This week, I wrote about what I am sure will end up being one of my favorite movies of the year, Chime (2024). It has two pretty great bullet points for a sales pitch: the movie is directed by the legend Kiyoshi Kurosawa and it’s forty minutes long. Watching this movie, and reflecting on the year so far, I haven’t gotten to watch nearly as much as I’ve wanted to. Chalk it up to playoff basketball and that pesky dissertation — which, by the way, does end up taking a lot of the energy and brain power that usually fuels the newsletter. But all projects are proceeding smoothly. I’m just pissed I missed Aggro Dr1ft (2024) at Coolidge.
Chime is widely available in the places you look for movies that you can’t buy in the United States.
Social Conditioning and Desire in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime
There is a terrible, restrictive, suffocating force that plagues the characters of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films. In Cure (1997), it is an inescapable sci-fi malady. In Creepy (2016), it is the unbearable compulsion of etiquette. In Doppelganger (2003), those same expectations of politeness that confine get subverted by an embodiment of the unconscious — or, in another reading, the id. Freud’s id, das Es in German, is one of a tripartite structure including the ego, das Ich, and superego, das Über-Ich. The literal translation of das Ich, “the I,” is the focus of Kurosawa’s latest, Chime.
The emphasis on “I,” is obvious even from the title. In the word chime **sits “i” in the middle stuck between two other letters. The “i” of Chime’s title, as it appears stylized in the title card and movie posters, fades away, trapped in place.
The film’s protagonist, Takuji Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka), is almost overlaid with the “i.” This adds to the poignancy of the echo of the “i” with the discursive I, referring to one’s self, and the “i” appearing like the silhouette of a human figure. More than even Cure and Creepy, Chime is focused on the dissolution of the I when one is subject to the powerful forces of social demand and unconscious desire. Matsuoka, and his family, suffer because of the inability to reconcile the different impulses delivered by these different sources. With each pulling the subject different ways, the horror of Chime is the absence of the I that is so necessary to conceive of one’s self as a subject. Matsuoka always behaves as if compelled by different transmissions from obscure, competing origins. What he faces is the nightmarish possibility that if all his actions are imposed from without, there is nothing within.
Key to Chime are these competing sources that compel one to act: social expectation and passion. Matsuoka and his family, Haruko (Tomoko Tabata) and Kenichi (Koki Ishige) appear picture perfect. He is a teacher interviewing for jobs as a head chef. But an encounter with one of his students, Ichiro Tashiro (Seiichi Kohinata), initiates a series of events that throw his life into disarray. Tashiro claims to hear an unusual chime, one that is unassumingly peppered in the film’s audio mix — a mix between the screech of tinnitus and the jingle that might greet a customer at a Japanese convenience store.
Despite Matsuoka’s friendly treatment of Tashiro, Tashiro kills himself in the middle of one of the cooking classes. He claims:
Half of my brain… it’s been replaced … There’s a machine in my head. It’s there to control me. It responds to the chime. But half of my brain is still the same, so I still have a rational mind.
Tashiro’s suicide is incongruent with his assertion of a “rational mind,” but his description of being controlled can be read as social commentary. He isn’t free to do as he wishes, of course. Even in the context of the cooking class, his behavior is strictly regulated. He has to behave in accordance with the goals of the class, learning to cook. Because he constantly flouts the instruction from Matsuoka, he is regarded by his classmates as odd.
Matsuoka is the only one who seems unfazed by Tashiro’s behavior. They are both chafing against behavioral expectations. Tashiro’s description of half of his brain being replaced and half of his brain retaining rationality is one version of the duality Chime explores. Tashiro’s particular behavior is a transformation of unconscious desire into what appears to be supported by cold, rational calculous. In this case we see how rationality, if Tashiro’s suicide is where it leads, may not be all it has cracked up to be. Ultimately, though, there is no rational actor anywhere to be found in the film.
The cooking class is the repeated site for gruesome violence. When explaining how to carve a chicken, Matsuoka’s student Akemi Hishida (Hana Amano) repeatedly asks if she has to. She doesn’t want to carve the chicken. Matsuoka’s first response is a simple “yes.” When Hishida asks again, “Do I really have to?” Matsuoka answers instead, “Skip it, it’s fine.” Hishida is infuriated and confused and demands that Matsuoka “explain it to me logically or I won’t understand.”
Hashida’s mistake should be obvious to the viewer: she has confused two different answers from two different subject positions. Hishida is required to carve the chicken for the purposes of the class. If she wants to learn to cook, she must put knife to flesh. Matsuoka’s first answer is at the level of instructor, giving her the requirements to proceed. In reality, however, nobody has imprisoned her or forced her to complete this class. She could skip this step, she could skip the class entirely and never return. Knowing that her presence there is ostensibly of her own volition, Matsuoka’s second answer is that of a peer rather than an authority. Her plea for a “logical explanation” seems as absurd as Tashiro’s claim of having a “rational mind” when she can simply walk out the door. Hishida can do whatever she wants.
