Survive Style 5+ and the Ethics of Creative Advertising

Phillip Lobo (bio)
University of Southern California

Abstract

This paper examines an exemplary piece of Japanese postmodern cinema, Sekiguchi Gen’s Survive Style 5+ (2004), in relation to the ethical quandaries and tensions that emerged around the practice of advertising during the so-called “creative revolution” in Japan. Drawing on the concept of the fetish in Marxist and Freudian discourse, as well as anthropological research and theories of translation, it shows how the film critiques the idea that advertising can act as a universal translator of desire in contemporary consumer capitalism through its use of jokes, style, and celebrity culture.

This paper examines an exemplary piece of Japanese postmodern cinema, Sekiguchi Gen’s Survive Style 5+ (2004), in relation to the ethical quandaries that emerged around the practice of advertising during the so-called “creative revolution” in Japan. The debates in Japan during the 1980s and 90s are paradigmatic of the privileged place that advertising holds in the discourse of postmodernity, both as an object of critique and as a field of new signifying possibilities; in either case, advertising is seen as central to the formation of the subject of global capitalism. The popular and academic conversations in Japan during the creative revolution explicitly enlisted the language and methods of advertising to propose solutions to the problematic of global, postmodern identity, pitting the national myth of a traditional Japanese identity against the reality of Japan’s prominence as a global player in trade and media. As a participant in the larger cinematic conversation about the problem of postmodern identity, Survive Style 5+ is an ideal object of study because it benefits from the director’s experience of the advertising industry during its high-water mark in Japan. Sekiguchi’s film looks critically on the heady hopes of that time, but refuses to retreat into traditionalist nostalgia. It therefore provides a distinctive take on the still open question of the global subject. Drawing on the concept of the fetish in Marxist and Freudian discourse, as well as anthropological research and theories of translation, this essay outlines how Survive Style 5+ demonstrates a central paradox in the ethical tenets behind “creative advertising.” The film critiques the possibility that advertising can serve as a universal translator of desire in contemporary consumer capitalism, a notion that reached its apogee in Japan during the 1980s and 90s. Reflecting on the promises of the economic bubble of that era, but fully cognizant of their disappointment in “post-bubble” Japan, Survive Style 5+ addresses issues of identity that continue to reverberate through the Japanese cultural imaginary. By examining how the film addresses these issues in relation to the complexities and contradictions of contemporary consumerism, it lends broader insights into the role of advertising in the formation of those identities, in the Japanese as well as the wider global context.

I’ve got to write about Sekiguchi Gen’s Survive Style 5+ if only so it might stop haunting me. A hyperkinetic, hyper-saturated piece of postmodern cinematic excess, it has lodged itself in my memory, where it bounces around the interior of my skull, resisting my best efforts to pin it down. I feel myself in the position of the Asano Tadanobu’s wife-killing character, Aman, trying endlessly to put this film to rest, alternately battering, dismembering, or immolating it with various critical weapons only to have it reassemble itself, not unmarked by my scholarly sallies, but rather stronger and more resilient for its scars. Part of my confusion is a product of the film’s own heedless self-celebration; its high postmodern style and its concussively bright pomo-rococo visual design can blind a watcher whose vision isn’t properly polarized. Its form, too, is paradigmatically postmodern, composed of a series interwoven stories that collide and react with one another in a fragmented cascade that makes it difficult to write about, because discussing any single scene implicates many related scenes. But for me, the real sticking point has been and remains the indeterminate foreignness of the film: indeterminate because it isn’t clear where it is simply strange to me because of my paucity of linguistic and cultural context, and where it is actually or – rather – meant to be strange. My perplexity need not be any deeper than the gulf of language, a lack of shared referents and a question of all-important comic timing. How, then, to distinguish what is lost in translation from what is added in translation? What does the film tell us about the task of translation itself and its means of mediation?

This difficulty is most clearly demonstrated in the film by the recurring imaginings of Yoko, a commercial executive played by Koizumi Kyôko.¹ She first appears lying in bed after an astoundingly brief round of intercourse with Aoyama, an odious but successful stage hypnotist played by Abe Hiroshi. Two plastic toys on the bedside table analogize their brief coupling: a pink bunny falls onto its back, spent, while the stick-legged faun it was bumping against continues to shiver, unsatisfied. However inadequate an encounter, it proves inspirational to Yoko, whose creative process manifests as a rapid blinking of her eyes and a dawning smile while a funky leitmotif plays in the background, ending in a compensatorily orgasmic “Oh yeah!” She dresses, gets up, grabs her dictaphone – a complexly embellished object marked with a crowned eye, another ongoing motif – and promptly records an advertisement idea: “A commercial about a man who’s quick in bed. He comes in three seconds.” This idea then plays out on a screen, depicting several men navigating an obstacle course of standard physical challenges, save for the final hurdle: sexual congress with a young woman. The underdog in the earlier challenges, lagging badly behind, is able to orgasm with such speed that he makes up for his lost time and crosses the finish line while his opponents are still thrusting away. Then the tagline: “Mind Blowingly Quick – For Fast Internet Access, Get SPEED!” (“Survive” 00:07:07-09:00). As with all humor, there is only so much accounting for taste and preference. Still, I thought this segment was funny, and Yoko certainly agrees – her snicker sputters in the exact cadence of self-amusement. Repeated viewings before friends and colleagues reinforce, however anecdotally, the sense that this first commercial is meant to be funny, and that its humor (more or less) manages to translate across the gap of cultural uncertainty. What could be more universal than the experience of unsatisfying sex?

But as the film progresses and Yoko experiences more moments of inspiration, her “thought up commercials” require more active translation — for example, a segment in which two muppet-ish felt creatures in business suits pour water into holes on the crowns of their heads. It took some research for me to discover these characters are supposed to be kappa, folkloric water sprites. As with all jokes that require research, it failed to strike me as funny. But it also became impossible for me to discern just how funny the commercial might be to someone who did possess the necessary context. Worse still, I didn’t know if it was meant to be funny, how good of a joke it is, and how funny it should be.² Is Yoko supposed to be making a bad joke? Is the scene funny because the commercial itself is not funny, and that’s the joke?

Sekiguchi Gen’s own background is in advertising – Survive Style 5+is his only feature-length production – and so Yoko is the nearest thing to a self-insert in the film. This context is critical for understanding his contribution to the wider field of Japanese film that addresses the questions and problematics around the formation of individual identities in tension with traditional modes and foreign influences, which arose in the wake of the increasingly global economy and Japan’s turn-of-the-century recession (Iles 1, 23). Sekiguchi participates in a larger conversation taking place in post-war, post-bubble Japanese culture, not least in the field of cinema. The diffuseness of Survive Style 5+’s narrative is predated by at least as two decades in the work of Itami Jūzō, with his “textbook … postmodern filmmaking” (Iles 23) and its visual vibrancy and genre-defying experimentalism is indebted to the work of even earlier filmmakers such as Suzuki Seijun and Nobuhiko Obayashi.³ Yet these same traits and tendencies can just as easily be attributed to Sekiguchi’s time in the advertising industry, which had embraced postmodern methods with self-conscious enthusiasm (Ivy, “Critical” 33). In fact, the entire film is preoccupied with ethical issues that become clear only when viewed through the tensions at play during Japan’s advertising heyday, in the so-called “creative revolution” of the 80s and 90s. Advertising, one of the most prevalent and universal forms of discourse within late-stage capitalist society, is tasked with a wide variety of translational duties that represent genuine ethical stakes within a culture of corporate consumerism. Rather than view the indeterminacy that troubled me as a matter of obfuscation and ignorance, then, it profits us more to treat indeterminacy itself as central to the film: a problematization of a pro-consumer ethic championed by Japan’s “creative” advertising professionals, whereby the dual operation of advertising – making a product both universal in appeal and singular in its recognition – is in constant and irresolvable tension.

