Helter Skelter, and the Beauty That Belonged to Everyone but Her

Japan’s top model tells the man who does her hair and makeup that every time a shutter clicks, she feels herself becoming a little emptier. He is the person she trusts most with her face. Before long the head of her agency will hand him a ring, to buy his silence about a mark that has appeared on her forehead and to have him cover it.

The model is Liliko. She is on every magazine cover, she is moving into film, and she is the woman every schoolgirl in the country wants to be. Her secret, which she shares with that agency president, a woman she calls Mama, is that almost all of her was made by surgery at an illegal clinic. The mark is the first sign that the making is coming apart.

That is the situation at the centre of Helter Skelter, Mika Ninagawa’s 2012 film of Kyoko Okazaki’s manga, and before the film had even opened, its heroine was already at work. In March of that year a real fashion magazine, VOGUE girl, put Liliko and her young rival Kozue on its cover, in character, photographed by Ninagawa herself. That summer Parco, the chain of Tokyo fashion buildings and one of the film’s producers, advertised its sale with the same two fictional models. The film’s tag line made its audience a promise: I’ll show you what you want to see.

This essay reads the film as a map of the uses of one body. Everyone around Liliko has a use for her. The agency ordered her face. The clinic built it and has to keep rebuilding it. The magazines sell it, a lover keeps her while getting engaged to someone else, a prosecutor wants her as evidence, and the public adores her. When the body begins to fail, all of them ask one question: can she still be shown? Nobody asks whether she is all right. That question belongs to her body, and the mark on her forehead is the first time it asks.

The film’s hardest claim is about the public, which is to say about us. The appetite that made Liliko does not look away when she falls. It turns round to watch. In Helter Skelter, adoration and scandal are not opposites. They are one hunger, facing two ways.

From the next section on, this essay discusses the whole film, including how it ends.

Okazaki drew Helter Skelter in 1995 and 1996 for Feel Young, a monthly manga magazine for adult women. It was collected in a single volume in 2003, won the Grand Prize of the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2004, and reached English readers in Vertical’s translation in 2013. Ninagawa, a photographer known for saturated colour, made it her second feature film, from a screenplay by Arisa Kaneko. It opened in Japan on 14 July 2012, ran 127 minutes with an R15+ rating, and became a major hit, taking about 2.15 billion yen at the box office.

Erika Sawajiri plays Liliko. Kaori Momoi is Hiroko Tada, the agency president, and Mieko Harada is Hisako Wachi, whose clinic made Liliko. Shinobu Terajima is Michiko Hada, Liliko’s manager, and Go Ayano is Shinichi, Michiko’s young boyfriend. Kiko Mizuhara is Kozue, the newcomer whose beauty owes nothing to surgery, and Nao Omori is Makoto Asada, a prosecutor who has been investigating the clinic.

The title is an English phrase. Helter-skelter means headlong confusion, and in Britain a helter skelter is also the spiral slide that winds round a tower at a fairground, which is not a bad picture of this story: a long climb in full view, and then the fast way down. Inside the film, Asada, watching Liliko on television, glosses the word as everything turned upside down.

The film is explicit, and this essay will not be. It will say plainly that Liliko forces her manager into sex and later directs violence at other women, that some of the clinic’s patients have taken their own lives, and that near the end Liliko harms herself in front of the cameras. It will describe none of these acts.

Start with the woman who made her. Tada is the author of Liliko’s secret. In one published transcription of the film, when Liliko learns that the money she was promised would go to her family has not been sent, Tada talks about the cost of upkeep and an investment not yet recovered, and then tells her that she does not think of her as business at all: Liliko is her dream, the one she made. In one breath Liliko is an investment and a dream. In neither sentence is she a person.

Then the clinic. Wachi’s work is not an operation but a subscription. The treatments have to be repeated and the after-effects chased, and some of the clinic’s patients have taken their own lives. What it really sells is not a face. It sells being looked at, and it can stop selling.

