There’s nothing quite like Japanese feudal nostalgia to make me appreciate the benefits of modernity. Sure, crass capitalist libertines are hard to love…but at least they have no honor. That has to count for something.
I’ve only read the first volume of Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura’s Lady Snowblood, but there’s enough honor here to satiate me for quite a while, thank you. The story, set in 19th century Japan, is a rape-revenge narrative. a genre to which I’m by no means opposed. Koike’s take on rape-revenge here is, however, different in some important ways from that in exploitation films like “I Spit on Your Grave” “Ms. 45,” or “They Call Her One Eye.”
— In most American rape-revenge films, the point of the film is the reversal; you get to see a weak, apparently helpless woman turn the tables and castrate/murder her attackers. You can root for her in part because she’s so clearly the underdog; she’s got to be clever and inventive to turn the tables on her assailants.
In Lady Snowblood, though, the titular protagonist is super-hero tough. She is smart and inventive, sure, but you never actually see her in any particular danger (she does get beaten and tortured in one scene, but her torturer is honorable and its all just a misunderstanding. She never actually gets captured or even touched by any villain, at least not in this first volume.
— In most American rape-revenge films, the revenge is personal. That is, the woman is herself a victim, and then she takes revenge on the person who victimized her, rather than on some random individual. This can be a little complicated; for instance, in Ms. 45, the victimizer is men in general, and that’s who the revenge is inflicted on as well; in Death Proof one group of women is murdered and another group takes revenge on the guy who did it. Still, the mechanics work the same; the films are built around a mechanics which, while not always strictly logical, is grounded in a sense of personal justice, individual trauma, and retribution.
Lady Snowblood, though, isn’t built around personal justice exactly. It’s about a blood feud and familial, rather than personal honor. It’s not LS herself, but her mother who was raped years before LS was born. The mother did kill one of her assailants, but she was unable to kill the rest. So she deliberately offered herself to any man who would have her in order to become pregnant and bear a child who would carry out her revenge for her. To which you’ve got to say…um, yuck.
But that’s not the reaction of any of the mother’s peers. On the contrary, they aid and abet the project; mom dies before she can pass on the details of the revenge to her daughter, but her friends helpfully convey the information. Thus, mom deliberately and elaborately ruins her daughter’s life, and everybody around her is like, oh, yeah, that’s awesome.
Moreover, in order to make ends meet and get some cash with which to pursue her revenge, LS hires herself out as an assassin. Most of the people she kills are not especially sympathetic — gamblers, pimps, murderers and so forth. Still, you almost can’t help feeling sorry for them as Lady Snowblood impersonally hacks them into little quivering pieces.
And then we come to the last story of the volume, where our heroine ambushes a coach with an upper class mother and daughter. She kills the mother, then forces the coachman to rape the daughter. Then blackmails the coachman with the threat that his sperm will lead the police to believe he murdered and raped the daughter.
This is all part of an elaborate plot to shut down the Rokumeikan, an estate where upper-class, pro-Western Japanese engaged in orgies with Westerners. LS’s actions are supposed to be justified, as far as I can tell, because the mother and daughter she brutalizes were (A) sexually promiscuous; (B) overly Westernized; and (C) sexually promiscuous with Westerners.
There are certainly class animosities being played out here as well; the loathing of decadent aristocrats bleeds into the loathing of Westernization and modernity. That was true for the Nazis as well, though, I believe. And indeed, Lady Snowblood really does help to explain why the Nazis and the Japanese were able to find common ground. The loathing of weakness, shot through with racial and national connotations; the fetishization of violence; the belief that a violation of national or familial honor justifies almost anything. Add in the hypocritically decadent exploitation elements here — Lady Snowblood is always battling in the buff, for one reason or another — and the result looks, to me, pretty thoroughly vile. No doubt that makes me a spineless, dishonorable Westerner…but considering the alternatives presented here, I may be okay with that.
The first thing I noticed when I read Lady Snowblood was what a big Mary Sue the titular character is. It's easy to feel sorry for her opponents, because LS is invariably stronger and smarter than anyone she meets. And she's hot! She reminded me of Kazuo Koike's other Mary Sue, Ogami from Lone Wolf and Cub.
