At the turn of the century, Battle Royale was an international cultural phenomenon. Soon enough I saw a blurry pirated copy on video, which seemed rather confusing in terms of characters and plot. Thus it is a surprise to learn recently that the movie was not officially released on video in the US until 2012, long after its poor cousin, Hunger Games, gained popularity with the American public. (I must note that the author of HG, Susan Collins, has always maintained that she had not heard of BR before she finished the novels. I believe her.)
The movie, directed by Kinji Fukasaku, is a variation of the horror/action movie genre. The original novel, written in 1997 and published in 1999, was considered shocking and controversial in Japan. There is obvious reference to Lord of the Flies, but it also bares the mark of shonen popular entertainment (mostly manga), which centers on the life of young adults (roughly 12-18 years).
Rewatching it on Criterion Channel in the middle age, I am surprised by its prescience; no, perhaps it is simply astute social observation and commentary. It is me who has been too stupid to realize that our time, in contrast to the post-WW2 baby boom that came to age in the 1960s and 70s, is a time of the old against the young.
In 2023, it is hard not to be inundated with the dumbass meme that the leading politicians are "too old." News media parrot the meme without any insight, crowing on about the age of presidents, presidential candidates, congressional leaders, etc., etc., without a hint of understanding why. When the very old president tries to do something good for young people, for example, by using tax dollars to pay off a portion of their student loans, look how the entire society goes into hysterics: "No one helped me with my student loans. Why should today's young people get any free money?"
Ours is a time in which older generations take ever greater power and resources from younger generations. The shift in population age pattern in the past 80 years is one of the main forces that drive the political and social climates in this era. (Another force is "the pill.") People tend to hoard more resources and power naturally over time (if they stay alive), but this trend is exacerbated by the delay in death. As the proportion of older people grows more rapidly than ever, young people quickly lose the little power they gained through the 1970s. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 is the first sign that we were entering of an increasingly conservative era with no end in sight, simply because old people continue to outnumber young people. Since then, (draft-dodging) conservatives never stopped complaining about younger generations for being too soft, too lazy, too fragile, too whiny, too whatever ... (The podcast If Books Could Kill has plenty of materials on this phenomenon. The fear and hatred of younger generations are on full display.)
To express the youth-elderly conflict, director Fukasaku derived inspiration from his youth as a middle-schooler carrying corpses killed by US bombs in WW2. The war is a killing game that old men throw young people into. That's certainly true. That the allegory continues to resonate from 2000 to 2023 is an indication that the generational struggle for power and resources remains the same in peace time and will continue in the foreseeable future, when the population continues to live longer and become older, gripping power and money ever tighter in our spotted, wrinkled, bony hands.
An example of this generational conflict? Climate change politics. Older people have less incentive to sacrifice some of their comfort and convenience, and more importantly financial position, to fend off an uninhabitable environment some years from now, no matter how much lip service is paid to loving their children and grandchildren.
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I have not watched the Hunger Games movies, but I did read the first book. It is OK but vastly inferior to Battle Royale. The difference between HG and BR is precisely a reflection of the difference between the American and Japanese popular cultures. HG is a typical American fantasy of playing pretend revolution in a faraway land/galaxy of dictatorship. Both exciting and safe, because "it will never happen here!" BR, on the other hand, is a horror story smack in the middle of its own place and time with a unique absurdist humor. The Japanese are the best in the world at the art of death, while the American ... well, as Disney has told us, Americans are immortal; death does not exist for them.
Ironically, 2 decades later, Battle Royale looks more like real-life America than Japan, with young people shooting each other dead in schools (with automatic weapons, just like the movies!) every day while older people buy more and more guns. If Fukasaku could see it from heaven, would he laugh out loud?
