With the flexibility of contemporary media, there is no longer much in the way of a bright line between the essay and what we might broadly call the expressive arts. Put another way, in contemporary society, there is scarcely any means to communicate a viewpoint that does not involve self-expression—and self-expression almost always communicates a viewpoint.
Social media is a garden made to reside in this fuzzy interpenetration between two modes: A nearly uncountable set of nodes of self-expression coalesce to produce the ‘discourse’ of any given online space. An easy-to-understand example of this can be found in how the variously self-expressive memes of a small to medium size meme repository, such as a themed Subreddit or Facebook page, will inevitably take on a discursive role in shaping and commenting on the communal zeitgeist of the space: In the /r/PoliticalCompassMemes Subreddit, a discourse on the structure of the community emerges naturally out of an endless stream of individual political expressions. In other words, the line between memetic art and commentary is vague in such spaces.
A similar phenomenon can be found in the current video essay boom taking place on YouTube. In order to distinguish themselves from the short video format that is currently popular on spaces such as Instagram and TikTok, viewers on YouTube have been increasingly self-selecting longer form videos such as podcasts and detailed video essays. However, the works emerging in this context are very distinct from the traditional essays of legacy publishing. For one, these video essays are engineered to build sustained engagement and community around their creators: It is no coincidence that YouTube, a platform with a massive core userbase of vloggers, has developed in this direction. We can draw a direct parallel between the current success of Substack, as a platform for what we could call post-blogging, and the emergence of long-form, personality driven video essays in a form that we could similarly label as post-vlogging.
The overall composition of online media is a thread that we could continue pulling at for some time, but for now we will focus on a key point of overlap between these various trends. In our highly media savvy, media saturated zeitgeist, self-expression as art and self-expression as argument have thoroughly overlapped. Of course, what we might broadly call art and politics have always been part of the same conversation. But what is significant about the current internet is the ease with which the particular mediums of social media have tended to facilitate reading their content as such. It comes down to what the audience is primed to see just as much as the content of media itself. When we encounter media on the internet, we are distinctly conscious of its attempt to say something. This is in part why contemporary media criticism tends towards discussing art in terms of its intent to communicate a perspective. In the current mode, it is so easy to walk out of every film and find that the question on the tip of everyone’s lips is what did it mean to say?
It is for this reason that I have come to particularly value art that frustrates this trend to some degree. Rather than presenting an argument about its subject—as an essay—such art is a structure or mould for the audience to interface with the subject in their own way. Different forms have their distinct value, but such ambiguous works act as mediums between the audience and the subject of the work rather than as commentaries on the part of the author. And frankly, I do not often care about the opinions of authors next to the dynamism of the subject as depicted in art, so this form has become something special for me. Love & Pop is exactly this kind of work of art—perhaps the best example of its class. And it is correspondingly something very special for me.
Love
Love & Pop is a 1998 film written and directed by Hideaki Anno which adapts the 1996 novel Love & Pop: Topaz II by Ryuu Murakami. As implied by the title, Murakami’s Topaz II is a spiritual sequel to his 1988 Topaz, which was an exploration of contemporary sexuality in the S&M space. Love & Pop continues developing this broad theme by depicting the sexual underbelly of the practice of compensated dating. However, it would be wrong to simply categorise the novel and the film (the latter being the key subject of this post) as stories about sex.
In the climax of the film a would-be rapist, known only as Captain EO, berates the protagonist, Hiromi Yoshii, for so easily exposing herself to his desires. To paraphrase, he lectures her by saying ‘why are you naked with some strange man when there are people who care about you?’ Were we to approach Love & Pop with the question of what it intends to say as a work of art, this dramatic moment seems suitable enough as a kind of thesis statement on the subject of compensated dating. A highly literal reading emerges when one approaches the film this way, one where the central theme of the film is that compensated dating is a social harm because teenagers might be raped. However, Love & Pop is bursting at the seams with content that cannot be coherently analysed within this framework. For one, this thesis comes from the mouth of a would-be rapist. It becomes difficult to directly interpret his claims as the central theme of the story when they come from a central antagonist. Such a contradiction undermines any attempt at an overly simplistic reading from the outset.
