On Ride or Die, Japanese Queer Media, and (Trauma) Porn
Input “queer Japanese cinema” or “gay Japanese cinema” into the Google search query and you’ll find a variety of suggestions: Wikipedia lists, film reviews, journal articles, movie trailers and more. Switch out ‘queer/gay’ for ‘lesbian,’ and half the pages that appear are pornography. A disturbing reminder of the intersections of racism, lesbophobia, and misogyny that fetishize Asian lesbians, the results also reflect the excess of explicit material that dominate mainstream representations. Of the four films I focus on in my piece on queer East Asian cinema, only Park Chang-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016) featured a sapphic story––a sexually explicit one at that. Mainstream sapphic representation often veers towards the sexually graphic and much of it exploitatively so. In Japanese cinema, most lesbian representation is made by men (for men) and belongs to the pinku eiga genre, a large category encompassing films with nudity and sexual content. Ride or Die (dir. Ryuichi Hiroki), released just three days ago, seemed at first blush to be a more emotionally nuanced tale. Several reviews promised such nuance, a Variety review even pronouncing it “miles ahead of Japan’s stereotypical LGBTQ films.”
Sources/Further Reading
The film’s trailer sells a tense yet potentially liberating atmosphere: Rei (Kiko Mizuhara) kills Nanae’s (Honami Sato) abusive husband, and the two embark on a road trip, fleeing authority. It’s Thelma and Louise spirit suggested that the film might also carry a cathartic vision of female revenge. But Ride or Die fails to deliver depth or liberation.
The first fifteen minutes crescendos into a horrifically graphic scene. Rei meets Nanae’s husband at a bar, prompting him to invite her over to his house. The camera doesn’t shy away from their naked bodies as they begin to have sex, nor does it look away when Rei stabs him in his carotid artery and slits his throat. Blood gushes out of him, raining down on her. As if the trauma of murdering him wasn’t enough, Rei reveals later that it was her first time having sex with a man. Ride or Die closely follows the film’s source material, manga Gunjō, which is authored by Ching Nakamura, herself a lesbian woman. The manga includes such graphic scenes; some may argue that the manga––and thus the film––is above critique because it explores, through the metaphor of hetero sex, the trauma lesbian women experience. Other critics seem to concur, arguing that such displays of nudity and female conniving actually subvert Japanese industry expectations. Max Gao writes for NBC news:
“In order to capture the spirit of the manga series, the film features [] extremely graphic scenes…Given the more conservative history of Japanese cinema, ‘Ride or Die’ is a far cry from the stereotypical LGBTQ films that have graced the big screen in the past.”
By ‘spirit,’ Gao refers to Gunjō’s trauma-porn heaviness, which the film captures faithfully. In Variety, Maggie Lee describes Rei’s seduction of Nanae’s husband as “a subversive variation on the femme fatale mode,” and the film’s depiction of lesbian love as untethered to Japanese stereotypes. The perceived radicality of Ride or Die may very well be true, as the film stars high-profile actress Kiko Mizuhara, one of Japan’s most famous stars, and Honami Satō, drummer of well-known band Gesu no Kiwami Otome. For the two of them to appear in an explicitly lesbian film and perform in the nude is novel.
Arguably the most public facing queer representation in Japan can be found in Boy’s Love (also known as yaoi or BL), a genre of homoerotic media geared for female consumption. BL media has been criticized as an unproductive fetishistic space and celebrated as a space for women to explore sexuality in the absence of heteronormativity and the hyper-sexualization of their own bodies. Yaoi’s female counterpart, yuri––to which the manga Gunjō belongs––is neither female or male-centric, with a more divided audience. Unlike Boy’s Love, yuri features women who do not often engage with each other sexually. There are exceptions like Gunjō, but predominant representations might be more closely aligned with homosociality than homosexuality. In this context, Ride or Die is radical––its embrace of lesbian sexuality allows gay women to see themselves represented in such a way.
Rei and Nanae engage in an eight-minute long sex scene. Mizuhara, who plays Rei, suggested hiring an intimacy coordinator––a choice which might have afforded their scene less superficiality. In the absence of awkward male-gaze porn-like images, their intimate moment is rendered with care. Regardless, I find it hard to digest suggestions that the film’s sexual explicitness is liberating.
As the two of them begin to engage in sex, Rei tells Nanae: “It must be nice for men. They can put something inside women. My fingers can’t fill you up.” Female written script notwithstanding, the lesbophobia of such a statement cages their intimacy into a heteronormative matrix. Rei seems to only be pleasured by sex with Nanae, but she engages in hetero sex twice: first with Nanae’s husband and then with a stranger––both out of an impulse to self-harm. In a media landscape filled to the brim with such twisted trauma-porn (and literal porn), watching the endless mental and physical torture of Rei is exhausting.
Queer films shouldn’t have to be liberating. Nor do they need to be sex-less or positive. But Ride or Die, like too many lesbian films, exploits trauma. Discussing the film, Mizuhara says: “There are different types of LGBTQ stories in film that focus on the struggles, but this film is a little different, because the shape of the love that they’re able to create in the end is their own.” Ride or Die fluctuates between deeply traumatic emotional lesions to bubbles of happiness. Rei murders Nanae’s husband. Then the two of them escape together, their manic laughter soundtracked by warm jazz, the twinkling Tokyo night surrounding them. Rei showers, the water dripping off her body red with blood. Nanae joins her, and Rei crumbles, the weight of her violence bearing down. Then we are back on the road, driving over calm ocean waters, a soft country song playing. The transitions between tense toxicity to music-video-like sequences doesn’t shift the film’s focus away from struggle, as Mizuhara might suggest. The shape of their love is plastic, its exterior shiny and new but its contents empty and fake.
*Ride or Die is streaming on Netflix.
