Jigoku

Nobuo Nakagawa's shocking, tremendous 1960 epic of the underworld, Jigoku (Hell) opens with a university lecture on the nature of Buddhist Hell. This is helpful, as I had assumed before watching this movie that Buddhists didn't believe in Hell. Don't they believe in reincarnation? Like, life is suffering, so we're doomed to endlessly repeat our painful lives on this realm unless we medidate and thereby discover the wisdom of the Buddha, thus releasing our souls to a higher plane of consciousness and understanding and Oneness with the universe.

I mean, that's what I'd always thought. I'll admit, I'm not terribly well-versed on the nuances of Eastern Religion. I know the basics. Jigoku definitely plays up the "life as a vicious cycle of suffering" angle, but does indeed involve a physical realm known as Hell (or in this case, The 8-Tombed Hell) in which the souls of sinners are tortured by being dunked in flaming pits of sulfur, their flesh slowly flayed from their bones by cackling imps. Or maybe that's just for the purposes of the film.

Released in 1960 by a B-grade Japanese studio known for trashy genre films, Jigoku stands as kind of the grandfather of modern Japanese horror cinema. (J-horror favorite Kiyoshi Kurosawa says as much on the terrific documentary included on the new Criterion release of the film). The abstract imagery, emphasis on brutality and gory violence, streak of pitch-black comedy recalls the contemporary films of guys like Shinya Tsukamoto and Takashi Miike. The specific focus on the divergent nature of humanity, shifting between good and evil impulses in a neverending and ultimately fruitless struggle that eventually renders both terms meaningless, seems to run through a lot of post-WWII Japanese cinema. Godzilla stomps Tokyo to the ground and still becomes a hero after the first few movies. Hey, he was punishing them for wrecking the Earth. They had it coming!



Shiro (Shigera Amachi), after attending that lecture on Hell along with his creepy friend Tamura (Yoichi Numata), goes for a late night car ride. After crushing a guy's skull and fleeing the scene, Shiro starts to feel guilty. Did he kill that man? Should he have called for help? Should he turn himself in? Not Tamura, though. He doesn't seem to regret anything, ever. Oddly, he also seems to know an awful lot about everyone he meets, including deeply-buried secrets and unspoken fantasies.

Despite his best attempts to get away from Tamura, Shiro runs into him everywhere. Eventually, the two of them leave Tokyo and venture into the country, to visit Shiro's ailing mother in a rest home. It soon becomes clear that this Rest Home represents a kind of Hell on Earth. Shiro meets not one but two attractive, available women but finds himself unable to pursue either one of them. His mother lingers in a state somewhere between life and death. Tamura continually taunts Shiro, his main squeeze Yukiko (Akiko Yamashita) and the other guests at the rest home, bringing up embarrassments and sins of the past they'd prefer to forget.

The evil manager of the facility cuts every corner to save money, even serving poisoned fish snatched up from a nearby creek to his guests and patients. So everybody dies and descends into Hell.

These opening sequences, comprising about half of the movie, are peculiar and unsettling and visionary. The characters spend a lot of time conversing and arguing on the railroad tracks that run by the nursing home, straight lines running straight back into the horizon, dividing the landscape neatly in twain. On one side lies life, on the other death, but the two are indistinguishable. (One close-up of a sandaled foot balancing atop an individual track suggests the film's overall view of life on Earth - a precarious balancing act that ultimately cannot be maintained after a short time).

Likewise, the shot of the dead, rotten fish being scooped out of the river provides a stark demonstration of Nakagawa's overriding concept - to live is to drift along being pulled by various unseen currents towards a mysterious and possibly unreachable destination. When these fish were alive, they were free to struggle against the current, and now they are limply pushed along without so much as a jerk, but the end result is the same.

Yeah, it's a little bleak, but the film is called Hell. You were expecting, perhaps, the latest installment of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour?

Once the characters actually descend into Hell, things get significantly more hallucinatory, surreal and horrifying. Tamura, as it turns out, is more of a demon than an actual person, which makes Shiro's fate seem a bit unfair. After all, he wanted to do the right thing on several occasions, and was forcibly stopped by Tamura. In Western terms, we'd think of that as unfair intervention, violating the "free will" part of God's contract with Man.

Shir doesn't actually have much time to focus on Tamura's demonic revelation. He's too busy searching fruitlessly for Yukiko throughout the various levels of the Underworld. That is, when he's not being tortured by the monstrous God of Hell or Tamura. The punishments meted out to the various characters are unflinching and gruesome. The skin is burned clean off their bones, revealing bleached white skeletons beneath. Teeth are smashed out of skulls, only to regrow in an instant so they may be smashed again. Heads are separated from bodies, and one unfortunate man is sawed slowly into tiny individual pieces.

But not all of the torments of hell are strictly physical in nature. Shiro seems destined to be punished psychologically for failing to protect Yukiko and his unborn child that, unbeknownst to him, she was carrying. He's made to chase after his infant son on a spinning wheel, to follow him as he drifts endlessly down a river of blood, to search for him within a spiraling mass of wandering zombies.

As an extraordinarily intense horror film, it's great, but the conception of Hell itself is equally fascinating. Visually, it's not so different from the standard, familiar look of Hell in pop culture. There's flames everywhere, horned devils, boiling lakes of fire, it's vaguely cave-like, fire-enging red, etc. But it's also immensely overcrowded, thick with suffering souls. One amazing shot features hundreds of twisting, reaching arms rising from a black hole in the ground. George Romero taught us that, when there was no more room in Hell, the dead on Earth would start to come back to life. Nakagawa clearly has a difference of opinion.

The major compontent of Nakagawa's Hell, aside from a serious real estate crisis, is repetition. This is a Sisyphean nightmare world. Those teeth will keep regrowing no matter how many times they are smashed out. Shiro can chase his unborn child forever and not actually catch him. More than once, he seems on the verge of figuring out this grim truth and giving up the chase, but then he immediately forgets this revelation and takes up running around in circles once again.

And I suppose it's here that you come back to the Buddhism. Both life and death consist of running around in circles, chasing an unattainable goal. In the film, Hell is more miserable, but only becuase of the pain and physical punishment, the inability to escape the Devil's torments. But, really, both sphreres involve a lot of panicky activity that doesn't get the characters anywhere or improve their situation.

So the secret, I suppose, would be to free one's self from the chase altogether, to realize that it's pointless, and to just live in the moment. I still don't see how this fits in with the whole reincarnation thing, but then again, I don't understand a lot of stuff about a lot of World Religions, so I'll just shut my mouth now.