feeling dizzy
by Douglas Messerli
Masao
Adachi, Nagisa Ōshima, Mamoru Sasaki, and Teakeshi Tamura (screenplay); Nagisa Ōshima
(director) Shinjuku dorobō nikki (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief) / 1969
No one might logically argue that Nagisa
Ōshima’s Shinjuku dorobō nikki (Diary of
a Shinjuku Thief) is uninteresting; if anything this kaleidoscopic piece of
cinema is overlaid with so many expressions of its central themes of revolution
and sexual freedom that it becomes almost muddled and murky in its complexity.
Although there certainly are numerous “oppositions” portrayed in Diary, one might more precisely
characterize its structure as being based as a series of contradictions or
structural reversals: the bookstore employee, Umeko Suzuki (Rie Yokoyama) who
arrests the book thief Birdey Hilltop (Japanese pop artist Tadanori Yokoo) and
turns him in to the head of the Kinokuniya bookstore (played by the chain’s president, essayist Moichi
Tanabe) later herself becomes a thief, experiencing what Birdey describes as a
sexual orgasm up stealing as a kind of intellectual orgasm of words, each
stolen piled-up book broadcasting the revolutionary words within. Later, after
being scolded for having even brought the thief in for punishment, we discover
that she is not even an employee but has used the occasion to develop a relationship
with the boy.
The disheveled man seemingly being chased
by attackers is, in fact, the real Japanese folk singer, Juro Kara, who is in
fact performing a stunt with his fellow players to advertise his street theater
group, and several times throughout the film performing his folk songs while
dressed in his underwear and a white thong.
The campy, transvestite-dominated street
versions of Kabuki theater of Juro Kara’s company have more political force
than the several documentations of student protests and demonstrations we are
shown throughout. Sex is replaced by ritual, ritual transformed into
naturalistic encounters. Even the dominant black-and-white images of Ōshima’s film are, in several
instances, reversed into brightly lit
color clips. Nothing, in short, is what it pretends to be in Diary of a Shihjuku Thief; from the very
first instant of the work, time is destroyed, the hands of the clock stolen,
yet throughout the film we are reminded, again and again, of the exact time,
not only in Tokyo, but throughout the
world. What pretends to be a “diary” is an outpouring of unnaturalistic scenes;
the thief of the title bears the gift of freedom to all he encounters.
One might
even question whether this “film” is what it claims to be, a series of
narrative images: for much of the narrative is buried in symbolic stances and
performances; characters become masked figures performing contradictory roles; dialogue
and conversation is replaced by written text.
Yet
for all that, I can’t truly pronounce this pastiche as a successful work of
art. Like a jewel-studded sabre—or better yet, putting it in context, like an
overwrought, drug-induced hippie art poster—Diary
of a Shihjuku Thief seems too embellished, too preoccupied with its own
layered illusions to emotionally involve and affect its viewers’ lives. While Ōshima
has certainly summarized the tone and feelings of the latter half of the 1960’s
decade, it leaves us with a sense of being simply confounded. And while that
puzzlement is, perhaps, just what one might have expected from an historical perspective
of an era of such contradictions, I felt more dizzy as I left the theater than
I felt freed or personally liberated. But then even living through 1960s I felt
the same thing nearly every day. So it may be that Ōshima accomplished just what
he had set out to do. Such self-congratulatory justifications, however, all too
often lay behind that decade’s rhetoric, which I have always felt revealed the
deep failure of that decade's exhilaration.
Los
Angeles, May 15, 2012
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