(Upbeat horn music)
- (Jared) What’s up guys? Jared here with another vlog. Have you ever sensed that a
movie, videogame, or TV show was deliberately punishing you by making you the butt of the
joke? Has it ever felt like an artist’s work amounted to a big ol loogie in your face?
And.. have you ever actually enjoyed it?
(SLAP) - (Man) Thank you sir! May I have another?
- (Jared) It takes a particularly ballsy creator to troll their own audience, and a particularly
talented one to pull it off. Whether it’s The Coen Brothers robbing us of a satisfying
ending, or South Park’s Trey Parker making us sit through a Halloween special that he
knew only he would like-
- (Randy) Did everyone enjoy the Halloween special?
- (Sharon) No Randy. Only you did. - (Randy) Oh. Well, that was pretty much my
target audience anyway.
- (Jared) There seems to be a certain kind of creator who derives joy from trolling their
audience. Sometimes, just for lulz, and sometimes, to make a profound point.
I’ve always been pretty captivated by the sheer gall it takes to purposely disappoint
your viewers. But there’s one particular example of trolling in film that’s so audacious,
so legendary, so utterly fascinating that it left me with my mouth agape after I saw
it, and I thought it deserved a closer look. So join me in this Wisecrack Vlog as I detail
my pick for the greatest troll in cinema history.
(Never Gonna Give You Up plays)
- (Jared) And as always, spoilers ahead.
Before we can discuss what constitutes a truly excellent troll, we first need to establish
- what does it even mean to troll your audience? In this context, trolling broadly means deliberately
angering someone to get a reaction from them. For the purposes of this video, I’m using
the word to refer to that experience when a piece of media builds a certain understanding
between creator and audience, only to aggressively undercut that understanding with full knowledge
that doing so will upset the viewer. For example, consider the legendary release of Metal Gear
Solid 2. For years, fans were teased with images that implied we’d be playing as the
franchise’s beloved hero. Turns out, an hour into the game, Solid Snake f**ks off
and you have to play for the rest of the game as some rando.
But all the world’s media trolling seems utterly banal when compared to that of the
1999 Japanese film Dead or Alive, directed by Takashi Miike. If you haven’t seen it-
no worries, I’ll fill in the details. Now, Takashi Miike is, in my opinion, something
of an eccentric genius. He makes multiple movies a year, sometimes as many as five,
while straddling vastly different genres and tones. He’s made everything from ninja action
movies, to fantasy dramas, to surreal gangster flicks, to kids movies, to some of the most
uncategorizable, inexplicably bizarre sh*t you’ve ever seen. He’s always pushing
boundaries, and refuses to let anything get in the way of him making an exciting movie-
even the script, which he has been known to elaborate on substantially.
So how exactly does Miike troll his audience? For context, here’s a brief recap of Dead
or Alive:
The film depicts two tortured souls caught in the midst of a power dispute between the
Triads and the Yakuza in Japan’s Shinjuku district. Our protagonists are Jojima and
Ryuichi. Jojima is a policeman who is forced to do business with criminals in order to
fund an emergency medical procedure for his daughter. Ryuichi, born to Japanese parents
in China, is a hitman who uses blood money to send his little brother Toji to an American
college. But despite their sacrifices, Jojima and Ryuichi can’t seem to hold their families
together. Despite Ryuichi’s efforts to keep him from a life of violence, Toji is tragically
killed in a gunfight. Similarly, Jojima’s efforts end poorly - even after he acquires
the money for the procedure, his family dynamic remains strained. Their tragic fates collide
when Ryuichi discovers that Jojima is thwarting his plans to take over drug shipments from
Taiwan. Ryuichi then kills Jojima’s entire family.
(EXPLOSION)
- (Jared) The movie ends with a familiar gangster film scenario: a standoff between two men
with nothing to lose. How will this tragic cycle of violence end for these two bereaved
family men? Glad you asked - Jojima pulls a bazooka out of his back -
(Gun loading sound fx)
- (Jared) And Ryuichi pulls a glowing orb out of his chest.
(Screaming)
- (Jared) The two projectiles collide and the earth explodes. The end.
(Click)
- (Jared) What… just… happened? The audience has spent nearly two hours investing in these
characters - identifying with their struggles, and engaging with the moral ambiguities at
play- only for the movie to, at the last minute change genres entirely and descend into trippy,
sci-fi craziness. For comparison - imagine if at the end of Titanic, right as Rose lets
go of Jack, he turns into a lizard person, eats her and throws the Titanic into the sun.
An ending that broke the tone so thoroughly would kind of ruin all that “king of the
world stuff,” right? When I saw this movie for the first time, I felt like the joke was
on me for caring about the story.
So what in the world is going on here? Is it just pure nihilism? A devious filmmaker
getting his rocks off by pulling the rug out from under his audience? Or is there something
deeper at play? To figure this out, we’re gonna have to take a close look at the rest
of the film.
First, I have to mention the intro. It would be misleading for me to say that the ENTIRE
film is devoid of eccentricities, because the first eight minutes are also totally bonkers,
though in a way that stays firmly rooted in the modern Yakuza film subgenre. To say it's
not YouTube friendly is an absurd understatement. It’s 8 minutes of exhilarating, no holds
barred, brutally tasteless, deranged excess: sex, strippers, hard drugs, binge eating,
murder, all in highly stylized hyperkinetic editing, set to heavy rock and roll.
