Dissociation in “Pleasures of the Flesh”
Pleasures of the Flesh (1965)
Pleasures of the Flesh is an exploitation film first and foremost, though it is tinged with Marxist critique as well. This perspective follows from the political leanings of the Japanese New Wave movement, whose films often traded in sexuality and violence to more directly convey political allegories. The film's protagonist Atsushi is a murderer and serial womanizer, so he is difficult to identify with. The trajectory of the narrative, as well as the bleak worldview it portrays, is consistent with film noir. Money is the primary factor which determines people's fates, and which causes misfortune as it circulates. Within this paradigm, we are inclined to judge some characters more harshly than others. It makes sense to judge Atsushi as the most evil character, because he ruins several people's lives in the wake of his self-destructive behavior. And yet we do come to understand his motivations. He experiences life in a state of constant dissociation, rationalizing his actions through the excuses of "fate," "revenge," and other lofty concepts. Cinematography and editing are employed to visually represent his dissociation, which is also reinforced through the temporal ellipses in the plot. We can recast dissociation as a philosophical concept, as a kind strategy of alienation from the symbolic (social) order. Slavoj Žižek in his book Looking Awry describes a complete break from the symbolic order as psychosis, and we can definitely read this character as psychotic for a number of reasons. Instead of mounting any kind of rebellion against society however, the protagonist spends money to instrumentalize women. Even then, his money gets away from him and is used in ways he does not intend. Which is to say, one's dissociation from the symbolic order does directly lead to revolutionary thought, it is merely an opening up which can just as easily be recaptured by hegemony.
In order to demonstrate just how exploitative and grimly satirical this film is, we need to attempt a summary of the plot. First we see a scene where a woman is getting married, named Shoko. Then, we receive narration which summarizes the events leading up to this marriage. Atsushi tutors Shoko, then a high school student, while he is in college. Her parents appear to be well off, judging by their capacious house with a sprawling garden around it. Somehow, they manage to convince Atsushi to murder someone who molested Shoko when she was a child. Because he is in love with Shoko, he decides this is the right thing to do. One scene in which the two frolic in her family's garden and nearly kiss, is used with Atsushi's voice over to show his feelings for her. He leans toward her, but her eyes are closed and she fails to notice his intentions. He then boards a train specifically to find the abuser, and throws him off of the train successfully. He returns to the parents and states that he has "taken care of it," and in turn they give him a small envelope of cash for the favor. The circulation of blood money sets a precedent for the events which follow.
About a year later, a middle aged man in a suit and coke bottle glasses comes to visit Atsushi at his home. This man was on the train when the murder was committed, and thus says he can "trust" Atsushi with a job. But in reality he is plotting to commit blackmail, and threatens to expose the murder if their promise is broken. The businessman works for the government, and has embezzled 100 million yen in taxes. He is giving 30 million yen to Atsushi to hold onto, because he knows he will soon be caught and go to jail, and estimates he will serve five years in prison. Working for the government, he has an intimate knowledge of how the law functions. The implications are terrifying, which is that no knowledge is truly concealed from the law, and every criminal will be punished in due time. It is the same logic that would allow this man to be present as a murder witness on the train, and to miraculously find the culprit himself. And so, he threatens to turn Atsushi in to the police if he spends this money. Our hero agrees as he doesn't really have a choice. Four out of these five years pass, and one day Shoko turns up to Atsushi's home, and she invites him to his wedding. When he offers to run away with her and the money, she refuses. This moment is what spurs him to further criminal action, not his act of murder. Therefore he decides to spend all of the money "on women," as he says plainly. He propositions a womaned named Hitomi in a nightclub, and agrees to pay her 1 million yen a month to live with him. However, he finds out that a Yakuza member is extorting some of this money from her, and furthermore she is technically married to him. She was "given" to this man as a favor from their boss. She cuts off her own pinky finger to buy her freedom, and the arragement is over.
The next case concerns a woman named Shizuko, whom he takes home from a nightclub once again. He shares a private room drinking with several women, though he forces himself on one of them in particular; it is implied that he rapes her. Afterward, he buys her off in the same way as before. She is married with child, and she sometimes sneaks away to give her husband money. Eventually this arragnement falls apart due to the strain it places on their family. Again, the money is going somewhere our protagonist does not expect. Next, he finds a nurse named Keiko in a doctor's office and strikes up a conversation with her. She had just quit her job after a doctor was sexually harassing her at work. We only glimpse a forced kiss between the two, their heads poking above a privacy screen. She agrees to the one million yen per month arragnement, though she is hesitant to have sex with him at first. He cheats on her with a mute prostitute named Mari. But even Mari really "belongs" to one gangster in particular, who tells him not to come around to the brothel any more. Just then, the embezzling businessman shows up and demands his money. He tries to drown our hero, but Keiko saves him. At this time she ends their relationship. Then he desperately keeps pursuing Mari, and buys her off from the gangster. The gangster is impressed with his bravado and wealth, and then tells him a secret: he is employed by the embezzler, trying to catch some tutor who ran off with the money. Atsushi laughs, and reveals that he was the wanted man all along. Mari shows up to the scene and shoots the gangster dead, miraculously. After that, Shoko surprisingly shows up to Atsushi's home asking for money. Even though she married a rich president of a pharmaceutical company, somehow the company went bankrupt. She already possessed the knowledge that Atsushi was rich, and even saw him spending time with women at the nightclub. At this point he reveals everything to her. Natrually, she calls the police and he is finally sent to prison. He almost eats a suicide pill, but changes his mind when the police tell him Shoko was the informant.
