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Dead zones: human mobility and the making of media nationalism

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Dead zones: human mobility and the making of media nationalism

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Content University of Southern California Division of Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts Dead Zones: Human Mobility and the Making of Media Nationalism Mike Dillon Doctoral Dissertation For Jaime Nasser Acknowledgements This project is most indebted to four scholars for their generous insights, high expectations, encouragement, and support. They are: Priya Jaikumar, Anikó Imre, Akira Mizuta Lippit, and Sophia Siddique Harvey. The American component of this dissertation has benefited from feedback and assistance provided by Phil Hammond, Jason Middleton, Brigitte Nacos, and Catherine Zimmer. A version of chapter four, titled “Bauer Power: 24 and the Making of an American,” is published in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 11.4 (2011), edited by Graham Barnfield. The Japanese component of this dissertation includes research conducted with funding from the Japan Foundation and the institutional support of Ukai Satoshi and Hitotsubashi University, with additional feedback from David E. Kaplan, Masujima Toshiyuki, Tom Mes, Andrew Rankin, Mark Schilling, and support from my parents, Keiko and Tom Dillon. A version of chapter three, titled “The Immigrant and the Yakuza: Gangscapes in Miike Takashi’s DOA,” is published in Studies in the Humanities 39.1-‐2 (2013), edited by Reena Dube. Several University of Southern California faculty members have been affiliated with this dissertation at its various stages, including Carolyn Cartier, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, David Lloyd, Curtis Marez, Anne McKnight, and Stanley Rosen. Christine Acham, Jade Agua, Kim Greene, Linda Overholt, Alicia White, and William Whittington have provided administrative assistance at the Division of Critical Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Finally, I have received invaluable support from my peers and colleagues in Critical Studies, who make possible the rich intellectual life of our department. To all, but especially: Lara Bradshaw, Kate Fortmueller, Dong Hoon Kim, David Lerner, Annie Manion, Ken Provencher, Jennifer Rosales, Brett Service, Janani Subramanian, Ioana Uricaru, and Courtney White. With gratitude. Note on Japanese names, words, and titles: Japanese names in this text are listed surname first. In cases of Japanese authors of works published in English, names are listed as they are published, typically in Western form. This applies most to Japanese authors who are published regularly in English, such as Masao Miyoshi. Whenever possible, official English translations are cited in lieu of original Japanese text. When no such translations exist, I provide my own, where noted. Unless noted otherwise, English-‐language translations of Japanese books and articles cited in the bibliographies are mine. If a Japanese film has had international distribution with an English-‐language title, or if the Japanese film has a corresponding Western title despite not having international distribution, I use that title (original Japanese titles are noted parenthetically). If no official English-‐language title is available, I cite the original Japanese title, without translation. Unfamiliar Japanese words and phrases are italicized. This does not include the names of locations, such as Tokyo or Shinjuku, and words that are commonly recognized in the West, such as “yakuza.” Table of Contents Acknowledgements Notes Chapter 1 | The Productivity of Violence: Introduction • The world behind the world | 1 • Powers of context | 8 • Im/mobility across nations | 19 • Violence big and small | 25 • Dead reckoning | 29 Part 1: Outside-‐In Chapter 2 | The Tourist: An Apprehensive Framework • Horror after 9/11 | 42 • The generic image of torture | 45 • Hostel | 52 • Transgression in a world without boundaries | 62 • The porn in torture | 66 Chapter 3 | The Immigrant: Tokyo Gangscapes • Multicultural Japan* | 78 • The curious case of Miike Takashi | 86 • The yakuza film and Dead or Alive | 91 • Marginality and the problem of space | 104 • Dead on arrival | 112 Part 2: Inside-‐Out Chapter 4 | The Terrorist: Bauer Power • “Jack Bauer Justice” | 122 • “Correct” forms of torture | 130 • The indestructible American | 138 • Bauer Power | 147 • Feigned urgency and silent clocks | 155 Chapter 5 | The Diplomat: Outside Matters • A satellite of the Planet Earth | 162 • Between Iraq and a hard place | 171 • Proxy war | 177 • Diplomatic tourism / touristic diplomacy | 183 • The Japan that can say “no” / Conclusion | 193 Coda | 202 Bibliography | 210 Chapter 1 The Productivity of Violence: Introduction “In most situations, what matters politically is who deploys nationality or transnationality, authenticity or hybridity, against whom, and with what relative power and ability to sustain a hegemony.” – James Clifford (10) “[…] humanness is a shifting prerogative.” – Judith Butler (2007: 954) The world behind the world The art piece “Cruel Britannia” by Robert Del Naja (Fig. 1) depicts the blueprint of a jumbo jet whose main cabin is superimposed by the stark, black outline of human figures, crammed tightly and unsympathetically into rows. However, rather than facing uniformly frontward, these passengers lie prone, stacked almost atop each other in an intricate pattern that invokes an unambiguous visual association with a slave ship (Fig. 2). The juxtaposition of imagery captures succinctly the central conceit of this dissertation: that travel and mobility are salient expressions of privilege, freedom, and access for some, but signal oppression, coercion, and victimization for others. Furthermore, the line that separates these vastly uneven mobile experiences – wherein, for some, the engineering marvels of air travel are merely the updated technologies of slave trafficking – is subject to shifting applications of power and therefore not reliably or easily identified. The value Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 2 of mobility – and the value of the person doing the moving – is not consistent, not necessarily. My objective is to explore media figurations of precisely such mobile experiences and of the social zones that give shape and meaning to a diversity of personas that include tourists and terrorists, gangsters and diplomats. In his famous analysis, Arjun Appadurai addresses a contemporary world in which “points of departure and points of arrival are in Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 3 cultural flux, and […] the search for steady points of reference [can] be very difficult” (1996: 44). The “location” of this project lies somewhere in-between these nebulous points of departure and arrival, in those curious zones in which the pervasive mixing and merging of people, culture, and capital confound traditional notions of how nationality is “deployed” (in the Clifford quotation above). In search for a unifying set of principles that unite these mobilities, I consider how human worth is determined at the interstices of culture, commercial entertainment, and politics. Four figures exemplify this potential: the tourist who cannot leave, the terrorist who must be captured, the immigrant who is unable to assimilate, and the diplomat who fights for his home. Such identity formations do not occur in the vacuum of social or political abstraction, but are generated, sustained, and evaluated in accordance with contemporary geopolitics. As a case in point, “Cruel Britannia” is an allusion to the “Cool Britannia” period of the United Kingdom’s pop cultural output in the 1980s and 1990s (see D’Monté); what the piece appears to suggest is that what is fashionable, prosperous, and politically optimistic is wholly interconnected with what is callous and inhumane. This allusion also raises a critical factor: the role of media in the making of nationalism. In this instance, a coordinated and self-conscious effort to market and venerate films, television, and pop music fed the image of a vibrant, cool Britain. Such is media’s ability to not merely reflect the dominant attitudes and social priorities of a particular moment, but to actively construct the common visual, narrative, and thematic vocabularies by which a nation can make sense of its own position in the world. The operative word – globalization – is defined by Anthony McGrew as “an intensification in the levels of interaction, interconnectedness, or interdependence Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 4 between the states and societies which constitute the world community” (23). In managing the sheer scope of this term and what it encompasses, I associate it most with contemporary period of late capitalism and with the economic/political/ideological system known as neoliberalism. This is to disentangle the project from arguments that the internationalization and imperialism of earlier eras were, in effect, phases that have since undergone rapid acceleration in the period of late capitalism (see Hirst and Thompson; Kozul-Wright). On the matter of cultural hybridizations, Renato Rosaldo contends that human cultures contain “no zones of purity, because they undergo continuous processes of transculturation (two-way borrowing and lending between cultures)” (xv); where relevant, I therefore assess the sovereign self-perception of nations as the product of relational histories with other nations (particularly in chapters three and five). However, this is mainly to chronicle the pertinent historical frameworks for an exploration of contemporary topics, less so to separate or study earlier periods of contact between nations as distinctly different global processes. Here, globalization is taken primarily to refer not just to an economic system characterized by the triumph of market liberalism, in which “governments have become the major obstacle for people to have the best and the cheapest from anywhere in the world” (Ohmae 11). Rather, it is taken as the context in which nationalistic backlashes are prompted by human mobility that is presumed to erode the integrity of cultural boundaries. The role of mass media in facilitating the ways people experience “movement” across cultures is a complex one, needless to say. Nowadays, without the prerequisite of travel, we are exposed routinely to a bigger world by global media flows that “sharpen Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 5 ordinary citizens’ awareness of cultural forms which are not primarily theirs” (Wallman 195). Media delivers exotic and foreign cultural forms to users in the familiar spaces of their homes, in what Raymond Williams calls “mobile privatization” (26) or what John Tomlinson calls a “mediated proximity” to faraway locations – verifying that globalization, for most people, is experienced without physical mobility across great distances (150-151). For migrants, such media offer instantaneous connections to their places of origin (Morley 125). And these latter movements of people and media across geographies – what Appadurai calls ethnoscapes and mediascapes, respectively 1 – produce an important nexus for rethinking the possible applications/effects of global media, first by decoupling it from the perceived singular hegemony of Planet America. Whether its effects are felt among the migrating or the idle, global media makes immediate connectivity possible, and this is observed not merely in the patterns of production (or co-production), distribution, and consumption of popular media cultures. User-generated and -uploaded content give rise to creative and entrepreneurial possibilities online. Embodied, perhaps, by a recent book by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, titled Without Their Permission, media’s ability to slip outside “approved” channels comprises one of its fascinating contemporary qualities. Piracy and unauthorized file-sharing on the Internet has flummoxed the entertainment industries, compelling a total transformation in the marketing and distribution of films, television, music, and pornography and spurring attempts at legislative interventions like the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) of 2011. 2 Further, infrastructures of social media has demonstrated true radical potential during periods like the 2009-2010 Iranian presidential elections, when messages sent Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 6 through the social network service Twitter were critical in exposing the violent crackdowns of the Iranian militia against civilian protests (see Kamalipour). Examples like this (subsequently nicknamed) “Twitter Revolution” or the short documentary Kony 2012 (Russell, 2012) – which campaigned to expedite the arrest of African war criminal Joseph Kony and launched a viral following among young adults – demonstrate the human empathy that can be stimulated over long distances by media message-making. As John Thompson notes, global media invites us “to form a view about, even to assume some responsibility for issues and events which take place in distant parts of an interconnected world” (1995: 233; quoted in Morley 183). But media’s relationship/s with global movements encompass a full range of optimistic and pessimistic reverberations. Zygmunt Bauman notes the “‘near-far’ opposition” (1998: 13) of contemporary life, which preserves associations between what is “near” (that is, local and familiar) and what is secure, whilst linking distant peoples and places with danger and trouble. (Global media perpetuates this dynamic, for instance, by reporting faraway conflicts – presented as “spectacles of disasters” [75] – without pointing out the complicity of wealthier nations in the political and economic turmoil that is occurring Someplace Else.) Walter Benjamin famously wrote, “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism” and global travel has similar, dual potentialities. It produces the faceless sweatshop worker and the nameless victim of sex trafficking just as certainly as it makes possible the traveling businessperson, statesman, and exchange student who propel opportunities for economic development, diplomacy, and cultural sharing. After all, does the “Cruel Britannia” Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 7 blueprint depict a commercial airliner masquerading as a slave ship, of a slave ship masquerading as an airliner? The four figures featured in the following chapters together represent the proximity between positively-associated enterprises like tourism and diplomacy and anxiety-inducers like organized crime and terrorism. Carolyn Nordstrom insists upon recognizing activities that operate in non-formal, non-state-sanctioned capacities as economically and politically inseparable from conventional understandings of power. She argues that various “shadow networks” (2003: 327) that control the illicit or illegal flow of goods and practices are too often seen as insulated systems impacting only “a distinct ethical and politico-theoretical domain” (330); rather, such networks should be viewed as overlapping phenomena that cut across national or cultural jurisdictions. Doing so helps our understanding of the contact points between multiple systems on the dark side of the global economy, be they weapons sales, prostitution, illegal immigration, or drug trafficking, or illicit economies within warzones that provide goods and services that embattled state powers cannot (Nordstrom 1997; 1999). Intricately linked and mutually supportive, the fluidity and dynamism of organized crime are central to how modern world is perceived in the work of Susan Strange and Manuel Castells (1996; 1998) and informs the complex power relations of global cities explored by Saskia Sassen. In conceiving of globalization’s menacing underside, I note a final, significant detail of “Cruel Britannia”: its “slaves,” packed atop each other in precise and regulated formation (cruelty at its most economical and efficient), produce the unmistakable shape of an airborne bomb – a human missile comprised of accumulated misery. When we Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 8 speak of the anxieties provoked by the darker dimensions of travel, at issue is not merely a breadth of humanitarian crises calling for a moral response, but also a real threat of abrupt, catastrophic violence. In an obvious allusion to the airliners-turned-bombs that wreaked destruction on the United States on September 11, 2001, the imagery reminds of the sense of urgency with which state powers construe mobility as something that must be monitored and, at times, restricted. And conversely, in visualizing the instrument of destruction as a collection of immobilized bodies, we may come to recognize the human casualties motivating the violence that takes place between those points of departure and arrival. Powers of context The analysis that follows focuses its attention on hegemonic entertainment media, whose complex and often contradictory negotiations of “near” and “far” lurk in the mainstream, hidden in plain sight within popular film and primetime television. Each of the texts explored, while fictional, draw upon topical subject matter or claim inspiration from real-life events relevant to issues of global travel. I argue that, in their adherences to and deviations from the anticipated parameters of genre and format, these media texts shed potential light on the management of contemporary anxieties surrounding the processes and purposes of travel in a global era. In their analysis of film history, Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery argue that any meaningful investigation of the field must make some effort to engage with the economic, social, technological, and aesthetic factors behind the specific text under review (150). Such analyses must incorporate a sufficient look at “that which produced the film on the Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 9 screen, that which brought the audience to the theater, and the process of social representation occurring on the screen within the filmic text,” they write (186). Each of the explored texts reflects the cultural moments of their origins. In situating each within wider discursive “zones” such as genre, contemporary politics, and critical response, I identify connective themes that allow for a theorization of domestic and global mobility and their valences in media discourses. In particular, each text – despite their heterogeneity of content, narratives, and genres – suggest a response to an unresolved and paradoxical attraction to globalization and internationalization and reversion to the security and coherence of nationalism. The scope of the following chapters is narrowed to two national case studies, the United States and Japan. The American context that informs this study is, decidedly, the decade following the terrorism of 9/11/2001. In response to those attacks, the United States Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act the following October, implementing a heightened security apparatus that has since been plagued by controversies over its alleged curtailing of civil liberties and abuses of the powers it bestows unto the State. 3 A retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan in pursuit of the militant Islamic sect Al Qaeda (which claimed responsibility for 9/11) was launched that October as well; the later invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on fraudulent evidence of weapons of mass destruction allegedly in the possession of then-president Saddam Hussein’s regime, cemented a long military enterprise in the Middle East, what David Harvey (2003) has unequivocally called a “new imperialism.” 4 These long-term engagements by the United States constitute key developments in a timeframe and state of juridical exception referred to generally as “post-9/11.” As of this writing, the American military as withdrawn largely from Iraq, Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 10 but its involvement in the affairs of the Middle East continues under President Barrack Obama (paradoxically a wartime president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient) in response to new crises in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and so on. U.S. forces remain to this day in Afghanistan. As Appadurai notes, the devastating strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (and a fourth, failed hijacking in the airspace above Pennsylvania) were remarkable for their choice of targets: they were not some distant embassy or hotel populated by privileged Westerners, but the centermost symbols of American global economic dominance (its Center of World Trade) and the headquarters of its military command. Thus was the inauguration of an era of war defined less by a specific aggressor, but by its declared enemy, the United States of America (2006: 16). As such, a running theme of this analysis will consider how discourses surrounding the War on Terror are tied inextricably to American anxieties about global movement. Social worries over the movements of terrorists extend, for instance, into the topic of illegal immigration, both as a serious matter of policy and as a talking point for hysterical right- wingers warning of “anchor babies” and whatnot. 5 For Wendy Brown, the period of American governance most relevant to this dissertation has been characterized by an overlapping “market-political rationality” of neoliberalism and “moral-political rationality” of neoconservatism. The resulting “impossibility of the Republican Party trying to be both the Party of Moral Values and Party of Big Business” has produced inconsistent foreign policies agendas on a range of security and human rights issues and justifications for inflated military expenditures (2006: 698). This was reflected in the basic preposterousness of the American war Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 11 objective, which included coalition-building through unilateral action and democratization through occupation. Yet, such a knotted foreign policy may be the inescapable expression of America’s assumed stewardship of the global economy and its designs (Chomsky 19-21); according to Michael Dillon (no relation) and Julian Reid, declaring a progressive moral sentiment against war while expanding the reasons and means for waging it is a central and prevailing paradox among liberal political economies. The analysis here considers how this malaise of contradictions spills over into mainstream works of fiction and near-fiction (making apparent the parallels between American military dominance and the magnificent, global reach of Hollywood media). 6 As an example, consider the action thriller The Kingdom (Berg, 2007), in which a team of FBI agents travels to investigate multiple deadly bombings at an American compound in Saudi Arabia. Its narrative of American justice/retribution is nationalistic, to be sure – yet the film is bookended by two remarkable sequences. First, the opening credits are transposed over a compressed history of American ties to Saudi oil production since the 1930s (visualized through a combination of animated graphics and documentary footage), culminating in the attack on the Twin Towers. Second, the final scene cuts between two conversations: in one, the leading FBI agent (Jamie Foxx) is asked about the words of encouragement he had earlier offered a colleague who was distraught by news of the bombings; elsewhere, the young daughter of the villainous bomber recounts his dying words to her upon being killed by the Americans (both exchanges were previously seen, but not heard). From opposite ends of the world, their proclamations are identical: “We’re going to kill them all.” Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 12 In effect, Kingdom is a gung-ho thriller about American heroism framed by sequences that ruminate on the self-injury America inflicts through its participation in endless cycles of violence with the Middle East. This embodies the kind of paradoxical or, to employ an overused term, schizophrenic impulses of mainstream entertainment to wring dramatic nuances out of America’s controversial presence in Iraq (which has been largely unsupported, one presumes, by Hollywood liberals) while still catering to audiences at home. Two chapters of this dissertation draw upon a similar structure to explore cases in which the tangibility of “Americanness” in a global world is configured through encounters with foreign dangers, both in instances of American nationals traveling abroad, and of hostile outsiders coming in. In counter-distinction from this analytical focus on the United States, another two chapters consider nationalistic, often xenophobic, responses to international movement occurring in and through another part of the world, Japan. This selection is informed not only by the unique circumstances of Japan’s social, political, and cultural engagements with globalization, but also because the Japanese experience of internationalism and internationalization is so closely linked to the United States. After World War II, a bilateral alliance was born between Japan the U.S., consisting of mutual extensions of economic and security privileges not accorded to other nations. The continuity of Japan’s political leadership aided the democratic transition under American supervision, exempting key figureheads, including Hirohito, the reigning Emperor Shōwa, from aggressive war crime tribunals. 7 In 1952, the signing of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security resulted in a permanent installation of an American military presence in Japan. 8 Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 13 The bilateral nature of the relationship, historically, has not been characterized by an equilibrium of powers, but is predicated on Japanese cultural subservience to American influence. Naoko Shibusawa argues that this arrangement, from the beginning, was steeped in a gender-political dynamic that situated America in a paternalistic role, “conceiving the bilateral relationship in the mutually reinforcing frameworks of gender and maturity” in which the Japanese were seen “as dependents that needed U.S. guidance and benevolence” (5). 9 Hollywood’s output of film narratives at this time proved a crucial component in streamlining this relationship dynamic; likewise, Christina Klein studies the important role these texts played in the hegemonic construction of Asia vis-à- vis “a national identity for the United States as a global power” (9; explored further in chapter two). Given this historical association, the global hegemony of American military, economic, and cinematic primacy is pivotal in examining what constitutes the “international” or “global” in Japanese society. But the objective here is not to endorse the view that any study of Japan is beholden to prioritizing a binary relationship with the United States, nor to take for granted that Japan-U.S. bilateralism remains a durable framework. Sociologists like T.J. Pempel favor leaving the “analytical ‘cocoon’ of bilateralism” (4) in recognition of how the end of the Cold War and rise of transnational corporatism have produced multilateral strategies for adopting foreign policies outside of this relationship. Similarly, Mike Mochizuki argues that the current climate actually resembles a “trilateral” arrangement between Japan, the U.S., and China, involving a precarious balance that avoids alliances between any two nations if it elbows the third one out. Rather, I am interested in how the perception that this binary is an enduring political and cultural reality continues to Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 14 structure the relational paradigms of national identity in Japan. Claims to a definitive Japanese nationalism, legitimated in large part by the pseudo-scientific assertions of nihonjinron literature seeking to identify and explore exceptional traits of Japanese culture and identity (see Nakane; Doi), are in fact dependent on international models to serve as the basis for comparison. The traditional yakuza film genre, for example, is exemplary of cinema’s negotiation of the tug-of-war between domestic and global sensitivities. Such films featured gangsters whose codes of honor symbolically rebuke the lures of capitalism and the Western values, indicating the symbiosis between American influence on Japanese self-perception (chapter three orients this topic toward derogatory Japanese attitudes about illegal immigrants). The discords undergirding this purportedly mutual and beneficial partnership between nations also pervade Japanese concerns about (and media representations of) national security in the age of global terrorism (see chapter five). Put another way, the contradictory impulses between globalism and nationalism comprise the essence of what Yoshino Kosaku describes as a “secondary nationalism,” a process of “self-otherizing” in which the distinctiveness of Japanese culture is articulated in stark contrast to outside nations. Such a relationship is embedded in the common contention that Japan possesses a unique ability to absorb and adapt foreign influences while still retaining an intact cultural core (see Tobin). Similarly, Marilyn Ivy argues that a prevailing dialectic between being technologically postmodern but culturally pre-modern remains the defining characteristic of Japan today. The domestic/international cultural hybridism of Japan’s recent hegemonic entertainment (see Iwabuchi) is also of interest, after two, perhaps now three decades of Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 15 Japanese media culture’s strong, hegemonic foothold in Western markets. This mixing has been felt in myriad ways, from the influences of Japanese dystopian anime on The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999) to the stream of “J-Horror” remakes in the 2000s, ushered in by the watershed adaptation of The Ring (Gore Verbinski; 2002) from Ringu (Nakata, 1998), itself the first film in a popular Japanese franchise. Most notable, of course, has been the embracing of Japanese animation among American viewers. Anthony Faiola called this peak period of Japanese media popularity Japan’s “Empire of Cool,” which offered “a more neutral, alternative source of entertainment at a time when anti- Americanism [was] running high” (5). My focus is not on such entertainment, which presents a different conundrum when evaluating “Japaneseness” that has fully entered a transnational space of consumption, which has its own set of contradictions and curiosities. Even as Susan Napier surmises that American viewers are attracted to anime’s perceived sophistication and divergence from American cultural values (249-250), Anne Allison notes instances in which American distributors “delete any images or ideas that would directly conjure up [Japan] in the minds of consumers” (70). 10 Referring to what Koichi Iwabuchi has called “culturally odorless products,” Allison argues that “Japanese goods […] circulate in export markets with their origins effaced, leading to the question of whether this diminishes or simply differentiates Japan’s presence in the cultural marketplace of today” (67). Catering in this way to Western audiences by effacing unfamiliar national markers, it would seem, only sustains a media landscape in which “the West [is] to be the center and the norm; and the non-West, peripheral and marginal” (Miyoshi 1991: 113). Instead, I examine Japanese texts that are significantly less visibility in the West, Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 16 yet are wholly legible as mainstream entertainments given their shape by concerns over Japan’s position in the global community and the influences of that community on Japanese policymaking. From the spy thriller Amalfi (a prestigious production commemorating the 50 th anniversary of Japan’s Fuji Television Network) to the crass and violent Dead or Alive (directed by the internationally-renowned filmmaker Miike Takashi but part of a genre that receives little attention outside of Japan), these works have been selected for their self-evident attentiveness to contemporary forms of human mobility. Presented to Japanese audiences through the codes and conventions of genre traditions and given context by specific policy histories, these works reflect their own engagements with how globalization’s moving parts impose unstable definitions of Japanese national identity on contemporary media literary. Of importance to this line of argument is the assumption that genres are productive places for accessing tumultuous social anxieties that disrupt reliable, agreed- upon conceptions of a “nation.” In both the American and Japanese settings under investigation, conflicting doctrines of internationalism and nationalism can be gleaned from genre narratives inspired conspicuously by topical issues of social and political significance to their respective contexts. In his seminal study Film/Genre, Rick Altman puts forth the provocative hypothesis that nations share with genres the function of “facilitating the integration of diverse factions into a single unified social fabric” from which culturally coherent subjectivities can be articulated (195). Altman outlines the multiple functions genres serve: as a blueprint for the film’s production, as a structure for its narrative, as a label to help communicate its content to prospective audiences, and as a contract of expectations with those audiences (14-15). In doing so, he argues, like Allen Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 17 and Gomery above, that the formation of genres is subject to multiple analytical approaches informed by their contexts of production and reception. Here, globalization and human migration form that proposed context, instigating the shifting parameters of genre and nation that coincide across the selected American and Japanese works. In the most concrete terms possible, we might call “genre” a set of textual and aesthetic conventions in storytelling that combine with some degree of awareness on the part of audiences and of filmmakers themselves; the latter are employed by a business regime that benefits from the regulation and categorization of their products. Studies of genre are often concerned with complicating the presumption that genres reference cultural myths that are themselves timeless. To be sure, some stability and historical continuity in genres is presumed – there ought to be some standard by which later deviations can be measured. Thomas Schatz writes that genres contain aspects that remain “static” and essential, while others must be dynamic to ensure longevity over time (1981: 15). However, as Mark Jancovich notes, viewing genres as unchanging and independent of historical processes results in a “tendency to conflate very different forms in a manner which can ignore […] historical change across periods, and differences or struggles within any particular period” (1996: 10). Far from being transhistorical, genre conventions are historically and conceptually unstable and can be counted upon to resist simple and consistent categorizations (Altman 50; Gledhill 64; Jancovich 2000: 470). 11 The malleability of genres includes their splintering into subgenres (Neale 9), the formation of hybrids (Altman 43), and their wide variations are seen not merely between time periods in singular national contexts, but across national cinemas and industries as well (Cherry 3-4). This adaptability of genres Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 18 accounts for its continued viability and the rising or declining popularity of specific genre forms that come in and out of prominence, in what Stephen Neale calls “cycles” (9). Their ability to pick up on shifting contemporaneous attitudes toward social conflicts (Grant 1986; Braudy 109, 179; Schatz 38) make them useful places for studying discourses on national and international politics and social justice. Exploring my materials in relation to the formats and structures that precede them allows me to better discern how these texts dare to make changes to established genres. Some may update their anticipated conventions to meet contemporary topics (chapters two and three), others may revert to more conservative models (chapter four), and still others may displace the main preoccupations of one genre onto another (chapter five). A second area of concern for the following chapters is each film or television program’s depictions of violence. Their visualizations of bodily harm range in their presentations from mild to extremely graphic: some, like Gaikōkan Kuroda Kōsaku, show restraint by electing for suspense over gore, while others, like Hostel and 24, push against existing models for film and television, respectively, through boundary-defying torture and brutality. In genres, “iconography and narrative work together to intensify oppositions and contradictions that exist within a culture, in order to seek imaginary forms of resolution” (Williams 128; see also Neale 16). Bringing these iconographies and narratives of violence to bear on America and Japan’s respective engagements with globalization, I argue, gives some indication of how these texts attempt to resolve those oppositions between the national and the global. Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 19 Im/mobility across nations As the above Judith Butler quotation shows, valuations of humanness are subject to juridical exception or redefinition according the shifting prerogatives of power. The respective American and Japanese media texts here span disparate genres and formats that together serve a particular hypothesis: human movement across boundaries, both in its “legitimate” and “illegitimate” manifestations, brings into focus the paradoxical mechanisms of power that both allow and restrict those movements. Bauman (2000) is explicit in identifying mobility – of information, of culture, of bodies – as the overriding logic of this era characterized by “liquid modernity,” a de-structuring of hierarchies and center-periphery relationships that comprised a bygone “solid modernity.” In his analysis of prison populations, Bauman notes that in a world characterized by the compression of time and space, immobility becomes the “mark of the excluded” (1998: 113). After all, globalization remains a wholly uneven process that affects sectors of the globe in dissimilar ways; the freedoms of mobility at a certain scale apply most to people of privilege (Massey 205; Tomlinson 1999: 132). Further, if this “new exterritoriality of the elite feels like intoxicating freedom, the territoriality of the rest feels less like home ground, and ever more like prison – all the more humiliating for the obtrusive sight of the others’ freedom to move” (Bauman 1998: 23). I expand on this notion by investigating the interrelation between mobility and immobility as a means for studying variations on the global experience. This is not to glamorize or romanticize such freedoms to move by “[endowing] cosmopolitan mobility with a normative dimension” (Cheah 296). One must recognize countless discrepancies “that differentiate the power of mobile and nonmobile subjects” and not presume that Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 20 “transnationality has been liberatory, in both a spatial and political sense, for all peoples” (Ong 1999: 11). It is to posit, quite generally, that the unevenness of mobile opportunities is a determining factor in power’s claims over what we might call “life” itself. Resulting perhaps from an antiquated, anthropological insistence “that the carrier of ‘a culture’ is ‘a people’” (Hannerz 1996: 22-23), the spaces of control claimed by nation-states become sites for wrangling which forms of mobility reinforce which set of priorities. As such, the ability to render immobile is a fundamental expression of power. In contrast, to achieve a sort of combative mobility – the ability to not stay put – may be a potential expression of resistance. The circumstance of a person’s mobility is a prominent axis upon which concepts of national belonging and human worth can pivot radically. The position to determine how those circumstances are coded becomes a valuable tool for cultural sense-making during an era in which borders are eroded by the hegemonic power of multi- and transnational corporatism and affairs of state are superintended by the market-friendly ideology of neoliberalism. For some, this era has come to invoke the seemingly irreversible and totalizing processes of unification under one system of late capitalism. As such, political rhetoric and media punditry among social conservatives commonly begrudge and bemoan the subsuming of (their*) cultural exceptionalism under a single, transnational culture heralding the permanent obsolescence of boundaries. But warnings of a trajectory toward an eventual and predictable end-state have always appeared exaggerated. In reality, the power of nations as the “basis for production and trade seem undiminished” (Mann 1995: 117), and in some cases “appear to be on an upswing” (Hannerz 90). Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 21 And so goes the debate: has neoliberal governance unmoored the nation-state from its authority to demarcate between “domestic” and “foreign?” Harvey defines neoliberalism as a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. (2005: 2) Grounded in an appealing moral philosophy of personal economic liberty, neoliberalism calls for the retraction of state regulatory apparatuses in order to accommodate total market liberalism. From this philosophy has emerged what Linda Weiss calls “state denial,” which presumes “the loss of national autonomy, the powerlessness of governments in the face of transnational capital, the obsolescence of the nation-state as an organizing principle” (2). But this is far from arguing that globalization threatens state power; rather, states adapt to reconcile with economic systems even within a neoliberal philosophy that argues these are mutual exclusive spheres. Weiss notes that the state’s “transformative capacity” (7; Shaw 117) to implement neoliberalization is what most facilitates changes in the economic infrastructures that make neoliberalism possible. Globalization, therefore, is not characterized necessarily by diminishing state power, but by a “highly internationalized economy in which economic integration is being advanced not only by corporations but […] by national governments” (167). States, she argues, “tend to be midwives (even perpetrators), rather than victims, of ‘globalization’” (13). Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 22 Therefore, the study of various “transnational” phenomena is not necessarily at liberty to disregard the national as an anachronistic framework for scholarship. Where possible, critical scholarship tends to resist conceiving of the complex global-local dialectic as a stark opposition between one master narrative of global sameness and the forms of resistance it inspires in various localities (Waters 1995). Within the general framework of globalization, the array of interstices reveal local cultures swept into global circulation as well as global processes adapting themselves to accommodate local circumstances. The well-worn concept of “glocalism” (or “globalocal”), acting locally but thinking globally, now constitutes the modus operandi for entrepreneurial as well as activist efforts. It is also a critical principle for identifying the seeming macro-processes of globalization at local levels, such as the cities that now act as the hubs of economic dynamism and human migration. Appadurai warns that viewing the local as a more tangible, more concrete thing that provides cultural or intellectual stability and security is no longer practical (1996: 54). Yet, despite the quickening of what Rosaldo calls “borrowing and lending” by the processes of global capitalism, the appeal of nations remains paramount (precisely because these points of contact between macro and micro – what this project has put forth as the global and the national – are so imprecise). As Naoki Sakai notes: Globalization is less an invasion of the native community by external forces than the emergence of transnational social conflicts as a result of changing global capitalism. But, many of us still want to construe the changing conditions of our lives in terms of conflicts between the inside of a national community and the Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 23 outside forces invading it. […] It is no wonder that […] virtually everywhere in the world, globalization is accompanied by the turmoil of nationalism!” (199) The imperative of this dissertation is to explore media texts that uphold the imagined nation, even while suggesting a cultural morphing and mutations in response to what David Morley calls “the distribution of the ‘familiar’ and the ‘strange’” in the modern world (10). As Nicos Poulantzas notes, state authority finds expression in its demarcation of educational, institutional or bureaucratic spaces that pattern individual behavior through Michel Foucault’s (1977) notions of “discipline.” By tying these boundaries to the temporal logic of tradition and history, a simultaneous “historicity of a territory and territorialization of a history” is achieved, and the maintenance of a “nation- state” is ensured (2003: 78) against those who do not conform to that social patterning. But discipline itself is negotiable within acceptable parameters; part two of this dissertation presents two figures – terror fighters and patriots in their own ways – who are undisciplined in the “correct” way, knowing when the higher values of a nation come before its institutional limitations in the face of foreign threats. The prospect of such threats – presumed to symbolize a wider, possibly permanent collapse of boundaries – has given rise to spectacular eruptions of nationalism, a retreat to the comfort of nations all laying claim to exceptionalism and uniqueness upon which “fantasies of purity, authenticity, borders, and security can be enacted” (Appadurai 2006: 23; see also Bhabha 1994). Contemporary policymaking, even while enacted under a rhetoric of sensitivity to a global community, can feature the unmistakable portents of jingoism and racism. Samuel Huntington’s hypothesis of a cultural “clash of civilizations,” now, pundits presume, takes the form of global ideological conflict Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 24 between Islamic fundamentalism (known most by the terroristic actions of the Al Qaeda sect), and first-world nations (putatively represented by the United States). As war waged in Iraq, then-President George W. Bush declared in his signature Texas drawl that “We’re fightin’ ‘em over there so we don’t have to fight ‘em over here,” characterizing the conflict as global in scale whilst insisting also on the primacy of defending a specific homeland. Hannerz describes the enduring appeal of nations thusly: This collective past, this ‘ethno-history,’ together with its promise of a future [offers] people above all three deep satisfactions. There is an answer to the problem of personal oblivion; your destiny is with the nation’s future generations. There is also the sense of a national restoration of dignity. If there was a glorious past, there must be a glorious future, and a personal share in that coming renewal. Thirdly, the nation offers the possibility of fraternity. Those living are of one large family. (Hannerz 83) The deliberate rosiness and romanticism with which Hannerz imbues his description is useful in helping us understand the emotional stakes underscoring the faith that the nation must be protected at all costs. Sakai notes that national sovereignty is, by nature, relational and only given meaning in a full international context; fears over globalization’s threats to national sovereignty first require the identification of an “outside” threat to make those claims to sovereignty more coherent. This explains why the scapegoats for globalization’s culturally corrosive properties so often foreigners and immigrants (197) – what David Sibley calls “the generalized other” (9). 