Some Words

Netflix on Demand has provided me with an odd array of documentaries recently. I don’t know why, but I have been watching documentaries almost exclusively. When I begin to watch something with a narrative plot, I last about 15 minutes. I don’t really know why. Feel free to refer to my previous post for pseudo insight into that matter.

One of the documentaries that I have watched was The Great Happiness Space. It is about men in Japan who entertain women at bars, professionally. A sort of no sex twist on male prostitution, they prostitute the a certain type of fake relationship instead. These men spend the entire night drinking with women they pull off the street, and charge these women to spend time with them. The women often force(?) them to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol. As the owner/entertainer of the bar that the documentary takes place in says, “My liver is pretty much fucked.”

For about five minutes I thought that they were simple assholes. Then for about ten minutes I thought that maybe there is a depth to them that you had not considered before. After this, a yawning abyss opened beneath me emotionally. If I looked down, and stopped viewing the film as a very limited character study, I would be forced to confront just how horrible human existence is for many, many people, even in very affluent nations. This was, I think, the real value of the experience. It allowed me to catch a glimpse of how horrible things were, while still being allowed to digest it over a period of time. The fact that the people who were being interviewed were often prostitutes, who carried out destructive behaviors in an attempt to cover up but whole created by the central destructive behavior of their life, was not hammered in. Instead, it sort of slipped in sideways, and then came to dominate. If you had to confront this at the start, without first being able to acclimatize to the amazing level of unthinking callousness of some of these people you might walk away before you really had a chance to see how deep the rabbit whole went.