Urusei Yatsura, No. 4 - Urusei Yatsura 4: Lum the Forever (1986)

I’ve been completely unprepared for Urusei Yatsura. I’d expected this franchise to work like many a film series from a TV show from a manga: with one-off, easy adventures with a consistent tone. Part One, Only You, seemed to confirm so much, which is why Beautiful Dreamer is so flabbergasting, a pretentious visual poem that just happens to be in the Urusei universe. Then Remember My Love has the appearance of a return to relative sanity, only for new director Kazuo Yamazaki (or maybe I should say Yamazaki Kazuo) to churn out Part Four, Lum the Forever, and answer the alluring siren call of incomprehensibility.

Really, there seems to be no greater logic dictating how one theatrical Urusei Yatsura release follows another. It’s almost as though Kitty Films, the animation studio tasked with adapting Rumiko Takahashi’s manga to television, saw these films as an outlet for freer artistic expression. I gather, from what little I know of the workings of the Japanese animation industry, that this is likely. As assumed in regards to Crayon Shin-chan, anime media franchises come about from manga, then spread into all other arenas: TV, film, video games, videos, merchandise, food. An animation studio is then defined by a franchise to a greater extent than even, say, Disney has been by the Mouse. (On the other hand...I may be completely wrong about this.) So you’ve suddenly got a coterie of creative individuals, and the only stories they’re allowed to tell are the further misadventures of Ataru and Lum, two preset characters strictly limited by Takahashi’s love-centric alien premise.


The TV show is beholden to the strictures of the manga, but the movies are where these guys can run rampant. So we get a massive tonal dissonance between entries, even when the same writer/director is involved, because of a push-and-pull between Takahashi, Yamazaki, formerly Mamoru Oshii, and other strong-willed creative types. This barely resembles a consistent franchise as we know it (I’m speaking solely of the movies), and that’s even with Japan’s culture of extreme pop fanaticism. Japanese fan devotion prospers to an ungodly level, so following Urusei Yatsura becomes Serious Business. Thus fans expect the same comforting story they’ve pre-devoted themselves too, even while creators struggle to escape those confines. And the franchise oscillates organically in a most atypical manner.


So there’s Lum the Forever, which came with a warning as perhaps the most challenging and off-putting of the entire franchise – and that’s with Beautiful Dreamer having already embraced total pseudo-philosophical surrealism as its raison d’etre. Hell, even the Netflix sleeve advises one must ignore Forever’s plotline to get any real enjoyment out of it.

Given these misgivings, Lum the Forever doesn’t seem particularly divisive at the outset (oh how naïve I was!). At the very least – and this goes for the film’s entirely, thanks be to Buddha – the characters are fully realized, and their personalities dictate the film’s texture. This alone is evidence we’re not watching one of Oshii’s efforts. And the scenario is simple enough…at first.

Nonetheless, again we seem to have abandoned the sci-fi-comedy-romance olla podrida of Takahashi’s original. Now, rather, the premise (once an involved tale of extraterrestrial soap operatics and romantic entanglements) can be reduced as follows: A group of high schoolers endures hijinks. That’s simple enough; it lets auteur Yamazuki go in whatever direction he wishes. In Lum the Forever, that direction is to have his cast make a movie, a fantastical bit of exploitation which seems equal parts Japanese mythology and The Evil Dead. I’d actually dearly love to see such a thing. As it is, the evident reality of Lum the Forever frequently gives way to extended scenes from this in-movie movie, played out in whole. Oh, and there’s parallels in there, as a feudal village’s Oni Princess spirit is a stand-in for Lum herself, all perfect beauty and superpowers. For grounding, basically assume that Ataru = Ash.


Here I find myself thinking, “Hey, this isn’t that complex!” I mean, it’s a meta movie! Those things can be obtuse, sure, but when you get a sense for one, the others all fall out regularly enough. And so, in the group’s unnamed horror movie a cherry tree is cut down. For want of a proper effects budget, the animated filmmakers depict this by themselves cutting down a cherry tree – the ancient Tarōzakura, guardian spirit of Tomobiki (their town). And so when strange events start occurring in the real world, paralleling the movie, well, we can always fall back upon the old “life imitates art, and vice versa” answer for all our strangeness.

Okay, I thought, maybe the present strangeness is only questioned because it’s not a specifically Japanese form of insanity – though have no doubt, as an anime fantasy, there’s still the baseline pile of space alien babes (now totally divorced from their leopard bikinis, curse it all!), anthropomorphic demon monsters, et cetera, all stuff we’re just supposed to assume. (I’ve no idea how someone with no grounding in this milieu might handle Lum the Forever.) On top of that oddity is a peculiar style of anti-logic more familiar from Italian horror than Japanese fantasy. Though Forever remains forever just eerie, creepy, never outright horrific, it feels tonally more of a piece with Suspiria or The Beyond or Demons, to randomly name three of Italy’s more coherent examples of not giving a shit.


Something like 80% of Lum the Forever glides along, casually odd, making reasonable sense as an experiential bit of low surrealism. There’s no attempt to actually feel like a Urusei Yatsura movie, apart from characters acting like themselves, but with only one of four films so far feeling like its own franchise, perhaps this is more regular than I give it credit. Tomobiki falls into a deathless winter, malevolent but impartial spirits hover the film’s edges, and Lum loses her electrical powers. This upturns the usual dynamic, as she can now no longer torment Ataru whenever he, her lover, attempts to seduce others. Also, Lum cannot hover as fast as she once could, and her horns vanish – all these details are the assumed normalcies of the franchise, which is why it’s hard to pinpoint new strangeness vs. old.

So far so good. I’ve got a pretty decent handle on Lum the Forever (apart from that totally out-of-place demonstrative pronoun).


Then the Third Act rears its incomprehensible head. Scenes follow scenes with progressively less obviousness. From what they present, it seems dreams are to blame. The dead cherry tree has reformed into a lake crater, why not, and is imparting the residents of Tomobiki with waking, literal manifestations of their collective subconscious – and it’s never clear just whom is getting brain-raped at any given time.

Okay, so what’s the big deal? Beautiful Dreamer invoked dreams as its explain-away to justify an entire movie’s worth of structureless existentialist babble. How is it Lum the Forever doesn’t become confusing until dreams enter the picture? Well, part of it is a steady accumulation of strangeness: Like a heavy locomotive slowly building up momentum, Forever remains normal for so long, then dives headfirst into craziness with such increasing abandon, it’s that much more disconcerting. We’re back in Chien Andalou territory here, sans the surer hand of an Oshii to fashion visual motifs to string us along. The final ten minutes honestly feel as though each and every animator, writer, storyboarder and voice artist was separately trying to out-create the other. There are individual shots filled to the brim with Lovecraftian tentacle gods, giant sentient raccoons, apocalyptic nuclear terror, ancient uteruses and sheer hallucination. Then come the next shot, and none of that is remotely pertinent any more.


