Self-Erasure and Existence in Serial Experiments Lain and Metropolis

The two films that I shall be exploring in this paper are Ryutaro Nakamura's Serial Experiments Lain and Rintaro's Metropolis. Lain follows the story of a young girl named Lain who is in junior high and starts experiencing increasingly strange events. She meets "alter egos" of herself, and as she becomes more and more enmeshed in the world of the Wired, which is an imitation of the Internet, she starts questioning her own identity and existence. As people start dying around her, she attempts to find out who is behind these events, while at the same time the boundaries between reality and the Wired are falling apart. In her search, she meets the 'God' of the Wired, who, as it is later revealed, tries to convince people to give up their physical bodies and so transcend their earthly lives to exist in the Wired. After Lain destroys the God in a final confrontation, she is able to reverse the strange events that have been happening since the start of the series in a sort of "All Reset." By erasing memories of herself from everyone else's memories, she ceases to exist to them and to herself.

Metropolis on the other hand is set in the future, where robots are constantly present as servants, or more precisely slaves, of humans, and are kept strictly in their place. Tima, created as a super-robot for the purpose of sitting upon the throne of the Ziggurat,[1] meets Kenichi, the nephew of the detective from Japan who was sent to capture the mad scientist that had created Tima. Rock, Duke Red's[2] sort-of-adoptive son and leader of the Malduks,[3] attempts to kill Tima out of both jealousy for his semi-affectionate regard for her[4] and prejudice against robots.[5] Nonetheless, Tima is able to escape his attempts with the help of Kenichi, though Tima eventually ends up in the Duke's grasp. In the final scenes, Tima loses her memories as her "robotic side" takes over, and seemingly fulfills her purpose by sitting upon the Ziggurat. However, she proclaims an apocalypse to punish the humans for their mistreatment of the robots. Kenichi is able to pull her from the throne and save her from completely merging with the throne. Seeming to have lost her memories, Tima attacks Kenichi. As the city crumbles around them, Tima regains her memories towards the end of the anime and unfortunately falls to her death from the great height of the Ziggurat to the ground below. Metropolis ends with Kenichi deciding to stay in Metropolis rather than go home with his uncle in the hopes of helping to rebuild Metropolis and create a better future, where presumably humans and robots can coexist.

Serial Experiments Lain and Metropolis are both very different, in subject matter as well as style. However, I feel that the importance of memory with identity and self present in both works are of interest, and I would like to explore the characters of Tima and Lain in particular. I intend to explore the concept of self or subjectivity and what that means when that self is erased in the figures of Tima and Lain. I claim that, despite their self-erasure, there exists identity within that erasure, rather than a lack of a self. Their self-erasure results in questions of identity and existence for these characters, and I shall attempt to prove that a new self is created, allowing for existence within erasure. Defining subjectivity in Lain and Tima however is problematic, given that one is possibly a computer program and the other a robot, therefore I believe that it is necessary to first define the self that is being erased.

In Lain, the series leaves the question of whether Lain is a computer program or not unanswered. One theory, according to The God of the Wired, is that Lain is a computer program, designed to break down the barriers between reality and the Wired, and that her physical body is one that he has given her. This theory would allow us to reconcile her apparent agelessness in the last episode.[6] The other theory would be that she has given up her body to "live on" in the Wired. Although this question cannot be definitely resolved, nonetheless in either case Lain has a self, the real-world self, one that exists or existed in what the anime presents as the real world. At this point I would like to mention that there are three Lains, her "alter egos", that make up Lain but cause problems in defining who Lain really is. This is a question that Lain, the real-world Lain, struggles with, as she is unable to connect who she thinks she is and what she knows and experiences as her existence, with the actions and character of Wired Lain that she only hears about through a second-hand source.


(Figure 1)

This image, taken from the artbook for Lain, is an attempt by the artists to differentiate between the three Lains. Their names are written differently[7] and as the image shows, there are certain expressions, postures, as well as speech characteristics unique to each Lain.

