Justifying Difficult Media
The realm of commercial pop media is so prevalent that stepping outside of it can get you sideways glances. Things that hurt, and suck in their unsanitized sensations aren’t talked about in polite society or cable TV. Ultimately that's fine. Horror, horror often fits in that description, but it comes with the alibi that you’re there for the fear. What I'm going to be talking about today is upsetting difficult media that exists to feel bad, and potentially cathartic, in ways that aren’t acceptable on public platforms. By the end of this post I hope you find yourself thinking positively about these nasty pieces, and tempted to partake yourself.
This post spoils: Dancer in the Dark, Kotoko, Blood on the tracks, and Tokyo Fist.
A nightmare in its creation and consumption, Dancer in the Dark is a film I can’t stop thinking about. A film about a factory worker slowly losing her eyesight while she saves enough money to give her son the treatment for that same disease. A film that is broadly a participant in Dogma 95, in which films used real locations, lighting, and naturalistic props to enhance realism. A film that left me cold and strained, aimless and hurt for the following week. Dancer in the dark was the first film to truly hurt me. Partially due to its contents, and partially the moment in my life that it struck me, I was impacted enough to stay up the next night and wander around town, crudely painting scenes that felt right under the faint moonlight. I didn't feel normal for a few days.
The factory music number is one of the tensest sequences in film. Our protagonist works on an assembly line where she maneuvers around this large hydraulic press that reshapes metal instantly, moving her entire arms in and out with moments to spare hundreds of times a day. So when her mind wanders to the repetitive sounds of her workplace, which evolves into an imagined musical number, my body cannot contain its stress. The gritty mirror to the fish cannery scene in ‘what became of Edith Finch’, the loud industrial noises, bleak color palette and Bjork's singing brings this to a climax. It ends with our lady just misplacing a piece of metal and breaking the machine, blissfully diffusing all threats of bodily harm. She avoids catastrophe but loses her job, setting up a string of tragedies.
Some plot events happen, watch it if you're interested, and then we arrive at the execution at the end. Bjork begins to sing as she is walking from her cell to the hanging platform that will take her life. Starting slow and steady, as the heroine’s will breaks panic sets in, and the song follows suit. Her scrambling and fearful wails dominate your senses for minutes while she desperately rebels against death. Eventually on the execution platform, she is made to stop singing, before breaking into panic again. As she thrashes and screams her song, the executioner gets approval before hitting the button. The song ends suddenly as gravity and the noose suddenly come into play and her life is extinguished. The moment of silence followed by a wave of pain mixed with catharsis was intoxicating for me, it made me feel at home in a void of emptiness. Completely engrossed, this was one of the most cleansing films I’ve experienced, by the end I felt boiled and scraped.
It's a great film in many ways, but it doesn't need to be celebrated as such. Director Lars von trier physically and sexually harassed the lead actress, and by all accounts is an abusive mess of a man. Among the people who made the film, Lars stands to gain the most from its celebration, so even the writing I’ve done here is done with a heavy heart. However, he does not benefit from me or you pirating it, so do with that information what you will.
A film I recently viewed fits cleanly into this post, even if it had a much weaker effect on me. Kotoko is maybe the worst film you could possibly show a parent. It's the story of a young mother who hallucinates sinister doppelgangers of the people around her. Throughout the film her infant child is brutalized. Dropped, stabbed, shot, hit by a car, and drowned, our protagonist’s blurred reality torments her into complete psychosis. Through these moments of extremes and other storytelling techniques were put into the perspective of our lead actress, painting her experiences with the widest breadth possible. When you see the series of expressions on her face, you understand at every step what she thinks. As she wraps her hands around her baby’s neck until it stops breathing, we are horrified by our understanding of her feelings. And after she just sits there in disbelief of what she's done, the world fades to white, and it feels right. She and we have lost the thing that mattered to us, and without it the world is empty. She comes back to consciousness in a small craftily decorated room, and the corners of the walls begin to open up one by one to reveal a small decorated vignette. We follow her perspective into the surreal, the world itself stops making sense and we finally break from her perspective.
