Oshii has also engaged in the dramatization of political issues related to those brought to the fore by Dallas and by the Patlabar productions in a range of live-action movies. These films (in the cases of both feature
length and short productions) tend to reflect a political pessimism that emerged during Oshii's days as a student protester - specifically against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan security treaty, which allowed America to main
tain troops on Japanese soil, and against Japan's subsequent collusion in the Vietnam war.
The somber mood engendered by the director's ideological disillusion
ment with the causes he had passionately embraced in his youth finds a potent visual correlative in the particular cinematographical style elabo
rated by Oshii for these productions. Incorporating many of the conven
tions and strategies usually associated with manga and anime into the province of live-action cinema - such as farcical humor and moments of disjunctively exaggerated violence juxtaposed with the mellow poetry of long takes and meditative sequences- the films deliver a tantalizingly jar
ring alternation of cartoon ish expressionism and photographic natural
ism without indulging in any placid concessions to either fantasy or realism.
The Red Spectacles-unquestioningly the most manic and surreal of the productions included in the trilogy - makes explicit reference to Oshii's political background and involvement in the student protest movement of the late 1960s and early 19 70s. As the prologue informs us, the movie is set in the late twentieth century at a time of relentlessly escalating crime of an
"increasingly vicious nature," with which the conventional Metropolitan Police are unable to cope, and related establishment of the "Anti Vicious Crime Heavily Armored Mobile Special Investigation Unit" in order to deal with the situation. The unit consists of" [p lolice men and women of supe
rior intellect and physical strength" who harbor an almost fanatical sense of justice and are tagged Kerberos (a Japanese adaptation of the name
Cer-137
138 Part Three : Oshii's Technopolitics
berus, the Watchdog of Hell). The agents are equipped with special "rein
forcement gear" inclusive of body suits and lethal weaponry.
A potentially brave and even noble endeavor to stem the onslaught of crime, the Kerberos operation rapidly spirals out of control, as its immod
erately zealous members start employing increasingly energetic, unethical and eventually brutal investigational tactics: "in their fervent hatred of evil, their actions were quite severe. Their almost cruel investigation activities became the target of strong public criticism." When, in the course of a rou
tine mission, a Kerberos agent beats an offender to death, the unit is dis
solved. Oshii presents this preliminary information as a putative "excerpt"
from "The Glory and Downfall of the Kerberos" by one "Hyohe Shiozawa."
The adoption of this strategy is worthy of notice, since it implicitly invites reflection upon the generic standing of the film as a whole in relation to so-called historical cinema. The Red Spectacles is patently not a historical movie in the sense that it offers a dramatization of officially recorded events.
In fact, the history it depicts is essentially a product of Oshii's personal speculations. However, this does not automatically entail that it has noth
ing to say about lived history. After all, numerous works claiming to rep
resent historical occurrences in a descriptively transparent fashion actually provide varyingly fictional versions of history, not history per se. This becomes instantly obvious if one considers, for example, that the plethora of war movies produced practically across the globe to comment on legion disparate conflicts hardly supply objective accounts of ascertainable facts insofar as they are inevitably colored by local ideological assumptions and prej udices.
The Red Spectacles is no less historical a film, in this respect, than those productions may be deemed to be: although it does not register empirically verifiable occurrences, it does propose a version of history in its own pecu
liar way - namely, that of history as a series of snapshot-like pieces of evi
dence for the ubiquitous incidence of repressive, exploitative and ultimately downright inhumane drives within diverse political formations. The con
tingent society which necessitates both the establishment and the dissolu
tion of the Kerberos Unit may never have obtained as such, yet its cinematic articulation operates as a convincing template for virtually any dispensa
tion governed by such drives. In this perspective, the film could be said to embrace the ethos of historicity rather that historiography. Whereas his
toriography refers to the discipline that purports to record history through texts, historicity constitutes the process that makes history through texts
that is to say, brings history into being not by claiming to represent given facts but by encoding diverse in terpreta tions of lived experience as dis
courses. This term, it must be emphasized, is here employed in accordance with the significance imparted upon it by Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1973;
20-The Red Spectacles, Stray Dog and Talking Head 139
1979 ).1 (A cognate argument to the one outlined above is also eminently applicable, as shown in a later chapter, to Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade.)