In his book Ethnography at Work, anthropologist Brian Moeran outlines a drama that has shaped advertising practice and philosophy. Advertising agencies are effectively split into two branches: accounts and creative. The former court and keep paying accounts – the clients from whom the ad agency receives its commission – while the latter produce the copy, images, and campaigns. Traditionally, account workers had more job security and pay, the rationale being that “those who solicit, obtain and maintain accounts are an agency’s lifeline and therefore in some ways superior to those who do not bring in money” (Moeran 82). Creative workers, on the other hand, are tasked with spending client money, a distinction that – however restrained their budget⁴ – denigrated them by the functional standards of more conservative business practice (82). For watchers of Matt Weiner’s Mad Men, this may sound familiar, and with good reason. The US advertising industry of the 60s – the topic and setting of Weiner’s television program – saw the rise of these allegedly undervalued workers in what has been dubbed the “creative revolution.”⁵ The industry key change headed up by Sterling & Cooper in the fictional program was led in real life by Madison Avenue agency Doyle Dane Berbach.⁶ Both production and product changed as a result, leading to the rejection of traditional managerial practice in favor of individual initiative, and a re-prioritization of account management best exemplified by the era’s legendary creative directors walking out on clients who failed to grant them their due creative freedom, or to recognize their genius (Moeran 83). More fundamental, however, was the change in the perceived ethical obligations of advertising agencies, as well as the role of advertising in defining the symbolic function of commodities. During the era of account supremacy, the wishes of the paying clients were paramount, but the rise of creative saw a new commitment to consumers, even an avowed championing of them. As Moeran outlines:

As advertising came to be seen as an ‘art’, and as creative people came to be regarded as ‘rebels’ against corporate order and general non-conformists, it was homo ludens (the consumer) rather than homo faber (the producer) who became the hero(ine) of the age. Thus were the Puritan values hitherto upheld by manufacturing clients challenged and temporally defeated by a carnivalesque approach to consumption. (85)

In essence, the advertisers come to represent the interests of the people: not a people of workers – labor disappears when the term “producer” is assigned to the owners – but of consumers. In this model of capitalist liberation, the advertisers speak to and for the people against corporatism, forcing the stuffy, square company owners to give the people what they desire, to answer their wants without judgment. The promise of such a utopia is in keeping with the individualism that consumerism holds sacred, the assurance that every person can find, out the vast variety of products at their disposal, the one commodity that can answer their desires.

This promise parallels the second change brought about by the rise of creative advertising, a shift that addressed “perhaps the most basic problem in advertising: how to make products that are very similar to one another seem ‘unique’” (Moeran 83). Advertising’s solution to this problem is to produce “visual and linguistic images that [are] themselves ‘unique’” through the practice of branding, a crucial operation in the consumer economy (83). Branding is no less than an attempt to grant proper name status — what Derrida calls “the reference of a pure signifier to a single being” (105) — upon the advertised commodity, to give it an untranslatable quality that renders it distinct and therefore memorable. And, indeed, the most successful branding projects do approach that grandeur, with brand-names like Band-Aid and Kleenex becoming not merely synonyms for their class of product, but the first term of reference.⁷ As Domzal and Kernan note, “[g]lobal advertising succeeds when it is perceived in semiotically-equivalent ways by multicultural consumer segments,” thus producing “culturally-transcendent meanings of the advertised product or service” (1). That is, a properly advertised product requires no translation or adaptation. It will speak for itself (or rather, the advertising will speak for it) in a manner that overcomes cultural distinctions, a re-imagining of a pre-Babel “pure language” that is, as Walter Benjamin posits, the impossible yet necessary underlying premise that makes the task of translation thinkable (257).

This cultural overcoming is the presumed outcome of globalized media producing a single “global culture”, and the attendant “traditional products, with their localized cultural meanings, by universal products, which have global meanings” (Domzal and Kernan 8). This belief, dubbed “convergence theory,” predicts that variations in culture and politics will eventually “become at most surface markers for different societies in a globalized melting pot, more like regionalized accents than different languages” (Kline 102). Advertising’s place in this coming “homogenization” is privileged as “the ultimate means by which the developing world is integrated into the social framework of the developed West” (Kline 102). To wit, it depends on the victory of cultural imperialism, in which advertising serves both as the herald of a monolithic consumer culture and as its new lingua franca.

The belief that advertising might somehow achieve this lofty goal may strike us as both quixotic and myopic, and not without good reason; this purportedly universal address targets a very specific group of consumers. In reality, the demographic segment that these supposedly “transcendent” advertisements address is a small subset of affluent, media-literate consumers (albeit figured as exemplary of the ascendant postmodern subject, the inevitable outcome of consumer evolution in a global marketplace). But this address, by definition global – and therefore both collective and “transcendent” – must also express the consumer’s individual sense of self, and answer their most personal desires. Indeed, this desire for a personal address is attributed specifically to the “global”, “postmodern” consumer, who wishes to be distinguished by their purchasing behavior and may even use products and commodities as a means of securing a coherent identity distinct from demographic expectations.⁸ Hence the postmodern consumer-subject’s rejection of “traditional bundlings of products in favor of eclectic … assortments which permit the creation of packaged styles to project individualism” (Domzal and Kernan 8). This paradox mirrors the challenge of bestowing unique identities on effectively identical products, and contributes to the peculiar role of advertising within contemporary capitalism: conferring fetish status upon consumer-commodities.

