camera as freedom (all-seeing eye/I), the car as independence, the accused is carrion feeding our justice system

updated in italics 4 March 2018

camera as vehicle of liberation, car as independence-junk automobile as corpse, legal process as crime in progress, and the accused are the carrion legal powers prey upon

Making of a Murder on Netflix

This Netflix series is a powerful dissection and exhumation of how corrupt "bodies" (entities, systems, regulations, surveillance, documentation, individuals, beliefs, values, and institutions) contaminate personal integrity and invade purpose while it examines the investigation and trial of two men tied to a terrifying crime. The filmmakers spent over ten years gathering evidence, footage, and tape to gather and weave interviews, document, images, and fragments of a tattered murder case that sent men to prison for life.

I am writing to reflect upon and sort through nuances in the puzzles within the chronology, a sinister treasure hunt that leads to terrifying truths about our human condition and identity.

I want to unearth for myself some sense of what is being said within the coded visuals and legal process. We must read into the narrative to find out what is really there.

There are many visual metaphors within the film that become links to what may otherwise be discarded as unusable evidence, a flawed series of events, etc. These clues (may) bring us closer to underlying motives, concealed back stories, or sheltered information that, thanks to the filmmakers, becomes the lasting voice to eclipse possible cover ups, memory lapses, shielding of individuals, self-defense and justifications of the indefensible, etc. The chase for the filmmakers is a different experience for me, a distant viewer voyeur, the filmmakers, the attorneys, police, neighbors, fellow citizens, reporters, news outlets, historians, etc.)

The camera is a stealth, all-seeing eye (I) and vehicle of liberation. The car is the symbol of American independence, a way to move, travel, and overcome limits we or other place in our midst.
..... way to get away, get out, explore, discover....and run into a "flat", engine overheat, or a deadly crash. The car symbolizes all those things here. 

Our criminal justice practices systematically prey upon the accused, the carrion of crime that feeds the system. Its vulture tactics are ravenous, insatiable, unrelenting and destroy human lives and dignity. There is no escape; that incriminating evidence is the trap that has no exit, and becomes the undetermined hell some might endure until death. The film shows us that like an old vehicle we are ready to dump, law can and will take possession of, disassemble, crush, and dispose of lives. The law and its agency can destroy anything that contradicts the image they present in a case, or that interferes with their narrative, cast of suspects, and circumstantial details. 

The location of the events hovers between the over forty-acre property of the Averys in Wisconsin, the homes, the salvage yard and buildings there, and the court houses, jails, legal offices, and streets of the Midwestern towns involved. The haunting image of the auto graveyard is a lasting, and points directly at the Avery’s lives, crushed by the system, the powers that be, the lies and deception, and twisting of truths to conveniently disable, disempower, separate them from society. Fenced in, walled up, and invisible. The press and media can revive images they gathered and make, replay them for consumption, but will that help the case move in any direction, and where?

The family members are marginalized, their movements diminished and halted; they have become completely impaired, ineffective, isolated, and unable to move. Decisions have been made for them, and land two of the family’s members Steven and Brendan in jail with life terms. Their lives are a waiting game, dictated by capricious moves in cat and mouse moves.

Their daily living and security been destroyed, seized, altered beyond repair. These men have been rendered permanently defective, dangerous, and illegal. They are immobilized, stopped by the side of the road, railroaded, branded, and membership as citizens cancelled with the stamp of criminal. Whether there is veracity in the Prosecution or Defense's determinations and cancellation of their identities is what needs further probing. Red tape will complicate and hinder movement. The pace of these matters drags. The film asks us to bear with the process, endure the wait, and become informed.

This story is reminiscent of Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest. The prison system and building with its pantoptic structures segregate and watch inmates who cannot be seen or see outside; they become numbered bodies, contained, fed and stored far from their communities. By eliminating them from the stream of life, the criminal ruling and dictates of the law reduces them to a line up, series of numbers, codes, a mug shot, penned up and hidden away as filed documents. The stories of their lives become a folder of papers and forms, the fragments of which paint a distorted picture, and include a blurred life.

