Underwater Love Dir. Shinji Imaoka

[Interfilm & Rapid Eye; 2011]

Styles: pinku musical
Others: Singing in the Rain with hipsters + porn

With many other pinku titles — the Japanese equivalent of softcore pornography — under his belt, director Shinji Imaoka returns to another cross-genre film: Underwater Love: A Pink Musical. The plot revolves around Asuka, a factory worker who, while returning home one day, meets a kappa in the middle of the road. For those unfamiliar with Japanese folklore, the kappa is a mystical creature that lives underwater, speaks perfect Japanese, is highly trained in the art of medicine, and loves cucumbers and sumo wrestling. (I’m not making any of this up.) This particular kappa, we soon discover, turns out to be Asuka’s high school crush who drowned at the age of 17 and thus turned into the strange creature. Mind you, this kappa is nothing more than a human dressed in a (very) cheap mask with a silly shell on his back. This begins a tale of rediscovered love that will take our heroes into insanely bizarre adventures such as sumo wrestling the God of Death and a quest amid the swamps in search of the mystical anal bead, the only thing that can impede Asuka’s tragic fate. It’s all certainly very weird, but weird does not always means good.

The dance routines that make up the musical half of this cross-genre film — all done to a soundtrack by German band Stereo Total — are just as unusual. The lyrics make no sense whatsoever to the ongoing plot, and the dances themselves are poorly choreographed; one wonders if any rehearsal at all went into them. It feels as if a crowd simply gathered to dance whatever sprung into their minds while the experienced cinematographer Christopher Doyle beautifully captured it all. Having been filmed in a brief period of five days with single-take shots, this all seems to fit well with Underwater Love’s aesthetic.

But for a film that so purposely embraces its own silliness and delves into its own absurdity, questions immediately arise: Is there a larger issue at stake here? Or is this all merely for the sake of a silly and fun love story between a kappa and a human female? And if it’s the latter, why does it bring so many serious issues to the table yet tell a tragic tale in such a detached, ironic way? Had this film been released in the 1970s, it might have become a cult film. Instead, the film seems like it was made with the sole purpose of trying to achieve cult status. But that’s simply not how things work. Cult films become points of reference, something that forever marks viewer culture and is often nudged at in future cultural productions. They are not filled to exhaustion with pop references; they themselves become the referenced. But in some ways, Underwater Love is the quintessential cultural product of our time: it’s marked by an unoriginality that demands continual references to pop culture — which can be easily understood by just about anyone — in order to be approved (Family Guy anyone?).

Underwater Love may find its place with those enamored with self-conscious irony. It’s a parody of the musical as much as it is of the pinku genre. One could go as far as to say it’s a parody of how the West expects the Japanese to delight us with the strange and bizarre. Ironic postmodern cool may have had its place in the counterculture of the 1980s, but it has become the very driving force behind mainstream cultural production and, worse, modern publicity (as David Foster Wallace so thoroughly and brilliantly argues in his essay regarding television and irony, “E Unibus Pluram”). Underwater Love doesn’t take itself seriously; it’s cheaply and badly made, and that supposedly makes it brilliant since it’s supposed to be that way. In a similar vein to Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation — but lacking any of its complexity and brilliance — the film almost circumvents criticism. Filled with pop culture references, be it the Stereo Total soundtrack or the bukkake allusions, it’s all there for us to think to ourselves “Oh I get it, and it’s fun because I get it!” The movie invites us into an inside joke and then congratulates us for having understood it.

Underwater Love may seem like just another silly Japanese film by a hyped pinku director, but therein lays the complexity. A complexity that, if taken seriously, can turn a laugh — when we see a man dressed in a cheap kappa costume arguing with the God of Death — into a nervous chuckle. But for me, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a passage by David Foster Wallace concerning the tyranny behind irony, where after “sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.”

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