Turning back to the initial wedding scene of the film, we can recontextualize this as Atsushi's central trauma which he is doomed to repeat in his memories. The audio of Shoko saying, "Teacher, please come see me in my wedding dress" is played over slow-motion footage of the wedding as it is actually occurring. We do not hear any diagetic audio which actually matches with the event as it is happening. The church is very dimly lit, with one spotlight beaming on Shoko. She turns her face in close up behind her to see the teacher, and the look in her eyes is vacant and anxious. In other words, this marriage has the appearance of being shrouded in darkness, and not being particularly joyous. And because we discover that Atushi is an unreliable narrator, this scene is cast into doubt. It is consistent with how Shoko is portrayed to us throughout the film. She is an enigma to Atushi, and he is unable to grasp her emotions. While he is shown teaching her in her parent's yard, she is smiling and biting on her pencil, which he appears to take as a sexual innuendo. Later as they are both lying on the grass, Shoko is gazing upward at the sky, and then closes her eyes. At this time the tutor turns on his side and tils his head slightly as if to kiss her. Before he can, she opens her eyes wide and smiles, but her gaze is still directed straight up, and her train of thought has moved on. They fail to establish true intersubjectivity, as Atsushi entertains Shoko's speech while failing to have meaningful dialogue with her. As the film progresses, Atsushi is haunted by hallucinations of Shoko wearing a pink dress. One such hallucination occurs while the tutor is living with Shizuko. After he beats her husband who is begging for his wife back, he gazes into the forest, and "sees himself" putting a noose around his neck. He also sees Shoko. In a similar scene where he is at the beach with Keiko, the two of them are laying down together in the sand. Suddenly a pair of policemen speed by in a buggy, but leave the lovers alone. Atsushi stands up contritely, and watches them drive away. This threat of prohibition emboldens him, and he then wants to make love to Keiko. He hallucinates that Keiko has transformed into Shoko. He grasps at Keiko even as she refuses him, tearing her black and white dress. Disgusted, she begins to stumble into the ocean with her high heels still on. She looks back at Atsushi as he chases her into the water, dressed in a gray suit. These events are presented in an extreme wide shot, recalling a composition we might see in an Anontonioni or Mizoguchi film. The cloudy sky refracts to the gray ocean -- thus, the gray suit and the black and white dress appear to recede into the waves. Eventually he bargains with her, agreeing to get married before having sex.
Two of the most memorable shots/sequences in the film are constructed with multilayered superimposition. In both cases, this device communicates a feverish passage of time through the frequentative tense. In the first such sequence, we see layers of a christmas tree, neon signs, and the nude figure of Hitomi applying perfume and putting on makeup. The close-up shot of Hitomi first focuses on her arm and shoulders, and then tracks upward to show her nose and lips. Her human figure is abstracted and objectified in this space. Dialogue between Atsushi and Hitomi is present, wherein he is concerned how much money she spends on perfume. She doesn't care because she is enjoying herself, and she even entertains the idea of plastic surgery. Within this context, we can understand Hitomi accepting her body as participant in a circulation of commodities, which is visually represented by the figure of her body merging with neon lights. Immediately before this scene Hitomi asks, "Where will you take me next? ...Tokyo has every kind of food and entertainment," and she lists off the various leisure activities one can pursue in Tokyo. Atsushi does not return her enthusiasm, clearly still ambivalent and guilt-ridden. The other such sequence of superimpositions occurs in a montage suggesting the frequentative tense, as Atsushi keeps returning to have sex with Mari. A close-up of her mouth is sumperimposed over their entangled flesh, then this mouth is duplicated once, and yet again. Her three disembodied mouths form a kind of monstruous triangle which occludes the otherwise conventional sex scene. Going beyond sexual pleasure, the image of sexuality morphs into something unholy and anxiety-producing.
So if we take these "subjective" shots which broadcast Atsushi's state of mind at their face value, we could issue an armchair diagnosis of psychosis, which was brought on after his act of murder. However, we don't know what happened to him during the four years before he learned of Shoko's marriage, so we have no claim to any psychotic symptoms during that time. Indeed, he focuses much more on Shoko's marriage as opposed to the murder he committed. His internal monologue contextualizes his cruelty as a sustained act of revenge for this particular trauma. If we also include a feminist reading of the film, Atsushi has been objectifying women from the start, and was waiting for an inciting incident to act out and possess women freely. A large sum of money gives him the perfect means to act out his antisocial fantasies, which he pursues after receiving a flimsy justification. And yet our reading is shallow if we simply write him off as a psychotic misogynist. Looking at the other characters, we can see that they are looking to Atsushi as a means of escape from their own lives, where money is constantly siphoned from them, in contexts where they have limited agency. And yet, they give up even more agency by living with this man and taking his money. Through his surplus of money, Atsushi opens up an emotionally toxic void of affluence. He psychologically ruins the women he "buys" while giving them money which might materially improve their lives later on. There is no positive moral judgment to pass on Atsushi, but I think it is possible to read nearly every character as motivated by the desire to "escape" wage labor and debt by psychologically destroying themselves and entering into a traumatic fantasy space. The "strategies" of psychosis and dissociation are not sufficient to escape the flow of capital, because the fantasy space itself is penetrated with the tendrils of a capitalist logic and was only opened up through a surplus of money in the first place, which must circulate. In other words, this desire to dissociate has been entirely thwarted, and in this failure we can better understand what kind of psychic work is occurring in this text. Poisonous capital is turned into poisonous affect, which cannot help but circulate until death.