12 In her study of violence on the U.S. Mexico borderlands, Rosa Linda Fregoso contends that by insisting Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 25 upon the non-normative or alien behaviors of the victims, states are able to turn a blind eye to the systemic problems of discrimination and the sometimes horrific violence it produces. Tim Cresswell notes the cultural judgments that come with notions of mobility and immobility. The heavy burden of being separated from a home can be viewed as engaging in a nomadism or vagrancy: “Mobility and movement insofar as they undermine attachment and commitment are antithetical to moral worlds,” he writes (15). Likewise, Morley suggests that to be a nomad or vagrant is seen as “a moral if not always criminal offense” (218) by a world that still believes in the sanctity of nations, homes, roots, and cultural stability. The circumstances surrounding mobility, then, can be as a critical a factor in justifying social marginalization as race, gender, and the like. The following chapters take broad looks at mobility across the spectrum of mobile privilege, in which the extent to which characters are deemed antagonistic or threatening (and conversely, deserving of empathy) is tied consistently to the types of movements they engage in. Violence big and small No theory of the state is without some exploration of its unique capacity to produce violence. Max Weber perceived the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (78; quoted in Sarat and Culbert 4). The state’s prerogative in sanctioning or retarding global mobility in order to preserve national sovereignty is predicated on the perception of that mobility as troublesome to the coherence of its system of “insides” and Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 26 “outsides.” It is important to note, however, that state violence need not be overt and muscular, as we may associate with the institutions of the police or military. The quiet violence of structural poverty, disenfranchisement, denial of welfare, and unequal distributions of, opportunities for, and access to fluid identity construction all remain chief byproducts of contemporary neoliberal practices. Harvey (2005) argues persuasively that the political economies of neoliberalism disproportionately redistribute wealth to elite classes through the commodification and privatization of public resources and curtailing of welfare programs. As Noam Chomsky puts it, the power that neoliberalism concentrates among corporate and political elites tends to produce bad economic policies that prove harmful to people but “turn out to be very good ideas for their principle architects” (26; emphasis in original). Neoliberal governmentality, according to Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, entails the balance of being “rhetorically antistatist, [but] adept at the (mis)use of state power in the pursuit of [its] goals” (381). Characterized by governments that initiate the “rollbacks” of state institutions by deregulating the markets, neoliberalism simultaneously “rolls out” other forms of state power in a “purposeful construction and consolidation of neoliberalized state forms, modes of governance, and regulatory relations” (384). In effect, neoliberal states withdraw from regulating some state functions, but enhance their power over others, cleverly extending their reach under the guise of an economic rationale beholden only to the market’s proverbial “invisible hand.” For instance, Naomi Klein’s powerful book The Shock Doctrine identifies in very compelling terms a nefarious “intersection between superprofits and megadisasters” (10), contending that neoliberal policymaking takes advantage of disasters, emergencies, and periods of Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 27 national crises to push through plutocratic legislation that would never be permissible to a more discerning public during times of calm. This dissertation is concerned with the potential for violence to have tremendous clarifying power in demarcating insider from outsider amid the processes of globalization that, by their nature, disregard boundaries. That violence may vary in its purposes, its effects, its nature, and its intensity. At one extreme lies the manifest brutality of physical torture – of beating, cutting, simulated drowning – presented routinely on programs like 24 as a necessary evil to avert the perils that terrorism poses to national security. At another lies the institutionalized discriminations of immigrants and socially unwanted persons (a theme emerging time and again in contemporary Japanese crime films), designed to obstruct civil participation and deny access to services. In all of the cases studied here, violence, whether silent or explosive, serves the purpose of upholding the continuing coherence of the nation-state by engineering social normativity. It does so by selecting which people are included and excluded from the social body and which types of mobility in and out of the nation is undervalued or overvalued. In all cases, the mobilization of state power in the manufacturing of national unity provides an important hypothetical template for understanding institutional responses to undesirable mobility among the “wrong” kinds of people. According to Ong, neoliberal states generate “new economic possibilities, spaces, techniques for governing the population” to manage the diversity of human values produced by global capitalism (2007: 7). In an effect she calls “graduated sovereignty,” the formations of zones characterized by asynchronous legal strata “promote the differential regulation of populations who can be connected to or disconnected from global circuits of capital” (77). Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 28 This brings this introductory chapter back to where it began: a jumbo jet that illustrates the insidious underside to privilege – a world behind the world in which every “zone of purity” is adjacent to a dead zone to which impurity is relegated and the privileges of transit are stacked atop anonymity and economic slavery. The proximity, therefore, between those legitimate and illegitimate bodies, between natives and interlopers, between the sanctioned and unsanctioned, produces the urgency with which the battle lines are drawn. These must often slice through shared cultural spaces (see below) that require some manner of purification if the abominable status of “hybrids and other confusions” (Douglas 66) is to be eradicated from the social body. As Morley states: the process through which, in different contexts, conflict is generated in the process of identity formation by the attempt to expel alterity beyond the boundaries of some ethnically, culturally, or civilizationally purified homogenous enclave, at whatever level of social or geographical scale. In these processes the crucial issue in defining who (or what) “belongs” is, of course, also that of defining who (or what) is to be excluded as “matter out of place,” whether that matter is represented by impure or foreign material objects, persons, or cultural products. (2000: 3) Of concern here is the manners in which violence can recoded as a justifiable, positive development because it contributes to the coherence of a culture: what Appadurai calls the “social productivity of violence” (2006: 7). Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 29 Dead Reckoning The rationale of neoliberal governance and the general condition of globalization, as the argument goes, propels an “opening up” of national cultures to multidirectional networks, un-restraining the circulation of workers to meet market demands. Whatever capacity for violence, big or small, that states retain over such mobile bodies is wholly contingent upon having a territory within which to enact it. Michael Mann argues that theories assuming that territorially-bounded states have been “left behind” by a world characterized by mobility are, in fact, missing the point; the relegation of state control to designated spaces may appear as a limitation to power, but is, in truth, the very source of that power. The state “is essentially an arena, a place” and for the state, power “is the product of the usefulness of enhanced territorial centralization to social life in general” (63). The question of how states contend between legitimacy and illegitimacy, globalism and nationalism, mobility and immobility, is a spatial – or zonal – one. Under this system, efforts to uphold and maintain certain “zones of purity” and myths of cultural exceptionalism is an enduring paradox of the modern nation-state, producing new valuations of bodies that transform the spaces of travel and movement into battlegrounds of life and death. In his analyses of concentration camps, Giorgio Agamben shows that the legitimacy of state violence has deeply spatial and territorial components. Demonstrating that sovereign power is most accurately measured by its ability to suspend juridical norms, Agamben posits that political subjectivity under the modern state resides between the right to exercise one’s rights and the omnipresent potential of having those rights taken abruptly away. Dubbing this modern subject homo sacer – the person who may be Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 30 killed, but whose death may be denied any political significance – he argues that life becomes politicized “through its very capacity to be killed” (89), and this “zone of indistinction” between full political life and “bare life” has deeply spatial consequences with regard to the application of power and how it might physically disperse the bodies of those subjects. Elsewhere, Achille Mbembe writes of the normalizing effects of power’s ability to subject living bodies to states of invisibility and annihilation, a “necropolitics” that can emerge as the natural order of things in a polity. Exercising control over mobility necessitates a space in which to house the politically dead, a separate world the undesirable ones must be made to inhabit if imaginary notions of belong/not belonging are to be maintained. Who is made to reside in these zones? Who is permitted leave? Who is transient? Concurrent with this project’s analysis of im/mobility is an acknowledgement of the special spaces of screen violence that determine when global mobility can be ground to a halt and when it is permitted to continue. More accurately, while some of the images under investigation are grisly, my purpose is not to focus merely on the types of violent acts committed, but on whom they are committed upon, and to what political end. How do these fictitious (though topical) scenarios of violence bring into view the paradoxes by which nation- states regard mobility as both luminous and treacherous? Put another way, a dead zone is a space in which the privileges of mobility are turned on their head and political invisibility and expendability are concretized through detainment, injury, and death. To be caught in a dead zone signifies a cessation of mobility, a making dead of person as a political subject. Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 31 The following media narratives are selected for their potential to offer some clarity into the nature of this relationship, whereas human indignity, in real life, is so often hidden from view, tucked away behind embassy walls and inside secret prisons. Regarding the delegitimizing of some bodies over others, Sibley argues that the very mechanisms of those processes provide the tools for identifying and studying those power structures that erupt around anxieties of social deviancy or alterity: Moral panics bring boundaries into focus by accentuating the differences between the agitated guardians of mainstream values and excluded others. Occasionally, these social cleavages are marked by inversions – those who are usually on the outside occupy the center and the dominant majority are cast in the role of spectators. Inversions can have a role in political protest in the sense that they expose power relations by reversing them, and in the process, raise consciousness of oppression. (43-44) Although Sibley’s mentioning of “spectators” in his study bears no relationship to visual culture or media studies, the metaphor is of immense value here. In studying the visualizations of violence in horror films, Catherine Zimmer argues for the importance of Agamben in evaluating how the value of living beings are rendered ambiguous through the imperatives of the genre narrative. That is, when a particular genre (horror, yakuza, action, spy) revolves around the deaths (often gruesome) of its main characters, such films provide some window into valuations of life/death that we, as spectators, are forced to contend with and contemplate. Here, we encounter the possible productivity of (screen) violence. Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 32 Lastly, a dead zone has another, parochial usage, referring to a geographical area that is unable to receive an electronic signal. Even as advances in mobile technologies and communications shrink our world, these dead zones remain, belying the supposed totality of globalization and reminding us that access to its benefits is wholly non- universal. To cross a dead zone is to experience – however temporarily – a state in which one’s connection to the world is a frustrating series of starts and stops, of alternating movement and stasis. Just as a fussy cell phone tower can suddenly spring to life and restore a lost signal, dead zones are given their meaning in relation to zones of life and the kinds of privileged mobilities that traverse them. Their adjacency to life is what makes them dead – conceptually, if not spatially – and the analysis undertaken here always bears in mind the importance of this relationality and adjacency. Ong’s analysis of “graduated sovereignty” is important here because it notes, just as “Cruel Britannia” does, that the struggle to erect insides and outsides does not occur at the physical borders of the nation-state, but at multiple strata made indistinct by the rampant merging and mixing of globalization. Foucault’s theorization of the “heterotopia” imagines space as inherently dynamic and capable of multiple points of meaning, power, and resistance in a society. 13 The very nature of global fluidity suggests that dead zones can now emerge anywhere, be it the middle of a tourist haven in Bratislava or the Red Light District of Tokyo. These are hybrid, heterotopic spaces in which that which is life- affirming (characterized by mobility, citizenship, economic privilege) and that which is not can come into such direct contact that their boundaries start to blur. The sites of analysis here, therefore, are not the fully necropolitical warzones of West Sudan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Syria, and others in which impoverished peoples are born Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 33 into and trapped by circumstances of horrific, unending conflict. Instead, I wish to concentrate on unanticipated or improvised dead zones, those that coexist with everyday civilian spaces in “graduated” fashion. These are imagined places of oscillation and indeterminacy, wherein nationalistic and internationalistic impulses come into uneasy contact. This is where “Dead Zones” resides: that strange space in which the human facets of globalization and the cultural (and sometimes ethnic) coherence of the nation come into collision. This is not to view internationalism as the preferred alternative to nationalism, or vice versa, but to always think of the global and the local as inseparable and intermutual. With these various paradigms in mind, the following chapters explore fictitious representations of four “zones,” wherein the value of human life (or extent of human threat) pivots on three central topics, to varying degrees: the nature of its mobility across boundaries and whether it is “sanctioned,” the spaces of power in which that “sanctioning” may be tested or restricted, and the collision between ideologies of nationalism and globalism inherent in the assessment of whether that mobility is deemed to be discursively troublesome. Furthermore, each set of narratives present instances of nationalism emerging from its engagement with the global. In part one, I look at two genres that are popular, but often deemed critically disreputable for their lowbrow content and general inclination toward depictions of excessive violence. By drawing upon a chartable history of each genre’s transformations, I am able to identify relevant departures from convention that she light on topical concerns. The Tourist | Chapter two examines portrayals of international tourism that have become a dominant trope of American horror after 9/11, specifically in the genre subset Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 34 that has come to be identified by the derisive moniker “torture porn.” The chapter places particular focus on the successful film Hostel. Surveying critical approaches to the genre’s representations of otherness and difference and the articulation of those differences through encounters with objects of horror, I consider how these contemporary narratives address one of the heated debates orbiting the Bush Administration: the issue of torture and its use on enemy combatants in the War on Terror. In doing so, I argue that such films reflect a distinctly geopolitical variation on past conventions of the horror genre; more accurately, the films, despite presenting tourism as an opportunity for exploration and contact with exotic foreign cultures, also invokes rigid categories of otherness that recall the Cold War politics that gave rise to modern international tourism as we understand it today. By depicting the dangers American tourists face abroad through torture porn’s tropes of abduction and mutilation, the films assert a paradoxical ideology that both criticizes and champions neoconservative fantasies of American geopolitical supremacy. Travel narratives see in torture porn allows us to consider the violence of torture within discourses of mobility, showing that some of the War on Terror’s greatest legal and moral scandals bear discursive similarities to questions of tourism. The Immigrant | Chapter three focuses on another type of mobile identity on the underside of global privilege, the illegal immigrant, by placing him in the specific context of Japan’s yakuza (gangster) underworld and corresponding film genre. An immensely popular staple of Japanese cinema since the 1950s, yakuza films have been conventionally preoccupied with nationalistic themes and recurring iconography that celebrates a continuity of traditional forms and cultural homogeneity. This is most Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 35 significant because of the American presence in postwar Japanese society, economics, and governance at the time these narratives were gaining the most traction among filmgoers. The last two decades, however, have seen an exponential increase in multiethnic representations in the genre, a clear reflection of the growing multiculturalism visible in modern Japan broadly, and in its city centers specifically. By using Miike Takashi’s ultraviolent Dead or Alive as a springboard, I address Japanese immigration policies in tandem with the genre’s history and reigning mythology. I argue that legislation designed to curtail the activities of the yakuza and illegal immigrants have mutually reinforcing social effects, and the genre, traditionally, has assisted in maintaining a façade of normative “Japaneseness” vis-à-vis the international community. Dead or Alive signals a radical shift in these conventions by presenting the complicated status of immigrant/criminals in relation to the broader national body; this approach features an auteur analysis that considers the idiosyncratic qualities that Miike brings to the yakuza film. Chapters two and three constitute consecutive efforts to study representations of movement within the contexts of specific genre traditions and then interweaving that history with a concrete political and/or social backstory. The exploration of torture porn recognizes the contentiousness of international opinion concerning Bush-era U.S. politics and considers how foreign hostility helps to clarify and determine notions of nationality and the presumptions of privilege that come with one’s “Americanness.” In contrast, the analysis of Dead or Alive addresses similar issues, but situates those encounters with foreigners that compel a renegotiation of nationhood within that national space; here, the Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 36 freshly vulnerable notions of national identity manifest not as a something that must be projected and protected abroad, but sustained and made convincing at home. Part two inverts the first section’s study of American international travel/Japanese domestic spaces by focusing on the American homeland and Japanese internationalism. These subsequent chapters move away from film to consider different scales of storytelling afforded by serialized television and trans-media formats, examining not only specific genre histories, but also the discourses that can be gleaned from in-depth analysis of narrative, thematic, and formal elements across multiple television seasons and/or platforms. The respective American and Japanese chapters in this section reference the content explored in the corresponding analyses in section one as bases for comparison. These latter chapters are also to be read in tandem, as they both feature a similar heroic male archetype who comes to embody the nationalistic value systems of their respective countries. The Terrorist | Chapter four returns to the United States to expand upon and reframe the discussion of torture porn featured in chapter two. Dealing once again with the role of torture in post-9/11 American policy, I argue that the popular television program 24 presents detainment and torture as an encounter between the imagined nation of “America” and the stateless, transnationally mobile characteristic of modern terrorism. But rather than spotlight the hypothetical terrorist figure, I reverse perspectives to instead consider the kind of nationalistic body that must be propped up in order to convincingly combat mobile terrorism. I argue this is most demonstrated by the physical and psychic resilience to torture exhibited by the show’s protagonist, counterterrorism agent Jack Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 37 Bauer, which is presented in stark contrast to his enemies, who fold under harsh questioning with near-absolute consistently. Incorporating critical and popular right- and left-wing discourses that emerged during the peak period of the program’s popularity, I interpret 24’s frequently-depicted spaces of torture as not merely sites of interaction between two bodies (torturer and tortured), but as spaces in which opposing ideological frameworks come to collide. This collision, ultimately, serves to produce an American body that symbolizes strength and national unity when faced with an abstract notion of international terror. In pitting the indestructible body of Bauer against the hapless, weaker bodies of his enemies, the program proposes a new model of national identity that stands confidently in the face of a globalism that permits the mobility of “inferior” bodies and doctrines. The Diplomat | Finally, chapter five chronicles the adventures of Kuroda Kōsaku, the foreign diplomat/secret agent/hero of recent espionage thrillers produced in Japan, spanning a unique narrative arc that consists of a television miniseries bookended by two theatrical films, with additional plot materials produced for ancillary home media. This concluding section serves as a counterpoint to the previous one, offering Kuroda as something of a Japanese analogue to Bauer: a super-agent with an incorruptible sense of duty to his country. In contrast also to the types of illicit travel performed by immigrants (explored in chapter three), Kuroda’s diplomatic savvy and skillful navigation of international affairs embodies a kind of ideal mobility for promulgating a fashionable sense of “Japaneseness” overseas. In exploring how international travel and cosmopolitanism are legitimated paradoxically by Japanese nationalism, the chapter takes a different approach from those previous, presenting this mobility as privileged and Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 38 desirable. In his synchronous ability to fight for his country while enjoying the spoils of exotic international travel (which doubles as the vicarious pleasure of the viewing audience), Kuroda’s various assignments epitomize the “right” kind of global mobility – the kind that upholds national boundaries rather than undermine them. However, like Bauer, Kuroda is far from a loyal and unquestioning servant of the state, and frequently acts of his own accord by disobeying the orders of his bureaucratic- minded or politically craven superiors. Kuroda’s insubordination is only ever motivated by a “greater good” which, as circumstances would have it, coincide with actions that assert Japan’s political responsibility and global leadership independent of American influence. As such, his actions represent a projective fantasy of Japanese geopolitical importance and self-determination in an age of globalization and the dangers represented by global terror. NOTES 1 Appadurai describes a total of five facets of global cultural flow that comprise “the building blocks of […] imagined worlds – that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe (33; emphasis in original). They are: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. The sociological notion of the “imaginary,” in Appadurai’s usage, draws from Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communites. John Thompson defines the social imaginary as “the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life” (1984: 6). 2 The tendency among academic perspectives on Internet copyright issuses is to engage the democratic and cultural potentials free expression online. See Vaidhyanathan; MacKinnon; Lessig. 3 The USA PATRIOT Act is an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Interpect and Obstruct Terrorism. Its opponents have called into question the constitutionality of a number of its most controversial components, such as indefinite detention and wiretapping. Key provisions of the PATRIOT Act (including wiretapping) were extended in 2011 by the Obama Administration. For criticisms of the Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 39 PATRIOT Act’s impact on civil liberties and facilitation of a national security state in America, see Brasch; Herman; Cole and Dempsey. 4 For a chronicle of the Bush Administration’s fraudulent case for invading Iraq (no longer the controversial assertion it once was), see Isikoff and Corn. For further criticisms of the mismanaged occupation of Iraq post-‐invasion, see Ricks; the documentary No End in Sight (Ferguson, 2007). 5 For informative works on illegal immigration in America, see Inda; Dowling and Inda. For examples of crazed commenary from conservatives in government, I submit Texas congressman Louie Gohmert and congresswoman Debbie Riddle, who both argued in 2010 of terrorists coming into American to produce anchor babies as part of an elaborate plot to infiltrate American democracy and detroy it from within (respectively, Tacopino; Hu and Smith). 6 There is an array of literature on the symbiotic relationship between media and terrorism. For works exploring the manners in which terrorists exploit media technologies and outlets to maximize their audience, see Bell; Nacos 1996; 2002; Hoffman. For a survey of how terrorism and terrorists have been represented in mainstream Hollywood entertainment, see Vanhala. Insofar as Hollywood depicts terrorists stereotypically as Arabs, see Shaheen. 7 See Dower 1999, especially 277-‐373; 443-‐484. Debates concerning the Emperor’s role in wartime atrocities were reignited upon his death in 1989; on this subject, see Chira; Field. 8 For a summary of the Treaty and its impact on U.S.-‐Japan relations in these 50 years of its implementation, see Packard. 9 In Yoshiko Koshiro’s analysis, the racisms between the U.S. and Japan date back to Japan’s adoption of Western paradigms of racial hierarchization as the social foundation for modernization and overseas imperial expansion. She argues that Japanese racism has firm roots in the West, and cites the pervasive anti-‐Japanese racism in the U.S. – despite the material and psychological investments Japan had made in adopting Western models of finance, education, and social life – as being a primary cause of a political backlash that sent the Japanese into a deeply nationalist trajectory toward Pan-‐Asianism. Japan’s Pan-‐Asianism was, in a sense, a desperate attempt to escape from the cul-‐de-‐ sac of a Japanese modernization bound to a Western paradigm of racial hierarchy. […] Pan-‐Asianism was well-‐nested within the Western version of a worldwide racial hierarchy. Modern Japan’s dualistic racism needed American racism to reinforce the validity of white supremacy, upon which Japan built its own superiority in Asia. Japanese racism also reinforced American racism. (12) If the racial infantalization of the Japanese on the part of the U.S. characterized relations between the two nations, this line of argument also implies that, in some sense, “the U.S. occupation of Japan [preserved] prewar race relations” (218). 10 Allison’s argument is rooted in an analysis of the American popular reception of The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (American broadcast, 1993-‐1995) and Sailor Moon (initial American broadcast, 1995) which were adapted, respectively, from the Japanese live action series Kyōryū Sentai Jūrenjā (1992-‐1993) and Bishōjo Senshi Sērāmūn (1992-‐1997). Allison concludes that the success of Power Rangers is due largely to the decisions of American Dead Zones | The Productivity of Violence | 40 producers to re-‐shoot scenes with American teenagers (and dub English dialogue over costumed sequences), thereby removing virtually every trace of the program’s Japanese origins. Sailor Moon, however, managed only minor changes in addition to its English dubbing, leaving its Japanese settings intact; the series was consequently a commercial failure, though it has attained a cult following. 11 This proclivity is seen in some genres, such as horror (Cherry 3), more than others. 12 Sibley borrows this term from George Herbert Mead’s original use to describe the psychological process of a child’s development of a sense of self. 13 The theorizing of Foucault’s studies – particularly on discipline – as spatial concepts is bolstered by his oft-‐cited Hérodote interview, in which he acknowledged the value in thinking about distributions of power in spatial terms. Part 1: Outside-In Chapter 2 The Tourist: An Apprehensive Framework “Heterotopia: Michel Foucault’s formulation for “sites – in linguistic or physical space – where the incongruous and incommensurable are brought together in tense, unsettling and often transgressive juxtapositions; in shorthand, [a] space of hybridity.” – The Dictionary of Human Geography (336) Heterotopia: Displacement of an organ or part of an organ from its normal anatomical position. – A Dictionary of Biomedicine Horror after 9/11 In the year following the invasion of Iraq by American coalition forces, a B-grade horror flick called Saw (Wan, 2004) opened to great box office success relative to its modest budget. The film’s high-concept premise revolves around the psychopathic killer “Jigsaw,” who engineers elaborate scenarios in which his victims are compelled to perform grisly acts of self-mutilation in order to escape with their lives. Central to the narrative are two men, shackled in a subterranean bathroom and given the Hobson’s choice of severing their feet at the ankles to earn their freedom or remaining there to rot. With a sequel-friendly formula that capitalized on new and increasingly inventive scenarios of bodily violence and mutilation, Saw carried on into six subsequent installments, each released annually at Halloweentime until the series (ahem) lost its legs and came to a close in 2010. 1 Saw’s popularity is credited generally with spearheading a Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 43 spate of horror films – or the glut of such films, depending on your level of affection for this genre – that seemingly overtook mainstream horror narratives for a good several years. It is New York Magazine critic David Edelstein who is credited generally for giving that trend a name: “torture porn.” The critical and academic responses to this “torture direction” in contemporary horror have, perhaps unsurprisingly, presumed some straightforward links to the topical sociopolitical anxieties of its post-9/11 milieu: surveillance, unlawful and indefinite detention, ticking-clock crises (see chapter four), and xenophobia. Put another way, discussions of torture porn are overdetermined by the most controversial aspects of America’s War on Terror. The most notable of these is the Bush Administration’s authorization of – and maneuvers to justify legally – the use of torture on enemy combatants and detainees (Shane). Among numerous other accounts of prisoner abuses at U.S. detention sites like Guantanamo Bay, the 2004 emergence of photographs depicting the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison is likely the best known of these scandals; this series of images, shocking and appalling on a visceral level, became one of the chief visual referents for public debate on the tactical efficacies and moral consequences of torture as an instrument of American wartime policy. 2 According to Arjun Appadurai, the era of globalization and macro-processes has produced “the odd return of the body of the patriot, the martyr, and the sacrificial victim into the spaces of mass violence” (2006: 12). At a time when long-distance drone warfare and black sites have rendered the human costs of war impersonal and unseen, Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 44 these mortifying images of torture serve as salient symbols of what culturally hierarchical violence still looks like. It does not require hoisting Abu Ghraib above countless other scandals orbiting the mismanaged war in Iraq to recognize that these photographs have come to constitute a prominent and accessible iconography for torture, as we visualize it today. The arguably most infamous of these is of a hooded man, standing atop a box with his arms outstretched and wires attached to his genitals, having been warned of electrical jolts if he lowers his arms (in reality, the wires were only to taunt him and carried no electrical charge). This most-circulated image appeared on the covers of numerous books and news magazines, including a May, 2005 issue of The Economist calling explicitly for then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation (Fig. 1). And for those who criticized the American invasion of Iraq as imperial aggression, the unmistakably racial dynamics of white Americans humiliating and violating Arab bodies would serve as a most poignant affirmation of that argument. As such, these images serve as an important referent when linking torture-as- entertainment to the politics of real-life violence and, in this instance, the substantial power dynamics and issues of racial Fig. 1 Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 45 difference that accompany American encounters overseas. Throughout the 2000s, seldom was this more apparent than in the horror genre. The generic image of torture According to Barry Keith Grant, “the experience of horror in the cinema is almost always grounded in the visual representation of difference” (1996: 6). Likewise, Robin Wood argues that the confrontation between otherness and the prevailing norms of Western society (which he calls “bourgeois ideology”) constitutes the “essential subject” of American horror (2002: 32). This basic notion is useful when considering horror, whose multiple subsets and subgenres frustrate efforts to determine a coherent set of parameters. While Paul Wells identifies horror’s “grand narratives” (6-7) – universal societal anxieties legible in horror narratives, seemingly irrespective of cultural differences – horror demonstrates a remarkable heterogeneity of stories and manifestations of the principle figure of “the monster” that figures in each text. As Brigid Cherry notes, the expansion of horror into new categories and hybridizations with other genres accounts for how horror has remained relevant over many generations (8). These difficulties of horror can be seen when evaluating what is and is not considered torture porn, a subgenre with a clear hereditary line to the serial killer/stalker format of “slasher” films popularized initially in the late-1970s and into the 80s, 3 yet particular enough to its cultural moment to warrant its own label. At some undetermined point, the derisive moniker “torture porn” became a marketing designation, applied loosely to narratives containing graphic depictions of violence and partially or wholly framing the critical and popular reception of a wide range of cinema. 4 In addition to Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 46 films about serial killers like The Devil’s Rejects (Zombie, 2005) and The Collector (Dunstan, 2009), these include suspense thrillers like Vacancy (Antal, 2007) and I Know Who Killed Me (Sivertson, 2007); detective thrillers like The Killing Gene (WΔZ; Shankland, 2007) and Untraceable (Hoblit, 2008); and even “serious” fare like the political thriller Unthinkable (Jordan, 2010) and the art film Antichrist (von Trier; 2009). Critics objected to remakes of the controversial 1970s rape-revenge films The Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972 [original]; Iliadis, 2009 [remake]) and I Spit on Your Grave (a.k.a. Day of the Woman; Zarchi, 1978 [original]; Monroe, 2010 [remake]) as torture porn for their seemingly increased fixation on brutality and sadism. 5 Even Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), despite its obvious theological earnestness, has been compared to torture porn for its prolonged sequences of public bloodletting (von Tunzelmann). 6 An attentiveness to ultra-violence and torture has likewise framed the reception of international films as well, notably from the so-called “New French Extreme,” including High Tension (Haute Tension; Aja, 2003), Frontier(s) (Frontière(s); Gens, 2007), and Martyrs (Laugier, 2008), and the “Asian Extreme,” including the yakuza dark comedy Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya Ichi; Miike, 2001) from Japan and the revenge thriller I Saw the Devil (Akmareul Boatda; Kim, 2010) from South Korea. 7 Is there a unifying template with which we can proceed? It is possible to identify what Stephen Neale calls “the generic image” – that is, “labels, terms and expectations which will come to characterize the genre as a whole” (49)? It would be inaccurate to reduce torture porn’s generic image simply to elaborate sequences of torture; after all, diabolical torture contraptions are hardly unfamiliar to non-horror cinema (James Bond, say, has escaped his share). Instead, Catherine Zimmer (2010) notes that, unlike in Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 47 previous cycles of violent films, in the horror genre or otherwise, torture porn relies on the maximum visibility of bodies in excruciating pain. What Zimmer calls the “production of visibility integral to torture as trope” necessarily impacts the films’ narrative constructions around scenarios of torture and the particular mise-en-scène of key sequences. In effect, these films maximize the visceral impact of seeing bodies in pain, aided by special effects whose simulated destruction of the human body seems to be the raison d’être of contemporary horror (Crane 9-10). Compared to the box office underperformance of Hollywood dramas (read: “good” films) that addressed the topic of torture during torture porn’s apex, these horror films are a significant pop cultural iteration with a unique potential to contribute to our growing understandings of torture in our contemporary moment. The full range of political and sometimes allegorical agendas seen in torture porn texts exemplifies this; these visual representations of bodies and their various mutilations, eviscerations, and dismemberments are not reducible to the singular issue of torture any more than the descriptive phrase “post-9/11” can account for the complexities of Bush-era political entanglements. The full range of human consequences totaling the War on Terror are measured in different ways, such as in the grieving families of fallen soldiers, in the increased scrutiny Muslims face from their neighbors, and in the countless Iraqi casualties produced since the invasion in 2003. Likewise, acts of violence-as-entertainment deemed crude, incendiary, or graphic enough to warrant association with torture porn are themselves wide-reaching; the generic image of torture is not about any one thing, but is given its particular nuances by particular social and cultural anxieties, each reflective of our contemporary moment of Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 48 terrorism/security and how its effects are felt unevenly across social and legal strata. Hence, the responses to torture porn’s themes of violence and surveillance are by no means disconnected from a variety of entertainment media concerned with the wellbeing of Americans in a world that feels so obviously unsafe. This chapter proposes one specific framework for examining these films – how does torture porn contend with the topic of tourism and travel in this era of globalization and global danger? The “almost insistently apolitical” Saw films (Zimmer 2011: 84) seldom make identifiable references to real-world events; furthermore, those films lack one component that would soon become one of torture porn’s most salient tropes: a travel narrative. In early 2006, Eli Roth’s Hostel was a financial success, but was met with critical backlash, including the prompting of Edelstein’s first notable use of the moniker “torture porn.” Hostel’s release was as high-profile as Saw’s (until the latter’s multiple sequels came to overshadow the genre) and established an important convention seen frequently in the non-Saw camp of torture pornography: the victimization of tourists (usually American) traveling abroad or in unfamiliar spaces. 8 International travel is central to the storylines of Hostel, Hostel Part 2 (Roth, 2007), and the Hostel-derivative Train (Raff, 2008). Similar elements are also featured in numerous, lesser-known films containing comparable levels of graphic violence or sadism, such as Wolf Creek (Mclean, 2005) from Australia, Turistas (Stockwell, 2006), and Borderland (Berman, 2007). The travel trope is hybridized with a mad scientist narrative in The Human Centipede (Six, 2009) from the Netherlands, supernatural horror in The Ruins (Smith, 2008), and thriller elements in Shuttle (Anderson, 2008) and Transsiberian (Anderson, 2008). 9 Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 49 Torture porn can be seen applying the conventions of horror to depictions of tourists whose mobility and privilege are signified through violence enacted on their flesh. In isolating this sensibility, I argue that the assumed hierarchies of culture and behavior between tourists and their sites of travel (which characterize the traditional power dynamics of tourism) are upended in the victim/victimizer relationships that are repeated in torture porn narratives. Here, the international tourist becomes an avatar for the management of xenophobic anxiety in an age of global violence and anti-Americanism, and by placing the torture trope in proximity to questions of global tourism, such torture porn portrays tourism as essentially violent, or possessing the capacity to facilitate violent encounters. The specific (and unmistakable) context of the Abu Ghraib scandal that underwrites the representations of violence seen in such works make it inevitable that they be linked to broader social and historical traumas of racism and imperialism. Put another way, I posit that the exploitative and colonial characteristics of tourism provide a useful approach to understanding the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in their wider geopolitical significance. To think about recent horror in relation to international tourism is to place an explicit emphasis on national boundaries in determining how otherness and difference are given meaning in these films’ oft-repeated narratives. To be sure, this is merely one line of analysis among those that conceive horror in terms of boundaries – that is, as an unnatural or undesired melding of or encounter between the [familiar/safe/ normative] and the [unfamiliar/ dangerous/deviant] that ultimately produces the object of horror. For Noël Carroll, horror’s monsters are defined by some manner of border-crossing and “are un-natural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of nature” (34); categorical conflict Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 50 distinguishes a monster’s impure or threatening biology (42-52), which in turn produces the affective response among audiences he calls “art-horror.” In effect, horror narratives often depict some manner of movement or trespass across demarcated spatial or social boundaries as the basis for encounters that so often end in corruption or violation. The safe becomes unsafe, the clean becomes toxic, and good must contend with evil. As Paul Wells notes, the object of horror is, at its core, a manifestation of socio- political anxieties simmering beneath a culture. It is a projection of particular threats, fears, and contradictions that refuse coexistence with the prevailing paradigms and consensual orthodoxies of everyday life. The monster may also be perceived as a direct and unfettered expression of the horrors that surround us. (9) Within a genre that houses all manner of the supernatural, the demonic, the abject, the psychotic, and the demonic, Wells argues that the 1960s, influenced by notable works like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), introduced a “fear of other people” as a dominant genre trope (13) and thereby eschewed neat moral separations between good and evil. The emergence of this trope in horror supports the arguments of scholars who, as Matt Hill notes, claim Carroll’s definition of the “monster” neglects to take into account the horrors committed by real people (15; see also Schneider; Freeland; Russell). The travel narratives that pervade torture porn are grounded in a supposed reality in which a fundamental crisis of American national identity is playing out against antagonists who, at best, are skeptical of the supposed moral justifiability of waging a war against terrorism and, at worst, are prepared to assault the American way of life by targeting its citizens. Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 51 Yet these cautionary tales of boundaries that ought not be crossed reveal more complex dimensions than simplistic, racist formulations of white Americans being violated by threatening native Second- and Third-Worlders. In his influential analysis, Wood argues that since the progressive social climate of the 1960s/70s, objects of horror are seen in the dissolution of identifiable binaries between self and other; conservatism in horror, then, can be seen in the reinsertion of binaries along ideological lines. As Christopher Sharrett notes, contemporary horror exhibits a visible neoconservative streak in its “restoration of the Other.” This can be seen in the paradoxical tendency to “reinstitutes gender, class, and racial polarization and subjugation” (255) even as it explores subjects – as torture porn does – that question or condemns the structures that uphold those distinctions. Mark Jancovich proposes approaching horror through the “the position of the victim – the figure under threat” (1992: 118), inverting the focus on the monster. In this chapter, I argue that the prevailing uneasiness toward global travel and transnational mobility apparent in the Hostel films is seen in the blurred distinctions between the victims and monsters of horror. This, in turn, reveals a topical reiteration of paradoxically liberal and conservative geopolitical agendas traceable to the geopolitical circumstances of the Cold War. That is, works like Hostel insist upon acknowledging American complicity in global systems of exploitation, thereby taking the indiscretions of arrogant, horny, and drug-abusing young adults and transposing them onto the figure of the proverbial Ugly American tourist. At the same time, Hostel (and to a similar degree, the series 24, explored in chapter four) reasserts fantasies of American superiority by holding to the premise that torture remains less offensive or ideologically corrupting Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 52 when performed in a manner that upholds certain ideological structures. Hostel (and travel horror like it) therefore present tourist sites as hybrid spaces – the proverbial “heterotopia” that introduces this chapter – both as a zone of contradictory social and legal agendas as well as a space that is inherently abnormal. Hostel Discourses on international tourism and violence are hardly mutually exclusive. Caren Kaplan notes that the figure of the tourist is not historically, politically, nor economically free-floating, and that tourism, as a practice, has a direct but often unacknowledged historical connection to the violence of empire. Imperialism has left edifices and markers of itself the world over, and tourism seeks these markers out. […] Tourism, then, arises out of the economic disasters of other countries that make them “affordable” or subject to “development,” trading upon long-established traditions of cultural and economic hegemony, and, in turn, participating in new versions of hegemonic relations. (63) In short, the very nature of a tourist’s travels is implicated in the construction of center- periphery boundaries that assert and reassert categorical differences between developed and undeveloped worlds (58). Various categories of geopolitical violence – from what Naomi Klein (2007) calls “economic shock therapy” to the history of colonial racism – can be located amidst existing hierarchies and asymmetrical relationships between the national and economic boundaries that characterize international tourism. Discourses on tourism have, traditionally, assumed a structural logic of touristic desire based on power hierarchies between cultural zones. The seminal text The Tourist, Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 53 by Dean MacCannell, for instance, argues that touristic desire results from a binary between the modern and the premodern and that the rise in international tourism parallels anxieties about modern life and tumultuous social differences that structure the experience of modernity. The hypothetical tourist strives to make peace with those differences by juxtaposing them against cultural objects and spaces that are unfamiliar and acutely incompatible with modern life (13). In other words, the search for “authentic” signs of pre- or non-modern culture (or that which can sufficiently be defined as pre- or non-modern) allows the tourist to take those signs as reassurances of the progressive achievements of his own modernity. As Kaplan puts it, tourists typically “want confirmation of reality without acknowledging their role as agents in the construction of reality effects” (61). The structuralist analysis put forth by MacCannell is anachronistic in its argument that the driving logic of touristic desire is “the ideological separation of the modern from the non-modern world” (8). This requires essential definitions of what we categorize as “modern” and “non-modern,” areas not experienced in the same manner by disparate societies. Time and again, David Harvey reminds us of “uneven geographical development,” the fact that geographical variances in the material resources available to different national economies will vary those nations’ historical trajectories toward modern- and post-modernization. To deny these heterogeneous effects is to deny the multitude of contemporary subjectivities across a number of discursive categories: society, religion, nationality, etc. Some of the earlier discourses on the structures of tourism therefore exhibit outdated tendencies to assign sweeping characteristics to the dynamics of tourism. These elide geographically specific relations between sites of Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 54 departure and sites of arrival and risk neglecting the power tourists possess in designating certain sites as “other” or as “exotic” in our historical knowledge of various cultural spaces. 