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Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade
Last spring I went to Tokyo, where I was supposed to attend a conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. The conference was drastically cut down because of fears about swine flu (boo), but I had lots of extra time to ramble around Tokyo (yay!), and I appreciated what events the SCMS did have a lot. Still, one cut to the program I really regret now was a showing of Jin-Roh. I rented it when I got back to Canada, and...wow. It would have been amazing on a big screen, and so interesting to talk about afterwards. I still want to talk about it. So here are my thoughts!
Jin-Roh: the Wolf Brigade. Dir. Hiroyuki Okiura, screenplay Mamoru Oshii. Production I.G., 1998.
It’s rated R and deals with hard-edged politics in an alternate-history postwar Japan, but don’t let that fool you. This movie is actually a fairy tale: a thought-provoking reworking of Little Red Riding Hood. The premise is that social unrest following WWII (classic opening shot of a mushroom cloud) has become so severe that it’s escalated to the level of urban terrorism. Rioters are supported in their massive clashes with police by an underground network of guerillas known as the Sect, who employ innocent-looking, dedicated young girls –Red Riding Hoods– to transport “satchel bombs” to the protesters without drawing too much attention.
Our story begins when one such Red Riding Hood is chased down and cornered by a member of the armoured police Special Unit Kerberos, named Fuse. For a split second, he hesitates to fire on her, and rather than surrender she takes the chance to blow herself up. This disturbing event leaves Fuse emotionally devastated. He’s tried, discharged, and sent for retraining. Alienated from the other trainees, he finds some comfort in talking to the dead girl’s older sister, Kei Amemiya, whom he meets by “coincidence.” It’s a bit of an eerie situation, especially since we hear their voices narrating a slightly altered (or original?) version of Little Red Riding Hood over some of the scenes when they’re together.
From this set-up, we get some good old Oshii-style byzantine internal politics going. It turns out that Kei is actually a former Red Riding Hood who was arrested, reformed, and sent by the main part of the Capital police (I think) to draw Fuse into a compromising situation so that they could use the negative publicity to shut down the military police’s Special Unit, a.k.a. Kerberos, the Wolf Brigade (again, not so clear...did I mention it’s byzantine?) Fuse manages to take down the men meant to capture him and escapes with Kei, who confesses everything out of love for him. But then it turns out in another twist that the whole thing has been an even more elaborate set-up by the Wolf Brigade: Fuse was never emotionally vulnerable, he was a stone-cold, obedient Wolf serving the unit by getting them some dirt to dish on the Capital police, namely, the now-revealed plot to set up Fuse. Once his unit gets proof of the Capital police’s plot from Kei, she becomes a liability, and their doomed relationship must end. Still, maybe the Wolf did have feelings for Red after all: though he’s ordered to shoot her, the shot that does the deed comes not from his gun, but from another of his boss’s agents in the end.
I actually liked this movie a lot more than I thought I would. It’s very well animated, with solid, detailed backgrounds and characters that are a little simple, but not distractingly flat, like in Sky Crawlers. The opening shots, still frames of chaos and protests under VO exposition, are particularly intricate, so that I had a hard time concentrating on the subtitles. My eyes wanted to roam over the pictures and explore all the details I couldn’t take in at a glance. A good “dispersed visual field”, I guess!
Besides the art, the Red Riding Hood story is woven through the movie in some interesting ways –not just the voice over, but also dreamlike images in which Fuse hunts the two Red Riding Hoods (her face switches between the first girl and her supposed sister) through the sewers with a pack of wolves, only to be horrified when they tear her apart. The sequence starts right from a conversation, so it has a sort of Kon-Satoshi-like surreality that keeps you wondering: is it a dream, a hallucination, or a symbolic representation of something that’s happening? It’s nicely paced, the way the fairy tale twists in and out of the main narrative and draws it together, so that the whole film feels proportionate and compact. And it’s a striking way to approach fairy tale and political allegory –not just making the fairy tale into an allegory itself, but threading it through defamiliarized but clearly pressing modern social concerns. If that makes any sense at all.
Speaking of modern social concerns, this movie came out before 9/11, but it has a lot of resonance today, given its concern with the psychologies of suicide bombers and of those who must deal with them. The sheer political ruthlessness of those in charge, as the two security organizations begin to fight each other rather than work for anything even approaching public safety or human rights, is surely a critique of the power dynamics of maintaining law and order. These are the sorts of security concerns that apply as much –or more- in a “safe”, controlled country like Japan as somewhere like Afghanistan. And as in life, things are just too complicated to decide who’s “right.” No one has a clear moral high-ground. It’s prescient that way.
One more thing to note is the theme of beasts and humans. It’s pointed out early on that stories about relationships between beasts and humans never end well. Near the end, Fuse is told that he’s a wolf, a beast, and even if he takes on human form and walks among men, he will always be a beast. It reminded me of Wolf’s Rain, of course, but there are also interesting things to be done with other human/animal Japanese legends (wasn’t there one with a horse and a girl?) Is it true that the categories of human and animal are so separate as Fuse’s superior tells him? Given that he hesitates to shoot Kei –and that this is an Oshii screenplay- I’d say not. But does his hesitation suggest that he is more “human” in his compassion –and that therefore it’s better to be human because humans are compassionate and animals are cruel? Or is he something else, some passage between human and animal that allows us to rethink both? Papers could be written on Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal” in this film…
Jin-Roh: the Wolf Brigade. Dir. Hiroyuki Okiura, screenplay Mamoru Oshii. Production I.G., 1998.