We next see her in a psych ward or nursing home years later. She lives a silent life of distant staring, broken by brief visits outside where she smokes unlit cigarettes in the rain. After the anxiety and fear that overwhelmed us earlier, this long drawn out quiet sensuality feels amazing. The actress's thin white dress, limp arms, covered in dripping rain enters my mind at times when I'm burnt out and need to stay still. The film ends on the brightest possible note, her son is revealed to be healthy, unscarred, and now a teenager, visits her as if he's visited a hundred times. While it was noticeable in previous scenes that he had never actually been hurt, here is the final confirmation that he lived. His cute inside jokes and attempts at mimicking how his mother played with him as a child warms the heart. He displays himself to be well adjusted and lively despite his family circumstances, and it feels so sweet contrasted against his earliest years. The creators used all of the tones and emotions afforded to them to create a very intense story. By pushing it so dramatically, we’re given the opportunity for even bigger senses of relief and joy.
From 2017 to 2023 Shūzō Oshimi released the manga Blood on the tracks. The story primarily follows a fixation from the author's previous work, an anxious boyhood put into tension by complicated women. It kicks off with the main character’s mom pushing her nephew over a very high cliff, and ends with the boy reflecting on his life as an elderly man, finally able to forget the trauma that defined his life. Blood on the tracks is an incredible depiction and evocation of anxiety and how crushing uncertainty can be. From the initial twist, we the audience and the characters in the story can't parse Seiko Osabe, the potentially murderous mom. Why did she push, what would she do to other characters, who is she, what does she want from us? The story maintains tension with these questions for dozens of chapters.
Seiko forces her son, Seiichi Osabe, to live in isolation, having the only person in your life be your mother. He is stuck not understanding, but loving and trusting a parent that we are horrified by. Her flippancy and unpredictability make seiichi’s attempts at connecting and pleasing her often fail. So when our darling boy tries to make friends, falls in love, and sneaks away to kiss a girl, the looming threat of an unpredictable guardian fills our mind. And when she shows up on screen all characters contort to her will. The story feels like an anxious train of thought born from a panic attack. Instead of reliving my own bad childhood moments, this story feels like reliving my worst imagined scenarios and fears from when I was 10. The story allows you to feel this awful headspace, but through the properties of the medium of comics you can stop or take a break at any moment. You can pace out the rate of terrible feelings, giving control over how you relive or work through these feelings.
Blood on the tracks expresses itself with the full range of emotions. By exploring different niches and extremes it flushes out and characterizes the trauma that Seiichi experiences, and justifies his mental journey one step at a time. For the rest of the story Seiichi finishes the job his mom started, killing his cousin in the same moment as he remembers the moment his mom threw him down a hill as a baby. As he’s put in a psych ward and charged with murder, his mom abandons the family and leaves his dad to himself. The years slip by, parents passing, living in isolation as the moments that defined his youth fade from memory. The swings this story takes creates emotional resonance that less bold media meekly fumbles at.
Kotoko was directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, who also created this final film, Tokyo Fist. While Kotoko was about the spectrum of parenting anxieties, Tokyo first is about relationship anxieties. A happily married couple is building tension over their stagnation, when the wife runs into her husband's friend from childhood who is a professional boxer. Initially uninterested in him, she likes the idea of an affair more and more as her husband shows his self hatred and anxiety. This comes to a head when the wife visits the boxer’s apartment, and while nothing happens, the husband walks in on them and gets a skull crushing punch to the face. This sets their paths, the husband joins a boxing gym and transforms himself into a brutal hulk of a forty year old. His wife moved in with the fearful and unwilling boxer, before falling back in love with her husband's single minded self destruction.
It builds to their eventual fight, on a quiet morning before the gym opens. The two go at it, the husband being destroyed but never falling down. The boxer goes on to win the next day, horribly disfigured. The husband is seen in close up at the hospital, covered in bandages as he begins to spray blood out in every direction. For most of its runtime it indulges in anxious posturing, mutual abuse, a refusal of emotional honesty or lowering defenses, and the gamut of miserable feelings that I absolutely hate experiencing. In my life I cut out behaviors that would lead to these outcomes, but in the context of a 2 hour film? I feel safe to experience the pain and discomfort of human depravity. It hurts so much, but the sensation of cleansing release is so much more impactful than the emotions conjured by less thorny media.