“Bodies are what really matter, right? Cause we won’t have them forever.”
While spectators can enjoy older films without fully knowing the cultural context in which they were created, some films can only be truly understood – their message unravelled – by making the associations between the narrative elements and the cultural and political events explicit.
One such film that necessitates such cultural exploration is Isao Fujisawa’s first and last feature film Bye Bye Love (1974). Fujisawa’s narrative follows Utamaru (Ren Tamura) and Giiko (Miyabi Ichijô) who embark on a road trip after Utamaru murders Giiko’s American lover Nixon (Enver Tenpai) with a stolen gun. While his film is often heralded as a classic of Japanese queer cinema, the failure to discern the political echoes obfuscates the fact that Fujisawa crafted a poignant metaphor of the young Japanese subject marked by the failure of the political protests of the sixties and seventies.
The first event that the spectator must keep in mind while watching Bye Bye Love are the Anpo protests in 1959-60 and in 1970 – the public outcry against the United States-Japan Security Treaty. The first Anpo protest culminated in the penetration of the Diet building by the protestors and a violent clash with police-officers that led to the death of maiden martyr Michiko Kanba, a female Tokyo University student. In 1970, in the wake of the Japanese university protests in the closing years of the sixties, a series of protest marches against the automatic renewal of the Security Treat occurred. Yet, this time, the political establishment, led by prime minister Eisaku Sato, chose to ignore the protests completely. Both political events underline that a call for separation was present among the public.
While of lesser importance, the second political event relevant to Bye Bye Love concernsthe “Nixon Shocks” of 1971. One of the shocks concerns President Nixon’s decision to suspend the convertibility of the dollar to gold to counter the foreign price-gouging on the grossly overvalued dollar and combat the rise in the unemployment rate and the increasing inflation rate. The Japanese government, who feared that the appreciation of the yen would impact the Japanese economy negatively, responded by forcing the central bank to intervene in the foreign exchange market to keep the old currency rate stable, thus proving that, within the political psyche, Japan wishes to remain dependent on the U.S.A.
The violence that marked the Anpo protests in the late fifties and the university protests in the closing years of the sixties finds its echo in Utamaru’s theft of the police gun. His act of castration, depriving the cop who was trying to arrest him for the obstruction of justice of what symbolizes and supports his power, playfully reverses the power displayed by the police to quell the political unrest. Yet, Utamaro’s theft also echoes that he, as subject, is radically disillusioned by the Other, in the societal fabric of laws, ideals, fantasies, and pleasures.
It is this societal and political disillusionment – or, the reverse, the acceptance of the impotence of political activism – that defines Utamaru’s subjective pessimism. He addresses his nihilistic pessimism to the societal Other via his poetic suicidal performances, like the one he performs in front of Giiko. These performances do not merely evoke that he feels subjectively dead, but also echoes the threatening inescapability of his own mortality (Psycho-note 1).
Faced with the truth of his own mortality, societal pacts and dynamics lose their meaning. The crude manner by which Utamaro, the stupid worm, dumps his girlfriend is an effect of the operation of his pessimism on the societal field – i.e. the signifier marriage has been violently robbed of his societal meaning.
Isao Fujisawa’s evocative interconnection between the disillusionment in the societal Other and threatening inescapability of one’s own mortality invites the spectator to re-analyse the relationship between the subject and the societal field. The occurrence of petty crimes, the seductive surge of commercialized sexual enjoyment, the joyous commodification of desire, and the hidden threat of sexual transgression evoke that the societal field is structurally supported by the lie – seduction is deception – and that this lie aims to societally repress the truth of mortality. To be able to fully indulge in imaginary conflicts and to mindlessly administering self-satisfying shots of pleasure, one must push the belief in one’s mortality to the deepest grottos of one’s mind.
Yet, even if one is disillusioned in the Other and one’s life threatens to turn non-sensical due to the inescapability of one’s death, one often refuses to fully cut off the bonds with the societal field – this post-war field marked by American political and economical influence. Utamaro is, as his clothing style implies, still subscribed to the societal dictate of consuming pleasure and chasing imaginary regard from others – the luring the other’s desire. He keeps performing, albeit in a minimalistic way, the societal lie of his immortality. This subscription allows Utamaro to fall victim to his own eros, his own sexual desire, and let his desire be entrapped by Giiko’s presence – this spark of life. Supported by a mendacious belief in his own desirability, Utamaro embarks on a chase to grasp the crazy little thing called love, the sole thing that can counter the threat of his pessimism.
These various subjective and societal elements lead Utamaru to realize a seemingly contradictory position within the societal field. Yet, his careless attitude is not caused by his radical refusal of the Other, but by the necessity to demand an answer from the societal field, an answer to the powerlessness he feels with respect to political power – We’ll get caught anyway. I’m not running, the meaninglessness his life has attained and its purified and radicalized truth: the inevitability of one’s death.
Giiko, on the other hand, has realized a different subjective position in response to the fundamental lie that structures the Other (Narra-note 1). Her determination to live off others – refusing to establish herself as a working member of society (shakaijin) within the societal field, is not simply a radicalized acceptance of the societal demand to consume pleasure – i.e. the assumption of the empty positivity of consumerism – and play the imaginary game of seduction and sexual objectification, but also an attempt to exploit the dimension of the seductive lie – words are like faces, they lie – to please her own ego, her own body-image. She acts, in other words, in full knowledge of the structuring role the lie plays within the societal field.
