Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive Trilogy: In Depth By Matt Schley Available for publication, contact mattschley (at) comcast.net “I prefer to break people’s expectations.”3 -Takashi Miike In early 2000, two films by a relatively unknown Japanese director named Takashi Miike stormed through the rounds of international film festivals, leaving a trail of infamy in their wake. One, Audition, seemingly a romantic comedy, lulled its viewers into a false sense of security, then pulled out all the stops as a fiercely excruciating horror story in the third act, leading to massive theater walkouts. The second, Dead or Alive, was more upfront about its graphic nature: the very first shot features a woman falling to her demise from a building onto the crowded streets of Kabukicho, Japan’s Sin City, where a gang member rips a bag of cocaine from her dead fingers. Suffice to say, reactions to this pair of films was not mild. Suddenly, critics and avid moviegoers from around the globe wanted to learn more about the films of Takashi Miike. Dead or Alive, in specific, quickly became a hot item in both Japanese and foreign film circles. Borrowing the Al Pacino versus Robert de Niro concept from Michael Mann’s Heat, Dead or Alive paired an equally infamous, larger than life duo against each other. Eventually spawning two sequels with little in common but the name and actors, Dead or Alive and its counterparts are perfect examples of Takashi Miike’s work. Miike has made 60-odd films since 1991, making him quite possibly the busiest director on the planet. Surprisingly, Miike had no great desire to make movies growing up, more interested in motorcycle racing. Simply seeking to escape his small hometown, Miike entered the Yokohama School of Broadcasting and Film, primarily because it required no entrance exams. At one point in his school career, a TV producer came to the school looking for assistants who would work for free. The school decided to sacrifice its biggest slacker, since all the other students were working on their graduation films. The rest is history. Miike moved through the ranks on TV productions, eventually becoming Assistant Director on a number of projects. Finally, he was asked in 1991 to direct a direct-to-video, “V-Cinema” film. V-Cinema, largely a product of Japan’s late 1980s/early 1990s ever-expanding economy, gave (and continues to give) upstart directors like Miike a chance to develop their skills on actual productions, as opposed to the artificiality of film school. Miike would continue to work in V-Cinema until 1995, with his first theatrical film, Shinjuku Triad Society. While Miike usually receives films pre-written and cast, he has a habit of retooling scripts, often throwing out entire scenes and adding new ones, as well as more subtle changes, making each of his films undeniably his. While fans and detractors alike were quick to label Miike as a man out solely to shock and disgust his audience with the explosion of Audition and Dead or Alive on the international scene in 2000, a deeper look into the films of Takashi Miike reveals a plethora of unique themes hitching a ride in the vehicle of genre cinema. Childhood and Themes The appearance of Miike on the international circuit has people scratching their heads, wondering what kind of person could create something so wild. As Patrick Macias writes in his book Tokyoscope, “One often feels while watching a Miike movie that a) there are no rules and b) the person in charge must be a total and complete maniac.”1 Deeper examination reveals Miike’s influences, both cinematic and (more importantly) experiences from his childhood and young adulthood which shaped his themes later on. Miike was born in 1960, not far from Osaka, Japan. During World War II, his grandparents lived in China and Korea. After the war, they returned to Japan. “The Japanese, even if we live in Japan, we are all drifting,” Miike says, “Especially me. My family is originally from Kumamoto in South Kyushu When Japan was defeated in World War II, my grandmother was in Korea. When she came back, she went to live in another town in Japan… I’ve always felt that I’m drifting, that I don’t have a home town that I can go back to.”2 This “drifting” would go on to play a major part in many of Miike’s films. Tom Mes, the author of the Miike study Agitator contends that nearly all of the 49 films he had done up to the point the book was published feature one or more rootless individuals, who “float between two elements, feeling rootless, part of neither one nor