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"The Grudge" (http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/thegrudge/) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0391198/)
Directed by Takashi Shimizu
Sony Pictures
PG-13 / Singapore:PG
2004
Reviewed by a contributor October 26 2004
"The Grudge" has been called the scariest ghost movie since "The Sixth Sense" (1999) (soon to be reviewed). I am not going to dispute this point. The movie's politics are more interesting. I persynally liked "The Grudge," but it was still a piece of shit politically.
In "Sixth Sense," Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) has the peculiar ability to see and communicate with ghosts. This time, the creepy child star is disturbed in a different way. Yuya Ozeki plays Toshio Saeki, the small murdered son of a man (Takashi Matsuyama) who kills his family and himself after he finds out that his wife (Takako Fuji) has been fantasizing about another, Euro-Amerikan man (Bill Pullman).
Toshio, along with his mother, becomes a ghost who lingers in his dead family's house and brings horror after horror, and death, to its occupants. With the exception of the elderly grandmother (Grace Zabriskie), all of the house's residents after the murder are Euro-Amerikan u.$. citizens who work in Japan.
"The Grudge" (2004) is a remake of the Japanese-language "Ju-On: The Grudge" (2003). The remake replaces the originally Japanese protagonists with Euro-Amerikans. However, the story remains set in contemporary Tokyo.
Some bloggers have picked up on the movie's xenophobia, a manifestation of national chauvinism, and a manifestation of inter-imperialist rivalry in the Japan-u.$. context. However, reviewers have largely ignored the xenophobia, and few people have articulated what exactly is reactionary about "The Grudge" in terms of xenophobia.
In fact, the movie seems to be xenophobic precisely because it substitutes Euro-Amerikans for the protagonists while leaving the diabolical ghostly antagonists as Japanese and keeping the Japanese setting. Supposedly, this is meant to retain the Japanese-mythological theme of the original movie, but "The Grudge" makes a point of highlighting its Japanese setting, as indicated by the conspicuous overhead shot of a crowded, super-wide crosswalk in downtown Tokyo, and several shots of the Tokyo skyline during the day and night.
If the substitution of Euro-Amerikan characters (and actors) for Japanese characters is meant to make the story more comprehensible and palatable to u.$. moviegoers, then why aren't Yoko (Yoko Maki) and the Saeki family Euro-Amerikan, too? There is no reason for this discrepancy other than white children and wimmin as ghosts would have seemed less unfamiliar and effectively less scary in an Amerikan-in-a-foreign-land horror context. "The Grudge" inverts the exotic-temptress stereotype of East Asian wimmin, replaces it with a long-haired Japanese medusa, and has the nerve to give this representation legitimacy in a u.$. context through a Japanese director.
Through awkward attempts at speaking Japanese, discombobulating Japanese-language food labels, incomprehensible Japanese written language everywhere, and fearful body language, "The Grudge" sets up oppositions between the main character, Kare Davis (Sarah Michelle Gellar), and other Euro-Amerikan characters, on the one hand, and Japanese people. This is not to mention Takeo Saeki's violent response to his Japanese wife's (Takako Fuji) perceived infidelity involving a Euro-Amerikan man.
Gender oppression
As a ghost, Toshio frequently mimics the appearance and sound of his former pet cat, a black domestic cat. He flip-flops between his "cute" and monstrous appearances. He even appears naked in one scene, which contributes to his exaggerated animal-like appearance and behavior. This parallels how children are currently represented in the united $tates and the united kingdom (at least these countries): as potential animals. Such representations are so widespread now that they pass without comment. Not only do we have socially constructed children "humorously" depicted as chimpanzees and gorillas in the movies, for example, in "Mean Girls" (2004), adolescence and medical disorder are being defined in terms of each other:
In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society. (1)
The explicit description of youth as potential animals seems to be a relatively recent development(2). Of course, this animalizing tendency in the description of youth isn't too surprising. As Stephen Jay Gould(3) pointed out pseudo-scientists advocating a racist recapitulation theory described even white children as apes in the late nineteenth century:
Recapitulation also provided an irresistible criterion for any scientist who wanted to rank human groups as higher and lower. The adults of inferior groups must be like children of superior groups, for the child represents a primitive adult ancestor. If adult blacks and women are like white male children, then they are living representatives of an ancestral [i.e., pre-humyn] stage in the evolution of white males. (p. 144, emphasis in original)
This reviewer came across someone who said that they were going to get rid of their own cat when they got home from the theater. Were they also going to get rid of their own child? After all, behind that innocent exterior lies the untamed, wild animal within us all.
