Burst City and the infancy of Japanese cyberpunk

Gakuryu Ishii's insane punk rock flick is the birth of something the film world had never seen before.

I can honestly say that during my decades of obsessive movie consumption that I have never seen anything quite like Gakuryu Ishii’s 1982 cyberpunk nightmare, Burst City. Produced during the same period as The Road Warrior, it predicts the same feral future as George Miller without mining those same veins as the Italian ripoffs that would spring forth in the following years. It simply makes the same assumption that mankind, living among its own filth and trash, would instinctively devolve into tribes of hard-living guzzoline-maniacs. It also seems to predict Alex Cox’s Repo Man and Penelope Spheeris’s Suburbia and Decline of Western Civilization in one fell swoop. Burst City’s prescience is wild! The way that it swerves and veers into familiar western movie territory without first being informed by it in the same way that cash-ins and knock-offs are is, in a way, a little too spooky for me. Was there some seismic shift in global culture that sent tremors around the world that savvy individuals were able to detect? Was there some phantom current running under our feet that the Reagan/Thatcher years of late-era Cold War brought closer to the surface? At no point during the East/West economic struggle were we ever that close to armageddon. Some voice was speaking to the world in a language that only the disenfranchised were able to hear and only the truly weird were able to articulate to the rest of us. The weirdest among us, it seems, made their homes in Tokyo.

Summarizing the plot of Burst City is no small task, even if the movie is quite simple in its storytelling. Clocking in at nearly two hours, it’s a hyper-kinetic freakout set amongst the rust and ruins of Tokyo’s industrial fringe, suggesting that this is all that remains of Tokyo. In one hand you hold the threads of a plot surrounding a chrome-domed lunatic and his mute sidekick. They spend their days hurtling through the ruins on a motorcycle, looking for the man who killed the mute’s father. In the other hand you hold the threads of a plot concerning a corporate plan to build a nuclear power plant on the same plot of land that the locals use to host nightly bacchanalia, fist fights, and drag races. At some point you’ll notice that these disparate threads come together to form a single, noisy tapestry. Tying it all together and giving a pair of simple revenge/resist plot threads some body is a series of high-flying performances from some of Japan’s highest profile punk rock bands. Everything within emanates downward and coalesces into the terminal point-of-no-return for psychedelia. It’s the moment that you realize the party has gone on too long and the euphoric high is out of gas, leaving you with nothing but a bitter, teeth-grinding buzz and the sneaking suspicion that you need sleep. That’s what Burst City is about and again with the psychic shit, Ishii’s movie culminates in a riot, clashing against the construction of the power plant a few years ahead of the Sanrizuka riots.

Cybernetics is a woefully misunderstood word thanks to science fiction. Thinking of it now, you likely have an image in mind of some person with body parts replaced with high-technology, right? But you’d be wrong. Cybernetics is a broad field of study which examines systems of control. Specifically, systems of control informed by the feedback loop of organic, meaty humanity and the technology we create to ease the burden of social control. Cyberpunk implies a street-level pushback against those control systems. From a certain angle, cyberpunk could be seen as the ultimate form of punk rock expression since technology is so deeply embedded in our way of life. To live without its sophisticated tentacles pulling the levers that would otherwise require thousands of human hands working in perfect concert we’d be reduced to cavemen. To live with it is to live forever with dread lurking at the back of your mind that no one is in control but machinery waiting to become smart enough to relieve us of any agency, whatsoever.

There’s no real square one space for the birth of cyberpunk as a science fiction movement since its beginnings could be seen as glimmers in the fiction published as early as the 1960’s, but fans are able to mostly agree on William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer, as the moment that it all came together. But for my money, Japan has always been way ahead of the cultural curve and once again, Ishii is telegraphing the shape of things to come to the rest of the world, but specifically to the disenfranchised underclasses. The best part is that this wasn’t even the first time Ishii did this. Only a couple of years prior he released Crazy Thunder Road which bears more in common with western biker movies than the rusty crumble of society in decline in Burst City, but the seeds are planted in that slimy soil and it resonated with an element of Japanese society that stuck out like a sore thumb.

