drawing restraint 9

I rencently saw Matthew Barney's film, Drawing Restraint 9. I can’t even begin to describe all the imagery, nor comprehend all the symbolism contained in it, so the following is merely my take on what I saw. Now before you think, based on my synopsis, that I hated it, I quite liked it. In fact, I was not bored at all during its two and a half hour span! Given that I can stare at images on Flickr for hours at a time, I greedily absorbed all the beautiful visuals presented by Barney. It was a very stunning movie, visually, with a hypnotic soundtrack (both Japanese traditional music and Bjork’s).

Generally, the film seemed to please the audience (a full theatre) which clapped appreciatively at the end.

The story begins with workers building a new loading ramp into the sea at a giant factory in a Japanese harbour, while a parade of dancers and drummers in traditional dress lead a tanker truck full of liquid petroleum jelly toward a ship in the harbour.

The story then cuts to Japanese lady pearl divers who are wearing white nun-like outfits, sitting on rocks by the sea and are smearing white paint on each others’ faces. They begin diving in the waters for oysters and make breathy sounds mixed with bjork’s medulla-like breathy lyrics. This was my favourite scene. The ladies begin diving underwater among white jellyfish to collect oysters into floaty wooden buckets tied to them by a rope. One of the ladies comes across what looks like a giant rock/turd, she sniffs it and begins to squeak like a dolphin to beckon the others, who swim over and also sniff at it. This rock-turd becomes important later on.

A parallel narrative begins when the ‘Occidental Guests’ (meaning westerners) played by Barney and Björk, are taken on board the Japanese whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru, Bjork is bathed in a tub with oranges with the assistance of ladies in kimonos, Barney is shaved, including, strangely, the top of his head and is adorned with horns, both have their eyebrows shaved off and are dressed in kimonos made from the skins of squid, marine and land mammals (based upon traditional Shinto marriage costumes). Björk’s teeth are blackened with squid ink and her hair is adorned with sea urchin hair ornaments. They both wear traditional Japanese clogs of what looks like whale bone and wear giant sea shells on their backs like raver back packs (cute). Neither looks too comfortable in their getup, which draws laughs from the audience. At no point do they talk to one another.

They take part in an elaborate tea ceremony in a tatami matted room, which takes a long long long time, and it’s the only time in the film that there is conversation (in English, Icelandic and Japanese). The man preparing the tea answers Barney’s questions about the ship’s history, including a story of how it ran into another ship and has a scar as a result. The man then makes a potent and thick green tea which Barney and Bjork drink. All the utensils used in making the tea are made of sea creatures - shells, dried out urchins, water is boiled in what looks to be a pot made of sea coral.

After the tea ceremony, Bjork and Barney fondle each other's prosthetic blow-holes which have grown on the back of their necks and make whale-like love (biting each others faces). The tatami matted room begins to fill with liquid petroleum jelly, they both draw their knives and lovingly slice off each other’s feet. The level of liquid in the tatami-matted chamber rises steadily as they slice away at each other legs and finger the open wounds and begin to rip off the flesh, which looks reminiscent of whale blubber. They slash at one another underwater and then feed each other their leg-meat sushi. They eventually reveal the results of their ceremony: They have undergone a transformation from land mammals to sea mammals. In a later scene, two whales are shown to be swimming away from the Nisshin Maru, presumably Bjork and Barney making their getaway.

Meanwhile, on the deck of the Nisshin Maru, a choreographed assembly line of men fill a mold with tons of hot petroleum jelly that hardens to resemble a giant hunk of cheese that is later sliced up using flensing knives, again, resembling whale blubber. Presumably, this sculpture is the source of the liquid jelly that fills the tea ceremony room.

The sailors then begin to fire harpoons into the sea. Instead of a whale, they have caught the giant turd/rock from the earlier scene. As it turns out, this is a giant piece of ambergris - resinous whale barf, caused by the irritating effects of ingested squid beaks and shrimp peel. Huge pools of this vomit float upon the ocean’s surface, ocean-cured and kneaded by wave action. Ambergris is extremely valuable and used as a fixative in perfume making.

The ‘ambergris log’ is taken on board the Nisshin Maru as if it were a whale. Sake is poured on the ambergris log and the sailors celebrate their catch. It is then placed into the center of the giant petroleum jelly sculpture while young boys ceremoniously place a shrimp/mud mixture all around it, almost as if building a shrine.

Finally, in the last scene, the old ramp at the harbour, which now stands beside the newly built one is destroyed. This I understand is based on a Shinto ritual where shrines, which are rectangular and covered with white stone and small pebbles, sit for twenty years at which point a duplicate of the shrine is built over the box and the old one is burnt down.

The film prompted me to read up a little about modern day commercial whaling and the greenpeace protests against the Nisshin Maru (which, in a strange twist of fate, resulted in a ship collision after the filming of the movie, very similar to the story told by the japanese tea master).