With his latest narrative, Keisuke Yoshida (Blue (2021)) turns a cinematic glance at juvenile delinquency. Yet, what urged him to tackle this societal symptom was not simply an interest, but the need to question the societal environment he grew up in and offer this result of elaboration to the audience.
While Keisuke Yoshida saw many troubled people become gangsters, he succeeded, by encountering understanding adults and forming bonds with friends, to turn away from the volatile dynamics of the poor neighbourhood he grew up in. For him, this film is all about raising awareness about the existence of ‘unchained’ cases and exploring, by utilizing his own experiences, about how to ‘enchain’ these children back into the societal field: What allowed me to break away from my ‘destructive’ societal environment and why couldn’t others?
Yoshida’s narrative begins its unfolding by introducing the spectator to an event of Mirai No Sato rehabilitation facility where Kengo Nishi (Wataru Ichinose), the chief, tells the audience about his criminal past and his idea that his ‘unchaining’ was caused by having no adults that truly wanted to help him. In the Q&A that follows, however, an audience-member radically puts his use of corporeal punishment into question – “Wouldn’t children who learn violence from a criminal grow up to be violent themselves?”.
After the event, Ms Kusano (Kaho), a junior high school teacher, approaches Nishi with a question: How can I deal with children who don’t grasp things by merely being told off? Since Yu (Iori Wada) returned from juvie and reunited with Kaito (Hayato Uesaka), things have taken a turn for the worse in her class. Kaito’s mother (Fusako Urabe), after his bullying antics led to a school-meeting, breaks down, telling the others she cannot reach her son and is afraid of him.
Not much later, Kusano receives a phone-call from a worried parent. She tells her that she has seen Yu and Kaito, her students, mingling with some local gangs and demands that she takes her responsibility as a teacher and discipline them. Unsure on how to approach the situation, she calls Nishi for help. A decision that, ultimately, leads Kaito’s mother to accept Nishi’s proposal to take care of her son in his rehabilitation centre.
Yoshida opens Unchained with a sequence that exposes the main dynamic of bullying and the logic of such kind of violence. The sequence shows that the act of bullying is function of an over-investment in the ego, an over-investment that does not only force the subject to perceive imaginary injuries everywhere but also to exploit the other’s bodily being to repair his ego through violent pleasure – bullying generates medicative pleasure that structurally resolves nothing. Yoshida, however, does not only inaugurate his narrative with making this volatile dynamic explicit, but also returns to it later in the film to signal that, within the Japanese societal field, the confrontation with Otherness is quite often the source of imaginary injuries – injuries inflicted to the ego as well as to the mendacious image of social harmony.
One of the first things Keisuke Yoshida sets out to do with his narrative is introducing a contrasts between two different kinds of violence: the reparative retaliating kind of violence mentioned above and the kind of violence that seeks to make the symbolic Other, the Other of the Law, present for the delinquent-subject. While the former kind is radically imaginary – ego versus other – and animated by enjoyment, the latter kind seeks to support the (inscription of a) symbolic ‘no’ and presents itself to the subject as drained of pleasure.
It is, moreover, not too difficult to discern that the ‘troubled’ subject seeks to distance himself from the Other – the threat the Other poses – via such reparative retaliating kind of violence and sabotages the path of the signifier. The individual indulges in superficial and volatile interactions with alter-ego and others to distance himself from societal demands – a brutal refusal of the Other and its representatives – and to avoid the confrontation with his own Otherness. Within such relational field, retaliating violence is turned to to ‘silence’ anyone who threatens to puncture the ego or succeeds in doing so. That Kaito avoids his own struggle is signalled in his speech: in the lies he tells Yu – “I beat up a cocky one on the first day.” – and the emphasis he puts on the pleasure of hurting others in his conversation with Kusano (Psycho-note 1).
Throughout the narrative, we do not only see Kaito continuously utilizing violence to ‘repair’ or ‘re-affirm’ his ego with narcissistic stop-gaps of retaliating pleasure, but also witness how his fixation on (safeguarding) his own ego thwarts the formation of any kind of social bond. Within a field determined by such a volatile dual dynamic – radical sameness or brutal difference, relations easily disintegrate and the exploiter can easily slip into in the position of the exploited object.
As we are introduced to the communal spaces of Mirai No Sato, we do not merely realize that volatile me or you, my ego or your ego underpins many interactions between the youngsters, but also that the first aim of communal activities (e.g. farming, eating dinner together, … etc.) is nothing other than cutting of turn to violence – subjects are forced to endure their frustration, their unresolved turmoil – and demand the suppression of their ‘violent’ impulses. Yet, such demand proves very difficult for Kaito to heed and his inability to do so disrupts social fabric of Mirai No Sato.
The question quickly arises as to what, in Yoshida’s view, can rehabilitate the troubled subject; what can make him hear the Other, what can loosen the hold of the imaginary on the subject? Or, to put it differently, what can create an opening for the Other to be installed and triangulate the destructive dual relational dynamic?
