of beasts and bodhisattvas: kore-eda's "monster" isn't as 'queer' as 'angelic'
From "Monster (Kaibutsu 怪物)" dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda
This is not the post I've been planning on for some time, but, I'd like to post it and save the other for next week or the following. My Storygraph Giveaway ends on the 19th and with certain politics here in USA I do have a review about an artwork that speaks more closely to my own home and my art (current and as-yet-unreleased) than this one. Surprisingly, it's not the humiliating-to-Latin-Americans 2024's "Emilia Pérez:" I don't want to talk about that egregore, even to criticize, though it's tempting; I don't want to feed it. No, I've been planning a review of an old kitschy Colombian artwork, nothing to do with narcos and exploitable violence, in a funny format that's made a come-back. But, I do want to make this post about "Monster (Kaibutsu 怪物)" now. This is also an important topic.
Introduction
It's award-season and MUBI offered me three months of subscription for $1 each month. Naturally, like any film lover, I took advantage of the offer and immediately watched Tarsem Singh's 2006 "The Fall." For years, there'd been no legal streaming of the film on any platform in the US and no availability of a reasonably-priced DVD or Blu-Ray on any legal platform. Notice I said legal, twice. The sumptuous and somewhat problematic film deserves its own post, but, that's not today's nor next post's business.
I also watched a film on MUBI I'd been looking forward to seeing by one of my personal favorite directors, Hirokazu Kore-eda, his 2023's "Monster." My take: amazing, perfect, poignant, beautiful. Perhaps it's not as gut-wrenching as 2004's "Nobody Knows" which I prefer over the Palme-D'Or-winning 2018's "Shoplifters" but, that's just me. Perhaps it's not as explicitly Buddhist as the shocking 2009's "Air Doll". Nor as meta as the fabulous 2019's "La Verité" with the likes of the greats Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke. Nonetheless, it's as hypnotic, engrossing and relevant as Kore-eda's best. So, what's the thing I'm gonna talk about? Well, speaking of Palm awards at Cannes, the film's screenplay written by Yuji Sakomoto (not Kore-eda himself, which is out of the norm for his films) won Best Screenplay at the festival, and the film won... the Queer Palm. TOMARE! JAPANESE FOR "STOP"! No hate. Want proof? Go to my Goodreads Author profile and look at the blaring category "Influences." See the first two authors? Not the third and fourth. The first two influences on my style of writing: Arthur Rimbaud and Ocean Vuong. Now, look those artists up and then come back and tell me I have no right and no appreciation so as to speak on the issue of art made by queer people and/or queerness within art.
I am not about that hate and that ignorance and no topic is taboo for me. Look at the topics I write and read about. I'm about people who make art that transcends boundaries and questions the limits of the human experience, what's sacred and what's profane and all that's in between.
A Word on Cannes and Its Politics
Regarding Cannes and what it might mean to receive any award at that festival, I'd like to point to 2013's awarding of the Palme D'Or, the highest award, to Abdellatif Kechiche's "Blue Is the Warmest Colour:" Kechiche had to share the award with the two leading actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, and, subsequently, auctioned it in a punk rock move so as to finance his next film. Why? I imagine he thought sharing the award was bullshit, decided on by a panel that included tools of the mainstream machine Steven Spielberg, Nicole Kidman and Ang Lee.
Kechiche's not a nice guy, look, I'm not making the case that all people making punk rock moves in and around their art are good people. The director allegedly sexually assaulted a woman, an accusation dropped by French officials because of lack of proof, and apparently he was difficult to work with while filming "Blue" according to Exarchopoulos and Seydoux. I point to Kechiche's example for the reason that "Blue" is a 'queer' film but it's also a pretty bad film. It's based on a comic ("Blue Angel" by Jul Maroh) meant to address the myriad of confusions that a lower-middle-class girl feels during a time of gender-and-sexual-revolution in France when confronted with an upper-middle-class artist she feels attraction to whose identity reads revolution but who is really quite empty-headed and out-of-touch. The film is, honestly, mostly simulated lesbian porn with some subtlety here and there around classism. Punk rock, sure. Not quite hitting the political mark that the comic does. And, in my opinion, not meriting as prestigious an award as a Palme D'Or. But, let's say it had been good enough for the D'Or: why award Exarchopoulos and Seydoux as though to make some kind of statement?
