I’ve had perhaps just a little too much fun this weekend.  Out and about at the Esquire Friday night, and then spent yesterday grading with sarah in the afternoon, then viewing _The Grudge_ with Dana and Christina, finally kicking back at Sanjay’s birthday/Diwali party, before being carted home once again by the kindly rachel s.  But ok, about the movie…

The Grudge, I’ve decided is recommendable.  Takishi Shimizu directs this Americanized remake of his own Ju-On (which I missed when it was briefly at the New Art a few weeks ago).
Critical opinion on the film  is interestingly divided, and if you decide to see it, you might well decide that there’s not much there but a lot of Boo!-saying.  But I think I’d disagree.

As we left the film Dana asked why it was set in Japan, to which I lamely asked: “Well, why it shouldn’t it have been?”  And as we drove home, we mostly discussed various plot issues, and I found myself sort of defending the film from Christina’s questions about its plot.  My line was that the nature and capabilities of the Grudge couldn’t/shouldn’t have been spelled-out too specifically.

The film thematizes unintelligibility, which is one reason it’s interesting that this remake focuses on Americans in Japan.  As I watched the film, I kept being remained of the excellent _Lost in Translation_, where a kind of pleasure in keeping a kind of loose grasp on things and ideas and people is described.  But _The Grudge_ find  in such looseness a kind of helplessness in the face of people and realities that threaten to grasp one with a kind of deadly fixity.  Sexual obsession, childlike neediness, obsessional rage, and finally death here countervail the pleasurable dream-state of LIT.  (jeeze does Ebert miss the point on this one).

The film plays with this, as the Americans repeatedly struggle to communicate with people around them, or simply to obtain food or move about the city.  This gets racialized when a hapless white American professor doesn’t notice he’s being stalked by a person whom he fails to recognize among in sea of Asians who to him are apparently as indistinguishable as they are “inscrutable.”

Like LIT then, The Grudge is always in danger of slipping into essentialized or even racist descriptions.  When Detective Nakagawa tells S. Michelle Gellar about Japanese beliefs about the dead, the film veers close to an easy kind of exoticism, which also appears early in the film when Gellar’s character peers over a wall into a Shinto cemetery to watch the natives burn incense to help keep in touch w/their ancestors.

The Grudge seemed a little flat to me at first, but is better on reflection.  I like how cramped and compact the evil house is — how you can never even see the house a whole.  And how the wide modern spaces of the City contrast with the convoluted neighborhood.  How the evil ghosts are so pointedly figures of the bitterly powerless.  The surly child or sullen girl, who’s look expresses a desire to devour and destroy that can be ignored only on  the assumption of this person’s powerlessness.  Of the wife, son, and dad who die in the house to inaugurate its evil ways, only the wife and son come back as grudgers.  Their scariness depends on their hostile helplessness.  The dynamic is familiar. 

Which brings us back maybe to the question of racial and cultural suspicion, which always lingers in this film (when first trying to find the evil house, Gellar approaches a Japanese mother and her child.  The mother politely answer’s G.’s question, but gently pulls her kid away from Gellar when G tries to be friendly).  In this context of hostility and and incomensurability, it’s hard not to read the film’s abiding preoccupation with eye-shape in terms that are at least partly racial. 

At the moment before the Grudge ghosts kill, and at other more random intervals, the eyes of the ghost become suddenly preternaturally wide.  This is automatically scary.  Normally one’s eyes narrow before attacking someone, and the reverse is horrifying in a Bataille kind of obscene way, race or no race.  But here eye shape is racialized, too.  Like anime-style animation, that draws figures in a way influenced by American post WWII cartoons, and that produces characters with weird more Caucasian-than-Caucasian eye-shapes, the Grudge presents its white victims with a last vision of a face that like Anime after WWII, offers back a spectacle of weird reflected whiteness to those it’s about to consume. 

So this then, is my answer to Dana about _The Grudge_ being set in Japan.

[p.s. reminds me of the BBC news report I heard a few days ago about Japanese nationalism.  The BBC announcer actually referred to the post-WWII provision in the Japanese constitution prohibiting a standing army as an act of “castration.”]

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 14th, 2004 at 10:43 pm and is filed under general, lived experience, meta-artsy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.