Like the abandoned cars in the Avery junkyard, these men have been removed from their surroundings and purpose. The accused are alienated from their families, loved ones, community, and work, lost their ability to function like “normal” people. They are punished, demeaned, torn apart by the legal process, cut open by the court and its investigators, and put on public display. Even the attorneys say once you have been accused, whether innocent or guilty, it alters your life forever. Perhaps, you will never get your life back, and certainly, you will never have your life as you knew it.

The film opens our eyes to the contamination of justice, truth, and civil, legal, human rights. The men the film focuses on have been dumped and trashed by a system that refuses to cooperate, manipulates the truth, and scapegoated these men to make an example of them and judge them.

I am reminded of Kesey’s Cuckoos Nest, a horrifying story of how we criminalize people, demonize and torture them so they have no recourse, there is no way out, and they have no defense. In Kesey's story, medical staff and doctors attack their bodies and minds, claiming that they must be subdued. They are zombified so they cannot think or act upon impulses or urges, drugged regularly to control their bodies and diminish those instincts. 

In Kesey’s novel, the patients are imprisoned, medicated, dumbed and numbed into an irrevocable stupor, and have no say about what happens to them. They cannot fight back, escape, or get help. The milky white fog is the haze they live in, the atmosphere they have to survive in as inmates, prisoners of their minds and the State who incarcerates them. They are forgotten, disposed of, determined degenerates, feeble-minded, insane and deranged, capable of hurting themselves and others. They are subdued, stupefied, and subjugated, render alien even to themselves.

Human beings are the cruelest most calculated creatures on earth. Though we have the capacity for compassion and generosity of spirit, when our soul is unwell, damaged, or weak, we are capable of great inhumanity.

The most foreboding, implicating images repeated throughout the series are the rows of vehicles from above and seeming maze navigated in a golf cart. This automobile cemetery is both the site of the criminal investigation and represents the livelihood of the family, a paradox of cycles of life and death. Those chassis lined up, dented, rusted, and inoperable, simply take up space and wait to be further picked apart. They are only valued for their parts, the parts that could be repurposed, and then they are ready to be further pressed and flattened to become scrap metal, salable at a fragment of their original value, use and worth.
The two men, like the vehicle-carcasses, await their turn to be pecked at by the vultures of the law, who eat carrion, feed upon corpses, tearing at flesh indiscriminately, licking bones clean, leaving nothing.

The American dream has always been linked to travel, mobility, the endless possibilities for gain, especially economical and social. The automobile allowed men to thrive beyond the covered wagon, the gold rush, the steam engine and railroad tracks that shortened the distance between coasts. The car is the pride and joy of every American and represents that liberty, that ability to roam, discover, conquer, and own property.

Our pride is not soley national, but that personal dignity we seem to find in our work, careers, roles in the professional world. We identify ourselves with how much money we make. America values productivity as upstanding and working citizens in service of the nation, its identity, pride, and wealth (power). Since the fifties, the money we make working provides us with the wealth to get the best car, the fastest car, the car that gives us independence, the independence this country was built upon, or so we thought. The car is automatic freedom, speedy access to everything we desire. The vehicles we drive get us ahead, get us places, take us where we never dreamed of going.

The auto graveyard becomes the very opposite image of that. The disemboweled cars in piles emphasize throughout the episodes that once the car has experienced an accident, a wreck, and damage, it is no longer legal; it is no longer visibly the representation of a shiny faced American citizen with good standing in the community, and its dents, scratches, and blemishes point to its inadequacies, its flaws, its potential to go off the road again. A car that exceeds service is considered and labeled irreparable. Its unpredictable functioning makes it unsafe. The only option is to take it off the road to protect other drivers, place the vehicle as is in the salvage yard where it sits, its parts extracted and the rest scrapped. Its fragments have little value, can only be reassembled, and will never be considered whole again.