Then everyone else. The makeup artist who adores her is paid with a ring to keep quiet and cover the mark. The magazines keep her on their covers until a fresher face sells better. At least one big job comes through a night with a producer. Nanbu, the department-store heir she hoped to marry, keeps her as his lover and becomes engaged to a politician’s daughter. And Asada, who has suspected what she is just from watching her on television, wants her as the trump card in his case against a clinic with powerful backers.

Set side by side, these relationships show a pattern that no single scene announces. Every one of them is a relationship with the product. When the product begins to fail, every one of them asks the same question: can she still be shown, still sold, still used? What each does next depends on the answer. Tada sends her back to the clinic. The makeup artist covers the mark. The magazines look elsewhere, and so does the heir. The prosecutor waits. Nobody in her life asks whether she is all right.

An essay in this Library, “Looking at Your Body Is Not the Same as Living Inside It”, drew a distinction that Helter Skelter might have been built to test. Looking at a body produces a verdict: a grade against a standard, which can be compared and then settled. Living inside a body produces a report: what it is doing, now, with no standard attached. And the body that is looked at, that essay observed, is kept up by everybody, by mirrors and cameras and other people’s eyes and a whole industry, while the body that is lived in has no one keeping it up at all.

Liliko’s life takes that literally. The body that is looked at has a maintenance contract: an agency that owns the investment, a clinic that services it, a makeup artist who hides its faults, magazines that grade it every month. The body she lives in has nobody. When the mark appears, it is the first thing her body has said that is not addressed to a viewer, and everyone around her translates it at once into the only language they share. A flaw in the product. Cover it. Fix it. Bill it.

She has been taught the same language, and that is the cruelty inside the cruelty. In one narration she hears a sound inside her, a ticking that tells her to hurry up, and she names it: the sound of something ending inside her. That is a report, as plain as a body ever makes one. She has no one to give it to, and no way to hear it herself except as a verdict on how she looks.

That essay made one more point that matters here. A kinder verdict is still a verdict; a generous judge is still a judge. Hold on to it. The kindest words anyone says to Liliko in this film are a verdict too.

The film does not let the system carry everything, and neither should an essay about it. The person who pays most for what is done to Liliko is not Liliko. It is Michiko Hada, her manager.

Michiko’s job is to carry someone else’s image: the schedule, the errands, the moods. In Okazaki’s manga she is Liliko’s contemporary; the film makes her a woman in middle age, the unglamorous half of the same business. Liliko throws water in her face and takes her rages out on her, and one night she forces her into sex. That is coercion, and nothing that follows turns it into anything else.

What follows is devotion. Humiliated, Michiko becomes more attached to Liliko, not less, and Liliko calls her a pervert for it. The word is the coercer’s oldest move: to take what the other person does in answer to what was done to her, and hold it up as proof of what she is. Devotion that arrives after coercion is not consent after the fact. It is one of the shapes a person can take while living inside someone else’s power, and this essay will not call it love.

Then Liliko spreads the harm. She seduces Michiko’s boyfriend, Shinichi, in front of her, and has the two of them attack the woman Nanbu is engaged to, a woman whose only offence is to have been chosen. Later, deep in pills and seeing things, she orders Michiko to attack Kozue. The violence Liliko directs is violence, and the women it is aimed at never agreed to be part of her story.

The mechanism is plain enough to state. The harm travels downward. The woman whose body has been used by everyone above her uses the body of the woman beneath her, and then turns that woman’s hands against the next woman down. A system can explain the shape of a cruelty. It cannot take over the responsibility for it, and the film does not ask it to.

At the amusement park, Michiko cannot go through with it. Kozue looks at her and tells her to go ahead, and she stops. What Kozue says next is the film’s own thesis, and it will come back.

Two people in the film are tied to the face Liliko had before the surgery, and the film keeps them close together.

The first is her younger sister, Chikako, who looks as Liliko once looked. She comes to Tokyo to see her and is turned away at the agency, so she writes a letter, and with Michiko’s help the sisters meet in secret. It is the one relationship in the film in which nobody wants anything from Liliko’s body, and it holds the film’s saddest exchange. The sister, who admires her, thinks Liliko became beautiful because she was strong. Liliko corrects her. No, she says: if you become beautiful, you can become strong.

