There are two kinds of people in this world: those who find insects scary, loathsome and detestable, and those who see insects as fascinating, wondrous and awe-inspiring. The former see a bug, they want to kill it without hesitation, while the latter will stop whatever they're doing to marvel at the magnificent tiny creature fulfilling its unique destiny in its micro-niche of the ecosystem.
Well, I guess there are actually three kinds of people: the two I just described, and also those who really never stop to think all that much about insects and are merely glad that they're not one themselves. So there goes my thesis...
Or maybe not. I suppose I can apply the analogy to the three types of viewers who are likely to have roughly parallel opinions on the films of Shohei Imamura: some are repelled by his sustained focus on life's grittier, grimier, abusive aspects, others find that same unblinking, unsentimental "anthropological" gaze at human behavior quite thrilling and delightful, while the vast majority of movie watchers have no idea who he even is or what would make his films worth seeking out when there are so many other more purely entertaining options at their disposal.
I'm in that middle set of both groups, fascinated by bugs and quite enthralled by what I've seen of Imamura so far. The Insect Woman is just the third film of his that I've observed, along with 1960's Pigs and Battleships and a random blind watch several years ago of 1979's Vengeance Is Mine, a library checkout from back before I started this blog that I watched solely because it had a Criterion label on the package. Even though I find a lot to admire and sink my mind into as I watch these films, I can easily understand why some would find them disturbing, maybe even offensive. Imamura's choice of subject matter is, to put a crass spin on it, rather tawdry, exploitative and sleazy when it comes to the behavior of not only his lead characters but practically everyone who steps in front of the camera with a speaking part. His mission seems to be one of stripping away whatever gauzy delusions of self-flattery people may have about themselves or the society they inhabit. The Insect Woman is apparently unique among his films for its historical sweep, covering Japanese history from a marginal perspective from the end of the first World War until the times in which it was released. Chronological markers are dropped along the way - a destitute inversion of Forrest Gump without the winking cuteness or special effects gimmickry, if you will - as we track a poor woman's tumultuous journey through life as the society around her goes through its own cataclysmic upheavals.
Though he's far from being the first director, even among the greats of Japanese cinema, to embark upon a prolonged study of his society's Lower Depths, I don't get the sense that Imamura was ever all that concerned about elevating the consciousness of his viewers in any overtly intentional way - if they watched one of his films and decided, out of concern for the poor and oppressed, to get involved with some kind of humanitarian do-gooder-ism, that was fine enough with him, he wouldn't object... but he wasn't particularly trying to move us to some kind of action in order to right the injustices or lend a helping hand. His detachment is austerely clinical, as he shifts from one wretched wallow in godforsaken depravity to another with each succeeding film. In a supplemental interview on the DVD, Imamura describes his fascination with a working-class waitress whose boisterous personality and compelling life story got his attention. He arranged interviews with her that eventually filled three notebooks with various anecdotes, providing the raw material for this story that he went on to tell in a fragmented, episodic manner, dropping in almost at random, then jumping forward in time - a chaotic zigzag, a survivor's obstacle course, with wry dismissive shrugs inserted as freeze-frames every so often that underscore the disappointment and treachery that seems to propel his protagonist from one incident to the next.
In this, Imamura provides a valuable and necessary service as a kind of counter-Ozu (but also counter-Kurosawa and counter-Mizoguchi and counter-everything in Japanese film that preceded him.) As one of the leading auteurs of Japan's New Wave, but also a director who had come up alongside the venerable predecessors just mentioned, he was keenly aware of the cultural (and perhaps business-minded) blind spots of his elders, whose depiction of then-modern Japan could certainly be critical at times but who nevertheless held back just a bit in order to deliver a satisfying touch of moralism or inspiration as they wrapped up their tales. That doesn't make Imamura necessarily superior to his mentors in any way, it's just that his unvarnished rawness acts as a bracing corrective influence that spoke bluntly to an emerging generation even as he risked offending the sensibilities of viewers both then and now. Just going on plot points alone, there's not really a whole lot besides cultural time and distance that separates the saga of The Insect Woman from the most ignorant, inbred trailer park trash debacle you'd ever find on any episode of the Jerry Springer Show. This movie has no shortage of degradation: multi-generational incest, flesh-peddling for cash or the simple satisfaction of crude lust, child abuse and neglect, racist stereotyping, gossip, back-stabbing betrayal in business and romantic relationships, pious hypocrisy, leering voyeurism, dirty old man lechery, cold calculated lying and thievery, even the creepiest displays of tit- and boil-sucking you'd (hopefully) ever care to witness. The thing is, none of it is melodramatically sensationalized or delivered with the slightest overtones of either a chastising rebuke or gleeful revelry in just how sinfully wicked everybody's behaving. Imamura, sitting perhaps on a well-upholstered, if not necessarily ivory, tower is merely telling it like it is. He's keeping it real, Tokyo '63 style.
