The filmed explained


I posted this in another thread, and this is just one interpretation from my brilliant teacher and my film studies class, but it's a pretty solid one:

1. Everything in the last 20 minutes is Aoyama's dream, basically everything after they get to the hotel, she shows him the scar, they are about to have sex. The only "reality" is when he awakens. Then again, more of the film is probably subjective than it may seem, such as when it appears the man working at the restaurant and hearing the conversation about the audition is judging them. He appears later in the film, in the room with the man in the wheelchair. Aoyama fills in all the blanks about Yoshikawa in his mind. In addition, nothing in "the room" with the phone and the man in the bag is real. There are many dream sequences in the beginning, and they are meant to be jarring. As is the scene that Aoyama's friend is trying to talk him out of seeing Yoshikawa and there are tons of jump cuts.

2. Aoyama seems like the nice guy, but is he really? Think about how he speaks of women. He says he wants someone confident, but he's infatuated with the obedient, passive girl. He held an audition to pick out a wife, asking and listening (from his friend) to a number of pretty degrading questions. Then he chooses which one he "wants". Do you see the darker misogyny and misuse? It's something that's laughed about in romantic comedies, the way women are treated. But this film examines it from another angle.

3. He doesn't treat any of the women in the film well at all. He's pretty rude to them, actually. His secretary, who it's hinted he's slept with and ignored. The girlfriend of his son. Really any woman he comes in contact with.

4. The dreams, the fears, are his projections. The sickness of them...perhaps his own sadistic sexual desires. For example, When Yoshikawa opens her legs to be burned by her abusive uncle, we see her both as a little girl and as an adult. The tongs are a phallic symbol, and there is a sensuality about the way she reveals herself willingly. Several things "happen" when she is a child, then an adult, then Aoyama's late wife. And remember when the son's girlfriend is giving him a blowjob in the dream, and at first he succumbs to it, but then pulls away all "This is wrong, this is wrong"?

5. His opinions about life (Enjoy the pain, that's life...which comes back to haunt him in the dream sequence....Life is beautiful) contradict, as again do his views on the ideal woman.

I don't think the film is a warning, I think it's a reflection on the role of women in Japanese society and how they are viewed/treated, as well as the concept of the female as the monster put into question.

Who is really the monster here?

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I thought the same thing too for a while, but it doesn't make sense. briefly it seems as if it's all a dream, but then he once again snaps out of the latest hallucination and continues to be tortured.

It doesn't work unless you believe that his awakening toward the end of the film is a dream within a dream.

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His wakening doesn't have to be a dream within a dream, he just woke up, then fell back asleep into the same dream. It's not that uncommon, although I would have a tough time falling back asleep after that kind of a dream! The give away is when he wakes up he immediately grabs at his feet to make sure they're still there.

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+1

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nice read. good stuff, man.

They mostly come out at night; mostly.

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Good insights and interpretations, but I don't think the movie was all a dream. It looked to me that he drifted off into a dream partway through the torture scene, but it looked like he snapped back to reality toward the end. That's at least what it looked like to me.

Movie Reviews: cwyattfilm.blogspot.com

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I think this movie is up to the viewer's own interpretation. Generally there are two theories here:

(1) Everything in the time between Aoyama having first slept at the holiday resort and when he temporarily woke up back at the resort was just a dream as in the OP's views. So the evil Asami and the torture scenes were just his dream.

OR

(2) Everything is real but there are certain scenes which were hallucination/imagination of Aoyama. From the moment Aoyama was drugged, he probably went into some drug/pain induced hallucinations, including hallucinating/dream the scene in which he woke up temporarily back at the hotel with Asami in bed with him and he wasn't hurt. Probably having his foot just chopped off, he was "dreaming" that things were back to being well again.

The key is how your own personal view as to whether the temporarily waking up scene is "real" or actually a "dream". It cannot be a flashback as in that short time of having woken up, he heaved a sigh of relief having checked this left foot - an indication, that in that state - be it a dream state or reality - he was conscious of the torture having happened either as a dream or in reality.

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Thanks for this explanation, seems fairly logical to me.

I'm confused (as with many other people) with when he wakes up in bed after the first torture scene and he struggles to remember proposing marriage to her, then he closes his eyes and it goes back to the final scene.

Was he dreaming the torture scene or the scene in between when he wakes up in bed was just a memory recollection for the audience to see?

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Have you ever had a really vivid nightmare? Woken up, recovered, gone back to sleep and had the nightmare pick up where it left off?

I have. Many, many times.

Thus, I think it's up to the viewer to decide which was the nightmare and which was real. There's actually more evidence to support Nightmare, rather than it being the normal 'over-analysis':

Some things I noticed:

* When he's at the bar, and the guy tells him about the hacked up bodies, he actually seems to see them and react to them. It's cut at the time to appear as if the idea is scaring him, but if you think of it as a dream, this makes more sense.

* When he talks to his very helpful friend he brings all his true fears to light out of character, about being old and washed up.