It would be easy to hear that as the product talking. It is also the truest thing Liliko knows, and she offers it with love, as the only protection she has to give. In the world the film shows, it is not a foolish belief. It is a reading of the room, and the room has paid her for it every working day. The tragedy is not that she believes it. It is that the one thing she has to hand down, to the one person who wants nothing from her, is the lesson that is taking her apart.

The essay “Air Doll, and the Difference Between Being Filled and Being Seen” found its answer in a stranger at a window, looking down at a doll that had been bought to be used and wanting nothing from her. Being seen, it argued, is what happens when somebody stops needing to fill another person at all. Helter Skelter has almost none of that. The one person who wants nothing from Liliko is her sister, and the agency had already sent her away.

The second is Asada. He has been studying her face on television the way a prosecutor studies an exhibit, and at one point he muses that people may be drawn to her as they are drawn to a fruit that looks perfect and is being eaten from inside, because everyone knows it will rot. He finds her at an aquarium, among tanks lit for looking, calls her by her real name, Haruko Hirukoma, and asks her to testify against the clinic. He tells her she had the courage to leave the countryside and come all this way, that people with courage are beautiful, that she is beautiful.

They are the kindest words anyone says to her in the film. They are also a verdict, a generous one, offered in exchange for testimony. When she refuses, he leaves her photographs and records of the girl she used to be, and when those papers leak it turns out that the leak was what he had wanted from the start. The face she had before is, in her sister, a person who loves her. In his file it is evidence.

Kozue is taking Liliko’s covers, and when Michiko comes for her at the amusement park she does not flinch. Go ahead, she says; everyone forgets soon. We are only devices for processing desire. There is nothing but irresponsible desire, and only the names and the faces change.

It is the film’s own thesis, given to the person who seems least hurt by it. Kozue is not cynical so much as exact. She has understood what Liliko cannot afford to understand: that the audience’s desire is real and has no loyalty, and that she will be replaced too.

The rest of the story proves her right. Liliko, deep in pills and swatting at butterflies no one else can see, collapses on a television set, and Tada tells her to rest. Michiko, staying on to tidy the wrecked flat, finds Asada’s papers and leaks them. The film does not settle why. Viewers have read it as revenge, as rescue, and as the one way left to make the country look at Liliko again. Whatever her reasons, the result is the same. The country devours the story of the surgery, and the clinic’s crimes come out.

That hunger is the hinge of the film. The public that adored her and the public that devours her scandal are one public, asking one question, whether she is worth looking at, and answering yes both times. Asada had already said it, about the fruit: knowing that it will rot is part of the attraction. The fall was never the opposite of the product. It was part of what was being sold.

So she gives them a last show. As the press conference approaches she promises, in the words of the film’s own tag line, to show them what they want to see. Under the flashbulbs, in front of the cameras, she harms herself, collapses, and disappears. The shutters keep firing.

Nobody puts a camera down. That is the image the film leaves, and it points where anger belongs: not at Liliko, and not at anyone who has ever wanted to be beautiful, but at a room full of lenses that could not stop, even then. Afterwards a billboard in the city announces that her photobook is being reissued. Even the fall has been packaged for sale.

Time passes. Kozue is still a star. After a shoot abroad she is taken to a club known for extreme shows, glimpses a woman who looks like Michiko, follows her through a door, and finds Liliko there: beautiful, and reigning as the club’s star attraction.

There is a reading of this ending in which Liliko wins, and it deserves to be stated at full strength, because the film’s director holds a version of it. Ninagawa said that at the end Liliko decides for herself, that her gaze then, no longer distracted by anything, is truly beautiful, and that to her Liliko seemed happier than at the beginning. One viewer’s essay puts it more bluntly: she won. She no longer needs an agency, a clinic or a magazine to agree. She is on her own stage, on her own terms.

This essay hears that reading and cannot share it. Harm done to oneself in front of cameras cannot be counted as freedom, and it is not counted as one here. No one should have to pay that price to decide something for herself. What the press conference measures is how little else had ever been hers to decide.

