Swallowtail Butterfly · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A dead man on a floor, and someone pulling a cassette out of his stomach. He had swallowed it to keep it safe. Play it and you get "My Way." Read the same magnetic stripe as data instead of music and it tells you how to print ¥10,000 notes that pass. One piece of plastic is a song about authoring your own life, a fortune, and the evidence in a murder. Hold onto it, because Swallowtail Butterfly is built entirely out of objects that are two or three things at once and never settle.

Start with the word the film is named after twice over. The yen is the strongest currency on earth, so people come from everywhere to get near it. The locals call them Yentowns, as a slur. The migrants take the same word and use it for the city they believe they are building. Iwai never adjudicates. He builds an economy on the refusal. His Yentowns counterfeit ¥10,000 notes and the counterfeits work, because a real note was also just paper that everyone had agreed to honour. Names run on the same currency. A girl is called Ageha, swallowtail, because somebody decides it beside her mother's body. A singer is called Glico, after a candy. Nobody's papers are real, and the community holds together on consent and nothing else.

Deleuze has a name for this and it is the reason to watch the film with him in the room. Classical cinema assumed a true world underneath, and even its liars were measured against a truth the film itself knew. Modern cinema, he argued, produces something else: the powers of the false, a storytelling that stops sorting true from false and starts making things out of their undecidability. Its characteristic figure is the forger, who does not report a truth but manufactures one, and shifts identity as he goes. Yentown is an entire society of forgers, and the film's counterfeit banknote is the plainest statement of the idea anyone has put on screen.

You could object that this is just a crime picture about counterfeiters, and Deleuze is decoration. Here is why he isn't. The falsity is in the film stock, not only the plot. Photography's oldest hold on us is that it testifies: grain, flare, light nobody arranged. Shinoda shoots pushed emulsion and practical light, lets bare bulbs and doorways blow past detail, lets halation eat the edges of faces. The casting carries the same guarantee. Chara is a working musician rather than a trained actor; Andy Hui performs in languages he does not fully command; the accented, halting, code-switched delivery gives the film a documentary friction no polished bilingual cast would have produced. Every one of those is a mark of unfaked recording, and Iwai spends all of it on a fairy tale that opens with "once upon a time." That is the whole trick. The false is operating in the material of the image.

It is also operating politically. Deleuze noticed that modern political films often cannot assume a people already exists for the filmmaker to speak on behalf of — the people are missing — and that when they are missing, cinema's job changes from representing them to fabulation: catching people in the act of legending themselves, storytelling as the means by which a people that doesn't yet exist starts to. Japan's undocumented migrants in 1996 had no standing to be spoken for, and mainstream Japanese cinema largely declined to look. Iwai looks, lets them speak Mandarin and English at length, and subtitles them for his domestic audience, which is an admission printed on the face of the film that Japan contains speech Japan cannot understand. Then he does the thing that is genuinely his invention. The band inside the story, Yen Town Band, was released, charted, and had a real career. The film's own fiction was issued into the world like the currency its characters print. Not a marketing stunt. The thesis, executed outside the frame.

Watch how he films the crowd and you'll see the same logic in the picture. Long lenses compress the shantytown into a churning mass; frames are packed with bodies, hanging laundry, wires, hand-painted signage in four alphabets, so the community registers as one organism before you have met a single person in it. Deleuze calls that a dividual, a collective carried as one unit of feeling rather than a set of individuals. And the light comes in two regimes, which he would have separated cleanly. Expressionism is light struggling with shadow and things acquiring a non-organic life of their own: the welded iron, the oil, sodium vapour and smoke, the scrap-metal skin Iwai inherits from Tetsuo. Lyrical abstraction is the opposite pole, luminosity offered as a spiritual alternative, light going into white. Shinoda modulates between them scene by scene. The violence is jagged and hard-contrast. The fable passages diffuse into a devotional milkiness where a stage light or a doorway goes past detail into pure white. In a junkyard. That modulation is the film's moral architecture, not its mood board.

Structurally it is 148 minutes cut like a promo: movements instead of scenes, hard ellipses, months of a community's fortunes compressed into a song, and then the club sequences allowed to run long until a performance stops being a transition and becomes an event. Slapstick sits next to sexual squalor sits next to the last act's real cruelty. Many viewers call that incoherence. The better reading is that the fable frame is being tested to destruction, and Iwai is filming what gives when you ask a fairy tale to carry an actual underclass.

The debts are specific. Blade Runner gave him the retrofit future, a megacity accreted from junk and signage rather than designed, and cityspeak, dialogue deliberately blended from several languages so the viewer stays partly outside it. Yentown is that grammar rebuilt out of Tokyo landfill. From Chungking Express comes Doyle's handheld available light at wide apertures with the highlights clipped, and the single pop song looped until it stops being a jukebox cue and becomes score, which is exactly the hinge Iwai runs "My Way" on. Fallen Angels supplies the wide lens pressed inches from faces in cramped rooms, and the casting of recording personas as characters. Imamura's Pigs and Battleships supplies the black-market underclass as a jostling economy, with hustling and sex work filmed as labour instead of crime melodrama. Tokyo Drifter supplies mukokuseki staging, Japan denatured into nowhere in particular, and the sung theme that returns as orchestration. Downstream: the Shinoda look became a house idiom across Japanese commercials, promos and youth cinema; the invented-band manoeuvre came back five years later as Lily Chou-Chou, voiced by Salyu and released as a real artist, and is now standard practice; and a precedent existed, which had not existed at this scale, that a Japanese city could be filmed as a migrant, polyglot place.

What it did to the art is this. It made the false productive rather than merely deceitful, and proved the case by putting its own fiction on sale. But having counterfeited money, names, nationality and stardom, the film keeps a short list of things it will not forge: a voice, a tattoo, a body, grief. Glico's singing is the one thing in Yentown that is not fake, and the film knows it.

So watch it again and keep that list. Ask what the film refuses to counterfeit, and why those things and not others. And watch the whites — the moments when a bulb or a doorway burns out to nothing in the middle of a scrapyard. That is Iwai telling you where the fable is still holding.