Bird and worm displacements: 'Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets' (1971)
An attack on consumerism in Japan and business-as-usual worldwide treads me some new psychic terrain.
Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (Sho o Suteyo Machi e Deyō) (1971), dir. Shūji Terayama, Japan
A tin can on a string tied to a moving car doesn’t slide over the road, but jumps and crackles when it hits small edges. If one edge sticks out a little more, it will send the can flying. This multiplication traces a shadow road around and above the real one: if the string holding the can to the tow ring could write in air, it would blow up the terrain, echo the rock as a boulder, and send the car off-roading.
This film crunches and thwangs chunky in my ears. In high school I played the bass in a band called The Dairy Farmers with my friends. I propped my bass up against the couch for a second, left the amp on, and when it slid down to the floor the strings didn’t crash like if I had dropped it from waist height, but oozed around each other. I rubbed my nails down the coils: the bass warmed the room because, unlike the guitar’s taut mosquito wire, its strings could actually move. I once visited an underground cistern in Istanbul with columns standing three stories high in a foot of water. They glided around on skates: relaxed, not like the six-limbed strider but my back’s cool decline in the bathtub.
In the locker room, coach Mr. Omi (Sei Hiraizumi) tells me (Hideaki Sasaki) to join him in the shower. The steam fills one big teardrop: now my clothes are hot-wet. I had only wanted to be the ball boy! He winds up for the swing and lances the ball through my face, through the wall, and straight to America.
You can read this in any order: Anti-Oedipus continues to inspire me to make connections over and across structures, like time, image, or memory. There are disjunctions, where things don’t match up and leave gaps between them, and then there are displacements, where the subject wanders—an accident, by-product, or residue. When I started writing here I tried to open myself up to you; this implied that I was hiding something. What was true, behind? I’m so grateful now for this blog and for my reading because I realize I was never hiding anything, only holding on too hard to certain ideas and images of myself. By writing I have opened the gates to a flow: these images cut them up, twist them closed, and let rivulets burst out of the balloon. I can catch them again or let them run through my fingers. Either way, they have displaced themselves and invited me to wander through them. I’m sorry if this is too abstract, but I’m not trying to put something into a box and present it as true and whole. I am only trying to ride a flow now, so maybe the next one will be clearer.
(As a side effect: I’ve found myself not really preparing what to write for these much anymore, besides a few little notes about images or ideas that the film stuck to me. Now I understand the terror of a blank page—but this kind of writing produces, not records.1 What will it pull out of me? How exciting!)
Three times in the film something or someone comes a little too close. In purple, a woman with a kite who runs screaming head-first into the camera. I stop the image at the exact moment where she gets too close: before this she stays at safe distance; after, she has come so close that the camera has refocused and I can see her clearly, like putting my face in one of those concave makeup mirrors that turns me into character creation. Before the woman with the kite, the film’s main character in green gets too close, and then so does a cloud of smoke. Between distance and focus their continued approach becomes very threatening: they move forward in a void with no directions; they don’t threaten to swallow but, at that scary moment, to open the void to my touch.
“Human strength! Terrible!” I live with the film’s other characters in a sad shack by an open sewer, where the walls look like hubcaps and newspaper. My sister (Yukiko Kobayashi) has only her pet rabbit for a friend and my grandmother (Fudeko Tanaka) lets grains of rice stick to her face when she eats onigiri. Mr. Omi takes me to see a courtesan who lives in a room layered with fabrics and red demons on the walls. She trims my nails and holds my face in her hands—suddenly my ear is as big as my body! The whole rooms swirls and the lights turn on and off slowly; I am very sad and very afraid, so I lie almost totally still, but there are two of us here in the room full of demons so I don’t have to be afraid for too long.
In the last episode of Shōgun that Dan and I watched, the Anjin and Mariko share conflicting attitudes about existence and death. He thinks the Japanese don’t respect life because they take it away quickly and don’t seem to mourn. She tells him that he seems tormented by himself and that the Japanese are free of this torment because they don’t fear their place in the cycle of life and death. She repeats, “We live and we die. We control nothing beyond that.” I don’t know if I can get there: I find myself resisting too hard the idea that I have a fixed place in the world. But if I do—and that that place is here, working this job, sharing my life with these people, following the lifestyle of my culture—then I must have been born incredibly lucky. I still come back to “And that too” sometimes: I hate these challenges, but I love them just the same because they have paved my years with small and great miracles, the greatest being the fact of my existence. Someone brought up the Orange poem the other day: “I love you. I’m glad I exist.”
I’ve tried for months to get this paper biplane off the ground, not counting the miraculous two seconds you and I spent the air. We were so close then! I thought I felt that last puffed-up sail and the lift we’d need to for real flight, but the gust died down and we plodded back to the surface. I must have looked so sad because you told me not to worry, we’ll try again next week, there’s supposed to be a big storm, and took me out for a drink to celebrate. Two seconds in air: like pumping light from a well.
A man in an alley at the end of the film looks at his feet and asks big questions: “Father, what good is history?” “Is it worthwhile dying for my country?” “Will anyone remember me after this film is over?” He tells a story about a lizard he found one day at school, which he put in a Coke bottle for safekeeping only to find that it had grown too big to get out. The screen turns white and still big thoughts: “There’s no world for me.” Don’t you get tired of all this thinking? Get on with it, already. Just one—more— push—
Careening garbage nails on guitar strings eeeeeeeee! the biplane catches fire! Broken glass, air raid alarms! (“Do you have the strength to get out, Japan?!”) Go, go, go! If I clip my wings and stay down here on earth forever, can I finally submit to this unstoppable life? A fruit cart turns over on whip-crack knives, jolting too close you fool! you fool! A choice: two seconds in air? or the cool, sweet earth like wine, where I’ll beg before the world for as much life as it can spare me.
See other films from: 1970s | Japan
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler
Although I did think about writing this part while making a snack after putting in my laundry. I don’t know if I can say that this writing is only production or only recording.