The origin of Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou lies in the fascination aroused by the blossoming of the message boards on the internet and the volatile dynamic of disembodied anonymous interactions. One could even argue that Shunji Iwai’s encounter with the internet allowed him to utilize his own solitary existence as a child – his sense of feeling outside the norm – to critically explore the irresolvable friction between the subject and the Other and the way the societal field fails its youth.  

Shunji Iwai begins All About Lily Chou-Chou by introducing the spectator to Yuichi Hasumi (Hayato Ichihara), a fourteen-year-old whose obsession withsinger Lily Chou-Chou led him to create a message board dedicated to her and her music. He finds pleasure inposting about his love under the alias Philia, exchanging messages of adoration, and welcoming like-minded people, like Blue Cat.

Yet, his daily life is not without cruelty. He is in the firm grasp of Shusuke Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari) and his fellow cronies. They allow him to partake in their transgressions (shoplifting, …etc.) but also take every opportunity to exploit him as an object-of-trash to satisfy their thirst for pleasure. Not long after being caught stealing and questioned by his teachers, they call him out at night and, as they believe he ratted them out, beat him, break his Lily Chou-Chou CD in two, and force him to masturbate in front of everyone.

Shusuke Hoshino, however, did not enter the space of junior high-school as a bully, but as a victim of certain rumours and lies and as a target of a vindictive Other – “You think you are better than us”; “We meet again, pussy. Let’s kick his ass”. His entrance into this libidinally explosive imaginary field as class president did not arouse adoration, but invited mere contempt. Luckily, his encounter with Yuichi at the school’s Kendo club offers him an amical bond. Not long after their first encounter, Shusuke ends up inviting him over at his house and introduces him to music of Lily Chou-Chou (Salyu).

All about Lily Chou-Chou opens with a very evocative sequence – a dreamy poetic concatenation of signifiers framed by floaty imagery of solitude and alienation. The written signifiers within the frame, signifiers seeking a way to give expression of the subjective effect of Lily Chou-Chou and her music, emphasize, first and foremost, how her presence has become a central orienting point, an anchor. The signifier that keeps returning within the initial concatenation of messages is ether/Aether and its constant return implies that only by clarifying what this signifier signifies that one can do justice to the intricacies of Iwai’s societal critique.    

Philia considers the birth of Lily Chou-Chou as a kind of genesis, the beginning of a specific experiential world; she is the ether personified. The signifier ether seems, at least in his evocative writing, to denote the manifestation of the pure fifth element that medieval philosophers believed to be the material stars and planets were made off – she is, for Philia, the quintessence.

Cornea’s elaborating response frames Lily Chou-chou as what gave birth to a specific kind of luminiferous Aether, the invisible medium once believed to fill all of space and which allowed light to travel. In his poetic attempt to formulate how she affects the Aether she gave birth to – “ … The shadows she releases in the Ether, sublimate its wavelengths, transcend its spectrum, reach the transparent beyond”, Cornea emphasizes that the shadows, the permeating images of pain, within her dreamy music resonate deeply with the pain of the youthful subject and that her musical affirmation of this pain sorts an effect of pleasure or, as Dream Child underlines, an effect of healing – “The ether heals my pain” (Narra-note 1).  

Les Paul’s signifiers allow the spectator to grasp the Ether/Aether as a space to escape from the things that hurts the subject the most – friends, family, lovers. In other words, the Ether is a place that give rise to a transient sense of peace by offering recognition of the subject’s inner turmoil, of the disruptive inscription of the societal Other, and a set of connections that, by remaining imaginary, bathe him in moments of fleeting self-serving ‘aethereal’ pleasure.   

Shunji Iwai also signals with his opening sequence that violence is inherent to such frail imaginary network of connections; the seed of violence is planted at the very moment a heavenly space of escape of the libidinal brutality of human interactions is established. Rod radicalizes the imaginary and presents himself as the “Ether’s chosen One, the One who guards Lily and [will] lead fools to the true Ether, so they will not err again”. And others put, with hostile and demeaning signifiers, the space called Ether/Aether and the cultish adoration of Lily-Chou-Chou radically into question.

