When he’s not acting as pure imagemaker, Mamoru Oshii is, before anything else, a worldbuilder. One of Japan’s premier multimedia genre auteurs, his “worldview, story, characters” creative philosophy has led to the construction of visionary alternate worlds—prospective futures, alternate pasts, and fully alien dreamscapes—that he often feels compelled to return to with the passage of time. Less iconic but more prolific than the cyberpunk futures of Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor, and Avalon—each of which he has revisited once or twice for sequels and spinoffs expanding the storylines and philosophical conundrums of their respective settings—is the beguiling “Kerberos saga,” an alt-history project spanning multiple decades of films, novels, radio dramas, and manga.
The core premise of “Kerberos”—carefully hidden in background details and supplemental materials—is a cheeky bit of speculative historical materialism: a proposal that, in an alternate timeline where Germany defeated Japan in World War II, the rest of Japan’s 20th century would not have looked all that different. Nuked, occupied, Westernized, and forcibly inducted into a moderately more authoritarian version of global capitalism, this Japan answers the surge of urban crime and radical resistance brought about by its new way of life in the most genre-friendly way possible: by establishing an elite unit of militarized, mechanically-powered supercops to sort out the streets of Tokyo with an iron fist. The fiercest and most dedicated warriors in Japan, these “wolves” are said to “love justice” and “hate evil” so much that they come to blows both with more bureaucratic-minded government agencies and the general public, typically for their habit of obliterating public property and performing extrajudicial executions in the name of law and order. And these are the “heroes” of the saga.
The “Kerberos Panzer Cops” rock out the most iconic sets of fascist-themed power armor since Darth Vader: rounded, jet-black metal plates with rivet-like spikes on the chests and shoulders, belt-fed light machine guns carried by hand and fired from the hip, miniature riot shields fixed to the arms, Nazi stahlhelm headgear set above gas masks with crimson-red, glowing electric eyes. The demonic yet irresistibly cool visage of the Kerberos cop almost singlehandedly carries the enduring cult status of the franchise’s most popular and only animated entry, the 1999 film Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade—directed by Hiroyuki Okiura, based on a screenplay by Oshii—a bleak, violent political thriller in the mold of Oshii’s ’90s hits that pushes the aesthetics of gritty realism about as far as traditional hand-drawn anime has ever taken them.
The Red Spectacles—the genesis of the Kerberos saga and Mamoru Oshii’s 1987 live-action debut—will be recognizable to Jin-Roh fans for about ten minutes. The film introduces itself in a flurry of expository intertitles and trigger-happy action played so self-seriously straight on its visibly limited budget as to border on camp: in the 1990s, the Japanese government turns on the Kerberos cops over a scandal resulting from their murder of a civilian guilty of misdemeanor. Kerberos, refusing to disarm—they love justice too much!—ends up staging a failed rebellion against their own government. Its three most elite members—Koichi Todome (Shigeru Chiba), Midori Washio (Machiko Washio), and Soichiro Toribe (Hideyuki Tanaka)—make their last stand at an abandoned warehouse near Tokyo Bay, with Koichi eventually leaving his two wounded comrades, at their insistence, to escape in an evac chopper with the last Kerberos “protect gear” armor suit. He promises to one day return to them and see true justice done.
From this straightforward prologue the film performs one of the most bizarre bait-and-switch maneuvers of all-time, completely shifting form from straight-arrow genre thriller to surrealist, Brechtian satire so glib and obtuse it makes Oshii’s previous feature—the cryptic, delicate Angel’s Egg—look like Disney fare.
When Koichi returns to Tokyo with a mysterious suitcase in hand, things are not as he remembers them. For one thing, film stock has changed from vivid color to stark monochrome; he instantly finds himself out of his depth amid cold, blocky, textureless architecture and eerily silent, empty streets in a seemingly endless night. On posters, billboards, and movie screens, the face of a mysterious woman (Mako Hyodo, voice of the heroine in Angel’s Egg) stares out at Koichi inquisitively and accusingly à la Big Brother. Shot in tight corners, rigidly angular asymmetric framings, and flat, undisguised soundstage interiors, The Red Spectacles is the typically panoramic Oshii’s most claustrophobic film by a city mile.
