Asami Yamazaki

When a lonely middle-aged film producer, Shigeharu Aoyama, decides to audition potential wives under the guise of casting a new movie, he gets more than he bargained for in Takashi Miike's ground-breaking horror flick, AUDITION.

Before the auditions are held, Aoyama picks out the resume of Asami Yamazaki as his favourite. Of all the demure young girls smiling prettily for the camera, Asami is the one he likes best. Aoyama's confederate warns him that there is something not right about the girl, but after the auditions are held he maintains that she is the one for him. And he seems to be right.

Romance blooms between Aoyama and Asami, but the girl has a dark past and when she finds out that the Aoyama's auditions were a pretext to meet girls she not only takes it badly, she decides to wreak bloody vengeance upon him.

It's not the setup of this classic horror story that is remarkable, it's the execution at the hands of Miike and the actress Eihi Shiina. Miike discards most of the techniques of the slasher genre: there are no jumpcuts, no mysterious shadows, no claustrophobic tracking shots. Miike's camera (in this film) is very still, every shot is lovingly-lit and in-focus. He builds a terrifying atmosphere out of all of that stillness, silence and light. (Textbook example is the burlap sack in Asami's apartment. The sack lies in the foreground by the telephone for a long interval while nothing occurs. Then the phone rings and the sack lurches and screams--there's a man in it. Neither Asami nor Miike's camera react.)

The film is also remarkable for its sudden divergence into David Lynch-style surrealism. Once we understand a little about Asami's dark past the film cuts into a sequence of flashbacks and do-overs in which her past is revised in different ways, as is her relationship with Shigeharu. Is it a dream sequence? Who is the dreamer? There are any number of compelling reasons that Asami could have become what she did. She is somehow able to insinuate her story into the lives of her victims; actually winding her different versions of her own backstory into theirs; rewriting scenes that we have already seen, but always leading to the same conclusion. There is no escaping Asami Yamazaki.

J-Horror is not unique in popular culture say that it relishes the destruction of young girls. This is a staple of fiction in many other genres:suspense, thrillers, crime, mystery and even superhero narratives are filled to overflowing with abused girls, and AUDITION plays right into that. The varying levels of abuse Asami may or may not have suffered in the past have caused her to become this monster, but this film presents those scenarios with the same clear-eyed impassivity that it does every other sequence, rather than fetishizing it in the way of 'torture porn'. AUDITION is far more interested in the vengeance that Asami wreaks upon her (mostly male) victims than in what was done to her. With her ambiguous backstory, Asami can in many ways be seen to represent the vengeful spirit of all of those girls degraded and butchered in decades worth of cheap movies. Aoyama, the protagonist, is presented as pathetic and helpless in this film in a way that Asami never is.

That said, Miike denies that his films have 'messages' and I think it's important to take that into consideration: he is not necessarily criticizing those other movies.

But if all that isn't enough to convince you that Asami Yamazaki is a great villain, the final scene certainly will. Watching her chanting as she works on Aoyama with the wire saw is perhaps the squirmiest scene committed to celluloid. If you haven't seen the film, see it. If you have, I have only one thing left to say to you:

IKI IKI IKI

-- JF

BOB

Established in suburbia as only Twin Peaks creator David Lynch could, through the close up screams of a grieving housewife and mother, and a static shot of staircase and swirling fan, Lynch cuts into dead prom queen Laura Palmer’s perfect all American bedroom. Once inside, the first glimpse of BOB is visible as seen in the mothers’ vision. He is the quintessential demon and/or drifter serial killer. Grinning, unshaven, clad in dirty denim, and with long flowing wolflike silver hair, BOB peers through the bars of the dead girls bed. The deep symbolism of this introductory shot, being ‘trapped’ in the mirror and enjoying a voyeuristic view through the bars of the teenager’s bed, became intrinsic and central to what was to be later revealed about BOB.

Psychotic strobe visions, deep red dreams and childhood memories seemed to be the only places that BOB could be found, whilst back on the physical plane his presence was dismissed for lack of real evidence. That was until the appearance of a one armed traveling shoe salesman named MIKE.

Peddling his ‘Circle Brand’ boots to the town, the smiling salesman at first seemed like simply a humorous homage to the villain in the old television serial, The Fugitive. Once again, Lynch used this to lower the audience’s guard, and make MIKE a terrifying gateway to learn more about BOB.

Without his mix of schizophrenic depressing drugs, MIKE sweats out the story that he is an ageless evil spirit who had an golden epiphany, finding the light of God. Unfortunately his former partner and familiar, BOB, did not experience it. MIKE also revealed that he was inhabiting the body of the salesman to find his old killin’ partner from the road, and stop him.

Lynch’s use of a familiar as the supernatural villain is an unique one. Many websites and fan literature describe BOB as a demonic entity possessing the physical murderer of Laura, her secretly abusive father, Leland. Some elements of the show do support this theory, see BOB’s confession in the police station basement. With shadows of classic demonic exorcism evidence, the usual flailing against the restraints, total possession of the host, playful teasing of the ‘exorcists’ that turns to unholy taunting, violence, and knowledge of evil events that it was not witness too, the show does present a case for demonic possession. But overall, Lynch and co present BOB as a familiar, an animal that aids with the tasks of the witch or the unholy. In this case the animal is an owl. However, unlike demonic possession, followers of the Catholic Church believe that a spiritual familiar is capable of overtaking the personality rather than the body of its host. This is supported by Leland’s ability to quite capably function and maintain his well groomed appearance as both a lawyer and pillar within society whilst possessed by BOB, until it takes over his will for short periods of madness.

After forty years of symbiosis, BOB eventually bloodily escapes the confines of Leland when he has had his fill of the man’s life and soul. In Leland’s final moments on earth, the show’s protagonists learn that BOB first appeared to Leland whilst he was staying at his childhood holiday home in the woods. This could be interpreted as either a metaphor, or literal account of, abuse, or simply that the spirit had found a new home. In his last act to decimate the soul of the man, BOB unloads all of the evil events that he has made Leland commit, and repress, into his mind. Again, whether this is a metaphor for the last act of conscience a dying man faces for a lifetime of sins, or a literal act, the evil nature of BOB managed to have one last slice of fun before breaking free and temporarily returning back to his wooded home. Soon, he finds another host with which to start the cycle again…

In the aftermath of the horrific events, as the witnesses to BOB’s ‘appearance’ discuss what has transpired, some find it too unbelievable to stomach. Cynical FBI man Albert Rosenfeld, taking the stance of both science and government, believes that whether he really existed or not that BOB may have just been a physical culmination of the evil within the world? This question is one that Lynch presents to the audience throughout the show. One which he only ambiguously answers.

Lynch attributes the casting of BOB to a ‘happy accident’, that set dresser Frank Silva was simply captured in shot whilst the bedroom was being filmed. Unfortunately, Silva died in 1995 due to AIDS. Besides working as a set designer on many Lynch productions, his only other non-Twin Peaks acting role was in the Anthrax video, Only. An appropriate final rockin’ appearance for the spirit of small town evil.