With this highly evocative introductory sequence, Iwai establishes the thematical framework of his narrative and set the stage for his exploration of the tensions between the subject and the Other, of the disturbing influence of the libidinal real and the failure of the Other and its representatives (i.e. teachers, parents, …) on relational interactions. At the same time, Iwai introduces the signifier as such as what orients and structures the non-linearity of the narrative and Iwai’s elliptical interventions. The messages shared the message board, which appear to the spectator as intertitles, are not only evocative of the alienation, erasure, and exploitation within the societal field and the wish to flee from the suffocating ideals, demands, norms, but offers the spectator the necessary associative network around the signifier Aether/ether to orient himself within the restless rhythm of the composition, within the restless wandering of subjects lacking a symbolic mooring point within the societal field.    

Shunji Iwai underlines right from the beginning the central problem youthful subject faces within the Japanese Other via a strange sequence where Shinichi’s father, to avoid the repetition of the kanji ichi between his child and Shuichi, demands that he becomes Shinji and silences his protest by telling him not to be “selfish”. This sequence evokes the idea that, within the Japanese societal field, the subject is constantly ordered to efface his own subjectivity to support the mendacious image of harmony (Narra-note 2).

This logic of subjective effacement is also evident in the way Shuichi’s mother (Chiyo Abe) reacts upon hearing of her son’s act of thievery. Her physical attack and her subsequent statement “theft is theft” underlines her radical fixation on the societal ideal, a fixation that causes her to promptly refuse the subtle invitation by Yuichi’s homeroom teacher Osanai (Mayuko Yoshioka) and Teru Onda (Yoji Tanaka) to give him space to verbalize something of his subjectivity, of his current struggle. The factual nature of the transgression is exploited by the mother to erase the appeal-function of his acting-out; she refuses to consider his act as a signal addressed to her as representative of the Other.

Iwai’s exploration of Shusuke’s subjective position and his conflictual relationship with the Other unsurprisingly put the emphasis on the societal dynamic of subjective erase. Within the frail and volatile field of adolescence, a field animated by libidinal storms, Shusuke is experienced by others as a constant threat to the fragile imagined wholeness of their ego and the fictional harmony of the societal space. His Otherness, whether denoted by class wimp or class president, invites verbal and physical violence, violence that inflicts imaginary injuries, represses subjectivity, and generates pleasure that reaffirms the ‘fake’ wholeness of the ego of the bully. Such violence, by cracking the ego and silencing the subject, lead to either fight – counter-attacks to repair one’s ego – or flight – the search for peaceful wholesomeness elsewhere. Yet, as the spectator quickly comes to realize, Shusuke’s bullying situation is not the cause of his transformation into a bully, but merely its prerequisite (Narra-note 3).         

The violent response by some youths to the repeated frustration of subjectivity is quite contradictory. The patriarchal directives push the subject into the claws of the capitalistic logic; from the erase of subjectivity to medicative injections of pleasure. The irony of their responses lies in the fact that their search for medicative pleasure does not resolve the frustration of subjective erasure. The double theft (e.g. stealing the sleeping man’s bag on the train, snitching cd’s from a chain record shop to sell through at a local record shop) is devoid of rebellious intent and stages their entrapment in consumerist logic, the way they use ‘money’ and ‘pleasure’ as stopgaps for their gnawing discontent and aching emptiness.

The flight into the Ether/Aether, the place where “light leaks through”, is another solution to the continuous frustration of feeling imprisoned within a societal space that silences subjectivity and seeks to exploit the subject as trash-object. Lily Chou-Chou, by awakening to the Ether and musically embodying it, inaugurates an experiential space of otherworldly bliss – Aether, a musical medium that translates, affirms, and alleviates subjective pain – and gives rise to a place of adoration where the exchange of signifiers establishes a minimal sense of belonging, a fleeting sense of recognition – “I see you, you see me”.    

The emphasis within the narrative on this erasure enables us to finally finalize our reading of what the Aether denotes. In our view, the ether manifest itself as a space of radical alienation unseen by the patriarchal Other, an invisible space where the alienation of the youthful subject receives its affirmation/recognition and where the subject, encountering the musical affirmation of what he cannot put into signifiers, can fleetingly escape his alienating societal environment in an acoustic atmosphere of heavenly bliss.