the other.”3 Mes also expands upon this contention, stating many possible rootless categories: cultural or ethnic, geographical, genealogical, physiological, or mental. Often a film or single character will display more than one of these forms of rootlessness. Miike’s hometown, Yao, was “far removed from any form of culture.”3 For this reason, Miike spent most of his childhood years close to his family members. This influenced another of Miike’s pervasive themes, that of family. Whether related by blood, interest, or circumstance, Miike’s characters tend to form family units. Often, the downfall of his characters stem from the family unit collapsing. The loss of a single member will often cripple and destroy the unit. However, many of Miike’s families begin in shambles, and work their way back together. As Miike approached adolescence, his interests turned toward motorcycle maintenance and racing. Fatal accidents were prone to happen. “You would be talking cheerfully to one of your friends before a race and several minutes later he would be dead,” Miike explains.3 This frequent loss of life, which Miike happened to witness as he went from childhood to adolescence shaped another significant theme inherent in Miike’s films: the link between childhood (or innocence) and invulnerability, and vice versa. Many of Miike’s films portray childhood as an invulnerable period of time. This invulnerability quickly dissolves as characters lose either their childhood or their innocence, often with immediately fatal results. Dead Or Alive Dead or Alive was a dream come true for V-Cinema fans before they saw a frame of footage. It was the first film to pair Riki Takeuchi and Show Aikawa, the “Big 2” of V-Cinema. With dozens of gritty yakuza films and legions of fans under their belts, Takeuchi and Aikawa shared (and continue to share) a larger than life persona (“Riki is the one who looks like a Japanese Animation character,” Miike giggles at one point during an interview.)4 Suffice to say, fans had been waiting for the Big 2 to battle onscreen. Dead or Alive also shares the distinction of being as representative of the whole body of Miike’s work as possible for a director with 60+ films. This is due largely to the fact that Miike had an immense amount of freedom to create this film however he wanted: “The video would sell well enough to recoup the budget, due to the fact alone that [Takeuchi and Aikawa] co-starred… Without these two V-Cinema stars, I wouldn’t have been able to go for such extremes.”4 Chock full of signature Miike themes and style, Dead or Alive is the perfect starting point. “1. 2. 3. 4!” DoA begins with a solitary long shot on a pier. It opens with a faux reel of film starting up, then we see Takeuchi and Aikawa squat near the water like children (in suits) and Aikawa mumbles, in English, “One.” Takeuchi responds, “Two.” They then count off to four together and like a song by the Ramones, the movie blasts into high gear. Besides being incredibly stylish (as most if not all of the shots in DoA end up being), this opening is important for two reasons. First, it is a knowing nod those who came to see the rivalry between Takeuchi and Aikawa played out. Although the audience won’t realize it until further into the movie, Jojima (Aikawa) and Ryuichi (Takeuchi) never share this moment, or anything like it, and it has no pertinence on the plot whatsoever. Therefore, it can be easily interpreted as a sort of pre-bout meeting between our two stars. Secondly, the off-kilter way the shot is framed and the way two grown men in suits squat by a body of water prepares us to enter the wild world of Takashi Miike. And what a wild world it is. The first seven minutes of Dead or Alive speed by like a bullet, an overwhelming montage of chaotically photographed and speedily edited shots, with five different storylines told almost entirely without dialogue. DoA’s opening is impressive on a purely technical level, but also on a narrative one. Tom Mes defines the three major functions of the montage: to set tone and atmosphere, to establish characters, and to condense narrative. In the original screenplay, each of the five stories told in these seven minutes were entire scenes, complete with dialogue. Here, no shot is superfluous. We learn that a) members of the Chinese Triads and local yakuza are being assassinated; b) Jojima, Show Aikawa’s character, is a police officer investigating these crimes; c) the assassinations are all being pulled off by a group led by Ryuichi, Riki Takeuchi’s character. We also “meet” most