It is Matsuoka, however, that embraces the peer subject position that eliminates the obligation between them that exists as teacher and student. When they both abdicate their responsibility within the context of the class, Matsuoka kills her. This act of violence is aligned with the unconscious desire that fuels all the seemingly erratic behavior in the film. Likewise, Chime shows how the division between societal demand and unconscious desire is not such a clean split as a brain that is half robot, half human. Though there are a wide range of expectations Matsuoka and others are subject to, and routine behaviors they carry out by social conditioning, the regimented society also expect the subject to never give ground relative to one’s desire. Or at least, not give too much ground. Matsuoka tells his son Kenichi, “It’s great to have a passion. Don’t overdo it though.”
The possibility of overdoing one’s passion, fueled by desire, is equivalent to subversion of society’s expectations. Such a subversion is socially corrosive in Chime. In a conversation with an investigating police officer, Makoto Otsuki (Ikkei Watanabe), the detective suggests that the cooking class may be a contributor to Tashiro’s violent behavior. Detective Otsuki asks, “has anyone ever become enraged or overwhelmed with sadness while cooking?” Matsuoka replies:
Quite the reverse. People come here to calm their negative emotions. Looking at the ingredients, touching them, and savoring the taste calms you down. So we feel fine even with dangerous things lying around.
Whether intentionally deceptive or not, Matsuoka undersells the negative emotions that could arise from indulging any passion. Frustration, hardship, and disappointment are all a part of any pursuit.
Matsuoka’s family also each demonstrate an excessive investment in an otherwise socially mandated or encouraged activity. Chime is also concerned with refuse and abjection, particularly in the register of appropriately disposing of one’s trash and maintaining a clean home. Matsuoka himself goes out of his way to pick up a stray bottle and deposit it into the recycling bin while being questioned for a second time by Detetive Otsuki.
More unusual, though, is Haruko’s, Matsuoka’s wife, relationship to trash. Three times in the film, she picks up large bags of recycling from the kitchen to loudly deposit them in exterior recycling containers.
Her approach is imprecise, leaving stray cans in the family’s yard. She clearly relishes the opportunity, close ups on her face in her final trip to take out the trash displaying an eerie glee.
If the amount of cans she is able to toss out day after day is surprising, the end of the film brings the viewer to a room in Matsuoka’s house filled with trash.
Kenichi also asks his dad for 200,000 yen to “invest” in a construction company run by an older student.
Matsuoka declines. Whether Kenichi is bullied or naive, he is frustrated by Matsuoka’s unwillingness to loan the money. Like his mother, he takes an otherwise socially encouraged idea to an outrageous extreme. Students, according to conventional wisdom, shouldn’t be starting construction businesses. It’s that same conventional wisdom that differentiates Haruko’s recycling from environmentally conscious duty. Her passion for tossing and stomping cans has superseded her ability to discharge other responsibilities.
In a series of interviews for a head chef job at a French restaurant, it is clear that Matsuoka is no different from his wife and son. In a particularly tense moment, the interviewer asks Matsuoka if he would continue teaching if he began working at the restaurant. Matsuoka tells him “I’ll give it up,” surprising the interviewer who says, “at the last interview, you said you took pride in that work.” Matsuoka seems genuinely surprised to hear his own words recounted to him. Again, there is a juxtaposition between Matsuoka doing what is socially appropriate, saying he takes pride in his work, and telling the truth, saying he wants to express his artistry through cooking at a high profile restaurant.
Though murder is certainly the most evocative and socially disruptive example, it is an act of the same order as the other disruptive, confusing, and maladjusted behaviors in the film. But the ultimate unmooring conclusion is that it is neither teaching nor cooking that Matsuoka truly wants to do, neither keeping a clean house nor throwing out bags of cans that would satisfy Haruko, neither a biological nor machine brain that would bring Tashiro rationality. The control that Tashiro is so anxious about being unable to escape is the control imposed by a social order that obscures the origin of demand and desire, the things that cause one to act. Chime, through this provocation, sets itself in opposition to the idea of true agency for the subject. Indeed, more unsettling still, the things one might cling to as guarantees of the self are as illusory as an adolescent investment opportunity.
Weekly Reading List
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/27/is-love-is-blind-a-toxic-workplace — Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker article on the vicissitudes of reality TV is behind the eight ball in a lot of ways. In every respect, Chad Kultgen and Lizzy Pace of The Game of Roses podcast have monopolized this beat. They are admirable readers of reality TV dating shows, frequently addressing the exploitative nature of the programs. Likewise, Kultgen is the first person to my knowledge who has ever seriously advocated for the formation of a reality TV union. If he is not the first to do it, he is at least the most frequent proponent of the idea.
Regardless, some good writing and New Yorker sheen make this a worthwhile read.
This week was my first ever encounter with the work of fighting game youtube creator GuileWinQuote. In the two videos I’ve watched, the above which is my favorite, I have seen some seriously invaluable exploration of some truly obscure fighting games. Highly recommended.
Until next time.