In the film's opening segment, three of the Kerberos Unit's erstwhile members refuse to disarm and rebel sanguinely against the system, but only one of them, Koichi Todome, manages to elude capture and flee after prom
ising to his injured companions, Ao and Midori, that he will return. By the time Koichi does go back, three years later, his city has altered beyond recognition and faded into an abstruse blur, and the more the ex-agent struggles to unearth vestiges of his past, the more his environment creep
ily defies his efforts. As the character of the old man Ginji tells the protag
onist, during his absence many things have changed: the "traffic light" itself is said to have "changed to muddy blue. It may never turn back to clear red again. Nobody stops for you." These lines paradigmatically capture the character of the dismal society depicted in the film as a whole: namely, an uncaring and befuddled world ruled by an obdurately atomizing ideology whereby even sitting down to eat in groups at restaurants is considered a heinous crime. 2 The sense of hopelessness that malignantly extends throughout this ragged social fabric is tersely encapsulated by Ao's descrip
tion of how, in jail, the ex-"Kerberos" agents went gradually from hope to despair, and of how the government defeated him and his unrepentant com
rades by destroying their vision to the point that they were rendered utterly spiritless and hence unworthy of incarceration.
As he struggles to locate his old allies, Koichi is relentlessly pursued by government-appointed assassins and torturers and haunted by enig
matic feline figures and by the image of a young woman with cat-like eyes featuring on posters, monitors and the screen of a large and utterly deserted auditorium. The feline symbolism could be read as an indicator of Koichi's alienation: professionally and historically associated with dogs, he evidently does not belong in a society pervaded by cats. As for the image of the girl, Musashi has persuasively described it as denoting " [tlhe idea ... of a Big Sister ... a pair of watchful eyes that follow you everywhere" (Musashi).
When the protagonist does manage to get hold of his former co
conspirators, it is by no means clear whether they are on his side or are working in the service of the government-employed persecutors, since their allegiances repeatedly vacillate in keeping with the film's frequent tonal shifts across an extensive generic gamut. Indeed, The Red Spectacles draws on visual and per formative sources as diverse as kung-fu action cinema, stage drama, vaudeville and film nair, consistently bathing its black-and
white or sepia-tinted images in stark lighting reminiscent of Fritz Lang's oeuvre at its most portentous. The overall atmosphere is not merely murky but tenebrized and quite literally night-soaked. Moreover, as we follow Koichi along countless stairways, corridors and tunnels, we can palpably
140 Part Three : Oshii's Technopolitics
sense the character's paranoia intensifying at each step. The recurrent inclu
sion of scenes in which the character experiences bouts of volcanically gut
wrenching diarrhea barely alleviates the overarching mood, insofar as the scatological topos never quite delivers a flamboyantly carnivalesque sense of comic relief but only serves, in fact, to exacerbate the sense of Koichi's possession by malignant forces. No less unsettling are the sequences in which the camera suspensefully pans across perfectly anonymous rooms that are nonetheless rendered ominous by the nightmarish vividness of materials and textures: nothing can be taken at face value, as even the bland
est door, carpet or basin threaten suddenly to spring to malevolent life.
Despite the nightmarish connotations of its subject matter and its elab
oration of a veritably Lynchian cinematic vision of decay, the film's mood often strikes jocularly bizarre notes by virtue of Oshii's ironical use of slap
stick and pantomime elements, theatrical facial expressions, tongue-in
cheek non-sequiturs, hilarious musical touches and, on the whole, an irreverent disregard for mimetic verisimilitude. While these traits would not be in the least surprising in the context of an animated film, their delib
erate and deft insertion into a piece of live-action cinema makes The Red Spectacles quite a unique experience. Its experimental employment of chro
matic palettes and textural effects, moreover, contributes crucially to the cumulative experience of this identifiable and yet utterly unfamiliar world.
