MegaTheory

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.

Stalker (1979)

One way to define mise-en-scène: everything which is in front of the camera. Mise-en-scène can be understood as an assemblage of people and objects which constitute the scene or situation of the cinematic world. Mise-en-scène functions by mimesis in the depiction of worlds real or imaginary, such as Georges Méliès’ painted backdrops in Journey to the Moon, or the more subtle construction of spaces within studio back lots characteristic of Hollywood Films. For instance in the film Casablanca, while the dialogue provides constant reminders that the film takes place in Morocco during World War II, the action was shot on plain-looking sound-stages. On another level of abstraction, one real-life location can be used to stand in for another, as a film shot in Vancouver might "take place" in New York. The truth-value of this visual world may not matter to us unless we are familiar with the location depicted, or if we are seeing a documentary or other film where truth-claims are called into question. But in these cases and others where we feel a "gap" in the representation, the mise-en-scène can become conspicuous. I argue that the mise-en-scène in the film Stalker is deployed in this way, to question the truth-value of its particular fictional world. Stalker takes place in the real world which contains one fantastical "Zone," and the mise-en-scène does the work of suspending our disbelief as to the Zone's magical properties.

Stalker was filmed in an abandoned power plant in Estonia in the 1970′s, and thus we need to consider the Cold War historical context. It looks like a "Soviet" power plant because Estonia was of course within the borders of the Soviet Union. Without knowing this information, one could still guess that we are looking at an abandoned factory of some kind out in the real world, with flora and climate similar to Russia. But if we possess this additional knowledge of the film's production, it does make a difference in how we interpret it. In the film, the power plant and its environs is named the Zone, where a meteorite or UFO has crashed and brought strange new phenomena in its wake. The Zone is a place which is shaped by the consciousness of the people who venture there, and the Zone can either "punish" its trespassers with death or grant them wishes. Of course, there is no way we could film such "magic" and prove its existence. Further, the problem of representation becomes more difficult if a space possess magic power, rather than a single entity or object. Even if we could "really" film this phenomenon, it may not have a recognizable form, or we may not have any visual proof as such. And indeed there are no flashy special effects in this film, and there are no moments where one thing is disguised as anything else. In this sense, Stalker is like The Blair Witch Project. We suspend our disbelief and "witness" the supernatural even though this is not manifest by any visual facts, but rather through acting, as well as systematic defamiliarization of the real world locations.

The film is structured in a way which recalls The Wizard of Oz through its color-coded passage from the real to the fantastic. In summary, three men known as the Stalker, the Author, and the Scientist travel to the Zone in order to make their wishes come true. The Stalker is a man who has intimate knowledge of the Zone, and guides the others through it. They begin in an urban center, which is filmed entirely in sepia tones. There are consistent patterns of decay, corrosion, leakage, and other forms of entropy throughout the film. The director Andrei Tarkovsky famously favors long takes, so that the viewer has more time to focus on the details of the space. Following Andre Bazin's thesis on Italian neorealism, we can argue these shots provide us with both a plentitude of space, as well as a surplus of time in which to contemplate the contours of the narrative world and posit our own interpretation of events. An early example of such a shot focuses on the back of the Stalker's head. The shot is symmetrical in that the back of the head is positioned directly toward the camera, centered in the frame. The man is also well-lit so that our eyes can trace the contours of various textures carefully. His blonde buzz-cut hair is a formation of porcupine-like quills, below which is a frayed cloth scarf, below which is a tweed jacket with its lattice of innumerable stitches. Another shot inside the Stalker's house shows the kitchen in a panorama, with an assemblage of rusty stove, kettle, ladle, and other objects carefully arrayed. Taking in this domestic inventory reminds me of the kitchen sequence in Umberto D where the maid solemnly conducts her morning ritual. In the shots within the town bar, the rough wooden floor appears wet and slippery, and the concrete walls have a worn skin-like appearance. As our heroes escape from the town, the action unfolds in a high contrast film noir montage. The pervasive spotlights, barbed wire, and tanks are shorthand for a dystopian police state. In these spaces, the abundance of flaws, fissures, and frays draws our eyes back and forth across the frame in an ever-increasing number of saccades.

