"Tokyo!" (2008)

Tokyo. Spectacle of the spectator. The internetwork made tangible, actualized: a city somehow brought to birth by the world wide web, which paradoxically had grown out of it like a plastic weed of contorted steel-glass buildings & color-coded designer colonies. A city that grew with the web, and which the web transformed, while being transformed by it, by that haven of demiurges: Tokyo. Paris has grown bloated, overrated by memory's forgetfulness, which we conventionally call 'nostalgia'; and far too many film homages have been paid as overlavish tributes. Rather than Paris, the 21st century hearkens to Tokyo. (If not to New York, a locale of new century grandiosity every bit as vibrant.) We have our first film omnibus devoted to Tokyo, by foreigners appropriately, non-Japanese, non-Tokyoans/Tokyo-ites: 2 french men, one corean. 2 frenchmen because frenchmen rather unnaturally like the idea of Japan & rather fanatically adore the naked torso of Tokyo, are enamoured by its metropolitan sophistication because somehow it isn't derived from europe, yet seems to run parallel with it, seems to be as chic & fashion aware as Paris or London or Roma is aware. And a corean because coreans understand japanese ethic better than any other foreigner can possibly contrive, without resorting to that intellectual fascination westerners have the imprecise fault of turning into worship. 3 quick jolts by 3 exceptionally talented directors constitute a fine yet unwholesome picture of a city that silently asks for more similar treatments: european cities insist on hagiography, but Tokyo doesn't have to beg: it is as bold as a new sun, day or night, far more relevant to our futurism than the european capitals. The importance of this particular film is that it has been made, its carefully pruned flaws secretly amounting to an aesthetic of threadbare dissection, thus allowing for the inevitable need to undertake Tokyo again, in another film omnibus, helmed by other music-video caliber directors. A film-length music video for the post-nothing ironic-irony crowd: Tokyo.
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(Michel Gondry - "Interior Design") Tokyo is one of those few cities that outwardly reflect the inward living space: it is a living room blossomed into foreign air like a mushroom cloud. [I remember once inhabiting the sublimest Starbucks in Tokyo, after navigating a trammeled concrete maze that led upward through a haze of whimsical boutiques, and while sitting outside and sipping a mediocre overpriced cappuccino, catching sight of the Tokyo skyline and feeling thoroughly at home, as if I were surrounded by house party mates on a friend's terrace outside her sliding glass door kitchen overlooking the sights and sounds of the city.] Tokyo is so much an extension of one's living space that the natural loneliness one feels outside on its streets in broad daylight equates to the infinite feeling of solitude that descends on one any sunday morning of the year when you find yourself sitting on a wooden chair, reading the paper, sipping a cappuccino, and suddenly recognizing that you have lived your life in the vanity of comfort. Better to serve others than yourself. A feeling of loneliness so pervasive outside as in, that one might as well be furniture. And so one becomes a desk, a lamp, a book left unread on the coffee-table. Or a chair, on which a solitary just like yourself sits and composes silent order by the soft discursive melodies of Tokyo's impinging traffic, everyday, like wanton house guests who won't leave one alone enough to feel one's aloneness.
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(Leos Carax - "Merde") Shit happens. In Tokyo as any other place. A frenchman notices that Tokyo is insanely clean, well-kept, antiseptic. He feels its cleanliness so much that he feels himself to be barbaric just roaming its kept pedestrian grounds, unkept & vulgar. When he speaks his barbaric french tongue, he imagines that it must sound like gibberish to the Family Mart clerks. So he says, "Shit" in french to them, and they just giggle, not knowing what he says, yet knowing that he smells like it anyway. The frenchman consequently concocts a fairy tale in which his alter ego, an unkempt savage caricature of a parisian vagabond, arises from the sewage of international waste, and plays the nihilist terrorist on the irritatingly peaceable Tokyoans. Suffice it to say, that this short film has nothing to do with Tokyo, but everything to do with a foreigner's psychotic sense of living in Tokyo knowing not its language, not its conduits, not its appetites. In the end the frenchman attempts to excuse his extroverted public fear into a brandname that he tries to sell as a distinctly impartial phenomenon by proposing a similar invasion into New York. Absolute bollocks because New York is the easiest city to sink into, the multinational city par excellence, ringing in the tongues of a thousand people. Tokyo is persistently japanese, hence its mystique and its appeal to the non-.
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(Bong Joon-Ho, "Shaking Tokyo") Not surprisingly, a corean outclasses the western contingent when it comes to description of a spiritual state arrested by fear of the oriental metropolis. It is the same loneliness of furniture people and rampant foreigners unlettered in the native language, but this time it is a definite fear of self that does not immediately or irrationally lapse into the absurd as a last resort. The fear of earthquakes is a biological fear, fear of orgasm & herd-union. But we are always involved through tabloids with eschatology, and so the appeal to city devastation, to apocalyptic sex: to the end of days. Let us not become robots, the corean asks, because he knows what excessive neon lights can do to the homebodies: create nightmares of sexless days. Days of captivity in a body that needs other bodies, other contact. The solitary seeks Tokyo like a lover, even if he was born and bred in the city. For Tokyo disperses and crushes love like a vibrator vibrating without insertion into the moist part. Let us not become robots, let us find human touch, human contact, orgasm....
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Tokyo! doesn't deserve an exclamation mark: it merits further interrogation, a revisit that asks itself for ontological purpose, is this shimmering high-definition monitor screen, Tokyo?