a) The role fear plays within the narrative
Pastoral: To Die in the Country(田園に死す, Den-en ni shisu), also known as Pastoral Hide and Seek, is a 1974 Japanese drama film directed by Shūji Terayama.
This biographical film is a conversation between ‘Older Me’ and fifteen years old ‘Me’. In this film, Terayama manipulates fear through uncanny visuals in his playful, colourful style. He incorporates metaphors and traditional Japanese poems and theatre to disguise grotesque stories and criticise post war Japanese society. Eventually grieving the broken, painful childhood memories comes to peace with the death of his innocence.
The main horror In Pastoral, is time. As humans, we all fear death brought by the passing of time. In pastoral, the memories of lost ones and traumatic experiences become glamorised and vivid. But under the colourful impressions, these traumatising memories haunt our present day. In the film, the concept of past trauma is naturally associated with ‘clocks’. Broken, buried and enlarged clocks scatter throughout the film, connecting each stage of character growth, reminding the terrifying changes time brings.
The first clock appeared as broken, representing our protagonist Shin-Chan’s root of his fear: his controlling mother.
Visually, the mother is an unsettling character. Her face is painted white, with a masculine voice but a female body just like Japanese Noh plays. It creates strong contrast in her darkly lit house. Compositionally, she is trapped in frames created between walls inside the house, miniking traditional Japanese theatre stages. The magic of literature appears in the defarmiliarsation of the ordinary, the defacing of the mother dramatise then symbolises her. They begin to represent a social phenomenon. The mother’s uncanney Noh makeup and white Kimono portrays her like a ghost, remaining in the past, and haunting Shin.
Despite the loud noise and fause time, Shin’s mother refused to fix the clock, she believed that it brought bad fortune to move it off the wall and later tied it against the wall. The idea of ‘bad luck’ paints the mother’s outdated Japanese spiritual beliefs signifying rejection of modern society. Bonding the clock also is a gesture of her rejection of change and excessive control of time in this household, an attempt to bond the time from moving on, an attempt to keep all nostalgic memories in the same place, a rejection of change which also bonds her son to ‘stay forever as [her] innocent boy!’.
She refuses to move on from the past like the broken clock that tells the wrong time. This ties in with the Japanese literature’s post war reflective spirit. After suffering from heavy loss in the second world war, there was a growing doubt of the past nationalism, hornor, while coping with the broken society. As time passes, the suffering in the society continues, recognising and coping with the past. The mental stigma that bonds people in regret and torments the present is the true, undefetable terror. The depressing atmosphere that looms in this house torments Shin and the viewer.
In the next chapter of the film, the dramatic visual language and uncanniness is further enforced by introducing conflict between imagination and reality. In those romanticised childhood memories, we saw a colourful ‘freak’ circus. In this illusion, the motif of the watch marks Shin’s awakening for freedom. The imagery of a circus, is an ‘embodiment of unique ontological isolation, epitomising a temporality out of social life’. As a blow-up lady told him that ‘everyone has a clock here’. This shocked Shin ‘but if everyone has time, wouldn’t they fight for who has the real time?’ hence awakened his awakening individual consciousness. He realised that he had been living under an illusion mother believed, and that time, or himself, has its own ways of existence, without having to be ‘contained in a grand clock’.
Visually, the circus is presented by bright, saturated colours, with fuzzy, dreamy filters diffrienciating from the mono coloured reality of Shin. The characters have more of a symbolic role acting beyond the characters of the movie, holding a conversation with the suidence too. They give an omnipresent, unrealistic aura, foreshadowing the chaos hidden under their colourful appearance. ‘Everyone has their own clock’ and ‘she is nothing without a blow up suit’ reflecting aspects of individuality, societal pressure. The montage metaphorically portrays the director’s poignant views of the outside world. Furthermore the director combines these in his stylised montage narrative connecting fragmented memories. They demonstrate conflicting narratives, with playful colours but are often shot from a hidden or isometric angle. Whereas the time travelling scenes are constructed with more shadows and symmetrical medium shots, appearing serious and dominating. Using the clock as transitions, Terayama connects Shin’s memory illusions mixed in reality, encouraging the viewers to find the ‘truth’ hidden in the colourful disguise of Illusions. Through the contrast of expectation and reality, Shin’s tragedy is enlarged. Because as hard as he tries, his struggle towards freedom is useless.