In contrast to many stories about underage prostitution, there is no inference from Love & Pop of an Eden of virginal purity that our characters fall from. By the plain text of the film, Hiromi Yoshii is depicted as being sexually active with her ex-boyfriend. And one of the catalysts lurking in the backstory of the film is the abrupt end of the relationship of one of Hiromi’s friends, Chieko Takamori. Chieko was engaged in a long-term, explicitly sexual relationship with an older, married man, who broke it off upon learning of her true age. The implication that arises throughout the film is that, in terms of pure obscenity, what is depicted in Love & Pop is actually constrained compared to the everyday lives of some teenage girls. In addition, there are many non-sexual elements to the story which are fixated on to an excessive degree, beyond what is necessary for the film to function as a depiction of the shocking obscenity of compensated dating, and its sexual dangers. Put another way, if we confuse the climax of the film for the contents of the whole film, we will miss the importance of other issues in favour of discussing the film in terms of ‘naked with some strange man’.
One of these excessive fixations that recurs throughout the film relates to the hobbies and interests of men. Or more specifically, their otaku-like preoccupations. Without fail, every male character shown in Love & Pop is obsessed with a specific interest and is detached from reality in the pursuit of its perfection: Hiromi’s father is a train otaku, a highly mundane hobby; her first client for compensated dating is, Kagegawa, a high intensity salaryman who brags obsessively about his daughter and her accomplishments; next comes Yoshimura who cooks grandiose meals so compulsively that he cannot find anyone to eat them; Hiromi’s third date is with Yazaki, who obsessively collects the impressions of girls’ bites in Muscat grapes; Uehara is more vaguely characterised as a stereotypical otaku; Captain EO is obsessed with Disneyland, and operates within an elaborate false persona built around the Captain EO film that is shown at Disneyland; and finally, Kobayashi, the owner of the mysterious phone, is a writer who inserts himself into the world of sex line message banks in order to collect material for his work. While these hobbies vary in their centrality and intensity, in general the men of Love & Pop are depicted as being obsessed with their own individual idiosyncrasies. Such men turn to compensated dating precisely because they either cannot reconcile their obsessions with maintaining a ‘real’ relationship, or at the very least their ‘real’ relationships do not fulfill their interpersonal needs properly. For example, if we assume that Kagegawa has a wife, his interest in compensated dating can still be explained because he needs to boast about his family to a social connection that exists outside of that family.
The fact that there is no clear correlation between these fixations and the sexual exploitation that forms a key subject of the film is suggestive. Instead of being depicted as something strictly related to compensated dating, it is a background feature of the world that is given its own importance. Rather than suggesting straightforward causation for the social conditions of its time, Love & Pop sees compensated dating and otaku-like fixation as simply two phenomena that co-exist in the same moment, and whose relationship can be depicted thoroughly without necessarily being explained. This is part of the general lack of essay-like qualities to the story, as we discussed earlier.
The structure of the film is bookended by Hiromi’s father’s model train set. In the opening minutes of the film, Hiromi wakes up to find her father absorbed in his train set; at the conclusion of the film, Hiromi finds her father still in the same place, having finally finished his train set and thereby completed his purpose for the day. At the midpoint of the film, Hiromi makes numerous attempts to phone home in order to escape her peculiar situation, which had until that point been leading her further and further into compensated dating in order to acquire the film’s titular topaz ring. For the one phone call shown directly, her father misses it due to his model train set. The suggestion that emerges from this scene—that Hiromi’s exploitation at the hands of otaku-like men is something analogous to the distance of her otaku-like father—is not essay-like in its structure. There is no suggestion that compensated dating and otaku-dom are literally interrelated phenomena, the film just depicts them both as pieces of a society trapped in listlessness and nihilism.