Japanese cultural stereotypes imply a socially enforced politeness and, though elderly by this point in history, the echo of unquestioning loyalty to an emperor rang clearly in the memory of many Japanese citizens, but not all. The rise of Japanese punk culture and youth street violence suggests that the memory rang hollow for many. Strict hierarchical structures applied to every way of life in Japan, as well, demonstrated by histrionic apology rituals like Dogeza, where one prostrates themselves before their superior, sobbing and screaming for their forgiveness, eventually left a bad taste in the mouths of the youths there who wanted no part of such nonsense. The icing on the cake came in the form of post-war Japan’s symbiotic economic relationship to the United States, whose occupation and treaties provided Japanese industry and monolithic Zaibatsus with significant sums of cash in exchange for access to naval bases. Is it any surprise that our religion of capitalism here surged to cartoonish proportions there? Not everyone wants in on that dream and those crushed under foot are going to break off and do their own thing. The more extreme the conditions, the more extreme the reaction, and Japanese capitalism, being a funhouse mirror reflection of American capitalism produced a counterculture that should have been the envy of the world had it not felt so alien to everyone west of The Sea of Japan. No evidence of this could be clearer than the punk rock style of the bands found herein. Released in the mortuary years of punk’s post-’77 surge, the bands in Burst City share nothing in common with the European acts that set the stage for alternative music east of Britannia. Instead, they could easily fit in with literally everyone defining the sound of Los Angeles at that very moment in time.

But that should be enough pontificating on the social and cultural conditions that fertilized the soil that eventually gave flower to the world’s first truly cyberpunk ecosystem. Is Burst City any good? Good God, yes. And then some. This movie should be a worldwide phenomenon based entirely on novelty, alone. Shinya Tsukamoto will eventually come along and hijack the current with the notoriously grimy Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and Shozin Fukui would steal the crown from him with the utterly off-the-wall low-fi-sci-fi bonanza, 964 Pinnochio, which dared to ask, “What if the subway scene from Possession but with sex robots?” But neither could exist without Burst City and, to a strong degree, Shigeru Izumiya’s elusive Death Powder.

Stylistically, Burst City is frantic. It’s electric, like sticking a fork in an electrical outlet and then doing it again and again for the thrill until you die. Bits and pieces of Ishii’s style emerge here and there in more mainstream fare, like the frantic opening of Takashi Miike’s Dead on Arrival and basically the entirety of Tetsuro Takeuchi’s Wild Zero, but the 16mm punk rock sugar rush on display here is a stylistic flourish deeply rooted in its filmmaker. A more critical eye might fault it for its laissez faire attitude toward storytelling and at a runtime of nearly two hours, one would think that matters, but I admit that I have a soft spot for style over substance when the style in question happens to be just so fucking good and bound to the signature of the filmmaker at large. Refer to my old review of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Jodorowsky stroke-fest, Only God Forgives. Mixing things up and punctuating bits and pieces of the story are numerous performances by bands with names like The Stalin (Tokyo’s answer to Crass), The Rockers, and The Roosters, and it’s a shame that they’re not better known outside of Japan because every single one of them is great and the scenes supporting them, some of which are dance numbers meant to illustrate the Franz Kafka drudgery of work and conformity, are extremely entertaining and ambitious for a filmmaker whose prior pictures were every bit as wild, but consistently green for a new filmmaker. You could call Burst City Ishii’s magnum opus even at this stage in his storied career. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea much in the same way the cyberpunk of Japan’s future isn’t but for fans of film, out on the prowl for something truly unique in a way that 99% film is not, you’re doing yourself a treat by indulging in it. It’s vibrant and vital and a strong reminder of those early days of your film fandom brought you into contact with something so hard to explain but a discovery so exciting that you keep digging to satisfy the craven urge for more.

Burst City is currently available for streaming through Arrow’s streaming service and Arrow’s excellent blu-ray release. I receive no kickbacks from Arrow for these links. I just think that you really owe it to yourself to see it.