And the last image is not an exit. It is a stage. A woman is on display, an audience has come to see what it wants to see, and the show goes on. The venue has changed. The arrangement has not. Set it beside two other endings. In Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a close cousin of this story, the audience finally panics at what it came to see. In Ninagawa’s own first feature, Sakuran, a young woman and the man she chose run laughing out of a walled quarter of old Edo, under cherry trees in full bloom. Helter Skelter allows neither the panic nor the escape. It ends with a door opening onto another room with an audience in it, and the person who opens it is Kozue, the next face, being shown her future.

Read that way, the ending is the film’s most frightening sentence. The spectacle does not end. It changes venue.

Okazaki made this story in the mid-1990s for adult women, not for the schoolgirls inside it. Reviewing the English translation in 2014, the critic Rebecca Silverman wrote that Okazaki is too accomplished to tell readers outright that we are all implicated in the creation of Lilikos through our craving for unattainable beauty in the media, but that the implications are unmissable: the book keeps cutting away to ordinary people chatting about the latest idol, gushing over surface beauty and sniping at anything less than perfect. Ninagawa’s film keeps a chorus of schoolgirls for the same work: between scenes, girls talk about Liliko.

Ninagawa came to the story from inside the business. She is a photographer who has shot fashion and advertising for years, and she said, laughing, that for a long time she had not noticed it was a story about her own world. She was clear about what she thought it was about. Women, she said, are shaped overwhelmingly from birth by whether or not they are pretty, in a world that is unfair from the start. People would rather put a lid on that unfairness than look at it, and facing it, she said, was the film’s main theme; women’s attachment to beauty came only second.

Ten years after the film, what Okazaki had drawn had an everyday name. In 2022 lookism, borrowed into Japanese as rukkizumu, was among the thirty words nominated for the country’s annual prize for new words and buzzwords. A nomination measures vocabulary, not experience. It says that enough people were talking about judging others by their looks to need a word for it, and nothing more.

None of this makes Helter Skelter a local curiosity. Fargeat’s film, released in 2024 with a Hollywood star, stands on the same frame: a woman dropped by her industry because of her age, a black-market product that promises a younger and more perfect self, a body that fails, and a last performance in front of an audience. The shape travels because the market it describes travels. What differs is what each film lets its audience do at the end. Fargeat’s is allowed to flinch. Ninagawa’s is not, and the shutters never stop.

For a reader who came to Japan from somewhere else, the talent agencies, the magazine covers and the schoolgirl chorus can look like a local peculiarity. They are a local dialect. The verdict itself travels, and the one thing this film insists on, wherever it is watched, is that the people doing the looking belong in the story.

The first is that Helter Skelter is a warning against cosmetic surgery. The film does not support it, and this essay will not make it. The clinic in the story is illegal and fictional, and the harm it does is the harm of an illegal clinic serving an industry that required Liliko to be remade and then consumed the remaking. Asked about beauty after the film came out, Ninagawa said she thinks the wish to become more beautiful, to make oneself better, is itself beautiful, and that she is on the side of women who try.

An earlier essay here, “Cléo from 5 to 7, and the Hour She Stops Being Looked At”, refused to call a singer’s beauty-work vanity. It is competence, learned under conditions she did not set, in the one skill the world was willing to pay her for. In that essay the singer’s hats were her inventory. Liliko stands at the far end of the same line: her inventory is her own body. Nothing here is a judgement on anybody who chooses treatment, for any reason, and nothing here is advice about it. A decision about one’s own body belongs to the person making it, with a qualified doctor, not to an essay about a film.

The second reading is that Liliko is a monster, and its mirror image, that she is only a victim. Ninagawa said that viewers tend to see Liliko as a monster, and that she thinks each of us carries a small Liliko inside. That is a generous thing to say and a useful one, and this essay agrees with it as far as it goes: many people who have been looked at for a living, or who have wanted to be, can recognise some part of her. But recognition is not absolution. The system explains the shape of what Liliko does to Michiko, to Nanbu’s fiancée and to Kozue. It does not explain their injuries away, and a reading that dissolved her cruelty into the machine would be doing to those women what the machine did to her: treating them as material.