While these Lains present another problem in defining Lain's selfhood, the point is moot when in the end all of Lain is erased. However, although the different Lains are distinct, there is a merging of the Lains, at least of Wired & real-world Lain, that is shown by contrasting the behavior of Lain in episode two, "Girls", and episode seven, "Society". In "Girls", she has just received her Navi, which is basically a computer, but she is still shy and withdrawn, "unconnected".[8] Some of her classmates take her along to a club called Cyberia, but she does not know how to dress for the occasion and has clearly not been to a club before, a fact that a couple of them tease her about: "You're usually in bed now, aren't you, Lain?" says one, followed by, "Lain, don't you have anything better to wear at night?" This is also the first instance in which we hear about Wired Lain. As the anime progresses, real-world Lain seems to be incorporating Wired Lain, showing a merging as she becomes more confident and dresses a little differently. This merging culminates in "Society" in which there is a scene where Wired Lain sort of "takes over" real-world Lain's body.[9] The immediate contrast between real-world Lain and Wired Lain is shown clearly, as well as the struggle with identity that Lain faces.

During the series she increasingly questions who she is, and tries to reconcile her own memories, experiences, and who she thinks she is with her alter-egos. The climax of this struggle is shown in episode eight, "Rumors", in which all three Lains make an appearance following a certain rumor about Alice that Lain apparently spread on the Wired.[10] In these scenes, real-world Lain is shown buried under wires and cables, crying and helpless, while Wired Lain confronts Lain of the Rumor. "Who are you? You're not me. I'd never do what you do," Wired Lain says to her, as Rumor Lain laughs continuously. "Stop it! Why are you acting like the part of me that I hate? You--" With Wired Lain's hands wrapped around her throat, Rumor Lain laughingly cuts her off saying, "I'm committing suicide!" and continues, greatly amused, "Hey, I'm Lain, aren't I?" Both Wired and real-world Lain emphatically deny this, however that is not to say Rumor Lain is not a part of Lain.

This struggle in identity is resolved in a way in the end, though rather bittersweetly when Lain must erase memories of herself, and therefore her existence, from other's memories. "When you don't remember something, it never happened... If you aren't remembered, you never existed,"[11] says Alice, repeating Lain's words. Without the recognition of others, Lain ceases to exist in the real world. The disconnect in identities that Lain experiences is addressed by Scott Bukatman in Terminal Identity: the virtual subject in postmodern identity, in which he says,

The newly proliferating electronic technologies of the Information Age are invisible, circulating outside of the human experiences of space and time. That invisibility makes them less susceptible to representation and thus comprehension at the same time as the technological contours of existence become more difficult to ignore...There has arisen a cultural crisis of visibility and control over a new electronically defined reality. It has become increasingly difficult to separate the human from the technological...as electronic technology seems to rise, unbidden, to pose a set of crucial ontological questions regarding the status and power of the human...the Information Age, an era in which, as Jean Baudrillard observed, the subject has become a "terminal of multiple networks." This new subjectivity is at the center of Terminal Identity. (Bukatman 2)

Bukatman argues against the idea that cyberspace is a null space, and instead is a narrative space, a site of action and circulation that sets up for a new identity. This new identity is termed "Terminal identity: an unmistakably doubled articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen" (9). It is this terminal identity that is created in Lain's self-erasure. I also argue that it is this terminal identity that is created, and exists, within the Wired that is more wholly Lain, and where she is able to resolve her struggle in identity, or at the very least comes to terms with her self-erasure and ceasing to exist. In the real world, the life that Lain leads is monotonous, and the world that she lives in is routine and life-less. As Susan Napier notes, "Increasingly in Japanese culture, the real has become something to be played with, questioned, and ultimately mistrusted" (421). She goes on to analyze Lain in its ability to portray the "fundamental concerns at the turn of the twenty-first century, most notably our sense of a disconnect between body and subjectivity thanks to the omnipresent power of electronic media" (Napier 431), and calls Lain a representation of the world of the Wired/Internet where reality and truth are constantly questioned (431).


(Figure 2: The same series of montages (like the one shown above) are shown in the beginning of every episode.)


(Figure 3: The above images are, left to right, from episode 1 and episode 2.)

Repetitive scenes and montages like the above screenshots signal Lain's life as lacking in some way. She is not completely free to be who she is as her different personas are segregated and it is not until the end with her self-erasure that she exists wholly in the Wired. In a way then, the cyber world has surpassed the real world.

Bukatman also mentions that vision is a "means for being absent from [oneself]", according to Merleau-Ponty, and allows through simultaneous projection and introjection the presence of self. Vision itself "is not a mode of thought or presence of self", but it allows for it (Bukatman 136). Despite Lain's self-erasure, she is able to appear in the real world and visit a grown-up Alice, who is able to see her and acknowledges her presence, though she does not remember who she is, only that Lain looks familiar. Evidence of traces of Lain that are left behind, in that sort of déjà-vu moment, are encouraging and allow for an affirmation of self for Lain according to Bukatman.

