Another Decade with Takashi Miike is a series of essays on the 2010s films of the Japanese maverick, following Notebook's earlier survey of Miike's first decade of the 21st century.
If movie history is defined as much by absences as by the films that actually get made, then one of the critical lacunae of 2010s cinema is the relative lack of movies about mass shootings. Random killings in highly populated public spaces mark one of the most distressing issues in contemporary American life, as these atrocities became more and more common over the last decade. This may not be as much of a concern in other countries, which have greater safeguards to keep people from access to assault weapons, but it should be alarming to anyone. How horrible it must be to die as part of some sick person’s fantasy (or, for that matter, to survive one)—horrible, in part, because of its uncanny resemblance to the shootouts we’ve seen in action movies.
Perhaps it’s because so many mass shooters have drawn inspiration from films that filmmakers haven’t known how to respond to the phenomenon of mass shootings and the impact they’ve had (at least in the U.S.) on our sense of public space. Life is simply different here than it was ten years ago. As a teacher, I take part in lockdown drills at my elementary school, and at least one movie theater in my city has staged a drill as well. No American urbanite is surprised to walk through a metal detector or undergo a frisk from security before entering a public event. And then there are those ubiquitous public service announcements reminding us to be on the lookout for anything suspicious whenever we ride the bus or the train. (“If you see something, say something.”) However effective these measures are in keeping people safe, they have the unwanted repercussion of reminding us we could be killed gruesomely any time we leave the house. I haven’t seen much in cinema that’s dramatized this particular fear, though people like Michael Haneke have been dramatizing for decades our culture’s increasing numbness to random public violence.
Occasionally we get films like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique (2009), and Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux (2018), serious movies that render acts of violence horrific; one never questions that the filmmakers condemn the slaughter of innocent people. What distinguishes Takashi Miike’s Lesson of the Evil (2012), which devotes its last third to a high school teacher massacring most of his graduating class, is that much of the violence proceeds in the fashion of any rousing shoot-em-up. In its use of “entertaining” tactics, Lesson of the Evil acknowledges something unspeakable—that a mass shooting might be rather exciting for the person carrying it out—and this makes the film provocative as well as unsettling. Movies like Elephant invite viewers to reflect coolly on the causes (both social and metaphysical) behind a mass shooting; Lesson of the Evil shocks us out of our familiarity with atrocity.
Miike, who wrote the film as well as directed, braces us for the shock; taken in context, the massacre doesn’t feel like the stuff of a routine slasher movie. The first two-thirds of Lesson of the Evil dispenses violence in gradually increasing doses; these passages also invite us into the murderer’s perspective by depicting the world he inhabits as worthless and depraved. In laying out the daily workings of the public high school where the psychopath works, Miike quickly establishes an atmosphere of corruption. Students devise elaborate plots to cheat on tests, online bullying is pervasive, and the gym teacher is blackmailing a student into sex. Very little learning, let alone the passing-down of morals from one generation to another, seems to take place. The theme of social decay harkens back to Miike’s Visitor Q (2001), which considered the subject via the breakdown of a nuclear family, though that film still exhibited a certain exuberance. Lesson of the Evil, on the other hand, is more brooding and subdued. Miike’s characterization of the school is generally without humor, and the somber tone, augmented by so much bad onscreen behavior, conjures a spirit of dread.
This dread gives way to actual violence in the second act, when a teacher and some students start to suspect that Hasumi (Hideaki Itô), the likable new English teacher, might be a homicidal maniac. Miike also suggests that Hasumi isn’t as perfect as he seems. When Miya (Erina Mizuno), the student being sexually exploited by the school gym teacher, comes to Hasumi for help, the English teacher takes advantage of the girl’s vulnerability and begins sleeping with her himself. Another student catches Hasumi and Miya kissing on the school’s roof one day; the boy dies cartoonishly in an explosion that night. The student’s demise seems at first like a non-sequitur, but it gains morbid resonance a few scenes later, when Hasumi murders a colleague who had been investigating Hasumi’s past. Apparently, there are strange gaps in the English teacher’s resume, and at the last school where he taught, a number of kids committed suicide in ghastly ways and in mysteriously quick succession. These revelations cast a pall over the current action, leading one to worry about the terrible things might happen at Hasumi’s current school.
From this point, Lesson of the Evil gets progressively sicker and uglier. The antihero confronts the student who’d learned about Hasumi’s mysterious past, then tortures the boy in his classroom before binding him with tape and leaving him to squirm. Miike cuts away from this scene to a flashback of Hasumi’s time in the United States, where he studied at Harvard and made friends with Clay, an American man who detects Hasumi’s bloodlust and recruits him on a killing spree. When the film returns to the present, Hasumi is preparing to chaperone an overnight activity at the school where the graduating class constructs stands for an upcoming culture festival. Hasumi kills Miya on the roof of the school, executes the gym teacher, then locks all the building’s doors from the outside and proceeds to hunt down every kid in sight. Miike cuts between different groups of students as they attempt to escape the school, only for Hasumi to find them out and blow them away with a shotgun. Throughout Lesson of the Evil, Miike had played different versions of “Mack the Knife” over the action to emphasize Hasumi’s malign nature; during the extended massacre, he plays the big band version of the song made popular by Bobby Darin, and the flamboyance of the musical performance draws attention to how much fun Hasumi’s having as he slaughters dozens of people. The violence may not be as spectacular as what Miike staged in Dead or Alive (1999) or Ichi the Killer (2001), but neither is it monotonous and rueful in the manner of his Izo (2004), a film concerned principally with the inevitability of violence in human history. The final act of Lesson “works” as suspense filmmaking, and this makes it especially indigestible.
In making a work so deliberately tasteless, Miike raises a worthwhile question: What would a responsible mainstream film about a mass shooting look like if it’s going to take the shootist’s perspective into account? It would seem obvious to vilify the terrorist and emphasize the hideousness of his crime; playing up the social factors that lead him to commit atrocity might distract from the immediate horror of his actions. Miike doesn’t attempt to explain Hasumi’s desire to murder people, apart from suggesting there’s something distinctly American about it. He also suggests, somewhat tantalizingly, that Hasumi’s massacre represents a societal failing, since the community he attacks was such an unhealthy environment that it practically called out for its own destruction. This idea is disgusting, just like Miike’s use of action movie techniques to generate suspense before each of Hasumi’s murders. Yet the disgust inspired by Lesson of the Evil feels purposeful—it reflects a common (and appropriate) response to news of a mass shooting. Miike asks us to look into the soul of a monster, then recoils with us.