Advertising’s fetish function can be understood both through a postmodern Marxist (by way of Baudrillard) concept of commodity fetishism, as well as the psychoanalytic definition of the fetish.⁹ Both cast commodities as possessed of seemingly-mystical properties that simultaneously indicate and occlude some deeper reality, symptomatic of the contradictions at the heart of the project of globalization. First, as commodities come to be viewed as objects for consumption rather than objects of production, they are invested with “sign-value,” the result of a “transeconomic act” in which consumption converts exchange-value into a signification of wealth (Baudrillard 112–113), so that the commodity represents “both a negation and affirmation” of use-value and exchange-value (Miklitsch 72). That is, the transformation of the commodity into an object of consumption brings to the fore its appearance as “the ‘ideal’ object of production: its ‘image’ (Bild), its ‘want’ (Bedürfnis), its ‘impulse’ (Trieb [also translated as ‘desire’ or ‘drive’]), and its ‘purpose’ (Zweck)” in a manner that aestheticizes the act of consumption itself (Miklitsch 85). The commodity therefore functions foremost not as an object-of-use or exchange, but as a locus of desire for both the postmodern consumer-subject and the engine of production itself, thus falling “simultaneously inside and outside the circuit of capital,” both motive-cause for production and luxurious signifier “beyond the surplus-value imperatives of the capitalist” (Miklitsch 83). This is particularly true of luxury commodities (Baudrillard’s example is the art auction), but can be extended to any commodity that possesses a symbolic excess, granting it that ‘special something’ that makes it worth of consumer attention. Advertising imbues the commodity with its sign value, bestowing the surplus value of meaning within consumer life. Further, the purportedly personal quality of advertising’s address, its targeting of the consumer’s unique selfhood and desire (qualities conflated in the postmodern subject), occludes the fact that the desire (and thus the selfhood of the desirer) is produced by the advertisement in the first place, and that—while both commodity and the desire it provokes and fulfills are meant to seem distinctive and unique—they are anything but, just as the target of the advertisement’s address is not a specific individual but a broadly-defined global demographic. For the production of desire is the other primary task of advertising, and goes hand in hand with its role of bestowing meaning upon the commodity – “why” is always also “why you want.”¹⁰ Advertising is tasked with presenting these desires as at once universal (understood by everyone regardless of cultural context) and particular (meeting individual needs and the need for individuality) while effacing the contradiction between the two, casting the enchantment that renders the consumer-commodity a fetish from the first.

Advertising’s duties are thus quadrupled, forcing it to take on two types of fetishization, each of which also necessarily involves the double task of both effacing and indicating absence. It should come as no surprise, then, that – within postmodernity’s pervasive atmosphere of irony – the joke has become a critical part of advertising. As evidenced by contemporary campaigns – the constantly compounding silliness of GEICO ads, the entertainment arms race of Super Bowl spots – the joke makes the tightrope walk of advertising possible, allowing it to indicate absence without speaking of it outright, flattering the media literacy of the viewer/consumer, inviting them to indulge in the provocation of the advertisement without feeling duped. To “get” a joke is to be on the inside of some understanding, to be part of an elect, the receiver of the wink and the nudge. This feeling is indispensable to bestowing that necessary sense of individuality and exception. However, as indicated earlier, jokes are also one of the most difficult of cultural artifacts to translate, further complicating advertising’s aspirations to the role of the universal language of consumer desire.

Survive Style 5+ takes up the question of advertising’s role in the formation of the consumer-commodity fetish and its relationship to jokes by way of its various interwoven narratives, which must be viewed in the context of Japan’s own advertising industry. The film not only serves as to document the aftermath of the high days of Japan’s own “creative revolution”, in which Sekiguchi Gen participated, but also puts to the test just how “culturally-transcendent” advertisements can be, particularly when undertaking the daunting task of translating humor. Moreover, it provides an alternative to the presumed dominance of American media, and of “American” aesthetics as “global” aesthetics. Indeed, it dramatizes the encounter between these “global” interests and representations of Japanese life and identity, which is produced and produces itself as possessed of a “uniqueness constituted as the particularized obverse of the West” (Ivy, Discourses 2), “an irreducible essence that [is] unchanging and unaffected by history” (Miyoshi and Harootunian xvi). This attributes to Japan a distinct relationship to postmodern globalism and diffuseness, although the tension arises at least as early as Japanese nationalism itself, starting with the forced end of the Tokugawa bakufu’s policy of isolation and the Meiji and Taishō efforts at modernization (Iles 39). However, the problem “acquired added urgency” due to the vicissitudes of consumer culture typified by the “economic strengths of the latter half of the 20^th century, and then the economic hardships of the late 1980s and 1990s” (Iles 30). While not unique to the Japanese context, the self-consciousness of the commitment to “Japaneseness,” exemplified by the genre of Nihonjinron,¹¹ makes the Japanese encounter with “the consumer age” an apt case study of how relational identity “must contend with questions of authenticity, of the brand, of fashion” that arise when self-identity is bound up with “such banal consumer-objects as pre-wrapped gifts from department stores” (Iles 40). Japanese advertising of the 1980s and 90s, and the films that arise around and out of it, provides a testing ground for advertising’s translational powers. This is not least because of the explicit connection established within Japanese cultural discourse between advertising and postmodern communication, in which copywriters and marketing corporations themselves took an active part alongside scholars and public intellectuals (Ivy, “Critical” 33). Released in 2004, a decade after the high-water mark of that discussion, Survive Style 5+ presents its own poignant critique of the hopes pinned on advertising during Sekiguchi’s time in the industry, and points towards a new mode of postmodern survival.

The drama played out on Madison Avenue in the 1960s was restaged in Tokyo’s creative revolution during the 80s, roughly concurrent with the predominance of Japanese products – particularly electronics and automobiles – on the global market, and all the attendant American anxieties about Japan’s economic ascendency (Gordon 292). For all the neo-Orientalist fears of the super-efficient, ultra-conformist zaibatsu, however, Moeran’s account affirms that internal conflict is hardly foreign to Japanese companies, nor can Japanese corporate culture be viewed as entirely foreign. By 1996, when Moeran was staking out his ad agency (Asatsu), he claims that despite social and historical specificities, “the end results of creativity in Japanese and Western advertising industries do not appear to differ that much” (88). While this parallel is productive, we should not overlook the cultural and historical distinctions that mark Japan in the 1980s when this “revolution” was underway. Whatever the cachet enjoyed by American executives during the heady days of Madison Avenue, it never approached the degree of cross-pollination between theorists of postmodernity and the advertisers driving the industry in Japan, or the widespread popularity of such self-reflective texts as Now Is the Meta-Mass Age (Ima, chōtaishū no jidai), published by the trendy marketing company Parco Corporation (Ivy, “Critical” 33). At the time, the conversation about advertising’s central role in postmodern communication was explicit and widely voiced, with an emphasis on how it might be used to change communication in the postmodern milieu. In the rosiest and most radical assessments, this discussion held up the copyrighter (kopi raitaa) as a “cultural hero” who embodied “the creative, playful, and somehow subversive artist” as opposed to the “rigidified corporate and bureaucratic spheres in Japan” (Ivy, “Critical” 38).

