Takashi Miike’s Gozu was never intended to be a theatrical feature, yet a successful passage at the directors’ fortnight at Cannes convinced the producers to give the V-cinema title a theatrical release outside Japan. What attracted international audiences in this V-cinema production was its brutal originality and its uncompromised surrealism.
Yet, Gozu would not have been the dream-like surreal piece where it not for Miike’s decision to bring in – apparently behind the producers’ backs – Sakichi Sato to radically rewrite the initial screenplay and spin a narrative around the image of a yakuza coming out of a woman’s womb. In this way, Miike turned Harumi Sone’s project, his wish for Miike to create a vehicle for his son, Hideki Sone, into a narrative that fitted his creative sensibilities.
Miike’s psychosexual narrative commences when Ozaki (Sho Aikawa) addresses his oyabun (Renji Ishibashi) with the following words: “Everything I am about to tell you is a joke”. He draws the attention of his boss and his brothers to a cute little Chiwawa dog outside the establishment and reveals that the dog is a trained yakuza attack dog. Despite no-one taking him seriously, he steps out and brutally kills the white dog.
Some time later, on the way to Nagoya to do some business, Ozaki divulges to his driver, Minami (Hideki Sone), that he believes that, as long as the oyabun is in charge, the gumi is doomed and, thus, that action must be taken. Ozaki, however, is oblivious to the fact that Minami has been ordered to kill him and dispose of him at a dump in Nagoya. Soon thereafter, strange things start happening and Minami ends up losing Ozaki’s lifeless body. A search that defies all imagination follows.
Gozu is, within Miike’s oeuvre, a work that has generated a lot of interpretation and critical analysis over the years – which helped cement its status as a (minor) masterpiece. Many of these critical pieces pay merely lip service to Freud and psychoanalysis, rendering opaque that a more serious psychoanalytic reading of this surreal piece, of this fantastical take on psychosis and its resolution, opens up new and fresh perspectives on subjectivity, sexuality, the father, and woman.
Our psychoanalytic analysis starts by considering Ozaki a paranoid subject whose delusional system is nearing its final form – the paranoid solution produces meaning and fixes his identity. It is evident, from Miike’s opening sequence, that, for Ozaki, the Other has attained a persecutory quality and he, wandering through the societal field, ends up seeing signs (dogs, cars, … etc) that corroborate the ill-intent of the Other and re-affirm that he, or better, his yakuza-ego and those who he can consider his semblable are in mortal danger.
Miike, however, highlights that Ozaki’s persecutory Other is not yet explicitly named and that he, as a result, cannot trust anyone, not even his fellow yakuza. Everything another subject does or doesn’t, says or doesn’t say, can signal their complicity with the Other’s plot against this yakuza-ness. Or, to put it differently, he can never be sure that the others arounds him are cut of the same cloth – a radical solitude clings to his presence.
The reason why Ozaki must invent a delusional signifying system is closely linked with how the oyabun, the fatherly instance of his gumi, realizes himself within the societal field (Narra-note 1).Addressing Minami, he laments the fact the oyaji thinks solely with his dick and is fixated on sexual jouissance. It is, thus, the boss’ jouissance, riddling his body and spilling over in his signifiers, that ripped Ozaki’s signifying system apart and has forced him to produce reparative delusional system to re-stabilize his yakuza-ego and his reality.
The proximity of Ozaki’s oyabun’s jouissance gives the persecutory threat a somewhat paradoxical finality (Psycho-note 1). His wish to rid himself of the oyabun forms the logical conclusion of his paranoic work to give his manifestation as intrusive Un-père some signification, yet such act might destabilize him further, offering himself up to a vindicative Other that cannot be situated anymore. Ironically, Ozaki’s sharing of his ongoing paranoic work – his harrowing revelations – forces his oyabun to realize itself as his persecutory Other and give, unbeknownst to him, Minami the order to kill and dispose of him.