There’s also the question of what it all means. Beautiful Dreamer, for its motions towards profundity, boils down to little more than a college freshman’s poetry. “We’re, like, totally weak beings in an unknowable false universe, man,” it says. “What is reality?” all that shit. The telling is complex and convoluted, but the end result is the very definition of shallow soulfulness.

Then there’s Lum the Forever. While Beautiful Dreamer’s end is what cements it as somehow knowable, this one just keeps on out-weirding itself. It becomes like a Cremaster movie, or some other such distant work of a solo artist working in his own idiom, without a roadmap for our edification. In those Cremaster movies, the viewer is expected prior to viewing to have an encyclopedic understanding of Masonic imagery, the history of Mormonism, the biology of bees, the science of glaciers, a specific 1970s murder, and dozens of other arcane cryptic effluvia. The finale of Lum the Forever seems constructed around a similar mystery, another Lynchian mind puzzle which boils down to little in the end. It all feels like the idealized confusion one connects with Mulholland Dr., and it’s equally impenetrable.

For all that, certain critics and prognosticators, intent upon discovering the meaning embedded within (because there’s just gotta be some brilliant post-human conclusion to all this, for why else couch a family anime epic in arcana), have their conclusions. Yamazaki just means to critique Lum’s cult of perfection, and through it criticize anime fans in general.

Excuse me for saying this, but Only You did that too, and 1,000,000x more clearly!


It helps that Part One is arguably some clear cut satire. It seems the whole of “Urusei Yatsura,” dating back to its manga form, is a spoof of prevalent anime attitudes. Lum is a flawless, angelic creation, perfectionism made flesh, not because Takahashi espouses it, but because she’s trying to mock that type. This is the reason for Ataru’s extreme frailty, he is Lum’s object of desire and her foil all at once. In the first movie, whole planets enter into genocidal war for Lum’s benefit – “I am prepared to die for Lum!” – and it’s a joke. A funny one!

The only problem is, fans seemed to take it seriously. Surely “Urusei Yatsura,” the greater franchise, wouldn’t have lasted for over a decade (half that for the TV show alone) if people didn’t take it seriously to some extent. So perhaps Yamazaki, conscious of Only You’s failure to end a mentality, seeks to do it better.

Too bad it’d take a James Joyce scholar to parse that out from Lum the Forever. Though I’ll make a brief effort. Towards the end, there are certain dreams which are easy to identify as a specific minor character’s or another’s. Each relates back to Lum in some way. At any rate, each dream is ultimately about Love, about a perversion of Love, and about some wholly non-hagiographic conception of Lum. That is, under dreams, Lum’s former male admirers grow bored with her…except when they don’t.


These regularized elements start to point, ever so imperceptibly, towards a critique of Lum’s flawlessness, and further to the cult-like devotion of Urusei’s zanier fans. Under this mentality, it’s not surprising that the film’s final moments involve all-out warfare being waged for Lum’s sake. Again, nothing too distinct from Only You. The only difference is, there it was clear! There was a perfectly sensible plot reason for the fighting; here, people just start firing off bazookas and warheads entirely without preplanning or a target or anything. It’s an exaggeration, sure, I guess, but that’s a problem? Only You was already an exaggeration, one many people evidently didn’t get. What’s the point in parodying it with even greater extremes? Poe’s Law dictates that people still aren’t going to be able to figure this out, those people specifically being Urusei Yatsura superfans.

Whatever is going on here, Lum the Forever winds up a fairly frustrating movie. It again represents the film creators’ complete disinterest in furthering the fundamental franchise concept – I now fully expect something unexpected from the coming entries. At least this one, unlike Beautiful Dreamer, is made with a functional understanding of the characters. Still, I suppose I’d’ve been better off simply following Netflix’s advice (aka the “MST3K” mantra), and just letting the strangeness wash over me without critique.

Urusei Yatsura, No. 4 - Urusei Yatsura 4: Lum the Forever (1986)

I’ve been completely unprepared for Urusei Yatsura. I’d expected this franchise to work like many a film series from a TV show from a manga: with one-off, easy adventures with a consistent tone. Part One, Only You, seemed to confirm so much, which is why Beautiful Dreamer is so flabbergasting, a pretentious visual poem that just happens to be in the Urusei universe. Then Remember My Love has the appearance of a return to relative sanity, only for new director Kazuo Yamazaki (or maybe I should say Yamazaki Kazuo) to churn out Part Four, Lum the Forever, and answer the alluring siren call of incomprehensibility.

Really, there seems to be no greater logic dictating how one theatrical Urusei Yatsura release follows another. It’s almost as though Kitty Films, the animation studio tasked with adapting Rumiko Takahashi’s manga to television, saw these films as an outlet for freer artistic expression. I gather, from what little I know of the workings of the Japanese animation industry, that this is likely. As assumed in regards to Crayon Shin-chan, anime media franchises come about from manga, then spread into all other arenas: TV, film, video games, videos, merchandise, food. An animation studio is then defined by a franchise to a greater extent than even, say, Disney has been by the Mouse. (On the other hand...I may be completely wrong about this.) So you’ve suddenly got a coterie of creative individuals, and the only stories they’re allowed to tell are the further misadventures of Ataru and Lum, two preset characters strictly limited by Takahashi’s love-centric alien premise.


The TV show is beholden to the strictures of the manga, but the movies are where these guys can run rampant. So we get a massive tonal dissonance between entries, even when the same writer/director is involved, because of a push-and-pull between Takahashi, Yamazaki, formerly Mamoru Oshii, and other strong-willed creative types. This barely resembles a consistent franchise as we know it (I’m speaking solely of the movies), and that’s even with Japan’s culture of extreme pop fanaticism. Japanese fan devotion prospers to an ungodly level, so following Urusei Yatsura becomes Serious Business. Thus fans expect the same comforting story they’ve pre-devoted themselves too, even while creators struggle to escape those confines. And the franchise oscillates organically in a most atypical manner.


So there’s Lum the Forever, which came with a warning as perhaps the most challenging and off-putting of the entire franchise – and that’s with Beautiful Dreamer having already embraced total pseudo-philosophical surrealism as its raison d’etre. Hell, even the Netflix sleeve advises one must ignore Forever’s plotline to get any real enjoyment out of it.

Given these misgivings, Lum the Forever doesn’t seem particularly divisive at the outset (oh how naïve I was!). At the very least – and this goes for the film’s entirely, thanks be to Buddha – the characters are fully realized, and their personalities dictate the film’s texture. This alone is evidence we’re not watching one of Oshii’s efforts. And the scenario is simple enough…at first.

