Audition: The Lady of Rage.

The very first scene is a moving one, a man watching his wife's final breaths before he sinks to the floor, his son walking in with a project just for his mother now faces the fact that she's gone. Too young to actually process it, the father grieves for two. The man, Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is bathed in a warm, leathered, beige light, his arms outstretched to his wife for one more grasp at her life. She is still, she has nothing to say. Later in a dream she will only inform him of danger as a representation of his guilt, she is more a function of his voice than her own. She is dead, and she has no voice. For the audience It is the first time we see him and it is meant to endear us to him immediately, to connect us to him as a man worth empathizing with in the midst of grief, before it quite literally rips him apart; both figuratively and literally. This is one of the strongest aspects of Takashi Miike's “Audition”, it's spell, it's daring, it's willingness to make a pitiable and understandable man ultimately the villain of his own story. He is so understandable because he is the everyman. His misogyny is not the white hood version of patriarchal hegemony, nor cruelty, it's the Sears, softer side of the institution. It's benign, average, much like the rest of ours, and this in contrast to the visceral fury of Asami's (A devastatingly full Eihi Shiina) anger and the happiness she finds in it. This contrast, this disproportion, and the lack of judgement in it (intentional or not) is Miike’s greatest feat in the film, and maybe it's scariest idea.

The honeymoon phase with Aoyama doesn’t last long before Daisuke Tengan’s script is already picking at its creation. Time and time again throughout the movie we see the protagonist utter very casual bits of misogyny; acknowledgments of his ignorance about women even as he grieves the one he loves. He's fishing with his son and compares women to fish, later as he consumes that fish, his son informs him of the ability of certain fish to change their sex, and he states he “doesn't know much about ovaries” (something he shares with a great deal of real world men) the irony being that it's a major aspect to women's bodies, to his dearly departed wife, the same bodies that are often steeped in such supposed interest in, respect for, love for. Aoyama listens to, and affirms a nasty bit of misogyny from his friend Yasuhisa Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura) about a table of women minding their business. When that same friend asks him what he's looking for in a woman, “maturity” is seemingly the primary trait, yet when Yoshikawa sets up this elaborate rouse- the titular “Audition” (in and of itself a misogynistic plot) and states that he will make the age range 20 to 35 Aoyama doesn't question the earlier part of that group at all. The message present in the audition process isn't just in what the process itself is set upon, or the fact that it extends out from an imbalanced power dynamic that sets the women on the task of qualifying themselves to men who are aware that in most cases these women would not be in their league - but in the creation of the rules that govern it. Looking over the potential candidates Aoyama remarks that trying to choose is as hard as “choosing his first car” Yoshikawa replies “How can you compare the two?” It is unclear whether the offense is with comparing a woman to a car, or a car to a woman”. Aoyama sits comfortably at his desk and reads Asami’s profile and her innermost thoughts a a voiceover read those words out to us in Asami's voice “To live is to approach death gradually”. Aoyama connects with this on the basis of the loss of his wife, but what Asami is talking about has to do with the specificity of her own life and the inner lives of women at large. Upon finally meeting her face-to-face Aoyama takes some pleasure in patronizingly and condescendingly explaining Asami’s words to her. “In your essay you said giving up what was most important to you was in a sense similar to accepting death. I was most impressed, everyone has had similar experiences, you are bound to have to give up something precious in your life and there's nothing you can do but except that fact. That's life. I mean.. I was amazed that a girl as young as you understands that”. “I was amazed a ‘girl’ as young as you” and “Everyone has had similar experiences” is informative as to Aoyama's essential flaw. The former being condescending, the latter patronizing and assumptive. In a Harvard lecture on “The Architecture of Cooperation” Dr. Richard Sennet discussed this as a sympathetic expression of what he calls “The Majesterial self” which he also calls a benign mode of taking control. “When we express sympathy, ‘God I feel what's you're feeling’- it's as though we're saying ‘nothing is really foreign to me, any experience you have if I react to you I'm going to identify as though I understand it myself”. Asami’s story, her desire, asks of Aoyama something he is unable to give in his current state of self centered-ness. It asks of Aoyama to look at she and other women beyond what they do for him, how they make him feel, it eludes him for the same reasons he didn't know and doesn't want to know about women's ovaries, a lack of curiosity in any meaningful sense. The connection between Yoshikawa’s suggestion that the best women for him to target are women who in essence lack the ambition to want to be a star, and Aoyama’s attraction to Asami being her acceptance of not only physical death, but the metaphorical death of her career in ballet, as well as her lack of desire for extravagance is also directly related to that self centered nature. There is no specificity to his supposed love for Asami, the bodies are housed in a trope, and within this any woman could fit. After Aoyama begins to feel the hazy symptoms of the poisoned drink he has unwittingly taken, and before he falls, we are shown a sort of dream sequence, where Aoyama is about to receive filatio, and as he looks down he sees his secretary then become Asami, who then becomes his sons potential girlfriend, the suggestion is that to Aoyama these women are somehow interchangeable even as he vehemently denies it. The mask of respectabality fades, the fact that he isn't a man that literally burns his women, does not seprate him, as he occupies the same time and space in the dream as other vicious men from her life. As she beheads the teacher who abused her Asami says “I never felt unhappy really, because I never stopped being unhappy!”. Aoyama is watching and she seems aware of his presence, it could just as well be addressed to him as the teacher. The very next part of the sequence we see a woman holding a boy, who says “men need women to support them or they'll exhaust themselves”, we are then taken back to the scene when his friend suggests the audtion, then to Aoyama now sitting in the audition chair previously occupied by Asami “my son said I better marry again because I looked worn out”. We are back to the present Aoyama falls backward (this is literally his figurative fall) hitting the floor and sees Asami, it is the first time he is actually seeing her.

