26th
Punk Music Saves The World
What do punk music, superheroes and doomsday cults have in common? They all live on myth and legend. And it is this combination of elements that gives the Japanese film Fish Story (2009) its effervescence as the plot of the film winds through a few seemingly unrelated story lines which eventually link together to explain how a punk record manages to pull the world away from the brink of Apocalypse.
The year is 2012 in the beginning of the film, and the scene is in a record store, where a doomsday cult leader, a record store owner and his customer await the devastating impact of a comet which cannot be stopped. The cult leader is quietly ecstatic, having predicted this outcome, while the record store owner, a typical pop culture-geek who watches the Go-Rangers and lovingly spouts facts about John Lennon, takes out a record “Fish Story” by the defunct punk band Gekirin and claims that it would save the world. The song was recorded in the year before the Sex Pistols were formed and the record never made it big. But as the film proceeds, through a combination of prophetic predictions and random occurrences, we will see how this claim is proven true.
Playing on tropes of pop culture, the different storylines amuse in themselves: 1) three men are introduced to the record “Fish Story” due to one of the men’s interest in the occult in music (one can hear a woman scream in the silent middle section of the song if one has the sixth sense), leading to an surprisingly eventful development, 2) a bunch of Nostradamus-worshipping cult-types change the date of the Apocalypse after their prophet turns out to be wrong and decide to establish a “Noah’s Ark”, 3) a young kungfu-wielding man who has been raised as a Champion of Justice battles against seajackers, and 4) the trials and tribulations of the punk band Gekirin who were just too advanced for the audience of their time, and 5) the story behind the title “Fish Story” and the silent middle section in the song. The storylines ultimately weave together into a coherent whole, anchored by strategically positioned figures and references.
Yoshihiro Nakamura’s film is mostly an entertaining romp through time and space, with the premises of its storylines simultaneously outrageously inconceivable, yet grounded in a certain sensible logic. It owes a debt to the novel by Kotaro Isaka from which it is adapted, as the story of the film delves into places that only novels can render so well: the unattended gaps in history, the irrational beliefs of individuals, and the synchronicities that inexplicably form the substance of critical events — the stuff which drives myth and legends. The film affirms what all music and comic-book superhero worshippers have known all this while — that the entities they believe in can really save the world.