* Obviously, the most telling one is the bag that appears earlier. He'd have no knowledge of it.

* Second, the line about the garret wire in the dream, cutting through flesh and bone easily. Then it is repeated in the torture scene.

* The repeating of scenes slightly out of time index. He falls. He goes into a 'dream.' He falls again, reality picks back up. This indicates the dream happened not when he fell but in the middle.

* Again, this happens when he re-enters the torture scene. His son gets sprayed from behind. He wakes up (for real, if the theory of nightmare is right) then when he goes back to sleep, it starts over - from the point it left off.

* His behavior when waking up to find she has left him seems groggy, almost drugged. Disoriented and confused, to say the least.

* The fact at the end, she's basically talking to him with a broken neck doesn't seem too likely.

... everything before the sex scene at the hotel drops enough information (the burn marks on her legs, his friends suspension about her, his own ugly behavior, his huge doubts about the age gap, his being attracted to his son's possible girlfriend, etc.) to fuel everything that came later in the nightmare view. There's probably plenty more to point to nightmare, and more to point to reality, but honestly I can't easily swallow "director playing tricks" line of reasoning.

If he's showing us something that the main character cannot see, then indicating the main character knows about it without seeing it (exactly, not similar), I call BS on that one, artistic license be damned. You can't show someone a directly contradictory image, because that doesn't encourage a riddle, but rather, simply make an unsolvable paradox. That's a trick for "looking smarter than you are," and it's a trick I sadly think Lynch is guilty of time to time. However, I really believe they supported a nightmare theory on a lot of levels. I think the above analysis pointing out his terrible treatment of women, unintentional as it might be, is more the commentary than anything else.

Anyway, there's a lot of subtlety here, which I think is more in the foreground than ambivalence. The way they handled the one night stand with the secretary was extremely well done.

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was the 1-night-stand before or during the relationship with Asami? And which facts support either version? thank you

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I agree with many of your points, especially the part about the bag man. When he is in her apartment and the bag's contents are revealed, if it was real, there's no reason he would know about that and it is foreshadowing what is going to happen to him. It isn't as if there were hints dropped throughout the movie to his character that would allow him to come to the realization that she was keeping someone prisoner and his character doesn't really get enough information to create the image before she starts torturing him. Since the torture and the dream image of the bag man line up--the tarp she lays down is a bag like the one he's held in, she chops off his foot, she has the same domineering master attitude--I think it's safe to say that they're either both real or both fake. Since he interacts with the bag man in a dream before he has reason to know the bag man exists, I'm inclined to believe they're both fake. However, the only scene that goes out of line with this are the interspersed shots of her waiting by the phone. Are they also thoughts or worries visualized, a paranoia that has yet to take shape?

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Have you guys ever thought that maybe in the beginning he sees her exactly how he wants to see her as this beautiful and fragile being. However after looking for her after their night at the hotel he seems to get a better grasp of her reality and the environment she has been exposed to. It only really kicks in once he gets poisoned by the drug though and that's why we flash into this dream-like sequence. But perhaps it isn't a dream but him realizing all the hints he missed, how she tells him about how she was abused as a child whereas I'm pretty sure she doesn't say that the first time around when we see them having dinner.

But then again; it's a movie and directors usually just want us to think and come up with these crazy ways of explaining the movie. I mean if they got you to think I guess the movie did what it was supposed to do.

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I would agree with that. When you first seem them dating it seems too good to be true. She's so interested in him and seems so innocent. Then when he gets drugged he starts to remember the truth about those dates. She was abused when she was younger and had some problems.

Obviously, he didn't know where she lived, so he couldn't know about the guy in the bag. I thought is was interesting to show the scenes of her crazy ass behavior the way the director did. I live in Japan now, so it makes me wonder about the quiet women types here. Actually, it kind of scared me being married to a Japanese woman and all. People are crazy here.

Central to Unit 27. Jean-Claude Van Damme's robbing a post office. I need back-up.

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I also think this film is a reflection on misuse of women. Aoyama really objectifies every woman he comes across or speaks about, even his late wife. Aoyama is the real monster here, and Asami some kind of impersonification of vengeance. I think the scene in the bar where Asami tells him she has been abused, was the reality. The altered scene we saw before was the memory of Aoyama, who just wasn't really listening to her: he only saw en heard what he wanted.

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I think the scene in the bar where Asami tells him she has been abused, was the reality. The altered scene we saw before was the memory of Aoyama, who just wasn't really listening to her: he only saw en heard what he wanted.


I hadn't considered this but it seems possible. If I'm remembering right, the initial scenes included several very strange jump cuts while Asami is speaking that are quite jarring. Techniques that wouldn't be out of place for the final half hour of the film, but they seemed very incongruous with the much more placid section they actually occurred in. I wonder if this may have been intended to suggest, as you say, that perhaps Aoyama wasn't fully listening to her, much as he seems clueless about the office woman he apparently had a fling with.

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