All About Ether: Media and Melancholy in Shunji Iwai's Lily Chou-Chou
Many of the films of Shunji Iwai, one of the foremost indie directors of the 1990s, centre on fantasies of escape. A mental asylum in Picnic (1994), poverty and prostitution in Swallowtail Butterfly (1996), a bad relationship and unemployment in A Bride for Rip Van Winkle (2016), his characters want to escape a grim or untenable everyday reality through a movement out and often at the same time, up (a movement of ascension which lends his films, like his close peer Hideaki Anno, a religious feel).
His 2001 All About Lily Chou-Chou is no exception, and it joins the long canon of films about escaping the drudgery and raw cruelty of adolescence. This film, however, is all about media: its characters plug in to get out. More firmly entrenched in the real world than his previous films, Lily Chou-Chou focuses on crafting a realistic chatroom universe which runs parallel to the film itself, with a built-in metaphysics drawn from both religious philosophy and the ecstasies of fan culture. Its characters take refuge from intense school bullying, sexual violence, humiliation and a feeling of impotence in this quote-unquote “Ether”, a collaboratively constructed media space which, at once womb-like, paradisiacal and addictive, blurs the boundaries between escaping, in, out, up and down.
All About Lily Chou-Chou is a non-linear narrative centring on two junior high-school aged boys, Yuichi and Shusuke, and their mutual love for the pop-star Lily Chou-Chou which is rehearsed via their chatroom alter egos (philia and blue-cat) respectively. This theory of the Ether seems to have generated from Lily herself: with song titles such as “resonance” and “glide”, Lily is said to write music “from the Ether,” describing her own albums as composed of different coloured ether, such as “blue ether” (Breathing) and “red ether” (Erotic). Accordingly, her fans also exist within this Ether and are sustained by her music like oxygen. Part of the film’s diegesis is dedicated to textual exchanges between members of the chatroom, where statements such as, “For me only Lily is real. For me, only Ether is the proof I’m alive,” evince not only the devotional nature of communication between Lily fans, but give clues as to the ontology of the Ether itself. “In ancient times, ether was a catalyst for light,” one user writes. “But Lily’s Ether is a catalyst for emotion.” For Shusuke and Yuichi, to exist in the Ether - that is, to listen to Lily’s music and to immerse oneself in the devotional online space of the chatroom - is to experience a kind of ambient communion with others for which their school lives offer them only few clumsily orchestrated opportunities. Even as the teenagers make mistakes and decisions that painfully concretise their individual identities in the real world, they are able to return to and find comfort in Lily’s immersive universe, dissolving their differences to become a single voice praising Lily.
When exploring the escapist potential of the Ether for two protagonists of Lily Chou Chou, it may be important to consider the shift in post-bubble Japan in the role of technology in people’s everyday lives, as it moved away from its role as the portal to the world-out-there as in the classic idea of television, and towards the maintenance of controlled, immersive personal environments. This is exemplified by recreational mood regulation technologies such as ambient background video (explored by Paul Roquet in his Ambient Media), and crucially for Lily, the Walkman mobile music-listening device, which for the “Lilyphile,” essentially wraps its user in a portable bubble of Ether. All the major characters of Lily Chou-Chou use Walkmans, and are often reluctant to share their music with others. A repeated shot in the film is of Yuichi listening to his Walkman silhouetted against the stark green of the rice fields among which he lives. He is isolated and disenfranchised within his rural environment, yet finds a sense of connection through plugging in to the transcendental Ether.
While these technologies allow their users to combat their loneliness and take refuge from external stressors, they ultimately cause dependency and further isolation as users become cut off from physical reality and unable to independently maintain their sense of emotional homeostasis. While in reality the internet does function as a portal to the world-out-there, in Lily Chou-Chou, it is little more than one of these mood-regulation technologies. Its users log on not to communicate or connect with the real world, but to experience an ambient, devotional togetherness. The Ether is not a medium in the strict sense but an atmosphere or environment; transmitting not information but affective presence.
