Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade
"Risking your soul for the things that decay"
Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1999)
Directed by Hiroyuki Okiura
Written by Mamoru Oshii
Based on the Kerberos Saga multimedia project by Mamoru Oshii
Watching the inevitable obliterating what is hesitated, Jin Roh aged too well. A procedure humouring the values of cinematic romance while knowing what tendencies the 20th century took as a security deposit. Not an altering of the past through bare cosmetics—where all images are unified and touched up with a newer semiotic definition that note what changed—but how place divvies into a certain psychology that stretches history in the flourish. 1950’s Japan in reconstruction shaded in red night-vision. The same protests occurring for the same reasons (instead of American occupation it’s German) clashing with the purest concept art example of police militarization. The Kereberos Panzer units—unlike Robocop even when it’s the same pitch—pronouncing a threat in law enforcement too bestial to have a martyred weakness and too industrial to function any other feeling besides what’s ordered as the utility matches the provoked aesthetic. Always timely even when what always enhances are better methods to crack open a body. Skipping steps at the start of a mass anxiety to behold what’s foreseeable sooner but feeling faded and dog-eared like a photograph locking what was pregnant and impulsive—the hope that can clearly offer—with what came about when seeing the moment again and thinking back on what was pained, adored, surrendered. Memory and consequence happening at the same time and in place. No longer lightly a hypothetical.
Retelling Little Red Riding Hood not for our benefit—even when the version in the film is the one where she eats her grandmother and drinks her blood—but through a compulsion. Conflicted in the attraction of medieval brutalism when it knows that informs a fascistic philosophy but in that pressure becoming symmetrical to what makes it stir. What ignites in repetition with obvious analogues but how this material keeps appearing in a collapse willed into occurring in clear or convoluted operations. Recognizable enough but having an obsessive need to keep playing it back. Already this copy but used to compose a scenario centered on a desire gambled into feeling authentic. What can be believed in with what strictures lend us as evidence but has that force to engineer and demolish the ends of how a person decides what they want from their time. Meant to be bluntly didactic to punish and toughen up like a fairy tale* designed to educate upon a reality as a way to criminalize experience even when it entices through the poetics of fantasy.
A girl in a red raincoat walking around a riot to take and transport a bomb in a messenger bag and exploding in front of a cop—decorated in black armour, wearing a metallic gas mask with a snout going slightly south, “red spectacles” for eyes—who could’ve killed her sooner. In the asking of why he didn’t shoot, the cop’s personal narrative retells itself into a context that concocts a reason after the result. At a glance, in his silence, and without body armour he comes off stern but fragile. He goes back to basic training knowing the job enough to be unenthused. He starts seeing a woman claiming to be the victim’s sister and plagued with visions of her chased in the sewers and devoured by wolves as trauma hones as prophecy. In red and with the same face as the person he saw wince while pulling a pin. Nudged into thinking she’s a terrorist but all that was willed for a cause fades as she dreams of being another person somewhere else. Both of them knowing they’re patsies manufactured to meet-cute by two rival factions in the police force but not stopping them from thinking what can be had together. She gives him a copy of Little Red Riding Hood knowing how it’s going to trigger a recognition of what their roles are but not knowing how that doesn’t offer an allowance to be anything more. Realizing too late this cop she’s fallen in love with wasn’t disillusioned but fastened. His home barracks at a training academy. His family older men too weak to hold up a rail gun who enlist him as plainly but as tight as a favor. What he gathers in presence as he puts on his gear always to be a detonator to what’s beyond him as a person but what he embodies through drilled-in skill. His experience as merits based on a precision that makes sure what is aimed at dies from the decision. His figure encased like gas inside the shell of a bomb. Anything loved—even when manipulated into occurring—accidental and a casualty.
Like La Jetèe—as opposed to just Vertigo—desire in surveillance has a greater finality happening in structures rebuilt but withering. A soon-to-be modern world fortified while wreckage remains as fading tokens. Junkyards gathered in like wilderness, scrap metal that once resembled a store or a house piled up over in a corner of a near-empty playground like kindling, the remnants of animals taxidermied and collected in glass at a museum to mock up romanticism. An external life castled in and haunted. But the premises of alternate history—also like La Jetèe—become flimsy as a further recognition crosses over. Rather than a logistical exercise that just expounds the virtues of having terrible opinions or a both-sidesism that’s become drearily common**, Jin Roh shows through altercation what hasn’t. How fascism—outside the struggle of being conquered or conquering—became the superstition of the 20th century. What still resided outside the symbolism of events and dictated the compromises made afterwards as emptier moments. How one is meant to follow a narrative they are made to fall into and even as they become the synecdoche to what’s wanted they are without agency to how it tallies out. The aggression of how we’re made to feel outside of ourselves in a system that nullifies perception and authors a control elsewhere. Tiring out what is struggled over to win gracefully.
-Sasha Makarewicz 2020
Next Time:
Little Shop of Horrors
The End Notes/Subtweets
*And not the bullshit an “adult fairytale” gets because most of the films with that adage are only meant to be simplistic. I’m talking about Shape of Water. Most of that guy’s movies if I was meaner.
*** “A is A”= Ayn Rand and Hannah Arendt are the same. Don’t get into superhero comics now. At least those ones. Like read One Punch Man or something, kids.