The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano by Sean

Author:Sean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, ART057000, Art/Film & Video
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

Ulterior Gender

If there has been a determining critique of Kitano’s representational politics, it has centred on the way women are shown to exist as sexist stereotypes, and passively take part (and are taken apart) in violent and masochistic scenarios. Kitano’s female characters seem to bear the hallmarks of patriarchal and masculine desires and fears, occupying the knowable, negative position of Other in a power-saturated binary.

First, in the Kitano film there is the figure of the trophy wife/girlfriend who puts up with the waywardness, coldness, detachment and/or brutality of the boyfriend/ husband. Passive, compliant and coded to-be-looked-at, they do as they are told, and silently suffer emotional or physical abuse regardless. Masculine men will their selves into existence in part through the subjugation of women. For example, in Boiling Point, Uehara forces his girlfriend to have sex with Takashi, and then repeatedly assaults her for doing so. That he later rapes an innocent bystander to a Yakuza massacre is a further indicator of the meat-value of women to the Kitano world. When in ambiguous fashion Yamamoto guns down his own girlfriend in Brother, we do not know whether he is trying to save her from her attacker or mow them both down indiscriminately. That we know he is a perfect shot, evidenced on numerous occasions in the film up to that moment, points to his pathology. In Hana-Bi, Nishi has for a long-time neglected his wife, now in hospital and dying of cancer, preferring instead to spend time with his buddy cop (the real love of his life?). That Nishi, suffering from guilt, a point I will take up below, rescues her from the hospital to take her on one final road trip, is an indicator of her passivity and his (belated) authority to affect events. In A Scene at the Sea Takako watches in a state of awe Shigeru ride the waves, while also neatly folding his clothes and tending to his needs. In Dolls, Ryoko returns to same bench in the same park at the same time with the same lunch for over twenty years, in the forlorn hope that her absented lover will meet her there as promised – a malady and devotion that could only effect a ‘woman’. In Achilles and the Tortoise, Machisu’s wife stands by him after every failure and setback, her life only lived through his dreams and desires. Supposedly all that Asao (Dankan) wants in Getting Any is to lay a/any girl, one gratuitous breast shot after another confirming this base desire and the camera’s objectification of women.

Second, and related, there is the figure of the good mother/wife whose role is to raise and nurture her offspring. Often, however, this ‘mother’ is actually an aunt or a grandmother because the biological mother has absented herself, a problem that leads to the third, wanting female figure in the Kitano film.

Third, then, there is the figure of the home-wrecker, who has abandoned the family, particularly her (male) children. In Kikujiro, Kikijro (Beat Takeshi) and Masao

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.