Thoughts on Sion Sono’s Strange Circus

Sion Sono’s Strange Circus made me think about how self-abuse is linked to experiences of abuse, well, how those two things form a link. There’s a scene where the protagonist (or the supposed protagonist, since identity gets blurred throughout the film, à la Satoshi Kon’s movies) is lapping milk off the floor. In another scene, the same supposed person (but older) is eating spaghetti directly off the furniture, without a plate. There are strange scenes of self-abuse when not in the presence of the abuser, and it really brought a certain point home poignantly. I’m not exactly sure what that point was, but I want to try and explore it as I write. The first thing that comes to mind is the movie poster, since it’s right here on the page. It shows the protagonist lying dead in her coffin, but her eyes are open and she’s looking at us with a smile or her face. I think this poster is more significant than it seems, is not merely a “decoration” for the DVD box, etc. She is dead, and she’s looking at us smiling. I know it’s a cliche, but I couldn’t help feeling as if maybe the movie was all a hallucination. I think this type of interpretation is useful because it helps me look at the movie content through a dream-analysis lens. In a sense, every movie can be read this way if one wishes to, which reduces the “hallucinatory” aspect of it to a sort of absurdity (if all movies are “dreams”, what does it even mean that “it’s all a dream”? Nothing “non-dreamy” exists to contrast that).
What makes me say that in this case, however, is that the film’s intro ends with Mitsuko jumping from a tall building and falling to her death. As she falls, she hallucinates a circus. In this “dream” she is guided towards a guillotine where she is to be decapitated. We never see Mitsuko fall, however. We see implications of her fall (she’s in hospital, she’s in a wheelchair), but these become blurry as we discover that, perhaps, she doesn’t need a wheelchair after all (she’s acting). Or even that we are lead to believe that it is her mother, Sayuri, who is in a wheelchair, and that this was all due to her fall down the staircase. So the fall from the building and the fall from the staircase are conflated. Now, what’s the key difference? In one case she’s committing suicide, in the other it’s homicide. But wait, at points there doesn’t even seem to be a difference between Sayuri and Mitsuko. Are they the same person? That would make the homicide scene actually become a symbolic suicide performed by two people, two parts of a divided self.
The film ends with the guillotine cutting her head, and we fade to black. So, as Mitsuko falls down, she dreams this dream, and when she dies in the dream, she dies in reality. We could say that the film ends with her body touching the floor, finally. After all, Yuji / Mitsuko wonders “which hallucination is the dream? Which one is reality?”. I don’t think this refers only to that final chainsaw scene, but to the entire film. Curiously, this gives a new spin to the movie poster: all we see is her head, as if beheaded, in a backdrop of red roses, so often symbolic of blood. It’s interesting to me how this ties into Sono’s other movies, the themes he tends to explore (women’s role in Japanese society being a big one, I would say). In Why Don’t You Play in Hell, a young pop idol is the source of almost religious devotion on the part of old, violent men. Her innocence is the water these men drink. On the on hand, it shows a bunch of yakuza who desperately want to be “masculine”, but who, when given a chance, will revel in song, dance and the dropping of all that macho pretence. On the other, it shows how the young girl is not as “feminine” as her fans think, and is being pursued, kidnapped, by the masculine structure that needs her to be an idol for them. The word “idol” carries its doubly meaning in Sono’s work I feel, as being both a pop celebrity and a religious statuette. I feel this happens in almost all the films I’ve seen from him, Love Exposure being a clear example, but also Cold Fish. I haven’t watched that many more. Suicide Club obviously ties into Mitsuko’s suicide, and could suggest how the story in Strange Circus is more allegorical than factual, speaking about larger societal issues than a single family’s history (whilst being also that, albeit in a blurred, dreamy way).
