ABSTRACT
The taste of Sukiyaki If we regard the Thai Western Tears of the Black Tiger as one part of the wider process of Occidentalism in Asian Cinema, the Japanese Western Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) continues this same process in even more exaggerated fashion. The baroque nature of Miike Takashi’s film can be attributed in part to the distribution hype in the West of labelling many Japanese films either as ‘extreme’ or ‘cult’ (see Oliver Dew 2007), with most of Miike’s films fitting into this kind of labelling. There is a sense that in making his film, Miike may be actively cultivating such audience reception and crafting his Western in such a way that his audience will immediately enjoy it as a cult film. Tony Williams has called Miike a populist filmmaker whose films are regarded ‘both at home and abroad as a director of “bad taste” films far removed from the art cinema circuit of his more distinguished predecessors such as Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu’ (Williams 2004, 55). As a cult film director, Miike deliberately courts ‘cinematic outrage’ in order to expand and destroy ‘the former certainties of that once dominant classical Japanese canonical cinema’ (Williams 2004, 55). This chapter will examine the way in which a part of this Japanese canonical cinema is expanded or destroyed in Sukiyaki Western Django. The main concern, however, is with Miike’s method of Occidentalism in which he infuses the Western into Asian Cinema. Coming after Tears of the Black Tiger, the film is a continuance of the effort of Asian filmmakers to recognise the Western as an inherent part of one’s tradition of genre cinema. Indeed, we may see Sukiyaki Western Django as perpetuating and consolidating a Western wave in Asian cinema. In the next two chapters we will discuss the South Korean Western The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008) and the Chinese Western Let the Bullets Fly (2010), respectively. These films, together with Tears of the Black Tiger and Sukiyaki Western Django, constitute an Asian Western cycle in the new millennium that has reinvigorated the genre as a whole. They may best be identified as Asian Post-Westerns inasmuch as they are Asian models of the genre – but mainly that they are ‘ambivalent unto neurosis’, to use J. Hoberman’s words from his definition of Post-Westerns (Hoberman 2003, 104). All four films seem to me to be genuinely neurotic in their ambivalence-and Sukiyaki Western Django is perhaps the most neurotic of them all.