The Aether does not only feed on the continued frustration of subjects within the societal field, but thanks its very birth due to the burgeoning consciousness of the failure of the Other towards the subject, a vague realization of the repressive effect caused by the widespread fixation on ideal images and societal harmony. The amniotic fluid, the fluid of forlorn solitude and subjective emptiness, is not simply what nurses Lily Chou-Chou’s music, but allows her music to invite others into her Aether, her amniotic sac to keep the Other at bay (Narra-note 4, Cine-note 1, Narra-note 5). The Aether is, thus, both the unseen space of the gnawing emptiness, the void of subjective erasure, as well as the hidden place where this threatening traumatic erasure, by finding recognition and translation in melodies and lyrics, can be temporarily alleviated and medicated.

While Shunji Iwai opens All About Lily Chou-Chou with a concatenation of floaty dynamic shots, a composition aims at visualizing the state of bliss aroused by listening to Lily Chou-Chou’s ethereal music, he soon turns to cruder dynamism – and, in certain sequences, straight-up handy-cam footage. The resulting frame does not only, due to its affinity with documentary film, heighten the naturalism of the performances and the impressionistic quality of certain ritualistic ‘seishun’ sequences, but is also utilized to evoke something of the subject’s struggle with the Other. Iwai’s reliance on shakiness signals, in a certain way, that the relation of the youthful subject with the Other that surrounds and embraces him always retains a conflictual and libidinal quality – the concatenation of imaginary pretences induced by the Other’s idealization of the seishun period do not change that.

Shunji Iwai exploits the establishment of a cruder frame to poetically emphasize the impact of Lily Chou-Chou on subjects like Yuichi. He intersperses his crude naturalistic composition with semi-static long takes that, due to their thoughtful composition and classical musical accompaniment (e.g. Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1, … etc.), become evocative, poetic of the pacifying effect Lily Chou-Chou sorts on youthful turmoil, on their sturm und drang.

The spectator will easily notice that many moments within Iwai’s composition offer a balanced blend between shaky framing and floaty movement. These moments, in our view, do not only echo the subject-as-being-adrift within the societal Other, but also come to visualize the subjective land-in-between, a subjective position sprung from the proximity of the Other as source of turmoil and the presence of the possibility to flee into digital space of shared similarity and fleeting pleasure. 

The way Shunji Iwai approaches light and colour within his narrative is quite eclectic – and, thus, demands our attention. At the level of lighting, it is evident that Iwai’s regular use of over-exposure indicates the transcendent presence of Lily Chou-Chou for the subject, a visual sign that her heavenly music, her pieces of musical salvation, illuminate, albeit partially, the brutal societal reality that envelops the subject.  

This reading allows the spectator to grasp what Iwai seeks to signify with the contrasts – stains of overexposure within darkish spaces – that plague his narrative spaces. Do these visual contrasts not continually emphasize that, despite experiencing moments of blissful escape from the pain of existence, the subject cannot escape the brutal reality that envelops him, cannot escape the capitalistic exploitation he is subjected to due to continuous frustration of symbolic recognition, the subtle erasure by a parental/Academic Other does not (want to) see. Given the thoughtful way Shinji Iwai approaches light and darkness within the composition, the spectator is motivated to take every shade as a signifier that evokes something about the subject, his relations with others, and his position within the Other.   

All About Lily Chou-Chou is a modern classic, one of the best, if not the best, cinematic experiences of the ‘00. Shunji Iwai delivers a captivating, yet disconcerting dis-harmony between his brutalist imagery and unverbalized written signifiers to fully immerse the spectator into the subjective ravage created by a society that, via the signifier, overvalues the image of harmonious sameness and the cycle of consuming objects-of-pleasure. Iwai, by compositionally evoking the sturm und drang of adolescence, the volatility of imaginary interactions, exposes the Japanese Other as failing the subject and his desire for recognition – the societal drama of the pervasive societal demand to excise anything that reeks of Otherness.  

Notes

Narra-note 1: What Lily Chou-Chou gave birth to with her signifiers is an Aether defined by her existence as musical symbol. It is because her music succeeds to resonate with subject’s solemn pain of existence that she gives birth to Aether, granting subjects a musical space to escape from the painful reality of existence.