The discovery of other human beings does not make this nightmare Tokyo more welcoming. In search of missing comrades, Koichi rendezvouses with a mysterious cab driver who prefers quoting Shakespeare to speaking straightforwardly, and discovers, to his anguish, that the government has outlawed fast-food soba restaurants as “threats to public order.” Wandering through the streets wearing shades in the dark, passing through hotels, movie theaters, soba speakeasies, and public restrooms with live goldfish in the urinals, Koichi is stalked by pudgy, smirking G-man Bunmei Murota (Tessyo Genda) and beset by squads of mime-like government goons who look (and meow) like they just walked out of an audition for Cats. When they attack, the film swerves into cartoonish slapstick violence, Shigeru Chiba’s decidedly un-buff figure pummeling extras with over-the-top anime moves in continuity-breaking shots on a darkened stage. Chase scenes are filmed with actors running in place; action beats are periodically interrupted by beer and mambo breaks for the characters.
As Koichi reunites with one former friend after another—now defeated, domesticated, and depressed, subsisting in run-down living spaces on crappy consumer goods—the villains repeatedly capture him by slipping laxatives in his noodles, with a wailing jazz-sax “diarrhea” leitmotif flaring up on the score each time. After receiving a beating and a lecture from Bunmei—usually in the form of a cryptic literary quotation or parable, a jarring nonsequitur, or a rant about moral relativism and the inevitability of authoritarian control—Koichi inevitably busts out again, usually by nonsensical means, and goes back on the run. With each recycled beat as Koichi and The Red Spectacles stumble blindly along, the logic of narrative, spatial representation, and even the physical composition of the sets seems to degrade with Koichi’s sanity.
If the dreamlike animated world of Angel’s Egg is Oshii’s graceful, minimalist, spiritually probing vision of the apocalypse, the godless dystopia of Red Spectacles is crass and manic to a fault. Among the most conspicuous stylistic tics is its bizarre transposition of ’80s anime aesthetics into live-action cinema. Though it’s not coy about inspirations from New Wave absurdist noir films—most obviously Godard’s Alphaville with its irony-poisoned retrofuture and celebrations of nonsense and obscurity, and Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill in its comical deconstruction of the macho genre hero—The Red Spectacles is equally drawn from Oshii’s anime work, and represents a distinct, discombobulating bridging of his early and later styles. Most of the cast are voice actors from Urusei Yatsura with few other live-action credits—the film itself is effectively a darker, more mean-spirited riff on Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer—and Oshii directs them as if they’re performing anime in real life: throaty, melodramatic line readings, often ADR’d alongside cartoon sound effects; flamboyant expressions, poses, and reaction shots frequently held in total stillness while only background elements or the camera itself move horizontally in a shot. Sometimes Oshii even slides actors’ bodies around the frame like cutouts, using the unnatural cartoon movement as a weird-out gag. (It should go without saying for anyone familiar with Oshii, but his compositional sense at least is impeccable and translates to beautiful semi-still images, however alienating the effect.)
Shigeru Chiba doesn’t exactly have the build of a cyborg supercop, but he does prove a comic actor of remarkable physical control, commanding the screen with precise and practiced movements even while playing a chaotic, hotheaded character. The style never really gets less jarring, though, and the “comedy” is more concerned with evoking hostile absurdity than genuine laughs. Much like the jagged editing, arrhythmic gags, cheap sets and props, and budget-friendly action sequences, it’s impossible to tell what’s a purposeful distancing technique or an awkward byproduct of limited resources and Oshii’s inexperience in the medium. Given the type of film this is, that may be a distinction sans difference.