The passage of a stripper (Atsuko Ami) emphasizes the performative quality of being within the Other. The societal field around us is, de facto, a stage upon which we perform our gendered ego and put our mendacious emotions on display, upon which we reflect our subjective bricolage of appearances to hide and pacify our subjective emptiness. Giiko’s performance as a woman and as a consumer is, in this sense, an attempt to escape the emptiness that defines her and deny the truth of the inevitability of her death.
The second political event is, quite obviously, echoed within the figure of Nixon, Giiko’s lover. Within the narrative, Nixon is both introduced as an aggressor for the Japanese Other – he is a hitman – as well as a protector of the Japanese Other – he is an American US embassy official who takes care of Giiko. He does not merely echo the economical aggression by president Nixon and the destruction the US inflicted on Japan during the second world war, but also signals the role of the US as protector and reconstructor in the post-war period – e.g. Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, Bretton Woods system, … etc.
In this light, Utamaru and Giiko’s fight where they trash Nixon’s place must be read as a metaphor of the societal division concerning the presence of America within the societal field and the sociopolitical situation between the two countries (Narra-note 2). Within this poetic metaphor, Utamaru personifies the Japanese subject who desires to shed the Japanese Other from the influence of that dumb-ass country – ‘Go home American! This is Japan’. Giiko, on the other hand, represents the Japanese subject who has accepted Japan’s political and economical dependency on the United States. Giiko’s brutal refusal of Utamaru’s sexual invitation is both a rejection of his rebellious invitation to unite against the American Other – get out! – and a meek acceptance of her subdued position to one’s aggressor – Nixon’s gonna kill me (Narra-note 3).
The love-hate relationship that blossoms between Utamaru and Giiko should, in this sense, be read as the visualisation of the diverging effects of a societal field determined by consumerism and political repression on the subject – nihilistic pessimism or a flight into pleasure – as well as a metaphor for the fissure internal to the post-war Japanese societal field due to the political and psychological hold the U.S.A. has over Japan. She is both attracted to and repelled by the rebellious flavour of Utamaru’s pessimism, the feeble echo of a desire to force societal change.
Giiko’s description of her relationship with Utamaru as a love triangle between him, her female self (atashi) and her male self (ore) should be read in a similar manner. Societally speaking, Giiko’s subjective division is closely related to the alienating effect of the societal demand to consume pleasure and exalt the imaginary. In a political sense, Giiko’s split metaphorizes the fact that the post-war subject is divided between his acceptance of Japan’s submissive position and his wish for more political independency, between the refusal to give up Japan’s reliance on the U.S.A and the wish to radically refuse American influence.
Two elements stand out in the visual composition of Bye Bye Love: the poetic shot-compositions and subtle repetition of certain visual elements. While the former ensures that the visual fabric is full of beautiful shots and poetic mood-pieces, the latter – i.e. the repetition of the American colours (blue, white and red), the presence of Coca-Cola bottles and Coca-Cola billboards, and the Pepsi vending machine – visually supports and amplifies Fujisawa’s thematical exploration of the political subject within post-war Japan.
The repetition of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 throughout the narrative echoes that the road trip will culminate in tragedy – in a literal and metaphorical death. The finale of Bye Bye Love offers the spectator not only a touching account of the importance of love for the subject, but also a pessimistic political denouement for those subjects who harbour a revolutionary wish to inaugurate radical change within the Japanese societal field and its bond with the U.S.A.
With Bye Bye Love, Isao Fujisawa delivers a true classic of political cinema. Behind the manifest queer narrative that emphasizes the subjective effect of love lies an affective unravelling of how the post-war political struggle and blossoming of consumerism has sabotaged the subject’s will for societal and political change. Even though Fujisawa’s metaphorical narrative must have resonated quite easily with subjects who lived through Japan’s era of political unrest, his message of political castration has not lost any of its relevance for the contemporary subject.
Notes
Psycho-note 1: While a subject believes in his death – “Death belongs to the realm of faith”, he acts in ignorance of this belief within the societal field. The truth of one’s mortality sustains the frail societal lie of one’s one immortality. The subject would not be able to bear the life he has if he “couldn’t totally rely on the certainty that it will end”.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW2F8WtruAY
Narra-note 1: “But I don’t know, is the white (mixed) in blue still white? It’s still white, but it looks like something else, why is that”. If one equates white with truth and blue with the lie, one can transform Giiko’s statement into a questioning of the relation between truth and lie within speech as well as in the field of the image.
Narra-note 2: Fujisawa delivers, within his narrative, apoignant remark concerning the difference between gender and sex. Driving away from the crime scene, Utamaru confronts Giiko with the artificiality (kahougin) of her womanhood. While Utamaru’s remark focuses on the biological truth as real (sex), Giiko’s retort – the whole city is artificial – emphasizes that culture and the language we breathe in and out, i.e. that what allows us to become subjectabd assume a gender, is fundamentally man-made (gender).
Giiko’s signifiers evoke nothing other than the fact that while Utamaru might rely on the biological real to support his manhood, he is doomed, due to his existence within a man-made societal field of signifiers, to perform his manufactured version of manhood for the other.
Narra-note 3: In our view, Giiko’s fixation on consumption of beauty-products and the seductive quality of the imageis the cause of her lack sexual desire. The emptiness that structures her subject – I do not feel anything – is what pushed her to the fleeting pleasures of consumption and led her to consume objects, in a kind of metonymy, in the vain hope to close off her lack.
Giiko evokes, in short, the idea that capitalistic consumerism turns the subject a-political. The subject has no need for political if he can surround himself with trash-objects-of-consumption.