The Insect Woman's title serves as an understandably Westernized paraphrase of the literal translation "Entymology of Japan," which would lead us to expect an educational nature documentary concerning beetles, spiders, silkworms and such. In the film's opening and closing scenes, Imamura draws a distinct parallel between the rudimentary behavior and lack of any overt teleological purpose (beyond mere survival) of more primitive organisms and what he chronicles in the life experience of his female protagonist Tome. It begins with a beetle scrabbling over some dirt, eventually slowing down and struggling as it tries to make its way up an incline (a small pile, perhaps just a few inches of elevation) only to see the granules slide out from underneath its skittering legs with each attempt to lunge forward. Likewise, Tome's final moments on film show her pressing forth, after a hard, cruel trudge through 45 years of life, up a steep hill, weary and with busted sandals, back to the impoverished mountain village in which she was born. In between the narrative frame provided by those seemingly futile ascents, we see select moments of her experience, from her dismal birth of questionable ancestry, the rude squalor of her early years as an innocent subjected to her father's dumb and brutal self-gratification, the functional role of sexual bargaining chip she plays as a young adult to alleviate pressure from her family's landlord, and her experiences during and after World War II in which she finds that life in the big city is no more respectful of her dignity than what she endured back in the village... assuming she ever had any higher aspirations to begin with.
Tome's birth, heralded by a staggering through the snow sequence reminiscent of Kobayashi's concluding (and life-ending) scene of the ten-hour epic The Human Condition, ushers us into the plight of relentless hardship and deprivation that she, and innumerable others like her, are born into and destined to remain. On her dismal meandering through the wreckage of mid-20th century Japan, Tome's environment changes as she leaves the benighted countryside for supposedly more civilized surroundings. She arrives at a level of relative material affluence, running her own business and profiting from the largess of a modestly prosperous (but cynically chauvinistic) benefactor. She even discovers religion (a more urbane cult of confession that dismisses the crude folk animism of her rural upbringing) and flatters herself with the idea that she's made a lasting and significant change for the better after openly admitting her sins and trying to make a clean break from her past - only to see all the improvements and achievements slip away, as she probably always expected they would. In all this, there's never really a point where she sees herself as defeated or without hope. She simply readjusts her shoulders to bear the burden that's laid upon her, and presses ahead.
!
Beyond the jolts and head-snaps provoked by Imamura's audaciously inventive filmmaking style (his insistence on doing a 100% location shoot in often cramped and inhospitable apartments and other such structures adds immeasurably to the tension and power of his narrative), the primary value I got from watching The Insect Woman was derived from the way it amplifies my own experience of working with and relating to people like Tome in my professional life. I share Imamura's fascination with the toil, the adversity and the sheer will to persevere that women like Tome bring to the task of living, though my hunch is that we are different in that my perspective on the ultimate value of their endeavors is more optimistic than his, and I think I'm more personally involved than he was in trying to address the problems caused by trauma, abuse and neglect. He and I both come from backgrounds more accustomed to middle-class comforts, but we both have a keen interest in trying to understand the experience of those who've had it harder than us. Tome's continuous need to stave off the pressure of those who would seduce, oppress, rape and otherwise exploit her is mind-boggling to me, even though I've done my share of stepping into that world through relationships I developed on the job. I view her ordeals from a historical perspective and it deepens my respect and sorrow for what the common folk of Japan had to endure as a result of the malfeasance of their governing leaders in the 1930s and '40s and the destruction that their foolish aggression inflicted upon their own society.
But then I step back a bit further and realize that the weight of all that poverty, rampant and unchecked carnal appetites and the devious cunning that sets people off in spirals of greedy rivalry and pointless self-destruction isn't at all limited to any particular time, culture or social demographic. I can't really recommend The Insect Woman as an inspirational film, or even as an exploration of what needs to be fixed in the social order of things - it's too bleak and forlorn in its outlook, despite what might appear on second glance to be some attempts at a form of world weary dark humor every now and then. Whatever redemptive qualities are to be found there exist mainly in the aesthetic dimensions of the production itself (and they abound, in my opinion, ranging from the acting to the cinematography to the powerful verisimilitude of what we see on the screen - this is a roguish, masterful work of art.) To the extent that I'm moved to empathy and constructive action on behalf of any "insect women" (or men) that we know in real life, I suppose that Imamura can be given bit of credit for jostling me out of my complacency.
Next: Charade