Revenge for the Male Gaze: Relieving Trauma in Takashi Miike’s Audition
Society warns young women, “Be mindful of what you say, wear, and do, so that you don’t ‘attract’ and/or ‘invite’ negative male attention. Be a ‘good’ girl, so you can eventually make a ‘good’ wife.” While seemingly benign on the surface, these problematic attempts at guidance have also helped perpetuate systemic, gender-based oppression, violence, abuse, and rape culture— leading to women’s lifetimes of trauma and internalized pain with nowhere to release it.
Takashi Miike’s 1999 J-horror film Audition can and has been interpreted as a sympathetic ploy to heterosexual male anxiety, guilt, and fear towards potential female partners. However, over twenty years since its release and upon closer examination through a post-#MeToo era lens, Miike is far more sympathetic towards the female “antagonist” and more prone to humiliating the male lead, so much so that Audition can be read as a rape revenge film, or, more broadly, a revenge film on behalf of all women who have suffered because of the heterosexual male gaze— even if the abused female character doesn’t get to outlive her suffering.
A lonely widower named Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is persuaded into finding a potential wife again by son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) and his friend Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura). Aoyama goes along with Yoshikawa’s conniving idea to hold a (faux) audition for a role in a movie, so he can cherry-pick a lady he likes from the unknowing bunch of potential suitors. Aoyama wishes to see “a lot of women” so he can find one that’s “perfect.” As Aoyama thumbs through the 30+ application papers and pictures, a young woman named Asami (Eihi Shiina) catches his eye. She writes about her background in classically trained ballet, while admitting she has no acting experience— she’s just hopeful that someone will give her a chance. She explains how her life had turned upside down when she became injured and couldn’t practice dancing anymore, and Aoyama is intrigued by what he claims to be her “maturity,” despite her being twenty years his junior.
As the audition scene is Miike’s first, deliberate examination of the male gaze within the film, he wants the viewer to feel repulsion, so that they’ll empathize with the inevitable female retaliation later. Miike aims the camera at each woman put on the spot— via both wide and circling arc shots— so that they always remain in the center of the frame, as they’re being gawked at like objects in a storefront window. Silently being evaluated by Aoyama and Yoshikawa, each woman in question is surveyed with a video camera that revoltingly lingers on every pair of visible legs. Thankfully, Miike refrains from showing the viewer much of the footage of one particular woman who removes her top during her turn; he knows he has already started to turn the viewer against Aoyama.
The two men’s dialogue exchanges begin to increase in pervasiveness. They ask some of the auditioning women if they ever had loveless sex—a humiliating, invasive question to ask strangers, especially in this kind of supposed professional setting they hope to convey. They discuss searching for a “heroine” between the ages of “20-35”— alluding to any woman that is over 35 and doesn’t meet Aoyama’s standards as unworthy (even though Aoyama himself is likely older than that.) Even if the language used, particularly, the reoccurring emphasis on wanting to find a “good/nice girl” stems from social constructs of what these men were told makes a woman “marriage material,” it’s no less destructive. A hefty amount of subtext lies within what the “good/nice girl” phrase is code for: a submissive, demure, quiet wife who doesn’t talk back and does whatever Aoyama wants her to do— a hurtful, unhealthy view of what constitutes both a relationship and gender dynamics.
When it’s Asami’s turn to spin and twirl, she outwardly embodies the fantasy of the “perfect/good girl” that Aoyama is searching for. She is dressed modestly, prim and proper, in all white, bridal-like attire. She hangs her head and bows politely and projects timidity and stoicism. And, just like that, Aoyama isn’t interested in the other women. Even as Yoshikawa claims he has his reservations towards Asami, Aoyama doesn’t want to hear it— he’s already made up his mind to pursue her and chooses to ignore any concerns. Aoyama is blinded by infatuation, and as his goal was to find someone to play the role of a good woman…that’s exactly what he gets. Winking at the camera, Miike eggs this suggestion on, insinuating what karma is to come later.
By the second act, as Aoyama and Asami start dating, Miike begins to shift from Aoyama’s male gaze to Asami’s, relieving the viewer from some of the unwarranted focus on him, and, instead, shining much-needed light onto her pain. Miike toys with this on their first date, as the camera hones it on him from her point of view. “I’ve been on my own all my life,” Asami tells him, hinting at her internalized pain. “I’ve never had anyone to talk to.” The viewer is shown glimpses of Asami’s limited life outside of her budding relationship with Aoyama, as she seems to have little going on other than a dire need for communication with him. Miike begins to reveal the darker trickles of her psyche, with sporadic cuts to Asami sitting in her near-empty apartment, bereft of belongings— with the exception of a phone and a body bag. Her past trauma caused by men has diminished her agency to merely gaining their approval— or so it seems.
Aoyama plans to propose marriage to Asami during a weekend getaway. As he is rambling, Asami opens up to him by the only way she was taught how to love and be loved: by getting into bed, removing her clothes, and inviting him to gaze at her body. She reveals a set of large scars on her legs to him, claiming that they’re from a childhood accident and that she wants Aoyama to know “everything” about her. But, instead of asking intimate questions to get to know everything about her, Aoyama just gazes at her body and tells her she’s beautiful. He pretends to care about her character but continues to view her through a surface-level lens. Asami asks him to promise to love only her; Aoyama accepts, and they sleep together. “They all say that,” a jaded Asami replies to his promise. However, in a gender flip of a more common trope, he is the one who wakes up in the morning alone, as Asami has bailed post-coital, and Aoyama is left feeling used and bewildered about where he stands with her. The power dynamic between the two is now beginning to shift from him to her.
