Ookiku Furikabutte (2 out of 4)
Simply Put: Has the emotional understanding of a peepshow.
I have to scratch my head at how gay men are regarded by straight folks, sometimes. If it isn’t men doing the whole shunning and ostracizing thing, then it’s women treating them like accessories. I suppose it’s inevitable that this sort of treatment would happen when names and labels are given the ability to reach out from their ether and affect the tangible relationships of our world (in conservative America, remember, you’re deviant because you’re gay, and you’re gay because you’re deviant). To me it just looks emotionally extremist, and that was largely my perception of Ookiku Furikabutte (Big Windup! in the English release). The show is, in large part, trying to appeal to a certain type of fascination with gay people that I have witnessed but cannot claim to understand.
I believe it’s something that can be boiled down to a phrase so pithy you could use it to pitch a movie in Hollywood. That phrase is “Are they or aren’t they?”
“Are they or aren’t they?”
“Are they or aren’t they?”
That last one is how I hear it in my head every time Mihashi and Abe, the two main characters, have a scene together where they become emotionally closer. Over the course of these thirty-nine episodes, whenever Mihashi has one of his many drops in confidence (and after a certain point you’ll hope the boy will see a therapist of some sort, sports or otherwise) the show will immediately stop everything else it’s doing to zero in on the homo-erotic moment, like a nature photographer that’s spotted a rare animal in the savanna. The problem is that each one of these scenes is precisely identical in form and content to all the rest like it in the show. There is no variation, no sustained development of character, just a repeated level of frustrated expression and misunderstood emotions in each encounter. There are no risks taken. The escapes are too clean. The boys don’t even wonder about or directly question their sexualities after they have their little moments. Does this get boring after a while? You bet!
Basically it goes like this. The boys are about to play a baseball game. Mihashi frets about some baseball related confidence issue. Abe goes over to try and talk some sense into him. Abe quickly loses his temper. Mihashi clams up and starts shaking. Abe dials it back and tries to talk nicely to him, and this effort is played up for laughs at the expense of Abe’s tough personality. Mihashi then starts blushing and sputtering like a German schoolgirl, and while the context would have us think that this is just how he looks when he is trying his best to communicate, what the show actually wants us to feel, as evident in the bubbly, blushing presentation, is that the two are falling in love. Just…you know…without ever actually coming out and saying that they’re falling in love.
Because that would be weird? Because it would make things uncomfortable for the viewer?
It’s an odd, stunted thing to watch, especially since it happens over and over, like the administering of some addictive drug. It leads me to suspect that the people who watch the show for these scenes in particular are getting pleasure out of the possibility of homosexual love, the mere hint of it, and not a developed expression of it. It’s treated as an emotional novelty here, not worthy of legitimate exploration, because that would entail looking at actual pain and suffering, which doesn’t seem to be on the agenda. At least Kaze to Ki no Uta sought to explore the desires of its characters with some degree of respect for the terror forced upon them by their peers and the world, even if it did sort of ultimately fail as a movie in the end. In Ookiku Furikabutte, however, the character’s emotions are treated by the direction as the viewer’s personal freak show to be ogled and pointed at, closed off from exploration, shoved off into a corner and forgotten until the next addicting shot. It’s a fetishistic, exploitative display.
Part of the problem is that all of the people in this show, the parents, the coaches, the girls at school, are supremely boring individuals. They’re sickeningly nice, neutered of any potentially threatening or passionate qualities. They harbor no interesting secrets, no heavy desires, no fears or regrets. They’re too happy and dumb to notice, well, anything really, much less a homosexual connection in their midst. This blinkered existence appears intentional. It’s all good cheer here, all deferred compliments and upward potential. There’s no attempt to intrude upon the freak show, no sense of suspense, because tearing down the curtains from around the cage the main characters occupy would expose the type of emotional imprisonment this kind of fetishistic presentation depends on.
Nobody says anything bad about anyone else. Everyone apologizes for everything. People are charitable and they smile these weird, pursed smiles with wide, innocent eyes that seem to expect reproach without any provocation. The world of these boys, Mihashi and Abe, is an emotional safety bubble that frees the viewer of judgment and allows to be gotten whatever perverse, third-person pleasure can be got from such a space. Elements that might have disturbed or upset the established formula of Abe harmlessly yelling and Mihashi blushing never showed up in any of the thirty nine episodes I watched, so I can’t imagine that the show plans to do so in any future iterations either.
The baseball was pretty fun to watch though.
That’s what kept me watching for as long as I did. I don’t know if it has anything to do with my finding real baseball games to be overlong and boring, but the swift, action-oriented editing of the baseball here was exciting. Each stage of the game, each inning, is like watching a series of individual duels, and the strategies and second guessing make for some genuinely exciting moments. Even when one game lasts for six or seven episodes, the individual moments of strategic success and failure carry us through to the end. I found myself watching episode after episode in succession so I could find out how the baseball games ended.
It’s almost enough to make me want to try watching real baseball. (Almost, but not quite). I’d say that’s a pretty good reaction.
The best parts of the games are the duels between Mihashi, who is the teams pitcher, and whoever is batting for the other team. Mihashi is guided by Abe, the catcher, who possesses a remarkable acumen for reading the habits and body language of batters (which is interesting in light of his hardheadedness when it comes to Mihashi. They don’t explore this contradiction enough though). As someone who never watched much baseball, listening to Abe’s strategies on how to deal with each batter was a treat. It gave me a newfound understanding of how winning a baseball game is really less about individual talents and more about sharp research, thinking ahead and execution. Not that the individual efforts go unnoticed here. The moments where Mihashi lets the ball fly out of his hand, and the batter thinks he’s got it this time, only for us to hear the hard slap of the ball hitting Abe’s glove, is edited down to a single pop of triumph. The pitch, from release to contact, is faster than watching the real thing, and whether it’s a hit or a strike, we find ourselves anticipating each one in succession. It doesn’t look quite like a real baseball game, but it feels exciting like one would for a fan, and that is something to be applauded, I think.
When the baseball ends and the show jumps back to its stunted homo-eroticism, you find yourself wishing it would just hurry up and get back to the games. I found myself often tempted to just fast forward until I caught sight of a baseball diamond, and had I done so throughout I don’t think I would have minded much. As is, the emotional sections are too cut off from the baseball sections, too undercooked, to make me feel that one needs the other, and in that sense, the show fails as a coherent piece of entertainment for me. It’s too bad because there’s real potential in the setup. A talented young baseball star’s rise into one of the most traditionally manly roles on the planet, contrasted with his realizing he’s gay? And for another player? Hell, that right there sounds like it would make for a really excellent, if not important, piece of entertainment. This is the sort of territory Hollywood won’t touch (although, there was that one time), but if an anime wants to take up the reigns where that movie left off, then I certainly wouldn’t complain. Hopefully, the next anime that looks for homosexuality’s place in what are still considered to be heterosexual arenas will put more thought into seeing how the two worlds relate to each other, instead of ghettoizing them the way this show does. There are real powerful things to be found there, if they look.
-Fiero
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