Go, Go, Second Time Virgin - Themes and Style

Themes and Style

Reviewer Donato Totaro calls the film an "alternating teenage expression of the sex (Eros) and death (Thanatos) drives, with sex continually made ugly and death the ultimate conqueror." He further points out that Wakamatsu often puts moments in his films which appear to criticize the standard misogynistic tone of the Pink film genre. At one point in Go, Go, Second Time Virgin, Wakamatsu has Poppo look directly into the camera and address no character in the film, but the theatrical audience, saying, "My mother was gang raped, and then she gave birth to me. Are the tears we two shed when raped, the tears women shed? What tears? What sadness? I am not a woman. I’m not sad, not sad at all. I don’t cry. I’m never sad. I…I’m not at all sad…..FUCK YOU..FUCK YOU."

Patrick Macias says that writer Masao Adachi, along with Wakamatsu, is responsible for much of Go, Go, Second Time Virgin's thematic, political and stylistic concerns. According to Macias, this film, like other Wakamatsu films of the time, "combined, in still unique manner, disjunctive New Wave style, existentialist dread, sex, sadism, and gore, all on a ridiculously shoestring budget."

David Desser compares the double-suicide with which the film concludes to the shinjū (lover's suicide) in traditional Japanese theatrical forms such as bunraku and kabuki. He contrasts Poppo and Tsukio's nonchalant suicides with the michiyuki-- the dramatic, poetic final walk of the lovers—in the traditional theater. Desser also points out the interesting use of music in the film. At one point, Tsukio sings a song to his mother. American standards like Gershwin's "Summertime," and the traditional spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" as well as Patty Waters' avant-garde jazz arrangement of "Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair" are heard on the soundtrack.