Pop
Just as Love & Pop complexifies the sexual dynamics of compensated dating, it refuses to simplify its economic dimensions. By all accounts, Hiromi Yoshii is well to do. Her family is in one piece, and her father’s elaborate model train set as depicted in a nice home is not exactly a proletarian aesthetic. In addition, a point is made of the fact that her mother was willing to provide spending money for her central trip to Shibuya wherein most of the events of the film take place: Hiromi turns down this spending money, and yet goes on several compensated dates in order to make extra money during the trip. One stark conclusion emerges from a close reading of the economic undertones of Love & Pop. Namely, Hiromi Yoshii, in contrast to the many down and out women who have turned to prostitution throughout history, did not really need any of the money she earned through compensated dating. The protagonist of this film was almost raped in pursuit of money to buy a luxury good that she could very well have gained by simply asking her parents. This contrast is implicit in the characterisation of Nao Yokoi, the most ambivalent and passive member of Hiromi’s friend group. Nao carefully saved up allowance money in order to purchase an expensive PC; her discipline is contrasted to Hiromi’s frivolity as a point of envy in the final act of the film. In a basic sense, Love & Pop is a film about a phenomenon that often devolves into sex for money, but where both participants are shown as not being driven by sex or money. As Hiromi herself explains to Captain EO, even if granted an omnipotent wish, she would have no need for money.
Even as the compensated dating of Love & Pop is removed from being a pure exchange of sexuality for economic gain, that does not mean those themes are irrelevant to the story as told. After all, Hiromi’s adventures into the world of compensated dating are ultimately framed around the need to gain money for a particular purpose. More specifically, Hiromi wants to purchase the titular topaz ring while it is still on a one-day sale that goes until 9 PM. The fact that there are multiple practical ways to gain this ring later, after this ephemeral sale, without having to rely on compensated dating, is in fact a central point of this story. This is clearly not a blunt and simple critique of capitalist consumption: It is not that Hiromi is willing to engage in compensated dating due to her limitless need to acquire luxury goods. Love & Pop is about the basis for the frivolous and irrational desires that drive Hiromi to chase this ring in a manner that is specifically a risk to herself and to those around her, even when other avenues were available. So why then did Hiromi need to pursue the ring during the sale, rather than waiting for a more practical moment? As she herself explains:
If you don’t pursue something you want to do, or something you want, right at that instant, that desire deserts you.
Hiromi is painfully aware that the topaz ring carries no particular meaning on its own. It is nothing but an empty symbol of opulence and luxury. However, that morning she looked at her fingers after waking up and sensed that they were incomplete. The ring did not represent a concrete step in her life that she wanted to achieve later, it was about fulfilling that ephemeral and transitory feeling before she moved on with her life. Her failure to do so is mirrored in the structure of the film: Just as she looked at her naked fingers after waking up in the opening of the film, her last act before drifting off to sleep and dreaming the final scene was looking at her still empty fingers and lamenting her failure.
The fleeting character of dreams and desires is a constantly recurring thread of Love & Pop. We can see this clearly through the characterisation of Chisa Noda—referred to by the nickname Sachi throughout the film. Of all of the members of Hiromi’s friend group, Sachi’s trajectory seems the most predetermined: She is planning to leave high school in favour of a dancing job with an agency that she has already secured. However, Sachi speculates that this direct path came about from fear of her own weakness in the face of choices. As Sachi explains:
“This isn’t the kind of thing you can wait for. I was so frustrated when I had nothing, I wondered if I could stick with anything. But once I tried dancing, I knew this was it. It is possible that half a year from now I’ll talk about how immature my approach has been. Or maybe I’ll have blown the whole thing off. Who knows? I get caught up in things easily, and I don’t like that. Which is why I realised it has to be now.”
Hiromi’s reaction to this monologue is particularly salient, as she thinks to herself:
Something that seems so vitally important can turn ordinary overnight … I hate it when autopilot kicks in like that. I think Sachi became a dancer in order to escape that feeling. She wanted something with a definite end.