While Lain presented questions of identity in a human figure, the figure of Tima in Metropolis is presented from the start as robot. Despite this, she is made human from the very start of her existence; it is from her "birth" [12], where her first encounter with another being is Kenichi, that she starts her existence as human. I shall argue that Tima has essentially two identities: the human Tima given to her by Kenichi, and the robot Tima that is her design, what she is made for and to be. I find the character of Tima interesting in her divide between human and robot. She is made in completely artificial ways, with completely artificial organs and body parts,[13] yet, she claims, or at least wants, to be human and that she has human emotions, can love like a human and therefore she is not a robot.[14] Her attempt to reconcile her robot and human self is an interesting struggle that ultimately ends in tragedy; however, the question I ask then is whether Tima has created subjectivity for herself between the two given identities, when her human self is erased along with her memories in the final scene[15]. First however, I shall examine her claims of humanity.

Since her "birth" into the world, her focus has been Kenichi. He is her first contact with another being, and so she sort of "imprints" upon him, and follows him around, imitating him. Their first dialogue is evident of this. Kenichi attempts to find out who Tima is, and after a few attempts in which Tima simply repeats what he says, he moves on. "Who are you?" Kenichi asks. "'I' am who?" Kenichi enunciates for Tima, and, interrupting him, Tima says, "You are I." "No, no, no...you call yourself 'I'," Kenichi corrects. "'I' am who?" Tima asks again, a question that she repeats at the end of her life. This repetition of the identity question, a question that continues to be unanswered through the end of the anime, suggests she has never found the answer, and perhaps, neither will we.


(Figure 4: Her conversation with Kenichi at the beginning of the film.)


(Figure 5: At the end of the film, when her body is broken and in pieces, all that's left of her is the ghost of her consciousness in the form of her recorded voice.)


(Figure 6)


(Figure 7)

Her preoccupation with Kenichi can be a little creepy, and shows that Kenichi is her world. She only cares about Kenichi, is constantly asking after him when she is separated from him and taken by Duke Red, and even the clothes she wears are picked by Kenichi, her appearance is shaped by Kenichi, and finally, he is the one that I would argue gives Tima her humanity.


(Figure 8: When she first meets Kenichi. He hands her his coat.)


(Figure 9: Kenichi gets her clothes)


(Figure 10: Tima seeks Kenichi's approval)

Duke Red also bestows an identity upon Tima, one that is an amalgam of robot and human. Tima is an imitation of his dead daughter, but also designed to be a deity, one meant to sit on the throne of the Ziggurat and rule the world. Despite her robotic body, Tima acts as a child would, and grows as a child would, albeit rapidly, and develops into something more adult-like as she learns to read and write, and is able to speak by herself outside of simple imitation. Undoubtedly she is still child-like through the end, but her development cannot be denied. In this development is a similarity to how humans develop. Tima might have been "born" physically developed into the world, but mentally she develops through the course of the movie as a human child would, placing her outside the category of her fellow robots into a limbo between robot and human. Her humanity, it can be said, is in her questioning of who she is.

However, two things complicate this assertion. One is the literal formation of Tima's identity by Kenichi. The words "You are I" that Tima says are innocent, but at the same time resonate with Tima's behavior and her obsession with Kenichi, and it is Kenichi that shapes her He is also the one to assert her humanity.[16] With the influence that Kenichi has over Tima, it is difficult then to see Tima as a separate entity, when so much of the "human" Tima is made up of Kenichi. The second complication is that although she might assert that she is human instead of robot, she succumbs to her design at the end of the film and sits upon the throne, becoming the "super-being" Duke Red has had her created to be. In the final scenes between Kenichi and Tima, she acts as robot, attacking Kenichi as if she does not know him, and treats him as a vengeful robot towards a human.


(Figure 11)

However, the divide between human and robot remains, made literal in the careful split of Tima's face, half robotic and half human. Despite her turning into the "super-being" she was created to be, she surpasses what Duke Red meant for her to be, in becoming judge and God, deeming humanity unfit to live beside robots. Her self-erasure comes as a wipe of memory, the loss of the Tima that is arguably "human" and recognizes Kenichi, and as destructive as her self-erasure is, Tima has created for herself a new self, one complicated by both her erasure of self and lack of control over what she is doing,[17] and her subversion of the Duke's designs for her. In the end however, the two sides of her, robot and human, seem to be presented as incompatible when, she asks, "Who am I?" looking up at Kenichi as he urges her to hold his hand, trying to pull her up and save her.


