Carnivalised: Bakhtinian Reading on Teshigaharo’s The Face of Another

By Justin Gao

Introduction

Trauma, in its very essence, is a persistence of pain. And if emotion is a story and persistence the canonization of that story, then pain would have been the uncompromisable and irrevocable nation myth of Japan. The devastation and despair that ravaged the Empire of Japan in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki established tone of humiliation and brokenness that governed the dismantled fragments of the archipelago, haunting the redevelopment of Japan’s nation-myth; their national identity was reduced to the mourning of a fractured people. Thus, embodied in the very story of Japan’s regeneration is the canonized myth of trauma. But this is only half of the story. Indeed, pain is not what governs the national identity of Japan today, quite the contrary. Japan is, in its technological proficiency, its irreplicable artistic styles, its profound cultural tenets of community and kindness, a beacon of technological innovation and artistic avant-garde. How, then, does a nation oppressed by the systematic and structural metanarrative of post-war trauma rebound and reconstruct such a vibrant and active culture in a mere half-century?

Hiroshi Teshigaharo’s 1966 Japanese New Wave film, The Face of Another, provides a potential answer. The film follows the psychological unraveling of a man whose face is wrapped in bandages, having been deformed by the atomic bomb. When he begins to feel an overpowering sense of alienation, he turns to a psychiatrist who proposes a human-like mask to allow him to blend back into society. Unexpectedly, his identity continues to disintegrate along with his moral groundings, and the film ends with an emphatic murder. In its incorporation of filmic and narrative elements eerily similar to Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque, Teshigaharo suggests that embracing the spirit of the Carnival—a chaotic, ‘unfinalizable,’ polyphonic amalgamation of perspectives and a complete and utter destruction of the idea of the material body—could allow the nation of Japan to rebuild its unity through the humility and materiality of each individual citizen. From the level of the dissected (Grotesque) body, the film’s metafictive implications 'Carnivalize’ (or devour) each concentric layer of society, through individual identity, interpersonal relationships, to the entirety of culture. These three steps—this complex cycle of destruction and creation, of deceit and revelation, of chaos and order—will reify the mechanisms of Japan’s ‘great comeback.’

Part I: The Grotesque body

Bakhtin’s Grotesque Body forms the foundation of his “Dialogic Imagination.” Through a post-structuralist deconstruction of the work of French Renaissance author François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (1564), Bakhtin frames the physical body as a site of transformation, degradation, and regeneration, forming the crux of his long-standing theory of dialogism. Within the generic contexts of satire and comedy, Rabelais’ narrative about the life journey of two absurd giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel, forms the proverbial ‘operating table’ for Bakhtin’s surgical dissection of the human body. Bakhtin argues that the text’s exaggerated political satire, its grotesque scatological references, and the absurd exertions of physical humor are the mechanisms through which the deified, holy conception of the human body is pulled down from heaven. Bodily functions like eating, drinking, defecating and sex compress the entirety of humanity to the lower bodily stratum—the belly, genitals, and anus—a vivid contrast to the pompous elevated sanctity that Catholicism and social decree imposed on the body. This synecdochal segmentation of the body, where the lower bodily stratum represents the steel framing around which humanity’s entire existence is built, both returns the body to the materiality of existence, and extends human existence beyond the providential predeterminism of Christianity. Instead of a body that is fixed and unchanging, Bakhtin recognizes a body in Rabelais’ work that is unfinishable, or ‘unfinializable,’ as it constantly changes—an open loop as opposed to a closed system.

Teshigaharo, however, extends this debasement of the concept of the human body one step further. For him, not only is the human body brought down to the level of raw materiality through its physical injuries (due to the bomb), but the body’s very conception of itself—its identity— is similarly fractured. First, for the film’s main character, Mr. Okuyama, the body is already segregated from its conception; there is the body, and there is the idea of the body,two separate beings that function differently in the film. A traditional Bakhtinian reading of this film would suggest that Mr. Okuyama’s insistence that “the face is the door to the soul” and that “when the face is closed off, so too is the soul,” forming a unity between body and being that seems to contradict the fragmentary nature of the Grotesque body. While there is irrefutable unity on the surface level of the character (between face and soul, for instance), Mr. Okuyama’s metafictive self-reflection on his body creates a profound gap between body and the idea of body.

Due to the face being “closed off,” Okuyama explains, “The soul is left to rot, reduced to ruins. It becomes the soul of a monster, rotten to the core. [laughs] I feel as if I’ve been buried alive.” Indeed, while his body stays dead still and unflinching, his soul is left to rot. There is no material, visible effect to this rotting of the soul, instead, Okuyama digresses to the third person in order to segregate himself from his body. And then, he laughs. Humour has the profound ability to destabilize the most consolidated hierarchies, and that is certainly the case here. Paradoxically, this distancing of himself from his body enables Okuyama to satirize the absurdity of his own body, forming an abstract awareness between body and being that reaches a far more visceral level. Distance creates unity.