Other images of decay, disrepair, and confusion show up in the images of the trailer, the garage, the property as a whole. The forensic and documentary views purport a clean, cold view of things that has no emotional attachment or narrative. The filmmakers are brilliant in their ability to remain detached, and it is in the gathering of the conversations, images, and events that there is a stream of objective information. The film is far from cold or detached, and clearly the filmmakers have spent time getting to know the community. One can always say that in anything of this sort, the editing is not objective, and this is where people can begin to argue that the film will drive the views or understanding in a certain direction.

The camera is a vehicle of freedom, a voice, and has been in the past, a way for people to disseminate information through images and words. There are propaganda films, and there are skewed tellings of history. We know this from the beginnings of time. A friend always says, the winner writes the history. Why, because some aspects of a story get buried, conveniently lost or hidden, erased or camouflaged. History is written and rewritten. Innocent people will always suffer at the hands of a power that destroys from a corrupted heart and mind. Truth, for the most part, does emerge in time. Sometimes truth doesn’t surface soon enough to save the innocent or prevent inhumane acts. As human beings, we are all responsible to do our part, even at the smallest level.

Our reliance on the camera since its inception as a vehicle of truth, as a means to record and evidence some fact, some semblance, some appearance to get at something deeper is dearly held conviction. Perhaps that is what is at the core of films like Murder. Whether fictional or real, crime stories of any sort or scale have a sinister, morbid quality not because the facts lurk in the shadows of truth, but because the truth is only partially disclosed and poke at our own levels of honesty and compassion. How do we judge and incriminate others in favor of saving ourselves, or making way for our own safe passage, pleasure, and freedoms.

the mess of life

Life is messy and difficult to tidy if at all.

What happens when we find ourselves upside down, our lives in a kind of turn around or spin, and none of the rules or things we understand fit anymore? What happens when we encounter an internal collapse, and our eyes and heart are open to something unfathomable, incomprehensible, something we can only feel.

What happens when words are inadequate. How do we communicate then. We are so reliant on words and images as the way to access one another.

Feeling in many ways seems a truer way to our authentic being, less attached to judgement, things we thinks we know, assumptions, preferences, old habits.....where do attachments come from, what do they link to for us. (this is an older reflection from July of 2010)

more images from transforming body

These are images from the solo exhibit at the Winfisky gallery at salem State University, curated by Haig Demarjian in 2013.

the erotics of the transforming body

For those who could not see the exhibit, here is the favorable review of The Erotics of the Transforming Body and some images of what I showed at Art House Picture Frames in Portland, Maine on view until October 30th. There are more to come and a future show in the works. (Added 5 September 2013: Subsequent exhibits of this work and newer additions include August 8-14 September at the Saccarappa Art Collective in Westbrook: "intolerance" tryptic on view and older watercolors, and September 2012 a solo exhibit at Salem State University curated by Haig Demarjian at the Winfisky Gallery titled Transforming Body, drawings by Alex Rheault. This solo included about 15 works.)
This is an ongoing project. For other images and works, see alexrheaultartista.wordpress.com.
(The alexrheault.com site will be updated finally in the fall)

http://www.pressherald.com/life/audience/gallery-puts-on-splendid-show-of-drawing-based-artworks_2010-10-03.html

becoming rapture

hinging vertiginous

longing

collapsing, being

beautiful crisis

The Incomplete and The Intimate

Ma Mere 

Dir. Christophe Honore’, 2004

Eroticism is a backdrop for the larger questions about who we are and what we are to challenge what Christophe Honore’ calls the moral straitjacket, the bourgeois tendencies of consumption, excess, and frivolity, the lack of depth in an empty life of human tourism that evades intimacy and engagement.

Isabelle Huppert and Louis Garrell’s staggering and poetic performances intensify Christophe Honore’ ’s contemporized adaptation of Georges Bataille’s story, “Ma Mere” set in the Euro-tourist-haven of the Canary Islands instead of a 1900’s brothel. Intimacy, incompleteness, and impurity are its underlying themes as the film travels society’s taboos, excess, consumptive desire in relation to being, presence/absence, and exchange. Relationships are ritualized to illustrate there is something beyond pleasure: tenderness, kindness, and humanity. The subtext is a coming of age paired with a reckoning with mortality, an accounting of collective complicity and corruptibility, triumph in failure, and weakness as strength. Clichés and conventions of all kinds literary and visual, moral and physical are inverted and subverted; all relationships and their proper order are transgressed and stripped bare from pretense, praise and all socially acceptable gloss.

