Sion Sono and the Will to Nothingness: Experiments in Death
“When, in some dreadful and ghastly dream, we reach the moment of greatest horror, it awakes us; thereby banishing all the hideous shapes that were born of the night.
And life is a dream; when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off, the same thing happens.” […]
“Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to an answer.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Suicide”
Disconnect
Modernity has not solved all of the problems of the past—death, destruction, plagues and pestilence still exist underneath not only civilization, but our feigned sense of prosperity. It eventually becomes a desert in which all connection to our previous mode of being, that of pleasure and pain, life and death in which we were connected to the other parts of the world, utterly disappears.
Of course, it is still better to have a toothache in the modern and post-modern world than in the Middle Ages. But this is precisely the issue. Freedom from physical pain, or relative freedom from physical pain transforms the world in a way in which man is separate from— distant from— his previous attachment to nature.
In some ways, the only true freedom in a society where freedom is so supposedly readily available, is to end one's own life. This was championed by the 18th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer as a freedom from religious law and dictums which allowed for the seizure of the offending man's property. This is a dubious and suspicious celebration, obviously, but his characterization is an important one in the age of contemporary treatments for depression, and the urging to accept a false sort of happiness. Films, in a way, are dreams of life, and can confront this inner dream of torment by shaking us free of this delusions by laying it bare. The second portion of the quote, the experiment that man puts to nature, is typified by some of the films of Sion Sono, especially Suicide Circle— or Suicide Club— and its follow-up, Noriko's Dinner Table.
In these films, young women will their own deaths, seemingly out of allegiance to a shadowy cult, in a mass suicide by jumping in front of a subway train— Were it not horrific, the amount of blood spilled by such a group would be nearly hilarious— In the latter film, it is learned that the so called cult of suicide is merely one tiny part of a larger whole in which people attempt to act as different people, in different roles, acting as mothers wives, fathers, children, siblings of other people for a price in a sort of family prostitution, each person fulfilling a role based on their own characteristics, or— as revealed by one of the cult members— zebras to be eaten by lions. Some people are zebras, and some are lions. Some people's roles require suicide, some don't.
In this way, it seems that the girls and the leaders of the suicide cult attempt to force nature to answer by simulating nature, a return to something from which man has long been separated. This in a way is a re acclamation to nature, an acculturation. Roles become the way to simulate nature. Kumiko, the— apparent— originator of the Suicide Circle, who begins life as an abandoned infant born in a locker, is a fitting leader. She, having been alive for only three days, is encased in an artificial womb, born where stuffed animals and schools supplies are meant to be placed. She, in a way, is representative of the new breed of person. A return to nature by instigating an extreme rebellion is not far off.
Hyperreal Re-Connection
In a meeting, this “club” makes many statements about how to inflict their new system of nature onto the world. “We need rabbits, not just lions,” it is said. “Some will kill, some will be killed.” It becomes a circle of life, but as Kumiko later says, “There are no perfect circles in nature, only the appearance of them.” The roles creating that circle create the appearance of a perfect circle, a simulation of what does not exist at all—a hyperreality.
When Shakespeare wrote that all the world is a stage and all the people merely players, he could never have predicted the degree to which these roles would dominate the world and to such an extent that these roles dominate human communication— Of course, some of these things are now taken for granted, with the advent of the internet, such as Noriko taking on the name Mitsuko out of the want to simply exist as something else entirely— Sono's strength is that he makes such familiar content disturbing. There is another instance in which a girl named Tangerine names herself after a particular thing she most admired, in a state of silliness at a random point in her childhood. Her identity is made to be just that, an act of whim.
This real role-playing is all a part of a want to “connect,” as it is mentioned several times by several characters. The connection, however, is not simple. The connection inevitably involves the benefits of modernity, such as the connection through the internet (where the club first meets and how the suicides are monitored). “Are you connected to yourself?”—the question that is most asked in these films is a difficult one to answer for anyone, evidenced by the strange phenomenon of the impulse to connect back to nature through modernity.
