Notes on a Semi-Pornographic Film

“… [R]ed splashes … little red particles.”

— The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923 

The movie is called The Fetist. It is supposed to be called The Fetishist, but questions of language are inconsequential in a film with hardly any words. Original title: 熱い吐息, “hot breath.” Director: Hisayasu Satō. Run time: 65 minutes. A “pink film,” or a softcore porno, or an eroduction with artistic sensibilities. Wikipedia says: no equivalent in the western world. Kazuya says: I will spill blood because I have to.

Kazuya is the boy. The boy is a freak. The boy spends his days holed up in his room, listening to his older sister and her boyfriend enact BDSM scenes. He’s a teenager: young enough to be on the threshold of developing sexuality but old enough to feel shame for it. He’s guilty because he desires, disgusted because his sister desires, wishing desire could be snuffed out altogether. But there’s no stopping it, and it bursts from him in gory spatters. The boy, our boy, takes to the streets to slash unsuspecting women at random intervals, then sprints home with their blood still on his knife. Fake blood: pinkish and gleaming: paintlike. In the mirror, he cuts himself, stares at his own too-bright blood-stuff, feels the claws of desire on him, lets them scratch. The painter says: there is beauty here.

The painter is the painter. He has no name. His art is failing and his boyfriend is a sleaze and there’s a slasher stalking the city, so things are going quite poorly, really. When he sees Kazuya running away from a crime scene, he becomes fixated. The perfect model, young and ripe and skittish as a deer. The next time he sees Kazuya, he follows him, begging. Model for me. Model for me. Our boy refuses, holding out his knife, but the painter grabs it by the blade. Blood oozes out from between his fingers, glinting strangely in the bluish light. After that, there is nothing left to do but agree. Kazuya says: I will spill blood because I want to.

~

Q: Where have you atrophied?

A: Towards sex, eating, drinking—it’s like Kafka said. My Catholic upbringing stunted my growth, made the development of my sexuality slow and then suddenly frantic, as if trying to make up for lost time. As I aged, I wanted men how men want women. Filthy and exploitative. The need to hold dominion over.

Q: What filled the void?

A: Horror films. Splatterpunk. Finding the photo of Robert Mapplethorpe with the whip when I was sixteen.

Q: Where did the wanting come from?

A: My body.

Q: What do you think of your body?

A: I never liked it, but it’s only a collection of muscles and bones, and I like muscles and bones. I like the way they move, shudder, slide together, break apart.

Q: Is there shame in that?

A: There is shame in liking anything at all.

Q: What are you really saying?

A: I’m saying that violence and sexuality walk together, shake hands, gnaw at each other’s skin, et cetera. Grunts of pain and pleasure sound virtually indistinguishable.

Q: It’s trite, isn’t it, referring to the little death?

A: But have we discovered the answer yet? What an evolutionary mess, that our suffering excites us. Or is it an advantage? A balm to soothe our wounds? Kafka once dreamt of a brothel in which the women were covered in shiny red sores. There was shame in that: it titillated him.

~

Kazuya poses for the painter, and they have sex. Part of it is unsimulated. Pulling, rutting, licking. Hot breath. The whole time, our boy whimpers like he’s dying, a sound so pleased and pained it could be a song. Or just a single needling note, tightening towards silence.

When next he returns to the painter’s suite, Kazuya is met by the painter’s boyfriend, who drugs and rapes him. So he goes home. He stares wildly at his knife, perhaps seeing blood where there is none. “You too have weapons,” Kafka once wrote. Kazuya erupts into the beast he’s been edging towards the entire time. Clad in the white garb he wears when slashing, he enters his sister’s room. Mid-coitus. Choked and bound. He kills her lover first, then turns to her. She’s tied up, breasts swelling between leather straps like balloons ready to pop. Sobs drip out from around her gag, and saliva hangs low from her lips. He stabs her. There is hatred of women here. There is hatred of men. Hatred of bodies. Hatred of flesh and guts, all things red and gleaming.

Kazuya showers. Reunites with the painter. “When I came to,” he cries, maybe lying, “I was covered in blood.” The first thing they do is fuck, Kazuya weeping the whole while, voice thinned out to a sharp blade of anguish, which could also be pleasure, but it wouldn’t matter if it was. When the act is finished, they attack the painter’s boyfriend. Hand-in-hand, they run.

~

Q: Where does the psychosexual begin?

A: In a little corner of the brain that lights up during adolescence.

Q: Where does the psychosexual end?

A: Somewhere with a knife and fake blood. Lots of it, too much, spilling viscous onto the floor.

Q: How does the psychosexual begin?

A: Imagine yourself on the edge of death. Imagine the sound of your own death rattle. Imagine someone holding you, kissing you, caressing you. Imagine a world in which someone could love you.

Q: What is the point of all this?

A: None. There is none.

~

The Fetist ends with two more murders. A voyeuristic neighbor who’d listened to Kazuya’s acts of violence stabs both men to death in a train station. Then he collapses, screaming. The sounds of the city overwhelm him.

~

Q: What is a body?

A: A thing to step out of.

Q: What is sex?

A: Despair.

Q: What is despair?

A: A weapon.

Q: What is a weapon?

A: A body.

~

The floor, drenched in artificial crimson.

     The corpses, lying motionless.

     Their blood, mingling.