“My favorite color looks good on you…”

Of course, this being a Takashi Miike film, you know what that color is without being told.

And to be sure, the director’s trademark offbeat violence and offbeat approach to violence are evident in Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) in all their glory.  One bit of hyper-ghoulish slapstick involves a rapidly-descending katana and a poorly-timed attempt to block it.  You can’t help but laugh at this brutal punchline to a joke that’s been set up and delivered perfectly in terms of pure visuals and editing.  Also highlighted here is Miike’s tendency towards one-upmanship, even if much of the time it’s only himself he’s one-upping.  For example, we’re treated to a variant on the famous Geof Darrow/The Quick and the Dead (1995) shot composed directly through a yawning exit wound—but then this image gets topped by an archer shooting an arrow through this cavity and into the next victim.  Another smile from the audience, another tidbit of gory cleverness of the sort that Romero worked so hard to achieve in Diary of the Dead (2007) and which Miike seems to come by naturally.  A few scenes later, though, one of the main characters gets raped while watching her young son stand over the corpse of her husband.  Suddenly the chuckles wither in our throats.  How dare the violence become so, well, serious?

Mashing up genres is getting so old--why not mash up history instead?

Of course we can view such moments as high opera to take with a grain of salt or as a brief sampling of the theater of cruelty that helps keep us honest.  Either way, our next move is to wait around for the nastiness to give way once again to more “entertaining” brands of mayhem.  Indeed, this strategy does work after a fashion, but then we run the risk of neglecting what’s unique about Miike as an artist in the first place.  For him, screen violence is not a single note that triggers visceral shock and/or moral outrage and that can be played only with varying degrees of intensity; nor is it simply an aesthetic principle to be explored a la Peckinpah and John Woo.  Rather, Miike’s finely calibrated sense of violence allows him to use it as a gesture palette for whatever he wants to do narratively and tonally.

The result is that in any given film of his—and Sukiyaki is probably a case study—we get violence as character development, violence as tragedy, violence as history lesson, violence as courtship dance, violence as dream-like poetry, violence as spiritual option, violence as exhilarating eye-candy, and of course violence as humor source.  In other words, Miike builds up a discourse that’s not “about” violence as we’re perhaps accustomed to from other filmmakers, but a discourse whose very language is violence.

Actually, that’s why we respect him.  Miike is not content just to push our buttons:  he wants to pry the tops of the buttons off and attach them to different underpinnings, so that in the end we’re forced to take a good, hard look at our own wiring.  I’m not saying this is a conscious mission of social good for him but rather that he views this approach as the ultimate in subversive fun.  And no, Miike doesn’t want us to get meditative on these points since much of the power of his work stems from our succumbing to the uptempo seductions that he’s continually staging.  Experientially, these land as a sense of anything-can-happen-next or an appreciation of Miike’s visual audaciousness, or both—and these are enough to jazz an audience.  They certainly did at the U.S. premiere of Sukiyaki Western Django at the Japan Cuts festival in early July.  Fully girded in our postmodern irony, we can pretty much laugh our way through the entire picture.

But there’s a hidden cost for both filmmaker and audience in such exercises, a cost that’s not to be found in other Miike films such as Audition (1999).  From the title on, Sukiyaki Western Django is a tribute to Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), which, despite its occasionally ham-fisted ways, will probably always pack an emotional punch.  But however much Miike lifts ideas from it, such as the resonant image of a casket being dragged through the mud, his film will never achieve the intensity of the earlier one because of his blatant insincerity.  And yet it’s his insincerity that lends Miike the freedom he needs to soar creatively and provides the heady unpredictability that his audiences love him for.  This is a tradeoff that’s always been present in his work, but rarely is it as stark as it is here.  There’s a civil war of sorts going on in the storyline, one that also happens to dramatize an internal conflict in Miike the artist that’s far more compelling.