The film is a kind of modern fairy tale with villains, heroes, innocent children, wicked parents, witches, fairies, and trolls in which Honore’ reflects back “our desire reduces us to weakness”, and that we think we know or assume can be crushed by what is.  We can be reborn more honest, frank, and raw, and perhaps, then, more able to really experience the experience we are experiencing. We can mess with the edges and precipices of a vertiginous existence, and feel vertigo and nausea, and then, we are ripe, available and can really experience deep empathy and compassion for one another. If we remove our mask are we more naked; what if we wear a mask and play our role as if our life depended on it.

The fragmenting of the body through edits, framing, bondage, wrapping, wounding, bathing, clothing, and nakedness in relation to clothing raise these questions visually, viscerally, and we are confronting our own squeamishness, our own desire, and our own failings as human beings, as lovers, as corresponding beings, and must examine our own responsibilities, our shortcomings, our failings as we witness those of others especially ones we love. One has to “go a little far”, one has the choice to terrorize or bless another. We are both animal and other. In true Bataille fashion, we must face the abject and its is there where we find beauty. “The origin of the world is the hole,” says La Mere’s lover-collaboratrice, Rea, played by actress Emma de Cannes. What we fear must become what we desire and love. We must embrace what we loath, and find intimacy there. For perhaps, what we loath the most is ourselves, and therefore life itself, and that is our true crime, and our daily death.

The privileged couple, their son, and their odd mix of friends, who are mostly pretty young girl-and boy-nymphs with lots of free time, avoid hordes of overweight Northern Europeans in white socks and sandals, random naked men with piercings in sensitive places, or unkempt boisterous American youths; they retire from the clubs, bars, and streets with an occasional pause to make love in a public place or taxi to their own posh villa with endless views from the swimming pool and patios to unmade beds where they frolic, violate one another, and repeatedly revive and give birth to experiences of Bataille’s theories of the erotic, existence, and liberty.

Pierre, dark eyed and lanky, is a handsome, moody boy who returns to his parent’s villa for a vacation. Upon his arrival his cryptic father speaks in premonitory codes about his mother and the masks they both wear, while La Mere, played by the stunning Huppert, exhibits her destructive ambivalence and insatiable hungers through restless fawning, fidgeting, and a string of sexual encounters, entrances and exits, which are essential to advance the metaphysics of sex, the  examination of our sexual taboos and prejudices, and how social structures damage and cut away at our being, depriving us of life, suffocating our spirit, and destroying any real exchange and reciprocity.  La Mere’s physical absence from the film for about a half hour marks Pierre’s need to find and make his own way, learn from the abandonment and separation about true union and being, and loosen the knotted ties to his mother. He is forced to journey through his mother’s identity, roles, and doings without her, and she is unable to defend her actions and their injustice. This black hole, as Honore’  describes it, alludes to the necessary demise of La Mere’s desire, and the implications and consequences of that.

La Mere is unwell after a bad fall, and laid in bed, shrouded in a white sheet like Mantegna’s “Dead Christ”, her feet exposed, her body and face recede in an acute foreshortening of the body wrapped as one form. Feet and toes become unwieldy appendages going off in various directions.  Her covered horizontality, her fall from grace and desire will become the death she will wear. For Bataille, the feet represent our contact with dirt, our destined fate to be attached to the ground, and our baseness as beings on the earth.  The pairing of the a promiscuous mother with the figure of Christ is not gratuitously irreverent or to shock, but rather serves to demystify the roles, which are interchangeable and undress our costuming and perfuming of that which is foul about us, inevitable, the corpse and tragedy that we are. She, La Mere, is both a scapegoat and a villain, guilty of what it is to be human and mortal, a sinner and saint, a mother and woman; she embodies the extremes we are, lives all that we are capable of. Her beauty becomes her ugliness and vice versa; her sexuality’s sovereignty becomes simultaneous poisonous death and health. Boundaries of opposites and dualities as posited by our social structures are blurred, they willingly pair, bond, and multiply through her. She breeds and evokes love, hatred, empathy, compassion, and embodies the pathos, frailty, horror, and tenderness of humanity.