Nonetheless, again we seem to have abandoned the sci-fi-comedy-romance olla podrida of Takahashi’s original. Now, rather, the premise (once an involved tale of extraterrestrial soap operatics and romantic entanglements) can be reduced as follows: A group of high schoolers endures hijinks. That’s simple enough; it lets auteur Yamazuki go in whatever direction he wishes. In Lum the Forever, that direction is to have his cast make a movie, a fantastical bit of exploitation which seems equal parts Japanese mythology and The Evil Dead. I’d actually dearly love to see such a thing. As it is, the evident reality of Lum the Forever frequently gives way to extended scenes from this in-movie movie, played out in whole. Oh, and there’s parallels in there, as a feudal village’s Oni Princess spirit is a stand-in for Lum herself, all perfect beauty and superpowers. For grounding, basically assume that Ataru = Ash.


Here I find myself thinking, “Hey, this isn’t that complex!” I mean, it’s a meta movie! Those things can be obtuse, sure, but when you get a sense for one, the others all fall out regularly enough. And so, in the group’s unnamed horror movie a cherry tree is cut down. For want of a proper effects budget, the animated filmmakers depict this by themselves cutting down a cherry tree – the ancient Tarōzakura, guardian spirit of Tomobiki (their town). And so when strange events start occurring in the real world, paralleling the movie, well, we can always fall back upon the old “life imitates art, and vice versa” answer for all our strangeness.

Okay, I thought, maybe the present strangeness is only questioned because it’s not a specifically Japanese form of insanity – though have no doubt, as an anime fantasy, there’s still the baseline pile of space alien babes (now totally divorced from their leopard bikinis, curse it all!), anthropomorphic demon monsters, et cetera, all stuff we’re just supposed to assume. (I’ve no idea how someone with no grounding in this milieu might handle Lum the Forever.) On top of that oddity is a peculiar style of anti-logic more familiar from Italian horror than Japanese fantasy. Though Forever remains forever just eerie, creepy, never outright horrific, it feels tonally more of a piece with Suspiria or The Beyond or Demons, to randomly name three of Italy’s more coherent examples of not giving a shit.


Something like 80% of Lum the Forever glides along, casually odd, making reasonable sense as an experiential bit of low surrealism. There’s no attempt to actually feel like a Urusei Yatsura movie, apart from characters acting like themselves, but with only one of four films so far feeling like its own franchise, perhaps this is more regular than I give it credit. Tomobiki falls into a deathless winter, malevolent but impartial spirits hover the film’s edges, and Lum loses her electrical powers. This upturns the usual dynamic, as she can now no longer torment Ataru whenever he, her lover, attempts to seduce others. Also, Lum cannot hover as fast as she once could, and her horns vanish – all these details are the assumed normalcies of the franchise, which is why it’s hard to pinpoint new strangeness vs. old.

So far so good. I’ve got a pretty decent handle on Lum the Forever (apart from that totally out-of-place demonstrative pronoun).


Then the Third Act rears its incomprehensible head. Scenes follow scenes with progressively less obviousness. From what they present, it seems dreams are to blame. The dead cherry tree has reformed into a lake crater, why not, and is imparting the residents of Tomobiki with waking, literal manifestations of their collective subconscious – and it’s never clear just whom is getting brain-raped at any given time.

Okay, so what’s the big deal? Beautiful Dreamer invoked dreams as its explain-away to justify an entire movie’s worth of structureless existentialist babble. How is it Lum the Forever doesn’t become confusing until dreams enter the picture? Well, part of it is a steady accumulation of strangeness: Like a heavy locomotive slowly building up momentum, Forever remains normal for so long, then dives headfirst into craziness with such increasing abandon, it’s that much more disconcerting. We’re back in Chien Andalou territory here, sans the surer hand of an Oshii to fashion visual motifs to string us along. The final ten minutes honestly feel as though each and every animator, writer, storyboarder and voice artist was separately trying to out-create the other. There are individual shots filled to the brim with Lovecraftian tentacle gods, giant sentient raccoons, apocalyptic nuclear terror, ancient uteruses and sheer hallucination. Then come the next shot, and none of that is remotely pertinent any more.


There’s also the question of what it all means. Beautiful Dreamer, for its motions towards profundity, boils down to little more than a college freshman’s poetry. “We’re, like, totally weak beings in an unknowable false universe, man,” it says. “What is reality?” all that shit. The telling is complex and convoluted, but the end result is the very definition of shallow soulfulness.

Then there’s Lum the Forever. While Beautiful Dreamer’s end is what cements it as somehow knowable, this one just keeps on out-weirding itself. It becomes like a Cremaster movie, or some other such distant work of a solo artist working in his own idiom, without a roadmap for our edification. In those Cremaster movies, the viewer is expected prior to viewing to have an encyclopedic understanding of Masonic imagery, the history of Mormonism, the biology of bees, the science of glaciers, a specific 1970s murder, and dozens of other arcane cryptic effluvia. The finale of Lum the Forever seems constructed around a similar mystery, another Lynchian mind puzzle which boils down to little in the end. It all feels like the idealized confusion one connects with Mulholland Dr., and it’s equally impenetrable.

For all that, certain critics and prognosticators, intent upon discovering the meaning embedded within (because there’s just gotta be some brilliant post-human conclusion to all this, for why else couch a family anime epic in arcana), have their conclusions. Yamazaki just means to critique Lum’s cult of perfection, and through it criticize anime fans in general.

Excuse me for saying this, but Only You did that too, and 1,000,000x more clearly!


It helps that Part One is arguably some clear cut satire. It seems the whole of “Urusei Yatsura,” dating back to its manga form, is a spoof of prevalent anime attitudes. Lum is a flawless, angelic creation, perfectionism made flesh, not because Takahashi espouses it, but because she’s trying to mock that type. This is the reason for Ataru’s extreme frailty, he is Lum’s object of desire and her foil all at once. In the first movie, whole planets enter into genocidal war for Lum’s benefit – “I am prepared to die for Lum!” – and it’s a joke. A funny one!

The only problem is, fans seemed to take it seriously. Surely “Urusei Yatsura,” the greater franchise, wouldn’t have lasted for over a decade (half that for the TV show alone) if people didn’t take it seriously to some extent. So perhaps Yamazaki, conscious of Only You’s failure to end a mentality, seeks to do it better.

Too bad it’d take a James Joyce scholar to parse that out from Lum the Forever. Though I’ll make a brief effort. Towards the end, there are certain dreams which are easy to identify as a specific minor character’s or another’s. Each relates back to Lum in some way. At any rate, each dream is ultimately about Love, about a perversion of Love, and about some wholly non-hagiographic conception of Lum. That is, under dreams, Lum’s former male admirers grow bored with her…except when they don’t.


