Globalism, new media, and the inescapable JapanZahlten’s account of the multiple worlds of the media mix can occasionally fall into a
teleological account of modernity, in which liquification eventually overcomes solidity and
national identity. While he avoids approbation, too many others discussing the postmodern
or new media in Japan have shown a utopian bent that ignores the loss of imagination sug-
gested by Fisher and Saudade. To his credit, Zahlten noted that “Liquification is primarily an
experience, and one that is relative to a perceived basic state of solidity as well as focused on
reconstituting it in a different form” (Zahlten 2014, 453). My argument here is that such
solidity—here the perceived solidity of borders, of limits to movement and imagination even
within an age of supposedly boundless media and global flow—is not just the remnant of a
past solidity (of nation, of reality) that will be ultimately superseded; rather, it is the contra-
dictory and often tragic reverse side to the liquid, a solid contradiction that defines as well as
complicates it. This is a historical and methodological issue, as I argue the need to consider
the inability to escape Japan when thinking of Japanese cinema in East Asia, and to think of
Black Sun and Helpless when discussing The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, or Saudade when
arguing about anime fans.
The issue also revolves around the problematics of media at a time of both globalization and
technological transition. Aoyama Shinji’s repeated citation of the Polaroid camera in films like
Helpless and Eureka (2000) may seem hopelessly retrograde in a digital age, but his consideration
of a media that is by design not reproducible (since Polaroids have no negatives) is I believe just
one example of recent films thinking through the problem of inescapability through a meta-
fictional or meta-media perspective on media’s role in that inability to escape, or to imagine an
alternative. Perhaps such explorations of “old” or “solid” media are necessary for us to critique
the liquid possibilities of new media and to reevaluate the place of cinema in its local form
within a traumatic age of globalism. Maybe such cinematic attempts to escape can help us
understand what it might mean to “imagine” an alternative to the impossibility of imagining an
alternative to capitalism.
Note
1 Foreign co-productions do have a longer history, going back to such films as A Night in Hong Kong (Hon
Kon no yoru, Chiba Yasuki, 1961), which was a collaboration between Tōhō and Cathay.
references
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