This tension in Japanese corporate culture is reflected in a scene in the film, where Yoko presents a completed ad – as opposed to one that is merely “thought up” – for “NonNon Aspirin” to a conference table of drab corporate suits. Prepared to show her work, with which she is “most happy” (“Survive” 00:29:30–39), Yoko’s presentation is interrupted before it begins by a phone call for the president of the client company, played by Sonny Chiba (billed as Shinichi Chiba).¹² It’s his wife, making the first of a series of comically trivial calls that might shame him, if all the shame weren’t reserved for Yoko. The meeting turns into a creative director’s nightmare: her presentation is continually interrupted by the insulting calls, while the clients are yelling things like “this isn’t even close to what we asked for” (“Survive” 00:32:24–30). “The customers won’t understand the functionality of our product,” one particularly strident man barks. Yoko gives as good as she gets, of course. She rebuts the demand for functionalism, saying that consumers will “get lost in the technobabble,” a claim reinforced by the president’s inability to pronounce the active ingredients of his own product (“Survive” 00:34:01-31). In creative ethics, then, ads translate between unintelligible corporate functionalism – unpronounceable signifiers that describe content but not concept – and the consumer’s world of personal choice and significance, to help them “decide what a product means to him/her” (Moeran 80). The ad serves as symbolic supplement, evoking desire rather than merely relaying information, affirming the identity of the consumer rather than simply representing what the product “does.” Advertising must engage the consumer or lose their interest, leaving them unsatisfied. “Commercials must be entertaining. Otherwise no one will watch,” Yoko proclaims. “Simple one-sided corporate masturbation is…” (“Survive” 00:34:32–40). She trails off here, in favor of letting the president give a shocked echo: “Masturbation?”

Fig. 1 NonNon Aspirin’s president (Shinichi Chiba) echoes Yoko.

But for all her piss and vinegar – and Yoko comports herself with ball-busting imperiousness through most of the film – NonNon Aspirin is still footing the bill. During the taxi ride back from the meeting, she confirms that her idea has, indeed, been rejected. But they can’t fire her; she quits, hopping out of the taxi midway, only popping her head back in to harangue her meek associate one last time. Her mistake is classic; Moeran states that the advertising industry has a “‘multiple audience’ property” (84), meaning that its products must address both the client and the consumer, and Yoko has failed to account for the account – that is, for the clients themselves. Of course, this is only a sign of her fierce ethical commitment, for while account-centered practices emphasize the happiness of the corporate clients, the ethics of the “creative” place the emphasis on the consumer – specifically, on the presumed agency of the consumer – demanding that “copywriters and art directors construct their advertising messages in such a way that ideally everything is left up to the consumer” (Moeran 82–83). This rhetoric of choice is, of course, profoundly disingenuous when ascribed to a medium whose raison d’être is persuasion. It’s more accurate to say that, in keeping with advertising’s flattery of the consumer’s literacy and individuality, ads are meant to convey the impression of choice even while affirming that the smart consumer will choose only the product being advertised.

Considering the construction of the film, which makes Yoko a much easier subject of sympathy than the faceless Non-Non Aspirin executives, it may be easy to read it as a simple celebration of creative advertising ethics. This kind of optimism was voiced by Japan’s postmodern intellectuals of the 1980s, who saw in advertising a parallel to their own role of intellectual translator: one who “mediates between the university and the masses” in the same way “the copywriter who mediates between the capitalist and the consumer” (Ivy, “Critical” 33). However, Yoko is not depicted as an unambiguous hero, nor even so clearly as a pro-consumer rebel. Certainly she styles herself as a champion of consumer entertainment, and considers herself an opponent of stern “Confucian” managerial style, favoring “playfulness and the carnivalesque” (Moeran 88). In practice, however, the specificity of her inspiration and the ferocity of her creative independence – hinging on the “joke factor” of the commercials – reveals less a contribution to consumer utopia and more a masturbatory tendency of her own. It is no coincidence that Yoko’s first inspirational moment follows the inadequate sexual encounter with Aoyama. The rapid flutter of her eyelids and the aforementioned “Oh yeah!” sound effect suggest that she’s “finishing herself off,” getting what her partner couldn’t give her while simultaneously revenging herself upon him in fantasy. This same eyelid flutter and sound effect mark every inspirational moment throughout the film, each signaling yet another “thought up commercial,” and each leading in turn to Yoko’s highly distinctive laugh, a wheezing snicker. Notably, this is the only laughter her commercials elicit, at least within the space of the film.¹³ The viewer may or may not find her jokes funny as suits their preference and capacity, but the onanistic aspect of Yoko’s inspirational process implicates her in the very practice she criticizes in her client. The ethics of creative advertising is her own fetish, covering up the disconnect between her practices and ambitions, the noble purpose she ascribes to her task as translator and the realities of the market in which she works.

Fig. 2 Yoko (Koizumi Kyôko) pleasures herself in bed and in the boardroom.

If corporate producers focus too much on the functionality of their product so that what they say becomes untranslatable, Yoko is excessively dedicated to the opposing principle: style. The role of a creative advertiser is to produce distinctness out of the undifferentiable, to bestow proper name status upon a product, but they must also make the product’s appeal as universal as possible. This combination of universal appeal and singular distinction has tended, historically, towards an excess of stylistic flourish that suffuses the film just as it suffused Japan’s advertising industry during the opulent latter days of its creative revolution (Lippit). This concept of style, already foregrounded in theories of the postmodern, was central to contemporary theories of advertising’s role in Japanese postmodernity: to convey a sense of “joyful knowledge” in which “sign and commodity fuse in an almost perfect representation of the larger symbolic economy” (Ivy, “Critical” 36). Style is a state of freedom for a signifier, a celebrated term within postmodernity, and one necessarily addressed in a film titled Survive Style 5+. On the face of it, Sekiguchi Gen’s film seems celebratory of or at least nostalgic for the heights of creative stylishness he must have experienced during his time in the industry, when commercials were regarded as “highly valued aesthetic artifacts” with the power to subvert their very consumerist messages through “a serial succession of images where the ad no longer advertises anything” (Ivy, “Critical” 37). However, the film retains its ambivalence throughout, not stopping with Yoko’s own frustrations. What emerges is a complex consideration of style – posited as the end result of creative advertising ethics, as the answer to the problem of personalizing the universal, of addressing the consumer properly – and its role in modern commodity fetishism.

Celebrity cameos and endorsements are tried and true methods for advertising agencies. There is, of course, the benefit of associating the glamor of fame with the product being sold. More importantly, as international signifiers themselves, celebrities assist in the ‘proper naming’ that is so central to the creative effort. When I speak of “Bruce Lee,” the assumption is that I am referring to the Bruce Lee, rather than a Bruce Lee; international fame has made the name singular as well as universally recognizable, requiring no translation, as good a model for the culturally transcendent signification to which advertising aspires as can readily be found. Celebrities are particularly prominent in Japanese advertising.¹⁴ Kline views this tendency as a function of Japanese advertising’s distinctive method of “internalization,” whereby foreign influences are domesticated even as Japan rises to the fore in the global marketplace (101). He shows how advertising, as an exemplary indicator of the ascendant global consumer culture, elucidates the myth of Japanese cultural exceptionalism, a conception of Japanese national character that necessarily resists the claims of “convergence theory.”¹⁵ What Kline calls “internalization” is synonymous with Marilyn Ivy’s definition of “internationalization” (kokusaika), in which seemingly disparate, oppositional terms are united under the same function: “the domestication of the foreign” (Discourses 3). How, then, are American advertising practices be adapted, repurposed, and translated into the allegedly unique Japanese context, and how is it that a culture that prides itself on the domestication of outside influences can itself have become a primary competitor in the struggle for global media hegemony? Kline identifies two strategies in Japanese advertising, roughly analogous to the distinction (purely verbal and contextual) between gohan and raisu,¹⁶ whereby commodities are presented in two registers: either traditionally Japanese, in keeping with family values and an inviolable national character, or foreign, and thus “exotic and sensual” (112, 114). There is, however, an “intermediate world” where the categories of modern and traditional overlap, a register “not peopled by traditional types who represent longstanding characteristics of Japanese civilization, or foreign characters that resonate with the promise and sophistication of the ‘other’ modern world” (115). This liminal space, the space of translation between cultural categories otherwise constructed as distinct, “is populated primarily by well-known Japanese stars from the world of arts, sports, and entertainment” (115). How is this space of translation characterized? As a world of “entertainment” and “play” within the “world of goods” (112). This third realm, and the most obviously postmodern and ‘global’ in its conception, “reflects syncretic rather than coexistent grammars … assimilat[ing] alien meanings into the home context through the mechanism of style,” which Kline deems “of crucial importance” (116, emphasis added).

