In the Flesh: Helter Skelter

The supermodel Liliko (Erika Sawajiri) sits on a ledge, legs parted, hair thrown in a black river over one bare shoulder. Behind her, a mural depicting an enormous technicolor set of lips smiles from the wall as before her, Hada (Shinobu Terajima) approaches in a nervous crouch to slip between her thighs and eat her out. Mouths within mouths, lips within lips; but who’s eating whom, really? Mutual parasitism seethes beneath the skin of every frame of Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter, a nastily adventurous adaptation of Kyoko Okazaki’s manga of the same name. Liliko feeds off the adulation of her fans while fucking and abusing her adoring staff and even their romantic partners, if they catch her eye, and in turn her fans feed gleefully on her. At first she’s an idol, an unattainable symbol of aspirational femininity; then, once the secret of her radical plastic surgery is out, she’s dinner. In an outrageous montage set to, of all things, Pachelbel’s Canon, hordes of teenage girls giggle over tabloid pictures of a fat pre-surgical Liliko, discussing her like a piece of meat that’s started to putrefy.

The riotous pace and color of Ninagawa’s film goes a long way toward selling the illusion that these glimpses of cannibalistic pop cultural excess are an unending bombardment, a social machine so huge and fast-moving that no single life can withstand it, let alone sate its appetite. The vivid reds and pinks of Liliko’s apartment resemble nothing so much as organ tissue, a digestive system rendering her into slurry as she rages against the idea of her own obsolescence, obsessing over her looks and the skin necrosis brought on by her radical procedures. Watching Sawajiri gaze with a complex and ever-shifting combination of anxiety, narcissistic absorption, and covetousness at her own reflection over the course of the film creates the impression that Liliko and her body are separate entities joined by a tissue of obsessive fixation, a living delusion sustained by beauty and the fleeting interest of the public.

Liliko herself functions as a kind of mirror, too. Her vacuity as a person means she’s always watching others to see how they feel about her, what her appearance awakens in them. Are they jealous of her looks? Do they wish they could touch her? Fuck her? Are they wondering what she sees when she looks at them? Her fame is an intangible field which slides wetly over every room she enters, revealing the hidden forms of resentment and desire. When it begins to fade, she loses her ability to make sense of the world, her mind and body breaking down in tandem during wild hallucinogenic breaks with reality. Eyes and lips appear in dull, inanimate matter. The world sees her. It parts its lips to feed. She has lost control over how she’s perceived, how her image is given like the blood and flesh of Christ to an adoring public to reassert the fact of her existence. Now the eyes are everywhere. Now the mouths won’t accept mere wafers or a sip of cheap red wine. A transubstantiation more final and more wretched is at hand.