Religion attempts to fill gaps of being, the unknowns and mysteries of our suffering, insatiable longing, and when it reaches beyond its dogma, teachings, and ideals, perhaps it achieves a level of humanity that is valuable.  Bataille’s own texts are filled with his own search to unravel the laws, rules, preferences to get at the origins of our social life and its constructions. This films explores much of that rich terrain, not to answer the unanswerable, but to expose its essence of unanswerability and unaccountability. Perhaps, when we unveil, unmask, and denude ourselves, we reach a truer sense of being, a more real experience of one another, and the suffering we all bear is perhaps soothed once we acknowledge the wounds we are capable of and inflict on ourselves and one another.

Bertrand Tavernier, Coup de Torchon: Taking out the trash

Coup de Torchon, 1981

Betrand Tavernier

Tavernier sets Coup de Torchon adapted from Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 in French West Africa 1938, where police chief Lucien Cordier, played by Philippe Noiret, inverts his perceived role as village idiot by strategically killing off those characters who think he is incapable, soft, and incorruptible and incapable of “dirty work”. Tavernier concocts a poisonous cocktail of noir-esque violence, clichés of a spaghetti Western, French colonial African style, with buffoonish clowning as Cordier poaches and disposes of living human trash through cold killings, calculated rendezvous, and disguise of stupidity and base humor. Isabelle Huppert’s Rose, his lover, and Staphane Audran’s Hugette, his wife are either insatiable, deceitful, and vain, and even Anne, Irene Skobline, contradicts him, is inaccessible, burdensome in her attentions, so in the end, women are reduced to the criminal, venomous, and disposable. Men are moving targets in this carnival shooting gallery; they too, are excessive, damaged, and contaminated where good and evil never reconcile. Cordier kicks Rose’s dying husband after he shoots him, and says “You, you won’t have a boring death.” And “This hurts me more than it hurts you.”

The camera seizes and holds hostage innocent African children crouching near enormous trees, as they dutifully recite the French anthem, and colorfully clothed local in the open market which illustrate how we exoticize and colonize through our tyranny the cultures of others with our gaze, our greed, our preferences, and our contempt. We trample lives and decide who lives and dies with little regard for humanity.

Exhumed from the dirt and excess of colonial values, racism, hypocrisy, hierarchy, and human waste, Cordier delivers the message that “all crimes are collective, and we participate in each other’s crimes”. Sublime visual poetry collides with the scatological, as Tavernier and his striking cast send us on a chase for bodies dead or alive, naked, in underwear, suits, or tribal dress to search for what is cloaked and buried within the body, our most sacred power object that holds infinite truths.

Ozu's Early Spring, 1956: Life is ephemeral life

Jasujiro Ozu's Early Spring, 1956, mirrors at post-war industrialization, Western cultural influences, and the personal and universal oppression of the Japanese  "salary man".

Ozu's spectacularly stark black and white floating world tableau is multilayered with architectural elements, fabric folds, veiling, transparency, opacity, patterns, and natural forms. These accompany portraits of faces and domestic activities, rituals, pairings, and expressions. Dress is increasingly replaced and masked by the more Modern conventions of photographic mise en scene and even premonitory Burtinsky-esque views. Vertiginous perspectives betray shifts of Japanese cultural, physical, and political landscapes. Treeless gridded cities carved out by buses and tram lines, boisterous traffic, and vertical neon signs. Throngs of male-dominated workforce commute, descend upon, and invade asphalt roads, cement walkways and rectangular buildings of uniform minimalist aesthetics, pushing out old ways of living and being.