10 And yet this is precisely where a (neo)conservative reinsistence on boundaries threatens to rear its head into the relational reality of tourists and their travel destinations. Hostel makes gestures toward this by weaving the genre’s anticipated levels of hard violence and gratuitous sex with wider concerns pertaining to modern American power in the era of Bush’s geopolitics. 11 The film depicts touristic desire among characters driven by the eroticization and exoticization of foreign lands but not attuned to the hierarchies of power generated and/or sustained by that very kind of cultural and sexual adventurism. Here, then, we see the central paradox of the tourist figure, who possesses the freedom to travel across boundaries to experience the world’s exotic spaces and relies on the cultural hierarchies that legitimate his desires to seek cultural difference. To date, the most astute analysis along these lines comes from Jason Middleton, whose sustained deconstruction of Hostel and its sequel links both films to anxieties of global travel during America’s Middle East invasions and documented prisoner abuses. He concludes that such films oscillate heavily between offering critical reflection of destructive American foreign policies on the one hand and justifying American exceptionalism and vigilantism on the other. That is, the films are in part “an indictment of American culpability” in the forms of violence that emerge in reaction to U.S. military and economic hegemony; yet, their conclusions, in which American protagonists are able to best their tormentors, ultimately reassert the notion that American violence is “the better alternative when faced with the systematic corruption and brutality ‘out there’ in Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 55 foreign nations” (23). My analysis of Hostel below expands on Middleton’s by reframing these apparent ambiguities between liberal and conservative models of American global geopolitics by predating them within broader discourses of tourism. Hostel’s protagonists are Josh and Paxton, college-aged American friends backpacking across Europe; accompanying them is Ollie, an older, Icelandic tourist they have befriended. We learn immediately that the primary purpose of the trip is sex tourism, as they explore the red light districts of Amsterdam. The shy and sensitive Josh has recently suffered a breakup with his girlfriend and Paxton, the more boisterous of the two, encourages him to get over his woes by “banging some new pussy” in Europe. 12 It is entirely significant that the film begins this way in Amsterdam, as Hostel’s structure eventually reveals this to be the “safer” side of Europe: brightly lit, English-speaking, and infinitely accessible to American young adults lured by the promise of legal pot and prostitution. For precisely this reason, however, Josh and Paxton have quickly grown bored with Amsterdam (“Way too many Americans,” Josh complains) and possibly with Western European generally, explaining that they have already passed through France, Switzerland, and Belgium. After being locked out of their hostel for missing its curfew, they have a chance encounter with Alexi, an Eastern European traveler, who invites them to his room. Upon hearing their disappointment that Amsterdam lacks exotic appeal, Alexi plies them with fantastic stories of a hostel outside Bratislava, Slovakia, populated by beautiful and promiscuous women who love entertaining Americans. As evidence, he produces a digital camera and shows off image after image of himself engaged in naked trysts with myriad attractive girls. He tells them: Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 56 You have to go East, my friend. This is where the best girls are. The best. […] You can go as far as Ukraine, around Odessa. But these girls I met at this one hostel in Slovakia, just outside Bratislava. The girls there are so hot you cannot believe it. And they love anyone foreign, especially American. They hear your accent, they fuck you. […] Barcelona, so many Americans. But Slovakia? No one there. There is so much pussy, and because of the war, there are no guys. You go to this hostel, you will have any girl you want. They go crazy for any foreigner. You just take them. This plot point does not develop without a dose of humor. After the two Americans exchange a devious, knowing look, the scene cuts abruptly to a train carrying them East (with Ollie in tow). Their destination, Bratislava, is represented here as derelict, former- Soviet wasteland (actually filmed in the Czech Republic and in no way resembling the modern vibrancy of the real Bratislava) and is populated by cragged, suspicious-looking adults and thieving street children. This depiction, in short, firmly establishes a stark contrast between the spaces of Western and Eastern Europe, their respective degrees of industrial development, and consequent appeal as destinations for tourists. Amidst the dilapidation, however, the three arrive at a lavish hostel bristling with activity; upon locating their room, they meet two beautiful girls – one Russian, the other German – who invite them promptly to hostel’s the on-site spa, where numerous attractive women lounge, topless and completely uninhibited. Flirting is immediate, and after a night of heavily partying, the girls throw themselves at the two Americans for sex. This is the approximate turning point of the film, which until now has proceeded almost like a teen sex comedy. The hostel, we soon learn, is part of an operation run by Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 57 Elite Hunting, a well-funded underground organization that specializes in abducting unsuspecting tourists, then auctioning off the rights to torture and murder them to a high- paying international clientele. Ollie disappears from the film early, and is later revealed to have been decapitated off-screen; Josh, in the Hostel’s first torture “set piece,” is mutilated with various instruments and later seen being disemboweled, post mortem. Paxton is captured last, and through a mix of resourcefulness and dumb luck, he manages to escape first the dank and grimy dungeons of Elite Hunting’s compound, and later the dangerous streets of Bratislava. While making his escape from the compound by stealing a suit and masquerading as a client, Paxton accidentally learns that Elite Hunting determines the base prices for its auction by the victims’ nationalities, with the highest prices reserved for American citizens. The film concludes when he, having safely boarded a train leaving the city, spots the Elite Hunting patron who murdered Josh. In the final scene, Paxton quietly follows him into a men’s room, where he assaults and kills him. 13 According to Middleton, the Hostel films are structured around a series of “reversals,” allowing the film to seemingly contradict its own attitudes on the theme of American exceptionalism running through the narrative. On the one hand, the film appears to condemn American arrogance and sexual exploitation of foreigners; on the other, its ending justifies violent retribution against foreign villainy. The common track is to view Hostel as a topical treatment of post-9/11 xenophobia (this was the immediate interpretation offered by various critics), filtered through the conventions of the slasher film. The film’s paradoxes, however, point to a more complex set of issues pertaining to tourism and what value being an American holds when traveling across the globe. Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 58 Middleton’s observation of these paradoxes hinges heavily on the film’s visual juxtapositions of spaces in which the human body is reduced to a commodity. There is an unmistakable correlation in the visual renderings of the Amsterdam brothel that opens the film and the Elite Hunting compound – the proverbial tourist “trap” in which all of the torture takes place (Figs. 2 and 3). Both feature long corridors flanked by chambers in which customers pay for unrestricted access to another body behind closed doors. At the brothel, the timid Josh foreshadows this correlation by expressing his hesitation about “paying to go into a room to do whatever you want to someone.” This stresses parallels the between the exploitation of sex workers and torture (thus developing a salient link between “torture” and “porn” in ways missing from the decidedly non-sexual nature of the torture featured in the Saw series). The visual contrast between the antiseptic, neon playground of Amsterdam and the dark, blood-soaked facilities run by Elite Hunting portrays similar forms of violence upon bodies across vastly different social spaces. Figs. 2 and 3: The brightly lit Amsterdam brothel (left) and the grimy Elite Hunting torture compound; see similar analysis in Middleton 7. Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 59 The film’s (perhaps pedantic) supposition that paying for sex is, in principle, no different than paying for any another form of bodily exploitation (including torture) correlates to a troublesome paradox in the American use of real torture against Muslims. The detainment of terror suspects is part of the purportedly noble mission of combating terrorism, yet simultaneously reveals the grotesque racism that lurks beneath the urgency of invading the Middle East. Of course, Hostel is not off the hook for perpetuating its own stereotypical imaginings of continental Europe as a land that grows progressively less developed the further one moves Eastward. What is notable in the film, however, is the way in which exploitative sex and appalling violence invoke not only notions of American exceptionalism, but also what the film (self-deprecatingly) portrays as exceptional American ignorance. Josh and Paxton are successfully lured by the promise of women, accepting, without question, that Slovakia, which has experienced no recent armed conflict, has suffered a wartime dip in its male population, leaving behind countless, sexually neglected women for the taking. 14 By linking the predatory sexuality of privileged Americans to their broad and persistent lack of education pertaining to Eastern Europe, the film necessarily invokes American policies of post-Soviet economic shock therapy. The suggestion of American political certitude and sexual assertiveness shares a similar feminizing effect over certain geographical regions contain inescapable references to Cold War power relations. Of course, this bait and switch is precisely what the film’s villains are counting on, preying on the presumed historical ignorance of American college students and pandering to their tacit belief that their nationality will guarantee a consequence-free romp through Eastern Europe, without being culpable in “their role as agents in the construction of reality Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 60 effects.” In the film’s depiction, Americanness (both real and imagined) is produced through its privileged history against an Eastern Europe backdrop whose economic development follows the American victory in the Cold War. This arc, in which the American avatar exhibits dual tendencies of confidence and utter vulnerability on the world stage, is significant to the Eastern Europe setting of the film, which ties the “American” tourist identity to a broader history of Cold War relations. Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism provides a useful study of how our current models for understanding international tourism first became widespread in the United States shortly after WWII, and thus “shared a common material infrastructure” with American geopolitical priorities of the Cold War (106). Klein notes that, under the guise of a benign cultural outreach, American tourists became important agents in a larger project of ensuring that whole populations of newly decolonized nation-states would adopt free-market liberalization. The United States consequently adopted a hybrid foreign policy of the aggressive containment of communism and an attitude of international capitalist integration, wherein the figure of the tourist came to play a crucial role. 15 As such, the history of modern tourism has roots in asymmetrical arrangements of political (and often racial) power, wherein the tourist’s position of privilege coincides with his capitalistic origins that facilitates his travel materially and justifies his travel ideologically. In Hollywood, this climate resulted in an abundance of films set in Asia that preached an ethics of cultural inclusiveness. Klein argues that the didacticism of such narratives encouraged American viewers to regard such foreign encounters as part of a humanitarian project of building bridges across cultural boundaries; this, in turn, Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 61 disguised the geopolitical imperatives of incentivizing or coercing nation-states to ally with the capitalist U.S. “In this vision, America was less a free-standing, armed defender of the world and more a member of a community bound together through emotional bonds,” Klein writes (54). Linking these representations to the mythos of romance and melodrama, Klein calls this a “sentimental framework” – the symbolizing of complex cultural and geopolitical realities in a sentimental (usually a romantic) relationship between two people (always heterosexual) who develop a union despite being cultural opposites. Sentiment and sympathy, in effect, became the prevailing tone of cultural interaction that coded America “as a familiar, legitimate, non-threatening, and beneficial presence in the decolonizing world” (99). The sentimental framework in part helped make palpable to American the dramatic political shift of facing up to its new, post-isolationist reality. Using this model, I suggest that a different breed of geopolitical crisis has found expression in the horror genre after 9/11. Torture porn may be seen as an inverse to Klein’s suppositions, funneling the contradictions of American geopolitics in what we might call, conversely, an apprehensive framework, which codes American policy in terms of dread and distrust. Within a sentimental framework, a traveler may seek to build lasting bridges abroad; in an apprehensive framework, the same traveler expects no such collaboration from foreigners, and proceeds with the assumption that they may intend to do him harm. This is not to argue that the earlier bridges were built without coercion or fear, but that a sentimental framework is buttressed by a warm and fuzzy rhetoric of inclusivity that is no longer sustainable in the decade after 9/11 and its characteristic apprehensions toward global boundary-crossing. Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 62 Klein’s study outlines a liberal/conservative paradox very much at play in the neoliberal/neoconservative binaries that characterize America’s War on Terror and its conflicting agendas (noted in chapter one). In torture porn, an apprehensiveness about the safety of modern American travelers now conveys deep anxieties about the seeming unilateralism of America’s military readiness, which, as Jeremy Scahill notes, views any region of the world as a potential battlefield. This philosophy continues well into the Obama Administration, cementing a basic antagonism between the U.S. and the world’s myriad troubled areas. Yet, far from dividing international encounters along uncomplicated ideological lines – as was reflective of the “with us or against us” rhetoric of the Bush White House – Hostel obscures these lines. While its point of view is invariably American, the film fully exploits the global nature of modern telecommunications and the inextricability of American market ideology in any system that would turn a profit from a global torture enterprise, even one that produces the most inverse geopolitical horror of all: Americans torturing other Americans. In effect, the film depicts the logic of American exceptionalism turned on its head. John and Paxton are first promised women because they are American, only to later find themselves a hot commodity for the same reason, thereby forced to suffer for the privileges of their cultural capital. Transgression in a world without boundaries One of the Hostel’s engaging subtexts in correlating sex tourism and torture tourism is its rendering of the impacts of global capital and information technologies on transnational criminal enterprises. This is pragmatically exemplified most by Hostel Part 2, which devotes much screen time to expounding on the inner workings of Elite Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 63 Hunting’s day-to-day procedures. While the sequel narrative largely follows a similar story arc, this time with a trio of American women as protagonists/victims, a fascinating subplot reveals a sophisticated and global auctioning process: a spectrum of wealthy multinationals – surely, what Leslie Sklair calls the “transnational capitalist class” – intently submit their bids to torture the girls upon seeing their photographs (uploaded to a web server from stolen passports) from their boardrooms, golf courses, estates, and yachts. As Wood outlines of modern American horror, these depictions challenge the conservative perspective that “legitimate” trade relations and communications operate independently of the criminal underworld and its illicit dealings. This interplay of legitimate, avowed functions of state and capital with unseen, criminal ones forces us to acknowledge the inherent dynamisms of hybridized space that can incorporate and normalize such a symbiosis. The juxtaposition of these wealthy bidders – embodiments of capitalist power – with the Elite Hunting’s torture industry (and its real-life analogue, human trafficking) paint a stark picture of a world in which the right to kill has been privatized. Privatized, that is, in a manner that blurs the boundaries between legitimate corporate practices that tout the global fluidity of neoliberal economic expansion and acts of brutality that people cite when listing the hypothetical dangers of travel. This is most seen in the introduction of two crucial characters in Hostel Part 2, two American businessmen who travel to Bratislava after winning an online torture auction. By depicting these men as themselves tourists, Part 2 is mindful of the extent to which touristic participation in the various exploitative economies observed in the film are entirely overlapping phenomena. 16 Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 64 Just as Elaine Scarry notes the etymological root “hos” and its dual ability to expand into the protective language of “hospes” or the violent potential of “hostis,” the film depicts a world in which definitions are indeterminate (44-45; also cited in Murray). The boundaries between hostel and hostile, friend and foe, life and death, are irrevocably blurred. What is significant is the duality of social practices within the imagined space of Bratislava, which exhibits a dialectic between the life-affirming and the life-denying. The geographical placement of the hostel registers as an oasis of cultural mobility and cosmopolitanism within the stereotype of Easter European backwardness; the hostel is also, however, a dead zone within that oasis, wherein tourists seeking pleasures not visible from the crowded paths of conventional tourist attractions are themselves rendered invisible. The initial impression of the hostel is as a singular space defined by friendly comings and goings between travelers who share similar economic values, sexual appetites, and media knowledge. 17 This can, evidently, pivot violently on the duplicitous nature and deleterious effects of global economic power to produce new meanings of travel and mobility. In Hostel, touristic privilege and exploitation, of a particularly American variety, become repurposed toward the horror genre’s engagement with real life paranoia of anti- American violence. In one sense, torture is portrayed as comeuppance for the transgression of boundaries – recycling within its own generic parameters another staple convention of preceding slasher narratives: oversexed, drug-abusing, and generally obnoxious young people being summarily murdered. In Hostel, the characters are punished for wanting to leave the commodified touristic spaces of Western Europe for something more exotic, arrogantly assuming that their mobility and entitlement as tourists Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 65 assures whatever services they expect to access across the world. The tourists here believe their status as Westerners entitles them to travel across indefinite boundaries, and for this reason, they must be immobilized. Their ultimate transgression is failing to realize that their world is not one in which boundaries have disappeared, but in which they have been merely rearranged according to new hierarchies of power. This sensibility is reinforced in Turistas, which involves a group of Western tourists in Brazil. Their bus itinerary stalled, they elect to party at an out-of-the-way cabana… only to later find themselves pursued by clandestine organ thieves. The film concludes on a gag: those who survive the ordeal (several others did not) prepare to board a commercial plane that will finally take them away from the horrors of Brazil and back to America. Upon encountering an American couple bickering nearby about whether to sightsee by plane or by bus, the protagonist interjects: “Take the plane.” In effect, the films become xenophobic cautionary tales not only against unfamiliar places, but also against leaving the secure and economically friendly zones of touristic pleasure. The trope of travel in torture porn wavers between presenting the joys of booze, parties and sex, while at the same time propelling the viewer’s desire not to be excessively adventurous by punishing characters who stray from the rational parameters of tourism. This would appear to be a prominent hypocrisy in a film like Hostel, which has earlier established that the soliciting of prostitutes in Amsterdam is but a variation on the torture of bodies in Bratislava. Ultimately, the film reestablishes a stark comparison between acceptable forms of exploitation: the capitalistic, familiar, Western spaces are coded as “alive,” while venturing away into the unfamiliar spaces is to court death. It is here that the film’s restoration of (neo)conservative boundaries (lines that can be crossed, Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 66 and ought not be crossed) presents itself, in the reintroduction of differences within the hybrid spaces of tourism in which human bodies can be dismantled, paradoxically made hyper-visible just as they are being erased from existence. The porn in torture The previous sections have outlined how inherent paradoxes in the simultaneously internationalist and nationalist policy agendas of the United States are repurposed in torture porn to address a world characterized by the dangers of terrorism. In the sections that remain, I explore how these contradictory tendencies between internationalism and nationalism (seen in Hostel in the representation of American arrogance and later American vigilantism) impact the presentations of victims of torture in our current media landscape. Linda Williams’ landmark study of pornography, Hard Core, identifies the pleasures gained in the act of looking at bodies on the screen and the role of cinema in producing visual knowledge around sexual difference. As a genre that “constructs scenes of torture as elaborate set pieces […] intended to serve as focal points for the viewer’s visual pleasure” (Middleton 2), torture porn appears to operate on a similar register: torture is designed to be seen, not left to the imagination through implication, suggestive editing, or clever mise-en-scène that obscures “the good stuff” that risk outraging the censors and obtaining the commercially deleterious NC-17 rating. Pornography and this visualization of torture are both organized around what Williams calls “the principle of maximum visibility” (Williams 48; emphasis in original) and are linked further by acts of penetrations orchestrated to propel visceral reactions among viewers (arousal in one instance, repulsion in the next). The implication that Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 67 viewers derive pleasures akin to watching pornography from these spectacles of torture is pertinent to the questions of visual knowledge produced by the war effort. Several, interrelated topics concerning the morality of torture, such as the excesses of American imperialism, sexual sadism and homophobia within the military, Islamophobia, and a broad “fear of other people” are all prominently on display in the sadomasochistic tableaus of the Abu Ghraib photographs. The making sense of global travel through narratives of violence bears a relationship to the theoretical notion that the Abu Ghraib images resemble photos purposefully staged for the viewing pleasure of a hypothetical spectator. A number of scholars have taken up the subject of the Abu Ghraib photos’ inherent theatricality (including Butler 2007; Sontag; Esmail-Hudai). Among them, Stephen Eisenman argues that the participating soldiers were, perhaps unconsciously, acting out a long history of cruelty and torture evident in Western artistic traditions. In what he calls “the Abu Ghraib Effect,” he posits that this visual history makes the distinctive iconography of Abu Ghraib intelligible within “ancient habits and expressions of authority and subordination” (99); further, this recognition is precisely what makes these soldiers’ actions seem so petty and banal. The recognizable and familiar qualities of such imagery result in “a moral forgetfulness or even paralysis” (99) that may explain why the public response to the America’s uses of torture has been lackluster and shortsighted, producing no convictions at administrative levels. Notably, Eisenman here echoes the anxieties and discomfort that Edelstein openly proclaims in his column that introduced the phrase “torture porn.” Edelstein’s concern is that cinematic torture – that is, the shaping of torture into a consumable entertainment – Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 68 tempers its horrors and makes us potentially complicit in the general incorporation of illegal torture into our cultural status quo. Really, how does one describe his distaste for sadistic violence without inadvertently glorifying it if lurid, detailed descriptions are necessary to communicate that distaste effectively? As Joel Black argues, a viewer’s reaction to fictional representations of murder “will consist of aesthetic astonishment rather than of moral outrage” (9), sidestepping any serious discussion of the tortures being enacted upon real people in real places. Provocative as these questions may be, it is ultimately predicated on shortsighted assessments of how images of torture (both fictitious and real) may provide insights into our contemporary global culture. When Edelstein bemoans that audiences embrace films like Saw and Hostel, he negates the possibility for diverse engagements with the genre. 18 With regard to the philosophies of horror, Andrew Tudor has argued that Carroll’s thesis fails to consider the different reactions and “particularistic accounts” horror elicits in difference audiences (50). The circumstances in which a piece of media is consumed has great impact on the meanings it generates, and there is misplaced concern here about whether viewers are complicit in torture. These questions come at the expense of asking what kinds of cultural anxieties (or catharsis) the context and details of that torture provides us. 19 Jasbir Puar’s work is very elucidating here, stating that the specific offenses at Abu Ghraib may provide insights into the underlying presumptions of racial and sexual otherness that similarly inform instances of alleged torture at other noteworthy sites, such as Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and numerous invisible prisons reserved for rendition (13). Puar also surmises that the Bush Administrations’ hasty condemnation of rampant torture at Abu Ghraib indicated a level Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 69 of panic regarding not the sadism of the torture itself, but in the sexual nature of that torture. The international embarrassment brought on by the Abu Ghraib incident belied America’s commitment to the noble cause of democracy insofar as “nobility” is equated with heteronormativity – absolutely never the aberrant sexual practices on display in those photographs (14). The challenge is to understand torture porn as a genre attempting to settle American cultural contradictions that I have broadly categorized as being between liberal and conservative camps within discourses of tourism and travel. The violence inherent in the themes of subjugation and eroticization that structures much of the imperial imagination may serve as a rubric for analyzing how similar themes are organized in the horror genre, itself know for its graphic depictions of violence and sex. It is noteworthy, then, that torture porn has been deemed so perverse that a mainstream critic felt pornography was an appropriate analogue to this form of visual spectacle, and the cultural was quick to adopt it. The implicit idea that pleasure akin to sexual arousal – rather than the generic pleasures of terror or disgust associated with horror – was where a line needed to be drawn is of great importance to the production of bodily knowledge and value, as referenced by Williams, through its depiction on the screen. Puar’s assertion that feigned outrage at the sexual nature of the torture at Abu Ghraib amidst widespread evidence of various other abuses (13) is significant to a discussion of torture porn and the deliberately derogatory suggestion that the voyeuristic pleasures gleaned from these films have spilled over into the “pornographic.” Just as sexual torture is where America felt torturers had crossed the line at Abu Ghraib, Edelstein’s discomfort with this new subspecies of horror invokes a sexual vocabulary to illustrate how its pleasures have Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 70 eclipsed those associated traditionally with horror. All of the conflicting positions – guilty, empathy, shock, anger, catharsis – are wrapped up in the erotic dimension of violence and the shifting power relations that produce that eroticism. Within the specific parameters that I have placed on the subject matter, there has not been sufficient engagement with torture iconography in a multifaceted manner befitting of the conditions of what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity” – and, consequently, the mobile consumptive practices of the modern tourist – in which such imagery circulates. In exploring the relevance of tourism to xenophobic allusions (and subsequent nationalistic constructions) in contemporary horror, one notes the remarkable similarity of the staginess of the Abu Ghraib photos to hypothetical snapshots taken by tourists. Puar is clear on this point: One could argue that if there is anything exceptional about these photographs, it is not the actual violence itself but, rather, the capturing of this violence on film, the photographic qualities of which are reminiscent of vacation snapshots, mementos of a good time, victory at last, or even the trophy won at summer camp. Unlike images of the purportedly unavoidable collateral deaths of war, these photos divulge an irrefutable intentionality. (31) In deconstructing such films, we might consider how, configured around the figure of the tourist, such leisure practices and acts of physical violence are implicated within history of ethnographic exoticism that performs a hierarchy of nations and racial otherness. Were the soldiers not behaving essentially as tourists? This is suggested by their joyous posturing, Lynndie England’s infamous thumps-up (Fig. 4), as if they were taking vacation photos made possible by the same lightweight digital cameras any one of Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 71 us would take on your next trip to… wherever. This sensibility of the snapshot, in the era of Internet media and social networking that facilitate their easy dissemination, are a necessary addition to “the growing record of visual cruelties” cited by Eisenman (15) and needs to be taken into account as a primary mode of visual representation immediately traceable to the behaviors of the modern imperial violence. As Christina Klein says, within the sentimental framework the tourist was “an emblem of America’s benign, non- imperial internationalism” (109); within the apprehensive framework, the pictures tell a different story. What we see in films like Hostel is U.S. imperialism struggling to reassert boundaries in order to justify itself through a system of gazes that normalize cultural othering, even if a degree of American ugliness creeps into the frame. This implicates torture porn and other entertainment media into the asymmetrical power relations that comprise tourist economies comprising of conflict and contact points between outsiders and locals. The belief that the U.S. and other powerful nations exist on equal planes of Fig. 4: Former U.S. Army Specialist Lynndie Enland, who was featured prominently in the infamous Abu Ghriab photographs. Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 72 cultural exchange with sites of tourism constitutes an active denial of the asymmetries of power that make such relations possible; this invokes what Mary Louise Pratt calls “anti- conquest,” which she defines as “the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment they assert European hegemony” (7). In effect, touristic anti-conquest may be seen as the perceived political neutrality of consuming another culture whilst ignoring the making of hierarchies that such consumption entails: it is “a way of taking possession without subjugation and violence” (57). Through the narrative tropes of the horror genre, films like Hostel possess no such illusions about the benevolence or neutrality of American footprints around the world. But is does redraw the lines of self-other in geopolitical fashion at time when liberalism and neoliberalism forces new lines to be drawn – a new, post 9/11 method of doing what tourism has done all along. As Zimmer observes in reference to Turistas, the films render “a tremendously projective fantasy – one in which American youth are figured as the victims rather than as perpetrators of this kind of organized violence” (2011: 84). The young American travelers featured in torture porn are always stumbling into preexisting networks of violence in which they are top commodities simply by being hapless. As Americans, they may have grown up in the consumerist culture of the United States, but have not had any direct connection to acts of torture currently identified as American matters of policy. The films demand added suspension of disbelief by portraying shadowy characters indiscriminately nabbing international tourists without raising any eyebrows from tourism boards or international law enforcement; this conceit may be simply a necessary plot contrivance, but fascinates nevertheless in its suggestion that Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 73 certain tourist zones are so overrun with a surplus of touring Westerners that the odd disappearance goes entirely unnoticed. In any case, these young Americans are as guilty as they are blameless, inviting us to wag our fingers at their indiscretions while appreciating their status as victims. Carol Clover gave us the influential thesis that slasher films typically operate on shifting modes of identification, wherein audiences are invited to first cheer on the killer (invariably male, or at least coded so, since the killer’s identity is seldom revealed until late in the narrative) as he attacks his victims. Audiences then reverse their sympathies when the hero – or heroine, in Clover’s identification of the “final girl” – turns the tables on the killer during the blood-soaked climax. Even though Clover posits this argument largely in relation to shifting gender axes, I find it useful in considering the permeability and instability of spectatorial identification in torture porn and how it operates in ways that challenge our relationships to both torturers and victims alike. What is often lost in the task of defining the genre’s narrative and visual conventions is the ethical ambiguities expressed in the very notion of “torture pornography,” a mode of spectatorship that encourage us to seek pleasure in the pain of others. Torture porn represents such issues of violence and torture in explicit tandem with the geographic fluidity of tourism and travel. In doing so, it foregrounds the near- homonyms “tourism” and the “terrorism” of torture that demonstrate the fine line that separates our pleasures from our anxieties with regard to the instabilities of the national under globalization and to the immediate worry of bodily harm in a War on Terror that has produced the prominent iconography of amputated, beheaded, and detonated bodies. The pervasive trope of travel in torture porn indicates is a reversion to older structures in Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 74 which nationality or race can still be reliable markers of hegemonic hierarchies while still acknowledging that global mobility will continue to test and threaten those hierarchies. Despite presenting America’s economic and cultural hegemony as deeply problematic to world affairs, Hostel nevertheless exhibits what Sharrett calls “a scapegoating politics” (262) by proposing “safe” zones of tourism and having the violence take place in spaces outside of those zones. The cathartic qualities of torture porn’s seeming explorations of the deeply troubling legal and moral quagmires of American foreign policies in the Middle East remain safe and controlled, providing what Isabel Pinedo calls a “bounded experience of terror” (1997: 41). What these films appear to contemplate is an inversion of the stakes, wherein the advanced level of access the American tourist has as a citizen of the largest hegemonic power center of globalization and neoliberalization, is what leads to their immobilization, torture and deaths. But as Middleton notes, the stakes are reversed once more, indicating the films’ preferences for depicting the violence of torture as being committed upon American bodies, people who would better ensure their own safety if they remember to remain within the safe zones of American influence. In the past, the logic of tourism as advanced American political objectives of reaching out to other nations while making sure its cards were held close to its chest. By repackaging the visual spectacle of torture along a similar liberal-conservative moral axis in the War on Terror, torture porn maintains certain controls over what pleasures we are to gain from watching torture, when it spills into the pornographic, and what purposes this spillage serves in carving out distinctly American figures amid the chaos of global movement. Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 75 NOTES 1 After the successes of Saw II (Bousman, 2005) and Saw III (2006) proved the series had the staying power of a lasting franchise, new writers were hired to conceive the next three films in tandem; as a result, Saw IV (2007), Saw V (Hackl, 2008), and Saw VI (Greutert, 2009) contain greater degrees of narrative overlap and intertextual referencing than did the previous films. This choice was made to envision a more expansive storyline that now stretches across multiple media – including the video games Saw (2009) and Saw II: Flesh & Blood (2010). Each sequel revisits and complicates past narrative developments; in keeping with the central theme of a jigsaw puzzle, the films thereby play like interlocking pieces, provoking fan-‐community analysis and interpretation of the Saw universe and its clues and details. 2 News concerning the Abu Ghraib torture scandal continued for years, punctuated by revelations that harsh interrogation methods were authorized at senior levels of the military command, apparently even by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (Reuters). In 2006, debate erupted over whether the Obama Administration should block the release of previously unseen photographs documenting further abuse (Spillius). For detailed accounts of the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, see Danner; Greenberg and Dratel; Sands. For literature that addresses Abu Ghraib in the context of broader American policies concerning torture, see Otterman; Harbury. Critically acclaimed documentary features on the subject include Taxi to the Dark Side (Gibney, 2007) and Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, 2008). 3 Vera Dika dates the peak period of slasher cycle between 1978-‐1981, although this largely excludes the subgenre’s longevity in the form of spinoffs and sequels (Cherry 19). Adam Rockoff is more generous, dating the first cycle slashers between 1978-‐1986. 4 In some cases, “torture porn” is a designation the film promotes proudly. For instance, the DVD jacket for Train includes an enthusiastic quotation from an online review: “Takes torture-‐horror to the next level… suspense never looked so good!” (Valkor). 5 The observation here is that these remakes – already controversial during their original releases – were given something of a “torture porn makeover” to meet the new requirements for violence in the post-‐Saw horror landscape, which involves improvised, elaborate, even bizarre methods of slow murder. See online commentary by Snoonian; Moore (on Last House) and by O’Hehir; jmh314 (on I Spit). 6 Recently, film critic Armond White – notorious for taking up contrarian, incendiary opinions in his reviews – has dismissed the critically acclaimed (and, later, Oscar-‐winning) drama 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013) as torture porn that “further accustoms moviegoers to violence and brutality.” Regardless of the validity of his criticisms, the deliberate use of the term “torture porn” here to knock a prestigious film down a peg illustrates its derogatory connotations. 7 On the marketing strategies of the “Asian Extreme” (also discussed briefly in chapter 3), see Dew. Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 76 8 For the purposes of this analysis, the “Saw-‐camp” of torture porn might be described loosely as films in which a maniacal central villain (in the mold of a serial killer or slasher film archetype) subjects characters to literal, strapped-‐to-‐a-‐chair torture. The “Hostel-‐camp” may feature similar elements, but always in the context of international travel or boundary-‐ crossing. 9 Another film that is unlikely to be characterized as torture porn but certainly worthy of mention is the action thriller Taken (Morel, 2008), in which an American ex-‐CIA agent pursues a band of sex traffickers who abduct his daughter while she is vacationing in Paris. The film and its sequel, Taken 2 (Megaton, 2012), appear to reference a similar set of worries about the dangers that await unsuspecting Americans abroad. 10 To this effect, John Urry’s study in The Tourist Gaze is more concrete in its referencing of the “usually enormous inequalities between the visitors and the indigenous population” (58). Urry acknowledges that, because tourists have high expectations for particular experiences that need to met, the local economies of tourist sites must structure their labor force(s) to meet those expectations. Local industries must often “ensure that the service provided by the often relatively poorly paid service workers is appropriate to the almost sacred quality of the visitors’ gaze on some longed-‐for and remarkable tourist site” (66-‐67). 11 In a stroke of auspicious timing, the release of Hostel was preceded a mere couple of months by a bombshell article by Dana Priest in The Washington Post, which wrote of the CIA’s use of “black sites” to conduct illegal interrogations. Priest wrote that several of these sites existed in former Soviet Bloc nations. 12 To those familiar with the genre, this introduction of the characters dives immediately into a recognizable slasher trope, wherein the pursuit of drugs and casual sex is typically what sets up their demise. In this sense the conservatism of 1980s-‐era slasher films can be identified in their use of violence as a metaphorical disapproval of “immoral” behavior (Wells 18; Rockoff 81) or at the very least a cautionary tale for young people (Twitchell). In this regard, Hostel breaks with convention in that the meek and sensitive Josh is dispatched early, while the comparatively brash and hedonistic Paxton is the one who survives; this dynamic may likely have been the reverse in a classical slasher. 13 Hostel thus concludes with the implication that Paxton manages to fully escape after this act of revenge. However, during the opening scene of Hostel Part 2, Paxton, who has been in hiding since returning to the U.S., is tracked down and beheaded by agents of Elite Hunting. This establishes not only the organization’s ruthlessness in eliminating any and all loose ends that may incriminate its operations, but also the global scope of its resourcefulness. 14 American cluelessness about Eastern Europe is a similar object of ridicule in Borat, also released in 2006. Here, performer Sacha Baron Cohen is granted satirical carte blanche in his portrayal of the eponymous Kazakhstani character by the rea-‐life ignorance of his interview subjects, who are unaware that they are participating in a candid camera-‐style comedy. Dead Zones | An Apprehensive Framework | 77 15 Klein outlines how American passport bureaus would distribute pamphlets instructing tourists to speak positively about America and behave in ways becoming of a particular American image while abroad (112-‐113). 16 In Hostel Part 2, Beth, the film’s main protagonist, is abducted in a similar manner as the other characters. However, she is able to gain the upper hand by revealing her own vast, inherited wealth, effectively “out-‐bidding” her would-‐be torturer for the rights to torture and murder him instead, before being allowed to leave the facilities, ironically now as a valued customer. This reversal, as Middleton suggests, perpetuates this contradictory quality of global capital by positing “economic power as both source of the problem, and as imaginary resolution to the problem” (21). 17 This simultaneous foregrounding of cosmopolitan values whilst assuming a hegemonic dominance of American economic and cultural power may be seen in a nod to Quentin Tarantino, also Hostel’s executive producer. In the lobby of the eponymous hostel, patrons can briefly be seen in gathering around a lobby television broadcasting Pulp Fiction (1994), with dubbed dialogue. 18 Edelstein is not the only one to respond in this manner to torture porn. Telegraph film critic Jenny McCartney’s review of Hostel illustrates her contempt for the subject matter with her review title: “Make it Stop” (the review itself, needless to say, is not positive). In addition, the occasionally very sanctimonious Roger Ebert was particularly dismissive of the violence seen in such films as inartistic and grotesque – this is most seen in his reviews for Wolf Creek and Chaos (DeFalco, 2005) and a subsequent op-‐ed on Chaos. The prevailing tone among such critics is that such films have crossed some kind of line into a socially unacceptable place, thereby prolonging a perennial debate about the influences of these violent films on impressionable young people (Wells 23-‐24). 