Editorials

Looking for Truth in the Violent Films of Takashi Miike

January 30th, 2022 | By Steve Erickson

(Content and spoiler warnings: this essay discusses school shootings, and gives away many plot details for Takashi Miike’s Lesson of the Evil and As the Gods Will.) 

Takashi Miike has made two films on the subject of violence towards teenagers at school, Lesson of the Evil and As the Gods Will. The response to the former was one of the most negative in Miike’s career. A story that plays as outlandish fantasy in Japan looks more like social realism in the U.S., especially without the markers of gravity that American films about school shootings—like Ben Coccio’s Zero Day and Gus van Sant’s Elephant—brought to this subject. 

But in an American context, it’s a sardonic flip of the idea—so often touted by gun enthusiasts and lobbyists—that teachers and security guards should be armed to protect students from shootings. In actuality, this could lead to a scenario like the one shown in Lesson of the Evil, where a teacher massacres his students. Here, the violent nihilism comes from authority figures, not the youth they’re supposedly leading. Yeah, this is in bad taste, but the fact that Alex Jones made a fortune causing material harm to school shooting victims and their families while this film was effectively banned in the United States—it has never been released legally in any form—is much worse. 

Even if this connotation is unintended, As the Gods Will suggests the unproduced sequel promised at the end of Lesson of Evil. Its view of authority is just as jaundiced, but expressed through the prism of unreality. As in Battle Royale, violence is turned into a game. The structure copies a video game, with students ascending to a new level if they survive the previous one. The title suggests a metaphysical dimension. The “gods” could be people playing The Sims or a realm of supernatural beings with the power to toy with ordinary people.

The Scholastic Slaughter of ‘Lessons of Evil’

Takashi Miike had used a slow-burn structure in Audition, whose first half could have led into a polite rom-com. Lesson of the Evil makes no attempt to hide its intentions. The very opening scene reveals that Hasumi (Hideaki Ito) is a killer, just as the second scene of As the Gods Will leaps into the film’s murders. But it’s very elegantly shot and cut, going back and forth between his parents discussing the then-teenage boy’s violent behavior and Hasumi heading up the stairs to their room, knife in hand. 

Apart from flashbacks to his origin story as a young serial killer, most of Lesson of the Evil is set at the school where the adult Hasumi teaches. Angered by cheating students, he hatches a plan to block them from using their cell phones to send each other answers. He learns about various scandals among the wealthy students. One girl is being sexually harassed by the gym teacher—he responds to this by sleeping with her himself—while art teacher Mr. Kume (Takehiro Hira) is sleeping with a boy. Over the first hour, he tracks down his targets and kills them. 

There are no satisfying explanations for his actions. In fact, Hasumi delivers a voice-over near the end where he says such rationalizations are up to the police. Miike himself offers ridiculous answers, like the presence of two crows spying on Earth for the Norse god Odin—Hasumi electrocutes one—and his hallucinations of a personification of Brecht and Weill’s “Mack the Knife” (several versions of the song are played throughout). 

More subtextually, the influence of both Germany and the U.S. on Japan underlies the action. In addition to Brecht, the suicide clusters inspired by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther are a reference point. It’s a nightmare of Japan turning as violent as the U.S. 

Miike’s direction never loses the grace of its opening hour. But while most of the explicit violence early in the film takes place offscreen, the end embraces a blood-splattered nihilism. The film does not benefit from its thin characterizations, even if they’re intentional. Most of the teens who get mowed down are simply disposable bodies. The last 45 minutes show teenagers being killed, over and over again. As a response to the school’s various scandals, it’s literal overkill. But the twisted moralism isn’t far from ‘80s slasher movies. The notion that watching the slaughter of teenagers should be unpleasant comes across. The purple light of the haunted house created by the students suggests giallo. 

While a few students survive to the end of Lesson of the Evil, many chances to stop Hasumi are foreseen and blocked by him. When a student tells another teacher about his suspicions, Hasumi finds out by bugging the room. He stages the teacher’s suicide in a subway train and binds the student with duct tape, torturing him with a soldering iron. He’s become an expert on faking suicides and accidents, getting away with murder since he was a teen himself. The film’s dark sense of humor becomes purposeful. The initial charm just allows him to get a pass for his violence. The moralistic pretext for his crimes wears thin when he mows down everyone in sight.

The Deadly Games of ‘As the Gods Will’

The use of animal avatars in As the Gods Will subverts Japan’s “culture of cuteness” concept known as kawaii. Cuddly-looking bears come to life to kill people that don’t obey their whims. In As the Gods Will, these images buckle under such weight and turn on humans. A Daruma doll, based on a traditional Japanese model of Zen Buddhism’s founder Bodhidharma, forces Tokyo students to play a game of “red light, green light.” The doll allows them to try and turn his power button off while his head is turned away, but it kills anyone still moving when it turns back to face them. Shun Takahata (Sota Fukushi) is the only survivor of this round.

In the second “game,” students are forced to dress as mice and play basketball in the school gym, under the supervision of a giant cat doll whose head darts out to scoop them into its mouth. They go through five levels of gameplay, each with a different setting and look. The rules grow increasingly strange and difficult to understand, much less follow. 

The first game is the goriest, although even the image of students’ heads exploding is made less real by the red balls that flow out of their dead bodies rather than blood. The use of cartoonish images of the doll avatars actually makes them more chilling. The game’s design has deliberately corrupted and weaponized childhood fun, while targeting people in their final years of youth. It also helps that the avatars have their own personalities and voices. The giant cat licks the floor much like a real animal. The Daruma doll sports bloodshot eyes and a mean giggle. These dolls have an intelligence and consciousness of their own. 

As the Gods Will is a triumph of style, finding a deathly hollowness in the uncanny valley of CGI. It communicates through that unease. The sets grow increasingly dependent on special effects. By the fourth level, in which a polar bear traps the teenagers in an icy lair, the film combines obviously animated greenscreen with live actors. The fifth level flips its style once again, moving to a castle with glaringly artificial sunlight. Throughout, the colors are bright and hyper-saturated. 

Conclusion

Writing about Lesson of the Evil in MUBI, Ben Sachs described “In making a work so deliberately tasteless, Miike raises a worthwhile question: What would a responsible mainstream film about a mass shooting look like if it’s going to take the shootist’s perspective into account?” Throughout his career, the violence in Miike’s films has been a provocation, often deliberately “irresponsible.” Lesson of the Evil dares to suggest that from an extremely twisted perspective, mounting a school shooting could feel like a rational act. As the Gods Will backs away from its precursor’s confrontational nature, but it still rubs the audience’s noses in cinema’s power to put cruelty on screen. It would’ve been easy to turn this approach into a goofy gorefest a la Evil Dead 2. These films speak from and about worlds as ridiculous as they are extremely dangerous. As fanciful as they are, is there a better way to describe the way modern life feels? 

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