It’s never entirely clear how many layers of irony The Red Spectacles is operating under at any given moment while swinging from one jarring stylistic disruption, wild tonal shift, and nonsensical happening to the next—like Angel’s Egg, some scenes and symbolic associations seem to be nestled so deep in Oshii’s subconscious as to be inaccessible to others. Unlike Angel’s Egg and its earnest solemnity, the prevailing mood of Red Spectacles is rancid contempt: for its clueless, reactionary protagonist who imagines himself a noble warrior only to be revealed as an ineffectual coward, and for the society he inhabits, a not-so-subtle allegory for our own world’s radically restructured postwar Japan, where bureaucrats and capitalists have definitively replaced warriors as the controlling hands of the nation. (Contempt for the audience may be a factor as well: this was Oshii’s first major project after attempts to pour his heart out in Angel’s Egg yielded nigh-career-ending commercial disaster.)
The Red Spectacles makes much of the Kerberos cops as Japan’s last “hounds” in a society overtaken by “cats”: Koichi’s briefcase is tagged with the image of a dog while his colorless Japan is awash in cat motifs, from the grungy, cramped apartments and empty storefronts to the cheap, flavorless canned beer and cup noodle brands. (Even its people are catlike, with hunched, slinking movements and smug Cheshire grins.) Characters remark how the new Tokyo, since it banished its dogs, is a “rotten town” filled with “rotten people”; they debate whether “the town rots because of the rotten people or the people rot because of the town.” Oshii, the nominal ex-Marxist, seems to posit an inevitable backslide into fascism so long as capitalism’s contradictions remain unresolved, yet he also seems to reserve a complicated nostalgia for the bourgeois warrior class of the old fascist society, who, if fatally stupid and violent, were at least pure and loyal in their way. Even as he looks down on these human hounds, he portrays their alienation from a cynical postmodern world and betrayal by the state they served semi-sympathetically, and seems to admire their rebellion against modernity in spite of their reactionary motivations. (Mako Hyodo’s crimson-shawled character, portrayed in The Red Spectacles as an ethereal symbol of dreams opposite the crimson-eyed Kerberos, has been evoked in subsequent Oshii projects in association with Japan’s failed communist revolutionary and terror movements—including, in an obscure 2006 short film partially shot in the West Bank, as a baffling fast-food-themed parody of notorious Japanese Red Army and People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine militant Fusako Shigenobu. In my recent interview with Oshii, he told me that he personally rejects all forms of utopian and “millennialist” ideology.)
More than his first live-action film, The Red Spectacles introduced Oshii to two collaborators who would become vital creative muses in decades to come: composer Kenji Kawai and his string-and-synth music, here closer to his propulsive fusion-rock roots than the more haunting and delicate tones that would characterize his later collaborations; and screenwriter Kazunori Ito, who would pull Oshii into the world of hard science fiction, though here (co-credited the director) his more empirical, exposition-heavy proclivities achieve an uneven mixture with Oshii’s early surrealism. Their script—verbose and withholding, expository and allusive—somehow manages to explain too much and nothing at all, particularly in its twist ending.
Yet the film is a noble experiment with an enduring core of diehard fans, even if I’m not one of them—at least enough to fund the new, Oshii-supervised 4K restoration on Kickstarter. The other two films in the Kerberos trilogy—Stray Dog: Kerberos Panzer Cops, a direct prequel to Red Spectacles that is to Tsai Ming-liang as Red Spectacles is to Godard, and the aforementioned Jin-Roh—are well worth seeing for a fuller sense of Oshii’s eclectic vision of this material, and well overdue for high-quality remasters of their own. Likewise Talking Head, Oshii’s third and best live-action film with Shigeru Chiba, the director’s most personal and exhaustive metafictional treatise on filmmaking—albeit without Kerberos suits.
The Red Spectacles is playing at the Metrograph this weekend, adjacent to a program of classic film screenings curated by Oshii as seminal influences on his work—including Alphaville and Branded to Kill.
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