Kaze to Ki no Uta (2 out of 4)
Simply Put: An unfinished movie that toes the line about its intentions.
The blasting popularity of the Twilight books and movies have driven the literary world into an academic (or jealous, perhaps) frenzy over trying to figure out just what it is that makes vampires an evergreen subject matter. Is it the nature of the vampires themselves? Is it that they are often tossed into complicated love affairs with no hope of untangling? Both of these things would fall under the banner of “escapism,” but its not quite that simple. The relationships are a big part of it, but I think its the fundamental nature of the book’s relationships that the fans (many of whom are young, inexperienced readers) have found so enthralling.
For example, what if the main vampire (and any teenage girl will tell you right off who the main vampire in the story is) was a girl, and the human love interest a boy? Would the book be nearly as popular? I’m not one to make wild speculations but I think it’s safe to venture an answer in the neighborhood of “no.” It is vital to the books world wide success that the powerful creature, the seducer, the one who has to hold back, be male, and the receiving creature, weaker by nature, be female. Feminist analysts and critics can try to spin it if they like, but I don’t think many teenage girls would ever listen to them. Thing is, young women are not-so-subtly encouraged to believe that they should want a man to take control of responsibility in their lives, and sadly, many end up living the fallacy, if not outright believing in it. How many young women are hooked by this idea, and when, I wonder? When young girls are shown by traditional media that hooking a good looking, rich man is rarely ever a regrettable, unhappy situation, that being in this situation makes them better off, well, how many young girls, even those born with privileged access to college educations, have the individuality and sense of self-worth to see that sham for what it is?
The good thing is that most girls seem to grow out of it by the time they leave college, at the latest. A few failed and dramatic relationships with immature high school boys, and maybe a less-than-stellar first sexual experience seem to be decent enough medicine for killing off most fantasies about the purported inherent worthiness of men (Possibly even causing resentment and bitterness in some). However, I would say that the damage may not be fully healed. Rather than be encouraged as women to let go of these fantasy desires and just live life as they want, an entire industry is built around women’s manufactured unfulfillment.
I knew a woman once who, though married, made a running gag of having an unhealthy crush on Derek Jeter (Big Yankees fan. Hated A-rod, though, but that’s not so strange). This was obviously harmless, and we would joke about it, but think about what it signifies. It’s basically a confession to this very real state of unfullfillment that affects hundreds of women everyday. The woman had been happily married for years, so these emotions didn’t manifest themselves in her, per se, but she knew about them, knew they were true, and invoked them by making a joke (she was the joking type). All the other women (guys too) at the job would laugh along with her, probably because they knew all too well of what she spoke, and therefore found the humor in it. It was a parody for them, basically, of every unfulfilled fantasy they’d ever had.
Another young woman I worked with was telling me about the film “The Ugly Truth,” with Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. It’s a rom-com about a chauvinistic radio personality and an uptight morning show producer who butt heads and completely fall for eachother. My coworker, in explaining the setup, mentioned of Butler’s character’s radio show that it’s about how men really think of women, hence the name of both the radio show and the film that contains it, “The Ugly Truth.” She said this to me earnestly, as if I was supposed to agree, by virtue of being male myself, that I was complicit in this revelation she had unearthed in the film. I later looked at some of the dialogue quotes on IMDB.
“My cat stepped on the remote,” says Hiegl, followed by Butler’s, “Be sure to thank your pussy for me.” It’s great to see that Hollywood has my back as a man. Nice of them, really.
I have a younger sister who reads the Twilight books and, being in an investigative mood, I once asked her what she liked so much about them. Part of what I could glean from her answer is that its as much social as anything. Girls make friends and talk with eachother over these books. They bond over it. The primary answer she gave me, though, had to do with Edward Cullen. “He’s perfect, basically,” I was told.
In summary, the point of all this is that alot of young women don’t know much about men, and when they do find out, it tends to manifest itself as disappointment. This is mostly due to inexperience and the fact that young men in general tend to kind of suck more often then not. It is also due to misinformation. Sometimes this lack of knowledge persists late into life. Sometimes it gets forgotten as just one part of our perennially embarrassing teenage years. And sometimes it leads to the creation of things like Kaze to Ki no Uta.
The title (translated into english as The Poem of Wind and Trees) has very little to do with the actual content. It’s a flamboyant title, meant to sound lofty and artistic, but it’s completely forgetable. The actual content is far more interesting. Were there really young men in all male boarding schools who sold their bodies for papers in secret? Perhaps. The important question here is whether or not the movie gives this rather grim subject matter a serious treatment. After watching it, I can provide a definitive “sort of, not really.”
There are two main characters, evidenced by the fact that they are drawn with better artwork than anyone else. More screentime, too. The first of these is Serge, a kid born from a noble family who gets sent to a French, all-male boarding school so he can learn how to be rich. There he meets the other main character, his roommate Gilbert, who is quite possibly the most androgynous thing ever produced by human thought. Gilbert is a tramp, and sort of a douchebag. He cuts class, and doesn’t mind being an asshole to his roommate and everyone else, who respond in kind. I guess he’s supposed to be damaged? But pretty at the same time?
Ahh, damaged and pretty at the same time. Now I see where this is going. This is about manipulating appeal again. A little bit of data, now. Remember that industry for women’s manufactured unfulfillment I was telling you about before? Well apparently it’s so bad in Japan that that particular industry has the misfortune of including comics about under age boys finding terrifically contrived excuses to have sex with another. I’m not even talking about a queer reading of history here. Nothing so nuanced. It’s like, the men in Japan have to have severe sexual hangups, and heavens be damned if the women are going to get left behind. A while ago I would laugh at what I thought was jingoistic sniping at the country for being overly formal about sexual relations, but I’ve now seen the writing on the wall. I’ve heard about the declining birth rate. I’ve seen the newspaper stories about the increasing number of young shut-ins. This is serious now. Young Japanese adults of both genders are porn addicts, and they’re not having kids because of it. Naomi Wolfe was right all along.