Once our heroes reach the Zone, the color palette changes from sepia to full color. The Writer falls asleep while riding on the electric cart into the Zone, waking up to a world of color. This suggests that the events which occur in the Zone could be a dream, or that the difference between the real world and the Zone is just as dramatic as the difference between waking and dreaming. Establishing wide shots of the landscape, a field littered with tanks, and the approach to the power plant are composed like Romantic era paintings, which emphasize the natural beauty of the surroundings. Several times in the film, characters will suddenly wince, turn away, or fall to the ground under the influence of the Zone's power. The Stalker scolds his companions for failing to "respect" the Zone. However none of the characters are ever granted any clear punishments. At worst, the men are gripped with existential terror. Witnessing these psychological attacks provides our only "evidence" that any supernatural events are taking place. The supernatural qualities of the Zone are also suggested by the eerie nature of the real-world settings. The abandoned buildings are derelict and overtaken with verdure, providing imagery which brings to mind binaries such as nature/technology, past/future, and peace/war. The spaces within the power plant are damp, dark, and ominous. One particularly effective location is the underground sewer tunnel, seen as an inky blackness interrupted with patches of brilliant light streaming through openings above. The room filled with sand dunes is another memorable example. The regular pattern of evenly-distributed dunes is unmistakably man-made, thus uncanny. This approach of "natural assemblage" or of using natural materials in a manner of collage is one of the film's major innovations.

One particularly enigmatic shot in the film fully realizes this concept of "natural assemblage." This is an overhead shot of a small pond, which slowly moves upward. While this occurs in the middle of the film, the shot is in done in sepia as we saw in the first act. In this murky shallow water, we see an array of objects passing by. At first these objects seem to be random detritus, but their symbolic nature soon becomes evident. We see floor tiles, springs and gears, snails, a bucket of fish, a gun, and a Catholic icon pass by. The ruins of a civilization can be figured as a pile of dead signifiers. Here the grand human obsessions with industrialization, religion, and war are reduced to mere trash floating in a stream. Much like the nondiagetic montage sequence of religious icons in Sergei Eisenstein's October, this shot is excessive. It is narrative excess, in the sense that we are gazing at mere objects which do not tie into the narrative action. But it is also excessive in its cryptic nature (why are so many diverse objects presented to us in sequence, like a rebus?). Without any narrative motivation for the shot, we must contemplate its meaning as the stream flows beneath us. There is a play with scale and perspective as well; because objects such as the gun are effectively in close-up scale, this makes us feel as though we are shrunk down to a smaller size, like a frog. This is also a demonstration of how a collection of objects, like the pots and pans in a kitchen, is enough to constitute an entirely self-contained "world." There is some equivalence between a room full of sand dunes and a stream full of discarded objects. We are both drawn into a sensuous visual world, at the same time we are reminded of the constructedness of all filmic worlds. The magic of Stalker lies not only within the power of the Zone, but also the power of mise-en-scène to create other worlds which are coherent enough to provide a rupture within reality itself. The Stalker finds transcendence in the Zone precisely because it is cut off from society. Just as the Stalker bemoans the death of faith in modern society, this film shows us the power of "suspending disbelief" which fiction brings to bear.

Moonlight (2016)

The explanation for the title of the film Moonlight is given directly to us in didactic fashion. Early in the film, the crack dealer Juan teaches the young Chrion how to swim, and relates a story from his childhood. Once a Cuban woman told Juan, "when black boys are out in the moonlight, black skin looks blue." He reminds Chiron that there are black people everywhere. Here we are directed to think about black skin, to consider both its physical properties and its political context. The phenomenon of light refracting off of black skin is emphasized throughout the film, like a visual manifestation of luminous souls. But there is a deeper purpose to this scene as well. In drawing our attention to black skin, we also must consider the black body, and embodiment in general. Chiron is not just a character, but a body existing in the world. We cannot understand Chiron only by his mental traumas and, but also by his physical trials and transformations. Cinematography is used as a writing implement to inscribe this history of a body.

At the outset of the film, the camera slowly tracks Juan pulling up to one of the housing projects where he sells crack ("in the cut"). When Juan exits the car and strides up to one of his associates, his body language is confident. Appropriately, the camera moves through the space deliberately and steadily circles the interlocutors in the scene. We can sense Juan's embodied consciousness in the camera movement, which demonstrates his control in this environment. The younger man posted on the corner tells a junkie without money to get lost. A group of kids run by the adults, chasing Chiron and calling him a faggot. Then we cut to a jittery handheld shot which disrupts our visual field. We are ripped from a Cartesian perspective to a flattened, vibrating plane. The camera is following our hero Chiron, with the cameraman clearly running to catch up. Shallow focus is employed, though it would be hard to make out the background in any case. The contrast is very deliberate; Juan is secure in his world, while Chiron is in complete free-fall.