19 In this sense, Eisenman’s argument has a similar problem because it acknowledges a torture industry operating under the auspices of the U.S. military but presumes the nature of the scandal is universal in its applicability. Eisenman frames American torture within the parameters of Western artistic traditions in a manner that curiously neglects the potentially formative influence of more recent images of entertainment violence on the offending soldiers. Why is it not the visual iconography of horror cinema – particularly three decades of slasher film representations – that leaps out as immediate referents for the shocking disregard for human life exhibited here? Or, for that matter, the iconography of hardcore pornography? In principle, it would seem equally as likely that the Abu Ghraib images invokes such imagery when producing the dominance/subjugation binary that Eisenman refers to when he argues for the unique importance of Abu Ghraib within discourses of torture because of its breadth of visual documentation. Chapter 3 The Immigrant: Tokyo Gangscapes “Modern yakuza are so strange, perhaps it only makes sense that the films have become strange as well.” – Ginshi-kai President Tsumura Kazuma (quoted in Suzuki 12; translation mine) “[T]he city environment continuously generates a curious blend of mixophilia and mixophobia.” – Zygmunt Bauman (quoted in Franklin 216) Multicultural Japan* There appears to be no shortage, from any nation, of conservative politicians whose hyperbolic warnings against illegal immigration smack of alarmism and racial provocation. In the case of Japan, there have been numerous instances in which organized crime syndicates, commonly known as the yakuza, are invoked to inflate anti- immigrant rhetoric and generate politically handy arguments for keeping immigration under tight control. Apichai Shipper distills numerous instances in which misleading statistics that reinforce links between foreigners and crime have been cited to “construct a public image of foreigners as ‘dangerous,’ with little connection to real events or social situations” (157; also Friman 973; Komai 104-105). 1 For instance, in 2003, then- National Police Agency Commissioner General Satō Hidehiko issued a statement to the Yomiuri newspaper that “our country’s security problem is factored by juvenile criminals, illegal foreigners, and both of their connections with bōryoku-dan” (literally “violent Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 79 group,” synonymous with yakuza) (July 2003: 38; translation mine). The comments were made in connection to an ongoing investigation of a non-gang affiliated, Japanese-on- Japanese murder; the mention of foreigners and violent groups was gratuitous and inflammatory (Shipper 164). 2 The Japanese debate about immigration takes a similar form as it would any industrialized nation, with conservative and liberal sides in disagreement about whether an influx of outsiders threatens the national body or strengthens its democracy. Despite an imperative among some state officials to make incendiary assertions about Dangerous Foreigners, evidence shows that rising education levels and increased contact with foreigners among Japanese students have actually increased public acceptance of immigrants (Shikama 185). Furthermore, legislation beginning in the early 2000s has decentralized government power and bestowed greater degrees of independence and autonomy to local governments; the effect has been a growing civic participation among foreign residents at local and municipal levels. This would suggest that social and political life in everyday Japan is not framed so overtly by xenophobic attitudes toward outsiders. 3 Likewise, it has become commonplace for younger Japanese filmmakers to depict the matter-of-fact presence of immigrants and non-native ethnics residing in Japan (Schilling 1999: 10). 4 Japanese pop culture’s acknowledgement of its own cultural heterogeneity suggests the market strength of what John Maher calls “metroethnicity,” a form of ethnic hybridity that “circumvents traditional conceptions of ethnic affiliation” in Japanese society (84). In Douglas McGray’s famous commentary, the vibrant cultural mixing produces an appreciable sense of “national cool” that now constitutes the essence Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 80 of Japanese popular culture’s soft power. 5 We are long past the days when Western consumption of Japanese films consisted primarily of its canonical art cinema – the work of Kurosawa Akira or Ozu Yasujirō, for instance – and not its popular cinema, save perhaps the iconic Godzilla (Gojira) series (Williams 54). The yakuza film (or yakuza-eiga), a staple of Japanese commercial cinema, is among these mainstream entertainment genres with increasing minority representations, a trend verified by genre specialists like Mark Schilling (2003). 6 Several memorable yakuza (or otherwise crime-related) films of the past twenty years – from renowned directors like Kitano Takeshi, Sai Yōichi, and Miike Takashi – have been centrally about the ethnic dimensions of gang violence and the struggles of non-Japanese to carve out a sense of identity in the underworld. Such films pose a conundrum for those, like Schilling, who suggest that ethnic presentations in mainstream films are inherently progressive. These film narratives would also seem to reinforce associations between foreigners and organized crime in the public imagination. As a generic imagining of a criminal underworld organized by a “code” of behavior whose primary referent is Japan’s feudal past, the yakuza genre allows my project a unique site in which themes of nationalism play out cinematically, and this particularly contemporary spin on the genre will allow me to situate such representations of immigrants moving and operating within the contested spaces of cities and shantytowns. For Saskia Sassen, cities are the ideal site for engaging the contact points between the global and the transnational because they are the command centers for neoliberal policymaking and also home to its victims. Within networks of exchange in which economies are no longer federal or national, the new scale by which we can understand Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 81 these economic and related social and political processes becomes the city and its surrounding region, entailing a new territorial understanding of the exploitative processes of late capitalism. Arguing that discourses on the global place too much focus on “corporate actors” (1998: xx), Sassen calls for studies of cities that consider “the formation of identities and loyalities among various population segments which do not regard the nation as the sole or principle source of identification and [are open to] new solidarities and notions of membership” (xxx). The dynamic social zones of cities, then, have tremendous potential for arranging human value by determining how people move through them – are they central or marginal, and for what greater purpose? And what role does the genre play in the formations of identities that call to attention the exact locations and functions of lines demarcating the national from the global? Eric Cazdyn’s study of the Japanese film industry in The Flash of Capital identifies three sets of historically over-determined social contradictions endemic to Japanese identity formation. The first of these is the tension between the threat of colonization and simultaneous expansion of colonial territories immediate prior to WWII; the second, between conflicting doctrines of collectivism and individuality in the postwar years. The third – and most germane to my analysis – concerns how global capitalism weakens the nation-state’s rationales for demarcations between inside/outside and domestic/foreign; paradoxically, however, global capitalism is nevertheless sustained by the enduring commercial power of “national narratives and identities [that are] some of the most profitable commodities transnational corporations sell” (8). Contemporary yakuza films reflect these basic contradictions in ways that are instructive in understanding how social marginality is managed at the interstices of illegal Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 82 immigration and organized crime. The yakuza genre’s popularity (especially in its earlier forms) owes to its romanticizing of Japanese traditionalism; yet, this is belied by real-life policies that aim to contain the yakuza, both spatially and culturally, to ensure their exclusion from mainstream constructions of normative “Japaneseness.” Michael Weiner’s phrase “racisms of the interior” describes the stratified social frameworks devised to marginalize the Ainu, burakumin (various social outcasts), and the poor during the Tokugawa era (1600-1867) (1997: 9); his usage of the term is thereby inclusive of anybody deemed exterior to the desired national body. I argue that, in recent history, these “racisms” toward immigrants and the yakuza have shared a telling trait: both groups occupy a paradoxical zone between being part of the social fabric and not part of it. Alleging an overlap in the realities of the yakuza and illegal immigrants helps to maintain a coherent set of parameters for defining Japanese nationalism in this global era. What is at stake in analyzing these yakuza films, then, is a deeper understanding of how the popular culture legitimizes the battle for political recognition among mobile foreign workers and others not tied to normative notions of being Japanese. While many of these films feature the familiar gangster-sociopath type (who makes for an entertaining villain), some, like Kamikaze Taxi (Kamikaze Takushii; Marada, 1995) and the Hong Kong-produced Shinjuku Incident (Shinjuku Inshidento; San suk si gin; Yee, 2009), dramatize how a life of crime emerges from the failures of Japanese institutions to process immigrants humanely. Legal frameworks regarding immigration in Japan illustrate the tensions between an “ideology of cultural and racial homogeneity” and human migration as a reality of global capitalism (Goodman and Peach, et al., 1). Until the 1980s, Japan’s labor productivity was not dependent on unskilled immigrant labor, Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 83 making it unique among the major industrialized nations. This history perpetuates the myth that Japan had closed its doors to immigration until labor shortages and global economic pressures forced them open. 7 According to this narrative, Japanese immigration policy was compelled to soften its restrictions in order to ensure productivity and tax revenues that in turn, met domestic labor demands and kept welfare spending affordable (Shipper 193). With the appreciation of the yen in the 1980s, the admittance of immigrant labor became the inevitable result of the transnationalization of Japanese capital, albeit under strict regulation. 8 Recent Japanese immigration policies, however, are teeming with structural hypocrisies that turn a blind eye to “side-door” policies and loopholes designed to circumvent regulations. 9 Further, an “official insistence on temporariness has made the presence of foreign workers more acceptable to the Japanese public and has relieved the national government of the burden of providing expensive social services to immigrant settlers” (Tsuda and Cornelius 450). Reforms enacted by the Immigration Act of 1990 are most notable for granting residency to Latin Americans of Japanese descent (nikkeijin), given priority status due to their Japanese ethnic lineage. Despite their total cultural and linguistic foreignness, the admittance of nikkeijin would nevertheless help to reinforce a façade of ethnic homogeneity in Japan. 10 Such racialized policy frameworks exemplify the nativist ideology of “‘uniqueness’ and ‘monoculturalism’” that rule the day (McCormack 1997: 3), frustrating the smooth integration of outsiders into the Japanese polity. Linguistic and cultural interactions with the local Japanese are potentially lessened by marginalized immigrant communities that band together to form ethnic enclaves (Sellek 205) – for instance, the Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 84 Nikkei communities concentrated in Ōizumi, the Muslims in Isezaki, the Chinese in Ikebukuro, and the collection of Mainland Asians in Shinjuku. Anxieties about criminal conduct among foreigners in Japan, even while statistically unjustified, are partially reinforced by these geographical demarcations; they are fueled further by the internal racisms of opportunistic conservative officials who claim illegal aliens threaten Japanese society by colluding with organized criminals. 11 This association with the yakuza, in turn, reinforces the social alienation of non-violent illegal immigrants, for whom links to organized crime may be a depressing reflection of their limited economic options (Komai 102-103). This leads one to imagine, as some have argued, that recent incarnations of yakuza films play directly into anxieties about the threats posed by foreigners, making it the de facto genre for expressing a subconscious fear of outsiders among the Japanese (Yamazaki and Fukuma 151). Schilling’s observations about the increasing diversity of contemporary Japanese cinema therefore carry aspirational implications for those concerned about the political recognition of sangokujin – ex-colonial nationals from China, Korea, and Taiwan, many of whose residence in Japan originates from a legacy of forced migration. 12 I argue that these films are not so easily boxed into either progressive or reactionary categories and, in fact, represent a tricky negotiation of depicting social otherness amidst the increasing inescapability of international integration. In searching for some sustainable definition of “Japaneseness” in a global world, the yakuza/crime genre is useful in thinking about the unresolved relationships between nationalism and internationalism that specifically manifest as anxieties about the unrestricted mobility of foreigners. The influential film Swallowtail Butterfly Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 85 (Suwarōteiru; Iwai, 1996) is something of a definitive example here. The film depicts a parallel Japanese society in which the appreciation of the yen has caused a flood of illegal immigration into Japan; we follow the lives of several interconnected characters in the fictitious immigrant ghettos of “Yen Town.” Past films of this genre, many of them set in earlier eras of Japanese modernity, seldom represented Japan’s populations of sangokujin, whose robust underworld factions vied for the real-world black markets after WWII. The fictional political economy of Swallowtail, by contrast, sees a Japan bustling with insiders and outsiders whose conflicting priorities are exasperated by shared geography, but also tempered by shared access to popular culture, notably music. The film concludes on a note of bittersweet optimism that the loss of stable identities in a global world nevertheless produces meaningful alternative cultural and linguistic practices among communities of displaced peoples. Swallowtail and other films like it attempt to take seriously the non-normative experiences of Japanese society and do not hesitate to portray domestic institutions as corrupt, racist, and regressive. 13 But whether films like this motivate genuine civic acceptance of diverse foreign groups is a complicated question. As a case in point, Swallowtail, thought-provoking as it most surely is, is also noteworthy for the backlash it has garnered from academics claiming that the film’s stylistic excesses undercut the authenticity of its message of multicultural coexistence (e.g. Cazdyn 161; Gerow 1998: 9). Scholars have variously accused the film of promoting a kind of “hollow multiculturalism” (Hitchcock) and “cosmetic multiculturalism” (Ko, referencing Morris-Suzuki 2001). Without a doubt, an underlying problem remains here as to whether Japan’s immigrant subjectivities are represented as part of a Japanese social reality, or are merely fodder for Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 86 a touristic fascination with otherness (Yomota 81-84). However, dismissing Swallowtail’s stylistic indulgences in its treatment of ethnic difference fails to consider how the paradoxically sympathetic and superficial presentations of immigrants is precisely how the genre is now negotiating its own mythology. In the yakuza genre, these paradoxical attitudes toward foreigners mirror the simultaneous real life apprehension of and popular fascination with onscreen gangsters. Where genre and stylistic flourishes converge, the immigrant-gangster is made both a human subject and a frivolous demonstration of cool. Through their narratives of turf conflict and gang territoriality, yakuza films seem most suitable for capturing the immigrant experience in relation to city spaces in which the processes globalization can be observed, measured, and analyzed. Their depictions of life in the margins also point to the fragmentations of urban spaces produced by those processes, whether they occur in the fictional slums of “Yen Town” or in Kabuki-chō, Tokyo’s premiere entertainment and red light district and famously a hive of yakuza activity. Further, the violence and self-destructive characters that conventionally feature in gangster films guarantee a persistent state of conflict between the divergent “life-worlds” (Holston and Appadurai 303) of domestic actors and illegal immigrants experiencing globalization “from below.” The genre’s central concerns about honor and nobility among lowlifes suggest a more complex dynamic at work than simplistic pro- or anti-immigrant ideologies. The curious case of Miike Takashi A most crucial person to this discussion is Miike Takashi, the controversial filmmaker and international cult icon whose yakuza narratives frequently depict violent Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 87 conflict between ethnicities. Many of Miike’s films show a fascination with the struggles and experiences of mixed blooded characters living on the fringes in Japan (Sese 58). His works have undoubtedly bolstered a growing worldwide consumption of yakuza films, a distinction he shares with famed director Kitano Takeshi. 14 In Miike’s yakuza films, multicultural encounters shape the underworld and create the bases for entrenched animosities between ethnic groups, much like between warring gangs; irreconcilable cultural differences synchronize, as it were, with gang rivalries. This is not to suggest that the varieties and complexities of Miike’s work can be entirely reduced to genre. However, and as some critics have proposed, yakuza films appear most at the origins of his sensibilities as a director because they allow for a merging of his tendencies toward violence excess and bravado with the confusion and melancholia of ethnic alienation (Shiota 1999: 59). Miike is a filmmaker whose works and international profile exemplify the frictions between Japan’s monocultural myths and its multicultural reality. A remarkably prolific director, Miike has (at the time of this writing) amassed 92 directorial credits since 1991 and works indiscriminantly in television, theatrical film, and Japan’s Original Video (OV; straight-to-video) market, where he got his start as a director. He has gained a significant international following for the graphic violence and trashy sensibilities of many of his films, which have spearheaded the cult popularity of the “extreme” cinema wave of the early 2000s and onwards. Because his filmography is so scattered and versatile on aesthetic, generic, budgetary, narrative, and stylistic grounds, scholars have benefited from work compiled by Tom Mes, whose book Agitator identifies several recurring themes in Miike’s body of work (23-33). To paraphrase and condense Mes’ Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 88 formulations, the films often feature characters who are social outcasts marred by a pervading sense of rootlessness, whether emotional, psychological, cultural, or geographical; at times, the cause of this rootlessness is physical or biological, affected by ethnic or physiological traits. Many of these outcasts struggle to escape their hostile surroundings and, in the process, form strong bonds with other sympathetic characters. Literal and metaphorical family units often play a crucial role in these relationship dynamics. Lastly, the film’s conflicts are frequently resolved through violence – often very brutal. Miike’s films contain provocative representations of otherness that short-circuit neat categorizations and prompt reevaluation of what makes something normatively “Japanese” by thematically and stylistically linking rootless identities to Japanese gang violence (Gerow 2009). Yet his renegade approach to filmmaking has produced Western scholarship that often overlooks serious engagement with the genre traditions he works in; instead, this line of inquiry is subsumed by his reputation as an unconventional auteur, and genre experimentation is simply taken for granted as one of the many symptoms of his radicalism. In what follows, my aim is not to dispute that radicalism, but to argue that even at their most outrageous, Miike’s relevant yakuza works are informed by the parameters of the genre. For instance, the familiar narrative trope of characters seeking “one final score” before leaving their life of crime is a logical match with Miike’s social outcasts and their desire for mobility and escape (Mes 33). Miike’s treatments of genre are outlandish, to be sure; the word “anarchy” appears time and again in press articles struggling to describe his experiments (e.g. Shiota 1998: 55; Shihōda 112; Miike et al, 116). These departures often involve hybridizing Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 89 multiple genres and styles (Shiota 2002: 73; Shihōda 112) – for example, the cyborg- yakuza-comedy Full Metal Yakuza (Furu Metaru Gokudō; 1997). Miike has also developed a reputation for graphic, often misogynistic violence and acts of “deviant” sexual fetishism – such as the sadomasochistic torture in Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya Ichi; 2001). Such traits have polarized responses from critics; American film reviewer Jeff Shannon, for instance, denounces Miike as “a hack auteur” preoccupied with “repulsive misogyny [and] violent shock-mongering.” As a result, Miike’s international fandom rests on an expectation that his films are fundamentally “about” transgressive violence and its relationship to Japanese institutions and social life. 15 However, the assumed importance of transgression to Miike’s authorship has compelled the scholarship around his work to cherry-pick, lauding some films for their perceived artistic or political merit, and ignoring less significant works altogether. 16 As Aaron Gerow notes, attempts to identify a method to Miike’s madness tend to begin with a defense of his most transgressive elements – that, perhaps at their most “anarchic” and tasteless, his films are informed by personal and political meanings (2009: 24-25). Mika Ko argues these features are central to his engagements with multiculturalism in Japanese cinema and the consequent breakup of the Japanese kokutai (national body) ideology. Tony Williams calls Miike’s work a “cinema of outrage” that draws from previous generations of incendiary filmmaking in Japan to respond to a globalizing world. Gerow is comparatively reluctant to assign such decisive readings to Miike’s sensibilities, conceptualizing them as fundamentally “homeless” – a term that ties together the wandering existences of many of his characters, the seeming lack of Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 90 consistency in his stylistic preferences, and his frequent alternation between high- and low-budget productions. Paying heed to the discourses outlined above, Gerow notes that Miike’s films “not only complicate debates on the politics of style in contemporary Japan, but also problematize, albeit sometimes in questionable ways, efforts to place them in polarized oppositions of the popular and the artistic, surface and depth, and the dominant and the alternative” (2009: 32). 17 This general lack of adherence to conventional boundaries makes Miike a compelling figure when considering the representations of social difference that pervade his works. In collapsing so many distinctions, his films not only exemplify the hybridized features of contemporary Japanese popular culture, but also raise questions of how cultural categories – notably between “domestic” and “foreign” – come into contact with each other in Japanese society. That is to say, studying the representations of immigrants in Miike’s yakuza films is not merely to gauge Japanese society’s dominant attitudes toward social identities that may not be undesired, but are certainly not about to vanish; doing so potentially opens up a space for understanding Japan’s particular processes of adapting to the seemingly totalizing forces of globalization. 18 John Clammer argues that the interplay between the foreign and the domestic in Japanese society points to an ongoing maintenance of difference – seen, in his analysis, in various material aspects like food, fashion, architecture, and the like. These are, in effect, manifestations on a smaller scale of processes that erect “conceptual boundaries” and “emotional structures” to assist in organizing society’s notions of self (8-9). They become the basis for setting a wide range of philosophical and social agendas with direct consequences for policies pertaining to Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 91 topics like educational standards or immigration. In this context, efforts to ascertain the essential qualities of “Japaneseness” raise the highly topical subject of identity, both national and individual, that of the cultural politics through which notions of difference (such as questions of ethnicity and minority status) are articulated, and the question of ethics or how arguments about and discourses legitimating or delegitimating ideas of difference are framed and justified. (12) A similar logic of “legitimating and delegitmating difference” against international norms can be seen in yakuza narratives in which lines of battle are drawn along ethnic lines. Such films invite examination of how otherness is classified with regard to the disreputable world of the yakuza and what the recent addition of ethnic characters contributes to those notions of difference. What cultural assumptions about the otherness of immigrants are generated through its specific linkage to the yakuza, whose fictional depictions so often end in violence without rehabilitation or redemption? The yakuza film and Dead or Alive Real modern yakuza descend from peddlers (tekiya) and gamblers (bakutō) that organized into outlaw groups in the mid-eighteenth century. 19 Experts on the subject consistently note the nostalgic associations yakuza have with “noble values that can be traced back to the samurai warriors of feudal Japan” (Kaplan and Dubro 3). In myriad popular theatre, literary, and cinematic traditions, yakuza heroes adhere to strict, hierarchized forms of organization ruled by jingi (a code of honor and clan loyalty) and are wrapped in a Robin Hood-like mythology as social outcasts opposing the injustices of Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 92 power (Raz 36; Satō 1982: 50). But the yakuza are not a bygone, fictitious class of criminals, having for decades exerted real political power within the Japanese government and have done it openly (unlike Western mafia groups, which operate in secret). David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro’s expansive English-language work on the subject draws parallels between the modern yakuza and modern Japan itself. Much as the economic miracle has determined Japanese trade power on the world stage, so to have the yakuza developed a global crime infrastructure of arms, drug, sex, and human trafficking. 20 Specific traits of the yakuza film’s postwar history and corresponding social trends provide the context for understanding the diasporic mob identities that feature in contemporary works. The genre’s relationship to codes of social normativity is important for understanding the political significance of immigrant identities becoming entangled with yakuza violence. In the seminal essay “On Chivalry” (“Ninkyō ni Tsuite”; translation mine), Satō Tadao argues that the postwar yakuza plays to the viewer’s distrust of state power and desire to be free of its constraints in favor of pursuing the romanticism of nomadism and adventure. At the same time, however, the viewer remains beholden to the belief that society’s laws must be upheld, labor strikes must be avoided, and the police must be obeyed (73). There is, therefore, a tacit acceptance on the viewer’s part that the price a yakuza pays for his nonconformity is an eternal loneliness as a social outcast. What Satō calls the loveable yakuza – or, more accurately, the yakuza who ought to be loved (“aisubeki yakuza”) – is admired for resisting the status quo, but in doing so is relegated to life in the margins. Consequently, Satō argues, yakuza film spectatorship Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 93 operates on a moral relativism that makes it serviceable to both conservative and liberal ideologies. This explains the genre’s popularity among right-wing nationalists as well as left-wing groups whose anti-capitalist positions merged with increasing anti- Americanism in the wake of the Vietnam War. 21 The presence of immigrants and foreigners in several of Miike’s films fits this mold, pointing to both progressive desires for interconnectedness with a world community as well as to reactionary fears of encroachment and contamination from the outside (Ko 59). From before the cult popularity of Audition (Ōdishon; 1999) launched Miike into international stardom, such themes were already at work in a number of his films throughout the 1990s. 22 One particular film, Dead or Alive (Deddo oa Araibu: Hanzaisha; 1999; henceforth DOA), has been cited by reviewers for being most exemplary of the “Miike Brand” for its divergences from accepted conventions (Tanobe 76) and normalization of levels of perversity well beyond what spectators expect from the genre (Natsuhara 173-174). DOA is an inventive variation on the yakuza film that melds Miike’s ethnic awareness with pervasive formal experimentation and manga/anime- inspired bombast. 23 In brief, the film begins with multiple simultaneous assassinations across Kabuki-chō. Ryū (Takeuchi Riki), who leads a band of descendants of zanryū-koji (Japanese orphans left behind in China after WWII), has initiated a turf war to muscle his way into the underworld drug trade. 24 This prompts an investigation by Jōjima (Aikawa Shō), a jaded detective who eventually abandons his professional duties to track down Ryū, resulting – in standard genre fashion – in a final showdown between cop and gangster. 25 Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 94 On the one hand, there are numerous elements in DOA that signal Miike’s peculiar departures from the genre. Scholars typically make this argument by referring to the film’s stylized and graphic opening sequence, which reinforces Miike’s reputation for provocation and political incorrectness. In the very first shot, Jōjima and Ryū, the film’s respective protagonist and antagonist, squat by the ground in an unidentified bayside spot and look into the camera (Fig. 1). Drolly, they count out “one, two, three four,” as if counting down to the start of a rock song. On cue, the film’s title hits the screen, accompanied by pulsing rock and roll audio. Playing without further credits, the first sequence is a barrage of sex, drug use, and absurdist violence strung together loosely by Ryū’s coordinated murders: a naked prostitute is thrown off a high rise; a man has his throat slit while sodomizing another man in a filthy bathroom; a mob boss is ambushed in the middle of a king-size ramen dinner, with shotgun blasts spilling the still-digesting noodles out of his belly and toward Fig. 1: DOA’s opening shot. Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 95 the camera. The film’s irreverent tone is further punctuated here by conspicuous formal techniques, such as alternating jump cuts and slow motion. Even the film’s crew members – some of them longtime Miike collaborators – have spoken of being baffled by some of the director’s outlandish creative decisions (Miike, et al. 174; 180-181). On the other hand, as much as DOA’s uniqueness (even among contemporary genre films with similar themes) suggests Miike’s singular authorial vision at work, it is not entirely divergent from the genre’s history of negotiating social difference. The most comprehensive surveys of the yakuza film typically focus on the 1960s, commonly cited as Japanese cinema’s “Golden Age” (e.g. McDonald, Watanabe; Shiba and Aoyama; Schilling 2003). Keiko McDonald’s expository essay “The Yakuza Film: An Introduction” outlines the context for the genre’s immense popularity at this time, noting that the yakuza protagonist of prewar films – a lone wolf/vagabond archetype who is forced into a life of crime – underwent a makeover in response to Japan’s rising postwar prosperity (170). By the 1950s, the romanticism of the screen yakuza’s Robin Hood-like mythology was revitalized by Japanese cinema’s “enthusiastic return to the jidai-geki (period film) in response to the American occupation’s ban on feudal tales being lifted. The public was hungry for this source of cultural continuity, and a new type of yakuza emerged to satisfy new needs” (173). In being updated from its feudal roots, the genre reflected the social concerns of newly democratized postwar Japan. National policy agendas like Prime Minster Yoshida Shigeru’s eponymous Yoshida Doctrine, which prioritized Japan’s economic recovery above all other public concerns, “increasingly became associated with the idea that individuals needed to subjugate their individual desires to the national good” (Goodman Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 96 and Peach, et al. 2). According to Cazdyn, Japan’s very stability in this era necessitated that [t]he individual must be rethought, fleshed out, constructed, fostered so as to prevent a future breakdown in civil society and lack of popular accountability. A sense of self – of one’s capacity and legitimacy to act as an individual and to intervene against the state and collective opinion – was crucial to keep the nation from ever being hijacked again. At the same time, an emphasis on the collective and the nation (not too dissimilar in logic to the discourse promoted during the war) threatened to trump the individual. The individual must be sacrificed, must give himself or herself over to the occupation and the reconstruction project. Perseverance and the suppression of one’s desires was the order of the day. (6) At that time, genre’s popularity revealed ambivalence toward a new era of individuality and its uncertain impact on notions of community and tradition (Watanabe 10). As Katō Kenji argues, the genre depicted morality – wherein notions of right and wrong are not necessarily analogous to being legal or illegal – through the strain a protagonist’s selfish conduct would place on his community (94). Yakuza characters of the period consequently engage in “a kind of moral territorial war” that allegorizes postwar tensions between traditional forms and a new politics of democratization and international capitalist integration (McDonald 174). As such, a crisis of national identity brought on by the perception of corrosive foreign influences is not merely a modern response to globalization. It is, in fact, central to the genre’s value system. Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 97 This interpretation is reinforced by Isolde Standish, who likens the violence between individuals in such films to power struggles between differing ideologies over the social and political character of postwar Japan: These 1960s yakuza films […] can be analyzed as sites where academic nihonjinron discourses are fictionalized in popular form. Contestation is reflected in the film as struggles, not as in western Hollywood dramas between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ per se, but between competing organizations or factions which are cast in either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ roles depending on their commitments to tradition.” (167) This explicitly ideological dynamic served a sense of national identity that “called for virtues such as charismatic leadership, group loyalty, and social harmony” (McDonald 174). A celebration of Japanese traditionalism can be seen in the genre’s iconography, which symbolized Westernization’s seeming lethal effects on tradition. For instance, “good” yakuza – those who selflessly chose “individual sacrifice for social preservation” (Barrett 76) – wore traditional garbs and used a sword in battle. The “bad” ones wore slick Western suits and carried “dishonorable” weapons, like pistols. 26 If these delineations of yakuza heroism seem anachronistic in the era of films like DOA, it is partially because the genre has departed from these dominant codes of representation except in the most nostalgic instances. Within a decade of its initial popularity, the yakuza genre became further ghettoized from its B-level status within the industry (Nishiwaki 21). The repetition of its allegorical narratives gradually became stale among audiences who grew tired of their predetermined patterns. Industrial factors contributed to this decline, too; rising competition from Hollywood and television Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 98 precipitated the decline of the film industry, whose survival became dependent largely on schlocky exploitation flicks and soft-core pornography, known as “pink films” (pinku- eiga). The idealism and romanticism of the genre simply died away (22). In response to the waning enthusiasm of jaded audiences, a new spate of yakuza films would feature an alternative, low-budget style. Nicknamed the jitsuroku (“authentic recording”) phase of the genre, this generation of films was heavily influenced by cinéma vérité, representing a “radical shift in pattern from idealism to realism” in the yakuza genre’s stylistic priorities (McDonald 189). The films utilized hand-held cameras, were shot in real locations that gave them a gritty authenticity, and were accompanied by narration that chronicled the events in documentary-like fashion. The most iconic of these films, Fukasaku Kinji’s Battles without Honor and Humanity (Jingi naki Tatakai; 1974), shows the political economy of yakuza organizations without deference to romantic or nostalgic notions of the yakuza selflessly defending the weak. These yakuza are conceited, petty, and small-minded; their acts of violence are graceless and clumsy, and assassination attempts mostly consist of firing weapons blindly in panic. Fukasaku’s works (and many films influenced by them) are intensely critical of Japanese institutions. Further, they cynically depict a “radical transformation of the yakuza life […] marked by an obviously symbolic growth in the power and purpose of money. Bribery is the lifeblood of this style of gangsterism, which has lost touch entirely with the group and community values of traditional jingi” (185). Characters are manipulated and betrayed and their deaths bear no relation to the codes of honor that defined yakuza screen masculinity for a generation (Yamane 14-15). In spectacular fashion, Kitano’s recent yakuza drama Outrage (Autoreiji; 2010) and its sequel, Beyond Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 99 Outrage (Autoreiji Biyondo; 2012) depicts the political snakepit of modern yakuza hierarchies. Here, the bosses of rival families conspire to usurp each other by instigating a complex proxy war among their henchmen. Among them is Kitano’s character, a mid- level foot soldier who is duty-bound to follow orders but comes to realize the endless cycle of violent retaliation between factions is at the orchestration of bosses engaged in slimy power struggles having nothing to do with honor or loyalty. Leaders are exceptionally cavalier about their lives of their men, betrayal is second-nature, and characters are killed off, not as comeuppance for their actions, but because they represent someone else’s “loose end” and must be eliminated. Outrage also acknowledges the international spheres of influence that make up the modern world of the yakuza, featuring business-oriented henchmen who put their fluency in English to good use when roping non-Japanese clientele into their extortion schemes. This cynical turn in the genre’s history is an important precursor to what we see in DOA. Without jingi, there remains no question as to whether an ambitious yakuza would choose self-sacrifice over personal gain. Miike’s characters are themselves rarely loyal to these outdated codes of morality. What is fascinating is how Miike communicates this mounting distrust of yakuza romanticism through the narrative and formal constructions of his film, accomplished in two ways considered by this essay. First, DOA’s dynamic formal representations of immigrants have the effect of making its Japanese characters and institutions seem emotionally and existentially sterile by comparison. Second, the film depicts geographic spaces as the metaphorical battlegrounds between social and institutional attitudes toward immigrant-gangsters. Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 100 While scholars note Miike’s thematic preoccupations with characters hoping to mend family ties, they seldom consider how those ties refer back to the structures of the genre. For instance, DOA takes the familiar narrative of a detective whose obsession with the criminal he is pursuing becomes detrimental to his home life. Jōjima’s existential numbness is such that when he inadvertently discovers that his wife may be having an affair, his response is not to display jealously, guilt, or anger, but to take in the news with the same matter-of-factness that governs his professional life; it is as if the social Darwinism of gang warfare leads him to accept his status as simply an unfit husband being replaced by a superior alternative. The traditional hero’s dilemma seen in Japanese cinema – between honoring his giri (“obligation”) versus his ninjō (“human desire”) – typically rests on delineations between duty to one’s family and personal ambition. Jōjima’s character arc is muddled by the near-simultaneous dissolution of his professional family (the death of his partner) and his literal one (the death of his wife and daughter), which occur in such quick succession that it is assumed his vigilantism in the final act is in response to both events. Because only after the erasure of Jōjima’s institutional and familial loyalties is he propelled to hunt his nemesis down, his actions are not counterbalanced by the community values that, in previous generations, had buttressed even the most vengeful antiheroes with moral accountability. Miike’s chooses to depict the sudden death of Jōjima’s wife and daughter in an unceremonious long shot: Jōjima, unaware that there is a bomb (presumably meant for him) under his car, watches from afar as the vehicle bursts into flames with his wife and daughter inside. However, the scene does not continue long enough to register his reaction – in fact, it cuts immediately to Jōjima returning from the funeral and later Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 101 resigning from the police force. The construction of this sequence of shots dulls the impact of his grief, or perhaps reinforces the emotional aloofness he displays throughout the film. Why does Miike kill off Jōjima’s family in such a perfunctory manner? By treating them as pro forma ingredients of a genre narrative, he seems to lampoon the earnestness with which devotion to family grounds the morality of an outmoded genre mythology. Jōjima is earlier seen taking professionally unethical steps to raise funds for his daughter’s medical bills, but there is no evidence that his actions are the result of hard-fought internal conflicts between his personal and professional obligations, as may have been the case among his genre predecessors. It is in the Ryū narrative, however, that Miike’s presentations of immigrants makes possible a conversation about Japanese society’s relationship to its minority population and to multiculturalism generally. As Jōjima’s life comes crashing down, Ryū also experiences the collapse of his gang family, signified most by the death of his younger brother, Tōji (Kashiwaya Michisuke), who is stuck by a bullet when intervening in a shootout to protect Ryū. Ryū’s ambitions to burrow into the drug trade are at odds with his desire to shield Tōji from a life of crime. That Tōji would die violently is hardly a surprising plot development for the genre, in which the death of a loved one crops up frequently to signify the spiritual downfall of a main character. However, the ethnic inflection of this familiar convention is intriguing. Tōji has spent time abroad as a university student, enjoys his studies, and insists that immigrants can excel in their host society. Naturally, he becomes distraught to learn that Ryū has been financing his education with illicit money. The two brothers thereby personify opposite poles of the discourses surrounding illegal immigration – on the one hand, progressive arguments Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 102 favor the societal contributions of immigrants like Tōji and advocate their access to society’s benefits and protections; on the other, conservative arguments worry about the rampant lawlessness symbolized by men like Ryū. In this sense, then, Tōji’s demise signals the difficulties of reconciling two reductive categorizations of the immigrant experience, one based in progressive idealism, the other in xenophobic paranoia. Miike’s treatment of these allegorical components is made more complex by the visual logic of this death scene. The moment Tōji is shot occurs in exaggerated slow-motion, and with the frame kept squarely on his face, it is at first unclear what has happened. The camera then lowers to show a widening pool of blood across his chest, dramatically emphasizing Ryū’s vantage point – that is, his not- immediate realization that his brother has been struck. This scene orchestrates to full melodramatic effect an emotional attachment to family and community, whereas the explosion that kills Jōjima’s family suggests their absence. Although Jōjima and Ryū share commensurate screen time before their ultimate showdown, this stylistic imbalance is difficult to ignore in a genre whose mythology once rested upon its invocations of Japanese traditionalism as a bulwark against internationalism. A wider range of stylistic representation accompanies Ryū throughout DOA. As Gerow points out, Miike’s “homeless” style is not simply a matter of burying the narrative in stylistic excess, but engaging in alternative formal strategies, sometimes tempering the rapid montages with long take compositions that are just as prominent in generating thematic meaning (2009: 32). At times, the film shows much stylistic restraint, declining seemingly obvious opportunities to exaggerate action and characterization. For instance, the opening scene shows Ryū walking brazenly into a crowded intersection with Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 103 a shotgun to knock off a rival gangster; the implausibility of this action is consistent with the unreality of the opening montage overall. In a later scene, however, Ryū is forced into a game of Russian roulette against another gangster to determine who will “win” access to an incoming shipment of narcotics (Fig. 2). Ryū calmly levels the pistol at his own head and pulls the trigger on an empty chamber… then pulls twice more, instantly earning the dealer’s admiration for his courage (or perhaps his recklessness). Unlike before, however, the entire sequence occurs in a single long take, maintaining distance from Ryū, whose back remains to the camera. While the above two sequences ostensibly serve to establish Ryū as a formidable badass, Miike both overplays and underplays the character’s most sensational displays of bravado, respectively. As a consequence, the film renders arbitrary, at least through its visual cues, the gangster’s temperament, something that, in the past, figured centrally in the genre’s representations of stoicism and nobility among criminals. Fig. 2: The “Russian Roulette” sequence, seen in one unbroken shot. Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 104 The greater range of formal experimentation employed to depict the immigrant experience (and the retreat from such experimentation when showing Jōjima’s emotional and professional reality) is one of DOA’s fascinating qualities. It grants Ryū a flexibility of representation vis-à-vis the visual grammar of the film despite the legal and institutional immobility he contends with as an immigrant and a violent criminal. This dynamic undercuts the assumed wholeness of Japanese monoculturalism by suggesting an immigrant – and a criminal at that – possesses greater potential for variegated expression, even if it is primarily one of social alienation. Moreover, by affixing the immigrant experience to notions of yakuza nobility, DOA exposes how the genre’s past allegories of Japanese traditionalism take for granted its own ethnic normativity. Rather than champion the values of Japanese monocultural superiority, the film has the effect of illuminating the racially exclusionary nature of the genre’s jingi mythos. Marginality and the problem of space Longstanding associations in the public imagination between real-life and on- screen yakuza provide an important context for deconstructing Miike’s complex representations of illegal immigrants in DOA. These associations have profound implications for how genre’s nationalistic mythology reconciles the growing internationalism of postwar Japanese culture. When noting that earlier yakuza films promoted traditional Japanese social identities, we must bear in mind the contemporaneous international relations that invigorated those representations. As Standish suggests above, the outlaw figure of the yakuza became a popular cultural avatar for ambivalence toward (even resistance against) the perceived incursion of Western Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 105 values. Her invocation of nihonjinron – those theories and (pseudo-)scientific explorations of Japanese cultural exceptionalism – specifically links the heroic yakuza’s sense of community to Japanese cultural values different from Western individualism. Nihonjiron’s ideological imperative to define Japanese uniqueness in relation to assumed characteristics of Western societies results in a binary between the individualism of the United States and the achieve-it-together collectivism of Japan. Kosaku Yoshino’s work characterizes nihonjinron as a market that relies on a process of “self-othering,” whose primary agenda is to promote areas of Japanese cultural and social specificity that can be positioned as unique among external cultural examples. Nihonjiron therefore is born from and sustained by a simultaneous need to assert Japanese exceptionalism but also to essentialize the characteristics of outside societies to serve as points of comparison. That is, Japan’s manufactured nationalism depends on managing the discourse of what constitutes non-Japaneseness inside and outside of its borders. 