“Ghost in the Machine” by Marcus Civin

Nov 16

Written By Marcus Civin

About Matthew Lax’s Lil’ Tokyo Story

These days, we remake, reboot, or remix almost everything. “A remake renders the archival malleable,” the Los Angeles artist Matthew Lax wrote in 2021 for a journal called MARCH, arguing that remakes bring “another artifact or possibility into an established lineage.”

Lax’s 2016 video Lil’ Tokyo Story opens up one of the final scenes from the 1953 film Tokyo Story by the legendary Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963). Ozu’s style is so particular and recognizable that referencing and rebooting it works well. That is, you can make something a lot like Ozu without being Ozu.

In Tokyo Story, the pacing is slow. Ozu frequently positions the camera about three feet above the floor, angled up slightly towards the faces of the characters who generally sit on the floor. Writing for The New York Times in 1972 when audiences in the United States belatedly embraced the film, Roger Greenspun described Ozu’s characteristic look as “the product of an almost immobile camera usually shooting from a low position, and the absolute rejection of such sleights of cinema as the fade or the dissolve.”

In Newsweek the same year, Charles Michener called Ozu a perfectionist but found that “his characters live as few characters in movies do, as though Ozu’s camera had simply found them going through their lives.” Many critics note that the deadpan, precise, and quiet sensibility of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch owes a debt to Ozu.

Tokyo Story is a somber examination of a disintegrating Japanese family amid a national economic boom and rapid urbanization post World War II. A young woman, Kyoko, lives in a small seaside village where she cares for her father, Shukichi, and her mother, Tomi. Kyoko stays home while her parents visit their other children who prove themselves hardworking but unfortunately selfish. Noriko is Shukichi’s and Tomi’s only accommodating host in the big city. Not a blood relative, Noriko married their son before he died in the war. Tomi gets sick, and it’s almost as if she gets sick from the general lack of care she and her husband receive.

In Lax’s Lil’ Tokyo Story, two Japanese performers living in Los Angeles play the roles of Noriko and Kyoko. Lax costumed them in understated female drag. There are two iterations of this film. In the single-channel theatrical version, a scene is performed twice, first in Japanese with English subtitles, then in English with Japanese subtitles. In the two-channel installation version, the two performances are side-by-side with Japanese on the right and English on the left. Here, the scripts and the subtitles are subtly different. Because the two scenes play simultaneously, watching this version is more like watching an argument about a narrative than a straight narrative. Sometimes aspects of the language are difficult to decipher, though the overall gist is clear. The language makes sense, and while the video functions without a hitch, because of the side-by-side overlaps and near-overlaps, it still somehow seems to falter or malfunction some.

Lax talks about the universality of Tokyo Story and the difficulty of truly understanding it without being Japanese or speaking Japanese. He wrote to me recently about the film, “It’s archetypal. Big family event. Dysfunctional familial interaction. Sadness. Disappointment. Failure. My attraction to this text is that it’s so poignant and sad even when I don’t understand the nuance, and intuiting the [subtitled] text that’s been given to me is inadequate.

In the scene Lax remade, Noriko and Kyoko say goodbye after Tomi’s funeral. Kyoko is upset that her siblings want to divide their mother’s belongings right after she dies. She thinks children shouldn’t act that way. Noriko explains that children drift away from their parents and make their own lives. People change and move on. It’s not personal.

Kyoko protests that she never wants to be like that. That’s not family.

Noriko confesses that she may become like that, despite her best intentions. Eventually, maybe everyone ends up somewhat selfish. Kyoko and Noriko exist at the edges, beside the cultural change that is washing over them. They are strangers to it. They also can’t avoid being part of it.

Kyoko asks: “Isn’t life disappointing?”

Smiling, Noriko allows, “Yes, it is.”

Greenspun, the 1972 New York Times reviewer, remarked on this scene. He described both women’s expressions as having a “cheerful, slightly embarrassed sense of misery,” then praised the film for “its freedom from the sentimentality or the satire that so often obscure an artist’s vision of normal living.”

When I got together with Lax for coffee this fall, he said the exchange between Kyoko and Noriko (translated as “Isn’t life disappointing?” and the response, with a smile, “Yes, it is.”) made him want to make Lil’ Tokyo Story. A film buff, he grew up with vintage films in the house. “I’m interested in canons,” he explained, “Tokyo Story is a classic. It’s enshrined.” He added, “I am interested in the narrative behind all these things—why we like Ozu, why it took so long for him to be canonized, why we exalt Ozu as purity par excellence, and how/where Ozu comes up in other things that are not Ozu now.”

Lil’ Tokyo Story isn’t Lax’s only remake. Another project tracks a salacious 1990s Calvin Klein advertising campaign by the photographer Steven Meisel. And, in his ongoing project, A Tired Dog is a Good Dog, he collaborates with dog trainers and pups (people who roleplay as dogs). For part of this project, a video, Puppy Play Table Reading: Courage of Lassie (2022 - ), Lax and pups (dressed in fetish gear, collars, and hoods with dog ears) read from the script for Courage of Lassie (1946). “My connection with Lassie is personal,” Lax explained. “The old Lassie movies are all wartime family flicks about abandonment. There's a lot about man and dog and God and man as these big nationalist metaphors.”

In a ‘zine that’s also part of this project, Lax writes, “The pups might be the wild dogs. The pups have freed themselves of the bounds of body, gender, and most importantly, work. Pups often speak of pupspace, the psychology and state of being pup, a place free of external pressures, deadlines, trauma, societal expectations, and the demands of capitalism.”

I asked Lax why he chose to cast Lil’ Tokyo Story the way he did, with performers in drag, queering Tokyo Story. He shared that it was somewhat instinctual. He also pointed to Kabuki theater, Elizabethan plays, and other instances in theater history where men played women.