Style, then, is the means by which cultural syncretism is achieved, even – or perhaps especially – in a culture that defines itself by its uniqueness. Extrapolated further, this observation informs the role of style and stylization in convincing the consumer of their own distinctness; “style” is frequently applied to the very quality of individuation that commodities claim to enable, as in “personal style” and “lifestyle,” terms loaded with connotations of choice and self-expression. Celebrities are avatars of style and stylishness; they are the stand-out example of sign-value’s preeminence. “Star-power” is a commodity with no materiality beyond its medium, its meaning, or its function as a universal signifier of significance itself. Moreover, because stars are instantly recognizable as themselves, they prove that style is the chief means by which the postmodern subject attains an individual identity; thus the Warholian promise of universal (if fleeting) celebrity becomes a general promise of distinct, individual identity in an era of alleged cultural homogeneity. Survival Style 5+’s own cast is appropriately star-studded. I’ve already named Sonny Chiba, Asano Tadanobu, Abe Hiroshi and Koizumi Kyôko, but there are also appearances by Reika Hashimoto as Tadanobu’s supernatural wife, and Vinnie Jones as a hit man who cuts a swath of misery through the narrative,¹⁷ whom Yoko has flown in from Europe to eliminate Aoyama.¹⁸ The overdetermination that comes from bringing together a cast with such diverse associations is in keeping with fragmented postmodern stylishness – there’s a Baz Luhrmann vibe to it.

If you are tempted to ask what purpose this casting choice serves, you are not alone. Throughout the film, Vinnie Jones’s character asks “what is your function in life?” (01:51:40–45). His Japanese translator and near-constant companion, the plaid-suited coordinator for the Katagiri Killer Service, translates the question as “anatawa yakuwari nandesca”¹⁹, a slightly awkward but accurate phrase. Yakuwari serves to translate “function,” but its connotations include “role” or “part” – a la a theatrical cast – as well as “contribution.” The same question, when begged of the celebrity casting, is answered in a scene in which Aman, Tadanobu’s character, hires the hit man to kill his wife, a task he’s as yet been unable to complete (though not for lack of trying). When this question is posed earlier in the film to an airline attendant, then to Aoyama, the results are grim; the airline attendant is verbally abused by both men because she cannot answer, while Aoyama ends up dead on his own stage because his answers are, by turns, a lie, and an admission of his uselessness (his fame and success do not draw water with Jones’s character). The brutal demand of functionality, as embodied by the starkly foreign character Jones plays, is a kind of evil avatar of global capitalism in its classically modernist conception; the violence of his performative foreignness recalls the way that Matsumoto Toshio’s Dogura magura (1988) codes its violence of the “global” against the “traditional” through fashion, with the characters in Western costume preying on those in traditional garb (Iles 46). Never permitting himself to be questioned or disturbed, Jones’s character instead demands that each character he encounters account for their usefulness. If he finds the reply lacking, as in the case of Aoyama, he renders judgment – “My friend, you’re not necessary” (“Survive” 00:41:51–42:23) – and destroys the object of the inquiry. In either case he is a force of reification, transforming persons into (dead) objects, his insistence on functionality not unlike that of the corporate suits, but backed up with ruthless violence.²⁰ When the question is posed to Aman, however, he replies “I have none.” This answer – when translated into English – prompts the hitherto belligerent foreigner to smile, nodding. “Cool,” he says. (“Survive” 00:53:04–12)

Fig. 3 Aman (Asano Tadanobu) answers the foreign hitman’s (Vinnie Jones) dangerous question.

Cool. Meaning what? First and most obvious, that all these famous faces and big names are here for the sole sake of being cool. But, more importantly, that coolness itself – a concept closely allied with stylishness – is based in absence. Pure style, without the drab practicality of functional content, is cool. Moreover (and tautologically), cool can have no other use.

What does this have to do with fetishism? The fetish is formed in response to the trauma of castration, of witnessing an absence where a presence had been previous imagined, prompting the synthesis of a replacement. Fetishes are compensations, transitional objects that attain their “magical” properties in reaction to absence, but depend on that very absence to operate. Seen this way, we can read the fetish quality of the commodity as a compensation for the lack of those master narratives and alleged culturally specific moorings that bestow a sense of identity in “traditional,” “local” contexts; sign-value as fetish is a distinctly postmodern necessity. Which brings us back to the film’s claim about coolness. The specific formulation of Aman’s reply – expressed in the English subtitles as “I have none” – is, in Japanese, “you butsu nani mo”. According to the Kokugo Jiten, “you butsu’ means, abstractly, the quality of visibility and presence; in less poetic usage, however, it simply means penis. Aman, still bloody from his last battle with his wife, is owning up to his castration. And castration, as it turns out, is cool – or, rather, it makes coolness necessary. The loss of meaning, of the presumed guarantee of presence provided by the phallus/logos, leaves a wound where substantive identity was once imagined to exist. Under the terms of postmodernity, style is the compensation for cultural castration writ large. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, the fetish

is presence accumulated in its sign, presence collected into a sign, brought back to it. Therefore, it also makes the sign valuable as presence, signifying itself, present without signifying anything else. A presence that produces a sign and a sign that produces presence, a double artifice in whose lacework the imminently strange is incrusted … a pure sign, a pure present, the familiar uncanny of the power of nothingness (7).