27 The urgency with which postwar nihonjiron proclaims this exceptionalism emerges, ironically, from the international relations that facilitated Japan’s postwar economic boom. Despite their obvious structural and sociological adherence to principles lauded in mainstream nihonjinron, the yakuza are seldom mentioned in such literature. 28 Not surprising, perhaps: the purpose of nihonjinron is to construct favorable discourses of Japaneseness, and in the selective process of how Japanese society wishes to champion itself, undesirable criminal elements were cropped out of the picture. (Jingi and jingoism were not to mix.) This process of selection explains how it is that the yakuza films of the postwar period reinforce the rosy assertions of the nihonjinron whilst the existence of real-life yakuza does not. Similar exclusionary attitudes about the yakuza can be seen Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 106 taking their shape in policies enacted with an eye toward the outside world, such as a wave of anti-yakuza laws that went into effect in time for the 1964 Olympic games in Tokyo. The efforts to crack down on organized crime signaled to the world community that Japan had no place for its yakuza elements (with the exception of popular fiction that celebrated Japanese traditionalism). Containment has since been a continuing objective of anti-yakuza lawmaking. As recently as 2011, new legislation has entailed policing any financial association with yakuza organizations, a measure designed to dissuade people from emboldening the harassment, extortion, and blackmail schemes typically employed by the gangsters. Such laws address the perception – if not the reality – of “the invasion of the yakuza into the lives of ordinary citizens and their inroads into the business communities” (Herbert 150). The adoption of the term “bōryoku-dan” to rebrand the yakuza as a “violent group” itself is an exertion of control, echoing Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that the power to name an object is sometimes enough to define the parameters of its social acceptance (65-66, referenced in Herbert 146). This type of policymaking proves problematic for illegal immigrants whose daily realities are bound up in illicit businesses and industries managed by the yakuza (who, in many cases, brokered their arrival to Japan). Kaplan and Dubro as well as Rankin detail the overlapping dimensions of real-life yakuza activities and the unauthorized influx of foreigners into Japan. 29 What is a worrisome byproduct of Japan’s economic clout in an interconnected world has been a boon for crime syndicates that control the flow of illegal laborers and sex workers. 30 Parallels between state efforts to curtail the expansion of Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 107 yakuza activity into financial and business sectors are not unlike the Olympics-era attempts to purify Japan’s image while under the scrutiny of the international community. Consider that the Immigration Reform Act, which gave preferential treatment to ethnically Japanese nikkeijin, was, in part, orchestrated to maintain illusions of Japanese racial wholeness; this was followed merely one year later by anti-bōryoku-dan laws, consisting of legislation aimed at managing the yakuza’s exaggerated threats to Japanese social stability (and presumably Japan’s reputation as a sound investment for global interests). 31 The proximity of these efforts suggests serious changes in Japanese state policy as concessions required for inclusion into the international community of industrial democracies. Amy Gurowitz argues that, despite resisting compromises to its ideology of racial purity, the Japanese government often does so out of sensitivity to its reputation in the outside world. 32 In this sense, the threat yakuza organizations are believed to pose to Japan’s credibility on the international stage (a cancer within) intersect with unrestricted immigration that supposedly threatens Japan’s cultural homogeneity (a virus from without). Both concern the management of a supposed crisis of Japaneseness that gives the nihonjiron its comparative frameworks. 33 The overlapping zone between these two social problems is where films like DOA can open conversations about constructions of ethnic normativity versus marginality when defining what is “Japanese” in a globalized world. The theme of marginality, to be sure, has been essential to the yakuza genre, as noted in studies attempting to pinpoint its precise appeal among the predominantly male, working class young adults that typically comprises its core audience (Suzuki 13). There is a basic understanding that the exoticism of the underworld invites a visceral escapism; Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 108 similar observations appear in studies of American gangster films (e.g. Warshow; Shadoian). In the Japanese instance, the literature on the genre suggests that early yakuza film spectatorship sprung from postwar urban industrial growth that resulted in the internal migrations of workers to Japan’s metropoles. One yakuza film producer notes that, in romantically upholding a sense of communality and national belonging, the genre sooths the profound loneliness people experience upon leaving their families and living in unfamiliar cities (Suzuki 15). 34 Those unable to conform to a conventional family life, or to social ideals they did not subscribe to, found vicarious pleasures in the outcast lifestyles of the screen yakuza (Fukuma 37; Katō, 97; Satō 1970: 52-53). This is a genre in which even those at the outermost fringes can band together with a sense of purpose and belonging and in which their most selfish impulses can be rebranded as masculine and cool. However, some criticize the genre for its utopic presentations of a community populated by people who voluntarily adopt its rules and codes. The world of the screen yakuza is one in which work and fun, labor and vice, are indistinguishable from one another. It is also a world in which justice and retribution can be attained solely within that closed system (Satō 1974: 102). 35 As Michel Foucault reminds us, the labeling of that which is aberrant or abnormal is a powerful tool in defining and regulating normative social behavior. The division between Japanese society and yakuza activity in the public consciousness rests largely upon exaggerated and selective accounts of the yakuza’s deviance – namely, their reputation for violence – that help to orient the self-regulation of acceptable behavior that Foucault calls “discipline.” This, in effect, enacts a sort of violence upon the poorest classes that often Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 109 comprise the yakuza’s lower ranks by depriving them of full symbolic integration into the social body (Katō 100). Even Ōshima Nagisa, one of the masters of Japanese New Wave cinema, wrote of his own aversion to working in the genre by describing this very problem: yakuza films instill in audiences the belief that the yakuza occupy a separate social space in Japan, reinforcing their political dismissal as tasha (“other people”) (131). He goes on to argue that the influential Battle series and specifically its use of voice-over narration and title cards – both components of its documentary-like presentation – titillate audiences with a seemingly historical account. Despite the realism of its subject matter, the films nevertheless unfold in an insulated fantasy world in which all conflicts and resolutions are confined principally to spaces of crime. Ōshima calls this projection of social and spatial otherness the “essence of discrimination” (137; translation mine). Similar arguments against real-life anti-yakuza laws and subsequent crackdowns of gang activities point to naïve understandings of the structural factors and class relations that compel disadvantaged people to join the yakuza in the first place. Making a felony offense of any dealings with criminal organizations likewise fails to comprehend the everyday spatial practices of urban life, which are not so easily compartmentalized between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” social interactions and commercial relationships. Upon the enactment of anti-yakuza measures in 2011, several commercial outlets lashed out against the law’s actual effects, such as the unnecessary intimidation of businesses and services that now fear legal reprisal for, say, unwittingly delivering a pizza or offering religious rites to a yakuza member (Richter). 36 Such problems are the inevitable Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 110 result of choosing to view the underworld as socially independent from its neighboring community instead of being defined in relation to it. Attempts to eradicate organized crime have instead forced gangsters to seek out new sources of revenue. They have done so by exploiting immigrants who risk deportation by turning to the police or by expanding overseas operations in mainland Asia, and also in Australia, The Philippines, Russia, and across Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States, notably in Southern California (Kaplan and Dubro 252- 273; also Katō 95; Friman 974; Gozuma). In other instances, the laws have compelled yakuza groups to consolidate into larger, less penetrable conglomerates (keiretsuka) (Herbert 148). Another tangible impact of these laws has been to reduce the physical spaces in which the yakuza can operate (even while their expansion into new financial sectors feeds perceptions of the opposite). This makes the regulation of space central to understanding the yakuza’s “illegitimacy” in representing normative Japanese society (Asakura 82-83). The set of policy frameworks emerging from the kindred view that both organized crime and the mobility of foreigner must be tightly controlled is what appears to have weaved its way into genre films like DOA. Let us return to its frenzied opening sequence, which, despite its seeming disregard for spatial or temporal coherence, is organized entirely by mobility through spaces. The relatively small area of Kabuki-chō permits the impression that its rampant yakuza activity is geographically localized and contained. Yet, within that space, criminal activity is fractured by the multitude of agendas and subjectivities that are shown to move with impunity through Kabuki-chō’s gangscapes. Miike’s irreverent treatment of genre iconography and stylized violence is reflected most Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 111 in the actions of Ryū’s team as they execute rival gangsters across town. In the sequence described above, Ryū walks into the busy streets clad head-to-toe in black, wearing sunglasses (at night, mind), and brandishing a shotgun. Without hesitation, he blasts away at his target (a rival drug dealer) with no apparent worry of the crowd around him and escapes without difficulty. In this logic-defying freedom of mobility, Ryū seems to parody the worst fears of immigrants doing evil: despite legal efforts to curtail their movements, they nevertheless move brazenly across space and time to devastatingly coordinated effect. The audacity with which Ryū commits acts of violence and then disappears into the incoherence of the montage invokes the sensationalized media visibility and simultaneous political invisibility of the illegal immigrant’s experience in the eyes of Japanese policymaking. The characters in Miike’s most significant works are often burdened with a search for identity and place, and it is in the yakuza genre that these thematic preoccupations find their most cogent expression. In eschewing traditional opening-sequence functions, like establishing location and characters (the first shot, as noted earlier, is a direct address that immediately confuses the distinctions between protagonist and antagonist), Miike’s “homeless” style insists on negating a sense of narrative or aesthetic wholeness. This is certainly apparent in the fragmented plot, unmotivated ellipses, and overall heterogeneity of formal techniques; it is also seen in his handling of another key element of the genre – violence upon bodies. The sequence’s final, grotesque image of a man’s insides splashing across the screen is one of several instances in DOA in which human bodies are variously torn open or turned inside out through violent encounters. (Many proclaim as the epitome of Miike’s excesses a scene in which a nightclub hostess, having been raped and drugged Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 112 offscreen, is drowned in an inflatable pool filled with her own excrement.) Shihōda Inuhiko argues that such sequences of bodily injury give Miike’s work tremendous political meaning by reducing gender and ethnic identities to their basest bodily functions (114-115). For Ko, this preponderance of injured bodies in film after film about ethnic conflict indicates Miike’s distrust of a national Japanese body (kokutai) that sees itself as ethnically unified and culturally homogenous. Arguing that the “lack of bodily integrity in Miike’s films […] dramatizes the break-up of the nation or, more appropriately, the break-up of the national body” (58), she links these bloodied bodies to Miike’s stylistic choices, suggesting the purposeful “weakening of diegetic or narrative unity within his fictional worlds” compliments this effect (53). Just as Miike’s characters fragment the national body, so too has he found an expressive formal grammar to fragment the spatial and temporal logic of his narratives and representations of urban space. Miike insists on a conspicuous lack of structural unity at all strata of DOA. This brings to bear an element of anarchy to assumed knowledge of the genre, its history, and its relationship to undocumented immigrants engaged in what James Holston and Arjun Appadurai call “the tumult of citizenship” (296). Dead on arrival DOA exemplifies a genre whose increasing diversity of representations is rife with the ideological contradictions seen in Japan’s policies toward immigration and organized crime. Miike does not celebrate his immigrants or appear even to propose solutions to these explosive encounters between ethnic groups. His politics surrounding Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 113 this contentious issue are hazy – but perhaps befitting the discourses around his authorship that alternately characterize his work as artistic brilliance and schlock. The films’ renderings of Japan’s complex relationship to foreigners is perhaps best seen in the failures of such characters to attain a permanent sense of belonging. As Gerow notes, the “homelessness” of Miike’s characters, like that of his style, is perpetual and without resolution. Perhaps for this reason, homelessness finds a place in the yakuza genre, whose characters also have ambiguous relationships to normative Japanese identity. Whether owing to a lack of belief in the cultural wholeness of Japanese national identity (as per Ko’s analysis) or a resistance to static social and artistic categories (per Gerow’s), Miike consistently presents his characters’ attempts to rise above their circumstances as ultimately futile. Informed perhaps by the “vulnerability and cynicism” Shihōda identifies in the generation of filmmakers after the Aum Shinrikyō terrorist attacks of 1995, Miike’s worlds are ones in which life is cheap (116; translation mine). Death can come arbitrarily and without warning and is a final rejoinder to a sincere search for place and identity. In City of Lost Souls (a sort of spiritual spinoff of DOA), the nikkei gangster/hero survives a protracted battle with the yakuza and Chinese mafia and escapes intact to the beaches of Okinawa, only to be assassinated abruptly by a disgruntled friend. 37 In Ley Lines, yakuza goons gun down the Taiwanese-Japanese protagonists, again by the seaside. Afterward, we see their spirits on a small boat, paddling out to sea with no certain destination. Most significant of all is Tōji’s demise in DOA. After his death, Ryū buries the body in an unidentified marshland somewhere outside the city (also the location, it is previously established, of their mother’s tombstone) (Fig. 3). This “burial” scene Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 114 contrasts the visual spectacle of the opening sequence, replacing the playground of neon lights and casual violence with a muddy and inhospitable space where the greyness never ends. This is a symbolic no man’s land where immigrants go to die, unclaimed by their country of origin and ignored by the host country that renders them politically “DOA” – dead on arrival (118). When compared to the lack of funeral rites (or visible mourning) for Jōjima’s family, what comes forth is perhaps Miike’s most progressive statement, that the genre’s promises of community are ultimately meaningless if they are not shared equally across Japan’s inhabitants. To that end, the conclusion of DOA is a sensible place to close this essay. In the climactic sequence, Jōjima, his family murdered and with nothing left to lose, ambushes Ryū’s team with his vehicle in an open field. In yet another nondescript zone whose proximity to the city is unclear, Jōjima manages to kill off Ryū’s remaining men, and both are wounded in an ensuing standoff. In this final moment, the film takes an unmotivated, unexpected turn: apropos of nothing, Jōjima produces a previous-unseen Fig. 3: The immigrant graveyard. Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 115 bazooka from beneath his jacket. Ryū, in response, begins to convulse painfully. Holding his hand to his breast, he extracts a glowing orb of orange light from his body (a crude CGI effect). Winding up like a baseball pitcher, he hurls the orb at Jōjima, who in turn fires his bazooka round. The two projectiles impact in the middle, creating a magnificent explosion that fills the screen. The film’s subsequent and last shot is of Japan, seen from outer space, as the explosion emanates outward and gradually encompasses the entire globe (Fig. 4). The film cuts abruptly to black, and the credits begin to roll. Depending on the viewer’s politics, the ending of DOA may possibly lend itself to the kind of open-ended interpretations that Satō identified at the genre’s earliest phases. Jōjima’s (albeit illegal) dedication suggests the importance of policing criminals and foreigners alike; but empathy toward Ryū’s institutional disadvantages as an immigrant demonstrates the need for a great civil acceptance of outsiders if Japan is to be part of the international community (Hook and Weiner, referenced in Gurowitz 442). But both of Fig. 4: Japan explodes. Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 116 these readings are predicated on boundaries that Miike seems intent on ignoring. His “homeless” style brings together so many disparate elements and devices (including the Dragon Ball Z-inspired iconography of the final scene), the scene defies explanation, let alone interpretation. Left only with an image of the islands of Japan wholly engulfed by explosion, perhaps we are left to muse whether the crisis of Japanese nationalism is at all tenable in a changing, globalizing world. As long as that crisis remains unresolved, the yakuza and illegal immigrants will occupy a shared social space, to borrow a phrase from Cazdyn, “at the dead center of contradiction” (7). NOTES 1 The National Police Agency and the Keisatsu Hakusho, the annual police white paper, compiled the data in question. According to Shipper, their findings are dubious at best, suggesting that some unsolved crimes are tacked on to the files of foreigners who have overstayed their visas; further, the numbers are discredited by the fact that foreigners are not statistically more likely to commit a crime, but are more likely to be suspected and arrested. Law enforcement point to statistics showing a rise in foreigner-‐perpetrated crimes, but that data also indicate that the rise is only in petty crime, while more serious offenses have decreased among foreigners but are rising among native Japanese (158-‐166). 2 Commissioner General Satō also issued similar statements just a few months earlier: “Since 1997, illegal foreigners have been committing organized crimes repeatedly. Foreigner criminals have begun targeting Japanese people, who are victimized even in their own homes. Crimes committed by colluding foreign groups and bōryoku-‐dan are also increasingly rapidly” (Yomiuri Shinbun 2003a: 39; translation mine). 3 There is extensive recent literature on this subject, including Shipper; Chung; Tsuda and Cornelius. On the growing expansion of immigration policies to encompass welfare and public service (and not merely labor concerns), see Papademetriou and Hamilton 32; Weiner 1998. 4 This greater sensitivity among Japanese filmmakers to the experiences of immigrants can be seen in a range of contemporary works, too numerous to name here. Among the various nationalities living in Japan, however, portrayal of zainichi Koreans (permanently settled residents in Japan) have been most significant, visible in films like Go (Isao, 2001), Blood and Bones (Chi to Hone; Sai, 2004), and Pacchigi! (Izutsu, 2004). Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 117 5 “Soft Power” refers to Joseph S. Nye, Jr.’s term for describing the ability to coerce nations to action through influence and attraction rather than conventional “hard” tactics like military threat or monetary persuasion. 6 Yakuza films are also known as ninkyō-‐eiga (“chivalry films”) in Japan. 7 According to Peach, Japan did not require foreign labor in the immediate years after WWII because it had flexible labor force comprised of women and the elderly; their employment was explicitly a strategy for keeping people unwanted foreign labor out. For works that argue Japan offers a unique case study of how advanced industries do not require foreign labor, see Reubens; Muller. See also Shipper, who views the legislative history of Japanese immigration policy as being caught between systems that broadly reflect the immigrant-‐ friendly policies of Western nations and those of Asian nations, which “are designed to deal with workers – not immigrants” (191). 8 See Douglass 1988 and 2000: 89-‐97. 9 See Chung 18; Tsuda and Cornelius 456-‐457; Lie 1994 and 2001. The majority of illegals in Japan are visa overstayers, admitted through “side-‐door” mechanisms such as the granting of “student” and “entertainer” visas. Others arrive through “back doors” controlled by yakuza organizations whose exorbitant commissions (for forging documents, brokering travel arrangements, etc.) are often taken from the wages of the men smuggled in as cheap labor or of the women trafficked into sexual slavery. See Kaplan and Dubro 273-‐274; 238-‐ 243. Not surprisingly, Japan since the 1980s has seen a rise in foreign gangs both working with and competing against the yakuza. 10 Nikkejin represent a complicated dimension to the issue of immigration because they are ethnically Japanese (and thereby fulfill a particular imagined criteria for admittance into the country) but also culturally and linguistically foreign. Even whilst allowing the Japanese state to perpetuate an illusion of ethnic homogeneity by granting priority entry to nikkeijin, their status poses a challenge to simplistic binaries between insider and outsider. See Ōnuma; Lesser 2003 and 2007. 11 On the perception of immigrants as a threat to a nation’s stability and the solvency of its welfare programs, see Rudolph; Chung. 12 For examples of such literature, see Weiner 1994; Mitchell; Goodman and Peach, et al. 13 Another significant film in this regard is Kamikaze Taxi, which is about the unlikely bond between a nikkeijin taxi driver and a young yakuza enforcer who is on the run after robbing his boss. Their eventual alliance against the film’s villain, a corrupt and jingoistic politician, becomes the metaphorical focal point of the film’s critiques of Japanese racism dating back to its imperial period. See Tosaki. 14 Kitano, also a comedian and television personality under the stage name “Beat” Takeshi, is known for his quirky and nihilistic variations on the genre, seen in the critically lauded Violent Cop (Sono Otoko, Kyōbōni Tsuki; 1989) and Sonatine (Sonachine; 1993). His artistic credentials were further confirmed with the crime drama Fireworks (Hanabi; 1997), which won numerous awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival, making Kitano a household name among international aficionados of Japanese cinema. As with Miike, Kitano’s experimentations with the genre and inclusion of multiethnic encounters represent Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 118 shifts in the modern yakuza mien; this is most notable in Kitano’s Brother (Burazā, 2000), which depicts the rise and fall of a yakuza boss in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. 15 Several works consider Miike’s authorship as a discursive construction of marketing practices that target Western audiences. In particular, the marketing and distribution operations of the British DVD company Tartan has come under academic scrutiny for its “Asia Extreme” label, which has introduced to Western audiences numerous recent ultraviolent films from Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan, among them several of Miike’s most provocative works. See Shin; Rawle: Dew. 16 Miike himself, it should be noted, refuses to comment on his own authorship; in interview after interview, he declines requests from reporters and critics to explain his films, insisting that viewers are free to interpret his films in any way they wish (e.g. Kitagawa 62; Shiota 1998: 56; Isogawa 25; Rekishi Dokuhon 29). 17 Of course, Gerow’s implicit contention that the nomadic wanderings of Miike’s many principle characters reflect the “homelessness” of his formal strategies and genre-‐busting narratives risks a false comparison between content and style. Conceptually linking Miike’s thematic content with his stylistic devices in this manner suggests that his films do actually exhibit thematic unity and consistency in depicting existential wandering, displacement, and alienation, even if the filmic properties are all over the map. 18 One longstanding argument is that Japan generates its cultural capital through the assimilation of outside forms. Joseph J. Tobin argues that a “pastiche of traditional Japanese and borrowed Western elements” is a key feature of middle class consumerism in Japan (1). See also the argument that Japan’s own “McDonaldization” likewise suggests cooperation with – not domination by – Western market hegemony (Watson). 19 The term “yakuza” itself has a long history, originally used derogatorily in reference to ex-‐ convicts, the mentally insane, or other “undesirables” throughout the Tokugawa era. Now, it refers exclusively to members of organized crime syndicates. However, other terms, while more or less synonymous, reflect a range of attitudes and social agendas towards crime in Japanese society. Bōryoku-‐dan is the preferred term among Japanese law enforcement and mainstream news agencies. Actual yakuza members are known to employ more romantic terminology like ninkyō-‐dantai (“chivalrous group”). Another term, gokudō (literally “extreme path”) is ambiguous in its usage, signifying in contemporary vernacular something akin to “lowlife” (a gokudō-‐sha), but also originally a Buddhist term with Edo-‐era connotations of someone who protects the weak. 20 In addition to Kaplan and Dubro’s comprehensive coverage, see Hill; Miyazaki; Rankin. For an outline of societal benefits the yakuza provide (and hence the reasons their existence is ultimately tolerated in Japan), see Herbert 148-‐149. 21 For this literature, see Havens. 22 These films include Shinjuku Triad Society (Shinjuku Kuroshakai: Chaina Mafia Sensō; 1995), Rainy Dog (Gokudō Kuroshakai: Rainii Doggu; 1997), and Ley Lines (Nihon Kuroshakai: Lei Lainuzu; 1999), three narratively unrelated films from what has been marketed in the West alternately as the Triad Society Trilogy and the Black Society Trilogy. His later City of Lost Souls (a.k.a Hazard City; Hyōryū-‐gai; 2000) tells a Bonnie and Clyde-‐ Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 119 esque story of a Brazilian-‐Japanese gangster and his Chinese girlfriend who traverse the multiethnic space of Shinjuku; their dreams of leaving a life of crime symbolically coincide with permanently escaping its rigid racial structures. Miike has repeated this trope in non-‐ yakuza films as well, such as in the melodrama The Bird People of China (Chūgoku no Chōjin, 1998). 23 DOA also has two narratively unconnected sequels, all of which star the same principle actors. In Dead or Alive 2 (Deddo oa Araibu 2: Tōbōsha, 2000), the lead characters are reimagined as childhood friends who unite in crime; Dead or Alive: Final (2002) is an actioner set in a dystopian future, with allusions to Blade Runner (Scott, 1982) and The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999). 24 Making Ryū part of a group of Chinese zanryū-‐koji exemplifies Miike’s theme of group loyalty. In a film that already departs from convention through its inclusion of multinational characters, this detail adds another dimension by tying those non-‐Japanese characters to issues of Japanese war responsibility (sensō sekinin). This theme runs through not only Miike’s films, like Shinjuku Triad Society, but is common to genre films of this era, such as Sleepless Town (Fuyajō; Lee, 1998) and Kamikaze Taxi. 25 Scholars who discuss DOA often fail to mention the significance of Miike’s casting choices. Takeuchi is a reigning king of yakuza OVs, appearing in the long-‐running Nanba Kinyūden: Minami no Teiō series (sixty films between 1992-‐2007) and countless other genre films; Aikawa is also a yakuza film regular, whose breakout role in the OV Neo-‐Chinpira: Teppōdama Pyuu (Takahashi, 1990) abandoned the traditional yakuza screen archetype in favor of a “contemporary brand of cool” (Schilling 2003: 36). Miike sets the tone for DOA by not only referencing these performance histories, but also lampooning them by as his narrative becomes increasingly absurd. 26 Within the narrower world of the film industry, some argue the popularity of the community-‐themed yakuza films was partially in response to the increasingly auteur-‐ centric, and therefore individual-‐focused, nature of the New Wave. See Nishiwaki 16-‐17. 27 For further literature on this topic, see Morris-‐Suzuki 1998. 28 In particular, yakuza organizations are structured according to vertical social relations, exemplified by the oyabun-‐kobun (“parent-‐child”) hierarchy that, according to works of nihonjinron, leads to a consciousness of rank that is central to Japanese social being. See Nakane 30; Standish 167. 29 A subset of yakuza films produced during after its initial era reflects the spread of yakuza activity into other areas of East Asia. Examples include Narazumono (Ishii, 1964), Tokyo Gang vs. Hong Kong Gang (Tōkyō Gyangu tai Honkon Gyangu; Ishii, 1964), and Sympathy for the Underdog (Bakutō Gaijin Butai; Fukasaku, 1971). 30 See Kaplan and Dubro 233-‐243. Because its lower-‐class make-‐up was often constituted by zainichi Koreans as well as indigenous Japanese, the yakuza were able to establish strong black market networks between Japan and Korea throughout the 1960s. Kaplan and Dubro even argue that these shadow networks played a significant role in stabilizing political relations between the two countries (228), and that the success of this initial foray into Dead Zones | Tokyo Gangscapes | 120 transnational network-‐building is what bolstered the yakuza’s confidence in expanding their influence further out in the world. 31 The full, official name of the 1991 anti-‐yakuza law is “Bōryoku-‐danin ni yoru futō na kōi nado no bōshi ni kansuru hōritsu,” which translates to “Laws pertaining to the prevention of illegal activities by violent groups” (translation mine). 32 These concessions, Gurowitz notes, have in particular mobilized human rights groups to pressure the state into adopting a variety of civil rights in accordance with international standards. See also Chung 15. 33 Perhaps this is also fueled by a casual Orientalism that views the yakuza as a unique and exceptional phenomenon (even though organized crime is endemic to most societies) instead of as a societal vice that must be regulated; the latter pragmatism is reflected in the actual legislation, not by crusading anti-‐crime rhetoric that sometimes accompanies it; see Herbert; Rankin. The tendency to exaggerate the yakuza’s uniqueness often stems from Western writers’ tendencies to invoke comparisons with the American mafia (seen in Kaplan and Dubro). This has the inadvertent effect of establishing the mafia as a normative standard against which the yakuza’s esoteric qualities are presented. 34 These young audiences were also frequenting the theaters at a time when the installation of television sets was more common among households than among singles; see Satō 1982: 52. 35 Satō, “Gendai Ninkyō-‐eiga Ron” (“Thesis on Modern Yakuza Films”), Shinario 29.2 (February 1974), 102. 36 The anti-‐yakuza laws also involved crackdowns on the entertainment industry. Kitano Takeshi, reportedly no stranger to yakuza types due to his lower class upbringing, has similarly complained of these laws. In his biography (as “Beat” Takeshi), he notes the impossibility of differentiating ordinary citizens from potential gangsters during every encounter with a fan (159-‐160). The policy, which could very well put his career in inadvertent jeopardy, rests on the assumption that the yakuza are not an existing, integrated factor of social life and are therefore easy to identify and isolate. Pressure on the entertainment industry has produced some scandals, notably the ouster of Shimada Shinsuke, a television comedian and entertainer who was forced into retirement in 2011 after admitting ties to yakuza organizations. 37 Japan’s southernmost prefecture of Okinawa itself is a politically-‐loaded choice of territory for the film’s climax because of the ethnic difference of its native residents and its presence of American military forces. See Ko, chapter three. Part 2: Inside-Out Chapter 4 The Terrorist: Bauer Power “I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage; I do not account the evil and painful character of existence a reproach to it, but hope rather that it will one day be more evil and painful than hitherto –” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (206) “Jack Bauer sleeps with a gun under the pillow. But he could kill you with the pillow.” – Fact #530, www.jackbauerfacts.com “Jack Bauer Justice” On September 13, 2006, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham argued on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor that the concurrent popularity of the series 24 (also on Fox) was sufficient evidence that the average American approved the use of torture on terror suspects if it assured victory in the War on Terror. Ingraham asserted that the American public’s love of 24 and its protagonist, Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) of the fictitious Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU), was “as close to a national referendum that it’s okay to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’re gonna get” (YouTube.com). This hyperbolic right-wing reverence of 24’s thrilling – but also wildly implausible – narratives of combating international terrorism was hardly an isolated instance; other prominent conservatives – including John Gibson and Glenn Beck – have similarly referenced the program’s frequent representations of “justifiable” torture as Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 123 evidence of the need for an aggressive foreign policy that cannot, must not, waver in saving American lives. 1 Elsewhere, conservative economist Stephen Moore insisted that “Jack Bauer Justice” – referring specifically to how Bauer “takes ‘em in, shoots ‘em in the leg, [and demands] ‘Tell me where the bomb is.’” – is both what the country demands and what policymakers should implement (Onegoodmove.org). 2 Austin Sarat and Jennifer Culbert note that state violence is typically rationalized through a “rhetoric of necessity, the common good, or high moralism” (1), and no television show of its era was invoked quite so prominently in this vein than 24. Newly renewed for an additional season, the program promises to remain at the center of conversations on transnational terrorism – which still persist in more contemporary entertainment like Showtime’s hit series Homeland (2011- ; created by 24 co-writer Howard Gordon) and the Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, 2012). 3 This chapter explores these purported right-wing underpinnings of the series by surveying the existing academic literature concerning the popular series and its links to controversial policies pertaining to torture and the overall notion that terrorism cannot be combated through existing judicial means. 24 underscores this rationale by representing torture as an encounter in which the imagined nation of “America” and the stateless and nebulous characteristic of “terrorism” come into contact. Similar to the torture porn seen in chapter two, the program uses spaces of torture to produce neat comparisons between “American” and “un-American” identities. In so doing, 24 represents a brand of political thinking, portraying the United States as both the leader of the international fight against terrorism rife and as a singularly stable national context amid that internationalism. As Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 124 noted by Monica Blumenthal et al., state violence may only go unchallenged if it achieves the trust of its citizenry that its actions are in the best interests of a coherent and agreed-upon set of those goals (9). For those that revere 24, Bauer’s heroism is directly analogous to the counterterrorism measures of neoconservative governance, no matter how ferocious or covert they necessarily need to be in order to ensure America remain safe. Chapter two focused on a series of “reversals” (Jason Middleton’s term) in the torture porn film Hostel, arguing that the portrayal of tourists and the geopolitical history they invoke allows for engagements with global violence while containing those representations within an America-centric ideology. This chapter focuses on the use of torture at home – partially continuing the conversation introduced with torture porn but also reframing the issue around explicit (not allegorical) depictions of terrorism. The analysis that follows imagines terrorism as an instance of global mobility – part of a “foreignness” that moves into the United States to contrive and conduct violence. While not all of the villains of 24 are non-American nationals, the program nevertheless condemns all series antagonists as un-American by propping up Bauer as a model for American resoluteness. Like with torture porn, the series uses the political act of torture to tease out the anxieties American appears to have about its own Americanness in a global context. Here, torture serves the symbolic function of managing and restraining that mobility not merely in a physical sense, but to shut it down ideologically in favor of a stalwart American nationalism that is taken for granted to be stable and unchanging. The program, therefore, suggests a dynamic between mobility and immobility that is at once about addressing the threats of terrorism by seizing the Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 125 mobilities of transnational bad guys, but also about aligning mobility with globalism, and hence with an ideology that lacks the proper American roots. In contrast, the “correct” American convictions on display are, by contrast, firm and immovable. At the peak of 24’s popularity, public and academic discussions about the program were notable for their complicated slippage between mass entertainment, the newsstream, and policymaking pertaining to the so-called “War on Terror.” One of 24’s producers, Joel Surnow, has described himself as a “right-wing nut job” who “shares his show’s hard-line perspective” (Mayer 2007) and there are anecdotal reports that George W. Bush is an admirer of the series (Starpulse.com). These factors narrow the gap between a piece of televised entertainment that generates its suspense by perpetuating the astronomically improbable “ticking bomb” narrative and the real-life curtailings of civil rights that have emerged from this sort of paranoia. 4 24, in effect, opens avenues for considering the kinds of presentations of unruly bodies (represented here by those out to commit terror) that most engage wider social valuations of whose movements and actions must be circumvented for the “greater good.” Of course, exploring such representations in entertainment fiction need not necessarily resemble the lunacy of Ingraham’s outlandish correlations, which assume a very straightforward link between the entertainment a public chooses to popularize and its attitudes toward policy. Such a viewpoint cannot account for 24’s widespread popularity across the political spectrum – its fan base reportedly includes Bill Clinton (Hollywood.com); the show has also attracted outspoken liberals like Janeane Garofalo to its cast (in season seven). Further, the global popularity of 24, particularly in the United Kingdom, is a sticking point: surely those non-American audiences who were so vocal in Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 126 disapproving the war in Iraq are not cheering for Jack Bauer because they view him as analogous to the Bush Doctrine. 24’s global success, then, raises fascinating questions about hegemonic influence of American entertainment explored by comprehensive works like Global Hollywood 2 that attempt to “acknowledge the policy, distributional, promotional and exhibitory protocols of the screen” that make possible Hollywood’s dominant presence worldwide (43). The simple truth is that 24, from its beginnings, has also been undeniably entertaining in how it exploits the “cliffhanger” gimmick to great effect and delivers on Hollywood’s reputation for glossy production value; in other words, the ability to pinpoint the show’s precise appeal to non-Americans is complicated by its sheer watchability as an action-drama. This diffuse popularity in other markets also points to the small-mindedness of the right-wing chatter in American that has insisted on interpreting 24 as a validation of torture as an effective tool for combating terrorists. Why, then, this fervor in the United States? As noted in chapter two, the issue of torture is one of the most contentious topics surrounding the Bush Administration’s handling of the War on Terror in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The torturing of terror suspects became public knowledge following the Abu Ghraib scandal and reports of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay Prison. Later reconfigured around the specific technique of “waterboarding,” debates about torture’s efficacy and justifiability have waned of late, swallowed up first by successive news cycles chronicling the numerous scandals of Bush administration. Upon his inauguration in 2009, President Barrack Obama publically rescinded the infamous “torture memos” that were drafted by the legal minds of the previous administration, permitting the use of torture under wartime presidential Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 127 authority (USA Today). There is wide criticism among major human rights groups, such as Amnesty International (Reuters), about the flimsiness of these arguments in justifying the illegal torture now confirmed to have taken place under Bush; despite this, the subsequent Obama administration has thus far declined to prosecute any former Bush officials. Through the duration of the Bush Administration, polling data indicated, with some consistency, that the majority of Americans did not support a blanket use of torture as an acceptable method of interrogation (Cohen). Yet between Emmy-winning programs like 24 and the robust box office performance of the torture porn subgenre, popular television and film’s representations of torture and mutilation doubtlessly increased in numbers and in profile in the years since 9/11. 5 Film and media studies have scrutinized such torture narratives in connection to the Bush Administration’s aggressive and unapologetic defense of torture (their euphemism: “enhanced interrogation tactics”). Boasting a broader range of fans and acclaim from critics who have generally been hostile to Hostel and Saw, 24 has proven a seminal popular text in studying the interstices of entertainment media and American policies toward torture, extraordinary rendition, and indefinite detention. 6 Its success as a television series also far surpasses Fig. 1: Eric Cartman tortures his Arabic neighbor for information in the South Park episode “The Snuke” (season 11, episode 4). Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 128 the timid box office performances of Hollywood melodramas that make earnest attempts at addressing the issue of torture, such as Rendition (Hood, 2007) and Unthinkable (Jordan, 2010). Furthermore, the narrative pacing, visual style, and sequences of torture of 24 became so iconic it was afforded its own parody on the satirical animated show South Park (Fig. 1). The bombastic action-hero persona of Jack Bauer has itself become the subject of parody in online memes like JackBauerFacts.com and on popular humor websites like Cracked.com (e.g. Fig. 2). Fig. 2: From Cracked.com, part of a user-submitted photo contest titled “Reality Shows We’d Actually Watch.” Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 129 The majority of critical works pertaining to the program’s representations of torture invariably place their attention on the portrayal of Bauer as a masterful interrogator. In doing so, these works have, with almost unanimous consistency, overlooked a pivotal element of the program’s engagement with the topic of torture. I turn this analysis around to consider instead the ineffectiveness of torture when enacted on Bauer himself at multiple points in the series. This conceit allows the series to represent America’s power as something manifested through its indestructibility, not necessarily through the pain it may deal to others. This distinction becomes important in projecting an imagined nation of a United States that possesses a moral superiority in the War on Terror. Bauer’s ability to withstand torture becomes one of the program’s key methods of distinguishing a patriotic American identity from the transnational enemy bodies that always prove less resilient to physical pain. This helps to establish categorical distinctions between good and evil, moral superiority and inferiority, that mirror neoconservative discourses around the moral stakes of torture. Jack Bauer’s body is an integral object for understanding the life-affirming and life-denying valuations that underwrite 24 in an age of terroristic mobility. Making Bauer’s body the central object of analysis allows for several approaches pertaining to 24’s myriad other controversial or otherwise paradoxical elements. For instance, the program’s supposedly progressive attributes (its depiction of an African-American president [Dennis Haysbert] long predates the 2008 election of Barack Obama; later, the series would feature a female president [Cherry Jones]) sit uneasily with its regressive caricatures of Muslims, which famously drew complaints from audiences. 