Modern structures encroach on a marginalized countryside marred and populated by by contamination, factory stacks, railway tracks carry workers donning paired-down tailored look of 1950's American white shirts and pleated trousers, or bell skirts below the knee to the granite beehive-office spaces. In the prefectures and outskirts of Tokyo, youth dominates, so animals, families, and children are now rare and invisible.

We experience a claustrophobic quality of life when in a narrow shaft of an common alley a woman exclaims, "the garbage man never comes". This alley and cry for a lack of order and care exposes these modern-day challenge of living in cramped spaces, piling human on human in a Modernist Tokyo where freedom, privacy, clean, land and air replaced by the social order of work, dress, and productivity hinder, delay, and smother life.

Brushing teeth, shaving, cleaning, ironing, folding clothes, dressing, undressing, packing, sleeping, eating, drinking, smoking, singing, walking, and talking are communal activities that bind humans. The Modern worker's activities replace communal ones with typing, talking, negotiating, telephoning, and commuting. The colorless, grey world reduces life to tonal values, darks and lights. Socializing becomes ritualized smoking, drinking, carousing, singing, and eating in bars and restaurants humanize the workers. These social activities bind and separate young twenty-thirty-forty-somethings who seek their fortune and self reflection in the telling mirror of society.

Clocks, file cabinets, typists typing, men working and smoking in their offices in sterile, unpatterned shirts. Rectangular windows render anonymous the beings and life inside, conceal their individuality, their lives. The geometric structures contain, protect, and foster only the goals of larger economic livelihood and well being disassociated from the values and desires of humanity.

Infrequently, a small Modernist painting may appear as the sole artistic creation that is not associated with mending, cooking, typing, or tidying. Creative acts must have production for a common good attached to them. In one scene, a small mirror sits high on a small piece of furniture and shows only shadows of movement. It is such a subtle moment, one that is easily lost, and symbolic of the minute details of humanity that may count for something of great proportion.

Ozu's use of flatness refers to many aspects of his inquiry into humanity, its lack of depth, diversity, the tyranny of surfaces, appearances, just as pattern becomes the micro and macro versions of the same thing. When viewed as the same, these lose their integrity. Everything seems perfect, untroubled, operational, working, and  fully functional. (In French, fonctionaire is a worker, state employee. Fonction means to function, act as. I imagine in Japanese there may be a similar word.)

 Ozu employs domestic objects, clothing, ambient sounds, and framing of spaces which become meta narratives and supporting actors. A torn pillow case, Western clothes suspended, costumes being put on or taken off or worn, books in stacks or books strewn, incense or cigarette smoke wafting and rising,  glasses of milk or beer sitting or being gulped have quirky qualities of disassembling, disorder, or chance. Objects in their stasis are active, continuing to speak about the characters, the actions, and the space in which we find them.

Activities also become meta narratives: the act of putting on make up and gossiping, the act of playing tiles and gossiping, the act of setting up or putting away bedding, packing or unpacking, the act of drinking and signing, the preparation of food, ironing, scrubbing a stain, combing one's hair, brushing one's teeth.

One's status and roles are multiple, playing out in different contexts and enhanced by objects, spaces, and ambient sounds. It is evident we suffer the complexity of the obligations that contradict themselves and spar with our desires, fears, values, or dreams as humans. A salary man, retired worker, father, mother, husband, wife, widow, old maid, married couple, dead child, unborn child, cook, cook, typist, invisible garbage man, secret lover are unfulfilled, experience loss, incompleteness, and separation. "Everyone' s dissatisfied." is a company director's words as he reflects upon the differences between one worker and an independent boss. Are either able to delay the mortality, loss, and suffering we all face at one time or another.

Against the sharp edges of crossword puzzle world of buildings, windows, newspapers, books, and tiles, our rounded tenderness is wounded, betrayed by emotional spills and cliche lipstick stains, both trappings and forensic evidence of our domestic systems and regulation, which fail to secure or guard personal or universal happiness.