These regularized elements start to point, ever so imperceptibly, towards a critique of Lum’s flawlessness, and further to the cult-like devotion of Urusei’s zanier fans. Under this mentality, it’s not surprising that the film’s final moments involve all-out warfare being waged for Lum’s sake. Again, nothing too distinct from Only You. The only difference is, there it was clear! There was a perfectly sensible plot reason for the fighting; here, people just start firing off bazookas and warheads entirely without preplanning or a target or anything. It’s an exaggeration, sure, I guess, but that’s a problem? Only You was already an exaggeration, one many people evidently didn’t get. What’s the point in parodying it with even greater extremes? Poe’s Law dictates that people still aren’t going to be able to figure this out, those people specifically being Urusei Yatsura superfans.

Whatever is going on here, Lum the Forever winds up a fairly frustrating movie. It again represents the film creators’ complete disinterest in furthering the fundamental franchise concept – I now fully expect something unexpected from the coming entries. At least this one, unlike Beautiful Dreamer, is made with a functional understanding of the characters. Still, I suppose I’d’ve been better off simply following Netflix’s advice (aka the “MST3K” mantra), and just letting the strangeness wash over me without critique.

Urusei Yatsura, No. 2 - Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984)

Mamoru Oshii directed Only You, the first film in the Urusei Yatsura franchise. It was not a pleasant experience for him. Despite being a Part One, Only You left Oshii little room for personal creativity, the title already belonging to a wider, fan-driven franchise, with a TV show and manga. It was really Rumiko Takahashi’s show, with Oshii a mere technician to deliver fluid animation of someone else’s heart, soul, tone and creation.

Though he first found professional success as a “Urusei” storyboarder – hence the swift promotion to director – Oshii was not content with the mere joyous, comic product mangaka and fans expected. Nope, Oshii was an Artist, with deep, profound messages to impart upon the world – that is to say, he’s an amateur philosopher with decent access to drugs and Europe’s art house triumphs, your Godards and Fellinis and Melvilles and Bergmen. And so, furthering his own myopia, franchise be damned, Oshii hijacked the Urusei Yatsura brand name, central characters and all, to write and direct Part Two, Beautiful Dreamer.

As an example of how atypical Beautiful Dreamer is, “Urusei” creator Takahashi was barely willing to let Oshii’s screenplay go into production. But obviously it was produced anyway, precisely as Oshii envisioned it – at which point the director was loosed from the series, to develop his own high-falutin’ auteur name with, among other works, Ghost in the Shell and something called Patlabor 2. So we’re dealing with someone who possesses evidently no significant sense of humor, having self-assigned him the task of continuing a satirical anime series in his own particular idiom.


Beautiful Dreamer is therefore a gigantic anomaly in the series, so much so that its U.S. distribution is by a completely different company. Appropriately, then, that U.S. anime fans, without perhaps as much of a vested interest in the overall “Urusei” universe, have responded far better to Beautiful Dreamer than Japanese audiences, who look at it as a part of the larger Urusei Yatsura franchise…and find it wanting. To be dead certain, as a piece of a series, Beautiful Dreamer is a shambles, a sorry excuse for a sequel. The only thing keeping it from being a “sequel in name only” like Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the presence of every single franchise character. Visually, at least, for there’s very little of their personalities as I understand – frankly, there’s hardly any personality at all, as Oshii is notoriously unconcerned with characters or plot as a rule.

Going in, given the overall series premise, you cannot fault me for expecting something vaguely sci-fi-ish, and also comical and romantic. Hell, even dropping some of that, surely the mere sci-fi conceit –invading aliens (this summation completely misrepresents the series, by the way) – ought to provide Oshii with the grist he needs for atmospheric, unfriendly visual poetry.

No, that whole assumption was ill-founded, though damned if I know what Beautiful Dreamer is actually about...No, wait, I do. It’s about dreams, which is kinda obvious now, though it takes the movie a good long while to get there – in fact, it’s nearly two hours of surrealistic expressionism, justified at the end with the ever-tiresome “all just a dream” copout. The process of actually reaching that moment, though, is Kafkaesque, and resolutely refuses to make sense on any level if you don’t already share its attitudes. Beautiful Dreamer comes of a melancholic personality – in other words, it’s clearly not Takahashi’s work – someone who feels Truth can only be gotten to through angst and ennui and lotsa equivocation about reality and humanity and time and, well, things get pretty well unraveled thematically, narratively, you name it, by the time this thing is through.

Though circumstances start out reasonably normal, in that Urusei Yatsura sense of the word, with the familiar characters – Ataru, Lum, Shutaro, Shinobu, Megane, and many, many others I’ve been unable to identify/distinguish – all working together on a project. It’s the day before the big school festival, and they’re creating a coffee shop. Specifically the Third Reich Decadent Coffee Shop – this is the section which makes sense. In a rare, isolated example of an attempt to do something pertinent to a Urusei Yatsura character, it is suggested Ataru’s own “weird tastes” have dictated this Nazi theme – because, sure, the world’s mightiest pervert would also be Hitler-crazed, right? (Ilsa says so.) Cue a slapstick electricity routine involving a WWII tank they’ve shoved in the middle of the school building – again, this is the sane section – slapstick wholly opposed to the Oshii self-pitying approach, but something a Urusei Yatsura cannot be completely expunged of.


Already warning bells are sounding, and not just the random excess of fascist imagery. Scenes are filmed (if that’s the right word in animation) to be just a little surreal, a little experiential. The setting rarely moves away from the high school – the “normal” location in a franchise that has the whole universe as its playground – but even so, Oshii is intent to show our own urban world as a minimalist, alienating wasteland. It’s kind of like the city-bound scenes in The Matrix, and it’s no mistake that the Wachowskis were basically trying to make a live action Oshii movie there – which ignores the fact that Oshii has made live action movies, such as The Red Spectacles, which was apparently his chance to redo the themes first broached here, but beyond the stifling control of the dread Takahashi, still dominating over Oshii’s precious, precious temperament.

I think I got distracted. So things are already sort of noirish, forever pessimistic and dour as if that were the automatic way we see the world – this is what I mean by having to share Oshii’s existentialism to really go along with this movie. I miss the gigantic mallets and space bikinis of Only You.


Then the next day comes, only it’s not the next day, but really the same day, the festival still one day away. That’s right, the strangeness becomes official with a Groundhog Day scenario, the entire “Urusei” roster sequestered together into a closed time loop. They become aware quickly enough, but not with the surface level ease of that Bill Murray classic. Rather, characters – minor characters, at that – gather in a non-Hitler coffee shop like in an Edward Hopper painting, and have debates about déjà vu and whatnot. It’s all so pseudo intellectual, like a college freshman who’s just caught wind of ontological doubt, and it takes it seriously. Add to that visuals which resolutely do not follow together in any evident manner, like tent-dwelling sewer monks and never-ending rain puddles…

There’s so little connect from one moment to another, despite all the subtitled mutual mental masturbation, making any attempt at a standard recap pretty hopeless. More and more Beautiful Dreamer is evidently an Art Film first and foremost, employing just enough Urusei Yatsura imagery to avoid actually being a Criterion competitor. With all the chiming bells and casually unrelated visuals, it’s like a Buñuel film, like Un Chien Andalou, and for you to really get a sense of the strangeness I’m referring to, here is a goodly chunk of that indecipherable movie (which, I must warn, shares Salvador Dalí as a director).