Another strange dream element is how Yuji / Mitsuko tells us that he (or she, but I think the movie can be read in a non-dual way: he is a man and she is a woman, or both at the same time, or neither. It depends on the scene and the angle one looks at it from) knows of a girl who was in the same situation as the protagonist in Taeko / Sayuri’s novel. The way he describes this girl suggests that it is “teenage Mitsuko”, played by a third actor we hadn’t seen so far. But! The reveal is that he might be talking about himself, about himself as Mitsuko. But the person we see enacting these things is, as I said, another actor. I wonder if the name Mitsuko could mean “mitsu (three) ko (girls)” and suggest a trinity between Taeko-Mitsuko, Yuji-Mitsuko and teenage Mitsuko. Well, we have to include childhood Mitsuko too, but imo she stands above and beyond the rest in that she is supposedly the childhood version of one / all of them; in that she is a character in a novel; and that the film seems to be her dream as she falls. Some scenes in the circus show us a “trinity of a women”. If I drop this who “mitsu-ko” thing, though, I could just compute it as “four or five women”, a plurality, and this gets shown in the circus too. A fractures identity, like the glass she breaks in order to erase her reflection. Perhaps the way she managed to erase her reflection is by not erasing, but multiplying: creating so many identities that it is not clear exactly who she is. That way she can couch the suffering under a protective blanket. I am not implying this is wrong, by the way. I think severe trauma requires blanketing, protecting oneself from it. The direct confrontation with this trauma would be not a healing experience, but maybe an even more traumatic experience. There is, however, a need I think to drip-feed trauma a rate that is “bearable” / “comfortable”, and this seems to be what Taeko is seeking, anyhow: to write all her trauma into an artform, a novel, that will help her heal and exorcise it in some way. One could read the guillotine scene not as an actual death, but as a death of the trauma’s grip on you. This could show the role of art as being central here: Taeko seems to have “finished” the novel. She celebrates this in her room, alone. “Finishing” the novel seems to be what sparks the chain of events that lead her to confronting trauma, since the novel is what leads her to Yuji, as “editor” / “reviewer” of the novel. Yuji is called a “robot”, an emotionless husk (exactly what Mitsuko appears to turn into as a child due to the abuse). In this bizarre read, the film appears almost optimistic: art helps in healing trauma. Of course, it’s not a miracle medicine, but it does seem to help at least. I wonder how this may relate to the views on art, specifically the art of cinema, expressed in Why Don’t You Play in Hell. The director-protagonist makes a movie, everyone dies in the process, he “survives” (or hallucinates that he survives) and brings the tapes back home. We, the audience, may be the ones watching those tapes as we watch the movie. At first I perceived some cynicism in that (he wears a CANNES t-shirt, they’re all obsessed with cinema in an almost unhealthy way, it seems to be almost a parody of the moviemaking world). Does he profit from the bloodshed in order to make a movie? Well, one could say the bloodshed would have occurred anyway, those yakuza families would have warred anyway. So perhaps he managed to get something of value from it all. Since it was going to occur anyway, why not transmute it into art? Why don’t play in hell? Trauma, traumatic hell, seems to heal when integrated into artistic expression. So, if one is going to hell anyway, why not be artistic about it, in the hopes of that helping in some way? Somehow, I feel like Strange Circus does a similar thing: Taeko is writing a novel to exorcise her trauma, she finishes writing it and, at the moment, gets lead towards her childhood home by Yuji. She gets lead towards all the things she had been trying to forget. Writing the novel makes her remember vividly all that has happened, and this remembrance causes a dismemberment / beheading. Weirdly, in the “chainsaw universe” it is Mitsuko herself (as Yuji) who beheads Mitsuko (as Taeko). So the suicide could be read this way too: writing a novel, making art, is a form of suicide, since one is essentially killing oneself, exorcising oneself. Of course, I don’t mean to trivialise suicide: I think precisely what is interesting about Sono’s work is how he takes real social problems and looks at them through an artistic lens (as do other filmmakers, of course, but I want to focus on him at the moment). Through looking at suicide in the context of a work of art, one sees more things about suicide, feels more things about it, about the real event, about all the network of meaning that constellates itself around such an event. I really believe that art doesn’t turn important things into shallow “artistic motifs”, but the opposite: that art takes important things and makes them even more important by looking at them outside the cultural lens (looking at them as symbol, as metaphor, etc). Sometimes art even takes insignificant things (apparently insignificant things) and sees the significance in them. Sion Sono’s films are charged with meaning, despite being (or precisely because they are!) so cold, so dark and seemingly detached. The detached, dream-like nature of his films, to me, gives more life to what he is talking about. Of course he may completely disagree, but I feel his films to be optimistic films, in the sense that the severe darkness the talk about needs to be talked about. A putrid wound wants air, it wants to be seen by daylight! Otherwise it remains hidden and putrefies even more. There are dark films that, to me, feel counter-productive. Like they’re simply wallowing in the mud. Dark films that, to my tastes, simply make things worse, make you more depressed, etc. This is a veeeery subjective thing of course, and maybe I’m totally wrong on this. Maybe all dark films are healing in some way, it’s just that some “I am not ready for”. But at the moment I stick to my current theory: that some films tackle dark topics in a dark way, in a way that I feel is counter-productive if what you want is to “heal” in some way. Yes, a very subjective topic. Anyway, somehow one might think that the darker a film is, the more depressing it is, but to me Sono shows the opposite. His films can be very dark, very harrowing, there is a total lack of hope in them, a total despair. And yet, I don’t feel they’re pessimistic, because in participating in that artistic experience of hopelessness a sort of healing occurs. I feel they’re “protest movies” in a way, too. He seems to be talking about issues affecting Japanese society, and I feel as if he care about these topics. That feeling of “care” is felt amidst the darkness. He is “protesting” about it, trying to change it, to bring awareness to it, not simply wallowing in it and accepting it. Anyway, now I’m just rambling about my judgement of his intentions and so on. I suppose that’s a sign that i must stop writing. I feel like there is more about Strange Circus that I would like to say, but I may leave that for another post. After all, I would like to continue linking his filmography together thematically, so maybe I’ll wait until I’ve watched / re-watched more of his films. Until next time!