As a jilted Aoyama searches for Asami, he finally starts to peel back layers of her trauma. He’s been informed about the murder and dismemberment of the owner of a bar Asami claimed to have worked for, and the viewer learns that Asami is secretly holding a man sans limbs captive in her apartment whom she treats like a BDSM submissive. Aoyama meets Asami’s former dance instructor, whose missing feet have been replaced with prosthetic ones. Through flashbacks of his maltreatment of her, the viewer learns it was he who gave her those scars on her legs, while calling her a “good girl” for allowing him to do so, and a “bitch” if she refused. These childhood memories of abuse are perhaps why Aoyama’s earlier insistence of wanting a “good girl” has been triggering for Asami, building to her silent hostility towards him up until this point. It makes sense as to why Asami’s sexuality with Aoyama has been aggressive— it’s a learned behavior from her past. But instead of growing more afraid of the increasingly antagonistic Asami, Miike begs for the viewer’s sympathies for her, especially in the ways he subtly vilifies Aoyama.
For fragments of the film, Miike paints Aoyama to be a fairly sympathetic character and a “good” enough guy. He’s a supportive father of his teenage son. He’s fairly reserved and not as (blatantly) misogynistic as his friend Yoshikawa. However, Miike never allows the viewer to forget how flawed he is. Aoyama is written as a lonely widower, which is accurate— however, in actuality, he seems to possess a penchant for viewing himself as the victim. Nor is he as innocent as he perceives himself to be, as evident when he flips his late wife’s framed picture around in fake guilt, as he continues to check out pictures of other women. Miike even suggests some sexual deviancy on Aoyama’s part, as he includes a montage of women in Aoyama’s life placed in various sexual scenarios that he’s fantasized about (including his teenage son’s girlfriend.) In these fantasies, the women are either always begging for his attention or to please him. Miike even implies that Aoyama had a past affair with his secretary, and that he likely only involved himself with her for the sex— hypocrisy for him getting insulted when Asami bails on him after they slept together. Aoyama also fails to sufficiently teach son Shigehiko how to view women as more than their male gaze permits, as Shigehiko uses condescending dialogue such as “the girl thing,” jokes that Asami must be cheating on his father, and claims to be fearful of female “complexity.”
Furthermore, Aoyama’s infatuation with Asami has been glib, at best; he knows so little about her, yet he’s hopelessly attracted to her docility, submissiveness, and insecurities. Asami’s issues and trauma do not make her undesirable by any means, but it’s telling that Aoyama is so drawn to a woman whose agency is concentrated on solely pleasing him— as far as he knows. His attempts at getting to know her intimately have been rather lackadaisical. When Asami’s identity does become more transparent to him, does the problem exist within her lying to him about her background that she’s not ready to divulge— or that she is simply not what Aoyama idealized her to be? “You’ve suffered so much, but you don’t show it,” Aoyama says to her. He seems to prefer her that way, compliant and withholding; he probably wouldn’t be able to handle her otherwise.
Miike alternates cuts between adult and childhood Asami during scenes of abuse (both done to her and by her), indicating she is still that same, hurting child that never healed from her trauma. She had tried channeling her anguish creatively and non-toxically through ballet, but, as that was stripped away from her, Asami’s desire to lash out directly onto her abusers has now culminated. Asami makes her former dance instructor her first casualty in this climatic retribution— all the years of PTSD and misery this man has put her through since childhood is now ending with a piano wire around his neck. “I never felt unhappy, really,” she declares, decapitating him, with a relieved smile across her face. “Because I never stopped being unhappy.” The once-obedient woman strikes back with the same violence against men that they’ve used against her throughout her entire life.
Asami’s revenge now takes form onto her second sufferer, Aoyama. She paralyzes and tortures him. She eventually sews his mouth closed. He has become the submissive partner, as she leaves him with nothing but to listen to her: “You call a lot of girls to the audition, reject them, then ring them up later to have sex with them. You are all the same.” As she pricks him with needles, she makes known her exhaustion from men: “Even if I give you my entire self, you’ll never give me yours…All words are lies. But pain doesn’t lie.” This physical punishment towards him has become the only way Asami feels heard, respected, and validated: “Only pain and suffering will make you realize who you are.”
Removing Aoyama’s feet is the pinnacle of Asami’s catharsis, while the peak of Aoyama’s male guilt. As she aggressively swings the wire from each side of his ankle, she experiences flashbacks of her agonizing past— her expression nothing short of relief. Miike positions the camera towards Aoyama, as she gazes upon his body and her power over it— another subversion of previous gender constructs. However, Aoyama temporarily blacks out, having a different fantasy in which a still-dutiful Asami had never left him after their night together, proving that he never loved her; he only loved what he thought she was.
Was Asami in the right for murdering her abuser? Well, she wasn’t necessarily in the wrong. Did Aoyama deserve the extreme pain she inflicted on him? No, but she never deserved his dismissiveness of her agency either— and she certainly didn’t deserve the systemic oppression and abuse that so many men in her life had projected onto her. The real tragedy in Audition exists within a woman who was so failed by a society that didn’t protect her that she resorted to physical harm and murder just to feel empowerment.
Even though Asami doesn’t get to survive the events of the film and work through her pain, her message stands: “Men need women to support them, or they’ll exhaust themselves.” Not the other way around. It’s just too bad she had to endure so much to prove that. – Julieann Stipidis