"Goldfish" is a young woman-worker whose large eyes influence her predominately male colleagues' pet name. Her independent attitude and ability to stray from the norms gets her into trouble. She is and further estranges herself as she develops feelings and inhabits a more deeply intimate, emotional realms; she becomes a fish out of water, as her colleagues find her swimming in an opposite direction from the others.

She aligns herself with a married salary man, Sugi, who is married to Masako. Sugi finds something he lacks or misses in her company She provides him with an escape from the loss of his child,  the ordinary familiarity of his obedient, predictable, and dutiful wife, the overbearing nature of his vocal mother-in-law, and the tiny world at home that seems to e closing in on him. He has become dulled by the daily chore of routine, and finds Goldfish's exuberance refreshing, welcoming, and flattering. 

Sugi and Goldfish strike up a friendship; the warmth and affection they feel for one another leads to a single-night romance and echo into the home and work lives, public and private lives of both, and begin to consume the imaginations of those nearest them. Later, Goldfish is invited to a noodle party, where she is greeted by an interrogation by colleagues about rumors of infidelity with Sugi ("Gossip links you two."), she fights to preserve her secret, and fights to protect herself. They taunt her and demand that she: "Try some criticism." and she consider how she would feel if she were the wife. One male colleague says" She needs to be told off. It's humanism." As if humanism can be bundled, categorized, and presented easily, or turned into punishment. This comments on ideals of justice and how distorted justice becomes when it is glued or hinged to revenge. Often, one who strays from norms is ostracized, criticized, judged for stepping onto the edges of what is deemed proper, correct, and safe. Her independence is threatening to others.

Ozu examines conformity as it resides in the obligatory crisp, blank shirt and pressed trousers or skirt worn by Modern Japanese office workers. Within the white shirt-uniform, we locate contracts, marital vows, ladders and status. The promise of a clean, orderly, and comfortable life where clothes are cleaned, ironed, and hung, ready to wear, ready to define our identity as we perform them daily outside and inside, privately and publicly. The white shirt,  the most basic garments of Western dress since medieval times first appeared as a a chemise or undergarment, bears historical multiple identities combative and repressed.

The white shirt distinguishes the worker from a farmer, factory worker, laborer as someone who works in an office where dirt is eliminated and prevented. The office worker remains tidy, respected, and salaried, can move up a mobile ladder of economic incentives and benefits, supposedly. What resides behind the white shirt, and near the heart? What does the white shirt reveal and conceal at the same time? The white shirt cannot stave off or prevent a less painful demise cannot cloak or cover the ugliness and decay of our mortality. The white shirt is not immune to stains, tears, (note: tears and tears are the same), destruction, and are not enough armour to protect our hearts and souls from suffering, death, and loss. The white collar is as vulnerable to life as its wearer. Our clothes speak to our nakedness, transparency, truths.

Miuri, is a young friend of Sugi and others, who has been ill for over 100 days, and who eventually takes his own life with sleeping pills. We can only assume he finds his isolation from the world unbearable, as he begs Sugi to stay with him during a visit. In a way, Miuri symbolizes most profoundly the disillusionment and loneliness the film embodies, as he is scapegoated by his best friend, often alone with his mother to care for him, and incapacitated, so cannot participate in life in any way. But, perhaps, he participates in some other way, and becomes the beacon of light for his friends, a living conscience, a prisoner of conscience.  He dies young in a sense, becomes hero and a villain, for he leaves those behind with the mess of the world, and becomes removed from the burdens, or so it would seem. We cannot be and not be at the same time.

"Life is ephemeral." is the most beautiful line in the film, and speaks to the undeniable truth and flux there. It questions the stability or usefulness, ethics and meaning behind standards and rules, and asks can we conform a human self to some ideal of economic, patriotic, or even domestic picture we want to frame and hold onto for posterity. Or is it true, we will will age, wither, lose our mobility, and lose our lives; our clothes, our jobs, our relatives and loves will not keep us together, yet we are bound together as a humanity, a collective being that will continue to be regardless of rules, or values, or anything we impose upon it.