Yûta Shimotsu’s Japanese film Best Wishes For All has mostly been interpreted as a capitalist fable about exploitation and expropriation of wealth. That reading isn’t wrong, but the film’s open-ended enough to suggest other kinds of brutalization. It speaks most directly not to economics, but to emotion—not to the need for resources, but to the need for hate.
The movie’s nameless protagonist is a Tokyo nursing student (Kotone Furukawa) who goes on vacation in the country to visit her grandparents while she waits for her exam results. Grandpa (Masashi Arifuku) and Grandma (Yoshiko Inuyama) are happy to see her, but they behave oddly; at one point in the middle of a meal they start oinking like pigs and then explain they’re expressing the joy of the pork they’re consuming, which is fulfilling its destiny by being consumed. There are also strange noises coming from the upstairs back room—a room that both grandparents stare at with disturbing intensity.
It's not too long before the student realizes that her grandparents are keeping a person in the room; they’ve sewn his eyes and lips shut so they can torture him and collect his excrement for miso paste. When the student attempts to free the man (with the help of a neighboring young man played by the smoldering Kôya Matsudai), the grandparents inform her that the guy’s the source of the family’s good luck. There’s only so much happiness in the world; some must suffer so that others may flourish.
The film spirals from there into a surreal nightmare. Everyone but the student, it seems, knows the basic facts of life—including her blithe parents, former schoolmates, and that smoldering young man. At the same time, though, the facts aren’t ever exactly explained. How are scapegoats chosen? Why does the student’s young brother start to bleed from the eyes and convulse when the scapegoat’s removed? How can her parents seem so unaffected by their young child writhing on the ground? What’s the deal with the ax murder scene that wanders in from nowhere?
As a metaphor for capitalism, the film never makes sense; the scapegoat isn’t forced to work, and (besides that miso) doesn’t provide any concrete products or services. Without him, the family doesn’t have a lower standard of living; they start to bleed from the eyes.
The confusion isn’t a flaw. Instead, it’s in the tradition of Kafka or David Lynch, where the failure to cohere is part of the logic of nightmare, which is often the logic of nightmarish reality. More, it points beyond the mechanical calculus of capitalism, and towards the psychological processes of prejudice and fascism.
The family’s callousness, their laughing dismissal of the idea that the scapegoat could be human, the way that normality is presented as a kind of horror—this could be an analogy for the way middle-class people build their standard of living on the slave labor of distant others. But we’re also seeing a community which tells itself it’s valuable because it has someone else to torture and spit on. Certain people’s lives have no value, and that assures everyone else that they’re important, worthwhile, deserving of happiness. It’s significant that the charmed circle is defined by religion—and those who reject their beliefs are shunned, mocked, bullied.
The point isn’t that the film is about fascism rather than capitalism. Rather, it’s that the movie isn’t tied to any one interpretation, and so demonstrates how various kinds of violence, and justifications for violence, wind around each other, mimic each other, and reinforce each other.
It also suggests how powerful these multiple justifications can be. Perhaps you could resist family pressure; perhaps you could forswear material success; perhaps you could defy ingrained hatreds; perhaps you could even face death. But when they all work together? Who can say no?
The last chilling image of Best Wishes For All is of the student returned to herself. Defying her family left her bleeding, ragged, desperate, filthy. Now, though, that she’s acquiesced in the torture of others she’s again clean, beautiful, radiant. Fighting against the cruelty of the world is a misery. Embrace it and be happy.