‘I’ll give you television, I’ll give you eyes of blue, I’ll give you a man who wants to rule the world’: The commodification of women and the desire for the West in Takashi Miike’s Imprint

The theme of sacrificed identity resonates in popular film and television culture, and is especially exemplified in Imprint, a short film commissioned for the Masters of Horror series, which originally aired on Showtime from 2005 to 2007. Imprint was originally released in 2006, although due to its graphic content, the episode aired only in the United Kingdom and not in the United States. Despite the relative ubiquity of the eroticized Asian woman in western media culture, Imprint strikes a particular nerve in its exploration of these themes, one underscored by an unflinching use of graphic violence as a storytelling vehicle. Horror offerings often fail to garner much critical attention, or are dismissed out of hand strictly because of their genre. Extreme horror, often gathered inaccurately under a broad banner of ‘torture porn’ is especially prone to critical rejection. Imprint, as an exploration of cultural identity and loss, deserves just such critical attention.