It’s rated R and deals with hard-edged politics in an alternate-history postwar Japan, but don’t let that fool you. This movie is actually a fairy tale: a thought-provoking reworking of Little Red Riding Hood. The premise is that social unrest following WWII (classic opening shot of a mushroom cloud) has become so severe that it’s escalated to the level of urban terrorism. Rioters are supported in their massive clashes with police by an underground network of guerillas known as the Sect, who employ innocent-looking, dedicated young girls –Red Riding Hoods– to transport “satchel bombs” to the protesters without drawing too much attention.
Our story begins when one such Red Riding Hood is chased down and cornered by a member of the armoured police Special Unit Kerberos, named Fuse. For a split second, he hesitates to fire on her, and rather than surrender she takes the chance to blow herself up. This disturbing event leaves Fuse emotionally devastated. He’s tried, discharged, and sent for retraining. Alienated from the other trainees, he finds some comfort in talking to the dead girl’s older sister, Kei Amemiya, whom he meets by “coincidence.” It’s a bit of an eerie situation, especially since we hear their voices narrating a slightly altered (or original?) version of Little Red Riding Hood over some of the scenes when they’re together.
From this set-up, we get some good old Oshii-style byzantine internal politics going. It turns out that Kei is actually a former Red Riding Hood who was arrested, reformed, and sent by the main part of the Capital police (I think) to draw Fuse into a compromising situation so that they could use the negative publicity to shut down the military police’s Special Unit, a.k.a. Kerberos, the Wolf Brigade (again, not so clear...did I mention it’s byzantine?) Fuse manages to take down the men meant to capture him and escapes with Kei, who confesses everything out of love for him. But then it turns out in another twist that the whole thing has been an even more elaborate set-up by the Wolf Brigade: Fuse was never emotionally vulnerable, he was a stone-cold, obedient Wolf serving the unit by getting them some dirt to dish on the Capital police, namely, the now-revealed plot to set up Fuse. Once his unit gets proof of the Capital police’s plot from Kei, she becomes a liability, and their doomed relationship must end. Still, maybe the Wolf did have feelings for Red after all: though he’s ordered to shoot her, the shot that does the deed comes not from his gun, but from another of his boss’s agents in the end.
I actually liked this movie a lot more than I thought I would. It’s very well animated, with solid, detailed backgrounds and characters that are a little simple, but not distractingly flat, like in Sky Crawlers. The opening shots, still frames of chaos and protests under VO exposition, are particularly intricate, so that I had a hard time concentrating on the subtitles. My eyes wanted to roam over the pictures and explore all the details I couldn’t take in at a glance. A good “dispersed visual field”, I guess!
Besides the art, the Red Riding Hood story is woven through the movie in some interesting ways –not just the voice over, but also dreamlike images in which Fuse hunts the two Red Riding Hoods (her face switches between the first girl and her supposed sister) through the sewers with a pack of wolves, only to be horrified when they tear her apart. The sequence starts right from a conversation, so it has a sort of Kon-Satoshi-like surreality that keeps you wondering: is it a dream, a hallucination, or a symbolic representation of something that’s happening? It’s nicely paced, the way the fairy tale twists in and out of the main narrative and draws it together, so that the whole film feels proportionate and compact. And it’s a striking way to approach fairy tale and political allegory –not just making the fairy tale into an allegory itself, but threading it through defamiliarized but clearly pressing modern social concerns. If that makes any sense at all.
Speaking of modern social concerns, this movie came out before 9/11, but it has a lot of resonance today, given its concern with the psychologies of suicide bombers and of those who must deal with them. The sheer political ruthlessness of those in charge, as the two security organizations begin to fight each other rather than work for anything even approaching public safety or human rights, is surely a critique of the power dynamics of maintaining law and order. These are the sorts of security concerns that apply as much –or more- in a “safe”, controlled country like Japan as somewhere like Afghanistan. And as in life, things are just too complicated to decide who’s “right.” No one has a clear moral high-ground. It’s prescient that way.
One more thing to note is the theme of beasts and humans. It’s pointed out early on that stories about relationships between beasts and humans never end well. Near the end, Fuse is told that he’s a wolf, a beast, and even if he takes on human form and walks among men, he will always be a beast. It reminded me of Wolf’s Rain, of course, but there are also interesting things to be done with other human/animal Japanese legends (wasn’t there one with a horse and a girl?) Is it true that the categories of human and animal are so separate as Fuse’s superior tells him? Given that he hesitates to shoot Kei –and that this is an Oshii screenplay- I’d say not. But does his hesitation suggest that he is more “human” in his compassion –and that therefore it’s better to be human because humans are compassionate and animals are cruel? Or is he something else, some passage between human and animal that allows us to rethink both? Papers could be written on Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal” in this film…
no subject
I haven't seen Jin-Rou, but based on Oshii's oeuvre as a whole, I'd definitely argue that we should assume that the protagonists in his films are posthuman rather than human.