It seems whatever heady idea a character proposes, it comes to reveal itself as true, as their world dismantles slowly into a morass of surrealism. As the days repeat, we move beyond the Sisyphean ordeal of Groundhog Day, through a disconnected panoply of other semi-sci-fi seminal set pieces. The world crumbles into disrepair, and soon everyone not trapped within the time loop is simply gone. It’s a Road Warrior world, our characters sleeping by night in Ataru’s house, and spending their days in the latest alien setting while they further debate the ontological merits of the space-time continuum, or whatever. “Civilization has come to an end.” Thank you, random voice which never appears at any other stage. It’s like every ten minutes we enter a new movie!

And then they’re living in Dark City! Boy, Beautiful Dreamer is best summed up by citing assorted other flicks which quite likely took some inspiration from here. There is no surfeit of imagination in Beautiful Dreamer, but it leaves one feeling so at a loss to actively engage the material. Now it’s just a waiting game to see if anything sensible comes of this stream-of-consciousness lunacy, and if things can reset themselves so that Part Three can make some sense, franchise-wise.


For now the world is a two-kilometer Flat Earth, upon the back of a gigantic flying space turtle, the missing characters granite pillars beneath the turtle further holding the world up. We’re a long way from Groundhog Day here. We’re an ever further way away from Only You, or anything functionally relating to Takahashi’s creation. Honestly, I cannot see just what in Beautiful Dreamer necessitated the use of these specific characters, except that Oshii needed someone to plug into his nightmarish hellscape, and might as well use those pre-existing creations closest at hand. This is somewhat artistically insincere, to be honest, as it doesn’t actually compliment or construct anything from the franchise; it just cannibalizes that franchise in whole, like using Avatar as the basic for hardcore pornography, or something.


With each new mini-premise entirely rewriting the rules, one can see why dreams will have to become the answer. Even then, it’s not that simple. Just who’s dream is this? Not that it matters, perhaps, as personality doesn’t account for anything. There’s the suggestion that characters are juggling dreams, shifting from one’s psychosis to another’s – yup, the germ, or inception if you will, for Inception is in here as well, but just as encased in pretentious muck as anything else.

Then again, we’re just as well in Nightmare on Elm Street territory, not in terms of anything as straightforward as a specific genre, but in the sudden artless introduction of Mujaki, an immaterial dream entity.


The introduction of a new explanation is actually a chance for new wrinkles – it’s all meant to get the audience questioning its own reality, but again, I’m not predisposed to do that (but having once been a teenager, I did once ponder such preposterous ponderances). Nicely enough, no matter how nutbars things get, the visuals are always nice. In fact, skipping back to that Groundhog Day section, it’s visually where Oshii is best able to convey the notion of loops (using a trick similar to those recycled Hanna Barbera backgrounds). His dialogue sure can’t get the job done.

Ignoring however many other strange notions of alienation, loneliness, misery and melancholia Beautiful Dreamer throws at us, if must end with that “all just a dream” ending – an ending which says it was simply Ataru’s own diseased mind (if I’m reading this right – likely not) that conjured up the twenty-six some odd layers of impenetrable brain candy. Thank goodness for that, too, for it means in the greater series story we can reject Beautiful Dreamer without it affecting things one whit.


That’s just what Japanese audiences did, angry like Takahashi herself that this has evidently so little to do with Urusei Yatsura. Hell, Oshii barely even managed to get Lum in her iconic yellow bikini, which is just unforgivable. This is kind of interesting, in franchise terms, as a perfect example of just how far a sequel can stray. It proves that sequels are necessarily products of compromise, between creators and perpetuators and fans. If one of those sides – here, perpetuators – gets too much power, the balance of a sequel – not wholly artistic, but not wholly commercial – falls apart.

Urusei Yatsura, No. 2 - Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984)

Mamoru Oshii directed Only You, the first film in the Urusei Yatsura franchise. It was not a pleasant experience for him. Despite being a Part One, Only You left Oshii little room for personal creativity, the title already belonging to a wider, fan-driven franchise, with a TV show and manga. It was really Rumiko Takahashi’s show, with Oshii a mere technician to deliver fluid animation of someone else’s heart, soul, tone and creation.

Though he first found professional success as a “Urusei” storyboarder – hence the swift promotion to director – Oshii was not content with the mere joyous, comic product mangaka and fans expected. Nope, Oshii was an Artist, with deep, profound messages to impart upon the world – that is to say, he’s an amateur philosopher with decent access to drugs and Europe’s art house triumphs, your Godards and Fellinis and Melvilles and Bergmen. And so, furthering his own myopia, franchise be damned, Oshii hijacked the Urusei Yatsura brand name, central characters and all, to write and direct Part Two, Beautiful Dreamer.

As an example of how atypical Beautiful Dreamer is, “Urusei” creator Takahashi was barely willing to let Oshii’s screenplay go into production. But obviously it was produced anyway, precisely as Oshii envisioned it – at which point the director was loosed from the series, to develop his own high-falutin’ auteur name with, among other works, Ghost in the Shell and something called Patlabor 2. So we’re dealing with someone who possesses evidently no significant sense of humor, having self-assigned him the task of continuing a satirical anime series in his own particular idiom.


Beautiful Dreamer is therefore a gigantic anomaly in the series, so much so that its U.S. distribution is by a completely different company. Appropriately, then, that U.S. anime fans, without perhaps as much of a vested interest in the overall “Urusei” universe, have responded far better to Beautiful Dreamer than Japanese audiences, who look at it as a part of the larger Urusei Yatsura franchise…and find it wanting. To be dead certain, as a piece of a series, Beautiful Dreamer is a shambles, a sorry excuse for a sequel. The only thing keeping it from being a “sequel in name only” like Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the presence of every single franchise character. Visually, at least, for there’s very little of their personalities as I understand – frankly, there’s hardly any personality at all, as Oshii is notoriously unconcerned with characters or plot as a rule.

Going in, given the overall series premise, you cannot fault me for expecting something vaguely sci-fi-ish, and also comical and romantic. Hell, even dropping some of that, surely the mere sci-fi conceit –invading aliens (this summation completely misrepresents the series, by the way) – ought to provide Oshii with the grist he needs for atmospheric, unfriendly visual poetry.