When Juan teaches Chiron how to swim, in some ways the cinematography echoes what we saw in the shot were Chiron is running away. The composition is similar in that we focus on a body bisected by the horizon, first by land and then by sea. Here the camera is submerged a bit underwater, to approximate Chiron's eye-level indeed how the body is suspended when floating on top of the ocean. The ocean rises and falls, bisecting the frame horizontally. However the handheld camera motion is gentle rather than violent, carried by the waves. Juan cradles Chiron's head as the child learns how to float on his back. The scene advances by montage of more water-logged shots where Chiron starts swimming with proper strokes. For the first time, Chiron gains bodily autonomy and self-confidence. Confidence is not just some abstract emotional quality, but the ability to navigate space with one's body. In the two scenes I have just described, the camera's position and movement mirrors Chiron, in that the camera is caught in the middle of a space rather than surveying it. There is a similar quality to the handheld shots which orbit characters in medium and close shots. We are inside the scene, we are implicated.

Even if Chiron was able to find some kind of control and autonomy through swimming, this was only a kind of solace he could find in the ocean. At school, he is still constantly bullied, and this is true in his adolescence as well. Seeking some kind of relief, he goes to the beach alone at night and runs into his friend Kevin by chance. Kevin says this is his "smoker's habitat" which suggests a means of escape or sanctuary for him as well. There is already a personal history between these two captured in previous vignettes. When they were children, they wrestled each other in the grass and laughed together. They also participated with a group of other kids at school showing each other their penises, purely out of curiosity. As teenagers, Kevin says in passing "I know you can keep a secret" which is a clear reference to that earlier scene. So, the sexual encounter between these boys on the beach makes sense given their shared history.

The scene is mostly structured in a close medium shot/reverse shot configuration as the two are sitting on the beach. Juan pulls out a blunt and says mischievously, "you like the water? Then let me introduce you to some fiyah" (fire is slang for weed, though here it can also signify passion). The two start smoking and giggling together. Kevin closes his eyes and says, "damn, that breeze feel good as hell." When they start kissing and touching each other, there is a close-up shot of Chiron's hand grasping the sand on the beach, flowing through his fingers. Another close up shows Kevin cradling Chiron's head in a gesture which mirrors Juan's tender touch. This scene has both narrative and philosophical significance. In terms of Chrion's personal history, this is his only sexual encounter and thus takes on a mythic and liberating significance. But this scene also foregrounds sensuous experience, and demonstrates how one's consciousness extends from one particular body as a locus into the physical world. Chiron is inextricably caught up in the water, the fire of passion, the ocean breeze, and the sand of the beach.

La La Land (2016)

We begin stuck in traffic on the Los Angeles freeway. One by one people jump out of their cars and break out in song, a hymn of communal joy and mutual striving titled "Another Day of Sun." The crowd is diverse, and their wardrobe is a rainbow of fabrics. Physical differences fade into the sea of Crayloa hues. An extended tracking shot moves us backward, forward, and around the tangle, interrupted by whip pans from one group of dancers to another. While the people are heterogenous, their fashion sense is homogenous. These people all look like they jumped out of a McDonald’s or Target ad, clean-cut with minor eccentricities. We are introduced to Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), who encounter one another as just two assholes in traffic. Mia is practicing dialogue for an audition, while Sebastian neurotically rewinds and replays a tape of a piano solo he has recorded. The message of this scene is that everyone is pursuing dreams while living in a competitive society, and that our protagonists are hardly more special than the others. It is possible to reduce them to these basic traits: Mia wants to be an actor, and Sebastian wants to be a musician. At this moment I ask myself, "how is La La Land going to do something new?" Specifically, I wonder what it is going to do with the musical genre, and what it is going to do with stories about "making it" in LA.

Next, we follow Mia as she comes back to her apartment after clocking out from her job as a barista. She chats with her other roommates who are also looking for work. There is a mural of Ingrid Bergman's face blown up to absurd proportions, dwarfing Stone like a piece of Soviet propaganda. This is followed by a parallel scene where Sebastian and his sister unpack his things into a new apartment. The space is ordinary and unadorned. The only thing Sebastian makes a fuss about is a plain wooden stool which he says belonged to Charlie Parker. He plays jazz piano in a bar, but he isn't paid well. These characters are working class with bourgeois dreams. Idols from a bygone era have religious significance for our heroes, and for the film itself. Singin' in the Rain (1952) is an important influence for La La Land, especially in how it foregrounds and celebrates artifice. When Gosling and Stone tap dance in front of a fantastical indigo skyline ("A Lovely Night"), I couldn't help but think of the scene where Gene Kelley serenades Debbie Reynolds in a studio backlot against a painted purple sunset ("You Were Meant For Me"). Both pairs remark on the contrived visual spectacle they are participating in. Artifice becomes the real thing, and our heroes fall in love precisely because love is corny.