A scene that demonstrates the way that the parents of such a generation come upon this phenomenon is also fascinating. In Noriko, the father of the family at the locus of the film, Tetsuzo, meets a man at a cafe and asks him where the cult comes from—in a manner characteristic of a rational modern sensibility. Once it is explained to him the purpose and meaning of the “suicide club,” everyone in the cafe applauds him, clapping at the knowledge and realization that he has come to—that people are merely players on the stage of life fulfilling their roles, and only some may sooner dissolve into nothingness by choice. There is something wistful about the scene, a knowledge that whoever is being applauded is coming to a realization that was obvious to many others beforehand, and one that was once obvious to humankind before the modern and postmodern worlds built their dissociating mechanisms around us. The father is strikingly out of touch, perhaps because he lives in the modern with its tenuous, though existent connection to the grounded realities of life and death. Everyone else in the cafe seems to understand the notion that roles are to be played in a simulacrum—the calling card of the postmodern world.
This has an obvious parallel to the need for people to be recognized in society, with scenes that parody the constant clamoring for attention that in contemporary society is so commonplace. The first of these scenes is the scene in the previous film, Suicide Circle, in which children—who may or may not be those behind the circle itself. The children applaud the girl Mitsuko's discovery that she is “connected to herself.” She stands on a stage, seemingly uneager for this validation of children, but accepts it willingly, and appears to—although this would imply that she has been indoctrinated into the suicide cult—decide not to kill herself when she approaches the train. Instead, she boards it and goes to the concert of the child pop group Dessert, whose hand gestures on a poster spell out SUICIDE. In this way, Sono shows how the movement influences youth through the most innocent of symbols, yet does not necessarily lead to an outpouring of violence. Instead, through Noriko's Dinner Table, he reveals that the club is instead something working in a manner more insidious, infiltrating life and re-asserting natural elements through modern means, and through the young.
As there is no complete explanation for why this child pop group may be convincing people to commit suicide, it instead falls on the symbol of the children instigating a possible movement through some sort of subliminal messaging. The youth enact a dance, through the celebration of idols that they never really see, but imitate, and it is not as though the group is necessarily convincing anyone to kill themselves, but rather are simply spelling out something they don't understand, the letters making a word that no longer means anything, but still carry an effect.
But the seminal scene in Noriko's Dinner Table is the one in which two daughters who have left their family for the cult return unwittingly to their father. He has re-arranged the house systematically to resemble their original home so as to offset their reality, so when they perform in their service, His friend is acting as the father—and it becomes nearly impossible for the daughters to tell how to act within their own constructed narrative. The siblings are acting as themselves acting as though they are only portraying themselves. Art imitates life imitating art imitating life. The confusion that results somehow allows the family to be shocked back into reality, the reality of modernity in which nature cannot enter in again.
Mechanical Circles
This simulation of nature expresses itself by means of technology in a grandiose sense as well. The final step in the simulation of nature takes place visually. In some ways, this is the key to the films' motif of circular symbols, unifying technology and religion, spirituality and materialism. The Macintosh reboot screen comes to mind when the viewer sees a similar circular loading screen. It rotates around and around the exterior of an illimitable void. The connection to technology and concepts of life and death is rampant throughout these films, and we see it unfold through the association between the death cult and how the internet allows it to spread, computers monitoring the death count through a bizarre code, but simple enough that it resembles a facebook newsfeed that tracks every real event and keeps it in a log to be forever digitized. The will to nothingness is realized in the real world through a will into a void which is a simulacrum of information.
In Suicide Circle, a flesh ribbon stands in opposition to the mechanical circles seen in the film and in Noriko. The ribbon is supposedly made of the flesh of suicide victims, but it has an apparent explanation in a cult of small children that has really begun to orchestrate the rash of suicides, and they take flesh from each person indoctrinated into their cult to make the ribbon, which creates a circle. some sort of piece of each person's identity as exemplified by inexplicable tattoos— forever united in a spiral— like that which returns in Noriko's Dinner Table, but is shown in that film as technology's doing. The flesh ribbon is a last rending of flesh in an experiment by nature, but since Noriko's events seem to exist before the events of Suicide Circle, it is evident that technology's influence has put the orchestration of simulating nature into place, and been a part of excising the flesh.
This seems to indicate that a clambering for a reality apart from the technological wasteland of postmodernity is not possible.
Throughout Suicide Club and Noriko's Dinner Table, there is at least some sort of clambering for a reality, albeit one that is evasive. There is a constant insistence that “you'll finally become the real you,” as told from one character to another. In the postmodern world, there is obviously no “real you,” no way to differentiate between the hyperreal of Jean Baudrillard and the actual experience on which it is based. Becoming the real you takes a step beyond the world itself in Sono's view, and it takes a step by step basis by engaging in multiple simulacra to reach that goal.
