The Red Spectacles

Mamoru Oshii's "The Red Spectacles" has to be pretty high on the list of the most underrated films of all time. Despite Oshii's international acclaim, it has remained mostly unseen and almost entirely misinterpreted. It's bizarre cinematic style, unintuitive narrative structure, and tonal dissonance make it a difficult film to process, and an almost torturous one to extract meaning from. Yet the rewards for perseverance are so great that I cannot stress enough the necessity of your finding this movie immediately, watching it, chewing on it, and then repeating the process a few times.  The trailer can be seen here, and if it looks even remotely interesting, you should look into it.  Fans of David Lynch will be particularly pleased, I imagine.

I'm also attaching an essay I wrote about "The Red Spectacles" for a class I took on crime in Japanese literature and film way back in my freshman year of college. The thesis is more or less irrelevant, so ignore all the parts about criminality, but I feel like the analysis of the film is still reasonably worthwhile as a close reading.

Analysis:

Mamoru Oshii’s “The Red Spectacles” is not a typical detective story of the type that we have primarily focused on in class. Rather, it is an abstract investigation of what “criminality” really means. In the world of the film an oppressive, totalitarian regime has ground the citizens of Japan into the dirt, and the people’s only hope for salvation rests in the myth of Koichi, a fugitive hero from an earlier era for whose return they wait. Unlike the majority of crime stories, which vilify the criminal, “The Red Spectacles” casts Koichi as a revolutionary idealist whose opposition to society is not a failing on his part but a commendable, even necessary reaction to the degeneration of the country in which he lives. The film suggests that though several people, the main character included, have come to the city claiming to be Koichi, even believing that they are him, he has never actually returned to Japan. The real Koichi fled the Kerberos and deserted his friends when the chips were down. In reality, Koichi was no hero. Yet so desperate is the need for a hero that the people create one out of this shadowy figure and enact his role over and over, seeking to bring change; the idea of this “criminal” figure, willing and able to take on the government, is all that sustains their hope.

In the years following the Kerberos revolt and Koichi’s flight from Japan, the country has fallen to pieces. The film does everything in its power to reinforce the stark hopelessness of life in Japan under the iron fist of the new order. As soon as the film jumps three years ahead, to the present day, there is a significant shift in the visual style. Whereas the first scene was in vibrant color, the future is shot in a sort of muddy sepia tone with harsh, high-contrast lighting that casts long, dark shadows. The streets are barren, devoid of human life and scattered with refuse. Everywhere there are posters with the haunting face of a young woman, recalling the classic image of George Orwell’s “Big Brother.” A thin layer of grime seems to cover everything, and the buildings are invariably run down, yet there is a disturbing sterility to the city due to the extreme government censorship and control. At one point, Koichi goes to see a movie. When he enters the theater, the soundtrack of a war film is clearly audible, complete with explosions, gunfire, planes flying overhead, and the shouts of soldiers, yet the screen shows only a still image of the girl’s face from the posters. All fast-food restaurants have been shut down, as they were seen as a breeding ground for dissent, and have been forced to go into operation underground as soba speakeasies.

The Kerberos, the icons of the old Japan, had a strong association with dogs and dog imagery; their name comes from Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades, and they were known as the “watchdogs of hell.” The new Japan, by contrast, is filled with cat imagery. Fliers with pictures of cats are sprinkled on the streets, Maneki Neko are seen in many of the film’s locations, and cats are often heard meowing in the background. This creates an instantaneously antagonistic dichotomy between the protagonist and the government. After all, dogs and cats are frequently thought of as mortal enemies. By emphasizing that the new era is an age of cats, the film shows that this is no longer a place welcoming to Koichi or his ideals. It also implies a bit about each, as cats are known for their aloofness and their calculating minds, while dogs are known for loyalty and heart. Koichi is poisoned by eating food with a cat label, while Midori later rescues him by poisoning the guards with dog-branded noodles. The two factions are not just opposed, but they are absolutely incompatible. The things that sustain one are toxic to the other.

One of the film’s more jarring aspects is the frequent use of bizarre, highly inappropriate broad comedy in scenes with no call for it. For all intents and purposes, “The Red Spectacles” is a serious film about serious issues, and yet it does not shy away from having Bunmei, the face of the evil Cats, burst into an impromptu mambo for seemingly no reason, or having Koichi become incapacitated by explosive diarrhea that he is unable to relieve because there is a goldfish living in the toilet. These moments appear at first to make absolutely no sense, but when given more thought, they add a great deal to the dystopian atmosphere. These sequences are horrifying; they are completely out of place, and as such, they illustrate the ignominy of life in the new Japan. Under the new regime, the city has a bad sense of humor and a bad sense of timing, and its people are unceremoniously stripped of their dignity. This motif reinforces the total ugliness of the city, and why it has to be changed.