Aman’s status as castrated is attested to by more than just his confession. His plotline, which bookends the film, resembles nothing so much as a haunted house plot: the classic uncanny scenario that Freud links to the fear of castration.²¹ From the first frame, Aman’s narrative engages with horror movie tropes – a dark wood, a secret grave, a confessed killing – as he buries his murdered wife, an action he will repeat over and over during the course of the film, until the sequence attains a quality of mechanical repetition. Each time he returns to his home, an art nouveau palace of saturated color and visual opulence, only to reencounter his wife, a force of silent malevolence who, true to her ghostly status, has a formidable suite of supernatural powers while within the bounds of home, but is incapable of leaving the grounds. Aman’s is a proper haunted house, albeit one that substitutes tinsel for cobwebs and luminous color for shades of darkness. It is a geography of symbolist tropes that evoke the uncanny: autonomous dolls and severed limbs, phone calls from within the house and from within dreams, independently moving images, and of course the ghost of Aman’s own wife. It contains an entire room decorated with images of eyes – images that Aman replicates on his long coat, a cloak of substitute phalli – wherein Aman re-slays his wife with the help of a pointed minute-hand pried from a clock (also in the shape of an eye). Over and over he is pummeled and “unmanned” by his wife, and though he kills her again and again, she returns every time, frequently endowed with some new strength derived from whatever method he previously used to dispose of her body: detachable limbs, fiery breath. Every time she reappears in a more and more outlandish outfit, beginning with a brightly colored but relatively simple dress and hair-do, before ascending into the impracticalities of high fashion, becoming-image.²²

Fig. 4 The escalating style of Aman’s revenant wife (Reika Hashimoto)

His wife’s first act of retributive aggression, however, is not any sort of direct violence. Upon their first tense reunion, she serves Aman an unbelievably sumptuous meal – a massive roast beef, a tower of flapjacks, a basket of bread, a dozen eggs merged on a single plate, just to name a few – an impossible culinary task that he consumes, with the help of a montage, under his wife’s ceaseless and watchful gaze. What might well serve as a commercial for a luxury all-you-can-eat breakfast – its visual composition bespeaks the director’s experience in the hyper-stylized heyday of Japanese advertising – takes on an aspect of menace, culminating in a cup of post-meal coffee, to which the wife adds an excessive portion of sugar, working the spoon with a sinister mechanical regularity. As Aman takes his first sip, his wife mounts the dish-laden table and delivers a kick that sends him flying, instigating the violent struggle that characterizes their interactions throughout most of the film.

Fig. 5 A menacing breakfast.

The scene dramatizes a collision between Kline’s two registers of Japanese advertising, a staging that occurs in a number of scenes throughout the film. On the one hand, we have traditional scenes of domesticity, as per the first register: Japanese home life, with wives serving food and drink to their husbands and dutiful children giving thanks to the head of the household. On the other, we have the invasion of Vinnie Jones, an avatar of foreign influence, whose import is explicitly linked (by way of Yoko’s request) to interaction with foreign commercial direction; brutal and reifying, he nevertheless offers a surrogate power for his translator, who, in acting as his voice, can partake in his unstoppable violence (preserving the resulting trail of dead bodies as stylish photographs that advertise his firm’s effectiveness). Between the two we have the realm of hypermediated images, initially suffused with a nightmare quality, in which traditional domestic relationships are fundamentally disrupted, marked by violence, the loss of family stability and – in a couple fleeting references – instances of rape and incest.

We may be tempted to read a reactionary impulse into the film’s depiction of this convergence, and not without precedent; complaints about the corrosive effect of postmodernity on the coherence of cultural narratives are a dime a dozen. Japanese cinema of the 80s and 90s frequently addresses the issue of gender and family, both bulwarks of “traditional” social identity; Itami Jūzō’s Osōshiki (1984)²³, Miike Takashi’s Bijita Q (2001) and Kawase Naomi’s Sharasojyu (2003) all tackle these questions (Iles 79). What little analysis has been performed on Survive Style 5+ correctly notes the relative powerlessness of its male characters, a reflection, the study claims, of anxieties around changing gender roles in Japan (Nah, Lee and Yu 817). Aman is pummeled by his wife, his own murderous rejoinders barely slowing her down; Kobayashi, a besuited father with troubled finances, is rendered ridiculous when a hypnotism-gone-wrong convinces him he is a bird;²⁴ Sonny Chiba’s “president” character is sufficiently hen-pecked that he repeatedly interrupts a company meeting to take his wife’s calls about menial tasks as how to replace a light bulb. The only prominent male characters with access to power – the hit man and the hypnotist – are pointedly loathsome, and appear allied with the forces of global commerce and mystification. First there is Aoyama, whose tiger-themed trappings – a theme-song celebrating his power and beauty, an elaborate codpiece, a golden throne – conceal a profound inadequacy (as evidenced by his sexual failure); when matched up against the hit man, he is easily overcome, left bleeding to death on his own stage. The hit man, on the other hand, is a dangerous intruder whose interference and insistence on functionality – however it may have been solicited by Yoko and Aman – leads to tragedy, trapping Kobayashi in his hypnotized state, annulling Aman’s reconciliation with his wife, and wounding Jay, a good-hearted burglar, in a fit of homophobic rage.

Yet these violent encounters result in novel outcomes and resolutions which, if not unmarked by ambivalence, are ultimately celebrated by the film. Kobayashi’s transformation allows him to achieve flight (with the help of his open-minded son, who delivers a monologue on the necessity of change), a pointed metaphor for liberation, which in turn saves Aman from self-destruction, the former catching the latter in mid-air as he hurls himself from the window of the Katagiri Killer Service’s office. The assault on Jay finally brings the mounting erotic tension between the burglar and one of his partners in crime to fruition, prompting Jay to avow a queer sexual identity and embark upon a new relationship with his friend. The film, therefore, does not propose a retreat into nostalgia; it does not reconstruct the “traditional” scene of Japanese home-life, nor does it bow to the global pressures embodied in the British hit man. Instead, it creates a new set of relationships that accommodates the changes ushered in by the era of the sign. It proposes to make peace with fetishization, accepting that traditional identity is a lost cause (if it ever existed in the first place) and embracing new conceptions of self-made possible in this realm of images, however frightening and new. For the fetish is at its most potent within the postmodern milieu, with its “its purely constructed meaningfulness” at once admitting to its artifice and its “double fictionality,” while at the same time “dissimulat[ing] that imposture,” continuing to function despite having, itself, no functional content (Bernheimer 4). This is explicated best in a scene in a grade school, where Kobayashi’s young son sits in class, his teacher delivering judgements on images the children have drawn of their fathers. For the most part these images are essentially identical, each deemed “normal” by the equivocating teacher, with an air of vague disapproval. The only images that break the mold are of Kobayashi himself, who is depicted soaring through the air with other birds; the teacher approves, misreading the image of Kobayashi as a “superhero” depiction (while simultaneously presaging his comic-book intervention at the end of the film). The other image, less well-received, is of another student’s father, dressed in women’s clothing, a misunderstanding stemming from the student’s mother saying that his father “likes women.” (“Survive” 01:04:42-06:12) While the teacher may not note the equivalence, the film earmarks it; both deviant dads have listed into the register of the image as images, one in the parlance of comics and movies, the other in the performativity of drag.

