Although most body modification films highlight masculine visions of power, a few Japanese films draw on a feminist cyborg myth either explicitly or implicitly, providing a speculative connection between humans and animals which biologically modify their bodies. Three of these films connect the cyborg myth with the natural world and produce hybrid beings with capabilities more like cuttlefish than decorated humans. According to the documentary Kings of Camouflage(2007), the cuttlefish [is] a flesh-eating predator who's a master of illusion, changing its shape and color at will. It can hypnotize its prey or even become invisible.” Scientist Mark Norman explains their amazing modification abilities: “They've developed this skin that can do the amazing changes in color and changes in shape. And what fascinates me the most is how different cuttlefish species have taken that basic tool that probably evolved for camouflage, and they've taken it a step further and said, ‘All right, how can we use this in other ways?’"
Noboru Iguchi’s Machine Girl (2009) and RoboGeisha (2009), and Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police (2008) highlight how women take “basic tools” and gain power when they are transformed into cyborgs. What changes in these Japanese films, however, is the interconnection between nature and machine embodied by each character’s bodily changes. These films take the connection between animal and human body modification one-step further than films such as Elysium to include biology. In these Japanese cyborg films, body modification immerses women in both nature and culture. The modification explored here blurs nature-culture boundaries and aligns human change with cuttlefish evolution.
As Donna Haraway explains in her Cyborg Manifesto, “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (291). For Haraway, cyborg fiction offers a space in which women can deconstruct binaries that construct nature and the feminine as inferior to their binary opposites, the masculine and culture. Haraway suggests the “cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (295). Because Western culture is grounded in such binaries, alternative perspectives are needed to blur exploitative boundaries. As Haraway contends, “most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in social practices, symbolic formulations and physical artifacts associated with ‘high technology’ and scientific culture” (295).
The American socialists and feminists Haraway describes might agree with the view that “a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war” (Sofia 1984) (295). But contemporary Japanese body modification horror supports a second perspective, one in which “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (295). In Machine Girl, RoboGeisha, and Tokyo Gore Police, women, nature and the machine merge creating new organisms with the ability to modify themselves from within.
Directed by Noboru Iguchi, Machine Girl most clearly aligns with the traditional view of the cyborg as a hybrid of machine and organism. The film’s protagonist Ami (Minase Yashiro) loses a hand and replaces it with a gun. The opening scene introduces her alteration and highlights a school girl Ami’s quest to avenge her brother Yu’s (Ryôsuke Kawamura) murder. “You’re the one who made it my business,” she says, as she kills a group of young men taunting a schoolboy. She has lost a hand, and when gang members throw knives at her, she attaches an automatic weapon and shoots off their heads. Blood spurts everywhere, so much so that the schoolboy calls her a murderer despite having saved his life.
When the film flashes back, Ami provides backstory to situate this scene: Six months before “she could hold her little brother with her left arm.” She excelled at basketball and cared for her brother Yu after her parents commit suicide. They seem like a contented nontraditional family until Yu borrows money from a gang to buy a videogame. In spite of Ami’s assistance, Yu is thrown from the top of a parking garage and dies. Despite the gang’s connection to Yakuza boss Ryûji Kimura (Kentarô Shimazu) Ami wishes to avenge her brother’s death and infiltrates the gang’s hideout, where she is captured and tortured, losing her hand during her escape. A machinist and his wife Miki (Asami) replace her hand with a custom-made automatic weapon. Because she lost her son to the Yakuza, Miki helps Ami defeat Kimura and his family while Yu’s ghost applauds, connecting machine with a supernatural element that complicates the cyborg myth.
Iguchi’s RoboGgeisha provides a more explicit connection with biology, since the cyborgs created in the film mingle machines with bodies and minds. The film’s opening introduces a Goblin Squadron of female cyborgs who fight off a prime minister’s security guards. Yoshie (Aya Kiguchi)—the RoboGeisha of the title—intervenes, saving the prime minister. The robogeisha explains her situation, telling the audience, “I am not a monster. I am a robot.” Another cyborg shows her spinning saw mouth, but the robogeisha protects the prime minister and declares, “Violence has no place in the world of the geisha.” From here the film flashes back to the RoboGeisha cyborg’s origin when she was Yoshie, the younger of two sisters working in a Geisha house. Although her older sister Kikue (Hitomi Hasebe) is considered the superior Geisha, Yoshie proves the most powerful. A customer and owner of a steel-works company, Kageno (Takumi Saitô), discovers Yoshie’s natural strength and fighting ability and recruits her into an army of Geisha assassins, including her sister as part of the Goblin Squadron. During training parts of each woman recruit’s body are altered into weaponry directly linked to their brains, turning them into cyborgs with ties to the natural world.
When Yoshie refuses to destroy members of a Family Rescue Organization attempting to find their lost daughters, Kageno nearly destroys her, but she survives, discovering Kageno’s real plan to have his robotic castle throw a new and very powerful nuclear bomb into the center of Mount Fuji, effectively destroying Japan. With the help of the Family Rescue Organization who find and repair her, Yoshie sets out to stop him and his robotic warriors. Ultimately Yoshie destroys Kageno and his robot castle only by reconnecting with her elder sister. Together their cyborg strength knocks the robot castle into space where it explodes into harmless fireworks. In RoboGeishabodies and machines merge both individually and through sibling connections.
Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police even more blatantly alters the cyborg myth by merging science and technology with genetics. The film is set in a future-world vision of Tokyo where the police have been privatized and destroy lawbreakers with unfettered violence. The samurai-sword-wielding Ruka (Eihi Shiina) leads the police squad with a mission to destroy homicidal mutant humans known as "engineers" who possess the ability to transform any injury to a weapon in and of itself. Ultimately Ruka too becomes an engineer when a genetic key is inserted in her wounded body. Once she discovers the police she works for assassinated her father, Ruka joins forces with the keyman (Itsuji Itao) who created the engineers. As a powerful biological cyborg, Ruka overthrows the police, halting their violent assault on the citizens of Tokyo.
Although these three films approach the cyborg in varying ways, they all reinforce Haraway’s claims: “The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience…. This is a struggle between life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (Haraway 291). They also highlight, if in fictional form, our connection with the natural world. According to the narrator of Kings of Camouflage, “Evolution means change, so maybe in a few million years, the flamboyant will march on eight legs right onto the beaches. Or the broadclub will hypnotize its predators as well as its prey. Perhaps the Australian giants will invent even more daring strategies to outwit their rivals.” Machine Girl, RoboGeisha, and Tokyo Gore Police offer a space in which to explore how evolution may also change us.
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