The scene for the musical number "A Lovely Night" breaks up the established color palette of the film thus far. In the early scenes where our heroine comes home from work and goes to the 80′s themed house party, primary colors dominate the palate. At the party she's in a sunshine yellow dress, while Gosling is wearing mustard yellow khakis and a crimson jacket. Sebastian and his band play covers of 80's songs, providing a background noise of comforting retro-kitsch. The party is a social situation where the industry "nobodies" enjoy dancing and swimming in an aquamarine pool together, taking a break from breaking into showbiz. Primary colors make a return during the second act of the film, when Gosling's band plays on a gaudy stage straight out of American Idol. The yellow and red lights flood the audience while the upbeat jazz-inflected pop music fills the venue; it's a reassurance that everything will be okay. Parties and pop music are associated with these hues. Purples and pinks, by contrast, are privileged colors used to convey romance and idealism. Mia's wardrobe displays more shades of pink and purple as she starts dating Sebastian. And the recurring indigo skyline is a sentimental motif for the film, which is then transformed into the starry sky of the planetarium scene where our couple literally dances among the stars.

Panty and Stocking are some of the most uncouth characters, female or not, to appear in anime. They curse like Cartman, banter about sex, make their magical transformations on stripper poles, and generally have little respect for anybody. The basic premise of the show, on paper, sounds very much like Bayonetta's concept: the heroine uses her sex as a weapon. Panty and Stocking take off their panties and stockings, respectively, which then transform into guns and swords. As these objects have been traditionally fetishized in Western culture, we can assume psychoanalysis would have something to say here. Because I believe psychoanalysis in any form is deeply problematic, I'm not going to go there. But the fact that these heroines are, in a sense, reified fetish objects, is a very provocative concept which remains in playful tension with the actual contents of the show.

The first obstacle to sexualizing these characters is that their personalities are abrasive and don't hold up to the tenants of traditional femininity: Panty is loud-mouthed, short-tempered, promiscuous, selfish, and violent; Stocking is cynical and anti-social, and shares her sister's qualities of a quick temper and vulgar vocabulary. While Panty gets around, we find that she is the one using the men, not the other way around – she even mocks their sexual shortcomings. Stocking is the opposite in that sex does not seem to interest her, but she's hardly vulnerable or innocent. Perhaps most crucially, men are utterly unimportant to these characters. Panty just uses men to fulfill her sex cravings, then leaves them in the dust. Stocking all but ignores them. Their male “leader” Garterbelt announces their missions, but is more an object of ridicule than a true authority figure. Similarly, their sidekick Brief is just a tag-along kid they nicknamed “Geek Boy”.

More central is the show's visual style and the way it parodies familiar anime iconography. In the first episode, we see Panty with her panties around her ankles – while she sits on the toilet, contorting her face into a grimace as she, ahem, relieves herself. The toilet, which is possessed by a ghost, swallows her up, and she emerges only to be totally covered in shit. Later in the episode, as she and Stocking stride purposefully toward the enemy, our heroine still resembles a walking heap of dung. As the girls transform, they change from their highly-angular, super-deformed bodies into realistically hypersexual ones. Panty and Stocking only take on this glamorous pin-up “bishoujo” appearance for short sequences in some episodes – it is just as likely that they will be seen traveling through toilets, picking their noses, turning into robots, and so on. In another instance, cursed pastries cause Stocking to balloon up to zeppelin proportions in an episode which parodies fat-shaming in the mass media.

Because these female bodies are so fluid, so unpredictable, and address real bodily functions, Panty and Stocking are characters which totally destabilize the visual language* of anime erotica and fanservice in general (There are a handful of fanservice-centric episodes, but they are at least self-aware anomalies). Unlike Bayonetta, whose basic form never changes, and whose every move is eroticized, Panty and Stocking are characters who cycle through visual modes with carnivalesque ease – in a single fifteen minute-long episode they can be boorish, gross, absurd, sexy and badass. If they use their feminine wiles, it is purely for their own benefit – they know how to play the patriarchy. Ultimately they rise above the anime stereotypes; they are neither objects of erotic attention nor infantilized moe little-sister surrogates. We've had strong and well-rounded female characters in anime before, but rarely has any television show done so much work toward short-circuiting the male gaze.