The frightening depiction of children as animals, or as grotesque demonic children, as with the Jewish children harassing Judas in "The Passion of the Christ" (2004), has a bearing on the social control of children as a gender-oppressed group. This is the case regardless of whether the context is humorous, serious, Amerikan, Japanese, Jerusalem, or whatever. Even more than books, movies are an important vehicle for propagating reactionary representations of children and other gender-oppressed people.
Inter-imperialist investment
Like "Blade Runner" (1992), "The Grudge" represents a potential centrifugal force for the settlement behavior of Euro-Amerikans. Depictions of long, lonely office building corridors, bleak nighttime streets, "depersonalization" in the city, "urban angst," etc., resonate with the angst of real-world imperialist-country parasites who feel that they are unable to control surrounding economic and social forces. (Although, angst is concentrated at not just the urban extreme, but also the rural extreme as indicated by the geographic distribution of reported ghost sightings, UFO sightings, etc.)
Interestingly, a connection may also be drawn between "The Grudge's" depiction of Euro-Amerikan citizens working in Japan and the Japanese recession in the 1990s, and the alleged need for u.$. investors to either come to the aid of, or learn from, the Japanese. The Hoover Institution, for example, has brought attention to the relationship between the recent Japanese recession and "the rest of the world"(4), as an example of the urgent importance (for whom?) of continuing IMF restructuring programs.
In the past, many Euro-Amerikan citizens working in Japan "had little knowledge of Japan and regarded the country as a distant and even somewhat mysterious place."(5) Seeing Sarah Michelle Gellar's character even try to speak Japanese is somewhat unexpected. In fact, compared with Japanese citizens who work in the united $tates and speak fluent English, u.$. citizens who work in Japan have rarely spoken fluent Japanese.(6)
"The Grudge" deserves a negative rating for doing nothing to change the imperialist-patriarchal status quo and, in fact, reinforcing it. Simple depictions of intimate partner homicide are nothing new in the movies; although, Takeo Saeki's murder-suicide happens to be in the theme of u.$. entertainment and news media portraying Japanese people as being uniquely sexist and suicidal. "The Grudge" does nothing to combat or even really depict the nature of gender oppression(7). At the same time, "The Grudge" stokes the fire of inter-imperialist rivalry—or raises the prospect of job opportunities in an economically stagnant Japan for Euro-Amerikan parasites.
"The Grudge" probably won't be considered for a remake in a socialist people's republic. It is an inherently supernatural movie that is obviously banking on the sex appeal of its "Buffy" star. On the other hand, it might be interesting to see a Chinese (or Laotian or Thai), lesbian, teenage couple terrorized by ghostly, demonic, straight Euro-Amerikan men and wimmin.
Notes
1. Sherwin B. Nuland, 1995, How we die: reflections on life's final chapter, New York, Vintage Books
2. Some urban teenagers have been characterized as packs of wild animals. For example:
Christine Haughney, 2002 September 6, "Central Park rape case convictions in question," washingtonpost.com, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43265-2002Sep5?language=printer
Lynnwell Hancock, 2003 January 16, "Coloring the Central Park jogger case," AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/14958/
Zener, Praez, and Chris Caruso, 1998 October, "The war on graffiti is a war on the new class," Hiphop-Network, http://www.hiphop-network.com/articles/graffitiarticles/warongraff.asp
3. Stephen Jay Gould, 1996, The mismeasure of man, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
4. Stanley Fischer, "Lessons from a crisis," http://www.imfsite.org/recentfin/lessons.html
5. William A. Blanpied, 2002 August, "A brief history of the National Science Foundation's Tokyo Regional Office," http://www.nsftokyo.org/History.htm
6. Paul Herbig, "Cultural influences on expatriate managers' success and failures," working paper, http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/9158/paper18.html
7. "Revolutionary feminism," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/gender/ ; MCB52, 1995 June, "The oppression of children under patriarchy," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mt/mt9child.html