"The Pornographers" (1966)

One man, a pornographer, says very innocently, "Humans are made this way." He means: through sex, and more importantly (though he does not intend this interpretation) through sex psychology. Freudian, but also Oedipal. A distinctly japanese ontology, a way of communing with others, in accordance with the unbreakable paradigm of male/female. The film takes off from a standpoint of disjunction (not of woman-and-man broken, but of what lies between them, their organs, their sex, their attitude toward this fundamental bridge) -- describes this disjunction and does not attempt to bridge the component parts: man as well as woman, and children too, are raised in a confusion of sex. It is not sex which they want (nor what the pornographer sells) but the satisfaction that one has either lived (copulated) or died (ejaculation+orgasm) with good reason. 

The pornographer's illumination toward the end of this bizarre film: "The 'Dutch Wife' -- epitome of the mechanical age!" Antonioni's admonition that "Eros is sick" gains new surmise here. Sex, too, is dead. A psychological abomination which no longer resembles the old priapic ceremonies and rituals has taken its stead; nor even the role it enjoyed as an instrument of the status quo shortly before, shortly after, the World Wars. Now, instead, we are graced with an exclusion of the human interest, indeed a subversion of the sexes; the systematic annulment of gender and traditional power models. Sex is now: with a machine, sans guilt, and of no responsibility to anyone but the solitary one, the career idolater. Quiet, lawful, fits all sizes, accepts all sizes; wordless, snug, lubricated, tactile: better than masturbation! Proto-Modern-Japan; but also, the corruption of sex in every avenue of human intimacy, as much in the West as it is in the East. Man and Woman live in screens, their ghosts are voiced through mechanical simulation.

What could fill the hole in the heart of over-sexed creatures?

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Is Mr. Ogata tormented by memories of his father's geisha mistress? (Shot of young Ogata, identified by the mole on his upper lip, held down in a bathtub by the arms of the geisha, naked under him, and he naked too.) This is the woman whom his father slept with, under him, caressing his organ.

The sins of the father descend on the children; the sins of the mother relax the morals of the children. Families are made through sex: "Man and woman, needle and thread." But sex is capable of rending the fabric of the family -- if it is not respected, as it once was, an Eleusinian mystery.

Mr. Ogata is a moral man, by his own claim - I can believe him because (1) he marries a widow older than him, possessing no great charm, and takes up her children; (2) he does not appear especially vicious or boorish, and he is a man capable of reflection and even guilt and shame for what he does; (3) he is not an out-and-out 'criminal', in the way a yakuza or corporate executive so unfailingly is, but a nonviolent and attentive man. But is not his cryptic sense of morality more of an involuntary consequence of his impotence? If he were vigorous and promiscuous -- as other men proudly desire to be -- and if he required no "Hong Kong medicine" to harden his main, would he still be a pornographer, a philosophic peddler of smut? He claims his vocation is patriotic, and selfless, and nobler than a white-collar job, because it is to the point about man's abasement, it is sincere in its aims, however low its origination: since "man is a pathetic creature", it even maintains an aura of pity and mercy about it. But none of these arguments resolves the issues which create psychic torment in his adopted household, nor do they prevent him and his wife and his stepchildren from descending into madness, immorality, and fecklessness.

A central wisdom of Imamura's film is that we are not led to judge their iniquity and lasciviousness, since we are persuaded to understand the greater nature of the scheme: that one's own moral code does not in itself engender a moral-guided family life. Subu Ogata's best intentions -- which to the impartial viewer come across as strands of fanaticism -- end up counting very little in the raising of children and in the keeping of one's spouse. Children suffer as much from morbid irregularity as they do from negligence.