Cinematic Resonance with the "Ordinary"

When mentioning Japanese films, those in the know often come up with a few titles of horror ("the Ring" being the most well-known to a Western audience), cheesy tales of lost love (the list of tear-jerkers in this category goes on and on), or gruesome social critiques that evokes thoughts through exaggerations ("the Suicide Club" is a highly suggested film in this genre).  In all three, the ability to use an effective script for storytelling, often with limited budgets common for Japan's relatively small domestic market, is a key for success.

But often, due to the audience's inherent bias and preset expectations, the storytelling does not go well.  There will be misunderstandings of the movie's intentions and main messages.  As storytelling, in itself, remains lengthy and monotonous, a confused audience would find a story boring.  While this is true of any film in any country, it is especially commonplace in Japanese ones, where the dichotomy of good and evil is deliberately not apparent.  Only with some historical dramas of war and revenge can Japanese films get to Hollywood-level clear-cut heroism on screen.  

One such ambiguous film is "The Kirishima Thing," a two-hour-long story of how different, unrelated characters in the same local high school react when one of the most popular student of the school goes missing.  The film is devoid of much action.  The main character never shows up on screen, and indeed never found in the course of the film.  It is simply a documentation of mundane lives of students as they are affected by one missing person.  Many viewers' feedback to the film has been a rather angry "what's the point of watching this?!"  

Going through the film without much thinking, one would easily agree with such assessment.  But when one start putting oneself in the shoes of the characters in the film, the stories start getting to them.  For instance, the film places great emphasis on the social hierarchy of students based on their extracurricular activities.  Those who play sports are at the top, while those doing arts and music are at the bottom.  The ill-treatment of those on the top toward those on the bottom partially explains the prevalence of bullying in Japanese schools.

However, the extracurricular activities also reflect real passion of participants.  While many of those in sports do end up playing professionally, even those in arts and music find solace in those activities (and a like-minded community) when they are ill-treated by others.  This passion for a certain activity is one that the audience will find great resonance.  Furthermore, the film portrays those without extracurricular activities, and as such, devoid of passion for any particular interest.  The film devotes significant lengths to how these "floaters" react to the teenage passion toward sports, arts, and music.

This is the point that the author felt strongly as well.  As someone who dabbed a little into literally everything back in school (ranging from sports, to literature, to art, to science), the author never had that one consistent interest to be continued for years on end.  Thus, like the film's "floaters," he felt a spate of incomprehension and envy toward people who steadfastly specialize in one activity despite often being knowingly bad at it.  It was quite mesmerizing to see people bury their heads in activities that they know will not lead to success in life or noteworthy accomplishments.  

Perhaps this is the concept of "ordinary" that the author has never known, and indeed, would have wished he did.  Ordinary people learn to find their specific places in society, limiting their curiosities to specific directions, and let those specific directions define them as human beings.  They become whole by becoming a piece that fits in the overall puzzle that is society, so to speak.  It is monotonous but reassuring, polar-opposite to the author's last few years of pursuit to understand a little of everything and everywhere.  

At the end of "the Kirishima Thing," there is a scene where the "floater" listens to a passionate monologue from a film-making student on why he does what he does, despite knowing that he will not become a movie director one day.  As the film-making student heatedly went about finding similarities between his work and the masters', the "floater" quietly let tears stream down his face.  It was not sadness, nor joy, but a shame of internal emptiness.  An inability to find one's calling.  To the author, and undoubtedly many others, this is a well-known feeling in daily lives of the "ordinary."