7 Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 130 The show is quite clear in differentiating Bauer as fully normative and unceasingly American, in comparison to the foreign or not-quite-assimilated status of many a secondary character whose behavior is frequently suspicious. While a full exploration of race and sexuality are beyond the scope of this chapter, this series certainly invites consideration of how the heterogeneous, culturally and geographically mobile identities that populate the world of 24 coalesce around an American body that, at the end of the day, is white, male, and heterosexual. Such an analytical approach may take a cue from Rey Chow’s theories of the “ascendancy of whiteness” (also discussed in Puar, 24- 32), about how multiculturalism is mediated and managed in ways that privilege European, heteronormative subjectivities. Other studies, such as Elizabeth Goldberg’s survey of state violence in historical films, similarly link representations of torture to the sidestepping of Third World historical perspectives in favor of “a white, Western protagonist [toward whom] audience identification is directed throughout the film” (248). In the narrative world of 24, difference is always suspect, marginal, or threatening. “Correct” forms of torture Reorienting studies of 24 toward Bauer’s body supplement discussions of neoliberal governmentality and the glorification of security apparatuses already taken up in existing studies of 24 (McPherson; Monohan). With regard to the issue of torture, Bauer performs a dual role as both a representative of state power and an occasional rogue agent who refused to be “disciplined” (in Foucault’s). This raises pertinent questions regarding the governing and management of bodies at the intersection of Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 131 neoliberal and neoconservative rationalities that characterizes the current imperial moment of the United States. The program’s overtly provocative depictions of torture scenarios to propel its season narratives arguably remains the most widely discussed component of this already politically over-determined series; this has overshadowed other relevant topics of discussion, such as its depictions of race, gender, state power, and surveillance technologies. The controversy, in brief, addresses Bauer’s remarkable effectiveness in obtaining information through torture, despite the consensus among military experts that torture, in actuality, does not produce reliable intelligence. While his actions are presented typically as ethically and legally dubious, Bauer is seldom wrong in determining the “correct” subjects to torture. He always manages to extract the necessary information with, as Isabel Pinedo (2010) puts it, almost “surgical” precision. That is, Bauer is efficient and exact, never torturing more than necessary and ceasing abuse immediately when he intuits he has collected the information he requires. In a highly publicized incident in 2006, Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan pleaded 24’s creators to reduce the volume of these inaccurately depicted torture sequences (a contemporaneous study by the Parents Television Council had counted 67 such sequences in the program’s first five seasons [Mayer]). Failing that, Finnegan requested that each episode depicting torture be accompanied by disclaimers noting that successful interrogations, in real life, do not transpire over the course of several intense minutes, but will take place over days, even weeks or months, before progress is reported with a subject. No such disclaimers ever appeared on the program. Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 132 Outlandish statements from conservatives (like the Ingraham’s quote that opens this chapter) have reinforced the criticism that torture in 24 evokes the fantasy of enacting brutal and righteous punishment on America’s would-be enemies without severe moral or legal repercussions because it circumvents imminent attacks on the homeland. This allegation may be best supported by sentiments expressed by Bauer’s onetime girlfriend Audrey Raines (Kim Raver) at the end of a typically eventful 24-hour day: “We both know that you belong here, Jack, at CTU, doing what you do best. And thank God there are people like you who can deal with that world” (episode 4.24). 8 At the height of the program’s controversy, Jane Mayer noted how, despite its constant featuring of torture techniques at the service of its suspense narrative, “the show never engages in a serious dialogue on the subject. Nobody argues that torture doesn’t work, or that it undermines America’s foreign-policy strategy. Instead, the doubters tend to be softhearted dupes.” 24 promotes an implicit fantasy of a readily identifiable, definable notion of the United States (the “in here” that exists in opposition to the equally homogenous “out there”) that contradicts America’s actual, complex position within the global flows of contemporary culture and politics. Bauer’s ability to deal with “that world” and his ruthlessness as a counterterror agent – and particularly as an interrogator – becomes the point contrast between the life-affirming and life-destroying ideologies visible on 24. And as viewers of 24 know, the stakes of failure (usually a nuclear detonation) are always a catastrophic; the program’s very format and presentation of these stakes encourage the viewer’s desire to see results-oriented torture as glamorous, heroic, and life-saving, rather than barbaric and life-destroying. Edelstein echoes this dilemma when discussing the popularity of torture porn (see chapter two), wondering whether our post-9/11 anxieties Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 133 have made us the avid consumers of torture-for-entertainment and therefore culpable for its widespread acceptance. "Fear supplants empathy and makes us all potential torturers, doesn't it?” he inquires rhetorically. In a sense, to evaluate the Bush-era political climate that 24 references is to raise just such questions of sympathy and morality for victims of torture. From the start, the abuses at Abu Ghraib provoked outrage over not only the moral failings of the participating soldiers (and, upon investigation, the administrative apparatus that sanctioned their behavior) but also over the cavalier actions of the soldiers who smile, wink, and thumbs-up their way through many of the photographs seen by the pubic. Others – typically conservatives – dismissed even the suggestion of a scandal. The never-eloquent Rush Limbaugh, for instance, argued the soldiers’ actions at Abu Ghraib amounted only to pent-up soldiers needing to “blow off steam,” likening the abuses as moments of levity akin to a fraternity prank (Meyer). The question of empathy, then, becomes central to assessments of who can be tortured, to what effect, and what response it provokes. Judith Butler’s work has been persuasive in extrapolating the discourses around torture into questions of how we define humanness itself amid the legal gray zones that have sprung up during the War on Terror. In comparing “which humans we regard as entitled to legal protection, and which humans we abandon to a domain unprotected by law” (2007: 954), Butler investigates the moral dimensions of such discussions in order to understand what types of bodies are to be granted the status of “human.” 24’s absorption into the conservative rhetoric of justifiable torture offers a potential ways of getting at these distinctions. This is not to validate the claim that, as 24 goes, so goes American public opinion; it is instead to posit Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 134 that the program’s attraction among advocates of torture evinces an ideology of maintaining distinctions between ally and enemy in a war whose declared enemy – “Terror” – is nondescript and uses networks of global mobility to prepare, assemble, and strike. Taking it as a given that each season narrative of 24 took much inspiration from topical Bush-era headlines, 9 the existing scholarship has probed the ways in which the show’s representations and ideological presumptions about torture reflect a current zeitgeist, perhaps even a bloodlust. But whose sympathies are the program trying to elicit and what national characteristics are being pegged to those sympathies? Alternatively, what national identities are implicated in how the program presents the moral stakes and circumstances of “acceptable” torture? Productive interpretations are there to be had in 24’s construction of its hero’s indestructible body. Past works have likewise examined action heroes of previous generations to determine the cultural climates they reflected in their day. Susan Jeffords, for instance, agues that heroes of 1980s Hollywood allowed viewers to “experience personal power by identifying with an individual hero’s victory over fictional antagonists and national power” (28) through the “hard bodies” of action heroes “that enveloped strength, labor, determination, loyalty, and courage” (24). Contemporary iterations of such analysis have hypothesized similar connections between Bauer and our post-9/11 American landscape, notably Tara McPherson’s reading of Bauer as symptomatic of a crisis in masculinity in the digital age. 24 suggests that the volatile times we live in require a particular type of hero to rise to the challenges of our global era and the terrorism it makes possible. This is evident in the program’s most consistent narrative motif: having to make difficult, Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 135 perhaps morally reprehensible decisions when faced with the choice of fighting for justice or relenting to the evils that threaten civilization (wherein “civilization” invariably refers to American-style democracy). Drawing heavily from Giorgio Agamben’s oft- cited arguments on the “state of exception” – sovereign power’s ability to declare the suspension of law during a period of crisis or emergency – many analyses of 24 point to the show’s glamorization of Bauer’s instinctive, not contemplative, action and circumvention of slow-moving legal protocols. Decisiveness is valued, not reflection. The temporal pressures of second-by- second insecurities mandate and naturalize frontier mentalities of shooting first and asking questions later. In this light, governmental agencies and (inter)national laws are feminized bureaucracies and conventions, respectively, out of touch with the field and as such insufficiently adapted for the rapid responses necessitated by absolute dangers. (Monohan 114) The fast-paced nature of the program, in other words, propagates the belief that those who would pause to consider “social problems and root causes of human insecurity are too soft in their approach, too systemic in their demands, and too time-intensive to even warrant mention” (116). Agamben argues that the state of exception “has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones” (2), and in the world 24, every waking hour is a state of crisis warranting exceptional action. Others add that the viewer’s acceptance of such a dynamics is justified in large part by Bauer’s identification as hero (Sutherland and Swan). It is through these combined rubrics that Bauer is assumed by 24’s critics to symbolize the American exceptionalism that motivated the Bush administration and its neoconservative base. Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 136 Similar analyses connect 24’s political subtexts to the conventions of recognizable genres. While the action genre is a logical area of concern for some (Pinedo 2011), the dominant trend has been to draws links to Western mythologies (Hermes 167-168; Delany 193), wherein perhaps the untamed frontier now takes on global, geopolitical resonances. This line of argument is evocative of Joan Mellen’s framework for understanding the changing nature of Western masculinity in its 1960s incarnations. For instance, in Tom Doniphon, the John Wayne character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, 1962), Mellen identifies a strongman who forcibly vanquishes injustice amidst a community that would prefer to compromise with and capitulate to it. She goes on to argue that this characterization is nostalgic for the man of action who does not hesitate to uphold his convictions in the face of societal pressures (258-261). One might extend this reading to Jack Bauer, the surrogate strongman who promises a return to American myths that delineate “right” and “wrong” in an unambiguous fashion. 24 maybe suggests such a strongman is necessary once again, now that such delineations have been muddied and complicated by geopolitical patterns that have proven fertile grounds for the financing and facilitating of transnational terror. 10 Linking this discussion to the conventions of the Western is useful because it allows consideration of 24 in tandem with older generic models that speak to mythic American cultural notions of right and wrong (or, alternatively, of civilization and lawlessness) being made legible through acts of violence. Lee Clark Mitchell argues that the pleasurable gaze audiences adopt toward masculine figures in the Western is, in fact, constructed precisely around depictions of violence endured by the hero. The Western consistently tears down the hero only to later have him rise victorious. Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 137 Western heroes are knocked down, made supine, then variously tortured so that they can recover from harm in order to rise again. Or rather, the process of beating occurs so that we can see men recover, regaining their strength and resources in the process of once again making themselves into men. The paradox lies in the fact that we watch them become what they already are, as we exult in the culturally encoded confirmation of a man again becoming a man. (185) In Mitchell’s view, these distortions of the body – the breakdown that precedes its inevitable reaffirmation – result in the contradictory trope of making masculine a form of masculinity that is ultimately unchanging; the hero must regain a masculinity that he never lost to begin with, presupposing a fixed, historically essential masculine identity that “always exists before the effects of cultural processes are seen” (186). While this chapter sidesteps analysis of Bauer’s body as a necessarily gendered one, this interplay between violent disruption and redemption of the body is relevant if Bauer is to be viewed by audiences as emblematic of unassailable American values. 24 produces a paradox in depicting Bauer’s transformation into “what [he] already is” (177), a relentless warrior for a system of American values that effaces the processes of its own mythmaking. Despite the disruption of terrorism, the America being fought for on 24 remains unchanging and is homogenous in its fantasies of restoring order to a world of chaos and difference. This perspective is allegorically in line with the Bush administration’s neoconservative agenda – I will return to this point later. Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 138 The indestructible American Starting with the notion that these disruptive/redemptive sequences of violence are translatable to the continuous mythology of a culture, much can be drawn from orienting discussions of torture explicitly onto the body of Bauer. This body now becomes a focal point for addressing 24’s imaginary construction of American power and its resulting fantasies of justifiable violence against America’s enemies. Apart from the occasional cursory mention in the relevant literature, Bauer’s resilience remains a curiously unexamined aspect of 24 and torture: periodically throughout the series, Bauer is abducted, often by the very terror suspects he pursues during a given season’s crisis. He is then subjected to brutal forms of torture for the specific information he possesses about an impending attack or the general knowledge he possesses about confidential government secrets (Fig. 3). In every instance, however, the torturers fail to extract information before Bauer is rescued or manages to improvise an escape. Fig. 3: Clockwise from upper left, the torture sequences featured in episodes 2.19; 6.1; the television movie 24: Redemption; and 5.24. Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 139 Given 24’s typically breakneck pace, Bauer is never the worse for wear after surviving torture and is quickly thrust back into the action. The most notable instance of this occurs between seasons five and six. Season five concludes with Bauer being captured by Chinese government agents, who have been hunting him ever since he led a botched raid on the Los Angeles Chinese Consulate (4.20). At the start of season six, Bauer is released as part of a deal between the Chinese agency and the American president, who requires Bauer’s assistance in fighting a new crop of terrorists (6.1). It is at this point the viewers learn that, in the interim between seasons, Bauer had been shipped off to a prison in China and tortured for valuable state secrets continuously for two years. Upon his official handover to CTU agents, the Head of Security at LA’s Chinese Consulate (Tzi Ma), who orchestrated Bauer’s abduction and incarceration, reveals that he was utterly unsuccessful in breaking Bauer: “Please convey to your president that Mr. Bauer never broke his silence. He hasn’t spoken a word in nearly two years.” 11 The beleaguered, physically and psychically damaged Bauer jumps back into action after a change of clothes and a quick shave. Bauer’s resistance to methods of torture increases as the series progresses. 12 His most graphic on-screen torture during season two (2.19-20), during which he is stripped, cut, seared, and sent into cardiac arrest, carries the distinction of being an unusual instance of Bauer’s injuries impeding his progress throughout the remainder of the season (when the narrative requires, Bauer can be seen clutching at his damaged heart, wheezing and wincing). Bauer rarely slows down in subsequent storylines, and by season eight, his body no longer appears to register pain in any recognizable or sustained way. In a far more compressed variation of what Mitchell calls the process of “violation and recovery” Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 140 (183), Bauer’s travails from previous episodes are quickly dismissed and never again referenced. 13 Even the seemingly trivial plot contrivance that Bauer is never seen eating, napping, or visiting the men’s room add to the physical burdens of his heroic suffering, giving him superhuman or machine-like qualities. These details are seldom noted in the literature on Bauer’s above-noted effectiveness as an interrogator. This resilience, however, is a crucial element in the program’s moral justifications of torture. Bauer’s indestructibility is not merely a dramatic conceit that permeates 24’s unending series of crises. It acts as a primary vehicle for the program’s post-9/11 ideological suppositions because it serves to establish a hierarchical relationship between the morally superior American body and the “breakable” enemy body. This, in effect, is what results when the series reduces complex geopolitical matters to simplistic symbolic encounters in the interrogation room. Any inquiry into the political effects of torture must begin with Elaine Scarry’s celebrated study The Body in Pain, which addresses the political meanings that can be extracted from the basic difficulties of articulating physical pain. Torture is an act "that permits one person's body to be translated into another person's voice, that allows real human pain to be converted into a regime's fiction of power" (18). Scarry separates the pain being experienced from the meanings generated for and extracted by the torturer, who produces that pain. This establishes a binary between torturer and tortured that is wholly antagonistic. This is redundant, to be sure – one does not usually torture someone on “his side” – but the externalization of physical pain in the form of a human torturer provides a useful understanding of these relationship dynamics. They are certainly inherent in 24’s Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 141 scenes of torture and help to chart out who is deemed worthy of the viewer’s sympathies in its fictitious narrative contexts. As Scarry notes: Even though it occurs within oneself, it is at once identified as ‘not oneself,’ ‘not me,’ as something so alien that it must right now be gotten rid of. This internal physical experience is in torture accompanied by its external political equivalent, the presence in the space outside the body of a self-proclaimed ‘enemy,’ someone who in becoming the enemy becomes the human embodiment of aversiveness; he ceases to have any psychological characteristics or content other than that he is, like physical pain, ‘not me,’ ‘against me.’ (52) The periodic torture of Bauer serves an important narrative function by identifying the villains of 24 in transparent, expedient terms. While 24’s frequent twists and double-crosses complicate easy identification of the “good” and “bad” guys, the one certainty the viewer can rely on is that Bauer himself is unambiguously the hero. This establishes an important standard by which villainy and torture are linked in the imagining of the United States as a bulwark against a shifting, unstable world in which the “good” and “bad” kinds of mobility must be defined, for all our sakes. The torturing of Bauer effectively announces the antagonistic intentions of the perpetrating character, and this, as I demonstrate below, carries important implications about the moral positioning of the torturer versus the tortured vis-à-vis certain international versus national dynamics. This “externalization” is, for Scarry, an analog of war, in that the capacity to destroy one’s body further symbolizes the destruction of the culture or civilization that body represents. In torture, “the human body opens itself and allows ‘the nation’ to be Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 142 registered there in the wound” (112), making torture an act through which the otherness of that abused body and its national, ethnic, or cultural heritage is made apparent and breakable. Elsewhere, Naomi Klein argues that the shock of torture (akin to the economic “shocks” that facilitate the advancement of free market capitalism, in her analogy) rests on “the idea that by depriving people of their sense of who they are and where they are in time and space, adults can be converted into dependent children whose minds are a blank slate of suggestibility” (48). This “Quest for Blankness” (35) pursues the objective of “erasing people and then trying to remake them from scratch” (30), demonstrating the subject’s capacity to be reborn and regenerated in the national/cultural image of the torturer. Of course, we are operating here with notions of “nation” and “culture” that, in actuality, are imprecise; one might argue that 24 most reveals its conservative leanings in the way it imposes a singularity of purpose onto Bauer that in no way reflects the heterogeneity of the American social and political body. David Campbell writes of national identity as being shaped and determined by perceived dangers to the national polity, which facilitate “the constitution of identity [through] the inscription of boundaries that serve to demarcate an ‘inside’ from an ‘outside,’ a ‘self’ from an ‘other,’ a ‘domestic’ from a ‘foreign’” (9). In this sense, the divisions between a unified American nation and the “evils” of terrorism featured on 24 are simply too neat. The broad and philosophical terms in which Scarry address this subject, then, serve as the starting point for examining American torture as a phenomenon that does not exist independently of historical and cultural context. 14 Many contemporary scholars resist looking at torture as historically invariable and consider how encounters in the Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 143 interrogation room are informed by structures of power and media particular to their historical moment. In addition to the above-cited work by Butler, these studies have framed American torture – usually by focusing on the Abu Ghraib scandal – within a variety of discourses, such as queer subjectivity (Puar), art history (Eisenman), photography (Sontag), and, notably, pornography (Danto; Bourke; Gurstein; etc.), to name a few; these subjects also overlap significantly, even among the authors listed here. One theme common to this range of scholarship is the assumption that national or cultural identities (of torturers and victims alike) are made evident through the act of torture, not presupposed prior to it. That is, neither the globally ill-defined enemy combatant nor his corollary, the American terror-fighter, can exist without the narratives and structures that activate such identities and bring them into being. Among such arguments, one of the more compelling is Anne McClintock’s assessment that the contradictions of American imperialism in the War on Terror (notably its simultaneous rhetoric of peace and commitment to indefinite war) can be best explained as a “paranoid” mode of governance. Paranoia requires an enemy to justify itself. Faced with an ideological enemy that is not readily identifiable and appears to be in constant motion, the question becomes “how to embody the invisible enemy and be visibly seen to punish it” (95, emphasis in original). In making the bodies of prisoners “legible” as enemy bodies, American forces are able to justify the notion that their status as prisoners is automatically aligned with their threatening stance against the United States. This, in turn, legitimizes the expansion of the war effort, the occupation of the Middle East, and particularly the broadening of surveillance technologies, a chief Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 144 manifestation of America geopolitical paranoia wherein “the power to see [becomes] equated with the power to dominate” (94, emphasis in original). 15 Conservative commentators in America commend 24 for “getting torture right,” presumably because only bad people would possess information worth torturing for. As McClintock argues, this circular logic supposes people are being tortured because they are our enemy… and they must be our enemy if we are torturing them. In addition, 24 propagates the fantasy that thwarting terrorism is just a matter of finding the correct person to torture. But what if we were to reverse this dynamic, given that the tortures undergone by Bauer are the most frequent and often the most graphic in the series? If the torture of an enemy serves to validate his status as “enemy,” Bauer’s torture, the most “visible” on the program, appears to achieve the opposite effect. Through torture, Bauer’s patriotism is amplified, his indestructibility made apparent through acts of torture that allow him to become, in Mitchell’s formulation, “what he already is.” 24 relies frequently on torture as its means of defining the so-called “Americanness” of Bauer. This exemplifies the contradictory premise of a War on Terror that is imagined as a conflict with identifiable “sides,” even though global terror has proven far less accommodating of traditional notions of political boundaries. 16 Torture on 24 serves to establish an important binary between good and evil that appears to be informed by the neoconservative rationale of re/asserting cultural boundaries “through discourses of patriotism, religiosity, and the West” (Brown 699). This, combined with obvious allegorical similarities between Bauer’s enemies and a range of Bush-era bogeymen, impacts the motivations behind the torture being committed. One of 24’s characteristic incongruities with the real-life effects of torture is its justification of some Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 145 instances of torture and not others. Henry Shue describes a difference between interrogational and terroristic torture – the former is enacted for the express purpose of extracting information and the latter is “overshadowed by the goal of the intimidation of people other than the victim,” rendering irrelevant whatever information the victim may or may not possess (53). The key distinction between the two, he notes, lies in the integrity and discretion of the torturer, who determines whether the victim’s compliance will result in the cessation of the torture. When the victim is offered no possibility of escape through compliance, torture spirals into an uglier and unjustifiable realm, such as in the events at Abu Ghraib, wherein the offenses were transparently about humiliation, not interrogation. One might characterize the controversies surrounding 24 as primarily about the program’s fast and loose oscillation between depictions of interrogational and terroristic torture. When Bauer is the torturer, his actions are legitimized by the hypothetical costs of failing to extract information about, say, an impending nuclear strike or assassination attempt. In the terms stated above, to grant Bauer this legitimacy is to assert the superiority and primacy of the torturer’s world, while diminishing that of the tortured, whose world is destroyed by the acts of torture that discredit the ideologies his body comes to represent. Torture on 24, time and again, “[objectifies] the fact that [the torturer] has a world” and legitimizes through “feigned urgency the critical importance of that world, a world whose asserted magnitude is confirmed by the cruelty it is able to motivate and justify” (Scarry, 36). Hence the program goes about the impossible task of depicting torture to justify American moral leadership – a leadership that must be Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 146 maintained if we are to narrate the War on Terror as originating with American victimization on September 11, 2001 (Butler, 2001). In contrast, the discredited world/worldview of the program’s villains is never granted the same degree of urgency or authenticity. When Bauer is tortured, the purpose might be to retrieve information (a typical question posed to him may be: “How much do you know about us?”), but viewers understand that Bauer’s compliance will likely result in his death – once the terrorists “have no more use for him,” as these plot conventions go – and thus no one will be left to foil the terror plot underway. Bauer’s torturing of suspects never results from terroristic or anti-American intentions and his methods spill over into unrestrained sadism only when sadism is part of a ruse designed to compel the suspect’s cooperation – such as when he threatens to murder a terrorist’s innocent family members, but with no actual intention of doing so (2.12; 3.23; 8.11). The sole exception to this occurs late in season eight, when Bauer viciously and callously tortures his girlfriend’s assassin (8.21). Yet this development is still accompanied by the viewer’s knowledge that the man possesses information vital to Bauer’s objectives. In other words, the difficult moral question the program impresses upon viewers is never whether Bauer must torture the man to complete his mission, but whether he goes too far in his particular techniques. 24 asks audiences to accept that Bauer is always performing interrogational torture, but is the victim of terroristic torture, thus putting forth a dangerous philosophy of political violence: when America does it, it is interrogational and necessary, but when “they” do it, it is terrorism. As Bauman notes, “The right to draw the line between legitimate (permissible) coercion and illegitimate (impermissible) coercion is the prime stake of all power struggles”; coercion by the state Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 147 is allowable, even necessary, while “all other coercion is designated as violence” (2002: 4). The circumstances under which Bauer’s victimization produces imaginary dichotomies of acceptable versus unacceptable torture are only part of what is fascinating about the incongruities between real-life torture and its representations on 24. The fiction exemplified by Bauer (and a crucial divergence from Scarry’s thesis) is that he does not experience the effects of torture in any conventional sense because his tormentors never manage to translate his pain into their power. Even when Bauer is faced with impossible odds and subjected to unthinkable forms of abuse, audiences never truly doubt his chances of survival (especially mid-season); in these sequences, power and control actually belong to Bauer, the tortured, all along. 17 Bauer Power Most pertinent to this discussion are the ideological considerations of interpreting Bauer’s superhuman tenacity as some type of allegorical embodiment of American resolve in the face of global terroristic mobility. His routine abductions bring him face to face with those determined to do the United States harm, and those encounters become occasions for Bauer to assert the superiority of American nationalism over globalism in very clear terms. This is seen, for instance, in his exchange with Marwan (Arnold Vosloo), the chief villain of season four. Marwan has already been foiled twice by Bauer and CTU – his first plot, a live Internet broadcast of the execution of the Secretary of Defense (William Devane; 4.1-5); the second, a remote-initiated meltdown of the nation’s nuclear power plants (4.8) – and yet he remains confident that the mass chaos Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 148 created by his actions was enough to consider his mission a vast success. Bauer, beaten, on his knees, and handcuffed, begs to differ: Bauer: Whatever you’ve planned next is going to fail, just like everything else you’ve tried today. Marwan: Fail? Almost 40 dead in a train crash, many more near the San Gabriel Island nuclear plant. Bauer: That wasn’t really your plan, was it? We managed to stop the other 103 power plants from melting down. That’s what America will remember, that we stopped you. Marwan: No. They’ll remember the image of Secretary of Defense Heller held hostage on your own soil, and it will burn in their psyches. This country will forever be afraid to let their leaders appear in public. Bauer: For all the hatred that you have for this country, you don’t understand it very well. Whatever you throw at us, I promise you that’ll never happen. (4.15; emphasis mine) Bauer’s statements are inspiring in large part because of the duress under which he expresses faith in American resilience. In its association of Bauer’s heroism with America’s geopolitical leadership in the fight against terrorism, 24 suggests that Bauer’s refusal to cooperate under the pressures of torture is analogous to an infallible, indestructible American social body. Much like how the shock and trauma of the 9/11 attacks simultaneously gave rise to remarkable public sentiments of unity and national belonging, Bauer’s pain doubles as his main expression of patriotism. In the world of 24, Bauer cannot fail because America cannot fail. In the Nietzschean terms introduced at Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 149 the head of this chapter, it is only by embracing pain and obstacles that one may determine his self-worth. This, in Philip Kain’s words, is what makes Bauer a “candidate for the Übermensch” (59), and by the transitive property, makes America supreme among nations. Such is the hawkish strength of Bauer Power, in contrast, say, to the hippie- dippie associations of “flower power” that neoconservatism rejects. As noted above, however, to prop up such patriotism as the exclusive province of an American hero (or, rather, the “correct” kind of American hero, given the may ostensible American nationals on the show who fail in this regard), is to take for granted that an identity is made coherent in relation to a belief in dangers “located in an external and anarchic environment” (Campbell 8). For Leerom Medovoi, the processes by which such fears propel new dividing lines after 9/11 (the milieu of 24) can be traced to Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of “race war” and its applications in the global war on terror. For Foucault, “the narrative of race war is most fundamentally concerned with two peoples, divided by language, religion, place of origin, or some other formative collective experience who are nonetheless caught up in a history of mutual struggle” and whose struggles in turn produce counter-historical narratives of power (Medovoi 59). 18 Medovoi asks what kind of traditionally defined “external” enemy poses a threat to a world in which boundaries have become so porous (70-1). His conclusion is that the War on Terror represents a contemporary political rationality suitable to managing the “mutual struggles” now divided along cultural fault lines as a result of the unification of the world’s cultures through market liberalism – what Samuel Huntington has famously called a “clash of civilizations.” Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 150 Medovoi’s claim here is that the War on Terror functions as a military remedy against “beliefs, meanings, and practices of any sort that threaten or resist […] incorporation into a global liberal society” (74). It signals the adoption of a new form of race war in which “Terrorist” becomes an abstract category of abnormality that must exist in order to assert the primacy of “normal” global governance. Terrorism becomes, like murder or rape, the naming of a deviant type against which society must be defended. This is the sense in which the external racial enemy has been folded back into a biopolitical project of the traditionally domestic sort: the surveillance, policing, and punishing of a race of ‘abnormals’ who exist in advance of their criminal acts, and who thus should be detected, identified, and neutralized preemptively, before they actualize the potential social threat that they pose. (72) In essence, the threat of terrorism has been weaved into the biopolitical management of populations that, in a market-integrated world, has become global in its reach (71). What is of interest is the impossibility of pinpointing consistent characteristics among Bauer/America’s many foes, which include a wide assortment of nationals (including treacherous Americans). Divisions between protagonists and antagonists are more customarily consigned to the amorphous realm of ideological and cultural difference (allowing for the occasional American traitor to pop up), but even this varies wildly; while grouped summarily under the heading of “terrorist” or “extremist,” enemies on 24 plot out different attacks with different aims for different reasons. Bauer himself, then, becomes the common denominator: whatever the ideological or national origin of or explanation for their terroristic actions, the villains of 24 are united in their inability to Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 151 break Bauer. Amid the persistently shifting loyalties of the program’s characters, this particular trait remains constant. What I have chosen to call “Bauer Power” therefore refers not merely to Bauer’s enduring body and patriotic resolve but also to a process of distinguishing and ordering social and political actors in the age of transnationally mobile terrorism. This near- homonym of biopower – Foucault’s theory of “the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being” (2003: 239) – makes Bauer’s tortured body the focal point of the viewer’s identification with the logic of a race war predicated on American exceptionalism. Foucault asserts that biopolitics is accompanied by, nor can the modern state function without, the mechanisms of race war, which maintain the sovereign’s right to kill by implementing categorical distinctions between “what must live and what must die” (254). Noting the genocidal nationalisms that dominated the twentieth century, Foucault identifies a modern rationality consisting of the denial of life for some as a direct means of affirming it for others. Bauer’s contention that America will never yield despite “whatever you throw at us” rests first and foremost on the delineation between the “you” and the “us,” legitimating a particular wartime biopolitics in which the stewardship of global stability rests in the ability of the United States to control who is allowed to move in and our of social and ideological spaces. Under terroristic torture – that is, torture that must categorically be the province of those whose very systems of mobility oppose global peace – Bauer’s body becomes a site onto which the battle lines of a new race war can be made legible along a sort of ideological mobility (or promiscuity) and immovability (or faithfulness). It does so, however, in a way that always asserts the primacy of an imagined, unified America that is Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 152 unilaterally committed to defending itself against the real dangers these global mobilities potentially represent. 19 Through its articulation in a body that is paradoxically rendered vulnerable yet is impossible to destroy, Bauer Power is the power to make different: to make visible the “enemy” through his association with terroristic torture; to assert moral supremacy over that enemy through a resistance to pain; and to assure that American exceptionalism remains stable and continuous despite the world-destroying violence of torture. This must be seen in tandem with the knowledge that Bauer himself virtually never fails when he is himself the torturer – the original sin of the series. When all is said and done, this is the fantastic premise that underwrites 24: the contradictory notion that not only does torture provide reliable information, but only from those who are too weak in their resolve to resist that torture. By making Bauer both interrogator par excellence as well as resistant to those very tactics he himself employs, the program promotes the moral supremacy and political primacy of American heroism each time a would-be terrorist caves to the pressures of physical and psychological torture. For Scarry, victims of torture are forced to accept their eventual confession or divulging of information as an act of self-betrayal, something they succumb to when the pain becomes too much to bear (46-47). In 24, only the weak-willed – or, put another way, those informed by inferior ideologies or bear the stigmas of rootlessness, exile, or nomadism – are capable of such self-betrayal; Bauer is not. Having Bauer remain in a position of power as both torturer and tortured allows 24 to effectively have its cake and eat it, too. One might say the divisions that Medovoi identifies in his account of a new, global race war are reduced to a matter of which side has more backbone under pressure. Putting it in these terms, I Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 153 cannot help but recall the commonplace portrayal of George Bush as the anti-intellectual president who always deferred to his “gut feelings” when making decisions (Suskind; Wolffe; Harris and Allen; etc.). More importantly, reducing the complex dynamics of torture to a matter of the superior “values” of American life allows a myth of American global leadership to remain intact amid the flows of global movement, thereby excusing the violence of torture and war as a necessary step in attaining the peace we all presumably desire. America need not apologize for a war that is synonymous with the preservation of American ideals that remain stable, always. The same might be said for Bauer’s ability to deflect any psychological trauma that might result from the (let’s call it what it is) sociopathic behavior that he commits regularly in the name of “doing the right thing.” Season seven, with its stark emphasis on Bauer’s psychological and spiritual redemption – this follows his self-imposed exile to Africa, depicted in the TV movie 24: Redemption – begins with him being questioned about his past uses of torture at a senate committee hearing. Bauer makes it explicit that he does not regret his actions. Bauer: For a combat soldier, the difference between success and failure is your ability to adapt to your enemy. The people that I deal with, they don’t care about your rules. All they care about is a result. My job is to stop them from accomplishing their objectives. I simply adapted. In answer to you question, am I above the law? No, sir. I am more than willing to be judged by the people you claim to represent. I will let them decide what price I should pay. But please, do not sit there with that smug look on your face and expect me to regret the decisions that I have made because, sir, the truth is, I don’t. (7.1) Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 154 Throughout season seven, this characterization is further reinforced by the introduction of FBI Agent Renee Walker (Annie Wersching), Bauer’s partner for much of the season and briefly his lover in season eight, before she is murdered. Walker’s hesitations about resorting to torture represent a (notably gendered) reversal of Bauer’s belief that the ends always justify the means. Yet her important contribution to the program as Bauer’s moral counterweight does little to complicate 24’s continual return to the torture trope. Season seven concludes by implying that Walker tortures an enemy ringleader now under her custody (7.24); her return in season eight is accompanied by the revelation that she suffered a subsequent mental collapse and retired from the Bureau (8.4). But the philosophical quandaries posed at the start of season seven and Walker’s overall character arc do much to introduce a more nuanced approach to the moral dilemma of torture. Their effect is quite the opposite, to reassert how fortunate the nation is for having people like Bauer “who can deal with that world” when others fail. Bauer’s configuration as a masterful practitioner of results-oriented torture, yet one who never succumbs to the effects of such techniques, exposes the hierarchies of power represented in 24: those with the powers of preserving (life/democracy/ civilization) are not merely those who wield violence directly upon enemy bodies, but also those who are most able to resist and withstand such violence. Bauer is unable to betray his country because he will not give in to the pains of torture; his enemies, however, must give in because doing so reinforces the inherent inferiority of their convictions and lack of ideological connection to the one nation that matters. It is this component of the series that Slavoj Žižek refers to as the “the lie of 24,” that a figure like Bauer can be such an effective torturer, but can simultaneously be a loving father and Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 155 sympathetic do-gooder. It is because he also carries these positive qualities that the need to torture on 24 becomes transfigured as part of Bauer’s personal tragedy, not of those who suffer at the hands of his authorized and unauthorized interrogations. Torturing others is the burden he must to pay to protect his country, just as war is a necessary evil to root out terrorism. Feigned urgency and silent clocks At the conclusion of every episode of 24, a digital clock signals the end of the hour, precisely where the following episode will pick up (e.g., Fig. 4). Likely the most iconic narrative device of the series, this clock is seen periodically throughout, usually in the transitions in and out of commercial breaks, to orient the view to each episode’s timeline. The clock is always accompanied by an intimidating, pulsing *beep* for every second on the counter, emphasizing the gradual loss of time that drives the suspense on 24. On rare occasions, however, the program adopts what fans have come to call the “silent clock”: upon the death of a sympathetic character, whose demise occurred by surprise and/or was intensified for emotional impact, the clock runs out its final seconds in complete silence, inviting a moment of contemplation and respect for one of the “good guys” who lost his or her life in the service of the narrative. The silent clock is reserved only for characters the audience has come to care for. Hence 24 is not without a moral compass, which it too often invokes in order to mobilize its viewers’ sympathies through reductive presentations of what goes on in a torture chamber – that is, among the improvised spaces of interrogation in which “stable” notions of the national and “unstable” notions of the global come to a head. In Homo Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 156 Sacer, Agamben identifies the power to kill without sacrificing, producing death without political meaning. 24 endows itself with an “attempt to construe certain deaths as sacrificial and others as banal and meaningless in relation to a given audience” (Rubbo 85). This violence is purposeful and sacrificial, and that violence renders impotent and denies martyrdom. 24’s representations of Bauer as both torturer and, more significantly, as tortured, illustrates the importance these torture sequences have in placing the program’s key players (and their real-life political referents) within broader spectrums of life and death. This becomes of particular political importance in the race war, generating claims for the need to destroy some lives in a campaign to protect others – here translated as the need to eliminate that which propels the global at the expense of the national. The prevalence of torture in 24, then, provokes a series of questions: whose extraordinary physical suffering is permitted to convey what meaning, and to whom? Whose torture, in Butler’s terms, is “grievable?” (2004) Whose pain, even death, is rendered a necessary evil for the Fig. 4: An example of the digital clock that appears at multiple points during every episode of 24. Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 157 maintenance of American democracy, and whose, to put in the more esoteric context of the 24 narrative, is deemed worthy of the silent clock? The central moral-political question of American violence upon foreign, transnationally mobile terrorism remains unresolved years after the “feigned urgencies” (Scarry’s term) of 24’s repetition of apocalyptic near-misses. Most recently, this is taken up as the subject matter of Homeland, which follows an emotionally imbalanced CIA operative’s (Claire Danes) efforts to track a Muslim sleeper agent in Washington, D.C. Despite garnering acclaim among critics and award recognition at the Emmys, the show has come under fire for its Islamophobic conceit, implying that Muslims all harbor animosity against the United States (Al-Arian). Rachel Shabi has contended that, even while depicting atrocities committed by Americans, Homeland’s “core message is that the U.S. means well, but sometimes has to do bad things; while the Arab and/or Muslim enemy doesn't mean well and hence does unfathomably bad things [sic].” And perhaps most significant to the longevity of this issue, the “responsible” representation of torture as entertainment, is the controversy that erupted around the political docu-thriller Zero Dark Thirty, which depicts the decade-long pursuit for Osama Bin Laden and the interrogation, surveillance, and other intelligence-gathering tactics of those in the CIA responsible for finally locating him (the assault on Bin Laden’s hidden compound in Pakistan, which resulted in his death, is portrayed in the film’s climax). Journalists and U.S. senators disputed the film’s suggestion that torture (among them waterboarding) produced actionable information in determining Bin Laden’s whereabouts. 