Audition's torture sequence is a payment ledger, not gratuitous
Audition's first hour isn't filler. Miike is building Aoyama's fantasy in real time and inviting the viewer — particularly the male viewer — to enjoy it. The film literalizes the male gaze as a casting process: Aoyama sits behind a desk while women perform compliance for him. Some viewers laugh. Some find Asami's quietness moving. This is the trap.
Then the film exacts its price. Every minute of romantic patience the viewer invested becomes part of the surface the needle scene punctures. The torture sequence is a payment ledger. Aoyama wanted absolute, exclusive devotion from a beautiful, submissive woman. Asami delivers exactly that — devotion so absolute it requires his immobilization, exclusivity so total it requires the dismemberment of every previous claimant on his attention.
The line kiri kiri kiri — usually translated "deeper, deeper, deeper" — does double work. It evokes both the literal needle action and the Japanese onomatopoeia for cutting. Asami isn't sadistic in a generic horror-villain way; she is fulfilling Aoyama's specifications with terrible precision. The horror is that he asked for this in less explicit form.
Audition is structurally feminist (it punishes the male gaze) and texturally exploitative (it lingers on Asami's beauty and on Aoyama's suffering with equal voyeuristic interest). Whether that's critique or reproduction depends on what the viewer brought into the theater. But the torture isn't gratuitous in the sense of being arbitrary — it is earned, in the worst possible sense.
Source claim: Audition's slow burn is the argument: the first hour constructs Aoyama's fantasy so completely that the torture sequence functions as a payment ledger for everything the viewer and protagonist desired.