(Rock music plays while gun shots run out)
- (Jared) It’s generally some of the most violent and depraved stuff you’ve ever seen.
Miike claims that this intro was initially comprised of a whopping twenty separate establishing
scenes that he decided to condense into a single wild one, as writers Rob Daniel and
Dave Wood explain in their essay from the anthology Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema
Across the Globe. This choice, importantly, demonstrates his belief that a film’s script
is merely “the starting point.”
But after that whiplash of pure sleaze, Dead or Alive slows way the hell down, and proceeds
to conform to all the genre conventions of a typical gangster film. This continues for
the vast majority of its runtime: The scenes are typically grounded in realism, family
dynamics and emotion. The film transitions to lethargic wide shots and introspective
meditations on the nature of evil:
During action sequences, the camera goes handheld for a more immersive feel, but unlike the
intro or ending, it remains grounded in realism. For the most part, the film leans heavily
into what Daniel and Wood describe as the “philosophical and introspective calm…”
of traditional Japanese filmmaking - a kind of calm that makes the ending all the more
out of place.” But we’ll get to that.
What’s more, Dead or Alive presents us with a number of moral ambiguities common to the
genre: Jojima’s need to engage in criminal activity to afford his daughter’s surgery,
and Ryuichi’s violence enabling his brother’s education. It also explores cultural issues,
specifically, the plight of the zanryu koji, or people of Japanese parentage, born in China
after World War 2. Ryuichi and his gang are strangers in a strange land, seeking roots
and an identity in the midst of a gang war between the Japanese and the Chinese, neither
of which accept them.
But despite all this effective, if standard, Yakuza movie fare, every once in a while,
for very brief moments, the film breaks genre conventions and goes a little haywire. And
it’s these moments that could clue us into what the ending may signify.
Periodically, we’ll witness scenes dramatized in a bland, traditional manner, perhaps even
redundantly so, only to spontaneously erupt into hyperviolence.
(EXPLOSION)
- (Jared) That explosion seemed a bit over the top, no? Likewise, when Ryuichi kills
the Triad and Yakuza leaders, an entire act of traditional filmmaking is upset when the
editing style and level of violence reverts back to the style of the intro. Sometimes
these explosions of excess are funny, other times disturbing, and other times, make for
bizarre moments of levity This tendency to indulge in bizarre rhythmic switches, from
banal, to extreme to comedic, raises the question: Is this whole film an elaborately constructed
dark comedy? And if so, what’s the joke?
Let’s go back to the ending, which, aside from the world blowing up, also involves a
guy jumping at Jojima’s car with a grenade in his hand, causing it inexplicably to explode
hundreds of feet into the air. Jojima, of course, survives this somehow. The original
ending written in the script featured our two protagonists meeting in Taiwan, where
they have a final dramatic shootout, and, ultimately, the audience wouldn’t know who
won. This ending presumably didn’t excite Miike, so he changed it. But it’s worth
asking: would a slow motion shootout be any more meaningful than the ending we got? Whether
it’s two bodies lying dead in the street or the entire planet exploding - either way,
the narrative device that brings the film to a close is, like most films of the Yakuza
genre, violence.
Now consider the central plot points: Ryuichi’s brother dies in a gunfight, and Jojima’s
family is killed as collateral damage for his meddling in Ryuichi’s affairs. Is this
bizarre ending commenting on the violence that dominates the genre of Yakuza movies
- that violence just begets more violence?
Perhaps Miike is criticizing the enormously popular gangster film genre by first inhabiting
it and then perverting it. It takes the supposition that violence is in itself a meaningful way
to end a movie, and drawing it out to its logical conclusion - that such violent ways
of life have potentially negative implications on the whole world.
Of course, it’d be remiss of me not to mention how absolutely hilarious this moment is after
the initial shock wears off, as if the film is making fun of the ambiguous “everybody
dies” conclusion by intensifying it to an utterly insane degree. Now it’s worth noting
that Miike has made a number of Yakuza films, not all of which have this arguably critical
edge. So it’s also possible this improvised ending is more a result of boredom with the
genre than disdain for it.
There are many other ways to theorize this ending. Maybe Miike’s railing against the
restrictions that any genre film imposes on the audience’s expectations? Perhaps the
ending is a wake up call for gangster film fans to engage more critically with the subject
matter? Or maybe this abrasive change in tone is more a commentary on the limitations faced
by directors when making genre films; limitations which can stifle them with narrowly defined
tropes and conventions.
Either way, I don’t think this troll fits under the category of purely spitting in the
audience’s face. As taken aback as I was by the ending, this bizarro turn is decisively
as thought provoking as it is hilarious.
But I’m curious to hear what you guys think. Does the movie draw the audience in with common
images of the yakuza film genre, only to punish us for being seduced by something so trite
and excessively violent? Is it depriving us of the satisfying, sensical ending we perhaps
wanted, or asking us if such an ending WOULD really make any more sense? Or is this epic
troll purely nihilistic?
And can you think of any examples of troll-y cinema that out-do Miike? Lemme know what
you guys think in the comments. Thanks to all our awesome patrons who support the channel
and our podcasts. Don’t forget to smash that subscribe button and I’ll see you next
time, guys. Peace.
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