by Steven Boone

DEMONLOVER would appear to be a perfect film to post on a page called HENTAI LAB, since it involves corporate espionage at a Japanese company that produces hentai (really silly adult animation).

But, as I mentioned in our first post, we’re not here for that. We mean “hentai” in the Japanese slang sense: weirdo. Strange, sensual and visually stunning movies go here.

Though this 2002 flick about corporate espionage and web 1.0 at its delirious tipping point now seems more dated than a Roger Corman biker flick (with the simulated Internet and New Media visuals pushing for sensory overload, little suspecting how much exponentially crazier such technology would get in the near-decade since this film’s release)…

… whenever Assayas uses the real world and not computer screens to create excitement, DEMONLOVER is as inspired and exhilarating as anything in his masterpiece, IRMA VEP.

Rain drops on windows, second-skin catsuits, tipsy handheld cameras following women up to no good down dark passageways…

Ambient noise music by Sonic Youth deepens the sense of atmosphere—in this case, one area where Assayas was years ahead of the aughts arthouse trend indulged by director-composer teams like John Hillcoat/Nick Cave (THE PROPOSITION), Jim Jarmusch/various (THE LIMITS OF CONTROL), Nicholas Winding Refn/Sunn O))) (VALHALLA RISING) and David Fincher/Trent Reznor (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO).

His slinky, cat-burglar-of-the-future visual style could have benefited such needlessly top-heavy films as AEON FLUX and INCEPTION.

Speaking of top-heavy, Assayas seems the kind of guy who could keep his eyes fixed on a woman’s cleavage without missing a word of what she’s saying. Dialogue and sound design handle expository duties while the camera ogles like a construction worker.

Despite a boring fetish for bondage scenarios and indoor smoking (this might be the smokin’-est flick since the heyday of film noir), DEMONLOVER’s imagination soars when capturing ordinarily mundane gestures and interactions. Its mysteries don’t add up to much, but its transitional images are an ode to bob-cuts, dark rooms and devious women on the prowl.

by Steven Boone (images by Conrad Hall, A.S.C.)

The second most costly hostage held by the powerful in order to guarantee your full compliance with destructive policies is your self-esteem. (The first is your security.) What fuels self-esteem varies between individuals, but it’s possible to profile groups roughly according to their confidence triggers. Among a group of educated hipsters, for example, the trigger might be one’s ability to project flippant irony and intellectual seriousness simultaneously. Failing to meet a particular group’s unwritten standard of poise and mastery puts you out in the cold. There’s no love out in the cold.

For macho men, the trigger is simple (but not easy): to be (or be perceived as) the most suave, commanding and potentially lethal man in the room. The macho man has a lot of models to draw from, but arguably the richest source is the past century of Hollywood movies.

The military, the police and corporations recruit by appealing to this basic insecurity, of course, promising a macho diploma in exchange for killings, errands and purchases. Movies simply provide the seductive iconography. It’s impressive, with all the ways the Macho Deception has been deconstructed and mocked in the past 50 years of pop culture, how many millions of men it continues to extort with images of masculinity threatened and defended.

I call ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE (1973) the greatest American studio film of the 1970’s for hundreds of spectacular reasons, but above all for the way it deconstructs and mocks the Macho Deception without humiliating the deceived. It’s as if producer-director-composer James William Guercio decided there was already enough shame and cruelty in the air; why manufacture some more? Guercio has nothing but empathy for the lonely males in this modern-day Western written by Robert Boris.

Eleven years after John Ford used THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE to take stock of masculine codes embedded in Wild West lore, Guercio chose to shoot many iconic ELECTRA GLIDE scenes in Ford’s signature location, Monument Valley.

But Guercio ventures where Ford, a studio craftsman, wouldn’t dare, into the mess that macho extortion makes of one’s love life. Imagine becoming a stooge for Authority in order to attract the kind of woman who just loves a man in uniform, only to somehow find yourself denying your relationship just to avoid stepping on Authority’s toes. Just to preserve your career. In one of the saddest and loveliest film scenes of the 1970’s, diminutive Native American motorcycle cop-turned-detective John Wintergreen (Robert Blake) and his John Wayne-like superior, Harve Poole (Mitch Ryan), come face to face with their shame, in the form a heartbroken barmaid.

