Some weird films came out of the 60’s. As cameras and filmstock became mass produced a medium notorious for its high expenses, strict ties to corporate owned studios, and need for profitability suddenly became extremely accessible. The artform had been around long enough for it to be studied and totally deconstructed, and the first real film schools were established around the world. Throughout the decade the scope and subject matter of film was repeatedly challenged. Conventions considered hard rules were intentionally broken and twisted, and techniques were pushed to their very extremes. This is how we got stuff like Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 “Funeral Parade of Roses”.
You cannot summarize a psychosexual mind-bending experience like Funeral in a concise way. But if you had to, you would probably call it a darkly hilarious and subversive commentary on transphobia and trans rights in Japan through the scope of a gender-reversed Oedipus Rex. For the most part the story follows Eddie, a young transgender hostess at a nightclub, and her affair with the seemingly heterosexual club owner Gonda to the dismay of his lover. This forms our Oedipal triangle. Tangentially, we get a B story about a group of avant garde artists doing drugs, having sex, and generally acting counter cultural while citing American punk rock stars as their inspiration and justification. This subplot even includes a meta self referential film director character who is trying his best to create art, acting as a vehicle for Matsumoto to express where he believes he stands in relation to these social issues as an artist. All of the stories intertwine and are loosely consequential to each other, but Eddie’s sexual hunger and the inevitable scene of her stabbing out her own eyes take center stage, especially once the audience realizes they are watching a retelling of Oedipus.
Although Funeral deals with extremely heavy subject matter regarding human rights, the nature of free will, and transphobia, no scholarly conversation about the film is worthwhile without mentioning just how hilarious it is in execution. Our emotions as spectators are constantly mocked when we are shown characters undergoing extremely traumatic experiences in the style of a Three Stooges movie with an upbeat slapstick soundtrack. One cannot help but chuckle a sigh of relief when the scene of our protagonist stabbing her eyes out is interrupted by a news anchor telling the audience to tune in next week for another great adventure. Much of the humor comes from the pre-existing knowledge that the audience has on what is about to happen in the story, making Funeral a direct companion to its predecessor that builds off of the older narrative.
Ultimately, the adoption and careful manipulation and retelling of a classic western story through a partially comedic lens by a Japanese artist speaks to the recurring theme of parody throughout all of Japanese art history to express a new idea through pre established ideas often by way of deconstruction. I propose that Funeral Parade of Roses is hard evidence that comedy and parody are reliant on each other and are seldom separated.