The strongest case against everything above is that the film is one more camera. Its director shot the covers, and real magazines printed them. A company that helped to produce it advertised its sale with the two fictional models. Its tag line promised the audience what it wanted to see, and the distributor’s page for the film still promises the best show. It was a hit. And Ninagawa, who asked her camera and lighting crews at the very start to shoot the women beautifully, has said that the press conference was one of two scenes that came to her as pictures from the beginning.

She did not hide from this. In an interview published the day before the film opened, she said that seen one way it was a film that negated her own work; that it had left her wondering how to go on facing advertising and fashion; and that if she followed that thought all the way, she would not be able to take pictures at all. Months later she said that in her ordinary work she is the one pressing the shutter and firing the flash, asking talent for a little more smile.

That candour is the film’s honesty, and it marks the limit of what the film can do. An indictment that is also a hit product cannot stand outside the appetite it describes, and an audience can enjoy the ruin exactly as it enjoyed the rise. This essay cannot settle which happened in any given cinema, and will not pretend to. The film shows a room full of lenses. Whether a viewer finds herself in that room is not something the film can do for her.

The same objection lands on this Library. This house sells private companionship, so a film about the market in looking is not neutral ground for it, and a reading that sorts attention into the kind that grades and the kind that asks is exactly the reading such a house would like. Weigh this essay with that in mind. The one claim made here is that the film’s standard is fair to apply to anyone whose work involves attending to other people, this house included: whether anybody, before asking if a woman can still be shown, asks if she is all right. That is a standard, not a boast.

Not that beauty is a trap, or that wanting it is a mistake. The cruelty of Helter Skelter is not that Liliko wanted to be beautiful. It is that every relationship around her was a use, and every use asked the same question.

There are good reasons a woman learns what Liliko learned. Being looked at well can pay the rent, open doors, keep a job, hold someone’s attention, and keep her safer in rooms where being overlooked is its own kind of danger. If you become beautiful, you can become strong: in a great many rooms that is not a delusion. It is an accurate reading of how the room works, and a woman who acts on it is not vain. She is paying attention.

What the film adds is the price, and the fact that the machinery runs both ways. The voice that tells a woman she looks wonderful and the voice that tells her she has let herself go are asking one question, whether she is worth looking at, and a public that can give a glowing answer can give the other one just as fast. The compliment and the scandal come from the same place.

The only question in the film that has no standard, cannot be failed and cannot be sold is the one nobody puts to Liliko: is she all right? It is the question the mark on her forehead was asking. It is also the one question she could have asked herself, if anyone had ever left her the room to ask it.

So, once, to you. If you have ever made yourself easier to look at because that was the strength on offer, you were not being vain. You were reading the room, and probably reading it correctly. You are allowed to be tired of the reading. And if the people around you mostly ask whether you can still be shown, the other question is still yours to ask, on an ordinary evening with no camera anywhere near: not how do I look, but how am I.

Who in your life has a use for how you look, and who has ever asked whether you are all right?

When someone praises your appearance, what is the praise asking you to keep doing?

What did you learn about beauty and strength, and from whom, and which way round did you learn it?

Where are you the camera: the place where you grade another woman’s face without meaning to, and could lower the lens?

This essay is cultural analysis. It is not medical, psychological or legal advice, it diagnoses no one, and nothing in it is a statement about any reader. It makes no claim about cosmetic surgery as it is actually practised, about any real clinic, or about anyone who chooses treatment. The magazine and the company named in it are named only for the published facts of the film’s release.

The film was not screened for this essay. What is described comes from its published record, from plot accounts, reviews and interviews, and the few lines of dialogue given here are paraphrased from published transcriptions. Where accounts differ, as they do about why Michiko leaks the papers, the essay says so or says nothing. Ninagawa’s remarks are reported as hers, from interviews published in 2012, and are not treated as proof of any reading. The distinction between asking whether she can still be shown and asking whether she is all right is this Library’s own reading.

Coercion, violence, suicide and self-harm are stated here and not described. If any part of this essay touches something in your own life, a doctor or someone trained to listen is the right person to tell, not an essay. Nothing here concerns the private life of anyone who made or acted in the film, and nothing implies that anyone connected with it knows of this house or endorses it.