One of the key media discourses of the early 2000s in Japan was Hiroki Azuma’s Doubutsuka suru Posutomodaan, translated into English as Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Published the same year as Lily Chou-Chou’s release, it presented a vision of the exemplary postmodern subject as the otaku, someone who, like Lily’s characters, was able to more fully actualise their sense of identity online in relation to the ‘database’ of the media-mix of popular culture. Tom Looser paraphrases Azuma, describing the otaku’s tendency to re-mix the web of reference points of the pop-culture database to “fully create their own worlds in the act of consumption.” Essentially, Azuma’s otaku gains a level of self-mastery in the face of the market that attempts to exploit them by becoming a curator and connoisseur of pop cultural material. In contrast, Iwai’s Lilyphiles present a different vision of fan culture, namely in their rejection of self-mastery and contrasting impulse towards self-dissolution. While Lilyphiles also retreat into media worlds, they essentially remain in a submissive power relation to it, and the succour they draw from it is based in communion (in the sense of something both shared and imbibed) rather than self-reflexive identity as a producer. Lilyphiles retreat into and are propped up by Lily: essentially drifters, they are like sea creatures sustained by ambient nutrients.
In this way, Lily Chou-Chou the pop star is essentially a cultural technology. Her physical form is never really shown in detail on screen; she is a voice, a name, a phantasmatic image on a screen beamed from a stadium to stragglers waiting outside, and she embodies the dream of restoring to disillusioned youth a sense of lost wholeness. Some may say the vision of the state education system presented by Lily Chou-Chou is nostalgic if cruel, but frankly, I find it is presented in a way that magnifies its fascistic aspects. The hierarchies and latent militarism of the after-school kendo club, singing to the flag at the opening ceremony, the inter-class choral competition: all of these rites of togetherness only mask the anger and violence which rifts the relationships between the classmates. Technologies like Lily, and her womb-like Ether-bubble, swoop into this world where tradition no longer suffices. Such technologies can be said to repair not only a generic sense of societal fracture, but to make a historical generalisation, a sense of wholeness that was lost with the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble in the early 1990s for the subsequent decade’s generation of infamously troubled youth. Economic crisis combined with an apocalyptic nihilism surrounding the turn of the millennium meant young people were less oriented towards a meaningful future and prone to seek means to escape the flow of time. blue-cat remarks in the chatroom that the world didn’t end in 1999 as Nostradamus predicted, it would have been better if he had died then anyway.
Nevertheless, Lily Chou-Chou’s most hopeful passage is one in which the boys, in their first summer of junior high school and still friends before they begin to bully, exploit and harm one another, steal some money and travel to Okinawa. Okinawa, essentially a colonial territory of Japan since the late nineteenth century, is presented as a place of earthy reality which, although possessing residues of dreaminess, is ultimately contrasted with the immaterial Ether. The boys spend their trip swimming on lush beaches with long-haired female guides, eating, drinking and playing games. At one point, a shijar fish jumps out of the water onto one of the boys, and the alterity of this strange animal out of its element cuts through the touristic image of Okinawa like a missive from the traumatic Real. A fellow member of the tour group is gored after being hit by a car. And Shusuke, while floating dreamily in the Ether-like space of the sea, almost drowns, bringing the trip to a close. It is clear that the laws of the Ether do not apply here, and Okinawa is a fantasy that one cannot simply dissolve into.
The significance of this Okinawan episode remains ambiguous in relation to the thematics of repair that define the film, however. Okinawa at once seems like a cipher for a general sense of Otherness which mainland Japan and the conventional mode of life it presents is unable to accommodate; and at the same time, in both the memory of the boys (nostalgic for their summer trip) and for national memory (nostalgia for the imperial times of which it is the last remaining outpost), Okinawa comes to figure a loss of something (innocence, empire) which each have been unable to hold on to, and the loss of which is transformed into a deeply felt sense of melancholy. In other words, the imperial mindset, characterised by a sense of manufactured ignorance, becomes untenable for the post-colonial subject. The awakening of this traumatic consciousness necessitates the invention of anaesthetic technologies, of which Lily’s Ether-apparatus is just one.
Iwai’s major observation in Lily Chou-Chou is the tendency among his characters to escape inwards, through retreat, rather than outwards, by trying to change their circumstances. This conclusion is hardly new to any film about teenage life. Yet it also reflects the socio-historical dilemma of a modern culture, formed by globalising or expansionist ideologies, suddenly faced with their abilities to move outwards on the wane. The full brunt of this question bears on Iwai’s millennial youth, reflected in the violence and frustration of their lived experience. They are victims of society’s lack of interest in its own future, which manifests in a refusal to invest in its younger generation, who without material resources or community infrastructure, are expected to sustain themselves on Ether. Their retreat into media is a survival strategy about which it is ultimately hard to moralise.