New Underground History of Japanese Violence: Vengeance Demon
about a third of the way through this very short feature wakamatsu inserts a flashback sequence that simply shows us, at greater length and in more stomach-churning detail, the crime with which the film opened. at first this seems redundant (we can remember what happened 20 minutes ago), but really it's maybe the most necessary scene in the whole thing, because blows up the whole framework of the conventional revenge narrative, in which the inciting incident is allowed to recede and recede until it becomes just an abstraction, half-forgotten, and we can stroke our chins and ponder about The Corrosive Effects Of Violence and Whether It Was All Worth It. 133
but <PERSON> doesnt let it recede, he makes us sit through it again, demands we sit and watch and really deal with what we're seeing (and we have no choice, because there is no longer anything shocking about it; we already know what will happen, and thus suspense and uncertainty cannot distract us), because he's a good materialist, and he knows it's not abstractions that beat and rape and kill. he wants to make sure we know this, too – he rubs our faces in the specificity of the crime, in its brutal, callous, knowing stupidity, so the stench of it won't fade, and so no one gets confused about who the real demons are here, or about exactly how much currency a virtue like "forgiveness" would have with them. anyway im not gonna say this movie is about settler-colonialism, because it isn't, but i also wouldnt say there arent some productive comparisons to be drawn 295