Kotoko (2011)
It's been quite awhile since I've written any posts on films. After spending enough time spinning my wheels writing out very long meandering drafts on films I've watched, I'd started to realize that the challenge I'd given myself when I started this film blog section of Unlife is actually counterproductive. It's all well and good to try to force oneself to write every day, to try to say something of value and think about things all the time, to engage with art instead of passively consooming media, but I've always disliked the attitude a lot of writers have that writing is something that you can only ever be good at by forcing yourself to write every day. It's true that writing like all skills needs to be practiced, but we already live in a world where written language is more a part of our everyday lives than any other point in history. Clearly the mere act of writing is something we all practice every day, and there is an excess of written word; people who call themselves writers would do well to try to have something valuable to say instead of adding to the noise, and so I've tried to take an opposite approach. I am cursed with having too much to say about everything and be constantly making weird nonlinear connections between things; it's exhausting and very difficult to get out on paper in a traditional written format like an essay or fiction piece. If there is some object of analysis, or if I'm commentating on philosophy trying to LARP as an academic or professor, then it's easier to write as if I'm a normal and real human person, but otherwise much like this post is doing right now, I wander in all sorts of directions and can't stay on topic to neatly tie together a piece of writing. Usually that only happens if I'm in the right state of mind, otherwise everything spins out in rambling and ranting about all sorts of arcane topics that I very much can argue for there being connections between but that require an exhausting amount of labor and focus to argue effectively. If I were an academic, or at least not in a mental state that is almost constantly one of oppressive anguish and anxiety or feverishly trying to keep myself busy on literally anything, then I could do it, but I have to work with the conditions I've been given. If I don't write I start to go more insane.
All of this is apt for talking about a film like Kotoko, because it's mainly a character study in a severely mentally ill woman. Whatever diagnosis she has isn't specified but it seems to be schizophrenia. But what's notable about this film that made me feel compelled to write a post about it instead of just leaving a quick review on my Letterboxed is that it's one of the realest portrayals of being severely mentally ill I've ever seen, and even more significantly it manages to very accurately portray mental illness without relying on the institution of psychiatry. Until the very end, we don't see any doctors or mental health wards; Kotoko lives in the world, or rather her world, and the audience is forced into it with her. The narrative nuts and bolts of what happens in the film is an exaggerated form of mental illness that not everyone lives with to such an extent, or in the particular ways that make it more cinematic, and this is a criticism I tend to have about a lot of films that attempt to portray mental illness. Being insane is usually not cinematic; it's mostly rotting, trying and failing to live something approximating a normal life and failing over and over again until it wears you down so much that you cannot keep trying anymore. But Kotoko, like Vampire's Kiss, manages to even on a pretty basic level succeed at portraying the subjective feeling of being severely mentally ill.
When films attempt to portray mental illness and neurodivergence, it is often from the perspective of a neurotypical person (big shock there). Actors often only have the tools for portraying neurodivergence from an outside neurotypical perception of it, and so it has to fit some concept of "good acting" that is very hard to make an effective performance without also ending up being an entirely inaccurate portrayal of the subject matter. In the worst cases it leads to the joke about how you "never go full retard", which has a very real basis in a lot of embarrassing attempts by actors to portray mental disabilities to stroke their own egos about how good they are at acting. Most of the time, they end up disowning those roles. In the best cases the end product of how films portray mental illness is overly sentimental: the mentally ill are portrayed as people to be pitied, who can never have any agency or have anything to offer the world other than being a burden to it, or they undergo an inspiring redemption arc back towards being a neurotypical normie. In the worst of cases, mental illness is portrayed in a stigmatizing way that is entirely inaccurate to how neurodivergent people exist in the world and especially to their subjective lived experiences. Unsurprisingly this latter version is by far the most common one, and it even translates in the scripts and the acting. Few films or media in general really understand what madness, real scary severe madness, is actually like, and it's hard to even self-advocate about it because it's so stigmatized. From my own perspective, it often feels tiresome at best if not very privileged if not also incredibly uninteresting since I very much dislike talking about the "myself" that exists in the "real" meatspace world. But it's also hard to talk about because these same attitudes reflect in how insane people are treated by hylics and psychics. We are to be pitied, ignored, not taken seriously, or we are all potentially violent serial killers who need to be imprisoned without trial in psych wards. The point is of course for these things to continue to perpetuate themselves; this is all essential to their functioning, to silence the objects of these discourses and media portrayals in whatever ways possible so that the mediocracy of neurotypicals can continue to discourse among themselves about things that they do not understand or give a single fuck about understanding.