It's not the Mary Sueness that gets me…it's what his Mary Sue does….
I haven't read Lone Wolf and Cub, I must admit.
I think you're way off base in dropping films like Ms. 45 and Thriller in the same category as Death Proof just because they have similar subject material. The former two are studies of broken characters spiraling into destructive behavior while the latter is a masturbation fantasy that fetishizes the violent destruction of the feminine and suggests that women are acceptable as characters only when they behave like masculine rapists.
The first Lady Snowblood film is quite good. It sounds like the most egregious elements of the manga were dropped in the adaptation process. Tarantino did a remake of it called Kill Bill.
No, I violently disagree with you about Death Proof. And about Spit on My Grave too. Ms. 45 is about a broken character spiraling into destructive behavior; I don't think that's what's happening in I Spit On My Grave.
You can read my take on Death Proof here. And more at the end of this essay if you can make it all the way through. You can read my take on Kill Bill here
You aren't paying attention to what he's doing with the camera if you think the film doesn't approve of the sadism. The entire movie is about staring at their asses, legs, breasts, feet, and they're objectified in this way even when they're being smashed up or dismembered.
You can say that Death Proof is about female "empowerment" if you define the capacity for violence and rape as the only meaningful measure of power. You also have to recognize Tarantino's association of this power with masculinity. Women are inherently weak, inferior rape victims. Men are the powerful, superior rapists. A women can only crawl out of her pathetic, biologically-imposed caste by embracing the "masculine" and learning to rape or murder. This is all Tarantino values. All of his movies are about pointless, neverending cycles of rape, murder, and revenge. A male character with a great capacity for harming others is "cooler." A female character with a great capacity for harming others is far more desirable as a sex object. The girls in the second half leave one of their own with a potential rapist because she's too "femme," below contempt. It's supposed to be funny.
The ending of Death Proof is a weak admission of guilt and a fantasy of sexual domination, Tarantino's surrogate having his "ass tapped" before being destroyed for indulging his own sadism in the first half.
"The girls in the second half leave one of their own with a potential rapist because she's too "femme," below contempt. It's supposed to be funny."
It is funny, because he's not actually going to hurt her.
"A male character with a great capacity for harming others is "cooler." "
That's you saying that, not Tarantino. Kurt Russell is shown in the film to be a whining, pueling, babyman. He's thoroughly emasculated. Lots of critics disliked the film for that reason, from what I've been able to parse.
" A female character with a great capacity for harming others is far more desirable as a sex object."
I think that is true. However, I think fetishizing female strength in this way is…maybe not ideal, but not necessarily misogynist either. I explain why here
The ending of Death Proof is certainly a fantasy of sexual dominance. It's women dominating, though, and as in a lot of rape-revenge, you're on their side because the movie presents men in general, and this man in particular, as evil assholes who deserve to have their butts kicked. It's a (qualified) feminist message.
There are a lot of filmmakers who hate women or who are outright sadistic. I just don't think that's where Tarantino is coming from in general. In Death Proof, for example, there's a ton of just women sitting around talking, and a real appreciation of female friendship I think. And it's not all "yay butch, boo femme," either. The enthusiasm for fashion magazines, for example; Tarantino doesn't think that's evil or dumb. He treats it with affection. And the death of the girls in the first half of the film — there's a moment where you see Rosario Dawson figure out what's going happen to her and, just as importantly, to her friends. It's a very moving moment, I thought.
The bottom line is, I cared about those characters, and seeing them killed was painful. I think Tarantino does that a lot — and I think that's why people accuse him of sadism and of being especially violent or cruel. It is cruel, but it's cruel because he's not sadistic; he cares about the characters.
Also:
"All of his movies are about pointless, neverending cycles of rape, murder, and revenge."
That's not true of Jackie Brown, I don't think; there's no sense that the end of that movie is going to lead to more killing, I don't believe. The end of Pulp Fiction, also, has some intimations of redemption; Samuel Jackson quits.
I don't know…I'm sure I'm not going to convince you to like Tarantino if you've decided he's evil. Death Proof really restored my faith in him, though. He remains one of my favorite filmmakers.
Are you a fan of Jack Hill's work, by any chance?