Lax is a quadruplet (and his parents breed dogs). “There are four of me,” he joked. “Lil’ Tokyo Story is in some way related to being a quadruplet. In there is this idea of multiplicity.”

Between Tokyo and Lil’ Tokyo, multiplicities: two directors, two cities, two languages, four actors, translation, translations, remakes, and more remakes. Some even think the Tokyo Story script, penned by Kogo Noda, was a remake of an earlier American film, Make Way for Tomorrow (1937). Before Lax remade Tokyo Story, it was already maybe a remake.

I talked with Lax over coffee about an Elaine Sturtevant show that was up then at Matthew Marks Gallery and included Sturtevant’s remakes of works by Keith Haring, Robert Gober, and Andy Warhol. In her own words, Sturtevant wasn’t “non-intellectual,” “Anti-Art,” “poking fun,” nor making imitations or copies. She also wasn’t interested in being a “Great Artist” or in overdetermined readings of her work. Instead, she was picking up, at least in part from Warhol. In a 1963 ARTNewsinterview, Warhol proclaimed joyfully, “I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody,” then “I think it would be so great if more people took up silkscreens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else’s.”

Sturtevant did just that. The machine seemed to free her and Warhol, if not from capitalism, from interpretations trucking in heroic and definitional bounds they didn’t want. In the 2021 essay for MARCH, referring to a frequently revitalized Rodgers and Hammerstein musical based on an earlier play, Lax wrote, “The remake is a stubborn political device, which often employs strategies of adaptation, homage, and reproduction. A remake always carries its referent, but Oklahoma! is Oklahoma! is not Oklahoma!”

In this light, Warhol is and isn’t Warhol and Sturtevant. Sturtevant is and isn’t a machine. Tokyo Story and Lil’ Tokyo Story are connected but separate.

Lax wrote to me, “The film’s title refers to the ubiquitous Chinatowns, Little Tokyos, Little Italys, and Ukrainian Villages.” Tokyo Story seems to be very much a Japanese film. Lax’s work, though, is fundamentally American—seemingly more post-war American than post-war Japanese—a political and possibly Queer device. In the introduction to the 1992 book Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, the theater scholar David Savran acknowledges that post-war communists and capitalists couldn’t agree on much but posits they did agree on sexism and heteronormativity. Lax offered, addressing the breakdown of the family in Tokyo Story, “There is no resolution, which I find Queer. We are going to live with this depression. We are going to be melancholic.”

After World War II, The United States pledged to defend Japan, its previous combattant, after Japan adopted a pacifist constitution and agreed to accept a substantial American military presence. Anyway, the United States was fixated on Communism. Allen Ginsberg, in linguistically halting Queer rebellion, voiced aspects of this mindset in his 1956 poem America: “The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. / Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. / Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.”

In his 2003 book A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater, Savran referred to plays like Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America (1993) about the AIDS crisis—replete with historical slippages and otherworldly entrances—and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997) about child abuse. In them, Savran found contemporary stories haunted by ghosts. “Like a zombie,” he wrote, “history is coming back to stalk us.” He continued, “Insofar that each skirmish has a winner and a loser, the ghost usually represents a casualty of history. For it is almost always numbered among the losers. It may not imagine itself a victim, but its refusal to die, to disappear, leads one to suspect that it has in some way been wronged or oppressed.”

For Savran, gender is drag—unstable and often an instrument of restrictive culture. Tokyo Story is about the breakdown of traditional family life. I think Lil’ Tokyo Story also suggests the lived and living breakdown of gender roles—roles that to some extent still haunt us and are enmeshed in iterations of family life across the globe. For me, thinking about Lax, Ozu’s characters—somewhat like ghosts—start to knock around a malleable timeline and roll right up to touch and intersect with our dimly workable present.

Lax pointed me to Rebecca Schneider’s 2011 book Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. I’m particularly drawn to the chapter that teases out some of the motivations behind American Civil War reenactments. In this chapter, Schneider writes poetically about the uneasy place of the past in the present: “It is certainly possible to argue that any approach to history involving remains—material or immaterial remains—engages temporality at (and as) a chiasm, where times cross and, in crossing, in some way touch.”

No one—no character—is one thing. Lax’s decision to cast performers in drag—related for him to instinct and historical precedent—suggests a “Why not?” in response to any question of “Why drag?” Lax reminded me, “Drag often is about reclaiming a position of subjugation.” Lil’ Tokyo Story doesn’t flip the patriarchy per se, nor does it aim to, but through this short film, Noriko and Kyoko reappear and rejoin us in our various contemporary contexts. These women used to perform prescribed roles. Hegemonic constructions of gender wronged them. The culture held them in. We can see now that it was not just their family and circumstances that were problematic. We can wonder now: Where was their refuge? Where was their freedom from external pressures, societal expectations, sexism, and heteronormativity?

Marcus Civin, November 15, 2022

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Matthew Lax’s writing in MARCH is available here

I interviewed Lax on September 25, 2022, in Manhattan. Emails followed. A PDF of Lax’s ‘zine A Dog Worries a Bone and Other Thoughts (Inga Books + table, 2022) is available here

Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story), 1953, directed by Yasujiro Ozu, with a screenplay by Kogo Noda and Yasujiro Ozu, is available on various online streaming platforms. A good reference on Ozu, which includes the reviews mentioned above, is Ozu’s Tokyo Story, edited by David Desser (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

For more on Sturtevant, see here and the catalog for the 2014 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Sturtevant: Double Trouble with an essay by Peter Eleey.

The critic Gene Swenson interviewed Andy Warhol for ArtNews in 1963 as part of a series attempting to define Pop Art. Find it online here

The full text of Ginsberg’s 1956 poem America is online here

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