordinarily bitter, bleak and weirdly feminist, with a great respect for nature, but almost no respect for the human beings that inhabit it.
Links:
Onibaba (http://www.criterion.com/films/665-onibaba)
Kuroneko (http://www.criterion.com/films/27628-kuroneko)
For more on the bakeneko, meanwhile, try this absolutely insane three-episode arc from the Samurai Horror Stories anime, called “Goblin Cat”, starting here (http://youtu.be/NRP1PDiHBng). The art is absolutely riveting, based on what seems to be a mixture of period prints, murals and screen designs, with a texture to the animation itself that almost make it look like paper collage. It's the most physically beautiful guro I've ever seen, and unsettling as hell. Also of note: The main character, a wandering exorcist/medicine pedlar who manages to be arch and empathic at the same time, and seems to be part-demon himself, plus the freakish rap credits theme.
Anyhow. Onibaba tells a similar story from the point of view of the women who get left behind—a mother-in-law and her son's wife, left to fend for themselves in the middle of a great grass sea after their mutual son/husband is drafted into some lord's army. The implication is that he dies, but they'd have no way of figuring out if this is true or not—these ladies live their lives down on the ground, like the insects in Jeffrey Beaumont's backyard, with utterly no idea of the larger political context that keeps sending wounded men in armour armed with swords blundering through their territory, aside from the fact that said men must be treated either as threats or—increasingly—prey.
In the middle of the field, near the women's house, is “a hole...dark and deep”. And that's where mother- and daughter-in-law dump the bodies of the samurai they kill with pikes they must have gotten off of previous dead bodies—using the grass sea as cover, they stalk these larger, more experienced men, rush them and slaughter them like animals, then strip them of armour and weaponry, which they barter in town for rice. It's a Brechtian subsistence existence, each woman left naturally dependent on the other: The wife on her husband's mother for strategy and impetus, mother-in-law on daughter- for sheer muscle and the sexual attractiveness necessary to lure their prey, when guerilla tactics fail. A static, repetitious life literally built on a heap of bones, with no hope of change or growth.
One day, a virile young peasant who was drafted along with the son/husband turns up. He's deserted from the army, and needs a place to stay; he claims he doesn't know what happened to his friend, though the mother-in-law suspects he's lying. He and the daughter-in-law immediately hit it off, and run off by night to screw feverishly in the grass. The mother-in-law, sexually frustrated, pleads with this man not to take the girl away, because she needs her in order to keep killing samurai; he only promises not to marry her, but says otherwise, she'll do what she wants.
Previously, we watched the old woman kill a samurai who wore a helmet with a hinged mask in the shape of an oni devil covering his entire face; though he claimed to be ”beautiful” underneath, when she took the helmet off, she saw that his face was actually scarred and disfigured. On impulse, she kept the mask, which her daughter-in-law doesn't know about. Now she uses the girl's native fear of ghosts and demons to guilt her into staying, appearing suddenly out of the grass with the mask on...but when she tries to take it off again, she can't. It almost seems to be stuck to her face...
With its air of stark daylight horror (Shindo was unable to film by night in the region where it was shot, because it was located on the bank of a river; every evening the grass would flood, and the entire rea would be infested by crabs. He was forced to specify that anyone who left mid-filming wouldn't get paid, so that his crew didn't simply run off) and its fleshly concentration on sweaty sex, ravenous eating and blood, Onibaba seems to take place in a world without supernatural influences, good or bad: All its worst plot twists come purely out of human psychology, human impulse, human venality and weakness. But Shindo would revisit a version of the same story with his later film Kuroneko, an overtly supernatural riff on the classic bakeneko or “goblin cat” ghost/vampire/demon scenario.
I got hold of Kuroneko last week, also as a Criterion release, and believe me, it didn't cost $9.99. But that was okay—I'm more than willing to pay for quality, if I have to. The film begins with what almost looks like an alternate version of the Onibaba scenario, except that the people emerging from the grass sea are samurai so down-and-out the look like peasants, descending on the unsuspecting house of yet another mother-in-law/daughter-in-law pairing like grim locusts. They kick in the door, eat everything in sight, gang-rape the women 'til they're dead, then set fire to the house. The next morning, as the women's charred corpses lie forlorn in the smoking ruins, a small black cat comes skulking out of the grove behind them, licks the delicious flesh of the mother-in-law's neck, and purrs.
Because Shindo's assumption is that everyone in the audience knows what's going to happen next, there's very little build-up before getting right to the meat of the story: A finely-dressed young samurai, dozing on his horse, passes through the Rashomon Gate around midnight and is startled by the cry of a cat. Immediately, a court lady dressed all in white emerges from the darkness, seemingly lit up from within, almost cartoonishly bright. She explains that she has to go home through the grove, but is afraid, because it's rumoured to be haunted, Naturally, he volunteers to escort of protect her, which turns out to be a bad idea on his part (to say the least).
Shindo sketches in the legend with fascinatingly palpable detail—the way our demure young ghost skips across puddles in slow motion, revealing black-furred ankles, or how her mother-in-law's beautifully-groomed ponytail will suddenly flip up at the end, twitching, like a cat's tail. The vision of the mother-in-law lapping water from a bowl, while behind a nearby screen, her son's wife tears a drunken samurai's throat out with her teeth. Peasants in life, their status as ghosts seems to have suddenly elevated them to the nobility: They occupy a massive mansion made from sliding paper and fog, constantly playing on the way that “sexy” Heian court makeup makes everyone who wears it look like a Noh play actor—blanched, impassive, those smudge-brows lifted in constant surprise, hairline plucked impossibly high. We don't feel too bad about their prey, either, since every samurai we meet is a bastard, to one degree or another. It simply seems a great pity that in a country this unstable, real justice can only be delivered through unnatural, toxic means.
And then...we switch over to the son/husband, drafted just like the guy from Onibaba, but still alive—surviving a massacre, triumphing over incredible odds, gifted with the samurai status he thinks can “save” the mother and wife he doesn't know are already dead. Shaved, bathed and dressed in the best his lord has to offer, he is nigh-unrecognizable by the time he's sent back to investigate this string of supposedly-supernatural murders in the grove, not knowing that the monsters he's agreed to slay are the only things left of the two people he loved best in the world. A series of decisions ensue, all of them tragic. There is no way to get out of this situation that isn't going to hurt.
In the original bakeneko legend, there's always an implication that the goblin cat ghost/vampire may only take on the appearance of a human being, along with their reasons for seeking revenge—that they eat the original person entirely, becoming a perfect facsimile that is nevertheless not really them. And while I'm not sure if believing this makes what happens in Kuroneko better or worse, watching it and Onibaba in quick succession makes for a very interesting experience. In both, Shindo's world-view is extraordinarily bitter, bleak and weirdly feminist, with a great respect for nature, but almost no respect for the human beings that inhabit it.
Links:
Onibaba (http://www.criterion.com/films/665-onibaba)
Kuroneko (http://www.criterion.com/films/27628-kuroneko)
For more on the bakeneko, meanwhile, try this absolutely insane three-episode arc from the Samurai Horror Stories anime, called “Goblin Cat”, starting here (http://youtu.be/NRP1PDiHBng). The art is absolutely riveting, based on what seems to be a mixture of period prints, murals and screen designs, with a texture to the animation itself that almost make it look like paper collage. It's the most physically beautiful guro I've ever seen, and unsettling as hell. Also of note: The main character, a wandering exorcist/medicine pedlar who manages to be arch and empathic at the same time, and seems to be part-demon himself, plus the freakish rap credits theme.
