“Right now, are you alive?”
Given the fact that convenience stores are so omnipresent in the Japanese urban landscape, it is not unusual for this kind of store to be featured in the filmic frame. It is also not surprising that creative minds have sought to utilize this space to put certain subjective or societal things into question. Sayaka Murata, in her novel Convenience Store Woman (2016), turned to this place to put the societal expectations women are faced with into question.
In 2020, Chilla’s Art utilized the context of the convenience store to craft a horror game built around the presence of an onryo, a vengeful spirit – a film adaptation by Jiro Nagai was released this year. Yusuke Iwasaki, on the other hand, sought to turn the convenience store into a heterotopia to critically question the tension between subject and the Other in function of the clash between the capitalistic discourse and patriarchal power dynamics – an approach that led to him to win the coveted FIPRESCI Jury Prize at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival.
One day, Sakai (Shota Sometani), who works at Anymart, a convenience store, is reproached by his managerImai (Tatsuya Nagashima) for his absent-minded presence and his utter lack of consideration for the costumer – he remains deaf to their signifiers and blind for what they might possibly want.
However, Imai’s reproach does not change anything – business as usual. However, not long after Ogawa (Erika Karata) starts working at the convenience store, things start to go awry. Haga (-) is caught breaking the rules and, in a discussion with the owner (Nishimura Masahiko), decides to quit. And Imai, driven by a desire for recognition, takes a radical choice after Sakai’s inability to satisfy his thirst.
What pulls the spectator into Anymart is the simple yet effective way Iwasaki opens his narrative. By framing mundane imagery (i.e. products on a shelf and the clerk waiting behind the counter) with a horror-sensibility (i.e. creeping zoom-out dynamism and subtle intrusive sound-decoration), Iwasaki signals from the get-go that a threat slithers underneath the mundane veil. He lets the spectator taste the idea that the mundane is but a thin imaginary veil that covers over the intrusive and potentially traumatic mess of jouissance. Iwasaki reutilizes the subtle yet intrusive sound-decoration on various occasions throughout his film to re-echo the truth of the veil’s mendacious and ineffective defence-function.
Iwasaki’s framing the mundane, for which he mainly relies on static shots, however, does not try to sketch out a place where the subject – or spectator – finds peaceful stability, but exposes the frailty of the mendacious veil by showing the ease by which inter-subjective tensions disturb it – subjects are fundamentally at odds with each other (Cine-note 1). Iwasaki visually re-emphasizes these irresolvable inter-subjective tensions by inserting sudden close-ups (e.g. the representative of headquarters scratching his neck while talking to the owner) or utilizing subtle dynamism (zoom-ins and zoom-outs) within his visual fabric.
Iwasaki reveals that what causes relational tensions – the disturbances of the veil, of the fantasy of ‘all works well’ and understanding – is ignorance of the other as ego and as subject. Sakai perforates the facade of hospitality by spacing out and is unable to take the spectator and his signifiers seriously. The boss causes a break-out of nervosity by not making eye-contact with the guy from headquarters and deflecting, without any thought, his concerns and his repeated advice to contact the higher-ups. And the girl Sakai goes on a date with ever succeeds to slip, via her speech, through the nets of his attempt to moor her in the safe harbour of his understanding.
However, one can also formulate the source of the relational disturbances differently. The veil breaks down because subjectivity perforates it, because subjectivity, a stain refusing to be erased, short-circuits the social-imposed image and the demand to support the fiction of relational harmony. Sakai fails to clothe himself with the image of hospitality, the image defined by the employee pledges. And the boss of the store refuses to inscribe himself in the capitalistic discourse of profitability in favour of filial piety.
By way of recapitulation, we can say that Iwasaki introduces the narrative space of Anymart as a space where the fictionality of the veil of harmony is continually exposed – the imaginary is a battlefield of misrecognition and subjective unreadability, a concatenation of subjective slips and their resulting clashes. However, what strengthens the impact of these disturbances on the audience is Iwasaki’s elegant way of compositionally signalling the reality of this veil. By thoughtfully using visual repetition throughout his film, he signals its presence by emphasizing one of its defining elements: predictability – a space where everyone acts within the confines of their image-role (clerk, manager, boss, co-worker, … etc.), where everyone mindlessly inscribes themselves in the capitalistic discourse, is predictable.
Later in the narrative, a conflict between the owner and Ogawa introduces another one of its defining elements: the erasure of thinking. With his statement – “Please do as you are told and not what you think you should do”, the boss exposes the fact that the veil only functions well when the pawns act in accordance with the rules imposed on them – act in accordance to the script, do not question it. This non-thinking is both a feature of the capitalistic discourse – do not put consumption and profit into question – as well as the patriarchal discourse – Do not question the authority of the father.
This frailty of this imaginary veil, as signalled in various ways with a subtle deadpan comical flavour, prepares the spectator for what radically punctures the veil: the Other’s enjoyment. The concatenation of frustrations of the fatherly position and the irreducibility of subjectivity and desire ultimately causes this enjoyment to manifest itself in its most brutal way, in the shape of the self-destructive death drive.
After the first shocking event – the first sign of the ravage caused by both discourses and their silent clash, the veil slowly thins within Anymart and disconcerting things begin to concatenate. The space of the convenience store is transformed into a canvas where expressions of transgressive enjoyment and dark desires can be imprinted, a canvas where the radical finality of failing discourses, destabilized egos, and subjective erasure are splashed on. The thinning of the veil and its effect on the subject – his frail ego is put in jeopardy, is visually emphasized by a subtle shift at the level of lighting: Shadows start to spread and colours become eerily faded.
The emphasis on the imaginary veil invites us to read Anymart, whose title subtly emphasizes an anywhere and anytime, as a societal critique, a critique of the societal demand to reduce oneself to a mere automaton that acts in accordance with the fatherly signifiers of authority or the signifiers that keep the capitalistic machine running, the demand to realize oneself in the societal field as subjectively dead, as a cog in service for a greater ‘good’, be it the father or the capitalistic demand to consume. With his brutal yet satisfying finale, Iwasaki shows that subjective tragedy is not merely caused by the bloody clash between both discourses, but also by the resistance of each discourse to give place to what breathes life into the subject: desire, a will that arose from desire.
With Anymart, Iwasaki offers audiences a darkly twisted comical horror narrative that does not merely expose the dynamic of repressive societal violence – the brutal erasure of what does not fit the imaginary veil, but also shows how such violence pushes the subject’s death-drive to realize its self-destructive finality. Anymart does not shock with its delivery of violent brutality, but with his ominous message that the Japanese Other, in his capitalistic as well as its patriarchal guise, will refuse that what does not fit: subjectivity/desire – a thing we, following Iwasaki, should protest (General-note 1).
Notes:
Narra-note 1: Iwasaki also highlights, via the character of Sakai, that the script of hospitality – the script born from the manual – can function with subjectivity evacuated – Sakai functions, generally, as a shell without a ghost. The script, by programming the acts and signifiers of the subjects implicated, creates a formalized situation that, by being predictable, can do without subjectivity present.
Cine-note 1: Iwasaki also interweaves static long takes into his visual fabric and plays with visual repetition.
General-note 1: Iwasaki visually implies that we, as subjects subjected to both societal discourses, are nothing but vacuum-packed salad-chickens – to function within this machinery, we must accept this radical sealing of our mouth; we must keep that fleshy hole from which we bear witness of our ill-fitting desire and our subjectivity shut.