The girls who kill themselves appear to be but a part of one small subset of the problems of modernity, the immediate and sudden death imagery in Suicide Circle is replaced in Noriko's Dinner Party with a slow, painful death—but it ends with the same general mood, that suicide is the only real freedom, the only way to reconnect oneself with actual experience. The only way to live, therefore, is to die.
Commodification
The most disturbing aspect of this newfound reality is the way it becomes a source of gaining capital, the way that though it is an imitation of nature, it is also prone to be sublimated into the grist of modernity.
In a telling scene in Noriko's Dinner Table, Kumiko has begun to introduce Noriko to her family. The interactions seem legitimate. Everyone seems happy. As Noriko says, they all seem “connected to themselves,” connected by “fat pipes” as opposed to the thin strings that most families seem to be connected by. Kumiko then tells Noriko to wait five minutes before coming inside to visit the other side of the family. She does, impatiently, and comes in, chided for being late, to witness the death of the family's grandfather. He family seems to experience genuine pathos. But this is in itself an act as well. The grandfather is not really dead, and everyone has a laugh, as though the entire scene were an audition. The scene is intercut with images of Noriko and Mitsuko examining multicolored toothbrushes for each client, cinematically foreshadowing the fact that every single familial interaction within Sono's world is commodified, but somehow feels genuine to its clients.
In perhaps the most shocking scene in the film, Noriko details where this sense of commodification bleeds into the will to nothingness. This scene is where the reality of personal relationships intermingles with the fantasy role play of Kumiko's service, in which a fellow member—Broken Dam—is stabbed to death by a client who hates his wife. He enacts the “fantasy” of killing her by actually plunging the knife into her heart many times while Kumiko looks on casually, smoking a cigarette. Afterward, the man with bloodied hands gives Kumiko his money, smiling, as though he has simply been given a service for his money. The next day, Kumiko tells an enthralled member that Broken Dam has actually died, and that she is next. She smiles and nods. Shortly afterward, the events of Suicide Circle commence. Broken Dam's goal was to become the rabbit for the lion, so to speak.
It is therefore a symbolic gesture when Broken Dam reverses her role, indicating that the mass suicide is merely the act of youth reneging on their potential—to choose death instead of life—rather than a simple goal of vengeance or of despair. In fact, the most disturbing aspect of Sono's films is that when there is hesitation, despair, or sadness, it rarely emanates from the suicidal characters. Usually, they are happy to die, or nonchalant. In death, Broken Dam lives anew among the supposed “circle of life.”
Being Towards Death
Martin Heidegger warned of the “being towards death” as an inevitable problem for a living being. Some have interpreted his words in the context of modernity, where all of its constraints would hasten death, in which the true self, the life force would be abandoned to the “idle talk” of the “they,” or— in layman's terms— society at large. This however, could be remedied by accepting an authentic project. In Sono's Suicide Circle, the trouble is— as was the case with Heidegger’s repellent, ultimately inexcusable political allegiance— that the youth have accepted an authentic project, just one that is authentically horrifying. That project is to die, and to die in such a spectacular fashion that it renders the living spellbound. In some ways, it is the inversion of the Nietzschean will to power, corresponding to the fear of the will to nothingness, but exemplifying it simultaneously. By accepting this authentic project, they cast themselves into nothingness. It is hard to say whether Sono by this measure refutes these philosophical principles or is re-asserting them in his own eccentric fashion.
In Sono's Strange Circus, there is a more explicit reference to “the being towards death.” The narrator mentions her “steps toward execution,” a phrase used to describe the steps of her life or in fact the narrative she may be constructing. This is almost a paraphrase of Heidegger's notion of the inevitable waxing toward the waning of life. Like Suicide Circle and Noriko's Dinner Table, it too contains notions of the will to death and the will to nothingness, formed in a way that make it seem like the march of life is merely a march toward death, the inevitable execution before others is the way that they are presented before others. One's execution begins when one steps in the public light, which is in itself a circus. Strange Circus is also a film that makes mincemeat out of the notion of the family through incest and shifting gender roles, in which a mode of being towards death is the goal, to escape the perversity brought upon by relationships. Nothingness is willed through the steps of life itself.
