09 June 2009
Faster, High School Kids, Kill! Kill!
Whether visceral trendy-thing or damning allegory, Battle Royale is a contentious but immensely satisfying Asian Extreme import that gels well with our class's recurring themes and motifs. Where Buffy took the usual conventions of teen dramas and subverted them for primarily comedic ends, juxtaposing trivial teenage concerns (popularity, fashion, socializing) with problems of absurd gravity (vampires, hell, the destruction of the entire human race), Battle Royale takes a similar approach with considerably different results: the Western teen's fixation on self-identity and social image are replaced by the Eastern teen's need to succeed—these kids care less about their relative "coolness" (evidenced, even superficially, by the school uniforms worn by all, preventing any conspicuous social hierarchy from being formed aesthetically) than about outperforming their peers in more concrete ways. Like Buffy, Battle Royale satirizes social pressures by supplanting them in a more ostensibly extreme context, actualizing the sense in which Japan's school system is "cutthroat" by forcing students to literally compete for their lives.
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I think the social hierarchy is a huge part of Battle Royale.
ReplyDeleteThe audience gets too see the characters out of school uniform during the basketball scenes, where they are made aware that the players Shuya, Hiroki, and Shinji are the popular boys in school, and that Mitsuko is an outcast.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from Shuya, Noriko is disliked and picked on. In a flashback, she is seen locked in a bathroom stall while girls tease her about being an ugly shrimp. She says this is the reason she will not trust anyone in the game.
My favorite dialogue of the film occurs between a dying Chigusa and her friend Hiroki.
Chigusa says 'You look really cool, Hiroki' and he replies 'you too, you're the coolest girl in the world' before she dies.
Even moments from death, coolness is paramount.
Hiroki actually ends up dying because he was so cool and popular. He tracks down his secret crush Kayoko, and she kills him out of fright, never guessing that he might have feelings for her as they are so distant on the social spectrum.
I think the cool thing about this film is that it does satirize social pressures, but doesn't neglect the characters in favor of a thesis. They all bring their pasts and social roles with them into the game,
no small triumph for a film with 42 kids to kill.
Aight, point conceded.
ReplyDeleteI think there's another interesting aspect to the coolness factor of the film in terms of the popularity and distinction amongst the students:
ReplyDeleteWhat about the two girls - Chigusa and Mitsuko, who deliberately alter their appearance so as to stand out from the other players?
The two "exchange" students, who immediately stand in distinction from the other players due to their lack of traditional school uniform?