of the significant characters in the film; all of Ryuichi’s gang, plus Jojima and the big bosses of the local yakuza. Clearly, the furious montage is far more than an exercise in extremes. From here, the film slows down immensely, as if Miike had a limit on the amount of cuts he was allowed to make to the film, and chose to spend the large majority on the opening. This slowdown irked many who came to DoA looking only for ultra violence, but Miike’s deliberate use of very long scenes that directly contrast his introduction serve to give his audience a feeling of disillusionment similar to that his characters feel. Not surprisingly, then, Miike’s signature themes show themselves immediately following the opening scene. As Ryuichi’s younger brother returns home from his studies in the U.S., he visits his mother’s grave, where he speaks to her in broken, slow Chinese from a sheet of paper. Ryuichi and his gang are established as zanryu koji: “war orphans” whose parents returned to Japan from China following the war, much like Miike’s own grandparents. These characters feel the same “drifting” Miike feels; as one character states later in the film, “[we are] like Japanese but not Japanese, like Chinese but not Chinese." Ryuichi’s band of rootless individuals feel no loyalty to Japan, and therefore have no problem with trying to take over the local drug trade. The broken, slurred Chinese Ryuichi’s brother speaks enhances this cultural divide: he feels no connection to Japan, but at the same time, has little knowledge of Chinese. The family motif is also established here. On one hand of the Miike spectrum, we see Ryuichi’s gang celebrating the return of Ryuichi’s kid brother, prancing happily around the graveyard where Ryuichi’s mother is buried. On the other side of the spectrum, we cut to Jojima’s household, where it’s established he is a workaholic who doesn’t pay enough attention to his family. Furthermore, his teenage daughter constantly insults him, and it’s later revealed his wife is having an affair. Again, Dead or Alive exemplifies Miike’s family themes. His happy family (Ryuichi’s gang) goes to shambles after the death of one single member, while Jojima’s family works toward finding happiness with each other. Several stylistic measures enhance both the rootless and family themes throughout the film. For instance, in several scenes where Jojima speaks to zanryu koji or Chinese immigrants, the camera is fixed and far away from the action, as opposed to when he speaks to his Japanese peers, in which the camera is closer to the action, and cuts back and forth between the characters. Framing the outsiders far away and not cutting for long periods of time furthers the feeling of rootlessness; they are literally farther from the audience. Similarly, when Ryuichi kills a member of his gang for disobeying orders, a very wide shot is used. Again, this wide shot is used when Ryuichi and his brother have a disagreement, splitting the family unit further apart. In both cases, it’s used to display the widening gap between the family. Near the end of the film, Ryuichi’s family has practically fallen apart. Furthermore, Jojima and Ryuichi are squarely pitted against each other. Ryuichi, the new top yakuza in the city, is foiled several times by Jojima, who makes a personal effort to stop all Ryuichi’s drug shipments. Finally, as Jojima’s family is finally reaching happiness, Ryuichi plants a bomb in Jojima’s car, which incinerates his wife and daughter. As both men have nothing to lose, they prepare to fight to the death. But the characters Jojima and Ryuichi end here. Miike has nothing left to say in terms of theme, so in the final scene, he returns to the fantastic rivalry between V-Cinema stars Riki Takeuchi and Show Aikawa. The fact that he is finished with the characters they have been playing is clear when Takeuchi makes the remark, “this is the last scene.” In a wild change from the original screenplay, Takeuchi and Aikawa riddle each other with holes, then throw down their empty guns, then Aikawa pulls out a bazooka from out of nowhere, while Takeuchi reaches inside his own chest and finds some kind of energy orb. They simultaneously fire at each other, as the film cuts to a wide shot of the world, where we see the entire eastern hemisphere engulfed in a massive explosion. The immense star power of Show Aikawa and Riki Takeuchi is revealed: their rivalry is powerful enough to destroy the planet. Dead or Alive 2 In his prolific career, Miike has only done a handful of sequels. In fact, his stance on