In this light, Hiromi’s desire for a topaz ring does not carry any particular meaning in the sense of the ring itself. Rather, she wants to bring closure to her desires. She wants to bring her feelings to a satisfying conclusion, rather than having them melt away into a vague nonexistence. She wants to get home and be satisfied if she happens to look at her fingers before going to bed. Of course, the brilliance of Love & Pop is precisely in how it indicts these feelings without judging them or presenting itself as explicitly polemical. Those who pay attention to the film will no doubt notice that Sachi’s fixation on the width of her fingers, which drives her to desire the topaz rings, is an extension of the same insecurities that caused her to get her nails styled at a professional beauty salon. This obsession in term came about due to the negative comments of her ex-boyfriend and her sister, who each insulted her hands in ways that left a deep impression on her. Hiromi needs to spend money on these trivial things in order to bring closure to her insecurities that arise in her everyday life among those that care for her. In this respect, the thesis of Captain EO takes on yet another meaning: when he asks ‘why are you naked with some strange man when there are people who care about you?’ we should consider ‘there are people who care about you’ to be a key phrase equal to the rest.
End
Even as this is a short review, we should dedicate some space to the technical elements of the film beyond just the script. One immediately notable attribute of Love & Pop is its framerate. While it was lowered to the conventional 24 frames per second for its theatrical release, the DVD and all subsequent releases have been in 60 frames per second. This peculiarity is hardly surprising given the production of Love & Pop. According to the Making of Love & Pop Documentary, Hideaki Anno decided to adapt this particular story out of a desire to approach a subject that would lend itself to being filmed by digital camcorders, since he had become interested in the technology during the creation of The End of Evangelion. By default, most camcorders record in the “naturalistic” frameworks of 30 frames per second or 60 frames per second instead of the cinematic standard of 24 frames per second. Of course, digital footage can easily be modified to alternate framerates after the fact. This was done for the theatrical release of Love & Pop, and many famous found footage type films that use camcorders, such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, remain in 24 frames per second despite the inherently cinematic feeling that gives them. However, unlike those films, Love & Pop was originally intended to be presented as a homemade, camcorder mockumentary. Given that mindset, it is hardly surprising that much of the photography was done with an eye towards being presented in a naturalistic 60 frames per second.
Of course, as is obvious from the final product, the mockumentary conceit fell away from the project when it came to its final production. Instead, Anno opted for an experimental style that featured a high degree of coverage involving camcorders placed intimately in various strange locations. For example, the film features camera angles taken from atop a model train, inside a girl’s skirt, inside a microwave, inside a bowl of pasta, a camcorder strapped to the hand of an actor, and a camcorder affixed to the head of an actor in order to create a first-person point of view shot. It is impossible to speculate with any certainty about the original intent of this style, beyond that it is a decision that fits with the various ‘naturalistic’ aspects of the production that we have discussed thus far. However, the benefit of experimentalism like this is that, like the story that is being adapted in this case, it tends to evoke ambiguous feelings from the audience, who do not necessarily have any familiarity with the grammar being used in such a film. For example, these many odd camera angles allow for a high degree of intimacy as the camera is placed in the midst of the character’s actions. However, unlike something like a found footage film, our perspective is often discontinuous with that of the characters, sometimes being affixed to inanimate objects around them. The resulting effect is an intense mix of the contrary sensations of intimacy and objectivity. This film does not have the rigid subjectivity of a naturalistic and intimate cinematographic style, but it also lacks the cold and impersonal objectivity of a David Fincher film. Instead, we witness the story through an ambiguous medium between the two.
In order to facilitate these innovative perspectives, Anno brought on some crew that were familiar with the particularities of filming intimately with a camcorder. More specifically, photography was headed by a JAV (Japanese Adult Video) team led by the AV director Company Matsuo. In addition, Matsuo consulted with the AV director Katsuyuki Hirano, who had extensive experience filming first-person perspective pornography, in order to help plan these shots. While pornography is a very helpful analogue to the style adopted by Love & Pop, as it is a genre that also combines intimate cinematography with an intentional distance from the characters, there are important differences between the two. It would not be accurate to say that Love & Pop is shot in the style of pornography. (Not that pornography has one unified style to begin with.)