No, that whole assumption was ill-founded, though damned if I know what Beautiful Dreamer is actually about...No, wait, I do. It’s about dreams, which is kinda obvious now, though it takes the movie a good long while to get there – in fact, it’s nearly two hours of surrealistic expressionism, justified at the end with the ever-tiresome “all just a dream” copout. The process of actually reaching that moment, though, is Kafkaesque, and resolutely refuses to make sense on any level if you don’t already share its attitudes. Beautiful Dreamer comes of a melancholic personality – in other words, it’s clearly not Takahashi’s work – someone who feels Truth can only be gotten to through angst and ennui and lotsa equivocation about reality and humanity and time and, well, things get pretty well unraveled thematically, narratively, you name it, by the time this thing is through.

Though circumstances start out reasonably normal, in that Urusei Yatsura sense of the word, with the familiar characters – Ataru, Lum, Shutaro, Shinobu, Megane, and many, many others I’ve been unable to identify/distinguish – all working together on a project. It’s the day before the big school festival, and they’re creating a coffee shop. Specifically the Third Reich Decadent Coffee Shop – this is the section which makes sense. In a rare, isolated example of an attempt to do something pertinent to a Urusei Yatsura character, it is suggested Ataru’s own “weird tastes” have dictated this Nazi theme – because, sure, the world’s mightiest pervert would also be Hitler-crazed, right? (Ilsa says so.) Cue a slapstick electricity routine involving a WWII tank they’ve shoved in the middle of the school building – again, this is the sane section – slapstick wholly opposed to the Oshii self-pitying approach, but something a Urusei Yatsura cannot be completely expunged of.


Already warning bells are sounding, and not just the random excess of fascist imagery. Scenes are filmed (if that’s the right word in animation) to be just a little surreal, a little experiential. The setting rarely moves away from the high school – the “normal” location in a franchise that has the whole universe as its playground – but even so, Oshii is intent to show our own urban world as a minimalist, alienating wasteland. It’s kind of like the city-bound scenes in The Matrix, and it’s no mistake that the Wachowskis were basically trying to make a live action Oshii movie there – which ignores the fact that Oshii has made live action movies, such as The Red Spectacles, which was apparently his chance to redo the themes first broached here, but beyond the stifling control of the dread Takahashi, still dominating over Oshii’s precious, precious temperament.

I think I got distracted. So things are already sort of noirish, forever pessimistic and dour as if that were the automatic way we see the world – this is what I mean by having to share Oshii’s existentialism to really go along with this movie. I miss the gigantic mallets and space bikinis of Only You.


Then the next day comes, only it’s not the next day, but really the same day, the festival still one day away. That’s right, the strangeness becomes official with a Groundhog Day scenario, the entire “Urusei” roster sequestered together into a closed time loop. They become aware quickly enough, but not with the surface level ease of that Bill Murray classic. Rather, characters – minor characters, at that – gather in a non-Hitler coffee shop like in an Edward Hopper painting, and have debates about déjà vu and whatnot. It’s all so pseudo intellectual, like a college freshman who’s just caught wind of ontological doubt, and it takes it seriously. Add to that visuals which resolutely do not follow together in any evident manner, like tent-dwelling sewer monks and never-ending rain puddles…

There’s so little connect from one moment to another, despite all the subtitled mutual mental masturbation, making any attempt at a standard recap pretty hopeless. More and more Beautiful Dreamer is evidently an Art Film first and foremost, employing just enough Urusei Yatsura imagery to avoid actually being a Criterion competitor. With all the chiming bells and casually unrelated visuals, it’s like a Buñuel film, like Un Chien Andalou, and for you to really get a sense of the strangeness I’m referring to, here is a goodly chunk of that indecipherable movie (which, I must warn, shares Salvador Dalí as a director).


It seems whatever heady idea a character proposes, it comes to reveal itself as true, as their world dismantles slowly into a morass of surrealism. As the days repeat, we move beyond the Sisyphean ordeal of Groundhog Day, through a disconnected panoply of other semi-sci-fi seminal set pieces. The world crumbles into disrepair, and soon everyone not trapped within the time loop is simply gone. It’s a Road Warrior world, our characters sleeping by night in Ataru’s house, and spending their days in the latest alien setting while they further debate the ontological merits of the space-time continuum, or whatever. “Civilization has come to an end.” Thank you, random voice which never appears at any other stage. It’s like every ten minutes we enter a new movie!

And then they’re living in Dark City! Boy, Beautiful Dreamer is best summed up by citing assorted other flicks which quite likely took some inspiration from here. There is no surfeit of imagination in Beautiful Dreamer, but it leaves one feeling so at a loss to actively engage the material. Now it’s just a waiting game to see if anything sensible comes of this stream-of-consciousness lunacy, and if things can reset themselves so that Part Three can make some sense, franchise-wise.


For now the world is a two-kilometer Flat Earth, upon the back of a gigantic flying space turtle, the missing characters granite pillars beneath the turtle further holding the world up. We’re a long way from Groundhog Day here. We’re an ever further way away from Only You, or anything functionally relating to Takahashi’s creation. Honestly, I cannot see just what in Beautiful Dreamer necessitated the use of these specific characters, except that Oshii needed someone to plug into his nightmarish hellscape, and might as well use those pre-existing creations closest at hand. This is somewhat artistically insincere, to be honest, as it doesn’t actually compliment or construct anything from the franchise; it just cannibalizes that franchise in whole, like using Avatar as the basic for hardcore pornography, or something.


With each new mini-premise entirely rewriting the rules, one can see why dreams will have to become the answer. Even then, it’s not that simple. Just who’s dream is this? Not that it matters, perhaps, as personality doesn’t account for anything. There’s the suggestion that characters are juggling dreams, shifting from one’s psychosis to another’s – yup, the germ, or inception if you will, for Inception is in here as well, but just as encased in pretentious muck as anything else.

Then again, we’re just as well in Nightmare on Elm Street territory, not in terms of anything as straightforward as a specific genre, but in the sudden artless introduction of Mujaki, an immaterial dream entity.


The introduction of a new explanation is actually a chance for new wrinkles – it’s all meant to get the audience questioning its own reality, but again, I’m not predisposed to do that (but having once been a teenager, I did once ponder such preposterous ponderances). Nicely enough, no matter how nutbars things get, the visuals are always nice. In fact, skipping back to that Groundhog Day section, it’s visually where Oshii is best able to convey the notion of loops (using a trick similar to those recycled Hanna Barbera backgrounds). His dialogue sure can’t get the job done.

Ignoring however many other strange notions of alienation, loneliness, misery and melancholia Beautiful Dreamer throws at us, if must end with that “all just a dream” ending – an ending which says it was simply Ataru’s own diseased mind (if I’m reading this right – likely not) that conjured up the twenty-six some odd layers of impenetrable brain candy. Thank goodness for that, too, for it means in the greater series story we can reject Beautiful Dreamer without it affecting things one whit.


