Issei Sagawa: Real Life Cannibal

(Long time readers: This is part of a class assignment on real life psychos. I've never really liked covering True Crime stuff because I have a very different emotional reaction to real world violence as opposed to fictitious violence. Still, I think it's an interesting story and I get to talk a little about how psychos work in fiction vs. in real life. Enjoy!)

            Issei Sagawa killed and consumed a woman and never went to jail for it. He lives in a small Japanese town writing books and making art and generally not bothering anyone. I don't know if he is actually insane and doubt he's much of a threat anymore but there's something both pitiable and monstrous about him.

Sagawa was born in 1949 to a wealthy family in Kobe, Japan. Despite the fact that he looked pretty much like a normal guy, he described himself as being frail, underformed, and sickly, which made me wonder if he had some sort of body dysmorphia issues at the root of all his psychosis. He grew fixated on western women as they represented an inversion of his self-image. As he said in his Vice interview, “I am weak and short. Western women are tall and beautiful.”

He also became sexually fixated on the idea of cannibalism. It's not apparently an unheard of fetish and there are videos out there of people eating human-shaped candies and describing devouring life and gaining strength from it. I suspect that Sagawa shares this fetish and he took it as far as a person can possibly go.

After a couple brushes with the law, including an attempted rape charge, Sagawa left Japan at 28 to study comparative literature at the Sorbonne. As I was putting my research material together, I found myself impressed by the man as I flipped through his photos from his time in Paris. He looked like the kind of smart, well-dressed, confident young man who would wind up in Paris studying Truth and Beauty. I was impressed and a little bit jealous of the romanticism of his life at that point.

On June 11th 1981, Sagawa invited a Dutch student named Renée Hartevelt to his apartment under the pretext of translating some German poems. As she was seated in a chair, Sagawa shot her in the back of the head with a small-caliber rifle. After she died, Sagawa raped her and began eating her body.

The thing that trips me out about the scenario is that it sounds like he had a shot with her. Come on, son. No one goes to some dude's house just to translate poetry. The point where cognitive dissonance kicks in for me is here. Sagawa was clearly into her and it seems like he had a shot. At that point my instinct would be to pour a couple drinks and ask about her major but his thought process was all "kill, fuck, eat."

That, my friends, is messed up.

Anyway, he carves and eats parts of her body. It's pretty gross and I'll spare y'all the details, but suffice to say he gets worried that the smell of rotting meat will be noticed so he carves the body up, packs it in a couple suitcases, and take them to a nearby lake for disposal. He's caught, the police arrest him, and he's quickly ruled insane. The French populace are outraged at the case and there's some debate about what to do with Sagawa. Before treatment even starts for Sagawa, the Japanese government step in and extradite him back to Japan. For reasons I'm not entirely clear on, the Japanese psychologists assigned to his case declare him "sane but evil" and let him go. Aside from a couple kerfluffles, he's been a free man ever since.

Sagawa has created a sort of cottage industry out of being a celebrity cannibal. During the interview I watched with him, the camera cut between whimsical drawings he drew to recreate the crime with photos of Hartevelt's dismembered body. He's written books, acted in bizarre films, created a repellent manga, and appears to have exploited his behavior into a tidy living.

The structure of the interview both demonizes and humanizes him. On one hand, he's a creepy little troll who ate a woman, makes money off the crime, holds no real regret, and works out of an office where he keeps photos of Hartevelt's body in cute little frames on his desk. On the other hand, he's a lonely little outcast who longs for death, has no self-esteem, and has been pretty ruthlessly exploited by the people who've come into his life since he returned to Japan. The few TV shows he's done make him look less like a monster and more as a man uncomfortable in his own skin and desperately seeking approval. A couple of cute German backpackers traveled around the world on Sagawa's dime, likely by exploiting his obvious attraction to them. The weirdest moment in Sagawa's post-cannibal life is his turn as a pornographic star. Some dirtbag pornographer hired a porn starlet to sleep with Sagawa on film The girl had no idea who Sagawa was before performing on-camera. After the act was over, the pornographer had Sagawa show her the photos from his crime and explain what he'd done. You can see the girl crumbling in horror at the revelation. The pornographer interviews the tearful girl in the car afterward and she says “I understand that he’s full of insecurities. I think it’s selfish to let his fantasies grow so wild. Or it’s like he’s lacking something.”

 

For those interested, you can see the Vice Magazine interview with Sagawa here. 

 

I chose Issei Sagawa for a couple reasons. Leaving aside the obvious fact that I'm a total weeaboo geek, I was fascinated by a guy who committed probably the biggest taboo in modern culture and suffered no real punishment.

I also chose Sagawa because of how candid he is with his internal life. Because he has his liberty and because so much of his life involves fixating on himself, he hasn't developed all those weird power fantasies other killers develop when they're left to rot in prison. He's intelligent and articulate and more than a little bit sad, but when I found myself being lulled into sympathy for him he would say or show something horrible and remind you that the would would probably best be rid of him. In other words, he's not a cardboard cut out fictional psycho but a nuanced and deeply broken human being.