This is life as the man-who-is-not-Koichi sees it. While it may not be the objective truth, this sepia-toned wasteland of oppression and decay is his vision of the world around him, and it demands action. In this world gone wrong, the only way to truly be a hero is to be a criminal as well. The law is wrong, and so to follow it is also wrong. The myth of Koichi speaks to a higher ideal that transcends the petty rules and regulations set down by the Cats. This makes him a criminal in the literal sense, but also forces the viewers to question their conception of criminality. The Kerberos were shut down because they were firmly committed to the ideal of justice, rather than the prosaic law of the land. They answered to a higher power than the government, cared about things more important than the rules laid down before them. In their eyes, (and the viewers’) it is the Cats who are the criminals in the truest sense, as they are the ones whose actions led to the massive corrosion of Japanese society that the Kerberos fought to prevent. Even though the protagonist is an enemy of the law, he has righteousness on his side, which is something that Bunmei and the Cats cannot claim.

Ao and Midori are eventually beaten down into joining up with the Cats, even at the expense of their pride, because they see no alternative. In the movie theatre, Bunmei shows the main character tapes of Midori and Ao’s lengthy, sorrowful confessions where they admit to their crimes and express a kind of forced remorse for the actions they took as members of the Kerberos. Their apologies are stilted and monotone, clearly the result of force rather than any sort of sincere regret. They still do not believe that their “crimes” were crimes, but they don’t know what else they can do but play along. And indeed within the city there is no alternative, because there is no power strong enough to challenge the Cats. But Koichi, with his illegal armor, represents the power to defy the government and set things straight.

What makes Koichi so special and makes him a legendary figure that inspires the common man to action is that he is, at least according to the myth, the one man who never gave in, who never surrendered his personal agency and human dignity to the machine. His refusal to surrender his ideals, even when opposed by the monolithic totalitarianism of the Cats, has transformed him into a symbol, and because he still has a suit of Kerberos armor, he is a symbol with teeth. To the people of the new Japan, Koichi represents individual responsibility and choice allied with the strength required to see it through. He bows to no man, choosing to fight on alone against impossible odds rather than simply accept that his time has passed, and the Protect-gear gives him enough power that he could possibly succeed. Even though this vision of Koichi is wrong, as the main character’s realizations at the end of his dream would suggest, it is what the people need, and so it does not really matter. The downtrodden citizens of Japan need a hero to believe in, a possibility for salvation in a world on the brink of collapse. It is because of this desperation and this longing for a better tomorrow that average people will take on his persona and set out to right the wrongs they see all around them.

In the end, the main character comes into the city, adopting his own romanticized vision of Koichi as his persona, with a suitcase full of red spectacles. The glasses are worthless on their own, but like Koichi himself they are emblematic, as they mirror the glowing red lenses on the eyes of the Kerberos armor. These glasses, with the associations they hold, could be the beginning of a revolution. By distributing the glasses to the people, the main character would be, in a way, giving them all pieces of the Koichi legend to call their own, symbolic suits of protect gear that they could use to throw off their chains and fight back against their oppressors. Hope is what the Koichi legend is all about, and by metaphorically making the people into Kerberos soldiers, the main character could have given them all the hope that they need.

And while he failed, he is not the first, nor the last to walk this road. As Bunmei opens the suitcase in the hotel, he asks how many times they will have to go through this before he finally recovers the lost armor. As the protagonist’s body is dragged out of the building, the girl whose face adorns the posters hails a cab, and enters. It is the same taxi driver who quoted Shakespeare to the man-who-is-not-Koichi in his dream, and he quotes The Tempest, saying “’We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’ What kind of dream is the one you are going to meet, miss?” She puts down the phone and smiles, as she fades slowly out of the sepia grime and into brilliant color, her scarf the same intense red as the glasses and the armor’s lenses. The girl, who watched the main character from the walls everywhere he went, was not an agent of the Cats’ oppression, but his guide, the soul of the city leading him on his journey to make things right again. And now, as the cab drives off towards the airport, she prepares to meet another dream, another would-be Koichi, and guide him on his way. It does not matter that this man, this incarnation of Koichi has failed, because Koichi is not a man but a dream, a dream that lives on in the hearts and minds of all the people. Regardless of how many Koichis Bunmei kills, more will come to take their places, until eventually their work is done. Koichi is an idea, and as Allan Moore famously says in his great dystopian novel V for Vendetta, “Ideas are bulletproof.”