That’s just what Japanese audiences did, angry like Takahashi herself that this has evidently so little to do with Urusei Yatsura. Hell, Oshii barely even managed to get Lum in her iconic yellow bikini, which is just unforgivable. This is kind of interesting, in franchise terms, as a perfect example of just how far a sequel can stray. It proves that sequels are necessarily products of compromise, between creators and perpetuators and fans. If one of those sides – here, perpetuators – gets too much power, the balance of a sequel – not wholly artistic, but not wholly commercial – falls apart.

The Cremaster Cycle, No. 5 - Cremaster 5 (1997)

The testes have dropped! The whole mess is complete!

And who makes a film franchise chronicling the slow droppage of the balls anyway? Oh right, Matthew Barney does. And it seems if you couch that in as many ideas culled from a myriad of other sources, the overall effect has the appearance of depth to many. But the fact remains that The Cremaster Cycle is a hermetic system – Barney admits so much himself – a self-contained and self-reflexive work that offers up no more insight, in the end, than into its own inner workings. That can be interesting and all, and can offer up in the proper gallery settings as good product placement for the same statues Barney has for sale in the lobby, but that’s it. Cremaster is its own thing, and can have no significant conversation with the greater aesthetic world, be it cinema, performance, sculpture or photography.

Or opera…Cremaster 5 employs opera as its central motif, using its Budapest opera house setting to tell basically the same meta-narrative as Cremaster 4 explored via the Isle of Man. As the final piece of a mostly-answered symbolic system, and a means to join the technical skill between Cremasters 1 and 2, Cremaster 5 doesn’t have much. Besides, I was pretty drunk when this thing came up (having done the Cycle in a single masochistic sitting), and was ready to be done.

As an opera, Cremaster 5 is a bust. Jonathan Bepler’s Hungarian arias, even with their five-act structure and all that formal jazz, fail to match the visuals. It’s all rather flat. And those visuals are nice, a splendor no one denies, even if they’re too baroque for their own good. As an experience wrapped wholly around the visuals, Cremaster 5 offers no grand transcendence, rather just mixing preexisting nice buildings with Barney’s own biological prosthetics and Vaseline creations – two things I have grown very unfond of in the past 6 hours.

I don’t wish to run my same issues into the ground – the intended meaning cannot be derived without access to outside reading, which only then informs us of the supposed despair and longing the film dabbles in. That’s par for the course, so I won’t go into histrionics about yet another Harry Houdini reference, or essential character titles unrevealed, or all that other goodness. Rather I shall make this writing experience as fruitless as the viewing, and just relay the facts.


Ursula Andress stars as the Queen of Chains. Yeah, “Queen” I can see. But “Chains?” The central premise is that Ursula Andress makes balls drop – a fact most young men learned upon viewing Dr. No, which made the point more efficiently and potently. Basically, she’s here so Barney can have a classic sex symbol to construct his body-hugging sculpture-costumes onto, and then share an onscreen kiss with later. Most of us would do the same.

The Queen has to aides, Asian twins. They bore me.

Also, the Queen is the central voice in Bepler’s tossed-off opera. I’ve seen Ursula Andress’ lips issue forth someone else’s voice before (again, Dr. No), but for an opera, that’s pretty pointless.


As for Andress’s costume, which Barney put such, er, effort into, well…meh. She has two dangling glass spheres upon her head, and I’ve run out of creative ways to point out the exceedingly obvious testicles. Also, her mat is pink, and has anuses. For no reason, there are Jacobin pigeons all about – Okay, one reason: They’re nice to look at. (Same reason Andress is here.)


On the opera’s stage is Her Diva (Barney, now literally hogging the spotlight). Barney is nude, once again, with a Vaseline phallus given full attention. From now on, such information shall be conveyed through the following symbol: ¥

Her Diva climbs the opera’s proscenium, dislodging flowers. As in every notion that can be stated in a simple and elegant sentence, this act is on screen for the better part of 10 minutes.

The Lanchid Bridge, that which joins Buda and Pest, crosses the Danube at night. Upon it is Her Magician (Barney, natch). ¥. He is shackled – guess in what material – and carrying a great clanging ball and chain because – say it to the heavens – GONADS! GONADS GONADS GONADS GONADS! I am fucking sick of this thought process! Her Magician considers leaping from the bridge. Reading the essays Barney wrote to supplement his own insufficient movie (though I could’ve just translated the Hungarian arias – sure), I learn that Her Magician intends the same nebulous moment of metamporphic transcendence we’ve already put up with for four entries. Footage cuts back and forth to Andress. This is normal in Cremaster, because the editor sucks, except this one and only time it’s because she’s interacting with this footage – instead of the usual, directionless reasoning. So she fears he intends suicide. Yeah, suicide because his testicles are growing!


Down in the Gellert Baths, Barney is Her Giant. Also, ¥. He walks along in a manner I would call slow, even by Cremaster standards, along a watery isthmus separating two baths – the two distinct genders. By Barney’s admission, this tile peninsula is supposed to be Ursula Andress’ perineum (it’s her taint). Tasteful! Androgynous mermaids are in the water – okay, androgyny is nearly as common as ¥ is. Swimming takes place for a while as I drift in and out of booze-related unconsciousness.

Her Giant plunges the liquid, ribbons ties to his nascent junk – We’re at exactly the spot Cremaster 4 left off! I guess the majority of 5 was just a waste of time then! So, pigeons pull on the ribbons, and lo and behold, there are gonads in the water.

Andress shrieks in mortal terror.

Her Magician dives from the bridge, into a bed of exquisitely meaningless river flowers.

Her Diva also falls. I’m getting the faintest hint falling has to do with the titular testicular tale.

There’s tapioca in the water. It’s over.

The Music Box Theater then puts on one of Barney’s later efforts, De Lama Lâmina. I can only assume it’s about a plastic-covered alpaca…that, or just more Vaseline and penises. I did not stick around to find out.

So…The Cremaster Cycle, a franchise all about the scrotum. About its muscular descent, more specifically. I could do something like that! It’ll be a five-film piece about the act of passing flatulence, called The Sphincter Ring. Part 1 concerns the nitrogen, 2 the hydrogen, 3 the carbon dioxide, and so forth (oxygen, methane). Assorted visual metaphors would be developed to portray peristaltic movement and anal embouchure. And to let people know it’s not all about the butt, complex and veiled reference would be made to the works of Plato, ancient Olmec myth, the life cycle of the wombat, Scientology, continental drift, Goedelian logical criteria, prop comic Carrot Top, this one credit card statement I got back in 2007, the Chernobyl disaster, forms of Middle Italian economics, and Season Three of “Buffy.” It would try to do for John Waters (and the singing rectum in Pink Flamingoes) what Barney does for David Lynch – that is, copy his styling while achieving a mere fraction of his triumph. People will be too confused to say it’s bad. But as a flatulence franchise, it shall mostly be full of hot air.