sequels in general is another sign he has a grander vision than the bottom line. Miike bluntly states, “Generally I think making a sequel is an insult to the original film, because the producers think we can make something better than the first film for less money… A sequel project is always based on negative thinking.”2 Why, then, a sequel to Dead or Alive? Turns out Dead or Alive 2 (2000) is a sequel in name only. Besides reuniting Takashi Miike, Sho Aikawa and Riki Takeuchi, Dead or Alive 2 is a radically different film from its predecessor. Or is it? Despite different characters, settings, and stylistic features, Miike’s childhood and rootless themes persist… DoA2’s first shot is that of earth from space, a shot that serves a dual purpose (not unlike the first shot of Dead or Alive). First, it is a sly nod to the last shot of DoA, where the earth was overtaken in a massive explosion. Second, the lack of any huge craters or debris signifies this film takes place in an alternate universe from the first movie. This simultaneous reference and reversal of expectation comes back a few times throughout the film. Thankfully, Dead or Alive 2 works on more levels than this, and doesn’t need to feed off the original film to hold up. This time around, Aikawa plays Mizuki, an assassin with bleached hair who dresses in bright Hawaiian clothes. In the first scene of the film, he’s hired by a flamboyant magician for an assassination, who yells at him, “You’re not a kid anymore, jerk! Get some new clothes!” This is important to the central theme of Dead or Alive 2: childhood/innocence/invulnerability versus adulthood/guilt/vulnerability. When Mizuki is about to pull the trigger on this assassination job, another gunman shoots his target; specifically, a gunman named Shu, played by Riki Takeuchi. When the two assassins finally meet face to face, a tension largely built from the ashes of Dead or Alive emerges, but our expectations are blown away when we learn Mizuki and Shu are childhood friends, brought up together in an orphanage. Though not the pervasive theme, one classic Miike theme emerges at this point: rootlessness. In Dead or Alive, Ryuichi’s gang had no ethnic roots; they were neither Chinese nor Japanese. Here, Mizuki and Shu lack parents, arguably the strongest form of rootlessness imaginable. Miike stylistically approaches rootlessness in a very interesting way in this film. At pivotal moments in the story, simple block letters on a black background flash onto the screen: “Where are you?” Without true roots, Shu and Mizuki don’t know where they are in life, drifting from job to job. Shu and Mizuki make their way back to the only roots they have: the island on which their orphanage existed and continues to exist. Here they meet their childhood friend Kohei, and lapse into playing around like kids, remembering better times. To see two men who were dedicated to destroying each other in the last film play dodgeball is surreal, to say the least. As stated before, the main theme of Dead or Alive 2 is one explored (to a far lesser extent) in Dead or Alive: childhood versus adulthood, and all the baggage associated with these two terms. Both main characters (especially Mizuki – more on this later) feel an intense nostalgia for their days in the orphanage, and with each other. “As kids we used to love this,” Mizuki remarks while riding the boat to the island. Nostalgia is pervasive, and controls most of Mizuki and Shu’s actions while they are on the island. In one expertly edited scene, Shu and Mizuki put on a play for the kids at the orphanage; the setting is a room full of children, with Shu and Mizuki acting like kids themselves. Simultaneously, back on the mainland a gang war between the Triads and Yakuza which has reached full force. Miike cuts back and forth between bouts of extreme violence and extreme immaturity (Shu and Mizuki even include phallic humor in their skit, inciting giggles from the audience). As several dozen gangsters die in brutal ways, the film cuts without hesitation to children clapping and laughing, as if they were happy about the deaths going on in mainland Japan, happily safe on the island. On a thematic level, this scene serves to equate childhood/innocence with invulnerability and adulthood/corruption (who better to represent lack of innocence than gang members) and vulnerability. When Shu and Mizuki return to mainland Japan, they hatch a plan to use all the money they receive from assassinations to buy vaccinations for children in Africa. The naïveté of their plan rings of childhood