The tension towards mother soon reached the climax, into action. ‘The only solution is if we kill our mother.’ Elder Shin-chan finally derived that conclusion. In this thrilling scene, the mother’s image finally changed. In elder Shin’s timeline, she is laughing at a TV in a modern apartment but still with the old clock, now fixed. Time begins to move forward, but the damage in Shin’s heart has already been done. As ‘But If my grandmother is killed, then my mother, even me, would not exist. Then who will?’ This discussion of the grandfather paradox not only amplifies his hatred towards this broken family, the twisted and extreme mentality of Shin. Horror is created through the death of his humanity and the suspense of the unknown result of the paradox. Furthermore, it also discusses the shared dream of humanity – time travelling.
The movie is a bridge between the director inside and outside the film with their childhood. This technique effectively challenges then smudges the borderline between the artistic world and reality. Although scientifically impossible, the romanticised concept clearly states human’s shared desire of fixing the past. In the final meeting of Shin and elder Shin, they sit in front of a chess board. The visual imagery leads this concept to a new height of challenging reality. Shin reveals the reality that they never managed to escape from their mother, shattering the dreams of the movie. ‘I have also got a clock now.’ implying that he finally got some limited freedom. In the background, Terayama completely disorientates the timeline in the movie and uses both background actors and the dialogue to perform his final argument – ‘time is an illusion.’
Without any grotesque visuals, the film challenges the psychology of human existence. The clock is once more used in the background as it turns anti-clockwise, hinting towards time travelling and illusion. There is a man getting a haircut with every shift of camera focus he suddenly transforms into elder age, eventually death. Terayama uses symbolic characters once more, disturbes the timeline of all characters, further enforces the imagery of ‘life’ into the chessboard Shin is battling with himself. In the end, with all the struggle and unfortunate events, Shin only battles with himself.
One can argue that his tragedy began with the awakening of Shin’s hope for freedom. Lu Xun once said that ‘the most painful thing is that there is no way out after being awakened from the dream… wake him up’. And the horor is the inability to fit into society after unmasking the brutal truth. In the film, there are clear distinctions between other villagers and Shin. Shin and mother are defaced in white makeup, whereas the other characters appear more vivid with clear character traits. The ‘old grannys’ wear a uniformed black cape and one eye, the clown like a soldier, and a woman wearing colourful clothes that never stops chatting. Through the set design, these characters are subscribed to a specific role in the village, and society. They are particles that run a micro society representing post war Japan.
Shin is excluded from them. This implies that he does not belong to a cog of the society, infact, as everyone has accepted their roles and acting along with their duties as characters in the village, but he struggles to be something different. If he had continued to live as everyone else in the village he wouldn’t have suffered so much, yet if he did so, he wouldn’t have even got a watch. But as humans, the most horrific thing for Shin and us is waking up from a dream in which we realise that all our beliefs and efforts are futile. Here, the director cleverly suggests the powerlessness of the loss of dreams in reality through their dialogue: ‘you never ran away, in fact, in the future you are still living with mum’ This meeting and the ending reinforced the idea of futility once more, as Elder Shin walks towards mother, the tension heightens, yet in a sclient stare, they sat down and began to eat dinner, their struggle has come to peace.
The horror in this film is inflected mainly on psychological aspects. Throughout the film, Terayama incorporates detailed metaphors in the background all hinting towards the idea of ‘illusion’. Physically shown, there are the imagery of ghosts and uncanney supernatural events, bringing thriller and discomfort. Narratively, these are symbolic and metaphorical conversations discussing something beyond the characters in the movie, challenging human existence. Visually, the dazzling colours contrast with mono colours, binding illusions together with reality, full of sudden shifts, illogical endings. There are no jump scare or disgusting characters, but the uncanny composition, discreet whisper, reveals the darkness of humanity in delicate visual disguise. Terayama presents his views of society and let fear drive Shin’s struggle through his suffocating life, finally discovering the futileness of life, and disappointment in human nature. In the end, nothing is more scary than humans, ourselves.
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