They reveal a kind of cowardice worse than anything an Army deserter might do.

Powerful institutions do this to us, if we let them. Their calculated enticements can pervert a relationship into a tangle of bribes, threats and transactions. You might laugh at how this shakedown turns macho men into flexing, posturing monkeys, but the same distortions are at work in all other social scenes. A friend of mine once said it all, observing some professors engaged in a vicious intellectual pissing match: “Yo, these dudes show off their knowledge the way young thugs back in our old neighborhood flaunt their sneakers.”

American rugged individualism might be a real thing. I imagine it’s partly what brought us through certain pivotal historical moments on the noble side of the issue at hand (slavery, women’s rights, desegregation, etc.). But when film, television and advertising projected this idea of individualism as stock images that even the most aimless conformist could wear like a regulation football jersey, its meaning became inverted.

ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE is about shedding the uniform. At first, Wintergreen, who likes to inform the ladies that he’s the same height as SHANE star Alan Ladd, longs to shed his patrolman blues for detective brown and beige. Eventually, no uniform can do anything for his stature or protect him from a violent American legacy. It’s up to him.

If all this sounds as heavy-handed as a crabby New York Times reviewer once made it out to be, let me stress that Guercio packed the film with warm, improvisatory humor and local color.

Best known as the producer of the rock band Chicago, he cast rocker, roadie and hippie friends as weary survivors of America’s post-Woodstock counterculture crackdown.

Old cowboys, flirty girls, rumpled detectives, fading retirees and hard put working men fill out Guercio’s canvas.

The director sacrificed his own salary in order to afford master cinematographer Conrad Hall, who dapples the canvas with smoky shadows and sugary highlights that turn potential cliches into solemn visual poetry.

And then there’s the breezy, funk-scored motorcycle chase that the creators of CHiPs must have studied. This is one of the few scenes Hall didn’t shoot. The playful groove tells us that poetry’s temporarily on hold while we celebrate the “wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun” of a classic American chase sequence.

With its low-budget genre movie flourishes and tenderly observed conflicts, ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE is a protest song, an appeal to those of us considering paying the ransom. You are better than that, it cries. It’s from 1973, but, as America’s decline accelerates, to a chorus of opportunistic Tweeters and snarksters, aggravated by antiseptic and demeaning corporate images, it’s right on time.

VIDEO: NOTES ON THE GREATEST AMERICAN FILM OF THE 1970’s

by Steven Boone

Hentai means “pervert” or “weirdo” in Japanese. It’s the kind of thing you shout at somebody you’ve just spotted feeling up women on the Tokyo subway. It’s a badge of shame.

In Sion Sono’s LOVE EXPOSURE (2008), Yu (Takahiro Nishijima), a virginal high schooler, finds himself labeled hentai after several misguided attempts at provoking his aloof, perpetually grieving widower father, a Catholic priest. Since Dad is also, strangely, the boy’s father confessor, Yu figures confessing to some truly outrageous sins will make Dad care again. He starts running with a street gang. Each week, he dutifully reports every street fight and petty theft in the confessional. After a disastrous affair with a flighty woman breaks Dad’s spirit anew, none of Yu’s “sins” can break his zombie-like state.

Yu’s pals convince him to up the ante by joining a ring of upskirt panty photographers.

Among 100,000 other things, LOVE EXPOSURE is about Yu’s rise in the porn biz as the “Prince of Peek-a-Panty”—a stealth photographer of ladies’ underwear in public. His work involves flinging a camera on a retractable cord between the legs of unsuspecting female passersby and snapping the shutter.

Yu honestly believes this “sin” will startle his father out of his ascetic stupor. He accepts every insult and injury in pursuit of this goal—including being called, by every upstanding citizen who discovers his occupation, “Hentai!!!!”

