Loving media is a hard job…
It’s not finding media to love that’s hard, nor is the ability to embrace that love, to wear it on my sleeve and say “Yes, this thing here is a favourite of mine”. The part that’s hard about it is that despite it being something so personal and filled with emotion, all our emotional strings are tuned differently. When there’s a work of art that strikes a chord that resonates so clearly for you, pass it onto someone else and it won’t hit on the same level for them at all.
“My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?” is an obscure Japanese art-house film about noise music, it could be my absolute favourite depending on the day. Unless you’re someone who can not only sit through but get something from the emotional crescendo of a movie being 10 minutes of feedback and distortion it won’t be yours, or even something you’d want to watch at all. I so desperately want people to have the same feelings that I get from the things I love, but if I can’t have that, I’ll at least try to communicate some of those feelings.
The main framing and impetus for action in this movie is supposedly a virus that spreads through images that drives those infected to commit suicide. The film puts us at the stage where it’s already transmitted world-wide and killed millions with no solution yet to be found. A noise music duo who live in near-seclusion whenever they’re not on stage are sought out by the president of Japan to save his granddaughter after hearing rumors that their concerts work as an antidote.
There’s a lot that the film leaves in varying states of ambiguity; mainly the state of society during the epidemic and if it’s just a cover-up for governments failing their people (“What’s our unemployment rate now? 38%, was it?” asks the president’s right-hand man). Despite that and how much of the movie is left to linger, for the mood and the noise, there’s enough to make some unintentionally prophetic readings from.
I only have vague recollection of how things looked when the world first went into quarantine, the empty roads and clean air mainly. In the film the two protagonists often wander through similarly unpopulated spaces; from the cloth huts with the corpses of the infected inside, winding roads, the abandoned school-turned-recording-studio, they don’t come across anyone else. Liminal spaces have been turned into yet another throwaway meme but an unspoken aspect of what initially drew in the people’s curiosity and anxiety of them is that without the possibility of a space being somewhere for people to be encountered, some place that serves an active use, you are now forced to take in the structure as a signifier of why it was built, its purpose, why it is the way it is and how it got there.
You can see an example of this in the liminal space’s sibling, the dead mall. The channels that dedicate themselves to exploring these places are almost always marked by the content of the video containing capitalist entities collapsing under their own weight. They still hold onto the carcasses of these places in a death grip instead of allowing the land to be anything else. On the other hand the comment section can always be found with nostalgia, for the place from those who’ve been there in a less economically bleak era, or for the brands of yesteryear for those who recognize not the area but the shared traits between malls and what could be found within.
Pandemics turn the world into a dead mall. Real life and film alike, every place that’s travelled through in solitude begs the question of ‘How did things turn out like this?’ but also piques a nostalgia for when people weren’t dying by the millions, for reasons that could be explained by the failings of political parties.
Another way this movie was a foreboding foresight into how our way of being would turn out lies in the form its 'Lemming Syndrome' affects people and how it circulates. Its means of infection is through images of those with it, wrapping itself around the optic nerve and sending the brain a 'command to self-destruct'. One scene involves the plagued granddaughter Hana standing a few meters away from a cliff's edge, proclaiming that she doesn't actually want to die, she's just sick and can't help feeling like this. It's a disease of hopelessness that's spread from seeing people who could be on the other side of the world... Doesn't it seem familiar?
This is the doomscroll of 2005. There's a few things about today's society that many others say people aren't built to handle, an artificial load that is only natural for us to crack under. One thing that tops that list in my eyes is the ability to see every atrocity, crisis, and disaster that the world has to offer, from wars between nations to individual pleas for help to stay alive. In a time where you can see the angles that will show you the absolute worst of it all, isn't it expected that we can't help but to fall into a state of unshakable depression and anxiety?
In this film there's a cure to all of this, and I think it revealed what my cure was too.
The climax of this movie comes when our main protagonist Mizui agrees to try to help Hana with the rumoured cure; a noise music performance. He fixes a blindfold around her head and leads her into a grassy field where the stage is nothing more than four speakers and his gear, directing her to find the exact spot to stand by sound alone.
What follows after a moment of gentle melody is an extended submersion into pure sound. The feedback of amplifiers screeching and crackling as a guitar is used less as a musical instrument but a blunt force weapon to be fought against to physically wring not notes but pure emotion out of. It only grows louder and louder as the minutes pass, flickering between the film's regular camera, the type of digital camera that could've been used to record countless concerts of the time, and flashbacks to Mizui's prior attempt to remedy his girlfriend with noise.
Evidently this attempt works. Hana abruptly passes out but Mizui plays on, converting every bit of grief bottled inside into the types of soundwaves that make your ears ring for hours afterwards. Once he's done, all he can do is put his guitar down, take a couple steps, and fall to his knees from the weariness of putting everything into playing. This scene is paramount in both explaining my cure and demonstrating what the appeal in noise music is.
There's a sign within the noise scene (and other underground genres) known as the 'Noise not music' symbol. Music has to fit within the structure of 'music theory', you can hit a wrong note, you can be off-tempo, your music can be wrong. Noise by rejecting this becomes pure catharsis in performance. In an earlier scene there's an on-stage set by our protagonist duo. One of them doesn't play any instrument but is screaming into a microphone. Not any type of practiced scream with technique but strained extended shouting where you can hear vocal chords being stretched to the point of pain. There is no holding back in catharsis.