Literary and Philosophical Allusions
It may seem strange to apply German philosophy to a Japanese filmmaker, but much as Sono's films seem to reflect Westernized Japanese society through a cultural lens that is not necessarily Japanese, Schopenhauer's philosophy reveals truths about Eastern philosophy like Buddhism. Concurrently, Sion Sono's influences are primarily Western in origin. For Noriko's Dinner Table he stated that his influences range from John Cassavetes to Rainer Werner Fassbinder to—broadly speaking— splatter films from the 80s. Bergman is also an unacknowledged influence, his ideas applied to the post-modern era, in the perceived technocratic social wasteland of contemporary Japan. As a result, we have the post-modern evolution from the darker corners of Bergman's modernism— as though the spiritual component of Bergman's angst has not only been eviscerated— but is also inaccessible even in thought.
In examining Sono's connection to Western conceptions, one single image seems to stand out with regard to the phenomenon of pervasive materialism and the death of spirituality.
The handbag which appears in a train station when the 54 girls commit suicide is a strange motif, but it recalls an image that is associated—— ironically and for rhetorical effect— with the excesses of the French Revolution in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest by Lady Bracknell, herself a stand-in for Victorian England’s passively asserted maintenance of class hierarchy. In Wilde's play, this is an image that is merely used to show Bracknell’s superficiality and seemingly eternal preoccupation with any semblance of deviation from order, Bracknell criticizes protagonist Jack Worthing’s humble, underclass origins by making a broad sweeping comparison with what she considers to be the worst subversion of hierarchy— as she is clearly a devotee of Edmund Burke and other anti-Revolutionaries— simply because he was found as an infant in a handbag in a train station, not having been born into her class’ blessed aesthetic distinction. As with any member of the ruling class throughout history, the mere mention of proletarian poverty is enough for her to imagine a cascading series of events that will lead to extreme violence, and — Providence forbid! — overturn her own class position by removing her head.
The “handbag in a train station” is the fixture for many scenes of violence in Suicide Circle, and this may be an intentional quotation by Sono, a former poet undoubtedly familiar with English literature. Perhaps, as it figures in the initial suicide sequence, it is overrun with an ocean of blood from 54 girls, that is the representation of the triumph of petty materials in the face of the death of transient life.
In opposition to Wilde's play, the handbag is accompanied by violence, not just in the train station, but appears during a mysterious suicide in an office building. It also supposedly also contains the skins of people involved in the suicide club, made up of a ribbon. In this case, the excesses of a revolution— the youth deciding to take their own lives— are inextricably connected with material objects. This is not only because the youth are so conditioned to live in Western society which values the accumulation of goods as an identity, but because the materials are present in these scenes of violence. In some ways, Wilde's target of satire is vindicated, and though she is championing a superficial sense of decorum— there is an unforgiving link between violent excess and a shoddy, leather bag.
Of course, this is a strange comparison to make, but it takes into account the strange inclinations toward reactionary thought by filmmakers like Sono and others who showcase the decay of family life and the destruction of man's supposed soul in the face of democratization, technological progress, social media, and post-modernity.
In this sense, the experiment of suicide and the breakdowns of structured existence in Sono's Japan illustrate the eventual want to rend modernity apart, or at least lay bare its emptiness, approaching it honestly, beyond the frivolous bells and whistles of its superstructure that at once keeps technology afloat and sinks humanity downward. This is why the eventual result is a retreat into nothingness, an authentic project that is itself a being towards death, that takes the form of a load screen— which is itself a simulacrum of the swastika, the sun wheel, the yin yang— spinning rapidly until it becomes a red blur, like a drop of blood transforming slowly into the crimson sun.
The will to nothingness has in effect become the project of youth because in a free society so connected with other societies in an infinitely expanding web of information, where shades of meaning can exist where there may be no man to support the shade, freedom is only defined by the will to divorce oneself from that web of information. In some ways, Sono's films appear to be not only about the death of the family life, the death of societal structure, but the death of the philosophical remedy. Hence, it appears as though films like Suicide Club return to two basic principle of Schopenhauer's, that suicide is an unassailable right— and that it is a clumsy experiment— but one that man eventually may put to Nature.
It seems in Sono's universe, nature doesn't answer, and returns only a steely, glaring gaze.
