In the Flesh: Beyond Outrage

What if you stripped all the emotion out of, say, The Godfather 2? What if you cut all the scenes of home life, all the malaprops and blunders and arguments from The Sopranos? In a lot of ways it feels like Beyond Outrage is the Yakuza movie Takeshi Kitano has been working toward making for the last thirty years, the culmination of his project of slowly peeling the gangster film genre apart until only its most unromantic elements are left. We’re far away from the slice-of-life fatalism of Hana-bi or the wry romantic sorrow of Sonatine here, though elements of both films endure in this one. The flat, cold presentation of gun violence. The intentionally emotionally opaque characters. What’s missing is any relief from the drudgery of endless cycles of revenge carried out by gangsters at the behest of cops who are ethically and morally indistinguishable from their supposed enemies. It all unfolds with painstaking slowness in a series of board rooms and lounges, schemes becoming fears becoming orders with the deliberate pace of a tortoise crossing a busy street. It’s just one office drone screwing over another.

When the ingratiatingly pleasant Detective Kataoka (Fumiyo Kohinata) gets wind of reforms headed his way through the department’s anti-corruption task force, his response is to instigate a mob war between the increasingly legitimate and profit-driven Sanno-kai and their Western rivals, the Hanabishi-kai. When it fails to take hold, he kick-starts proceedings by springing Otomo (Takeshi Kitano) from his prison sentence and hooking him up with his former enemy and attempted assassin, Kimura (Hideo Nakano), guiding the two into a bloody struggle against the Sanno-kai with the quiet backing of the Hanabishi. We never really meet most of the people killed in this conflict. Only Ishihara (Ryo Kase), Otomo’s one-time second in command, and Sanno-kai chairman Kato (Tomokazu Miura), who killed his old boss and seized his job at the end of Outrage, merit mention. Fittingly, it’s their quietly jaw-dropping death scenes that provide the clearest symbolic evidence for what Kitano is trying to say here. 

When Otomo gets his hands on Ishihara, he ties the traitor to a chair and leaves him with his head smack in the strike zone of one of Kimura’s pitching machines. Like the manufactured violence which unceasingly consumes generation after generation of Yakuza, the machine pummels Ishihara’s skull without reason or remorse, rocking his head back at sickening angles with each impact. It’s an open question when and if we even see the man die. There’s no moment of final, fatal contact, it’s all just one long smear of mindless violence, impact after impact crushing bone, bruising flesh, sending random nerve signals through Ishihara’s battered body. Then there’s Kato, ousted from his own organization and sunk from the heights of the criminal underworld to the flashing lights and mechanical chittering of a pachinko parlor where he sits staring at a betting machine with all the verve of a cancer patient, his face slack, his body slumped. When Otomo sits down beside him and knifes him viciously in the lung and liver, it almost seems like a mercy. Then his old rival guides Kato’s head to rest gently in the pachinko machine’s maw, surrounded by a halo of blinking blue lights as he gasps his last, too weak even to cry out or stand. We can’t see his expression. He can’t form any words. It’s not even a moral message so much as it is an aesthetic one, a single brutal expression of the ontological emptiness of this kind of life, the cheap promises and unthinking viciousness that keep the wheels turning and the lights blinking, that entice us like insects to cluster close around our own destruction, to press our bodies up against it until nothing remains of our humanity.