While Minami is not introduced to the spectator as a paranoid subject, he does end up falling victim to a ‘psychotization’ of his surroundings – the intrusion of opaque signifying elements (e.g. the sudden ringing of the payphone, the multiplication of gazing instances, …) and the return of what was rejected in the real fabric of the societal field (i.e. narcissistic and incestuous sexual jouissance). What suddenly undermines Minami’s relationship with reality is the confrontation with Ozaki’s lifeless body, an event that, by introducing a sudden lack, complicates his function as père-version (Narra-note 2). Due to this event, Minami’s phantasmatic frame of reality starts faltering and becomes unable to pacify sexual jouissance, to undo it from its intrusive quality. The kind of sexuality that manifest itself, the kind of excess that, by its proximity, continuously threatens destabilize his ego, is what Minami could not symbolize.
Unsurprisingly, as the narrative unfolds, Minami begins to distrust the Other – the societal field defined by this excessive sexuality and estranging Otherness – and is on the verge of reading certain events, acts, and signifiers as signs of a plot being plotted against him (Narra-note 3). The spectator is turned into a witness of the crumbling of reality – reality as a facade – due to the continuous intrusion of the real. Yet, at the same time, the manifestation of the sexual Real provides him with a chance to symbolize it. Yet, how?
The absurd finale of Gozu is all about reparation, about delivering an answer to the question as to whether Minami can re-install Ozaki as père-version to reestablish a stable reality for himself and what to do with the oyabun, the fatherly instance exposed as an un-père, as a non-mediated intrusive presence of jouissance (Narra-note 4, Psycho-note 1).
The composition of Gozu presents itself to the spectator not merely as being split between static restraint and restive dynamism, but as a restraint frame that is under threat of being turned upside down, a visual defence that is about to become the support of threatens the consistence of the mundane.
Miike succeeds in sorting this effect on the spectator by smartly exploiting diegetic sounds and elegantly utilizing non-diegetic musical decorations (Sound-note 1). He inaugurates us in an atmosphere – the rigid symbolic system of yakuza – that is subtly under threat and, by virtue of threatening the system, arouses some foreboding uneasiness. Miike, moreover, supports the ominous strangeness of the filmic atmosphere, even delivering some genuine horror-like moments, by exploiting musical accompaniment, by playing with visual repetition, and by letting darkness invade the filmic frame.
What also ensures that a threatening uneasiness lingers within the film’s atmosphere is Miike’s subtle insertion of ellipses, of voids that disturb the temporal consistency of the film and evoke, rather elegantly, Minami’s increased struggle to orient himself within his comprised reality, comprised by the Real of sexuality.
Miike elevates his composition by fluidly interweaving – i.e. without complicating the tensive and ominous flavour of the atmosphere – aesthetically pleasing moments into its fabric. He proves his ability to find interesting compositional lines to structure his shots and deliver visual moments that please the spectator’s voyeuristic look.
Takashi Miike wields the same aesthetic sensibility to frame violent acts. However, he does not seek to exploit the power of composition to beautify and exalt violence, but to expose its radical brutality. The composition, in other words, does not grind off the crude and traumatic dimension of violence, but merely seeks to sharpen it and, thus, amplify its visual impact on the spectator.
Miike also exploits the power of shot-composition to emphasize the comical absurdity that clings to certain violent occurrences (e.g. the effect of gravity on Ozaki’s lifeless body) and to underline the unsettling weirdness that weakens the mundanity of the societal field. Miike seeks to expose the strangeness that resides in the ordinary (the unheimlich), to stage the re-encounter of what is most intimate outside oneself (extimacy), the manifestation of the gaze as what upsets the imaginary-symbolic equilibrium (Psycho-note 3).
In one case, Miike turns to shaky framing to not only confront the spectator with the voyeuristic dimension of film-spectatorship, but also to equate him, fleetingly, with the gaze that threatens to upset Minami’s frail equilibrium. In this sequence, Miike beautifully shows that the subject, after his encounter with the gaze, promptly seeks to efface it from the visual field – i.e. by finding a way to integrate it into pacifying consistence of meaning as reality.
Takashi Miike’s Gozu is a cinematographic gift, a surreal masterpiece that stays with the spectator long after the credits have faded. While some will dismiss Miike’s phantasmatic exploration of psychosis as a disorganized and indulgent mess, the use of certain psychoanalytic coordinates re-organizes this shocking experience in a thought-provoking exploration of subjectivity, sexuality and jouissance, the father, woman, and love (General-note 1). Highly recommended.