The spaces depicted in The Red Spectacles are especially memorable insofar as they obsessively rely on a chillingly boxy architectural style redo
lent of Chris Marker's La JeUe (1962), one of Oshii's favorite productions.3 Moreover, these spaces are predicated on the dispersion of the center of vision through the proliferation of errant lines of orientation and on the unbalancing of perspective through unpredictable oscillations and rota
tions in the distribution of matter, to the point that depth appears to dis
solve into a loose, unpunctuated becoming. As walls vanish, collapse or suddenly materialize amid the treacherous play of light and shadow, any conventional sense of natural form is recklessly forsaken. At the heart of the film there lies a spatio-temporal paradox whereby the more things appear to change, the more they stay exactly the same: the protagonist is trapped in an inescapable, intensely claustrophobic nightmare that repeats itself ad infinitum as he moves from one scene to the next. An arbitrarily assembled bundle of purely marginal variations seems to have been thrown into the mix just to mock him with the illusion of change.
Koichi increasingly appears to be living within the synthetic space of a film as everything around him takes on the semblance of a set. Often inconsequential lines spoken by disparate personae, moreover, come to sound like portions of a Theatre-of-the-Absurd script intent on parodying hackneyed plots in the traditions of the gangster movie, the psycho-thriller
20-The Red Spectacles, Stray Dog and Talking Head 14 1
or hard-boiled detective fiction. The eerie attraction of The Red Spectacles may ultimately reside with this particular facet of its prismatic cinemato
graphical configuration, to the extent that self-reflexivity enables Oshii to deliver a deliberately barmy pastiche not merely of established genres and styles- which could barely be deemed original- but, more specifically, of expressions of popular filmic and narrative forms at their most torpidly formulaic. Hence, the movie offers (among other things) a darkly comedic critique of the degeneration of all manner of codes and conventions as a result of indiscriminate overuse. Oshii's camera work corroborates this indictment of the emptiness of words by exhibiting characters that scarcely look at one another while they spew out their stilted lines, as though they were subliminally aware that their utterances could never really communi
cate anything. Eye contact is accordingly deemed redundant, since inter
action is quite simply of no consequence. For all they know or care, they could just as well be addressing a hypothetical black hole on the outermost edges of the farthest galaxy.
+++
In Stray Dog: Kerberos Pa nzer Cops, a prequel to The Red Spectacles explaining how Koichi spent his exiled years, a younger member of the Ker
heros Unit named Inui is released after a protracted period of detention and sets off to find Koichi in order to establish why the latter abandoned his troops and fled. Unsure as to whether what he seeks is merely answers or - more grimly - revenge, Inui embarks upon a journey that leads him to Mei, a young girl formerly attached to the now missing Koichi, and the two decide to trail the elusive man together. At the same time, other mys
terious forces also appear to be looking for Koichi in the conviction that, as a fugitive from government and as a latent political foe, he represents an ongoing menace to the system.
As the centerpiece in the live-action triptych also comprising The Red Spectacles and Talking Head, Stray Dog acts as something of a bridge between the sinister and bitingly cold desperation of the preceding film and the tech
nical eccentricity of the next. Stray Dog has unequivocally afforded Oshii an unsurpassed means of flaunting his impeccable directorial style, and evinces throughout an organic fluidity in the handling of cuts, long takes, camera positionings and transitions that far surpasses in caliber the film's engaging but somewhat unembroidered storyline. As Inui and Mei travel together in search of Koichi, the action often resembles a documentary, especially in the use of pillow sequences exhibiting elaborate urban scenes replete with shops, adverts, temples, pagodas, fairgrounds, congested
142 Part Three : Oshii's Technopolitics
avenues, elegant edifices, desolate hovels and vacant lots. In these sequences, the camera subtly emphasizes the two characters' roles as spectators in their own right, thus encouraging us to identify with them and share their point of view.
