Kitano Takeshi

The assumption of auteur theory is that the films an auteur has directed can be analyzed to uncover recurrent themes and aesthetic patterns that express the unique cohesion of his or her personal vision of the world, transcending historical contexts.¹ Kitano Takeshi's films, for example, include recurrent themes and aesthetic patterns such as the motif of dualities, the obsession with the color blue, and self-annihilating violence. In light of these motifs, Kitano might be considered an auteur in the traditional sense. However, many have declared that if there is anything unchanging about Kitano it is that he is always changing. Thus, Kitano may be enshrined in the list of masters appreciated by contemporary cinephiles, but he also remains something of an outsider to auteur theory.

In his insightful book, Aaron Gerow undertakes the extremely difficult task of explicating the consistent inconsistency of Kitano Takeshi. Gerow calls Kitano the embodiment of "postmodern authorship."² Gerow's strategy is self-consciously dialogic: he refrains "from predetermining the 'Kitano as consistent' versus 'Kitano as ever changing' debate by dividing the book into two main sections: one devoted to summarizing accounts of the stylistic and thematic consistencies in his work, relating and sometimes problematising [the films] through historical and biographical context, and another that analyzes each film from Violent Cop [1989] to Zatoichi [2003] for its uniqueness—as well as for the problems it poses to the vision of the ever-changing auteur."³

In his conclusion, however, Gerow tries to solidify Kitano's "fluid identity."⁴ Gerow claims, "With many dualities in Kitano's cinema, especially in his later work, framing structures have operated to unite opposing terms through creating hierarchies or subsuming the terms in a transcendental third term. This is the case with the two Kitano Takeshis: in concert they have elevated Takeshi's status to someone who is both an auteur and someone who self-consciously critiques auteurism, who pursues his unique worldview and yet escapes any who would define it, who is both a master director and can play with that very concept."⁵ Despite using such a cliché in auteur theory as the "transcendental," Gerow does not mean to elevate the status of Kitano as another auteur who is a little more sensitive to his status than other masters. In Fireworks (1997), Kitano's own painting of an angel has wings, but Gerow calls Kitano an "angel with the broken wing …, a transcendental figure who cannot fly."⁶

We might well contrast Gerow's Kitano to Walter Benjamin's "angel of history." While the "angel of history" is transcendentally "looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating," his "wings … spread," the broken-winged Kitano is entangled with history.⁷ Gerow's book appears to be "postmodern" auteur criticism, but in fact, it is a historical project on Japanese cinema, media, and celebrity culture since the 1980s, which typically embodies what Alex Zahlten calls "the age of liquefaction." Referring to Manuel Castells's work, Zahlten argues that both the world and the network society are embedded in a "space of flows [of data, capital, goods, etc.]," which is also "dominating our economic, political and symbolic life."⁸ I once argued that the division between Beat Takeshi as a performer and Kitano Takeshi as a filmmaker embodies "the gap between cinephilia and telephilia," a means by which "Kitano problematizes the inevitable coexistence between TV and cinema in Japan."⁹ The divisions are not so simple any longer. If identity is becoming more and more imagined via the media of recording and storing bodily data, aren't we already doppelgangers of ourselves, insofar as recorded images and bodily data themselves are immortal? As long as we identify ourselves via recorded images and bodily data, is there any valid reflection of the self onto a projected self ? And, in a period of media celebrities and reality shows, is the split between person and decorporealized shadow already collapsed into mediated self-imagery?¹⁰

In his later work, Kitano often mediates his own identity as a doll or a puppet: a static figure. In an interview, Kitano explicates, "I rarely see myself objectively. I do not think about what kind of man I am. After all, it is as if I am using two puppets. In reality, I am a director and use two puppets of myself in my film. They are simply my puppets and I cannot answer the question of which is most like myself. As a filmmaker I seem to be the closest to myself."¹¹ Here, apparently, Kitano himself tries to solidify his status over his fluid images but in a transcendental manner.

The puppet motif is developed in Takeshis' (2005), in which Kitano plays both "Beat Takeshi," a famous actor named for his own real-life star image, and "Kitano," a down-and-out actor who bears a striking resemblance to the famous Beat. A bobble-head doll of Beat also features prominently. Kitano drives a taxi as unexpected events occur: a naked black man with a searchlight on his forehead passes by the taxi; an on-nagata falls onto the front window; numerous corpses lie on the ground. When the taxi Kitano is driving falls into a strange black hall, the camera zooms in to the bobblehead doll standing on the shelf at Kitano's apartment. This bobblehead doll could be the owner of the authoritative perspective in the film, metaphorically pulling the strings and manipulating the actions of Kitano. In other words, the objectified/solidified image of Kitano controls the mental states and the actual lives of the living human being Kitano.¹² Perhaps it was Kitano's attempt to give puppets a chance to regain control over their own actions and identities: an uncanny experiment of reversal of fortunes and blurring of boundaries between human beings and dolls.¹³ In Glory to the Filmmaker! (2007), the filmmaker Kitano as a character turns into a doll of himself and comes back alive over and over again.

Films and history, however, are ultimately beyond the authorial control of Kitano. When Takeshis' was completed and premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2005, Kitano confessed that he became "really exhausted" and felt "sick" while watching it. He "was not able to catch up with" his own film and thought, "What the hell is this?"¹⁴ The auteur's supposed transcendental worldview, if there was one, was swallowed up in the complication of the loaded viewing perspectives that Kitano's work presents.