(Figure 12: It is her robot hand that he is gripping, and unable to reconcile her robot and human self, she is unable to grip his hand back and save herself.)

Even though Tima perishes in the end, her consciousness transcends her physical being[18] as Lain's does, shown in the way Tima's voice still lingers like a ghost in the radio. Her memory lives on, she is not forgotten and, she is the impetus to Kenichi staying in Metropolis, giving him a reason to try to build a better future where robots and humans can coexist.

In examining subjectivity in both Lain and Tima, I found Sharalyn Orbaugh's article, "Sex and the Single Cyborg" of interest, despite the fact that neither Lain nor Tima are cyborgs. Cyborgs as Orbaugh defines them are, "that embodied amalgam of the organic and the technological—confounds the modernist criteria for subjectivity” (436). She explains her particular interest in cyborgs because of the complication in subjectivity that they present, as part machine and part human. She also discusses the fear present with the figure of the cyborg, a fear of the overtaking of the individual subject by the machine, and the complete abandonment of the organic body to advance to the next level of evolution. In my reading of her article, there is an assumption in her arguments, which is that there is a problem of subjectivity in cyborgs because of the mix of organic and machine. She implies that the organic is necessary in order to consider subjectivity, and the machine encroaches/problematizes that subjectivity. She does say however that ,“Cyborgs, which are by definition not naturally occurring, serve in a new but equally significant way to mark the borders of modern(ist) subjectivity and simultaneously to reveal the ways those borders are breaking down and being redrawn in postmodern, posthuman paradigms” (439). While cyborgs do present a new sort of subjectivity, they still problematize subjectivity according to Orbaugh. However, I argue that it is not necessary to have a physical/organic body in order to have subjectivity, proven in the characters of Lain and Tima.

Regarding the problem of memory loss with Tima and Lain, Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism[19] seems to suggest a possible rethinking of self-erasure and the resulting loss of existence (16). In dealing with subjectivity, Jameson presents a loss-of-self view that at the same time still recognizes the existence of the feelings that make up the self, but are not connected to the self (Frederic 15). He proposes a different sort of existence, a "mere existence" that does not carry purpose, rather than a complete loss of existence. While this somewhat agrees with my idea that the consciousnesses of both Lain and Tima are still present post-self-erasure, I cannot agree with his assumption that the lack of feelings or apathy is what characterizes self or subjectivity, and consequently that there must be a presence of feelings in order to obtain subjectivity. Instead, I believe that apathy can characterize subjectivity just as well as what Jameson counts as "true" feelings.[20]

In constructing a self within self-erasure, the characters of Tima and Lain, despite the resistance to losing the self in Lain or the confusion of existence for Tima, nonetheless are able to create some sort of existence for themselves that transcend their physical bodies and are affirmed by the other characters in a way, regardless of deaths or loss of memory. I conclude that there cannot be a complete loss of existence then since this is the case, and despite the erasure of self, the erasure of existence, there can be a creation of existence within that erasure. While we are not robots nor do we have the ability to erase memories, the questions of identity Lain and Tima are subjected to allows us to rethink our own ideas of self and subjectivity, and how our existence is situated and defined, whether it's on the "Wired" or elsewhere.


NOTES

1. The only information given in the anime about the Ziggurat is that it is the pinnacle of human technology, and that whoever sits upon it will rule the world, though how this is and whether the public is aware of the Ziggurat's power and purpose is unknown. However, I find it curious that despite the celebrations of the completion of the Ziggurat the anime opens with, it seems that no one asks questions about it or what Duke Red plans on doing with it. In fact, for the majority of the anime the Ziggurat is out of the picture despite its capabilities.

2. The de facto leader of Metropolis in the sense that he is popular with the people and holds power and influence. Boone however is the President, who is later usurped and betrayed by his own military by Duke Red's hand

3. The Malduks are portrayed as Duke Red's personal military group led by Rock, though they also act as vigilantes in policing the robots.

4. Tima is made in the image of Duke Red's dead daughter.

5. Rock believes that it is Duke Red who should sit upon the Ziggurat, not Tima, a robot.

6. She appears to a grown-up Alice looking the same as when they went to school together, after she has wiped the memories of herself from everyone's memories.