I don't know much about Shinya Tsukamoto as a person or the actress and singer Cocco who stars in the film and came up with the story. Tsukamoto has directed some of my favorite movies ever like Tetsuo: The Iron Man1 but I was very curious to see how he would handle a story like this, and I was surprised at times but not disappointed. While Tsukamoto is best known for his influence on Japanese cyberpunk, the visual style that he's famous for in Tetsuo is not a one-off trick that only works in that particular genre. Kotoko is thematically as far as you can get from something like Tetsuo; Kotoko is a woman in the real, modern world, and on paper the events of the narrative are ordinary if tragic. But the way that the film is told, much like the way Tetsuo or Bullet Ballet or A Snake of June is told, is in how he uses an intense visual style to portray extreme experiences and mental states that seamlessly integrate into the reality of the film. Tsukamoto is perhaps one of the best exemplars of Japanese cyberpunk for this reason: what he is thematically interested in is intensity, but not intensity as an end in itself but rather as the psychological experience of speed. He revels in the intense and extreme in his films, some more than others, but it's because the elaborate machinic chrome stop motion and metal percussion of something like Tetsuo is necessary to convey the film's thesis statement on cyberpunk at the individual microscopic level, on the level of an individual body and flows of desire being mutated, ripped apart, remixed and rewired into something new, monstrous, and fast.
Tsukamoto applies this same style of speed and excess to Kotoko, though while something like Tetsuo is trying to portray the experience of becoming inhuman, Kotoko does the opposite by humanizing the abject dehumanized state of psychosis. We never quite know what's real and what isn't in the film, or if it isn't real, we never know quite why. Even if something happening in the film like a man with a rifle breaking into Kotoko's home (in Japan where guns basically don't exist) to shoot her toddler son2 isn't believable, a basic rule of making movies is suspension of disbelief and Kotoko abuses that and the audience at multiple points by putting the audience into the psychotic state. For someone who has a psychotic condition, it doesn't matter whether or not something is logical or if a delusion is so elaborately disconnected from reality that it would be difficult to even hallucinate just for the sheer amount of visual data your brain would need to overwrite. For a psychotic person, a delusion is not metaphor but it also isn't meaningless nonsense; from the perspective of psychosis, it is something that is happening to you, no matter how absurd it may seem, and Kotoko portrays this scarily well. Few other films that are focused on portraying mental illness would even know to make a distinction between a hallucination and an extremely vivid delusion, because portraying hallucinations as if they are simply the perception of something that isn't there in the same way a neurotypical would perceive it is more cinematic for the audience of predominantly neurotypical people. We are accustomed culturally to thinking of hallucinations and delusions as seamlessly integrating with the "real" world, but the reality is that it varies. For some people these things do integrate vividly into the real world, for others the real world already feels fragmented and disjointed all the time so that the line between it and the mind is always thin. Few films portray delusions as being almost like a daydream that is so vivid that you literally forget what reality is or where you are and where you believe that the delusion is happening to you right now.
But it's one thing to portray the primary symptoms of mental illness. What resonated so much about Kotoko to me is how the film also situates mental illness outside of the psychiatric ward, in the real world, trying to exist in the world as a psychotic person. Kotoko is a very real three dimensional character who isn't just defined by her mental illness, and this again hits scarily close to home because even though the way that the film portrays mental illness is extreme and exaggerated to get it across in a film format, it also portrays her positive qualities as extreme and out of joint. She loves her son to such an extent that she lives in constant terror of doing something to hurt him. She is talented at singing (appropriately so since the actress playing her is a singer in real life) but can never have any recognition for it because of how much she's in a spiraling crisis preventing her from even being able to function in very basic ways, and when she is given an opportunity to sing in front of someone for the first time, her performance has a very specific kind of unrefinedness to it. She contorts herself in awkward ways, she seems almost in pain from how forcefully she lets out her emotions through the one thing she has that makes her feel human, and the scene is heartbreaking for how real it is in portraying the ways that psychotic people can often be incredibly artistically talented in ways that don't square with normative neurotypical ideas of what "good art" is supposed to look like. But alongside all this, she also stabs men with forks at the slightest provocation because she is paranoid and terrified of everyone, especially men. She hallucinates seeing doubles of everyone where the double attacks her. She has vivid, extremely violent delusions of being brutally murdered by men, she viciously fights off a man's attempts to court her, at one point he corners her in a closet and she just screams "I'm terrible, I'm horrible" while blood pouring from her slit wrists smears the door red. It's a harrowing scene.
Out of everything I've seen so far that portrays mental illness, nothing else I've watched quite captures the feeling that scene in particular does of being so shattered that no matter how miserable and lonely you are, you will ruin everything you can get your bony hands on. Nothing else has quite captured that feeling, so deep and all-consuming, of such absolute worthlessness that it can only be expressed by saying "I'm horrible" over and over again. One other example that comes to mind for being comparably raw and real is "Delete Me, I'm So Ugly", although that was made by someone who is just actually also severely mentally ill so I would expect it to succeed at that, whereas I don't know enough about Cocco or Tsukamoto to speculate where the hell this film managed to pull such a powerful depiction of mental illness. It's high praise from me to make the comparison because "Delete Me" is another one of the best things I've encountered of accurately describing what living with real severely awful mental illness is like, without reducing it to psychiatric language or pop psychology platitudes. Both it and Kotoko are an outpouring of pure grief and rage at this feeling, seldom ever communicated or taken seriously, of a life that has always had something deeply wrong with it. People like us might make it long enough for whatever reason trying to exist in the normal world, and we may do our best to imitate being normal, having some sort of place in society so that we can survive. We often fail, over and over again, in ways that Shulamith Firestone wrote the book Airless Spaces to portray from her own experiences being psychotic and in psych wards. Each small failure to exist in the world compounds in on itself, and the world of a mad person gets smaller and smaller. If we have anyone that cares about us, they often end up more and more distant because they either don't care to deal with us or don't have the energy to. We may even come to doubt or question how we continue to live, much like how Kotoko explains why she cuts herself.