Maybe Cannes doesn't care about awarding art as much as spoon-feeding the public certain lucrative politics. Maybe, if it did, then, that same year (let's talk about simulated sex on screen and going punk rock) Lars von Trier's left-handed masterpiece "Nymph()maniac vols. I & II" would have been nominated and would have won. But, von Trier has a very rocky relationship with Cannes, to put it mildly. "Nymph()maniac" commits two politicallly incorrect blasphemies: one, portraying a woman, the main character Joe, claiming that her regretting an abortion is a feminist perspective; and, two, refusing to exploit queerness as a theme in a film about a sex addict. But, come on, come on! Ignoring the 5.5 hour grueling and graphic and genius "Nymph()maniac" with Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård and Christian Slater going balls-to-the-wall, seems like the cushiest and smelliest move that year in discerning which art deserves merit for its craft and its thought.
Equivocation in Film
"Monster" isn't really 'queer,' I think. To the jury of the Queer Palm for 2023's submissions, led by John Cameron Mitchell, known for writing and starring in both the play and the film "Hedwig and the Angry Itch" and for directing 2010's "Rabbit Hole" (and who is, also, a Radical Faerie, just keep that in mind), it certainly is, which is disturbing because it's mostly about children playing. According to Kore-eda in an interview for Forbes, its original script didn't have queer themes, apparently, until time was handed to Kore-eda and Sakomoto during the pandemic to narrow down their vision to something more political and they decided to talk to LGBTQ members of Japanese society.
Kore-eda thinks that having to identify with the label of "gay" is quite monstruous:
"We talked to people in an organization who support LGBTQ children, and they suggested that we decide whether the boys are aware that they are gay, or not — choose one, rather than having this mixed up feeling that they saw in the script. [...] We were able to work with that, and realize that what is not named in the story, that feeling that they might be gay, was indeed the 'Monster.' The fact we were able to get those opinions during the making of the film was very fortunate."
Heaven forbid children have mixed feelings and that human existence be rightfully confusing in all ways, particularly in the development of sexuality, right? No subtlety or ambiguity. I'll get to this obsession around identity and how it's inherently not Buddhist within a film made by an artist whose works are all essentially Buddhist in nature. Kore-eda is all for observing that compulsion to "choose" an "awareness" of a sexual identity is monstruous.
The final product is in essence a subtle homage to the late and great director Akira Kurosawa's classic 1950's "Rashomon", a film about a particular event portrayed from different perspectives so as to demonstrate a sense of equivocation, or what seem like contradicting truths existing congruently (see "The Rashomon effect" in film). The plot revolves around four characters: Saori Mugino (played by Sakura Andō), a single widowed woman in her thirties concerned about and feeling disconnected from her pre-teen son Minato who shows evidence of mental and physical stress and potential abuse; Mishitoshi Hori (Eita Nagayama), a good-natured man in his twenties or early thirties who is newly hired as a fifth-grade teacher by the school Minato and Yori attend and is their very homeroom teacher, partnered to a petty woman his age who really doesn't deserve him; and, finally, Minato Mugino (Sōya Kurokawa) and Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hīragi), fifth graders, the former experiencing early signs of mental illness most likely due to grieving his deceased father and the latter experiencing no explicit signs of mental illness but is nonetheless a character psychologically and physically abused by his father (called "pig's brain") and chronically bullied at school by his peers for his idiosyncratic behavior and his shameless sense of joy and non-reactivity. Yori sets off a series of unfortunate events, which seem to vilify different individuals according to which perspective we see the events from.
Unbeknownst to the adults, Minato and Yori become best friends, find an abandoned train car in the forest and invent games around the uniquely-mature topic of the Apocalypse. Their friendship, however, is misunderstood and they find themselves like the adults around them placing blame where there is no blame to be had. The true villain of the film seems most obviously to be Yori's father, as he is explicitly abusive toward his son in what is apparently the only way he knows how to control the boy's behavior so as not to appear "pig-brained" whatever that may imply. Yori, though only 10 or 11, takes everything in stride and finds fun and wonder in small things, not seeking to harm anyone or to control circumstances, which is naturally why Minato is drawn to him. In a collective society in which image is the only "truth" that matters, adults behave insincerely and assume the worst and children watch and pick the evil up.
Yori is immune to caring about what looks good or not, what's right behavior or not, but, he's being beaten into conforming to it.
Angels and Beasts (Monsters)
Yori is no monster; he's more like what's called in Buddhism a bodhisattva. A bodhisattva, from the root word "budh-" which is the same root of "Buddha" which means "to awaken," is, in Mahāyāna Buddhism, an individual who has achieved nirvāṇa (meaning "to blow out" but is more traditionally translated to a sense of enlightenment or perpetual bliss) but rather than sit all day decides to come back to earth, colloquially speaking, and while remembering that bliss is on the other side of suffering and sickness and death decides to enjoy the great process of human existence. Like a god who can't help loving being human while knowing he or she is still a god. It works pretty well with Christianity if we consider Christology in its most sophisticated sense. But, I digress.