20 The film inspired pundits from across the political spectrum to make rare forays into film criticism; many argued, in essence, that the film does not allow room to Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 158 debate the moral dimensions of torture, but instead implies that “brutalization brings breakthroughs” (Mayer 2012). Perhaps the loudest among these critics was Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian, who condemned the film unreservedly as being pro- torture. 21 The film’s brief inclusion of interview footage of Obama (broadcast on 60 Minutes shortly after he was elected president in 2008), during which he states his intention to put an end to all American torture programs, was also dismissed as insincere; echoing Mayer’s observation that dissent on 24 only comes from “soft-hearted dupes,” Peter Bergen noted that Obama’s comments, in the context of the film, came across “as wrongheaded and prissy.” Jack Bauer, despite the shaky moral and legal grounds on which he operates, remains irreproachable because he does it right and makes it certain that “they” will do it wrong. It is also within the biopolitical race war and its coinciding designations of the categories “alive” and “dead” that the dramas of interrogational and terroristic torture play out on the program. Bauer’s resistance to the electrical wires, blades, fists, and other improvised devices that are deployed against him allows him to convert the world- destroying traumas of torture into a manifestation of American exceptionalism. This remains true regardless of whether he is the torturer or the tortured; in the delineation Scarry offers between a weapon and a tool (172-176), with its respective powers to destroy and create, Bauer’s body is always alternating registers. Each time Bauer is tortured, the implicit conflation of his body’s indestructibility with its Americanness brings into focus the comparative nature of his enemies’ bodies and justifies their social and literal deaths by excluding them from a narrow American vision of a peaceful global society. Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 159 NOTES 1 In 2007, the media watchdog group Media Matters for America compiled instances of conservative commentators justifying their hawkish stances against terrorism through references to Jack Bauer, including the Ingraham quotation above (Ironside). For instance, on an episode of The Big Story with John Gibson, Gibson devoted a segment of his program to 24’s season 6 storyline about the detonation of a terrorist nuclear bomb in Southern California. He asked: “Fact or fiction? Well, it certainly may be fiction for now, but 24’s Jack Bauer it has right. People need to wake up to the possibility of nuclear attack.” Elsewhere, Glenn Beck (then on CNN) aired a segment called “Thank God for Secret Tactics” on his eponymous show, during which he proclaimed “I want a Jack Bauer out there. […] Let’s be honest. It’s the tactics and the programs that we don’t know about that make us all sleep real well at night.” 2 Moore made this statement while appearing as a panel guest on the October 20, 2006, episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher; the overwhelmingly left-‐leaning audience promptly and loudly booed Moore’s comments. 3 As of this writing, a new season of 24 is scheduled for broadcast in May, 2014, in a limited, 12-‐episode run (reduced from its usual 24 episodes) titled “24: Live Another Day” (Rice). 4 The phrase “ticking bomb” is invoked most frequently in reference to Alan M. Dershowitz’s contention that such exceptional circumstances may provide a limited legal jutification for the authorization of torture. 5 Numerous recent television programs have featured storylines or sequences concerning torture, its efficacy, its morality, etc., either as a regular feature of the show or in specific episodes. Examples include Lost (ABC, 2004-‐2010), Battlestar Galactica (Syfy, 2003-‐2009), American Horror Story (FX, 2011-‐) and Sons of Anarchy (FX, 2008-‐). 6 This is not to say that people have not used the moniker “torture porn” to describe 24. This is typically done to suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that the Fox program appeals to the basest forms of sensationalism pertaining to the terror-‐related fears and fantasies of viewers. 7 In response to complaints from Arab-‐American groups about the portrayals of Muslim terrorists on the program, Kiefer Sutherland was featured, as himself, in a PSA in support of the American Muslim community. The PSA accompanied the original broadcast of episode 4.8. 8 This sentiment is mirrored in a downbeat epilogue to the series finally that was produced for the season eight DVD set. Chloe O’Brien (Mary Lynn Rajskub), Bauer’s longtime colleague and trusted friend at CTU, is arrested and dragged away in front of her young son for aiding in Bauer’s ultimate escape from authorities. Questioned as to why she would jeopardize her career for someone with a dubious professional record like Bauer’s she insists that “He did things that no one else had the guts to do, things that needed to be done.” Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 160 9 It is worth noting, however, that despite its ripped-‐from-‐the-‐headlines topicality, the program does not actually depict waterboarding until as late as episodes 8.19 and 8.20. 10 Interestingly, in the program’s eighth season (the series finale, until a revival season was announced in 2013), the true culprits behind the day’s terror schemes turn out to be agents in the Russian government. In this way, 24 concludes its run with a strangely nostalgic turn toward the geopolitical anxieties of the Cold War period. 11 Bauer’s torture by the Chinese is not depicted in the main series. Instead, this is depicted briefly in a short film promoting season six, in which the Chinese, frustrated by Bauer’s unwillingness to identify a suspected American agent within the Chinese government, stages an American-‐led raid of the prison in an scheme to deceive Bauer into thinking he has been rescued. The purpose of the ruse is to trick Bauer into exposing an undercover American agent, which he inadvertently does before being thrown back in his cell. 12 Bauer’s growing invincibility runs parallel to his growing ruthlessness in taking immediate action when necessary. This is most evinced by his increased willingness to kill his enemies in flagrant acts of revenge that ignore legal protocols: his season three execution of CTU traitor Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke; 3.14) is presented with some ambiguity (was she really reaching for that gun?). However, his later executions of the similarly treacherous Christopher Henderson (Peter Weller; 5.23) and Dana Walsh (Katee Sackhoff; 8.20) are, plainly, murders. The latter episodes of season eight feature an enraged Bauer on an unrestrained killing spree, prompted by the assassination of his girlfriend (8.17). Bauer’s final act of torture against her assassin (8.21) features some of the most brutally graphic and censor-‐provoking violence of the series. 13 One exception to this is season seven, during which Bauer is exposed to a degenerative nerve virus, resulting in the gradual loss of his memory and physical faculties (7.15-‐24). This is not the result of torture, however. 14 One noteworthy limitation to Scarry’s suppositions here is that they assume a “war” is engaged by two nations or civilizations in a contest for supremacy. Such definitions have a dubious applicability in era of global terror, which is not characterized coventionally by conflicts between nation-‐states. 15 In this sense, much can be said about 24’s narrative structure, which jumps between multiple simultaneous events (often through innovative uses of split screens); this technique is effective in generating suspense by establishing the existence of real, sometimes multiple, terror plots underway. The degree of omniscience given to the audience is significant in light of a post-‐9/11 political climate that has proven an acute “lack of omniscience” among the American public about unknowable foreign dangers and domestic governmental malfeasance (Scarry 2004: 284). 16 It should be noted that Bauer is by no means the only American national, or even the only protagonist, to undergo torture in the series: investigations on 24 typically feature multiple red herrings involving the torture of various minor characters. These occasionally even include Bauer’s own CTU colleagues, who (sometimes mistakenly) fall under suspicion of espionage or collusion with terrorists. Nor are 24’s myriad villains necessarily coded as “other,” and there are frequent revelations of Americans abetting or financing the terrorists; Dead Zones | Bauer Power | 161 the most notable example of this is in season five, when the man responsible for authorizing acts of domestic terrorism turns out to be the President of the United States (Gregory Itzin). 17 The circumstances of Bauer’s torture are often pragmatic narrative requirements. At times, torture is a diversion or delay tactic – Bauer must suffer to allow others, elsewhere, the time they require to achieve a particular objective; at others, torture is an interruption – torture delays Bauer’s pursuits and his enemies evade him, prolonging the crisis storyline. Or, torture becomes a means of inadvertent infiltration – once Bauer manages to escapes his restraints, he finds himself conveniently inside the secret headquarters of his enemies. 18 Foucault defines “race” as “a partisan divide within the populace” (Medovoi, 59) and is therefore not discussing “race war” in terms of our contemporary biological or scientific understanding of racial divisions. 19 This dynamic is likewise echoed in 24’s nuclear crises and the real fears that they allegorize of terrorists acquiring WMD. Foucault identifies nuclear weaponry as being paradoxical in their facilitation of the sovereign’s traditional right to kill, but now possessing the possibility of eradiating life itself (2003: 252). In 24, however, a nuclear blast is a “survivable crisis” (Herbert 87) that only signals an occasion to celebrate American resilience further. 20 Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, two senior members of the Armed Services Committee, Democrat Carl Levin and Republican John McCain, Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., have all come out to dispute the film’s depiction of “successful” torture. 21 The peak point of Greenwald criticism spanned over several days, in opinion pieces published in The Guardian on December 10 and December 14, 2012. Another piece followed in February 25, 2013, after Zero Dark’s losses at the 85 th Academy Awards. The film also had its supporters. Outspoken filmmaker Michael Moore, for instance, argued that, far from endorsing torture, the film exposes it as a morally corrupt practice (The Huffington Post). Chapter 5 The Diplomat: Outside Matters “For if there is one single truth about Asia, it is that while each country there is totally different from every other, Japan is the most different of all.” – Pearl S. Buck (9-10) “Part of diplomacy is to open different definitions of self-interest.” – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (quoted in Kaminski) A satellite of the Planet Earth All Nippon Airways (ANA), Japan’s largest commercial airline, publishes an in- flight magazine called Wingspan, which routinely includes an “International Route Map” (Fig. 1) conceived via azimuthal equidistant projection – meaning all points on the map depict the correct proportional distance from its center. The image presents a contorted visualization of planet Earth, in which the distance of travel to all world destinations may only be measured in relation to a Japanese center. If this dissertation’s introductory study of Robert Del Naja’s “Cruel Britannia” pointed to some nebulous state in which the lines separating privilege from destitution are indefinable, ANA’s map represents a stark sense-making of the world for its predominantly Japanese clientele. Viewing this map, these travelers are invited to reinforce their perceptions of Japan-as-home – the natural place from which all travel emanates outward, and to which all travel returns. Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 163 Fig. 1: Sample ANA "International Route Map," found in the June 2012 edition of Wingspan, pg. 54. Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 164 Of course, a durable notion of an “outside” matters for any durable conception of an “inside”; however dominantly positioned on such a map, Japan’s centrality is nevertheless given geographical clarity by its peripheries. Jean Baudrillard’s called Japan “a satellite of the planet earth” (79), which John Clammer expounds upon thusly: “[Japan is] a society and culture both nowhere in relation to the real power centers and points of influence in the modern world system, but yet everywhere in terms of its artifacts and its economic presence” (34). The task of this chapter is to examine the relationality of this simultaneous anonymity and all-importance in the context of contemporary Japanese national security. At a time when transnational terrorism has become a regular part of our geopolitical vocabulary, Japan’s ability to protect itself against threat figures centrally in ongoing conversations about the stakes it claims in global affairs. Such anxieties have produced no shortage of dramatic content for Japanese television programming, which imagine Japan as being under frequent attack from both foreign and domestic assailants (and often some collusion of the two). Such narratives typically focus on quasi-fictional law enforcement agencies and their institutional idiosyncrasies: in SP: Security Police (Esupī, 2007-2008), characters are tasked with the protection of VIPs from threat of assassination; in ROMES / Airport Defense System (Romesu / Kūkōbōgyo Shisutemu, 2009), they protect the integrity of airport security; in Bloody Monday (Buradī Mandei, 2008-2010), they protect from cyber-terrorism and bio- warfare. 1 The latter program, in particular, references Japan’s own recent history of biological terrorism, in which the Aum Shinrikyō death cult launched a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995. 2 Public attention has since been reignited whenever new developments appear on the news, such as when two of the perpetrators Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 165 were sentenced to death in 2000 (BBC News), or in 2012 when another fugitive member turned himself in after 16 years on the run (The Guardian). Yet when we picture contemporary terrorism, the image that comes readily to mind remains that of two smoldering towers across the New York City skyline in September, 2001. As such, this sort of genre entertainment out of Japan is not without some mixing of topical domestic concerns with the historical primacy of the United States in shaping our perceptions of terrorism and the production values of Hollywood that still remain something of a gold standard in global film and television. Some cultural or political connection to the United States, then, becomes quite relevant when assessing how anxieties about global terror are perceived, how they are to be combated, and the relationship Japan has to the now-global forms of human mobility that make such terrorism possible. Modern terrorism is at once local and global, and much of the more provocative or interesting media pertaining to such issues reflect this fact. For instance, a most distinctive bevy of influences from the American action- drama 24 (which was successful in Japan) can be seen in the miniseries Gaijikeisatsu: Sotogoto (2009) and subsequent feature film Gaijikeisatsu: Sono Otoko ni Damasareruna (Horikirizono, 2012), which follows an ultra-secretive branch of the state police charged with investigating possible terrorist attacks from foreigners. 3 While the titular “gaijikeisatsu” (foreign affairs police) is not under the rapid time constraints of Jack Bauer’s CTU, it is portrayed as an agency whose efforts are never a priority for politicians and often frustrated by a lack of resources and jurisdictional authority, all of which hamper aggressive and proactive investigations. The protagonist (Watabe Atsurō), a skilled but embittered (and ethically dubious) agency operative, wonders aloud whether Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 166 standing by and allowing a successful terror attack would do Japan some good by snapping it awake to the realities of terrorism. Reactionary in all of the same ways evident in 24’s insistence on the dangers of foreigners, Gaijikeisatsu represents one of the darker and more brooding of the Japanese dramas pertaining the subject of terror, containing none of the comic relief that can be seen in the contemporaneous programs listed above. Its subtitle, Sotogoto – an alternative reading of gaiji () – translates roughly to “outside matters,” placing the origin and nature of the security threat squarely on foreign entities. A similar, near-masochistic sentiment can elsewhere be seen in the film Aegis (Bōkoku no Eijisu; Sakamoto, 2005). Heavily derivative of the Steven Seagal actioner Under Siege (Davis, 1992), the film concerns a cadre of Japanese naval commanders who collude with North Korean extremists to launch an attack on Japan. Their treason, however, is motivated by patriotic intentions: they hope to lure Japan into a war to reinvigorate a proud sense of nationalism, convinced that an imminent and common enemy will unite a fractured Japanese social body. Across these thriller and war genres, then, lies a persistent presentation of encounters that take place overseas as fundamentally being about violent conflict. As with the previous chapter on 24, I ask how this perception – that negotiating with the outside world, first and foremost, requires an understanding how best to mitigate violence and conspiracy – impacts prevailing notions of “Japaneseness.” Here, I reverse the suppositions of chapter three, considering not how the presence of mobile ethnicities prompt a reevaluation of the national body, but how similar reevaluations are prompted by the transnational mobility, this time, of a Japanese figure: the insider, moving outward. Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 167 A particularly intriguing example of this is the Kuroda Kōsaku series (based on novels by Shinpo Yūichi). These mystery/espionage narratives feature the eponymous Kuroda (Oda Yūji), a Japanese foreign diplomat who doubles as a covert counter-terrorist agent. These stories cut across multiple media platforms: Diplomat Kuroda Kōsaku (Gaikōkan Kuroda Kōsaku; 2011) is a single-season television series bookended by two feature films, Amalfi: Rewards of the Goddess (Amarufī: Megami no Hōshū; Nishitani, 2009) and Andalusia: Revenge of the Goddess (Andarushia: Megami no Hōfuku; Nishitani, 2011). A series of short episodes, titled Amalfi Begins, were also made available for cellular download to promote the release of Amalfi. These texts – sequentially Amalfi Begins, Amalfi, Diplomat, and Andalusia – combine to form a more- or-less continuous narrative, with each new storyline beginning shortly after the last has concluded. The Diplomat DVD set also contains an unaired episode that breaks from the master storyline, following a supporting character. Fuji Television, one of Japan’s major networks, produced all of these Kuroda properties; Amalfi, in fact, was promoted as part of Fuji TV’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. This latter detail is of special significance: for its anniversary project, Fuji selected a globe-trotting narrative, featuring a character who is Japanese but also a citizen of the world, simultaneously anchored to the nation of Japan and yet free-floating, ever- mobile, and unconstrained by legal, cultural, or linguistic boundaries. The Kuroda series is useful, then, in proposing a discussion of Japanese self-identity at the interstices of internationalism and nationalism, globalism and jingoism, cosmopolitanism and nativism. Kuroda becomes an arbiter of the interplay between these ideological responses to the Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 168 world and their respective attitudes toward the value of foreign diplomacy in asserting notions of the “homeland.” Although the following makes for a lengthy digression, it is best if I first outline Kuroda’s actions across the multiple storylines to situate my later analysis. The Almafi Begins episodes, constituting the promotional lead-in to the events of Amalfi, take place 24 hours prior to the start of the film. Kuroda is undercover in Macao, masquerading as a poker player to gain audience with a gangster and negotiate peaceful solutions to business impasses with the Japanese government. These ten-minute episodes, five in total, are mostly inconsequential to the master narrative of the film, but introduce Kuroda’s willingness to put his safety at risk for his country and his uncanny calm under pressure. 4 Outrageously implausible as a diplomatic operation, the sequence also makes use of that old spy film standby, the high-stakes card game, which the hero always wins with a killer final hand. In so doing, the series establishes the espionage genre conventions that structure each Kuroda’s adventure, which, like 24, reference current events (Gaikōkan Kuroda Kōsaku no Himitsu [henceforth Himitsu] 21). As will become a running motif throughout the series, each storyline of the Kuroda canon begins with a seemingly unremarkable crime that comes to reveal a wider conspiracy at the top echelons of Japanese political power; each narrative also concludes with Kuroda receiving the details of his new posting, and the next one begins with his arrival at the new embassy site to await instructions. In Amalfi, Kuroda is brought to Rome at Christmastime, in anticipation of a G8 summit, at which one of the agenda items is the issue of intervening in the war-ravaged Balkans. In a seemingly unrelated incident, the young daughter of a vacationing Japanese woman (Amami Yuki) goes missing in a Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 169 museum. Kuroda is assigned somewhat arbitrarily to assist with the missing person case, until it is revealed the girl has been kidnapped for ransom. As the plot thickens, we learn that the kidnapping is part of an elaborate scheme by a man named Fujii (Satō Kōichi) to use the girl as leverage to disable Rome’s security apparatus, then raid the Japanese embassy (it’s all quite complicated). Their ultimate objective is to coerce the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs (Hirata Mitsuru) into confessing on-air that he once authorized the cover-up of accidental civilian deaths in the Balkans (including that of Fujii’s wife) after a botched aid mission; Kuroda arrives in the nick of time to dissuade Fujii from executing the PM, arguing that he be spared to face justice for his crimes. Having thwarted the crisis, Kuroda is sent – without fanfare – to Latin America for his new assignment. Benefitting from the longer, episodic narrative, the television series Gaikōkan involves a more sprawling investigation. Following a throwaway sequence in Bolivia (following the events of Amalfi), in which Kuroda orchestrates the release of a Japanese political prisoner, the story begins in San Francisco during a World Trade Organization summit. He is brought on as an aid to the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs (Kusakari Tamiyo), a woman who, out of implied romantic interest in Kuroda (though the feelings are not reciprocated), becomes his eventual ally in the series. While in California, Kuroda is contacted by Shimomura (Kagawa Teruyuki), a former colleague, who dies soon thereafter in an apparent suicide. After coming to realize that the suicide was staged, Kuroda is notified that Shimomura is the chief suspect in a murder in Tokyo. Suspecting a wider conspiracy, Kuroda returns to Japan for the first time in over a decade; maintaining a low profile by accepting a series of menial administrative tasks, he Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 170 conducts his investigation, forming a (non-romantic) partnership with a hapless rookie female detective (Shibasaki Kō). At long last, it is revealed that Shimomura and his accomplices are conspiring to enact revenge upon a band of corrupt politicians who rubber-stamped the importation of an experimental antivirus whose side effects caused fatalities among their family members. Their plan – forcing a former Prime Minister (Hiraizumi Sei), at gunpoint, to publically admit he streamlined a dangerous drug into the market – fails, and Shimomura is killed by the police (episode 1.9). Defying his superiors, Kuroda enlists the help of the Vice Minster to expose the conspiracy – thereby preventing government officials from whitewashing Shimomura’s insurgency as a random act of terror (1.10). Despite his insubordination, Kuroda is allowed to retain his diplomatic credentials at the end of the series and is once again reassigned. So begins the second feature film, Andalusia. With his work done in Japan, Kuroda is promptly whisked away to Paris to oversee an international summit, at which the delegate from Japan intends to enlist other nations in the aggressive regulation of transnational money laundering. The adult son of Japan’s Police General Superintendent (Tanihara Shōsuke) has been murdered while vacationing in the French-Spanish border town of Andalusia; eager protect the father’s reputation, Japanese politicians move to bury evidence that the son had connections to a cabal of an evil bankers laundering funds to arms dealers. In keeping with standard political mystery/thriller narratives, Kuroda joins forces with a Japanese-born Interpol Agent (Itō Hideaki) to protect a young woman (Kuroki Meisa) being targeted for assassination by the bank for her knowledge of the illegal investment schemes at the heart of the conspiracy. In a final twist, we learn that Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 171 she is, in fact, the murderer, targeting unscrupulous Japanese investors in an attempt to deliver them their “just desserts” for their financial crimes. Upon solving the mystery, Kuroda receives word of his new assignment – this time, in Dubai. As of this writing no further Kuroda productions have been announced, although the material lends itself to being a continuing series. Between Iraq and a hard place Kuroda represents a genre archetype that is not dissimilar to Jack Bauer: the two men share a common dedication to protecting their nations and are victorious in the end because of their willingness to disobey legal protocols and break some rules. Kuroda is not a precise Japanese analogue to Bauer, however (that distinction belongs to the protagonist of Gaijikeisatsu, noted above). The stakes of Kuroda’s failures never reach the heights of nuclear catastrophe and his patience and diplomatic know-how is the soft touch that counters Bauer’s brute force – one is a scalpel, the other is a sledgehammer. But whereas 24 reduces complex life-and-death matters into improbably simplistic ticking-bomb scenarios, the typical dilemma Kuroda faces is whether or not to follow the politically-motivated orders of his superiors to remain silent about Japan’s international wrongdoings, which have been revealed through his investigations. Unlike Bauer’s routine dilemmas, in which a wrong decision can result in mass death, Kuroda’s are about saving face: he must determine whether to protect his nation from scandal or expose its myriad evils in the name of some greater principle of social justice. Kuroda tends to select the latter, and all of the narratives’ “villians” – the corrupt politicians and corporate Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 172 bigwigs at the top, and the vengeful, would-be assassins at the bottom – get what’s coming to them. But if Bauer’s secretive exploits prompted frenzied American right-wing commentary that romanticized his counterterror tactics, Kuroda, too, is shrouded in a similar romanticism about the good works he performs on behalf of his country. In interviews about the character, actor Oda admits to his fascination with the daily lives of diplomats, whose efforts may result in real impacts felt by ordinary citizens, but nevertheless remains hidden from public view (Himitsu 21-23). Kuroda’s colleagues respect him for his no-nonsense professionalism, but his aloof demeanor earns him few friends (how his lack of social graces translates to a successful career in diplomacy is unclear in the series). 5 But despite this gruffness and preference for diverting attention from himself in the workplace, Kuroda is plugged very deeply into the everyday Japanese experiences of global politics. There is a hidden space in which politicians and corporate elites are thought to convene away from public view, and Kuroda is the man who operates an additional layer behind that – the world behind the world behind the world. The actual, physical dangers of being a foreign diplomat are not an incidental concern here, demonstrated by the September, 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Bengazi, Libya, which resulted in four American deaths. The Diplomat series itself draws inspiration from a December, 1996 incident in which the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru was taken over by revolutionaries, leading to a prolonged hostage crisis (see a detailed account by Goldfield); throughout the program, Kuroda is haunted by memories of a similar hostage situation in his past that resulted in the deaths of Japanese citizens. The looming threat of real violence is an important factor in deciphering Kuroda as Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 173 possibly illustrative of a manufactured fantasy of “Japaneseness” within a context of post-9/11 counter-terrorism. It is also relevant when understanding the unease that matters of warfare and military power spur in Japanese political discourse. Central to this discussion is the perennial debate concerning the continued utility of Article IX, Japan’s constitutional amendment outlawing military belligerency against other states, implemented in 1947. In keeping with what Thomas Berger calls a postwar “culture of anti-militarism,” Japan instead maintains Self-Defense Forces (Jiei-tai; henceforth SDF) that are deployed typically for international peacekeeping and disaster- relief missions. 6 The changing geopolitics of the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall have increased pressures from the international community for Japan to get involved militarily in its affairs. The early 90s was marked by criticism of the Japanese state by foreign, particularly U.S., officials for its limited participation in the Gulf crisis, sending mine sweepers and funds instead of putting its soldiers at risk. After the 9/11 attacks prompted the emergence of America’s Homeland Security apparatus and subsequent invasion/occupation of the Middle East, Japan found itself facing a difficult constitutional question: as an ally of the United States and one-half of a special bilateral relationship, there was an expectation Japan would lend its support to the American War on Terror, in whatever capacity it could. The demonstration of real global terror on 9/11 and later invasion of Iraq (unpopular and widely protested in Japan) invigorated voices in Japan calling for a more assertive foreign policy that is independent of the constraints of bilateralism with the United States. In part, this is due to an intense distrust of America’s ability to achieve actual victory in the War on Terror (a sentiment that, needless to say, is not exclusively Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 174 Japanese). Ohji Tomoko, for instance, levels heavy criticisms at the American use of unmanned drone strikes because they obscure the human costs of war, thereby also hiding from view the vengefulness and hatred that this kind of long-distance warfare breeds in perpetuity (245-248). Despite this, the question of Japan’s participation in assisting this American enterprise is not as clear as one might assume. In 2004, then-Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō’s deployment of SDF soldiers to Iraq at America’s request – the first armed deployment of Japanese forces since WWII not overseen by the United Nations – was highly controversial; the soldiers were withdrawn in 2006, amid continuing protests over the war (Greimel). Yet Koizumi’s policies were evidently not unpopular enough to prevent another term of office, as he was reelected in 2005 on a foreign policy platform of continued cooperation with the U.S. (Blumenthal and Griffin). In 2006, Koizumi was succeeded by Abe Shinzō, whose rhetoric and policy agendas have proven aggressive and nationalistic (Arase 573). Regarding the removal of restrictions to Article IX, Abe has stated, "I want to realize a new constitution that is written by our own hands" (Schleicher; translation in original) – insinuating that the current shortcomings of the Japanese constitution are attributable to meddling of American hands. Abe’s recent campaign rhetoric is notable here. In 2006, the poster that primarily followed his campaign included the phrase “Japan, a Beautiful Country” (“UtsukushĪ Kuni, Nihon”; translation mine), a politician’s platitude about national belonging if there ever was one. By the time he ran for reelection in 2012 (after his initial resignation in 2007), Abe’s campaign materials have taken on a harder, bolder stance, replacing the jovial, smiling Abe with a tougher, bolder look and the slogan “Take Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 175 Back Japan” (“Nihon wo Torimodosu”), a rhetoric of resistance to social change and the implied subservience of Japanese interests to foreign powers (Figs. 2 and 3). Abe has since drastically expanded the defense budget under a banner of “proactive pacifism,” inching Japan’s military capabilities further and further from its constitutionally-limited parameters (Fackler). According to David Arase, participating – however nominally – in the fight against terrorism has allowed Japan to strengthen its military under the guise of helping the U.S. This line of argument is supported by Christopher Hughes, who argues that Japan’s participation in Iraq, even in a restricted and non-combative capacity, helped set an important constitutional precedent for justifying the further empowerment of the SDF, as Japan eyes wearily the rising influence of China. The result, currently, is an ambitious but contradictory defense apparatus that is well-resourced and sophisticated but not battle-tested (Oi). Figs. 2 and 3: Left to right, Abe’s 2006 and 2012 campaign posters Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 176 There are contrary opinions that downplay the potentially alarming suggestion that Japan is marching toward robust militarization. For instance, Francis Rosenbluth, et al., note that the actual percentage of politicians elected on reactionary, jingoistic rhetoric is statistically low, and some of Abe’s most controversial agenda items, such as the whitewashing of Japanese imperial atrocities during WWII in history textbooks, was rejected by the vast majority of Japanese schools. 7 In this light, Eric Heginbotham and Richard Samuels argue that the deployment of peacekeeping troops in Iraq was merely a symbolic gesture, concerned more with currying favor with the United States than actual military expansionism. As one of Kuroda’s colleagues on Diplomat points out, prioritizing good diplomatic relations with the U.S.A. is simply smart politics (1.3). These contradictions in Japanese foreign policy are all evident in the portrayal of Kuroda as an international agent acting on behalf of Japan’s security interests. In what follows, I argue that, owing to Japan’s lack of the military power and constitutional backing to combat terrorism with the kind of unilateral action preferred by the United States, these concerns have been displaced onto espionage narratives. Kuroda, in effect, becomes an avatar for Japanese self-determination in a context in which Japanese nationalism is compromised by its relationship to the United States, historically and politically. Just as chapter four argued that Bauer’s “Americanness” is coded through his circumvention of rules, Kuroda’s “Japaneseness” is wrapped in a sort of fetishization of his diplomatic mobility, which encompasses the multifaceted ways Japan experiences the world: through the consumptive pleasures of tourism, the political seriousness of diplomacy, and, when need be, the muscular response to terrorism. Gavan McCormack notes that Japan’s period of modernization produced an acute identity crisis: caught Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 177 between the adoption or rejection of Western cultural and institutional norms, “Japan vacillated between insisting on being not Asian at all, and declaring itself the epitome of Asianness” (1996: 159). Kuroda’s movements reflect the historical legacy of this dilemma, suggesting that the exact affiliation between a nationalist and internationalist Japan remains wholly unresolved. Proxy war The definition of a diplomat employed by the Kuroda franchise (and even featured on the DVD packaging of the TV series), curiously, mirrors verbatim the definition seen widely across the Internet, including on the Wikipedia page for “diplomat”: A diplomat is a person appointed by a state to conduct diplomacy with another state or international organization. The main functions of diplomats revolve around the representation and protection of the interests and nationals of the sending state, as well as the promotion of information and friendly relations. The media featuring the Kuroda character all take place in a world in which the diplomatic ability to “protect the interests of the state” has expanded to include the resources and extrajudicial leeway needed to combat terrorism. But whereas Bauer singlehandedly embodies American combat against some reactionary notion of terror, Kuroda’s calmer, measured, hence diplomatic approach presents a stark, alternative imagining of how life-and-death decisions are made behind the proverbial curtain. In this sense, his very name (), which translates literally to “black field,” evokes associations with the covert military operations known parochially as “Black Ops.” Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 178 Japanese critics of the American War on Terror, such as Ohji, write of the failures of tackling the problem militarily when patience and intelligence-gathering prove far more effective tools for counterterrorism. 8 A figure like Kuroda, we may reasonably surmise, represents some attempt at melding the good works of foreign diplomacy with the hidden sphere of espionage and counterintelligence, presenting the two as necessary alternatives to open war. In heroic fashion, Kuroda is portrayed as a cultural Jack-of-all- trades, sent in to solve unforeseen problems involving Japanese citizens around the world. He is heard speaking fluently in at least a half-dozen languages throughout the series and is deeply knowledgeable of how to maneuver foreign cultural norms and legal systems. Further, Kuroda occasionally proves adept at hand-to-hand combat and possesses Sherlock Holmes-like instincts when deducing facts about his surroundings (the counterterrorism faction Kuroda works for in secret, it is presumed, supplied him with these abilities). The lineage of the series, therefore, to conventions of popular spy films is self-evident; such films typically feature secret agents defending their nation in boilerplate storylines of international intrigue, conspiracies of world domination, and exotic international locations. For example, the International Secret Police (Kokusai Himitsu Keisatsu; 1963-1967) film series follows the particular by the model set by James Bond’s adventures and suave, womanizing persona. 9 I propose that these genre narratives have become the de facto places for representing topical anxieties related to terror and national security and the national conversation around Article IX. In so doing, such narratives act as surrogates for the ideological structures of the Japanese war film. The Kuroda stories, in effect, substitute the figure of the soldier with that of the diplomat/spy, providing him the flexibility and Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 179 mobility to face down enemies that are constitutionally unavailable to the SDF. Films like the above-mentioned Aegis seem to reference a desire to demonstrate the well-funded combat capabilities of the SDF – conversely, hinting at an incessant frustration over the inability to put those resources to use – but only do so within fictional scenarios. Aegis imagines an implausible conspiracy at the highest levels of power between foreign terrorists and the Japanese naval command. Another film, Sengoku Jieitai (Saitō, 1979), remade as Sengoku Jieitai 1549 (Tezuka; 2005), is a war/sci-fi hybrid about a battalion of SDF soldiers who time-travel to Japan’s Warring States period of the 16th century and engage in warfare unavailable to them in the present day. The films weave the combat- effectiveness of the SDF into the very fabric of Japan’s ancient history, envisioning the SDF as not only capable of a fight, but also as an essential, proactive part of Japanese nationhood and self-determination. Ultimately, such films are works of projective fantasy, and unbridled international mobility for the hypothetical figure of the Japanese soldier, remains difficult to tie to the pragmatic realities of the war (unlike in the United States, where films addressing the War on Terror include Oscar-winners like The Hurt Locker). In other words, the war genre in Japan is limited in its abilities to depict issues of contemporary national security as an encounter between domestic and foreign entities – not in a way that is grounded in reality, and certainly not in a way that gets at the full scope of mobile experiences involved in Japan’s relationship to the world at large. In depicting such encounters through espionage allegories, the Kuroda series appears to absorb the ideological underpinnings of the Japanese war film, particularly the narrow focus it places on a historical and political connection to the U.S. Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 180 Theatrical films from Japan in the war genre have risen in number and popularity in the 2000s, and many of them have been hits (Ishida 49). Yet, if Japanese films at their most mainstream are to be believed, World War II involved very little historical lead-up to the conflict with the United States, beginning with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and concluding with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and Japan’s unconditional surrender in 1945. The waning months of the Pacific War have proven the stuff of powerful melodrama in films from the past generation alone: Oba: The Last Samurai (Taiheiyō no Kiseki: Fokkusu to Yobareta Otoko: Hirayama, 2011) and even the Hollywood-produced Letters from Iwo Jima (Eastwood, 2006) all depict the existential dread of impending defeat against American forces. Other narratives all emphasize an American primacy in defining the Japanese war experience: The Firefly (Hotaru; Furuhata, 2001) concerns the anxieties of tokkōtai (a.k.a. kamikaze) pilots before their suicide missions; and Chichi to Kurasaba (Kuroki, 2004) depicts emotional trauma in the aftermaths of the atomic bombings. Best Wishes for Tomorrow (Ashita e no Yuigon; Koizumi, 2007) and I Want to Be a Shellfish (Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai; Fukuzawa, 2008) focus on the subsequent war crimes tribunals, presided over by American courts. The apparent reluctance on the part of Japan’s hegemonic cinema to engage seriously the full history of imperial aggression in Asia illustrates the unmistakable mythmaking at work in the genre – which, we must bear in mind, is consumed by generations of viewers with no historical relationship to the events on the screen, rendering their appreciation of such films a question of dramatic and aesthetic impact (Maruya 545). Ishida observes that these films exhibit a “forensic sensibility” (translation mine) enhanced by the realism of modern specific effects, encouraging Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 181 audiences to accept that they are watching a historically-accurate document (50); yet, the majority of such films are sentimental and dramatically upbeat, concluding with end credit sequences often accompanied by popularly recognizable songs (53). In this paradoxical manner, the films combine their appeal to historical credibility while promoting a lighthearted approach that eschews substantive engagement with “the burden of history” (53; translation mine). The prevailing tendency in Japanese films about WWII, then, is to present narratives of victimhood, not responsibility or penance (Toyota 87; Napier 162-163). It is of importance here to note these interlocking factors: the popularity of America-centric war narratives in Japan, the political history of U.S.-Japan bilateralism, and the emergence of these dynamics in the Kuroda series’ depictions of a world “at war.” For Franziska Seraphim, the imbalance of power in Japan’s postwar identity was an immediate implication of the U.S.’s own political unilateralism, resulting in the impression that “democratic civil and human rights to all Japanese people [were] a ‘gift’ of the American occupiers rather than the fruit of Japanese democratic revolution” (15). Japan’s bilateral ties to the U.S. that had tacitly assumed a Japanese subservience to American priorities because of the ways those priorities were politically and culturally articulated as mutual. According to Seraphim, this conflicted relationship has since become interwoven into the very structure of Japanese policymaking, its uses and purposes having adapted over time in response to domestic and global changes. Several prominent postwar populist movements along the spectrum of progressive and conservative politics each took a particular stance on the politics of war memory and its relationship to an American-style democracy that encouraged Japan to put its wartime Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 182 past behind it. 10 The more progressive of these groups contended that bilateralism here came at a steep price; Japan’s treaties with the United States were having the effect of allowing the nation to “shelve” its own responsibilities for actions committed in WWII by officially prioritizing its role in helping further American military interests during the Cold War (20). 11 According to Sabine Frühstück, this dynamic persists to this day in the self- perception of SDF soldiers, whose masculine identity is social constructed through multiple comparative axes that pit them against the typical white-collar worker (salaryman), some mythical figure of Japan’s past Imperial Army, and the further mythic figure of the American G.I. The case of the latter is pertinent here: the American soldier (coded white and male), despite his aggressive and destructive prowess, is viewed as the quintessential military norm, in a class by himself because he represents the modernity the Imperial Army never could (76). These comparative associations enshrine the hierarchal geopolitics and historical power imbalances of bilateralism (likewise, the ahistorical assumptions about the America also codifies the association with defeat in 1945, failing to consider how the U.S. military has changed as an institution). Frühstück notes that the resulting associations results in the malaise of Japanese soldiers who remain in a sort of limbo, unlike the American military machine that – irrespective of its moral validity – proves unified in its patriotism and sense of purpose. Next to their American counterpart, SDF soldiers “often see themselves as falling short of what they imagine a real, normal military to be” (8). I argue that these conflicted value systems embedded in the SDF – from its very inception to its modern-day combat-un/readiness – results in, for lack of a better term, a Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 183 sort of immobility. The SDF is constrained, constitutionally and ideologically, from playing a more active role in shaping Japan’s global destiny (except in cases of absolute fiction), and it is with this in mind that I propose Kuroda wages a proxy war on behalf of the Japanese. Embodying more thoroughly the duality of values between mobility and immobility and transparency and secrecy that appear to be at stake in the battle against terrorism, Kuroda possesses the ability to move beyond these constraints proactively. The following section examines how such an engagement with the world is structured through the nature of his travels. Not tied to an explicit military solution to the problem of terrorism and assertion of Japanese self-determination, Kuroda is free to adopt alternative modes of experiencing the world; professionally beholden to his country of origin, however, he also foregrounds the centrality of his “Japaneseness” throughout his adventures. Diplomatic tourism / touristic diplomacy Diplomatic travel may be seen as an inverse of the mobile experiences of illegal immigrants discussed in chapter three within wider circles of now-internationalized organized crime. This inversion does not consist merely of differences in modes and spaces of travel – circulating through slums and shantytowns vs. the hallways of embassies and hotel suites or huddled in the bow of a boat vs. sipping champagne in Business Class. The protections of diplomatic immunity, which grants the diplomat exemption from prosecution under a host country’s laws, places the diplomat in a fundamentally different relationship to the legal frameworks of citizenship and movement (a freedom from immobility through detainment or incarceration) within international Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 184 social spaces (see Michaels). These are the conditions of travel in which notions of “nationhood” are deployed in the Kuroda media. Zygmunt Bauman (1998) divides travel in the global era between those of tourists and vagabonds, respectively the privileged and unprivileged forms of movements facilitated by mobile capital now having cataclysmic effects on notions of boundaries and nations. In stark contrast to the restricted, legally dubious, and materially miserable circumstances of the hypothetical vagabond posited by Bauman, Kuroda’s missions, curiously, are often filtered through the subjectivities of touristic adventurism. Even while necessarily portraying a shadowy world of political conspiracies, these texts nevertheless exemplify the romantic impression that the life of a diplomat consists of luxurious hotels, fine dining, access to the faster-moving lines at airports, and the like. (Who among us languishing in airports have not envied the ease with which such people move through those spaces?) Kuroda even muses about the hedonistic spoils that come with the job when he is offered a newly off-the-line Alfa Romero as his rental car upon his arrival in Rome, an offer he declines. With these professional perks in mind, it is rather vital to note the extent to which Kuroda’s journeys are structured around an indulgent, touristic gaze. Director Nishitani has spoken of pressures from producers during the making of Amalfi to showcase the film’s authentic Italian locations for the express purposes of enticing would-be tourists (Shindō 26). 