The reference to transvestism is fleeting but telling, particularly in relation to the function of the fetish. As Marjorie Garber argues in her article Fetish Envy, “the fetish is . . . a metaphor, a figure for the undecidability of castration . . . of nostalgia for an originary ‘wholeness’ . . . Thus the fetish, like the transvestite . . . is a sign at once of lack and its covering over” (49). Yet when one forsakes nostalgia and rejects the myth of wholeness, instead avowing castration and the fetish it necessitates, it is possible to claim an “empowered transvestism” and thus “to seem rather than merely to have or to be” (Garber 56). As the essence of style, seeming is what counts in the era of the sign – not a naive approach or a mistaking of style for substance, but a willful avowal of the fetish, an empowered seeming. Garber refers to a performance by Madonna as a paragon of 80s style-as-substance, playing with religious iconography and the notion of her ‘materiality’, rendering unique and proper a name which was already unique and proper, but in a wholly different register. But this principle extends to the characters of Survive Style 5+, particularly Yoko, who staunchly refuses to use the verb-endings of feminine performance. Taking license to “get off” in front of the mystified (and all-male) corporate executives, her performative masturbation – an act comically pantomimed on-stage by Aoyama – reads as an empowering gesture. She is capable of pleasuring herself in ways Aoyama can only pretend, not because she “actually” possesses a phallus (unlike Aoyama, she doesn’t make grand proclamations about her power), but because she performs it, adopts it as a style, recognizing the necessary surplus of seeming. Style is power and pleasure in the milieu of postmodernity, as Yoko the creative advertising executive knows better than anyone in the film.

But is advertising as a practice – endowing commodities with sign-value, and answering the demand for new identities better able to withstand the vicissitudes of postmodernity – capable of this signifying task on a universal scale? Can the fetish be mass-produced in a satisfactory way? The function of the fetish is, after all, highly personal, a critical supplement to the identity of the postmodern consumer. Can this role be entrusted to advertising, with its universal and ultimately functionalist (global, economic, capitalist) demands? Produced and released in the aftermath of the high hopes and low times of Bubble Era and its ultimate bursting, Sekiguchi’s film is positioned to give an incisive view on the promises and disappointments of postmodern advertising. These questions bring us back to the question of jokes, tied inextricably to the ethics of creative advertising in Survive Style 5+ by way of Yoko. She summons the foreign hit man (analog of foreign interests), is literally in bed with the hypnotist (a professional mystifier), and serves as the closest thing to a directorial stand-in, her job being the same as Sekiguchi’s own. She is the one who gives voice to the aspirations of creative advertising to entertain and communicate with the consumer, and she furthers those ends chiefly by way of her commercials’ “joke factor,” whether or not those jokes are funny or translatable. Jokes have a function similar to that of the fetish, particularly when viewed through Freud’s work on the subject. They indicate something repressed without outright revealing it, while also generating a surplus of pleasure. They are concerned with the “formation of substitutes” and the “representation of something that cannot be expressed directly” (Freud, Jokes 28). They are also indicative of the personal, establishing the position of the self; they are subjective communications that forge connections between the speaker and listener (which is why Yoko claims she uses them), which generally function best when they are culturally specific, spoken by and to the culture to which they pertain. The goal of global advertising, then, is to tell jokes that produce a common cultural field, to produce an all-inclusive “inside,” to generate a discourse that everyone will “get” on a personal level – a goal as strange as that of bestowing celebrity status on all people. Yet Yoko is the only one who laughs at her own (masturbatory) jokes, making them far more like the fetish-proper, an individual quirk that compensates for the disrespect and disregard she faces in her professional and personal life. As Freud notes, “no one can be content with having made a joke for himself alone” (Ibid. 175). Do Yoko’s jokes qualify as jokes, then? Do they qualify as ads? Can the fetish be universalized?

The culturally-distinct kappa commercial mentioned above is inspired in a taxi, when Yoko – her frustration mounting throughout the film – browbeats the driver into a fit of literal hat-in-hand apology that reveals his comically bald head. However, when she tries to record the “funny” idea inspired by the encounter, she notices that her dictaphone is missing; she left it at a diner she visited earlier, where it is discovered by a pair of young female students, jaded youngsters who embody – along with Jay’s merry band of burglars and Kobayashi’s son – a rising postmodern generation. The students listen to a recorded litany of commercial ideas that play over Yoko’s panic as she exits her cab mid-trip and begins to run through the streets of Tokyo. Yoko’s urgency and upset are motivated by more than her desire to recover all her amazing ideas and hard work. Quite the contrary, the sound of the recording grows oppressive, and the content of the commercial brainstorming reveals the specific character of her ideas; a mix of the sexual and scatological, a series of foul smells and borderline dirty jokes, many without definite advertising application. They resemble nothing so much as vignette fantasies: “A crab and a shrimp having sex. A new taste is born. A snack food commercial.” – “Nose hair grows from lies.” – “An alien who eats from his butt and poops from his mouth. Farts hit his nose.” – “Deodorant commercial. A man with a canine sense of smell. He faints at the smell of his feet.” – “A guy as big as a horse with a condom to match.” – “A shampoo commercial. A man whose sexual pleasure zone is his scalp. Every time he washes his hair, he faints in agony.”²⁵ – “When a girl’s period gets close, she jumps sideways.” – “A pain relief medicine commercial. A guy’s head hurts so much, it explodes. His brains fly BOOM, BANG!” (“Survive” 01:13:10–51; 01:17:30–45; 01:18:47-19:00; 01:24:01–09). Until finally the litany ends, and she stops running. Catches her breath. Intones: “I’m so stupid.” Turns and begins to walk back in the direction from which she came (“Survive” 01:28:03–58).

Fig. 6 Yoko rushes to reclaim her tape recorder full of ideas.

This sequence runs parallel to other movements towards closure in the narrative. We see Yoko again only in the final sequence, in which every major member of the cast makes a brief appearance. When seen alongside Aman’s reconciliation with his wife, and the burglars’ queer love connection, this proximity implies resolution or at least realization. By sheer weight of examples, we can see that Yoko’s jokes are not just untranslatable to non-Japanese audiences, but rather untranslatable generally: they are not funny, they are fetishistic; not popular, but personal.

The ethics of creative advertising reach their deadlock here. While they endeavor to provide some means by which consumers can understand and experience their purchases as significant and so supplement their identities, creative advertising’s aspiration to universal address drives it into the crosshairs of postmodern critics like Baudrillard. Moeran cites Baudrillard when he presents the opinion (not his own) that “advertising appropriates people’s ‘real’ experiences”, devaluing them first by being “made reproducible in all other consumers,” and second because “the fluidity of commodity culture turns today’s ‘authenticity’ into tomorrow’s ‘falseness.’” “Ultimately,” these critics claim, “advertising signs indicate the absence of both human relationships and real objects” (Moeran 112). This (by now more or less standard) critique matches the claim to fetishization. Yet the mass-marketing of the fetish eliminates its particular character, eradicating the distinctiveness that creative advertising purports to create in the first place. Moeran holds out hope: his time spent in the advertising offices of Asatsu leads him to believe that some possibility of authenticity still exists in the social, human conditions of advertising production. Survive Style 5+ abandons the notion of the universal field of global advertising discourse, instead achieving the goal of individual distinctness, a proper naming that would sufficiently supplement the absence present in the life of the consumer. It does not bemoan this absence, but considers postmodern style as precisely the means of surviving, of synthesizing a new mode of being in the face of the failure both of traditional conceptions and foreign demands. It celebrates change and holds up the fetish, avowed fully and without reservation, free from functionalism. But that fetish must be personal, its style distinctive, and advertising is found inadequate to the task, precisely insofar as its address is purportedly universal.