Instead of scatological humor, which reduces the physical body to the reality of the ‘present moment,’ or absurd satire, which dismantles the artificial hierarchy of the body to its base, constituent parts, this self-reflexive satire operating on two metafictive layers breaks apart consciousness itself, and puts it back together—distance creates unity. The atomic bombs not only destroyed the physical body but the essence of Japanese being; the courage, determination, and relentlessness of the Japanese war spirit was supplanted by a motion of surrender. Yet, through this destruction, Japan found unity in its own fragmentation to become a leading model of what national identity should look like in postmodernity.

part ii: The carnivalesque

In Bakhtin’s interpretation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the moments of impromptu play—Play Extempore—as in scenes with mock religious figures and mock institutional settings, subverts social hierarchy. Kings become fools and fools become kings. Thus, mimicry is integral to the creation of an effective Carnival (one that successfully satirizes the social hierarchy); one must make the important distinction between mimicry and replication as only exaggeration or understatement can destabilize accepted social law. For Bakhtin, Gargantua and Pantagruel’s literal narrative can be interspersed with satire and humor, which creates Carnivalistic dynamics between characters within the constraints of the diegesis.

The Japanese New Wave, however, does not care for cohesive diegesis and a continuous, uninterrupted ‘suspension of disbelief.’ Teshigaharo wields the metafictive and deconstructionist tools available to him as a postmodern artist, like heavily layered and metafictive symbols and plot points, to expand the focus from individual to interpersonal. Mr. Okuyama’s psychiatrist plays the role of the fool in the film; like the fools of Shakespeare, and the fools of medieval Carnival events (Mardi Gras), fools are often symbolic of subversion and chaos, producing provocative questions that stun the characters and audience alike. The psychiatrist is the one who brings Mr. Okuyama’s self-fracturing into the physical world.

For Okuyama, the psychiatrist’s promise of a prosthetic face offers a satisfactory resolution to his internal turmoil, and an opportunity to explore an alternate life—an end and a beginning. But further, a prosthetic face also symbolizes the psychiatrist’s subversive curiosity which forebodes—and inevitably leads to—chaos. “I was afraid you would use it to escape from yourself,” the psychiatrist says, knowing that Okuyama’s morality will fall to the lure of anonymity. Thus, the mask that acts as an external manifestation of his inner conflict also channels the expression of Okuyama’s most primal instincts. For Okuyama, the mask provides an excuse to transgress socially accepted moral codes and act upon his desire, revealing the inherent fragility and arbitrariness of social norms, and the universality of humanity’s bestial instincts.

But, as promised, the psychiatrist’s role reaches deeper than that. During a scene where the psychiatrist repeatedly and meticulously applies, adjusts, and removes various sets of prosthetic facial hair, Teshigaharo evokes an air of purposeful, motivated and artistic intentionality. Intentionality to do what? To manipulate the sophisticated social games and parodic switching that occurs in everyday Play Extempore. In other words, to control, and thus have the ability to subvert, the Carnival itself. The pair exchange terse opinions about the effectiveness of the mask within the confines of society, implying that the pair are outside of the confines of society, and are consequently privy to its inner workings. The iconography of the psychiatrist thus becomes clear. A psychiatrist, or psychologist, or person of any vocation that practices an observatory, scientific approach towards social interaction inherently distances themselves from the immediacy of the ‘social game’; through their lack of immersion, people in these professions can describe the very rules of the game, which can not be done if an individual is bound by and operating under the rules of the game. By distancing himself from the realism of the world, Teshigaharo himself takes on the role of the psychiatrist and enters a liminal abstract space where he is able to reflect on the realistic mechanisms of the ‘social game.’ In the psychiatrist and Okuyama’s attempt to mimic realism through a comedic obsession over the placement, texture, and color of facial hair, they satirize the Carnival of social interaction itself. In essence, they Carnivalize the Carnival.

part iii: the body of a nation

Having connected the individual and interpersonal, we must now venture to the largest of the three concentric circles: the national. The grotesque body, firstly, evokes ideas around the body politic; the human body is directly correlated with the ‘body’ of the nation, its people. Further, like the way Teshigaharo creates unity through a distancing between being and the body, the Japanese have adopted cultural techniques that separate their values from the physical. But more importantly, it is through the individual reckoning with their own trauma, either directly experienced or passed down through generations, that the shared experience of pain becomes a process of communal empathy. The cloning of Grotesque bodies—bodies that have undergone existential reconstruction—leads to a mirroring effect where personal trauma is seen and understood in the trauma of another. Coincidentally, through this authentic multiplicity of experiences and perspectives, the nation stands fortified against the oncoming wave of postmodernity, an era we now know will usher disintegration and diversification like never before. Yet because of their carnivalized identities, and because of their intentionality over the reconstruction of cultural practices, the Japanese nation embraces postmodern chaos with its inexhaustible range of creativity and artistry, which in turn determines the cultural myth that presides Japan.

Yet the Carnival doesn’t come without warnings. The film ends with a horrifying image of dozens of blank, masked faces, accompanied by a final act of transgression: Okuyama murders a woman. Teshigaharo’s harrowing ending is a testament to the importance of unity through difference (or distance). Unity, or the outcome, can not precede the necessary prerequisite of disunity. Forcing an outcome, such as unity, without its prerequisite is like employing intentionality in the Carnival without the body being Grotesque. The order of events is important: the individual body becomes Grotesque (self-reflection), then the carnival itself becomes Carnivalised (determine your approach), and then the nation is unified (existential coherence). This three-step analysis is indicative of two more universal truths: think before you act, and act like you mean it. These two tenets are how Okuyama fulfills the arc of the anti-hero and how the Japanese nation approached the trauma of its past amid the onslaught of postmodern confusion. Thus, if the “know what you believe and be intentional with your actions” approach rebuilt Japan from spiritual hell to pioneering modernity, perhaps it should encourage us to live our lives with a similar measured assertiveness in our intentionality.