I also chose him because of the overtly sexual nature of his crimes. Maybe it's my own prejudices but I tend to see almost all serial murder as behavior of a corrupted sexuality. There's a reason killers target people they're attracted to and a reason that most of the crime involve either dominance or rape. People destroy what they want to fuck because they hate anything that makes them feel lust because they hate themselves for being unable to approach the person in a meaningful way. It's really just the logical extreme extension of the typical misogyny you see every time some dude talks shit about some girl.

Serial killers who kill just because are slasher movie villains. That's fine, I like a good slasher flick as much as the next malformed child of the 80s, but they aren't proper psychos. I believe that in a healthy, socially supportive society, people who kill other people for reasons other than profit or temporary rage are fundamentally aberrant. They're broken, usually by a combination of chemistry and circumstance. It's easy and perhaps morally correct to simply want to toss them down a deep dark hole and forget about them, but I tend to see psychos as extreme extensions of toxic social attitudes we all buy into. A sad little fetishist who fixates his sexuality on cannibalism the way that Sagawa does is an interesting, if depressing, mirror held up to the darker sides of human sexuality.

Psycho by Robert Bloch

So does Norman Bates work better as an effeminate, boyishly handsome young man or as a baby faced, portly, forgettable mama's boy?

That's the big difference, innit? The storyline is basically the same. The structure is a bit different, too. Instead of starting with poor doomed Marion Crane and her lover, we crawl right into Norman Bates' life. Reading it, I kinda wonder how many of the original readers figured out what the big twist ending was. You can do a lot of tricks with visuals that you can't do with the written word and it's pretty obvious that Norman is shadowboxing in empty rooms.

Then again, I came to Psycho, both the film and the novel, knowing all the twists and turns. It feels like a fairy tale someone told me when I was really young and remained imprinted on my psyche. Reading it was still very rewarding. When you watch the movie version of a story, it's like you're observing it in real life. You can see the visuals, pick up the non-verbal cues, and interact with a story as a passive observer in the characters' lives. Reading the book lets you climb into people's heads. What you lose in "objective" visual clarity, you gain in intimacy.

Having climbed directly into Norman Bates' head, I gotta say it's a pretty fucked up place.

It's hard to feel sympathy for him, in that mama's boys seldom elicit sympathy in this culture. I feel a bit of pity for him, though it's easier to pity Anthony Perkins' version than the novel's version, if for no other reason than the superficial. The Norman I imagine from the book is shlubby and unappealing. People who encounter him seem to think he's harmless, but the way he carries himself and the stuff he says would set off my creeper alarm. Maybe the late fifties/early sixties were a more innocent charms, but I buy the version of Marion Crane from the movie, sitting in the parlor with Norman and being frightened by the things he tells her.

Blah blah Ed Gein blah blah Texas Chainsaw Massacre blah blah.


The big thing I took away from this book is the idea that no one really understands themselves or the people around them. Norman Bates really believes that he's covering up for his demented mother, Sam Loomis is shocked that the woman he was considering marrying could have stolen $40,000, and Lila Crane has to come to terms with a sister she barely knew. It's an idea that has some resonance with me these days.

I don't really have much to say beyond the fact that Norman Bates is the ur-psycho of pop culture. His weakness, his vulnerability, his dementia, and his mother issues have become what people think of whenever people use the word "psycho." No other madman has captured the public imagination the way that Bates has.

At least not until Hannibal Lecter came along.    

Psycho

Oh, man. I wanna be Alfred Hitchcock when I grow up.

Okay, writing a review of Psycho is an act not entirely dissimilar to reinventing the wheel. It's been decades since the movie terrified people out of their showers and a thousand commentaries have been written about the movie. Nothing I say, nothing I observe, hasn't been studied more thoroughly by wiser heads than mine. So alls I can do is tell you a story.

I met Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano when I was seventeen. I had just graduated high school and a bunch of friends and I decided to drive down to the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in Pasadena, CA. There was a bunch of razzle dazzle around the various franchise horror flicks coming down the pipeline, and a bunch of odd fliers appeared about the disappearance of three amateur filmmakers in the woods outside of Burkittsville, MD, but somewhere lost in the commotion was an ill-attended appearance by the man who wrote Psycho.

I don't recall why I went to the panel or what burning question I had that compelled me to the podium, but I remember that sweet old face smiling down at me from the stage and saying "I think monsters should be beautiful."

Damn. I was very deeply affected by that. Even to this day that accidental little piece of poetry stays with me. The notion that the embodiments of our lusts and our terrors and our animal passions could hold a strange dark beauty was something I responded to. Obviously, I am not talking about the real monsters of the world, the sick and mean among us that go out and do real harm to real people. But those things we create, the stuff that affects us as deeply as a proper monster can, there is something genuinely seductive in that.