Oshii's touchingly unpretentious visual poetry, frequently underscored by a poignant lack of dialogue, consistently communicates a disarming sense of mellow, indeed almost whimsical, pleasure. This potentially grat
ifying, serene mood derives much of its cinematographical intensity from its ironic juxtaposition with the violence that besieges the protagonists' lives and its ominous potential to erupt without warning. On the whole, there
fore, even though Stray Dog is far sunnier than either its live-action pred
ecessor or its successor, its pivotal concerns are no less somber. This is evinced by the emphasis which Oshii places on the harrowing themes of political strife and existential discontent. Likewise affecting is the film's allegorical reference to the relinquishment of parental responsibility through the cardinal symbol of the abandoned dog.
The opening sequence (situated before the credits), where members of the Kerberos platoon stand still and silent against the aural background of Kenji Kawai's daunting guitar melody, having just heard that their unit has been disbanded, could be described as vintage Oshii. The same is true of the climactic scenes, in which Inui dons for the last time the Kerberos armored suit and nimbly vanquishes a horde of mimes. The opening por
tion of the movie encapsulates Oshii's preference for methodically paced and meditative sequences which, in this particular case, seems a highly appropriate means of communicating the composite mood of disbelief, anguish and humiliation in which the defeated agents are locked.
The closing section, by contrast, reflects the director's ability to han
dle no less proficiently rapid-fire action sequences replete with state-of
the-art visual and special effects. Moreover, the film's hyperdynamic climax serves to momentarily revive the darkly humorous tone adopted in The Red Spectacles by means of deliberately exaggerated - and hence latently farci
cal- depictions of legion gory deaths redolent of Quentin Tarantino's cin
ema, and of elliptical references to the visual formulae of a variety of popular genres ranging from the yakuza movie to the spaghetti western. An even more outrageous expression of caricatural humor is supplied by Koichi and Inui's eventual reunion on the beach, a fairly protracted sequence featur
ing much leaping, grappling, knocking and splashing about - as well as stylized postures reminiscent of Kabuki theatre - which contrast sharply with the lyrical sublimity of the landscape against which the mock battle is enacted.
In spite of such occasional revampings of the earlier live-action film's ubiquitous penchant for the absurd, Stray Dog essentially offers a subdued
20-The Red Spectacles, Stray Dog and Talking Head 143
experience even as it engages with the harrowing ethical and ideological issues alluded to earlier. As Tasha Robinson has noted,
[r]ather than tipping his hand, Oshii simply follows the character on his voyage of self-discovery, which includes much silent exploration of local scenery, includ
ing one languid ten-minute wordless sequence backed by swelling piano. The film marks Oshii's meditative impulses at their most extreme: it draws its central metaphor clearly enough in a monologue that likens [Inui] to a feral dog, but apart from some tone-breaking slapstick between [Inui and Koichi], Stray Dog seems more like an extended Yanni music video than a narrative film [Robinson 2003].
The monologue to which Robinson's review refers is delivered by Hayashi, a shifty character who claims to belong to the "Fugitive Support Group" and has supplied Inui with information about Mei in the first place to help him trace his old comrade. As the film unfolds, it becomes increas
ingly obvious that Hayashi has his own ulterior motives at heart, and quite distinct reasons for wanting Koichi's location pinpointed. The monologue tangentially harks back to the black-and-white, profoundly affecting stills of abandoned dogs presented under the opening credits, while also sym
bolically alluding to Koichi's and Inui's affiliation with canine figures (inu, incidentally, means "dog" in Japanese). Since this portion of Stray Dog doubtlessly represents the film's graphic and thematic core and simultane
ously speaks volumes about Oshii's ethical and ideological convictions, it appears worthy of extensive citation in the present context:
They are stray dogs. Someone might have dumped them, or they got lost. There are so many of them around here. They co-exist with humans, but from a care
ful distance ... they'll never open themselves to humans. They hold a strong grudge against the humans who dumped them but they also miss the smell of their masters so much. They are eternally ambivalent. But they're animals no mat
ter what. They will never know the reason why their master had to dump them.
After a digression citing the "impressive" but "tragic" story of a "dog" who would never succeed in finding the "master" and the "future" he yearned for in spite of his "running continuously on his bloody feet" (an elliptical
After a digression citing the "impressive" but "tragic" story of a "dog" who would never succeed in finding the "master" and the "future" he yearned for in spite of his "running continuously on his bloody feet" (an elliptical