This, then, is the final failing of creative advertising ethics. The wish for both the universal and particular, the principle of granting a product a “proper name,” reaches an impasse in the function of the fetish. Try as the creative advertiser might to translate the value of an otherwise undifferentiated product into the specificity of the individual consumer’s desire, Survive Style 5+ posits that any such attempt will lead either to ads that are radically personal and untranslatable – as with Yoko’s jokes – or radically personal experiences that are transformed into objects of style – like the framed photos in the Katagiri Killer Service offices.

Fig. 7 Photography and fire at Katagiri Killer Service.

There is something commercial-like about the deadly dance between Aman and his wife in its consistent repetition, but it depicts a personal connection, a form of strange communication which resolves towards mutual recognition. The violence of their interchange, all of it stylized, develops into a dialogue, a reconciliation that finds them working together to mark the coat with eyes, to construct a cloak of fetishes, a profligacy of gazes, a surfeit of signification. They could go on like this forever, and given the chance they might wish to. Once Vinnie Jones’ hit man finally dispatches Aman’s wife once and for all, all that remains of her is the grave from which she won’t wake and the photograph that the plaid-suited translator coordinator has hanging on his office wall. Aman arrives and wordlessly sets the photo alight, rejecting the reified sign of the service he requested, establishing the terms of his own finality, the last act before his (aborted) suicide attempt. The message is clear: burn the photo, reject the universal, and accept no fetish but your own.

Footnotes

1. Former pop icon turned actress, Koizumi is a true engineered star. Her biggest selling-point is her ‘cuteness,’ the success of which lead to lucrative deals in advertising campaigns. This context is significant for the arguments to come. (Lippit 2011; Moeran 137–8)

2. I may not, for example, find Anne Fletcher’s The Proposal (2009) funny so much as horrifying, but I do at least understand why Oscar Nunez’s strip show set piece makes other theater-goers titter. The joke’s mechanism is visible, and the investment in its funniness – the filmmaker’s faith in the gunpowder of the gag – are made evident through signs like duration, repetition and reference.

3. Nobuhiko’s Hausu (1977), a haunted house narrative that employs animation and collage as well as live-action, is particularly resonant with the haunted house sections of Sekiguchi’s film, which contain their own multi-media elements.

4. And one can imagine the expectations of the efficiency of ‘creative’ workers in their expenditure.

5. This use of “revolution” can’t but sound ironic when the revolutionaries are Madison Avenue high rollers, but from a marketing perspective it’s very canny. Who could object to something called the “creative revolution,” much less during the heady 60s?

6. Doyle Dane Berbach was responsible for the now iconic (at least in the advertising world) Volkswagen Beetle “Think Small” ads.

7. I include another excerpt from Moeran to underline the importance of untranslatable self-identity to advertising; this section is descriptive of his own advice to the advertising company he was working with, who were then pursuing a client – Frontier Electronics – and brainstorming tag lines that would

differentiate one company from another, in the way that Sony had been able to with its The One and Only. Frontier needed to be incomparable. It had to adopt a tag line that was distinctive and timeless, not subject to fashion. By going for something like It’s (All) in the Name, The Name says it (All) or Like the Name Says, Frontier would be able to re-enforce its image and turn back on itself in a never-ending cycle. Frontier produced cutting edge products at the ‘frontier’ – a descriptive noun that was also the company’s name, and so on ad infinitum. In short, Frontier = Frontier (13).

Moeran’s italics make added emphasis redundant; the tag lines do, in fact, say it all.

8. The oft-cited challenge of marketing hipness is that it must convince a large enough segment of the market that their own individuality, their own uniqueness (and thus the uniqueness of their desire), can be expressed through the purchase and use of a given product, which product is, perforce, mass-produced and mass-marketed.

9. The connection between to two having been elaborated by numerous critics besides myself.

10. The marketing of Listerine is the most commonly-cited example of this widely recognized phenomenon; first produce the cure, then invent the sickness.

11. Translatable as “Discussions on Being Japanese” (Ivy, Discourses xv).

12. The swinging reveal shot on this venerated martial arts film star plays up the cameo, begging recognition, a celebrity face ploy straight out of the kind of advertising that Lost In Translation (2003) pokes fun at. That he ends up being a henpecked corporate conservative rather than, say, Hattori Hanzo, is in keeping with the irony underwriting the whole piece.

13. Though let’s be fair – all of these commercials, besides the Non-Non Aspirin presentation, occur safely in the privacy of her own mind.

14. As Stephen Kline asserts in his comparative analysis of American and Japanese advertising content and practices, “Japanese advertising uses models, artists, television personalities (including singers, actors), and comedians most in its advertising” as compared to its American equivalent (111).

15. That Japanese culture’s presumed resistance to global homogenization goes hand in hand with an equally pervasive myth about the homogeneity of Japanese cultural identity imbues the belief in cultural exceptionalism with its own fetish quality.

16. Both are words for rice: gohan is the Japanese word generally written in kanji; raisu is a katakana transliteration of the English word. Thus rice signifies (and is signified) differently depending on its context.

17. Vinnie Jones retains the thuggishness that made his acting career in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, though without the redemptive fatherhood and with an extra helping of viciousness.

18. Her reasons are derived from her experience working with foreign directors, whom she deems more “sophisticated” and who perform at a “higher level.” Yoko clearly does not cleave to a sense of Japanese cultural superiority; she is perennially frustrated by the limitations she faces, and her clients’ lack of vision.

19. All translations are courtesy of Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer, for whose assistance I am intensely grateful.

20. A violence that is not without an erotic element: Aoyama states that it “feels good” as he dies, and Aman’s wife, in her final moments, smiles cryptically and silently bids her husband “bye-bye” before collapsing, her back a pincushion of tiny penetrations.

21. The ghost story genre is also linked to earlier instances of the identity problem in Japanese culture, as evidenced by “a tremendous resurgence in the popularity of the ghost story and other literary works of horror . . . as a way of conceptualizing the trauma of social change on an individual level” during the Meiji and Taishō periods (Iles 39).

22. This culminates in her final death, inflicted by Vinnie Jones’s hitman and preserved by way of photograph.

23. Osōshiki prominently features a commercial set replica of a pre-modern inn (ryokan), staging the strange relationship between the traditional and the contemporary. (Iles 43)

24. This scenario briefly places him in the care of farcical research psychologists, a recurring trope that appears as early as Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Kurutta ippeiji (1926), which locates the cure to contemporary identity fragmentation in “traditional” culture, signified by the Noh masks that are placed on patients to soothe them (Iles 20).

25. Herbal Essences commercials of the late 90s, anyone?

Works Cited

• Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Telos Press Ltd., 1981.
• Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Selected Writings, vol. 1. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Harvard UP, 1996.
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• Derrida, Jacques. “De Tours of Babel.” Acts of Religion. Edited and introduced by Gil Anidjar, Routledge, 2002, pp. 104–134.
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