The Great Happiness Space

Saw The Great Happiness Space, a documentary about a Japanese host club, a sort of gentlewoman's club where women can go to buy overpriced drinks for the hot guys who work there. In return, these "hosts" sit with the women and listen to them and laugh with them and sometimes also have sex with them. Many of the women who frequent these clubs are themselves prostitutes and are kind of addicted to these clubs, their prostitution sometimes caused by their debts to these clubs. It's a very interesting and alarming viscous cycle of purchasing professional affection. The hosts for their part are fairly attractive (they all have this uniform, Goblin King in a business suit, sort of look) but the pretense of actual affection is paper-thin. They talk of how they manipulate the women to form emotional bonds with them, how they pressure them to buy drinks.

Whereas these women sell their bodies, the men are mostly selling their emotions. One host talks of losing himself in his role, becoming confused as to the boundary of reality and fantasy. One of the women tells the camera that she is, for real, no kidding, in love with one of the hosts, that she wants to give him all of her money and to die for him. The host waves this off, accusing her of trying to manipulate him. She is devious, he tells us. He hates her.

The film is fascinating. It starts off making the Host club seem kind of sexy and glamorous but slowly peels back layer after layer of the artifice, revealing the ugly manipulation underneath and then revealing the common, human need for companionship under that. One host is moved to (perhaps drunken) tears as he talks about how they all, the men and the women, only want to be loved, how money both enables and distorts these relationships. Several times the hosts talk about their jobs in terms of "healing," as though they were doctors or therapists. One of the hosts is chastised by the owner for feeling guilty for manipulating the women. "You think this is a psychiatric institute? Never forget, this is your job."