Yoshida’s answer is twofold: The Other must produce ‘unconditional’ signs of love – “Even though he was covered in blood himself, Chief started treating my fingers without saying any word”; “Although it was out of love, Mr. Nishi’s punch was unbearable”. The Other produces such signs by listening genuinely, by attaining and maintaining a stance of consideration and respect, and by continuously uttering words of support. The second element concerns creating a space where a purpose can be found, where the subject can cling to a signifier that, by offering him a meaningful path of sublimation, allows himself to inscribe himself into the societal field in a constructive way.
Yoshida also does not fail to touch upon the dismissive discourses concerning delinquency and troublemakers that linger within the societal field – “A bad apple deserves to be discarded” (Narra-note 1). The brutal irony of these statements lies in the fact that they subtly excise the question concerning the logic of the violent acting-outs, erases the question as to what kind of Other his violence is reacting to.
The director also explores, in a rather confronting way, that the subject, despite being able to address genuine signifiers of regret, cannot erase the physical consequences of his past violent acts, the real traces of his past transgressions within the symbolic field. The past, by virtue of being inscribed in the bodies and the psyche of victims, is always able to catch up with the perpetrator. While the symbolic debt paid to the Other of the law rarely suffices for the victim and the (physical and mental) suffering he is burdened with, the past can also be exploited by media to not merely corroborate dismissive societal discourses, but to provide (autoerotic) moral pleasure.
Kaito’s father, who reveals himself as a victim of Nishi’s violent past, is pushed into a rather strange position, invited to take the signifiers of his own son Kaito – his fixation on the dual – to signify the (dynamic) of the trauma that befell him in the past. However, does such retro-active interpretation not blind Kaito’s father for the transformation or, better, triangulation Nishi underwent? Does Nishi, with the way he presents himself, not prove that change is within the real of possibility for Kaito? And, does such resentful holding on to the past not inhibit and corrupts the victim as subject in his process of coming-into-being?
All the different narrative threads come nicely together in the evocative and somewhat open-ended finale. By opting for such kind of ending, Yoshida invites the spectator to reflect on the various thematical explorations and answer, for himself, the question whether Kaito can change. However, it is evident that Yoshida seeks to expose the ‘dismissive’ discourses around delinquency and the moralistic ideals concerning raising and educating children as being complicit in imprisoning subjects in a cycle of destruction and self-destruction.
At the level of the composition, Keisuke Yoshida seeks to leverage the framing potential of the static shot and the long(er) take. By keeping his frame still and thoughtfully using the cut, he ensures that his relational drama is primarily fuelled by the way his cast brings the enunciations and acts to life with their bodily presence. In a certain sense, Yoshida does not want to stylistically contaminate the performances and let the naturalistic performances come to their full right. In some cases, Yoshida also exploit the static frame of his shots to create visually pleasing plays with compositional lines – e.g. frames within frames.
While Yoshida frames moments of violence with some shakiness, his reliance on compositional stillness is still apparent. Due to this stillness, Yoshida does not merely avoid beautifying violence and its ‘joyous’ excess, but succeeds in brutally confronting the spectator with the nonsensicality of its excess while also subtly signalling that this turn to verbal and physical violence is a radical defence against the Other (i.e. the Other of the law) and their subjective division (i.e. Other as one’s unconscious).
The composition is not without dynamic moments, yet dynamism is mainly reserved to shift the perspective – to undo the need for a cut. The shifts to shaky framing are not merely utilized to amplify the brutality and the crude impact of the violence – as mentioned above, but also to echo the subjective suffering the ‘unchained’ subject causes for his immediate surroundings and to subtly infuse a sense of a reality being documented.
With Unchained, Yoshida delivers a rather brutal social realist drama that does not merely ask the spectator to accept the fact that the societal field bears responsibility for the production of ‘trash’, but touchingly highlights that the seed of rehabilitation lies in confronting the troubled subject a radical different Other. Unchained is a timely film that reformulates the well-known answer to the societal ill of delinquency in a convincing and touching filmic package. Is the film too hopeful? Maybe. Yet, such hopefulness is the only gamble we have.
Notes
Psycho-note 1: The prominence of the imaginary, of the dual, in Kaito’s way of interacting with others is beautifully illustrated in his statements – e.g. “Hurting someone does not hurt me”; “It was a matter of winning or losing.”. By formulating these statements, Kaito reveals that, within his mental world, there are but two positions: Me or the other. There is no investment in the other as subject.
Narra-note 1: Let us also highlight how Kusano, as homeroom teacher, is forced to carry the full responsibility of what happens in her class and is subjected to all kinds of opinions from fellow teachers. Yet, what lies behind the absence of any kind of support is the uncomfortable reality that the Other has already given up.