Still, the similarities that do exist contextualises the lens that Love & Pop brings to such a sexually charged subject in interesting ways. However, the purpose of these similarities as deployed here are almost precisely the opposite of their use in pornography. The tinge of the objective and dehumanised exists in pornography in order to erase the particularities of the characters in favour of the audience’s own fantasies. This is contrasted in the case of Love & Pop, where the audience often finds themselves trapped as inanimate pieces of furniture as they watch Hiromi undergo trauma. We are not an audience to sexual exploitation; we are just stuck in the same room as it. As the novelist Kingsley Amis said of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, “one of the troubles with Lolita is that, so far from being too pornographic, it is not pornographic enough,” by which he meant that the indifferent depiction of sexual exploitation is all the more uncomfortable next to sex that is meant to titillate.
Of course, beyond the sexual dimension, we must return to the ambiguities of the experimental style chosen for Love & Pop. Just like the script, this presentation denies the audience clear answers for how they are meant to feel. While some films benefit greatly from a style that has a transparent and obvious purpose, in the case of this film, the approach taken by Anno and the rest of the crew further develops the non-essay-like feeling that we have already discussed. Just as the grammar of narrative leaves room for interpretation in Love & Pop, the same is true of the grammar of film as it is deployed here.
Of course, there is at least one question that the audience is primed to answer by the narrative: ‘why are you naked with some strange man when there are people who care about you?’ However, Captain EO’s question is far more rhetorical than it seems, even if we can offer concrete answers. As we have already discussed, the concepts of ‘naked with some strange man’ and ‘people who care about you’ map onto subjects that are discussed within the film. The compensated dating depicted in the film is not a purely sexual act, but a complex sociological phenomenon that is contextualised by insufficiencies that its participants feel in their own lives. The men of the film are depicted as consumed by empty and meaningless obsessions. And Hiromi and her friends are similarly consumed by empty and meaningless insecurities. However, none of this concretely explains the all-important question of ‘why’. Throughout the film, we come to understand the contemporary character of ‘people who care about you’ and ‘naked with some strange man’, but it is less clear why this situation is allowed to exist, and what its ultimate cause is.
Of course, the poignancy of the film lies in that there is no prescribed universal answer to this question. It simply depicts a society where this situation is allowed to exist and forces the audience to think about the implications of such a society. Shinji Miyadai, a noted expert on compensated dating during the 1990s, crafted a picture of such a society in his 1995 book Endless Everyday Existence. Ryuu Murakami’s Love & Pop: Topaz II was published the very next year. The society that Miyadai sketched out was (according to Akihiro Kitada) one built around images such as “the bloomer-clad high school girl, going about an everyday existence that does not aspire towards any concrete meaning (ideological content).” In such a society, it is perhaps natural that no clear answer arises to the question of ’why’ that was posed by Captain EO. Because the only coherent answer that applied to Hiromi Yoshii was ‘why not?’
What Love & Pop thoroughly depicts is a society bereft of meanings that could provide a concrete reason for Hiromi to not indulge the desires that led to her disastrous day in Shibuya. The film does not depict a capitalism that pushes Hiromi towards prostitution out of economic desperation, but it does depict a capitalist society where consumption can fulfill trivial and transient desires, at least for a while. It depicts a society of individuals who are each fixated on minor concerns, hobbies, obsessions, and insecurities. One where Hiromi wakes up concerned about the shape of her fingers and cannot bear to go to sleep with those same unsatisfying fingers. The reason why ‘people who care about you’ is allowed to coexist with ‘naked with some strange man’ is that the lives depicted in Love & Pop are so absent of meaning that the former cannot fulfill a person, and so they find themselves embroiled in the latter. Not for any particular reason, but precisely because there is no reason in such a society not to. Love & Pop is a unique piece of art because it does not present answers, it presents a world too contradictory for any such thing to exist.