Miike and Tangens film moves its protagonist and antagonist in the same direction until they meet each other, and when they do it is neither as protagonist or antagonist but simply two very flawed people now finally connected in the truest sense that they ever could be. Aoyama and Asami start out sympathetic figures and become somewhat unsympathetic by the end. Asami's rage then is not evil, but human, and perversed as it may be..justice. It balances the scales between the shape of their lives. The “Heroine of Tomorrow” is the aspirational for Asami. It promises of something more fulfilling, of something as big as a movie star, something larger than life. It mentions nothing of relationships, and yet here she was auditioning. One gets the feeling that this is the beginning of all of her ill-fated relationships. A constant refrain of hope and disappointment. Asami’s, (by way of Eihi Shiina's intricately detailed performance) deliberate setting of the table, a fork in the road here, a spoonful of context there, a plating of the elements that fed Asami ‘s rage are meant to be in service of the main course that is Audition’s grotesque finale. The last 15 minutes or so of this film are not merely shock and awe, nor a twist, but a small performance piece both in the context of the film and outside to the spectator. It is a movie in and unto itself, that ends up connecting and informing the entire thesis of the film. Asami’s ascension into her largest self is less a revelation of her evil, than of her counterparts in the world. It is the revelation of her joy, which is the form the purity of her rage takes. Every prick of the acupuncture needle, every rip of the flesh, every vibration of Aoyama’s pain rushes through Shiina’s body like sugar, this is a delightful dish. This is her best work yet, a masterpiece of her commitment and she is having the time of her life. Every “Kiri Kiri” spoken by her is slapped across a canvas of expression that implies the exact opposite. It is not just her body that transforms (Shiina's movement in general is so much wider, so much grander and vivrant) but her spirit, her soul. This is who she is, this is what she wants, this is her “Incredible thing”. Miike's film has the good sense not to apologize for it.

Women's rage whether that is in the context of life in general, or in the context of the performer who is willing to have courage enough to bare their raw self to an audience in a way that may attract them just as well as it may repel them- doesn't have the built-in apologencia that men enjoy. Films dealing with it, that come anywhere near an endorsement have always stood out, but many times the men upon whom this fire is released are objectively hideous. Audition even moreso than Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession” inflicts this upon a empathetic male subject. He is not heinous, he is not a rapist, or an abuser, he is a loving father, a grieving widower, he seems good at his job, but he is also a man. He has a fling with his co-worker while he was married, possibly while his wife was sick, he ghosts her without much thought as to how that might feel. He goes along with this audition idea enthusiastically for the most part, again without thought. He patronizes, condescends, he takes, lionizes women’s sacrifices even as he sacrifices nothing. He is neither the worst example nor the best, he is merely the average man. That he be the one to suffer so, is an integral part of her performance piece. A challenge to the expectation of suffering for women crystallized by doling out an analogous amount of suffering to the unwitting party. That for most of the movie Asami is playing a role and her finale is the courage to challenge her destiny, to challenge the role she has been given, is the fear factor. As with most stories in reality that involve murderous women, the underlying phobia is of women as more than what we can concieve. Though gruesome murder by men can be shocking due to the more sensational aspects of the “how”, it is largely expected or at least understood that this can happen. Violence is so directly associated with masculinity that there are whole rituals and rites of manhood around inflciting it, for women though it borders on unimaginable, to men especially. If the role of the performance artists or the actor in any stage setting is a search for the truth in human experience then Asami's reveal of something much closer to her true nature, something in defiance of the narrow confines of not only men's expectations, but her own. Something that it is also so monstrous to someone so sympathetic it eludes all conceived possibilities in the mind of the first time audience- is the act of courage. Wives, secretary’s, maids, even movie stars as women and girls, moving, living, existing, to indulge and confirm men's destiny, we see this repeatedly even as they appear normal in the film, just as we normalize everyday bits of misogyny in our own lives. “You call a lot of girls to the audition, reject them, then ring them up later to have sex with them you are all the same” “Audition” isn't just the in-context audition in the film, it's the auditions women endure in their lives to and for people about as curious or interested in them as an employer is in you. It's ending is then not one based in damnation or martyrdom, it is merely an off-beat affirmation of Asami's life and of her words. “You are paralysed, but your nerves are alive”, “When you are in pain you see your shape clearly”, and maybe most importantly “I truly have no one else you have others”, after all, it is because he had somebody that he survived, and as it happens that somebody is male. In a way Miike's film is an affirmation of the common sentiment amongst certain groups of women that if misandry were as real as some men like to insist, the results would be catastrophic for men, and the fallout would be much more than merely words. That Miike's film gives us an outlet to see the power, the beauty, the ferocity, and fervor of female rage without inhibiting or impeding it, without judging it, and without the aid of a cinematic sermon is what makes it so delicious. Here at the end Aoyoma is with yet another dead woman, on equal footing, (pun intended) eye to eye, suffering in exquisite pain, inhibited, barely able to speak, scarred. For a moment Asami tipped the scales, and more importantly she found her most courageous self and it was rage, it was power, and it was horror.