Backing up a little, the film is called "monster," in Japanese is "kaibutsu" and written with kanji 怪物, which is less like something malevolent and more like the old way of saying "beast" in the mythological sense. Something formidable but very much terrestrial and creaturely. I'm going to get a little metaphysical. If Kore-eda calls the feeling to choose a sexuality the "monster" of the film we can interpret it as something that exists at the opposing pole of spirit. Spirit -- Beast. By that logic, identifying with a constant, with a universal, with a title, is beastly albeit powerful, while detaching from any constant, any universal, any titles, is spiritual. The film is rich with that kind of logic.
Two particular scenes stand out to me regarding this logic, beyond the magic realism ending. One is the scene in which Yori with great certainty and with childish exuberance, while playing on the stairs leading to torī gates and climbing a jungle gym that resembles a multicolored spiraling tower, assures Minato that the universe is expanding and will one day reach its limit, after which things will go back to the way they were (see apokatastasis and my post about Buñuel's film "Simon of the Desert"):
MINATO
"Will the universe break?"
YORI
"Yeah, time will go backwards. It will turn back so clocks, people, trains and cats will all move backwards. Beef on rice will turn back into cows and poop goes back into your butt. Humans will turn into monkeys, the dinosaurs will come back and we'll go back to before the universe was born."
MINATO
"So we'll be reborn?"
YORI
"That's right."
MINATO
"Shall we get ready?"
In other words, that which has manifested terrestrially, all the beasts up to the pinnacle of intelligent creatures which are humans, will unmanifest so that consciousness can begin anew. Minato doesn't question this theory, but, rather, seems taken by it and interprets it as rebirth. This scene comes after the boys have buried the corpse of a cat they'd found by their school so that it may be "reborn." Like the rising of the dead in Christianity, right?
Another scene is in which Mr. Hori, unjustly and out of the ignorance of those around him accused of abusing Minato, having lost his reputation, his job, his partner, in full breakdown mode walks onto the roof of the school to consider jumping to his death, when all of a sudden he hears the mysterious sound of horns. These horns sound like Tibetan horns used in ritual (remember the definition of nirvāṇa, "to blow out") in Tibetan Buddhism, an offshoot of Mahāyāna. Zen, the most common form of Buddhism in Japan apart from the naturalistic Shintō, is also a form of Mahāyāna. Anyway, we learn from the perspective of Minato that the horns are being played by himself and the school principal in the latter's office after discussing how horn-playing and general music may more accurately express truth that cannot be spoken with words, for certain truths are misunderstood by ordinary society and yet they must manifest. Mr. Hori is so taken by the haunting horns coming from a mysterious source that he's snapped out of his suicidal impulses. There's more to learn and experience in a human lifetime than losing face against society.
The end of this film revolves around the boys escaping ordinary existence as well as an actual typhoon by meeting in their abandoned train car that has become a kind of space-time-traveling chariot (Mahāyāna means "Great Vehicle"). Saori and Mr. Hori determine that Yori and Minato have gone there and brave the deadly storm to try and reach them in the car beneath a mudslide just to see that they've seemingly vanished leaving behind only a rain poncho. Whether "real" or not, the two boys have crawled out through an opening when and where there is no more storm, audibly marveling that they haven't been "reborn" as they're still "themselves" and running through the forest reaching railroad tracks that are no longer blocked off. As though they've passed through a torī gate. As though bodhisattvas don't need to be reborn because they have always lived in the eternal bliss of nirvāṇa, and never die.
I'm Going to Leave This Here So That You Can THINK
(Please Watch the Film For Yourself)
Backing up a lot, let's recall that in the film the character of Yori is still only a kid.
Controversial take: children, because they're not sexual and cannot be and therefore aren't burdened with the monstrosity of attaching themselves to sexual identity, are all closer to being bodhisattvas than adults for that very reason. Even more controversial take: why, then, in all that is holy, sexualize children by calling them out for having signs of a super-particular sexuality before they even have a chance at experiencing it for themselves?
However, in Buddhist fashion, part of humanity's charm is to want to categorize, and so the truly punk rock move is to accept the Queer Palm for a film that is precisely about doing away with Queer Palm awards, like the big contradicting joke that is human existence and equivocation.
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