The message-board, on the other hand, makes a minimal community by allowing those who entered Lily Chou-Chou Eather to joyously parade in unison around their chosen queen.

The latter formulation is not without affinity to the way right-wing groups install an ultimate object-of-love and establish a collective devotion to that figure; a devotion that grants their idol the power to radically shape their signifiers as well as their acts. Shinji Iwai delivers, in a certain sense, a thematical precursor to what is thematically so beautifully explored in Dennis Gansel’s Die Welle (2008).

Nevertheless, the anonymous space of the message board does allow certain subject to signal their suffering, to write what they cannot talk about, to address an other when the Other refuses to listen.

Narra-note 2: It is father’s fixation on creating a symbolic support for the mendacious image of a ‘traditional’ family that leads him to ask Shinichi to give up his nomination of being his first-born son – a nomination that he, within a traditional family, cannot share with another.

Narra-note 3: We must understand the impact the near-death experience andthe subsequent sight of the traveller’s blooded unconscious bodysorts on Shusuke’s subjective position through the lens of the Freudian notion of nachträglichkeit. Is it not the proximity of Real death that confronts him with the traumatic truth of being ‘erased’ by the Other, by being bullied to subjective silence by the Other?

This confrontation, first and foremost, manifest itself as an inability to remain silent when the enjoying bullying Other appears on the stage – he attacks, armed with a knife, the enjoying Other, this Other who generates pleasure from erasing the subjectivity of others.  However, his violent acts soon turn exploitative; he starts subjecting others to his enjoyment to silence his ignored and dismissed Otherness and prop up his damaged ego – fleetingly fill its cracks with enjoyment to create a fictitious sense of wholeness.

He relieves his unresolved pain by subjected others to it – he becomes a source of subjective erasure. Nothing illustrates this better than his turn to blackmail to force Shiori Tsuda (Yu Aoi) into enjo kosei and entrap her into lucrative exploitative capitalistic dynamic, his banding together with the vindictive girls in his classroom to organize the punitive rape of Yoko Kuno (Ayumi Ito) – a violent sexual reproach for being Other, and the ruthless way in which he exploits his friends financially. He does not merely prop up his damaged ego with enjoyment, but also with capitalistic exploitation.

So, how can we understand revelations by Sumika Kanzaki (Kazusa Matsuda) that Shusuke’s family broke up after the bankruptcy of their business? In our view, the nachträglichkeit effect of the near-death appearance gives these ‘familial tragedies’, these imaginary injuries, threaten the frail stability of his ego. We can, in fact, consider Shusuke’s turn to capitalistic exploitation as the answer to what cannot be spoken off – his familial misfortune.

Narra-note 4: How can we understand the tragic finale of Iwai’s film? In our view, by confronting the spectator with the two sides of Shusuke, Iwai reaffirms that, within the Japanese societal field, subjective turmoil is forced to remain quiet – the establishment of the fiction of harmony demands that the subject, to offer his support, repress its mental struggle.

However, turmoil cannot be silenced. It is, thus, because Shusuke, like many others, has no Other that can radically welcome the verbalization of his turmoil that he ends up attacking Otherness with the societal Other’s weapons of subjective erasure – consumption, exploitation, and pleasure.

The message-board, in this sense, offers merely an imaginary community, yet short-circuits any true acceptance of Otherness due its anonymous nature – loneliness despite connection. Due to the Other’s constellation, due to the subject’s perception that the Other that surrounds and embraces him is blind and deaf, the written evocations of his subjective turmoil cannot be turned into enunciated signifiers.

Cine-note 1: Iwai signals the importance of the confrontation with death and near-death on his behavioural shift by decorating Shusuke’s shocking attack on a class-bully with dreamy Okinawan music.  

Narra-note 4: This idea of being within the amniotic fluid, embraced by the amniotic sack produced by Lily Chou-Chou’s music, finds its visual resemblance in the way Shuichi listens to her music – on his bed, with his headphones, closed off from the outer world.

Narra-note 5: Blue cat’s statement that, for him, the Eather is running out can, in our view, only be understood as the dripping out of the amniotic fluid out the sack and the manifestation of an oppressive and suffocating void that pushes the subject to suicidal action or to performing violent reparative acts of pleasure.