The story and presentation of Kaze to Ki no Uta makes a ton more sense when viewed in this light. It’s escapist fantasy for disappointed women, the goal of which is not neccessarily to tell a coherent or meaningful story, but to give them their jollies at the sight of young boys violating each other, regardless of context. It’s like that barely-legal fetish in pornography. I’m not here to judge taste, though. The story is all that matters in the end, and the story of Kaze to Ki no Uta, while quite good in places, is marred by how it deals with its sexual content.
The problem is that they’re trying to use the fact that it’s two boys who are having sex as a source of terror. Given that this story was written in 1976 for women who probably knew little to nothing about being male, I suppose it’s an understandable result. This movie’s atmosphere hinges on its audience being terrified by the idea that every sophisticated European boy who ever went to an all-male boarding school was secretly gay inside. This terror may have been possible in 1976, but here in the twenty first century, the movie just feels extremely outdated. The modern viewer would only be able derive amusement from what it thinks we’ll be afraid of.
So let’s think about it in an outdated sense. Let’s pretend this stuff actually scares us, or that we might get AIDs from watching it, or something. The gothic presentation is excellent. Hallways are dark and silent, with dozens of damning eyes lurking behind the doors. During the day, Serge and the boys go to class, pretend to act tough, get whipped for disobedience in class, and tease eachother for the dumb shit that kids do. No women are to be found here. It’s like a deserted island. Or a gulag. At night the school becomes a hellish world, every sleeping inhabitant a potential source of danger. Gilbert walks the night like he owns it. He slums around, returning to his room only when he doesn’t want to be with any of his numerous lovers. He scares the living shit out of Serge, but he also fascinates him. He becomes obsessed with Gilbert, and eventually falls head over heels for him.
What’s strange is that his schoolmates don’t seem surprised by this. In fact, many of them seem expect it. The only one with any sense of heteronormativity in him around the place is Serge, who continually denies his homosexual urges. This is supposed to be a substantial portion of the escalating drama. The movie tries to tell us that Serge is merely lying to himself and the world by denying it, but this sort of world just isn’t realistic to begin with for this to have any impact. In reality, Serge would have been the normal one for clinging as strongly as he does to straightness, but here he’s cast as the odd man out. It could be viewed as a subversion of sexual politics, but to what end? This is an example of the movie trying to manipulate its world for the sake of being appealing, ergo, justifying Gilbert and Serge hooking up at all costs. I’ve seen some anti-gay marriage protests, and I can confidently say that the heteronormativity in the movie just isn’t hostile or overt enough to be realistic.
Heteronormativity does rear up as an enemy later on, but it feels like a hypocritical about-face on the part of the students who ostracise the two protagonists. Some of them joke about being seduced by Gilbert themselves, but then they call Gilbert a fag? Really? It just isn’t consistent or logical. Most heterosexual people are very, very in tune with their own versions of gay, and they walk on eggshells to avoid it. It’s the whole, ‘I got nothing against gay people, but I’ll die before I ever talk to one or be friends with one’ school of hypocrisy. That’s one notch above Tim Hardaway, by the way. There is anger against gay people, and even merely questionably gay people, but is it jealousy, maybe? The film would have us believe so.
The film knows what it’s doing from a horror angle, however. Dark shadows obscure lying figures on the bed across from your own, a cold clammy hand grabs onto your ankle in the dark, you realize you’ve been doped, and you find yourself fighting against a person with whom you have no quarrel, although the same does not go for them. And there’s always the fear of being discovered. Serge is the victim of most of these things, and the movie accurately guages and follows his reactions to each of these traumatic experiences. You really want to feel sorry for the kid for going through so much crap, but even that isn’t consistent. It’s like, if Gilbert was such a dick to you in school, why are you still in love with him years later? Was a one night stand really that affecting? Is Serge just one of those ’I could have fixed him’ battered wife types? Are women supposed to sympathize with him or something?
Call it what you want, but I’m calling a spade a spade here. This movie is trying to make an abusive and unhealthy relationship seem tittilating. It glorifies the bodies with closeups that would probably make any real homosexual person I know uncomfortable as hell. When Gilbert is shown having sex with a boy in the woods near the school, there is a closeup of his shirt magically slicing in half, seemingly under its own power. Later on, after Serge has just fought away one of Gilbert’s jealous lovers, Serge angrily rips Gilbert’s borrowed shirt off, forces new pajamas on him, and then makes him drink his medicine down with a glass of water. Some of it spills off to the side, and the camera closes in on it trailing down Gilbert’s bare chest. This is all superfluous to the story, and it’s only there for the audience of unsatisfied women. It’s these sort of escapist touches that detract from the dramatic credibility the story was going for.
The scene where Gilbert is forced to pick up chestnuts out of the fire, though? That’s some Lord of the Flies shit right there. More of that please. That is how you stage a dramatic scene. There’s much more at stake in that scene than what is readily apparent, and it’s the dramatic high point of the whole movie. I could sure as hell get used to more scene direction like that.
So is Kaze to Ki no Uta ultimately trying to tell its audience something important? Or is it just trying to tittilate the damaged sexual interests of an adult audience in unhealthy ways? Unfortunately, the film ends with many loose ends unaddressed, so we never really get a chance to find out. It’s got other things to offer though. It has an expert gothic presentation, both aurally and visually, and a great sense of dramatic timing. If only it had taken itself a little more seriously. It could have really been something else.
-Fiero
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