And yet the film is also often funny and tender, and usually former follows from the latter because trying to have real human emotions as a psychotic or severely traumatized or majorly depressed person is itself difficult to do. Even when trying to be recognizably "authentic", it often only comes through in a broken, offputting, awkward kind of way. We seem to forget how to pass for human, or if we do, it's only very poorly. It's a losing game to try to pass as human but it's hard to know what else to do when every sane person doesn't just feel unreal but also like they will become potentially randomly dangerous at any moment, or are all conspiring against you. Trying to blend in seems like the only way to survive, and this is part of the game that they play, how they wear you down year after year of failing and stagnating and rotting. But even the most destitute and miserable of us have good days or good moments. We have aspirations, things we care about, things we enjoy even if they're hard to do. Kotoko reminds us that even schizophrenic people are still human beings with the whole range of possible emotions, even if they may often be strange and awkward, even if we may often be shattered, broken, continually suffering from abuse and neglect.
But fitting with Tsukamoto's style, Kotoko portrays even this in an extreme and uncomfortable way by making Kotoko's relationship with Tanaka (who is played by Tsukamoto himself) violent and abusive in a way that Tanaka repeatedly consents to. He gets forks stabbed through his hands, get chained up and brutalized, is hit and screamed at – but he endures it all out of sheer unconditional love for Konoko. It's absurd, both comical and horrifying, and very classic Tsukamoto imagery of depraved violence with a just barely concealed libidinal subtext that inverts typical male and female gender roles regarding sexuality and violence. The fact that the director Tsukamoto himself plays Tanaka, a character who at all costs just wants to love Konoko, played by an actress who came up with the story for the film and presumably has some kind of personal investment in the subject matter, is itself indicative of how much the film genuinely wants to love and understand the mad no matter how ugly and horrifying it is. This is part of what makes the film so special. It's one thing to accurately portray mental illness, or even to portray the mentally ill as being real albeit very broken people, but to be fully committed to loving and understanding the mentally ill even to the point of being literally stabbed and beaten for it and to still insist on it is a very rare thing. Not many people who aren't psychotic are willing to undertake or acknowledge the reality that psychotics are often incredibly horrible to the people closest to them, especially to those closest to them.
All of this being said, I'm not without criticisms of the film. For the most part I think Konoko is one of the best portrayals of mental illness in film, and I would expect no less than this kind of earnestness on the subject of mental illness from the same director who made a film where a guy who shoves metal into his skin replaces his cock with a drill. Initially I was expecting to have to be very critical of the film's focus on heteronormativity and the family, which reaches a level of such saccharine absurdity that at one point it almost seems like Konoko's insanity has been cured by the power of love. But love only wins in the movies; in the real world, being schizophrenic is something you live with for the rest of your life, and it's always possible to have another psychotic break. It usually happens, weirdly enough, for the same reasons that neurotypical people get anxious or depressed: because of "stress", because of existing in a social context rather than as the idealized isolated individual of so much of bourgeois psychiatry. Fortunately, the film doesn't try to neatly tie things up in a happy ending where the power of love can make women become normal functional mothers and employees.
But this is where the movie feels like it descends a bit into misery porn instead, because Kotoko doesn't just have a psychotic relapse. She descends fully, irrecoverably into catatonia, and so the rest of the film goes before it ends. It's a bit frustrating, but also not entirely surprising, because it is actually possible to "recover" from being schizophrenic and to live with it rather than spending the rest of your life trying to be normal as Kotoko does when she seems to be able to finally fit into a normative definition of being a successful woman – albeit with the gender roles reversed again since she has a job while Tanaka decides to quit his job as a writer to focus solely on her. She fails to integrate into society and be normal because we have built a sick world that no one can withstand without being able to suffer collectively, and being significantly neurodivergent isn't just extremely isolating in one's personal life but also makes holding down a job a constant struggle of trying to be normal without becoming so exhausted and miserable that you start to fall apart again and fall back into the psychotic spiral. Ultimately this is admittedly a nitpick, because even today the narrative that it's possible to live a decent life as as schizophrenic person isn't very widespread. But I will not belabor that point further and direct you to a post I wrote on the matter and then immediately regretted publishing.
All other things considered since this post has gotten pretty long, Kotoko is one of the most accurate, moving, and compassionate portrayals of schizophrenia that I've seen in a film. A lot of it is "horrifying", but that only made me feel more seen by it, which probably should be a cause for concern.