My favourite types of art don't hold back. Nothing satisfies more than to see someone give everything they have to create something beautiful. Hour-long wrestling matches where both fighters collapse from exhaustion not once a victor is crowned but half-way through moves. Examples of maximalism where no idea or concept is withheld or restrained. Those pieces of media where it's undeniable the creator poured every part of themselves into their creation. Keeping my blindfold on to the terror of the world and focusing on these forms of pure emotion is the cure that I needed.
Above all else, noise and all other media that leaves nothing of itself to the wayside are unquestionably sincere. Art that’s devoid of soul is also devoid of purpose. From our pandemic I’m sure we can all remember when an assortment of millionaire celebrities all sang ‘Imagine’ from their LA mansions, and how just completely empty it felt. It was the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad from a webcam. Before arriving at the inn the noise duo stops by, Hana can be seen with a CD Walkman, apathetically skipping through tracks before instructing her grandfather to toss a disc out a window. Vapid media has no place in these times.
An actual noise musician plays the role of the other half of the protagonist duo, Asuhara. When questioned on if the noise actually works, he retorts by stating that it doesn’t kill the virus, it feeds it instead, being infected himself. It’s the last thing he ever says, Mizui finding his corpse moments later. As much as I sincerely believe in what I said about the power that art holds, I can’t help but acknowledge that when I’ve written some fiction in the past, it did not work as a salve for the ills that my words were coming from, it only immersed me deeper in them. The only way to hone your emotions into something that truly shines is to turn them into a double-edged sword.
What this film shares with the rest of my SSS rank favourites is that it’s about grief. The first thing Mizui does after finding his friend and bandmate’s body is to turn it into art, assembling a funeral pyre and setting up a microphone before setting it alight. The very first scene of the movie introduces us to the process of making noise, where the pair take random bits of plastic hose, decks of playing cards, sea shells and electric fans and see if any of them make a sound worth using. Even our worst misfortunes and dirtiest pieces of scrap can be noise.
Asuhara’s death and cremation comes right before Mizui finally accepts the president’s plea to conduct a show for Hana. During the loudest parts, where his manipulation of guitar strings is most erratic, Asuhara can somehow be seen leaning against one of the speaker stacks, watching on in uncharacteristic glee at the display. Being part of the trans community it seems like there’s a constant stream of obituaries of people who’ve passed just when they’ve started to truly exist. I can’t help but want to try to keep them alive by carrying on their work in the same medium they were known for.
One music genre that I love sums up all of these errant thoughts and feelings but also some strange complexities and contradictions start to occur. Black metal is infamous. Sonically abrasive, culturally isolationist, and filled with some terrible examples of humanity. If someone knows anything about black metal it’s probably Mayhem; that one band where a singer committed suicide, and a murder happened within the band.
Black metal idolizes its own image. Stagecraft and aesthetic takes equal footing to the music in deeming something ‘trve kvlt’. The more controversial, the more kvlt it seems to be. There’s a divisive Depressive Suicidal Black Metal band called Shining, what the band is about and what the lyrics contain can be summed up by the label it comes with. The lead singer is known to be an edgelord that self-harms on stage, asks interviewers to stab him and celebrates the idea of listeners dying. In a community that rewards spectacle but punishes softness in that very stereotypically masculine way, I can’t help but wonder how much of this is him willingly playing the part in an unendingly tryhard scene and how much are sincere expressions of emotional turmoil.
To end this article about an early 2000s art-house movie where Tadanobu Asano plays a guitar in intensely atonal ways as an emotional outlet I’ll briefly talk about another early 2000s art-house movie where Tadanobu Asano plays a guitar in intensely atonal ways as an emotional outlet.
Where ‘My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?’ is noise, Electric Dragon 80,000V is undeniably punk. From the main originator of Japanese cyberpunk cinema, Gakuryū Ishii, this movie is a direct punch to the face both in style and messaging.
‘Dragon Eye’ Morrison is struck by lightning as a child, directly in the ‘reptile’ part of the brain that controls emotions and desire. In his adult life he uses his ability to communicate with reptiles as part of his job rescuing lost pets and keeps a dozen of his own as pets. When not working he plays guitar to fight back against his urges to explode with emotion.
The villain here exploits his means of survival by setting Morrison on an extended search for a lizard that’s being kept intentionally unreachable, and when their paths finally cross it results in his pets at home being slain and guitar sliced up into irregular blocks of wood and metal.
With his way of life manipulated to annoy and aggravate him, and the things he holds dear destroyed, Morrison has no choice but to explode. He hastily tries to reassemble his guitar using screws and metal brackets, but where he used to create cohesive music where he and his instrument were one, he can only make noise.
He manically fights against an incomplete and damaged object, gradually tearing it apart and fighting to create something that should be so familiar to him but can’t replicate. It’s chaotic, it’s loud, it’s ugly, but also it’s beautiful in the exact same way the playing in our prior movie was. There is nothing being held back in his attempt to rescue the one thing that saved him from ruin.
From there he has no choice but to take on the person who took his means of peace from him. He knows his face, he knows where to find him, it’s just a matter of enduring whatever pain is thrown his way and throwing it right back to the antagonist. The movie ends with him trying to settle down and sleep for the rest of the night, but his emotions and desire won’t let him. He can only repeat to himself: “Got to buy a guitar…”
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