Related posts:
• No. 2 Cremaster 1 (1996)
• No. 4 Cremaster 2 (1999)
• No. 5 Cremaster 3 (2002)
• No. 1 Cremaster 4 (1995)

The Cremaster Cycle, No. 5 - Cremaster 5 (1997)

The testes have dropped! The whole mess is complete!

And who makes a film franchise chronicling the slow droppage of the balls anyway? Oh right, Matthew Barney does. And it seems if you couch that in as many ideas culled from a myriad of other sources, the overall effect has the appearance of depth to many. But the fact remains that The Cremaster Cycle is a hermetic system – Barney admits so much himself – a self-contained and self-reflexive work that offers up no more insight, in the end, than into its own inner workings. That can be interesting and all, and can offer up in the proper gallery settings as good product placement for the same statues Barney has for sale in the lobby, but that’s it. Cremaster is its own thing, and can have no significant conversation with the greater aesthetic world, be it cinema, performance, sculpture or photography.

Or opera…Cremaster 5 employs opera as its central motif, using its Budapest opera house setting to tell basically the same meta-narrative as Cremaster 4 explored via the Isle of Man. As the final piece of a mostly-answered symbolic system, and a means to join the technical skill between Cremasters 1 and 2, Cremaster 5 doesn’t have much. Besides, I was pretty drunk when this thing came up (having done the Cycle in a single masochistic sitting), and was ready to be done.

As an opera, Cremaster 5 is a bust. Jonathan Bepler’s Hungarian arias, even with their five-act structure and all that formal jazz, fail to match the visuals. It’s all rather flat. And those visuals are nice, a splendor no one denies, even if they’re too baroque for their own good. As an experience wrapped wholly around the visuals, Cremaster 5 offers no grand transcendence, rather just mixing preexisting nice buildings with Barney’s own biological prosthetics and Vaseline creations – two things I have grown very unfond of in the past 6 hours.

I don’t wish to run my same issues into the ground – the intended meaning cannot be derived without access to outside reading, which only then informs us of the supposed despair and longing the film dabbles in. That’s par for the course, so I won’t go into histrionics about yet another Harry Houdini reference, or essential character titles unrevealed, or all that other goodness. Rather I shall make this writing experience as fruitless as the viewing, and just relay the facts.


Ursula Andress stars as the Queen of Chains. Yeah, “Queen” I can see. But “Chains?” The central premise is that Ursula Andress makes balls drop – a fact most young men learned upon viewing Dr. No, which made the point more efficiently and potently. Basically, she’s here so Barney can have a classic sex symbol to construct his body-hugging sculpture-costumes onto, and then share an onscreen kiss with later. Most of us would do the same.

The Queen has to aides, Asian twins. They bore me.

Also, the Queen is the central voice in Bepler’s tossed-off opera. I’ve seen Ursula Andress’ lips issue forth someone else’s voice before (again, Dr. No), but for an opera, that’s pretty pointless.


As for Andress’s costume, which Barney put such, er, effort into, well…meh. She has two dangling glass spheres upon her head, and I’ve run out of creative ways to point out the exceedingly obvious testicles. Also, her mat is pink, and has anuses. For no reason, there are Jacobin pigeons all about – Okay, one reason: They’re nice to look at. (Same reason Andress is here.)


On the opera’s stage is Her Diva (Barney, now literally hogging the spotlight). Barney is nude, once again, with a Vaseline phallus given full attention. From now on, such information shall be conveyed through the following symbol: ¥

Her Diva climbs the opera’s proscenium, dislodging flowers. As in every notion that can be stated in a simple and elegant sentence, this act is on screen for the better part of 10 minutes.

The Lanchid Bridge, that which joins Buda and Pest, crosses the Danube at night. Upon it is Her Magician (Barney, natch). ¥. He is shackled – guess in what material – and carrying a great clanging ball and chain because – say it to the heavens – GONADS! GONADS GONADS GONADS GONADS! I am fucking sick of this thought process! Her Magician considers leaping from the bridge. Reading the essays Barney wrote to supplement his own insufficient movie (though I could’ve just translated the Hungarian arias – sure), I learn that Her Magician intends the same nebulous moment of metamporphic transcendence we’ve already put up with for four entries. Footage cuts back and forth to Andress. This is normal in Cremaster, because the editor sucks, except this one and only time it’s because she’s interacting with this footage – instead of the usual, directionless reasoning. So she fears he intends suicide. Yeah, suicide because his testicles are growing!


Down in the Gellert Baths, Barney is Her Giant. Also, ¥. He walks along in a manner I would call slow, even by Cremaster standards, along a watery isthmus separating two baths – the two distinct genders. By Barney’s admission, this tile peninsula is supposed to be Ursula Andress’ perineum (it’s her taint). Tasteful! Androgynous mermaids are in the water – okay, androgyny is nearly as common as ¥ is. Swimming takes place for a while as I drift in and out of booze-related unconsciousness.

Her Giant plunges the liquid, ribbons ties to his nascent junk – We’re at exactly the spot Cremaster 4 left off! I guess the majority of 5 was just a waste of time then! So, pigeons pull on the ribbons, and lo and behold, there are gonads in the water.

Andress shrieks in mortal terror.

Her Magician dives from the bridge, into a bed of exquisitely meaningless river flowers.

Her Diva also falls. I’m getting the faintest hint falling has to do with the titular testicular tale.

There’s tapioca in the water. It’s over.

The Music Box Theater then puts on one of Barney’s later efforts, De Lama Lâmina. I can only assume it’s about a plastic-covered alpaca…that, or just more Vaseline and penises. I did not stick around to find out.

So…The Cremaster Cycle, a franchise all about the scrotum. About its muscular descent, more specifically. I could do something like that! It’ll be a five-film piece about the act of passing flatulence, called The Sphincter Ring. Part 1 concerns the nitrogen, 2 the hydrogen, 3 the carbon dioxide, and so forth (oxygen, methane). Assorted visual metaphors would be developed to portray peristaltic movement and anal embouchure. And to let people know it’s not all about the butt, complex and veiled reference would be made to the works of Plato, ancient Olmec myth, the life cycle of the wombat, Scientology, continental drift, Goedelian logical criteria, prop comic Carrot Top, this one credit card statement I got back in 2007, the Chernobyl disaster, forms of Middle Italian economics, and Season Three of “Buffy.” It would try to do for John Waters (and the singing rectum in Pink Flamingoes) what Barney does for David Lynch – that is, copy his styling while achieving a mere fraction of his triumph. People will be too confused to say it’s bad. But as a flatulence franchise, it shall mostly be full of hot air.


Related posts:
• No. 2 Cremaster 1 (1996)
• No. 4 Cremaster 2 (1999)
• No. 5 Cremaster 3 (2002)
• No. 1 Cremaster 4 (1995)