innocence. This is emphasized stylistically when Shu and Mizuki go on various assassination jobs and literally become childhood versions of themselves (previously seen in flashbacks). This change to childhood form also emphasizes their invulnerability on these assassination missions: never once are they in any danger themselves. After several successful assassinations, Mizuki finally learns of the sickness that has been plaguing Shu the entire film: he violently hacks up blood, making clear in his dialogue he will soon die. Here, the childhood versions of Shu and Mizuki cease to appear because they are finally faced with an adult problem, a lack of invulnerability. Quickly thereafter, they are overtaken by a group of rival assassins, who quite literally become child versions of themselves during the gunfight. Seeing this transformation, Mizuki is unable to fire, but Shu does, killing all three. Shu is able to fire because he has been dealing with vulnerability through his disease the entire film, while Mizuki has been purely wrapped in childhood. Dead or Alive 2, despite the themes of childhood and occasional phallic humor, could be considered a more mature work in many respects to its predecessor. DoA2 allows Riki and Show only one brief moment of out-of-character star power: after they’ve been shot multiple times, they casually stroll through the streets, talking to old ladies and taking photos for tourists, all while covered in blood. Call it a very reasonable and enjoyable indulgence for an otherwise thought-provoking and excellent piece of pulp cinema. Dead or Alive: Final Dead or Alive Final’s trailer describes Dead or Alive as “Destruction” and Dead or Alive 2 as “Rebirth.” Dead or Alive: Final is described among a tornado of old Chinese film clips as simply that: “Final.” Taking numerous cues from other films, namely Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Blade Runner, as well as featuring actual strips of film as a major motif, Final stands among the Dead or Alive trilogy as the most cinematic, allowing Takeuchi and Aikawa to largely roam free of character or plot development and live their larger-than-life personalities on-screen. For this reason, it could be argued Final is the least mature work in the trilogy, abandoning the character driven structure of DoA2 in favor of the Riki-and-Show moments of the original Dead or Alive. The heavy cinematic influence on Dead or Alive: Final is very interesting coming from Takashi Miike, a director praised for being uniquely original and out of left field, who admits to having few film idols aside from Bruce Lee. Perhaps the heavy borrowing from cyberpunk films was largely the idea of the screenwriters. However, Ichiro Ryu, the main writer of Final, previously worked with Miike on Ley Lines, the first Dead or Alive, and City of Lost Souls, none of which show major signs of cinephileia. In any case, any chance to explore influences on Miike’s work should not be passed up. The most obvious influence on Dead or Alive: Final is the classic sci-fi film Blade Runner. Blade Runner was the seminal work of “future noir,” in which Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former cop brought out of retirement prowls a gritty, dirty, futuristic Los Angeles in search of Replicants, illegal androids who look exactly like humans but have superhuman strength and abilities. Dead or Alive: Final apes many of Blade Runner’s best attributes, both from a visual/aural and thematic perspective. Apparent from frame one is an attempt to bring a similar dirty, dystopic feel to Final’s 2346 as was felt in Blade Runner’s 2019 (in fact, a giant blimp almost exactly like that in Blade Runner passes by the camera proudly displaying the words “DoA Final,” a knowing wink to BR fans). Obviously, Ridley Scott had a bit more money to work with than Takashi Miike, so the methods differ slightly. Final was shot entirely on digital video, to which cinematographer Kazunari Tanaka applied a sickly looking yellow filter, making the air seem full of smog and dust (a similar effect was used in Soylent Green, speaking of influences). Final has further markings of a low budget dystopia: cardboard boxes are strewn everywhere, graffiti lines every wall, characters wear various levels of subversive clothing, and Riki Takeuchi dons the obligatory trenchcoat. Dead or Alive: Final owes to Blade Runner in terms of soundtrack as well. Koji Endo combines eerie synthesized sounds with a wailing saxophone, not unlike Vangelis’s “Blade Runner Blues” from the BR soundtrack. Also, Miike’s