Through my recent essays I have tried to demonstrate that while there has been a proliferation of more “types” of female characters in media, they are still often constrained by impossible binaries or else simply objectified in new ways. As I turned my attention to the fetishization of innocence we sometimes see in anime, I realized I may have accidentally stereotyped the animation of Japan in an unfair way. It would be a gross misrepresentation to claim that the West favors “mature” female sexual objects while Japan favors “innocent” ones. Both cultures have media which encompass all possible “types,” from reactionary to transformative.

Of particular interest to me is the “mahou shoujo” (magical girl) genre and the way its various works have presented differing versions of female innocence, power, and sexuality. Formulaic, melodramatic, and fundamentally rooted in action and romance genres, mahou shoujo is considered a “low” popular girl's genre – but its representations of women are uniquely challenging to the status quo.

As my fellow USC colleague Kris Ligman has pointed out, the animes The Rose of Versailles and its spiritual successor, Revolutionary Girl Utena, are both remarkable for their tropes of gender-bending and their presentations of heroines who take on masculine gender roles. In the famous Sailor Moon, the squad of magical girls consist of a number of character “types” who are equally validated: clumsy, hot-headed, nerdy, tomboyish, etc. In a sense these affirmational group-based shows recall American war films centered on diverse (racially and otherwise) groups of male soldiers. However, objections have been raised to the way the main character Usagi is swayed by romance and is occasionally saved by her personal prince charming, Tuxedo Mask. Other mahou shoujo titles like Pretear and Princess Tutu also operate on the same female stereotypes for their heroines: weakened by romance and strong emotions, and dependent on a male love interest.

An American riff on the majou shoujo genre, The Powerpuff Girls, offered solutions to some of these problems. Because the heroines were very young children, love interests were out of the question. The central man in their life is Professor Utonium, their father – but he is hardly a traditional parent. He's presented as absent-minded, bumbling, and incapable of keeping up with his bright and far more powerful daughters, whom he can hardly control outside of getting them to bed at a reasonable hour. The Powerpuff Girls themselves, though childlike, are also strong and able heroes, letting little stand in their way of fighting evil.

This highly abridged history brings us to Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt, which is not only a parody of mahou shoujo, but a frenetic mashup of cliches and genres culled from both Japan and the West. In its simplified, angular, and colorful visual style it resembles the Powerpuff Girls; its R-rated gross-out humor recalls South Park; and its iconography draws from mahou shoujo, action films, video games, and other sources. It is a highly irreverant show which takes no prisoners in its efforts to shock, awe, and amuse its audience. What interests me is how the show systematically destabilizes familiar representations of women, by introducing “noise” into the depiction of women in anime.

The tradition of “fan service” in anime has seen a long-running codification of the representation of the female body. That is, as tropes of the panty-flash, breast jiggle, etc, became more entrenched and familiar in various genres, “fan service” became part of the visual language of representing the female form in anime. In especially egregious shows like Strike Witches, female genitalia becomes a spectacle in itself which frequently fills the screen space. In such anime fan service is so prevalent that, in effect, the female characters are in a state of constant sexualization which merely varies in intensity according to ritualized patterns of tension and release, hide and seek. This industrial tradition has served to further objectify women and privilege the quality of to-be-looked-at-ness, that is, to exalt their roles as objects of the male gaze.

One can argue that the phrase “male gaze” has been thrown around a lot, but that is for good reason. Despite the problems of Laura Mulvey's classic article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” some of her basic premises have been difficult to refute. In much mainstream film, men control the action of the film and, more indirectly, the gaze of the camera. Women are in turn limited to subordinate roles in the narrative, existing as objects of male visual attention (think Transformers). To summarize, women in classical narrative cinema have both lacked agency and have been objectified in systematic ways. We know conversely, as in the mahou shoujo, of course there are many stories where women are heroes, however the characters are still prone to normative/perscriptive ideals of femininity and subject to objectification.

Screenshot from "don't take it personally babe, it just ain't your story."

A spiritual sequel of sorts to Digital: A Love Story, set in a prestigious private high school, and on the social networks of 2027.  Seven students, three endings, one eavesdropping teacher. A full length visual novel about the erosion of privacy, gay drama, young sexuality, and the perils of modern online life for a high school literature class. 

We talk to each other about how much time we spend on Facebook and Twitter, about how much time we waste on it. Articles in periodicals like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate bemoan how the Internet and social networking are frivolous and time-wasting. Expressed in these articles is a kind of helplessness which casts the user as a victim of the technology. We're not victims. And if we want the web to be more meaningful, we should begin to produce content of substance instead of passively watching the Web like TV – whether it's digital art or more thoughtful tweets. If we take the time to produce better content, the Web will be a better place.