Anyway, Psycho. I assume you all know the history of the book, the case it was based on, and the ties to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There's a lot of interesting background to the story but generally speaking horror movies play fast and loose with the stories they are inspired from. I would rather get into my views on the movie than go on about some nutjob from Wisconsin and the ways he decorated his house.

It drives me nuts when people call Psycho the first slasher movie. Yeah, a naked broad in a Bad Place gets done in through the gross misuse of kitchen cutlery But aside from a couple of frightening murders, it fundamentally doesn't feel like a slasher movie. Slasher movies, as I've come to understand the term, require the murderer to be a cipher. Norman is painfully, painfully human.

I like Norman Bates. Norman Bates breaks my heart. People tend to fixate on the justifiably famous shower murder, but my favorite scene in the movie is the parlor scene between Bates and the ill-fated Marion Crane. In the darkly shadowed room, trapped by his own obsessions, this lonely little weirdo shares his misery with the increasingly uneasy Marion. It's heartbreaking. Psycho came along before the serial killer archetype calcified into what we understand it to be. Norman Bates isn't a cold, calculating, misanthropic genius. He isn't even aware he's killing people. He's just deeply fucked up.

Psycho, in a weird way, is almost a ghost story. Norman's mother is, in a very real sense, haunting the Bates motel. The atmosphere of isolation and decay, the very tangible sense of claustrophobia and loneliness, and the looming, tombstone-like presence of the old house on the hill, all add a nearly supernatural air to the events that occur.

Then there's the shower scene.



There are three things that work really strongly for me. I like the fact that the violence happens so suddenly, that she's attacked with such brutal speed and viciousness in the sanctuary of the shower. I like the graceful way that Marion Crane slides down the wall, hand reaching out to us as if for help. Finally, I really like the slow pull away from the lifeless eye. It's a horrible image, and Hitchcock forces us to linger in on it in silence.

As for the rest of the movie, the discovery of the corpse in the Bates home still freaks the shit out of me. The big reveal of Mrs. Bates is still genuinely scary and Hitchcock forces us to linger on the image, this grotesque parody of life, poorly preserved and staring back at us with hollow eyes. It's a shocking image, especially considering the era this was filmed.


I don't really have a problem with the Psycho remake. I listen to cover bands, too. I even thought that Vince Vaughn did a pretty good job as Norman Bates. My big issue was the simple fact that he's physically too imposing for the role. Anthony Perkins had a more boyish look to him, which fit better with a character in arrested development. He's more unassuming, more innocent, and his final descent into madness becomes all the more chilling in his guiltless features.



I've always wondered about the final monologue, which comes as a chilling counterpoint to the false reassurance offered by the forensic psychologist. How deep was Norman into his own lunacy? How unaware was he of his mother's actions? Or was he even there at all, a hollow man from the start, his mother's skeletal smile superimposed over his features as the movie ends.

Creepy.

ia ia cthulhu fhtagn

Creature (who thinks Janet Leigh was quite a hottie in her day)

A word on reviews

I created this blog to get involved in the discussions going around the webs, particularly the Final Girl Film Club.

I don't really have a lot of genre fans in my personal life. None of my friends or loved ones are brain-damaged enough to really love this stuff. Furthermore, I'm always the one guy in my group who, after leaving the movie, wants to pick apart the stupid thing. Everyone else is thinking about dinner and I'm griping/ranting/praising the thematic stuff going on within the story. Once I start going on, I can see my friend's eyes begin to glaze over.

So, I figured, I might as well put this junk on the interwebs, let those of you who want to engage in this sort of thing come and find me.

On my end, I'm going to do my best not to ape professional film reviewers. It's been my experience that a lot of cats who are doing this thing with me tend to follow the format laid down by the critics we grew up with. The critics are writing for people who are still deciding on whether or not they want to see a movie. I'm a special-interest blogger. I'm writing for people who've already seen it.

Which means no synopsis, unless I need one for whatever point I'm trying to make. There's not much point in me explaining what happens in Dawn of the Dead. You've seen it. That also means SPOILER ALERT!

I say that again. SPOILER ALERT! I get that you don't want your experience and appreciation of a work ruined by some mouthy idiot spilling secrets. I cover my ears and LaLaLAAAA whenever people start talking about Dexter. Consider yourselves warned.

Also, obviously, I'm not a professional film/book/vidjya game reviewer. I didn't study film or English or Vidjya Game History in college. I will probably miss a lot of the technique and craftsmanship that goes on behind a work. I can only discuss what resonated with me.

Finally, I'm gonna try not to review crap unless it's something that really demands my vitriol. We horror fans are a sad, sad bunch of people. Our interests pretty much require that we wade through an ocean of shit to find the rare diamonds. Frankly, life's too short to talk about every lousy thing that's out there.

Think that's it. I'm working on reviews of Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, and the novel Heart Shaped Box. Thanks for sticking around. If you got a unique point of view on something, chuck it into my Comments box. Like I said, I'm here for the discussion.

ia ia cthulhu fhtagn

Creature