As Yu comes of age in a cruel, hypocritical adult world and meets Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), his first love (while, for reasons you’ll understand only when you watch the film, he’s dressed as a girl), it becomes clear that he’s a hentai not because he sticks cameras up skirts but because he loves, openly, earnestly.

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Today, almost no one dares to say, “I love you.” It has to be, “As a poet would have put it, ’ I love you,’ or some kind of a distance. But what’s the problem here? I claim that when the ancients say, ‘“I love you,” they meant exactly the same. All these distanciations were included. So it is we today who are afraid that, if we were to put it directly—“I love you”—that it would mean too much.—Slavoj Zizek

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Trouble is, Yoko is the product of sexual and emotional abuse. The only men she does not despise are Kurt Kobain and Jesus Christ. She even picks fights with men in the street—and wins.

In fact, Yu meets her while she’s in the middle of demolishing a street gang.

Even so, he loves Yoko with a purity and devotion that pose a threat to the machinations of church, state, big business and high school: When Aya (Sakura Ando), the drug-dealing teen leader of a Scientology-like cult named the Zero Church…

attempts to convert Yu and his father in order to lure hordes of troubled Catholics, a domestic war begins. Aya wants to seduce and destroy Yu.

Just like Yoko, Aya is the product of sexual abuse. She uses her precocious skills as a power broker to exact vengeance upon the world for her shattered psyche. Secretly, she desires Yu as strongly as she despises and envies his purity. 

Meanwhile, Yu’s friends among thugs, delinquents, pervs and pornographers revere him as a troublemaking, moneymaking badass, but his true motives are beyond their comprehension.

All he wants is to love and be loved. His mother’s death when he was very young left a lifelong void that his devoted but remote father could not fill.

Yoko appears to be to the saintly “Mary” type that his deeply religious mother promised would come along one day.

He’s also applying some professional advice from his Peek-a-Panty sensei to his love life:

Aya is determined to eradicate any possibility of romance between these two. She seduces Yoko and charms Yu’s father before exploiting their insecurities to install herself as the family’s spiritual guide. (In a knot of plot twists that you’ll find preposterous out of context, Aya exposes Yu’s secret hentai life at his high school, orchestrates events so that Yoko ends up being Yu’s virtual stepsister and steals his drag alter ego in order to make Yoko fall in love with her, not Yu.)

Aya’s use of surveillance and duplicity to infiltrate a family makes a great metaphor for the way our institutions maintain power in the Facebook era, through calculated “frenemy” gestures.

Though the “hentai” label alienates everyone in Yu’s life, he keeps to his conviction that love will ultimately power through the web of lies. The final hour of this nearly four hour movie punishes and rewards his moral determination as powerfully as the ending of SANSHO THE BALIFF burnished a son’s faith in his dead father’s teachings about compassion.

In America, Hentai refers to Japanese pornographic animation, the kind where tentacle beasts ravage petite, big-breasted nymphets. There is no such animation in LOVE EXPOSURE, but its goofily operatic, hyperkinetic, plot-mad style is straight out of mainstream anime.

Despite sitcom-broad satire and a style that seems to encompass Nicholas Ray, Richard Lester, Nikkatsu gangster and taiyozoku flicks, DRAGONBALL Z and Shohei Imamura’s THE PORNOGRAPHERS, LOVE EXPOSURE is ultimately wrapped up in the fate of its characters, not empty spectacle or provocation. Its great special effect is allowing folks we’ve written off as losers, sociopaths or deviants to emerge as something a lot harder to judge or dismiss. Certain of these twists made my heart explode.

This web page is called HENTAI LAB in tribute to LOVE EXPOSURE. HENTAI LAB will not examine subway gropers or filthy cartoons. We embrace the term here because poet-filmmaker Sion Sono put it to such sublime use in his masterpiece, sticking up for those of us who dare to love passionately in a world that runs on fear, hostility, greed and manipulation. We are the true perverts, without shame. But there is a price to pay.