cast speaks an amalgamation of languages; namely Japanese, Cantonese, and English, mirroring Blade Runner’s Cityspeak, a “mishmash of languages,” consisting of “genuine Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Hungarian, and Japanese.”5 Finally, Blade Runner touches Dead or Alive: Final on a plot and thematic level. In this incarnation, Show Aikawa plays an android left over from some long-forgotten war, referred to as a Replicant. In Blade Runner, “replicant” was used as opposed to “android” because of the preconceptions “android” would conjure in people’s minds. In Final, “replicant” is used specifically to remind viewers of BR. By the end of the film, Aikawa’s robotic character finds himself pondering the meaning of his existence and even falling in love, much like the replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in Blade Runner. One final Blade Runner comparison: according to Ridley Scott (but not, it should be noted, with the agreement of Harrison Ford and many BR crew members) Rick Deckard, Ford’s hardboiled replicant killer, was in reality a replicant himself. Near the finale of Dead or Alive: Final, Riki Takeuchi’s character goes home to find his wife literally malfunctioning, writhing on the ground in a fashion not unlike Daryl Hannah’s replicant character in BR. Turns out Riki himself is also a replicant. Furious, he goes to kill his creator, but is unable to carry out the deed due to his programming. This scene itself is more reminiscent of the climax of Robocop, a film Miike incidentally parodied in Full Metal Yakuza years before. Perhaps Miike accepted this full-blown homage to Blade Runner because many of its themes and his actually coincide. Miike’s concern with rootlessness is fully apparent in Blade Runner: its mishmash of languages and cultures paint a world in which no one has roots. Furthermore, Blade Runner’s replicants have no memories beyond their four year life spans, another significant lack of roots. Their quest on Earth, in fact, is simply to gain longer lives, with which to perhaps establish personalities, memories, and roots of their own. Blade Runner also speaks to Miike’s family themes. In a pattern similar to Dead or Alive’s families, Blade Runner’s band of replicants is slowly pulled apart by death once they split up and Leon (Bryon James) attempts to take out Deckard alone. At the same time, Deckard forms a family unit with replicant Rachael (Sean Young) and survives. If any part of Dead or Alive: Final is 100 percent Miike, it is (as it should be) the final scene. Possibly more over-the-top than the finale of Dead or Alive, Final ends with the ultimate battle between Takeuchi and Aikawa, in which they remember their previous incarnations with flashbacks to the first two films, then expel so much rage and power they somehow meld into one single being, a very phallic robot named “D O A 2001 Model” which blasts into space. A totally bizarre, somehow fitting end to the showdown between the Big 2: they become the Huge 1. Quotes 1Macias, Patrick. Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion. San Francisco: Candence Books, 2001. 2”Takashi Miike Interview.” Midnight Eye: The Latest and Best in Japanese Cinema. 05.01.2001. http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/takashi_miike.shtml. 3Mes, Tom. Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike. England, U.K.: FAB Press, 2003. 4Dead or Alive. Dir. Takashi Miike. 1999. DVD. Kino Video/Viz, 2001. (Supplemental material). 5Sammon, Paul M. Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Full Bibliography Macias, Patrick. Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion. San Francisco: Candence Books, 2001. ”Takashi Miike Interview.” Midnight Eye: The Latest and Best in Japanese Cinema. 05.01.2001. http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/takashi_miike.shtml. Mes, Tom. Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike. England, U.K.: FAB Press, 2003. Dead or Alive. Dir. Takashi Miike. 1999. DVD. Kino Video/Viz, 2002. Dead or Alive 2. Dir. Takashi Miike. 2000. DVD. Kino Video, 2003. Dead or Alive: Final. Dir. Takashi Miike. 2002. DVD. Kino Video, 2003. Audition. Dir. Takashi Miike. 1999. DVD. American Cinematheque/Chimera, 2002. Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. 1982. DVD. Warner Brothers, 1997. Sammon, Paul M. Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Mes, Tom. “…Or Something Else Entirely: Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive Trilogy.” Dead or Alive 2 DVD Insert. Kino Video. 2003.