12 Amalfi is an unending travelogue, beginning and concluding with credit sequences that play over b-roll footage of Italian locales, and Kuroda’s investigations takes him to obligatory sites in Rome, such as the Vatican and the Spanish Steps. Perhaps the film’s most flagrant exploitation of the touristic gaze is a cameo by singer Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 185 Sarah Brightman (playing herself), performing the classical crossover song “Time to Say Goodbye”; 13 the lavish attention it pays Brightman has little narrative justification, providing a modest goose chase among Italian investigators who (falsely) believe a terrorist is among the concertgoers. The elegantly-packaged DVD collection of Amalfi even includes a bonus booklet of tourist destinations across Italy (Fig. four)! (The Andalusia collection does not come with any such booklet, although the DVD special features include making-of documentaries that spotlight the film’s French and Spanish locations, which are worked gratuitously into the film narrative as well; these features are not included on DVD collection for Diplomat, which is set primarily in Japan – though the opening San Francisco scenes do not fail to include a sequence by the Golden Gate Bridge.) Even while it is clear that Kuroda has some skeletons in his closet and his gruff, impersonal manner alienates him from his colleagues, the viewer’s sympathies are nevertheless aligned with Fig. 4: The supplemental Amalfi tour guide of Italy, subtitled “The World’s Most Beautiful Coast” (translation mine). Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 186 his. Kuroda is our tour guide, dispensing useful information to his inexperienced colleagues (telling them how to spot a pickpocket, for instance), but also fully embraces his own status as a tourist himself, seen glancing appreciatively at the walls in museums and enjoying himself during the many acts of eating that punctuate the narrative (the only times Kuroda is seen letting his guard down). Why the added dimension of tourism? Rather, why characterize Kuroda’s international mobility as one that is touristically inclined when, after all, these narratives insist upon viewing Kuroda as a no-nonsense diplomat? To be sure, the travels of a diplomat lend themselves to a kind of touristic fascination. The book Wain to Gaikō (Wine and Diplomacy; translation mine) organizes its chapters around real diplomatic tales in various countries by spotlighting the various gourmet dishes that were served at each location – illustrating the premise that successful diplomacy takes place during friendly interactions over fancy meals and galas. Another, Kawatō Akio’s Gaikōkan no Shigoto (The Foreign Diplomat’s Work; translation mine), is keen to challenge the conventional image of the tuxedo-clad diplomat, wineglass in hand, conversing fluently with foreigners (11). Instead, Kawatō insists that diplomats being connoisseurs of various cultures is not a perk of the position, but figures centrally in the job’s most demanding requirements of acting as the “engineers” or “producers” of positive international relations (14); elsewhere, he likens diplomats to kuroko, the stagehands of Japanese theater traditions whose black clothing obscure their movements from view, but whose actions are integral to the successful execution of the narrative (229). Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 187 Both of the above texts, however, fail to acknowledge the elitism of such lifestyles, which operate on the kind of privileges not available to the ordinary person’s experience of the world. Masao Miyoshi notes in his chronicle of Japanese embassies and diplomatic relations with the West during 19 th and 20 th centuries that time spent abroad was deemed essential to an high-class education, a notion spurred further by flattering items in the American press that praised the Japanese mind for its kinship with Western sensibilities (178). There is a certain seductive appeal to traveling with a diplomat, having at one instance someone who can act as your learned tour guide and, at another, grant you access to the finest dinners with Very Important People. As Christina Klein argues (see chapter two), the infrastructure of international tourism is tied inextricably to the history of “prejudice and overgeneralization” (Miyoshi 55), which characterized the mutual diplomatic efforts between the United States and Japan. (The quotation by Pearl S. Buck that opens this chapter is one example of Miyoshi’s tracing of instances of the American intellectuals hoisting the Japanese above other Asian races for their supposed kinship with the American mind [67]). The material connection between tourism and diplomacy depicted in the films is, to be sure, a series of inflated stereotypes and opportunities for Kuroda’s investigations to encounter the region’s gorgeous scenery and architecture; by the same token, both Amalfi and Andalusia are slyly provocative in linking the two areas of discourse, linking Kuroda’s touristic impulses with his obligations as a diplomat to produce a freedom of mobility that forms the crux of his ability to fight crime. In so doing, the films employ – through Kuroda’s eyes – a hybrid gaze (assumed at all times to be Japanese) that both partakes in the world’s touristic pleasures and is Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 188 superior to and critical of it, maintaining a prejudicial stance while simultaneously embracing what foreign cultures have to offer. Despite the calculated showcasing of Italian attractions in Amalfi, French/Spanish culture in Andalusia, and (briefly) the draws of San Francisco in Diplomat, Kuroda is always besting these nations at their own game, proving constantly to be the most knowledgeable person in the room and one step ahead of local law enforcement. This is illustrated most during the Sarah Brightman concert sequence, which crosscuts between her on the stage and Kuroda’s progress in the investigation: local police clumsily scour the concert at the exact moment Kuroda, elsewhere in the city, intuits the real nature of the conspiracy and heads to the Japanese embassy, which the terrorists have infiltrated by cleverly threatening the concert hall as a divergence. The film both touts the glamour of Brightman’s performance and undercuts the seriousness of Italian law enforcement, as Kuroda only manages to solve the mystery through his own know-how as a diplomat-superspy. As Scott Malcomson notes, “It may be that a cosmopolitan is simply someone empowered to decide who is provincial” (238). What results here is a self-serving contradiction. Kuroda – and through his gaze, the viewer – is able enjoy the touristic lifestyle that exists in large part due to the favorable diplomatic relations between Japan and its foreign allies. At the same time, that very gaze is used to assert his superiority over others – not merely over various other nationals, but over his own bosses when they fail the Japan public interest. As seen in chapter two, Caren Kaplan argues that tourists typically “want confirmation of reality without acknowledging their role as agents in the construction of reality effects” (61); Kuroda invites a touristic gaze while disavowing two reality effects simultaneously: the role of first-world hegemony in sustaining the Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 189 structures of global tourism, and his own proximity to the affairs of government that legitimize friendly relations with other nations that make tourism possible in the first place. Kuroda floats freely, tied only to a vague notion of loyalty to his country and the protections of its citizens. His actions, are not, however, reflective of any concrete, practical, or identifiable set of politics – at times, he is willing to assert his own globalism by exposing the selfish wrongdoing of Japanese politicians in the service of the “greater good”; at other times, his efforts place Japan’s nobility above all else, even if it means rejecting Japan’s integration in the world under circumstances harmful to Japan’s sense of self-worth. Japan ought to be a part of the world, yes, but the “Japan” he protects out there in the world is a very pristine one. What of the conspiracies themselves? Across Kuroda’s adventures, each mystery reveals eventual connections between unscrupulous Japanese nationals engaged in illegal international activities – or, more accurately, the cover-ups and secret disavowals of unethical decisions that resulted in the deaths of Japanese citizens. One thing remains consistent: Kuroda specializes in counterterrorism, yes, but through his investigations has a knack for exposing Japanese culpability in global shadow networks, from the high levels of illicit corporate finance seen in Andalusia to the lower levels of gangsterism seen Amalfi Begins to the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing of politics at their most clandestine. The spaces in which these dramas unfold are of great significance here: in Amalfi, the moment of climactic confrontation occurs in the Japanese Embassy in Rome; in Andalusia, a murder takes place in the ambiguous jurisdiction of the French/Spanish border (to which Kuroda is called in the first place because the area lacks a Japanese Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 190 embassy); in Diplomat, a pivotal hostage crisis erupts in the halls of government in full view of the press, blurring the lines between government secrecy and total media exposure. Each of these sites represents what I have been calling a dead zone – spaces of mobility that cease to be about mobility and instead transform into sites of tension between the global and the national. The Japanese Embassy, for instance, becomes a simultaneous site of Japan’s internationalist agendas and the place where the mobility of traveling Japanese tourists, diplomats, businessmen, and politicians come to a grinding halt and answers are demanded at gunpoint as to what role Japan assumes for itself in the world. Kuroda is depicted as the only figure able to move fluidly through these zones – both the physical spaces of the buildings, their backdoors, and surrounding alleyways as well as the ideological geography of national interests being challenged on foreign soil. His ability to curry favor with a full range of transnational types (tourists, terrorists, Interpol agents, businessmen, fellow diplomats, a network of informants, gangsters, and journalists) is his passport in and out of zones that would spell trouble for virtually anyone else. Combined with his diplomatic immunity, this might be called a super- mobility. At the risk of humanizing a character so implausibly superhuman in his ability to bypass all boundaries designed to restrict movement when necessary, there is one drawback to Kuroda’s constant mobility, which is that he must be constantly moving. In a globalized world in which “there is no simple sense of the spatially and temporally distinct ‘home’ and ‘away’” (Urry 4), Kuroda is a walking paradox, perpetually representing his “home” by being perpetually “away.” In Diplomat, Kuroda initially resists the idea of following his investigation to Tokyo; he has not been back to Japan in Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 191 eleven years, having only moved from one foreign location to another. The series pokes occasional fun at his obvious unfamiliarity with contemporary Japanese life, such as having him purchase paper tickets to ride the subway, when prepaid train passes have been in wide use for years (1.2). At the conclusion of each narrative, Kuroda is transferred to a new assignment in a new location, though it is implied that his transfers are motivated partially by the desire of his superiors to keep him from rustling too many feathers in any single place. Reinforced by the series theme song “Time to Say Goodbye,” Kuroda’s life is a series of departures, and he is always a stranger. Yet this is far from declaring Kuroda a culturally suspicious figure whose rootlessness suggests the kinds of demonization referenced in earlier chapters by David Morley and Tim Cresswell, who observe the cultural biases against those seen to be decoupled from the sacred, stable notions of home and nation. Rather, Kuroda’s movements from place to place are due to his strengths, not his being exploited or abused – he is a man without a nation who nevertheless is working tirelessly for the nation of Japan. Kicked around the world by institutions unwilling to handle his uncompromising truth-telling, Kuroda is rendered the most privileged of vagabonds. It is here that the Kuroda media engage in their most indulgent vision of Japaneseness in the international arena: he never needs to be home because everywhere he ventures, home is with him. Chapter three examines a situation in which undocumented foreigners are seen as a dangerous infiltration; their alien cultures are viewed as corrosive and they are believed to be unconcerned with the peace and stability of the national body – an impression reinforced by their association in the popular media with the yakuza. Kuroda, by contrast, represents the exportation of Japaneseness that is Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 192 at home in any culture, concerned with Japanese interests in a world in which Japan’s interests are those of the world. On the particular issue of terrorism, Kuroda is well- equipped to take on threats that are both domestic and international, making him the ideal candidate for facing down dangers that call for a domestic response at times, and a global response at others. Kuroda’s brand of supermobility makes him tourist and vagabond, all things to all nations, while remaining unimpeachably Japanese. The end credits of Amalfi return to the film’s dominant tourist gaze. Taking place shortly after the events of the film, the citizens of Rome take to the streets to observe the fireworks that signal midnight on New Year’s Day. Kuroda is not present, but his gaze has fully become our own (the film assumes a Japanese viewer, of course) as the camera’s perspective transitions from witnessing the most nationalistic of dramas unfolding at the embassy to a most cosmopolitan of holiday celebrations shared around the world, if from a local, Italian vantage. The world glimpsed at the final moments of the film embraces the paradox of Kuroda being all things to all nations while acting in the specific interests of Japan: the world continues to turn irrespective of Japan’s stake in it, but is nevertheless one in which Japanese involvement, even when absent, is central. A Japan that can say “no” / Conclusion Unlike the credit sequences of the films, which are allotted additional time, each episode of the Diplomat series begins and ends with slick title sequences – the kind that conventionally accompany television thrillers and the “previous on…” recaps that introduce new episodes. True to the program’s themes of international conspiracy and diplomatic strategy, the sequences feature multiple dramatic shots of Kuroda (turning, Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 193 running, looking sullen) superimposed with a fast-moving set of non-diegetic images, such as the inside of Kuroda’s passport, a world map, and unidentified hands taking turns at chess (Figs. 5 and 6). Underneath the images, urgent music is accompanied by a voiceover that recaps important information from past episodes. The overlay of images establishes concisely the show’s pertinent symbolic themes of travel and diplomatic strategy, investigation/ conspiracy narrative, and action- thriller tone. The direct conflation of moves on a chessboard with the covert wheelings and dealings that occur between world leaders suggests the diplomacy is akin to game of strategy; as pieces are taken off the board in increasing succession, viewers are given the impression that the game (and hence, the investigation) is nearing its end. The visual flourish of these sequences also brings to bear the matters of transparency at issue in the affairs of government that are the focus of Diplomat’s conspiracy narrative. The superimposition of images – literally transparent – that links images of “legitimate” diplomatic travel (such as Kuroda’s passport), “illegitimate” Figs. 5 and 6: Kuroda in action, superimposed over his passport (top), from the opening credits of the Diplomat series; the recurring image of an anonymous chess game, seen during the program end credits. Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 194 dealings and other improprieties of states (secretive figures obscured by shadows), and the metaphorical navigation between the two spheres (the chess game) all point to an assumed proximity between what states declare openly, and what they keep hidden from view. In the age of the Wikileaks scandal that exposed secretive communications among government officials, debates concerning the gap between the public and private faces of government have been loud and pervasive (see Sifry). Perhaps, on one level, the appeal of a character like Kuroda, despite his shortage of people skills, is that there is no lying in him. His motivations are noble and uncomplicated. The exact nature of Kuroda’s counterterrorism credentials is never revealed, and neither the program nor the films ever depicts terrorism in its most infamous forms of bomb blasts and airline hijackings (as 24 does). 14 Yet in the freedom of movement he exhibits across national lines, legal strata, and even media platforms, is made necessary by ubiquitous threat. That is to say, the state of emergencies compelled by the existence of terrorism justifies Kuroda’s adoption of all forms of mobile subjectivity at once, as if he was the avatar for a Japan that refuses to remain immobile and has overcompensated by granting him maximal movement. Everywhere at once, he is the consummate insider and outsider, demonstrating that the global “center” of Japan is – or at least has the capacity to be – a roving one. The paralegal mobility Kuroda possesses that makes it possible for him to sidestep the very legal apparatuses he is sworn to uphold appears to be where his symbolic assertions of Japanese power are most evident. In a subplot in which Kuroda takes the visiting princess on a tour of Tokyo, she eventually heeds his advice to abandon negotiations with the Japanese that would have resulted in plutocratic energy treaties, Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 195 instead choosing what she deems best for her people. Her unquestioning trust in Kuroda’s guidance is explained by their intimate personal history: it is revealed that when she was a small child, Kuroda had rescued her from kidnappers while on assignment in her country (now that she is of age, it is shown that she harbors romantic feelings for him). Kuroda’s implied influence on the outcome of world affairs thus extends back to before the series diegesis. As such, the program projects the indispensability of Japan in world politics. It is in these subtle (some not-so-subtle) areas that Kuroda’s cosmopolitanism and worldliness bring his unshakable nationalism into focus; his positive impact on the world does not diverge from his Japaneseness, but certainly transcends the short-term objectives of its petty political priorities. After all, as Mark Twain said, “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.” Ishihara Shintarō’s famous (if controversial) book The Japan That Can Say No is a work of nihonjinron that proclaims Japan’s right to self-determination and ties that greater independence to an ability to say “no” to the geopolitical primacy of the United States. 15 He writes, “We have the power to say no to the United States, but we have not exercised that option. We are like a stud poker player with an ace in the hole who habitually folds his hand” (43). If Japan were to develop a poor international reputation, Ishihara places the blame on Japanese diplomats: their negligence in their work allows for negative impressions of Japan to persist abroad (30). Kuroda’s continued success, therefore, is a rejoinder to this – the “Japan” he represents is one that is committed to charting out its own paths and resolving its own internal disputes: when to play, when to fold. And as we’ve seen in Amalfi Begins, Kuroda is a formidable poker player. 16 Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 196 It is in his willingness to turn the proverbial cards on his own superiors that the full scope of Kuroda’s nationalism par excellence comes into focus amid the globalism of his day-to-day existence. Although each of Kuroda narratives – the two films and the television series – feature plot twists and revelations (none of them particularly earthshattering) that always expose the complicity of some powerful Japanese politician or businessman in an international criminal enterprise (or, as the case may be, an abuse of political stature for personal gain). For instance, when the villainous politician behind the Diplomat conspiracy – which, to this point, has included the intimidation of the media, abuse of legal powers, manipulation of the police, tampering with scientific research, and ordering of assassinations – is finally uncovered (1.10), he insists that he was only carrying out the marching orders of the American government for the continued benefit of the alliance between the two nations; maintaining the good graces of America is, he believes, what is best for Japan, at all times. Kuroda’s rebukes him, saying “Your greatest failing was not believing in this country” and that “The real danger to our country is the presence of spineless politicians” (translation mine). He thus implies that the nature of the villain’s treachery is reducible to buckling under American pressures, to being unable to say “no” to a top-heavy U.S.-Japan relationship that has persisted, in Ishihara’s eyes, for too long. Despite the assertiveness of his title, however, Ishihara does not call for a new age of isolationism. Rather, he calls for the Japanese to be confidence and strong in their cosmopolitanism, which will allow Japan to be “the mainspring of the new genesis” on the global stage (30). Herein lies the conception of Japaneseness at the heart of Kuroda’s efforts: elite, at the center of world affairs, and a key determinant to its future. His ability Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 197 to recognize and willingness to stand up to the corruption of his leaders is largely informed by his time spent abroad, which has given him a grander perspective than those trying to preserve a narrow set of geopolitical interests. Internationalism, transnationalism, globalism, cosmopolitanism… all are frameworks within which a Japanese jingoism can adapt and thrive. In keeping with this imagining, Prime Minister Abe gave his co-authored book the narcissistic title O, Japan: Be Proud of Yourself in the Center of the World. Kuroda’s brand of cosmopolitanism is hardly some “abstract emptiness of non- allegiance” (Robbins 250) but a very specific conceptualization of world of mobility and belonging in which Japan has the greatest claim – an ideological correlative to an International Route Map distorted around a Japanese center. Upon reflection, is “cosmopolitanism” the correct term for what is being touted in these films and explored in this chapter? Tim Brennan argues that cosmopolitanism and the politics of multiculturalism bear a strong relationship to market capitalism dominated by the U.S., thereby inadvertently propping American multiculturalism as the model by which such politics are held (see also Morley 231; Malcomson 234). Whether the universal talents Kuroda possesses bucks this reliance on the United States is an open question – after all, his travels are organized as much by the market-based structures of tourism as they are by the nationalistic priorities of diplomacy. What is evident, however, is a desire for a more active role in shaping the world agenda justified by first imagining a world in which Japan’s interests reflect those of all countries. Such a politics may break away from a singular binary relationship with the United States, but does it not substitute it for a new hierarchy that lauds Japanese mobility at the expense of others’ relative immobility? Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 198 During the sentimental closing scenes of Diplomat, the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, now Kuroda’s ally, delivers an impassioned speech at a United Nations forum on child poverty (1.10), pleading for Japan to lead the way in doing right by the world’s impoverished populations. Hence the series illustrates a pivotal contradiction: it acknowledges the real consequences of Japanese actions in world affairs, yet still views Japan as the sole catalyst for those consequences. And with this comes a bizarrely masochistic counterpart: should there ever be a political scandal of global proportions, surely it will involve Japan as its masterminds. Like the quasi-nuclear blast seen engulfing the world in Dead or Alive, all politics will emanate from Japanese leadership, no matter how destructive. This is the fantasy of supermobility Kuroda represents: to no longer be hindered by the difficult question of where to position Japan in relation to its international ambitions. Kuroda possess the ability to negotiate a full range of what James Clifford calls “discrepant cosmopolitanisms,” the variations in mobile experiences that each produce “specific histories, tactics, everyday practices of dwelling and travelling: travelling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-travelling” (36; emphasis in original). When political corruption or the threat of terror relegates Japanese citizens to a blackened space – a dead zone – in which national self-interest come into conflict with international cooperation, he can be there to bridge the gap, ensuring Japan remains constant, immovable presence in a changing world. Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 199 NOTES 1 It is typical in Japan for successful televisions programs to be later produced into feature length films that receive theatrical releases – these are usually offshoot storylines that keep the program’s principle cast members. The series SP, for instance, has had two film adaptations, both helmed by series director Motohiro Katsuyuki: SP: Yabō-‐hen (2010) and SP: Kakumei-‐hen (2011). 2 For exposition on Aum Shinrikyō, placed in perspective with other apocalyptic cults, see Lifton. See also the celebrated book Underground (Andāguraundo) by novelist Haruki Murakami, which consists of interviews with victims of the subway attacks. 3 The agency featured on the program is a variation of a real Foreign Affairs Division (gaijika; roughly Japan’s equivalent of America’s National Security Administration), whose responsibilities include investigations into illegal immigration, kidnapping, espionage, and terrorism. In modern times, the agency has been tasked increasingly with investigations of international terrorism, such as in 1994, after an Al Qaeda bombing plot on Philippine Airlines Flight 434 killed a Japanese citizen. The agency’s counter-‐terrorism efforts have likewise increased the years since 9/11, placing additional focus on potential national security threats from China, North Korea, and Russia. The television series itself is adapted from crime procedural novels by Asō Iku. 4 At the time these “minisodes” were released, the arguably most recognizable use of “Begins” in a title occurred in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005). While there is no indication of Amafli Begins being a nod to the Batman franchise, the link does draw attention to Kuroda’s super-‐heroism and vigilantism. 5 While having appeared in dramatic film roles, Oda is perhaps most recognizable to Japanese audiences as Aoshima, a detective who frequently runs afoul of police bureaucracy in the popular police procedural/comedy series Bayside Shakedown (Odoru Daisōsasen), which, between 1997-‐2012, Fuji TV has revisited through several one-‐off specials on television, “minisodes” available for smartphone download, videogames, and four feature films, each directed by Motohiro Katsuyuki, in 1998, 2003, 2010, and 2012. As the no-‐ nonsense Kuroda, then, Oda is playing against type, although he has made appearances in other, serious action-‐thriller films before, such as Whiteout (Howaitoaoto; Wakamatsu, 2000). 6 Amid criticism of Japan’s lack of participation in the first Gulf War, the Peacekeeping Operations Law was passed in 1992, now allowing Japanese troops to participate in United Nations operations. 7 Most recently, this issue flared up in 2005, when the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, a nationalistic group, published a history textbook that downplayed Japanese culpability in WWII, notably the Nanjing Massacre and the sexual torture of “comfort women” across Asia. See Rose. 8 Ohji’s criticism cites the Ivan Arreguín-‐Toft article “How the Weak Win Wars,” which theorizes the ways in which weaker actors in an asymmetrical power struggle can still emerge victorious because what they lack in power, they possess in interest and Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 200 determination. In Ohji’s view, the United States outguns the enemy substantially, but consistently underestimates the role its own war efforts strengthens the enemy’s resolve. For Yamamoto Shun, the perceived arrogance of American war policy creates an important context for considering the contemporary war film, because war itself has become synonymous with American chauvinism; in his view, this arrogance is most evident in the perverted invocation of a “just war” against Iraq put forth by George W. Bush – in which “justice” is really code for “American justice” that the world is expected to adopt (46). 9 One of the films in the International Secret Police series, Key of Keys (Kagi no Kagi; Taniguchi, 1965) is known to Western audiences for serving as the basis for Woody Allen’s spoof What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), in which Allen dubbed the otherwise unedited film with absurdist English dialogue. 10 The five groups Seraphim focuses on the most are: the Association of Shinto Shrines; the Japan Association of War-‐bereaved Families; the Japan Teacher’s Union; the Japan-‐China Friendship Association; the Japan Memorial Society for Students Killed in the War. As Seraphim notes, while calls for acknowledging wartime responsibilities became aligned like never before with a strong anti-‐Americanism, this form of activism became associated with leftist political groups, which became increasing marginalized as mainstream political discourse became harshly anti-‐communist; the political left thus became victim to the very processes it advocated withdrawal from (17-‐18). 11 As noted in chapter one, a new postwar alliance between Japan and America meant that American public opinion of the Japanese, characterized by an intense racial hatred galvanized by Pearl Harbor and the war itself, required tempering, and eventual dissipating. Naoko Shibusawa notes that this radical change in attitude toward the Japanese in the decade following the war – in essence, the soliciting of American public support for allying with a nation only recently a sworn enemy – was made possible by cementing an ideological relationship that pitted America as masculine and mature, and Japan as feminine and immature. A most venomous racial hatred does not fully disappear, but is adjusted into a “more benign paternalistic sort” (Ninkovich 86). Shibusawa argues, “By conceiving the bilateral relationship in the mutually reinforcing frameworks of gender and maturity, many Americans began seeing the Japanese not as savages but as dependents that needed U.S. guidance and benevolence” (5). 12 The popularity of – even cultural obsession with – the Hollywood romance classic Roman Holiday (Wyler, 1953) in Japan has made Rome a popular destination among Japanese tourists (see Kitano K.). Diplomat alludes to the film in a mid-‐season subplot in which Kuroda is charged with escorting a visiting princess (from a fictitious, Russian-‐speaking country). Unwilling to participate in policy discussions, she escapes her security detail; a sympathetic Kuroda agrees to “hide” her by guiding her around Tokyo’s largest temples and shopping districts and introducing her to traditional cuisine. This subplot concludes with the princess returning to her country (and with Kuroda facing no reprimand for abetting her truancy) and therefore has little bearing on the main investigative narrative of the film. The production notes from Amalfi, which actually takes place in Rome, mentions on multiple occasions the use of Roman Holiday scenes as points of reference during the shoot (Yamamoto H. 18). Dead Zones | Outside Matters | 201 13 “Time to Say Goodbye” is an adapted version of the Italian song "Con te Partirò," by Francesco Sartori and Lucio Quaranttoto, with combined lyrics in Italian and English. Performed as a duet between Brightman and Andrea Bocelli (the vocalist on the original Italian version), the song was an enormous hit in Europe upon its release in the late 1990s. On the television show, a cover version is performed by the male opera group Il Divo. 14 In this vein, the film is also more politically correct than the source novel, which features a Middle Eastern character as the chief terrorist/villain. No such character appears in the film. 15 Specifically, Ishihara condemns the United States for its hypocrisy in dictating terms to other countries when it has myriad domestic problems of its own (84-‐93) and, in particular, demands the U.S. stop dictating how Japan distributess its own discretionary funds for Official Development Assistance to other nations (91-‐92). 16 It may be that Kuroda Kōsaku is a reference to Kuroda Makoto, of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry in the 1980s, known for his tough negotiations and reputation for standing up to American demands (Ishihara 48-‐49). Dead Ends and Flexibilities: Coda The drama/thriller Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2002) centers on a Nigerian exile named Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who discovers the seedy hotel where he works a night porter doubles as an underground organ trafficking hub. Illegal immigrants like him, desperate to return home or be reunited with family members, volunteer the unsafe, medically improvised extraction of their kidneys in exchange for forged passports and visas. In following several immigrants eking out an existence in the shadows of London’s labor economies, the film echoes the visual correlation made in “Cruel Britannia” at the start of this dissertation: the conditions of slave labor and political obscurity are not only in direct contact with the privileges of travel and tourism, but are in a mutually interlocking relationship. When confronted about his abhorrent enterprise, Señor Juan (Sergi Lopez), the villainous hotel manager, states blithely that the wealthy “come to hotels in the night to do dirty things. And in the morning, it’s our job to make things look pretty again.” Evocative of James Clifford’s use of the hotel as a metaphor for the contradictions between residency and movement that defines modern mobility and travel, the film depicts how the global fluidities of ethnic identities, languages, and cultures make modern London a culturally indistinct zone through which human figures come and go. Embodying both the notion of a dwelling and a home but also of the mobile nature of Dead Zones | Coda | 203 human life, a hotel becomes a place of multiple meanings and values, a nexus of transit where various people come into contact. Tourists occupy the hotel’s many rooms while the immigrants toil and gangsters rendezvous below – and it is not wholly inconceivable that other bedrooms house scheming terrorists or assassins, or that, in the ritzier suites, diplomats ready themselves for work. Within that singular space, multiple mobile realities converge, making the hotel a site of transit and mobility, but also one of terminated freedom and inflexible societal boundaries. London, the host city, is seen here as a space in which day-to-day, legal enterprises operate alongside (and are often sustained by) illegal ones staffed by people with few economic options. With few exceptions, every major character is an immigrant, some working in “respectable” businesses that give London is positive cosmopolitan reputation; others work in the shadows, possessing menial skills, relegated to substandard housing and subjected to sexual intimidation in the workplace – truly the “experience of destitution and trauma” (Bhabha 1996: 204) that accompanies many versions of what we have come to call “transnationality.” Transnationality, then, is a pretty concept masking some very dirty truths about how human life is arranged and organized amid tumult of global movement. Aihwa Ong’s theory of “graduated sovereignty,” explains the creation of variegated levels of valuing human life based on market-based rationales, a means of managing the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of populations, particularly in urban areas. It is a system of governance by which “citizens in zones that are differently articulated to global production and financial circuits are subjected to different kinds of surveillance and in practice enjoy different sets of civil, political, and economic rights” Dead Zones | Coda | 204 (2006: 215-216). In her findings on ASEAN nations, Ong argues that states have taken to making different kinds of biopolitical investments in different subject populations, privileging one gender over another, and in certain kinds of human skills, talents, and ethnicities; it thus subjects different sectors of the population to different regimes of valuation and control. This unequal biopolitical investment in different categories of the population results in the uneven distribution of services, care, and protection; while some subjects are invested with rights and resources, others are neglected outright. Thus globalization has induced a situation […] whereby even as the state maintains control over its territory, it is also willing in some cases to let corporate entities set the terms for constituting and regulating some domains. Sometimes, weaker and less-desirable groups are given over to the regulation of supranational entities. What results is a system of variegated citizenship in which populations subjected to different regimes of value enjoy different kinds of rights, discipline, caring, and security. (217) Citizenship, the rights that come with it, and the civic norms by which services and institutions guarantee the quality of life are now divided between skilled and unskilled workers, the latter constituting a new, “excluded humanity” (2006: 24). Graduated sovereignty is but one studied example of the means by which states, rather than weakened by transnational forms of mobility and border-crossing, are readily engaging with and adapting to them by employing new criteria for evaluating a person’s worth. Globalization has made it necessary for states to maintain the illusion of control and containment over a national territory while also being amenable to certain modes of Dead Zones | Coda | 205 transnational movement in the interest of commerce. This dissertation has demonstrated several instances in which the resultant negotiations of nationalism and internationalism place a heavy burden on our theoretical understandings of mobility: some subjects are granted new social and cultural clout by virtue of their flexible travels across borders, while others are rendered immobile by the same systems and processes. This dialectic is illustrated briefly but smartly when Okwe, in an early scene, ends his shift at a second job driving a taxi and hands over his vehicle to the next (presumably also illegal) worker. Catching his colleague wearing a gold cross around his next, he points out the Middle Eastern name on the fake ID the workers use communally: He chides: “Your name is now Mohammed!” Okwe’s negotiation of the city’s fluid ethnic boundaries involves slipping in and out of the multiple identities that create the zonal indistinctions of modern London. Yet this perpetual mobility is imposed, and his very survival depends upon his always moving, always changing within the narrow parameters of the shady businesses that will hire, the slums that house him, and the viciously criminal organization that he encounters at the hotel. Within these zones, Okwe’s mobility is always lateral, never vertical, as placeless peoples “are never free of regulations set by state power, market operations, and kinship norms” (2006: 19-20). The restrictive nature of the mobilities available to those at the bottom of the social spectrum are exemplified most by those in the film seeking passports and are willing to sacrifice their organs in risky, makeshift surgeries to obtain them. Some obvious contradictions are in effect here: the possession of a passport provides documented evidence of their belonging to a nation, thereby guaranteeing them the freedom to leave that nation, to return to their home countries unmolested and Dead Zones | Coda | 206 unharassed. And yet the pursuit of that document results in a dead end: mobility may be obtained, but only in exchange for death and total anonymity in the host country’s legal system that cannot identify the body. Each chapter of this dissertation explored a similar set of contradictions emerging from simultaneous engagements with moving bodies as a reality of global living and as a problem that provokes the most reactionary fears of invasion, infiltration, and infection. In the making of media nationalism, each set of representations has its cake and eats it, too: globalism propels the emergence of nationalistic tendencies and valuations of life, but that brand nationalism also basks in the privileges and benefits of globalism. In that zone where the two come into contact, there is at least a space for conversation about the role of borders in framing the real human costs of globalization. The dynamic is relational and therefore very murky. Precisely because of that murkiness, Ong rejects the stark binaries of life and death (employed, for example, by Giorgio Agamben’s study of the Holocaust) as insufficient models for understanding the nuanced and overlapping systems of valuing life within the same territory. Elsewhere, John Urry writes: The diffusion of peoples between cultures can no longer be understood through the employment of conventional notions of control and resistance. Instead, the notion of hybridity which brings to mind the organic binding of different cultural conventions and symbols is more appropriate. (4) Control and resistance remain a robust part of the equation, but their mechanisms and rationales are themselves uncertain, and these media texts demonstrate the hybrid ideologies produced by the relationship between the two poles. On the question of how Dead Zones | Coda | 207 human life is valued in relation to its mobility across nations, we have seen conflicting – and conflicted – themes of apprehension and empathy in torture porn, intersecting progressive and reactionary discourses toward the social marginalization of immigrants and gangsters, the paradoxical effectiveness and ineffectiveness of torture on 24, and the simultaneous tourism and vagabondism that structure the unending travels/travails of Kuroda Kōsaku. Outlining how flexible responses to neoliberalism have resulted in these varying governmentalities across social strata, Ong notes that flexibility cuts both ways. States rewrite the rules to favor transnational capital, but not transnational laborers; in other instances (seen in chapter four), the responses to the undesirable consequences of globalization include outrageous justifications for physical violence against those who do not conform to a national imaginary. But mobile peoples are fully capable of also utilizing these new fluidities to their advantage to “both circumvent and benefit from different nation-state regimes by selecting different sites for investments, work, and family relocation” (1999: 112). What remains an open question is whether such flexibilities come with the potential for new alliances between disenfranchised populations, fostering a capacity for kinship no longer hindered by discordant national or ethnic identities. Transnational figures are less likely to be loyal to sites to which their relationship is temporary or transitional, whether such attitudes are voluntary or coerced (Holston and Appadurai 303). Irreconcilable gaps still remain in the “lifeworlds” (Ibid.) of laborers and managers, citizens and migrants, those who are authorized to move and those who are not. Dead Zones | Coda | 208 Then again, in these films and television programs there is an indisputable strain of ambiguity toward the lasting viability of nationalistic ways of thinking – some acknowledgement, however begrudging, that nations not plugged into the circuitry of global movement will only lead to their own dead ends. As such, the texts under examination here are of crucial relevance to the imagined longevity of the appeal of nations. This is not merely because the texts draw upon real stories and recognizable subjects and are therefore reflections of weighty issues like torture, persecution of immigrant, or violence against embassies; they also indicate conservative ideological leanings struggling to make themselves emergent at the dead center of mainstream media entertainment. At the conclusion of Dirty Pretty Things, Okwe recruits several allies from his community (the underclass of illegal immigrants and prostitutes) and turns the tables on Señor Juan, sedating him, surgically removing a kidney, and then exchanging it for a passport that allows his return home. Okwe is a criminal who strains British welfare and breaks the law to ensure his return home: to those who would view him in this light, we bid Okwe good riddance! But to those who see in Okwe an embodiment of the “to-and- fro” of contemporary existence (Clifford 247), films like this invite deeper questions regarding the impacts of such on how humanness is understood through the precise nature of its movements across demarcated spaces. Okwe is an illegal resident of one nation, the legal citizen of another, and in between those points of arrival and departure, a participant in something quite different: hybridized, eclectic – immobile, but dynamic and provocative. The issues raised here are, by their very nature, global in their scope and are active phenomena anywhere people Dead Zones | Coda | 209 live and interact with cultural forms, not just within the specific settings of the United States and Japan (and briefly here, the United Kingdom). 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Creator Dillon, Mike (author)

Core Title Dead zones: human mobility and the making of media nationalism

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 04/30/2014

Defense Date 02/24/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinema,genre,Globalization,Japan,media,nationalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,terrorism,Travel,Violence

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Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jaikumar, Priya (committee chair), Imre, Anikó (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member)

Creator Email dillon@usc.edu,maikudillon@gmail.com

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