Sedgwick emphasizes that the modern patriarchal society, which was established based on the homosocial desire, not only treated women as a peripheral object for trade and confined them in the domestic realm but also repressed homosexuality and homoeroticism. According to her definition, male homosocial desire means men’s strong same-sex bonds that are created by a tacit agreement of sexual objectification of women. The film ends “with a deep sense of abandonment,” claims Yomota (Yomota 2000: 85).Ģ Shinsengumi in Gohatto/Taboo is depicted as an epitome of a homosocial society that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discusses in her influential book, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985). The extermination of the “monster” in a homophobic manner does not bring back a peace but rather indicates the beginning of an end of Shinsengumi, an army with a glorious record of maintaining the feudalist and patriarchal order at the end of the shogunate. Hijikata eliminates Kano, Yomota argues, “in order to maintain the order of the army” (Yomota 2000: 85). According to critic Yomota Inuhiko, the cherry blossom tree is a metaphor of Kano Sozaburo (Matsuda Ryuhei), a young swordsman who joined the Shinsengumi, a special police force organized by the declining Tokugawa shogunate, and stirred up homosexual desires among the members. When he was bullied by other men, a monster started to reside in him.” At the finale of Gohatto/Taboo (1999), the last film by the late Oshima Nagisa (1932-2003), Hijikata Toshizo (Beat Takeshi) speaks to himself before he draws his sword and cuts down a tree of full-bloomed cherry blossom in one stroke. Haut de pageġ “Sozaburo, he was too beautiful. I will clarify how the “New Wave” filmmaker who started his career in postwar Japan critically tried to represent the beginning of the star system in Hollywood. Closely examining the screenplay of Hollywood Zen, which Oshima wrote with Paul Mayersberg, in conjunction with articles written in the 1910s-20s in both American and Japanese trade presses and film magazines, I discuss the politics of representation of race as well as the politics of gender embodied by the stardom of Sessue Hayakawa in the 1910s in different national contexts. Throughout his career as a filmmaker, Oshima kept questioning the modernized feudal patriarchy of the emperor system after the Meiji Restoration that led to the devastation of World War II, oppression toward women and minority groups, and the immorality of the Meiji generation for its subjugation to ultranationalism and fascism during wartime as well as its instant switch to American-style democracy during the post-WWII occupational period.

In this essay, I consider Oshima Nagisa’s unmade film, Hollywood Zen, to be his historical project.

Sessue hayakawa the cheat