I went to the ICA this evening, to see Jessica Oreck’s new (I say new, but looking at iMDb I see it was made in 2009 and has only just had its UK release) documentary feature Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. The film explores the intricate and intimate relationship between the Japanese people and….. beetles! I knew I had to see this film the minute I read about it, and that if I didn’t grab the chance this weekend I would miss it. Even in our enlightened metropolis, movies about buglife aren’t likely to be granted more than a half-dozen screenings.
Even I, one of the weird handful of people who would actively go out of their way to track down stuff like this, was unprepared for the extraordinary revelations this movie had to offer. Why dream of alien planets when right here on Earth we have a city where giant scarabs are as common a household pet as the hamster or gerbil, where crickets are invited into the home to provide live music, where the dragonfly is a symbol of bravery and the emblem of the warrior class?
In Toyko, you can go to the mall and pick up a new pair of jeans and a pair of Nikes, then pop into the store next door and buy a rainbow beetle and a pack of synthesized tree sap to feed him with. The amusement arcades are packed with kids playing computer simulations of Bug Hunt and Bug Wars. Adults and children set off at weekends into those patches of forest and wild places that still remain close to Tokyo to have a picnic and to track live insects.
Families gather at dusk to watch the fireflies. Our beetle seller from the mall proudly shows us the red Ferrari he bought with his earnings.
It is not just its content that makes this film extraordinary but the directorial vision that lies behind it. Beetle Queen appears to be Jessica Oreck’s first full-length feature, yet it speaks with the kind of self assurance that if not born of long experience can only come from a genuine and passionate commitment to its subject matter. It is not a conventional documentary. It is a work of impressionist art, a montage, a collage of ideas and images that leaves you feeling you’ve been granted a privileged glimpse into one artist’s unique methodology as well as the secret mechanisms of an entire culture.
The Tokyo of this film is a world of hidden allusions and complex symbolism, an environment we in the West have come to think of as the most intensively urbanised in the world and yet whose people still maintain their connection with nature in ways that make you re-evaluate everything you thought you knew about Japan. It made me think about my other most recent literary and filmic experiences of that country – David Mitchell’s Number9Dream, Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, Richard Lloyd Parry’s compelling book about the life and death of Lucie Blackman, People Who Eat Darkness – and what Beetle Queen had in common with all of these was the sense it carried that this is a world that we as Westerners can gaze upon but never fully enter. Unlikely though it may seem it was Noe’s film that kept coming to mind while I was watching Beetle Queen. The interplay of colour and light, the almost hallucinogenic swirl of sensory impressions, the interlocking grids of train-tracks, street intersections, city freeways that characterise both films, drawing you down into a mind-maze that both dazzles and disturbs.
In particular I was enchanted by the attitude of the children, girls and boys alike who treated their pet insects with respect and rapt wonderment, a small boy sillhouetted in the ultraviolet light of a moth trap, releasing a grey-green Lunar Moth back into the wild as a trainer might toss a racing pigeon into the sky, the three young friends who called their dung beetles ‘brothers.’ The idea that one should fear or loathe these creatures would, I suspect, be utterly alien to them.
After the film we were lucky enough to be given an impromptu and completely unadvertised talk by the Curator of Beetles at the Natural History Museum. His mini-lecture, sprinkled with phrases such as ‘the other day when we were in Peru,’ and ‘we’re in the course of naming this beetle after one of my colleagues,’ was sheer delight, all the more so given that he had brought several cases of beetles with him to illustrate it. These we were allowed to examine in close-up, and audience questions were not in short supply as a 20cm Amazonian beetle larva made its rounds among us in its jar of formaldehyde. ‘Careful with that,’ said our tame entomologist. ‘The lid’s loose.’
Which just goes to show, I suppose, that a love of beetles has very little respect for national boundaries. And according to the staff of the Natural History Museum, the number of girl coleopterists is on the rise.
I love this city.
Read an interview with Jessica Oreck here.