Notes
Narra-note 1: It is, thus, heavily implied that Ozaki’s persecutory Other is none other than his oyabun by virtue of the sexual fixation that animates and orients his signifiers, a fixation that produces an excess that affirms he is not cut from the same cloth.
Following this reading, the killing of the dog in front of the oyabun has a deeply performative function, confronting his persecutory instance with his own willingness to destroy him.
Psycho-note 1: The concept of the père-version is Lacan’s way to reduce the Name-Of-The-Father to a symptom/sinthome that can bind, as a fourth knot. the psychic registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) together.
The notion of un-père, on the other hand, is utilized to name the encounter that, by exposing the hole left by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, causes the destabilization of the subject.
Narra-note 2: That Ozaki is a père-version for Minami, albeit a problematic one, is implied by how he responds to Ozaki’s wish to off the boss: “Since you saved my life, I’ve been ready to lay down mine”; “No matter what, I’m behind you all the way”.
Narra-note 3: Miike offers a nice play on the ‘psychotization’ of the societal field by letting the American wife of the sake-shop owner read her answer to Minami from a prepared script, implying that the Other knows more than Minami and has foreseen his steps.
Narra-note 4: Miike shows, in a rather intimate manner, that one simple psychotic belief can repair the subject’s reality and allow him to enter the field of sexuality.
Psycho-note 2: Readers will wonder how we interpret the infamous body-horror rebirth scene. In our view, the finale graphically stages the extraction of desire and jouissance from Ozaki as père-version, the reparation of Minami’s psychic reality by separating an enjoying body to desire – the bodily site of object a, the cause of his desire and the centre around which his drive circulates, from the père-version that, by being radically desexualized, can truly sinthomatically knot his psychic reality together.
The finale, in fact, exposes that the true struggle of Minami concerned the installation of Ozaki as a pure symbolic knot, as pure function. The frailty of Ozaki as père-version – a knot not yet tight enough – is caused by Ozaki’s paranoic response to bodily jouissance – the establishing of the persecutory Other, and Minami’s unresolved sexual attraction.
The frailty of his function is revealed by the disruptive effect his bodily disappearance sorts on Minami’s reality. Minami’s trajectory – that what returns in the Other – that his sexual inhibition is function of his rejection of the incestuous and narcissistic dimension of sexuality.
His acceptance of Sakiko (Kimika Yoshino)’s sexual advances could have led to a reality-fracturing flood of sexual jouissance – a destructive excess of enjoyment, yet his penetrative act, shockingly as well as miraculously, gives birth the re-invented père-version that does not merely binds symbolic, real, and imaginary tightly together but makes sexuality and masculinity possible for him.
One could go even further and argue that Miike shows that the fatherly function, to function properly for the subject, must find its support – or even its origin – in a woman/mother.
Narra-note 5: The film can also be interpreted as kind of Heraclean narrative – a take on the descend of heracles into the realm of the death to rescue Theseus. There are many narrative elements – the road that stops at the river, characters who appear to have already died, the appearance of Gozu, the bull-headed demon – that support such ‘mythical’ reading.
Such reading does not contradict our psychoanalytic reading, but adds another dimension to it.
Psycho-note 3: How can we connect the signifier extimacy with the un-père? While Minami’s psychotic decompensation is not instigated by an encounter with the un-père, he ultimately forces himself to force this real – to confront sexuality, that what has no symbolic place within his subjectivity, what appears as most foreign to him. The crazy prelude to the finale is an extimate event, an event where Minami faces what is excised from his own subjectivity in the name of love.
Sound-note 1: In some cases, Miike induces a sense of uneasiness or ensures a sliver of uneasiness remains lingering in the atmosphere of his narrative by brutally cutting off the consistency of the diegetic sound with a streak of silence as he cuts to another shot.
General-note 1: Spectators might be surprised that we have avoided utilizing the signifier homosexuality. We do not consider Minami a closeted homosexual by virtue of what happens in the finale and because of the final shots of the narrative.
In our reading, what attracts Minami in Ozaki is the specific masculine ideal he embodies, his unattained ideal-ego. His attraction to Ozaki is narcissistic in nature. Sakiko’s seduction brings Minami’s ego in jeopardy, yet Ozaki’s birth does not merely put a stop to the threat of ego disintegration, but, as sanitized père-version, enables him to desire a woman as man, as a masculine yakuza.