7. From left to right: kanji (Chinese-based characters) for the real-world Lain, katakana (characters typically used to phonetically spell out foreign words or non-Japanese names) for Wired Lain, and English for Lain of the Rumor. I would like to note here that it is interesting the artists decided to use English instead of hiragana (phonetic characters used for Japanese words, but also to spell out kanji) for example (Japanese writing system consists of kanji, katakana and hiragana).

8. Here I refer to what Lain's father says in episode one, "Weird", to Lain after she asks him for a new Navi: "I keep telling you that you should use a better machine. You know, Lain, in this world, whether it's here in the real world or in the Wired, people connect to each other, and that's how societies function."

9. In an important plot development in which men from Tachibana Laboratories speak to her about the situation of reality and the Wired merging, Lain is asked questions about who she is, whether she knows her parents' birthdays, etc.--questions designed to make her question her own existence. Lain is unable to answer these questions and is visibly shaken, having a bit of a mental breakdown when suddenly Wired Lain takes over, and acts completely opposite, uncaring and unimpressed.

10. Alice, the person Lain is closest to, has a crush on a teacher, and Lain, or more specifically Lain of the Rumor, reveals this secret to everyone through the Wired.

11. Episode 13, "Ego".

12. Refers to the scene where the laboratory in which she is made is burning down after Rock sabotages it, and she stumbles out, naked and out into the world for the first time.

13. Refers to the scene between Duke Red and Dr. Laughton in which Red goes to Laughton's lab to check on his progress with Tima and asks if she was made with real organs. If Laughton is to be believed, and for the purpose of this paper I do as I see no reason he would lie (Being that constructing Tima itself is illegal, and he also follows with, "Real organs are quicker, but they don't last as long"), then Tima is completely artificial.

14. Refers to the conversation between Duke Red and Tima at the top of the Ziggurat, after the truth of her robotic body is revealed. While it might seem like Tima does not know that she is a robot, I argue that she does not accept her being a robot for the reasons stated.

15. Reacting to the call of the Ziggurat, her design/robotic self is "activated".

16. Tima does not assert her own humanity at the beginning; it is Kenichi that assumes she has simply lost her memories, and that she'll regain them soon, of her family and her name--details that make up a human's life and starts to construct for her her humanity.

17. She was built to sit on the Ziggurat and so it is not really by choice that she does so since the human Tima is gone at that point.

18. This brilliant observation/idea was kindly contributed by a fellow peer, and was a great help in moving past the pessimistic end of Tima to a new way of thinking about her death, for which I am very grateful.

19. Jameson presents postmodernism as a waning of affect, where the problems of modernism, that of alienation and anomie, are no longer applicable, arguing that there is no self to cut ties from, due to the depthlessness and fragmentation of self. There is no complete whole subject, which modernism assumes in its discussion of alienation from self, and instead offers two-dimensionality, a loss of a center, and rather than no affect, there are "free-floating and impersonal" feelings.

20. I use Michel Gondry's film "Interior Design" in which a young lady transforms into a chair in order to live her life the way she wants, and not necessarily conforming to people's expectations of her as well as what and how her dreams and ambitions should be realized. Here, the individual is still there, but perhaps not recognizable in the traditional sense.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Late Capitalism. (1990): 6-16. Print.

Napier, Susan J. “When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ and ‘Serial Experiments Lain’.” Science Fiction Studies 29.3 (2002): 418-435. Print.

Orbaugh, Sharalyn. “Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity.” Science Fiction Studies 29.3 (2002): 436-452. Print.

"Interior Design" segment in Tokyo. Dir. Michel Gondry. Perf. Ayako Fujitani, Ryo Kase, Ayumi Ito, Nao Ohmori, and Satoshi Tsumabuki. 2008. Film.

Metropolis. Dir. Rintaro. Madhouse, 2001. Film.

Serial Experiments Lain. Dir. Ryutaro Nakamura. Triangle Staff, 1998. TV.

