Excessive Cuts

In the complicated splatter pattern of gangster delusion, lust, and greed, a strange picture emerges in 2001's Ichi the Killer (殺し屋１). Some might take this as a parody of gangster and action films in general but I think director Takashi Miike is making a more fundamental argument about the human compulsion for violence. It's also a pretty entertaining bloodbath.

You could almost take it as a parody of The Dark Knight, seven years early. A hero in a black body armour costume vows vengeance against criminals after witnessing an assault of a loved one in his youth. His adversary is a fearless killer with a Glasgow smile.

But it's not that simple. The "hero", Ichi (Nao Omori) is sexually aroused by the victims of the criminals he kills. The inciting incident of his career, witnessing the gang rape of a high school girl, was possibly implanted by hypnosis and, as years passed, he's realised he wanted to rape the girl, too. This could be a commentary on how rape is typically fetishised in films though the nature of attraction itself implies a relationship between predatory and protective behaviour. Men and women are attracted to vulnerability. For some people, it's a small leap from being attracted to an existing vulnerability to actually wanting to cause pain, creating vulnerability where it didn't exist before.

Meanwhile, the villain, Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano), is a sadomasochist. More of a masochist, really. He wears it on his face, not just with the Glasgow smile but with a criss-cross of scars. One of the more interesting images in the film is when he blows cigarette smoke through his unnaturally elongated mouth.

As the film gets bloodier and bloodier and both characters seem driven more by their strange, private fetishes, the story loses a lot of tension. It leans much more in the direction of slapstick, at times reminding me of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. But I was much more reminded of Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill and I think it likely Miike was, like Suzuki, driven a little artistically crazy by the repetitive conventions of the genre. He made quite a piece of work out of it, though.

Ichi the Killer is available on Shudder.