Serdar | Genji Press

The Japanese term for a freelancer, no matter what the occupation, is the English-derived prefix free-, and that’s how the two main characters of Vibrator introduce themselves to each other. They’re “free”, in the sense that they have no real obligations to family or friends, no connections with even the society that sustains them, however casually. They’re free to float around like unpaired oxygen atoms in the void, which explains why they bond so violently when they meet. They have nothing better to do.

Her name is Rei (Shinobu Terashima), and she’s a freelance magazine writer; his name is Okabe (Nao Omori) and he’s a former gangster hanger-on, now a truckdriver. They run into each other at a convenience store where Rei is looking for the right kind of wine to drown out the self-hating roar in her head. Nothing in her life seems real outside of the feelings she keeps bottled up inside—and in a country like Japan, where so much depends on the face you present to people, who wants to know you’re an emotional wreck? But she’s drawn to Okabe, with his dyed skullcap of blond hair and his easygoing manners, and she walks out into the parking lot where his truck’s idling to find him waiting for her. He had looked at her and felt the same electricity she did, and with that she climbs up into the cab and roars off with him into the night.

How quietly and starkly this film tells a story that still has such horrible immediacy. Without politics, without cant or hypocrisy, and without even much fanfare, this film shows us a dramatization of a scarifying incident from real life and gives it meaning and focus. When trailers for the film first appeared and audiences (and pundits, and critics) shouted “Too soon!”, I had to ask: Since when do they need your permission to proceed? An artist that does not provoke is nothing more than a sycophant.

And as it turned out, director Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday) had already gotten permission from the people who were most in the position to give it: the relatives of those who had died onboard United Airlines Flight 93, hijacked by terrorists who ostensibly planned to fly it into a building in Washington, D.C. From everything that has been reconstructed about that event, they died so that others on September 11, 2001, might live. To wait for the “right moment” to tell such a story is simply asinine. The right moment is always now, and some day there will be people who were not alive at the moment and will need to remember what the moment was like.