Peace is War and War is Peace

In the film Patlabor 2, police officials get caught up in a struggle of authority between civil and military levels of power, during a terrorist attack. The film’s director Mamoru Oshii takes us on a journey of theoretical mind games in which he uses the antagonist Tsuge, a former Japanese military hero turned rogue, to create chaos against his own country in order for political change to occur and a new form of peace to be established. Society often looks highly upon the idea that there is such a concept as global peace; however in “Patlabor 2” Oshii metaphorically counters this idea with a theory that war is peace and peace is war, that you must have one in order to have the other. This theory goes against traditional theory that peace is accomplished by the idea that war is non-existent; Oshii uses various situations and characters in Patlabor 2 to convince his audience that “war is so called peace, and so called peace is the dormant seed in every war.” We can see evidence in both the film and political theory that supports Oshii’s theory that war and peace coincide. In the film we see Oshii use characters as a main way to depict his theories through dialogue of Arakawa and Captain Gota, as well as the character development of Tsuge. We will also be comparing the theory of Immanuel Kant with the theories/ideas presented in Patlabor 2, in order to solidify Oshii’s theory. Throughout this paper we will discuss the issues of war and peace and how they coincide with each other, and whether or not there is such a thing as a just war and an unjust peace.

War and peace are two very different things when compared with each other, the idea of peace does not usually mesh well with the idea of war; however the idea that war and peace must occur and coincide together is not an idea/theory that is widely accepted by the norm of people, because peace is usually regarded as the result of the absence of war, and war is usually regarded as the action that prevents peace. Oshii portrays his theory that war and peace are very similar and in many ways coincide with each other. We see this many times throughout the film, however one scene specifically provides dialogue that provides the viewer with evidence that war and peace are results of each other; the scene is between Arakawa and Gota when they are on the boat dock discussing the actual thing they are trying to protect:

Arakawa: “We’re a rich country. And what is our wealth built on? The bloody corpses in all these wars. They’re the foundation of our peace. We now put the same effort into indifference that our parents put into war. Other countries comfortably far away pay the price for our prosperous peace. We’ve learned very well how to ignore their suffering.”

Arakawa’s dialogue with Gota portrays a very interesting idea that peace is built on the results of war, and that the reason they have peace within their country is because there are foreign nations fighting wars in order for them to maintain their peaceful way of living; this compliments Oshii’s theory very well in which he shows his audience through this dialogue that peace is not the absence of war, but in fact the result of war. I believe that Oshii uses this dialogue as a pivotal point to show the audience that peace is built because of war; Arakawa clearly states that peace is built on the bloody corpses of war; which gives the audience an insight on what Oshii really feels about the issue of peace. The dialogue is almost a metaphorical way of portraying Oshii’s belief that peace is not always a good thing, that there could be a peace that is unjust; and that unjust peace is the direct result of a war that occurred for the wrong reasons such as: for wealth, natural resources, land, etc. Another quote from the same dialogue specifically targets the idea of just wars versus an unjust peace:

Captain Gota: “And yet it seems to me that the line between a just war and a unjust peace is very faint indeed. If the just war is a lie, is the unjust peace less of a lie? We are told there is peace but we look around us and even if we cannot give it words our lives tell us we cannot believe what we are being told. In the end every war gives way to peace so-called, and every so-called peace is the dormant seed of war.”

Once again Arakawa’s dialogue with Gota shows Oshii’s theory that war and peace coincide with each other, that every form of peace is a result of war and every war is the result of some pursuit of peace. In this portion of the dialogue Oshii presents a new idea within his theory, the idea of whether or not a just peace is actually possible. I think that this part of his theory is very interesting because society views all forms of peace as a positive and just thing; however according to Oshii all peace is the result of every war, so does that imply that every war is just? This scene is also the first time the audience is introduced to the idea that although Japan is not in war its peace is almost fake and unjust as a result of the sovereign rule of the U.S. (result of WWII). I believe that Oshii uses Tsuge’s character to answer that question in which he uses his experiences in the peacekeeping of southeast Asia (beginning scene of the film) to show his viewers what a unjust war is. I believe the opening scene depicts an unjust war. In the opening scene of Patlabor 2 Tsuge leads a platoon of Japanese labors on patrol Southeast Asia; shortly into the scene they were attacked by enemies and could not defend themselves because of direct orders from the UN, which led to the massacre of Tsuge’s men. The reason why Tsuge’s platoon could not fire back and defend themselves against an attacking enemy was a direct result of Japan’s actions during World War II. After World War II the US rewrote Japan’s constitution in which it stated that the nation could not have an organized army and could not participate in combat against other nations. This change in their constitution led to the unjust slaughter of Tsuge’s platoon; Oshii uses this incident as a pivotal way to confirm his theory by showing that peace is always a good thing, but it is not always a result of a just war. (“Peace and War from Patlabor 2”, “Japan after World War II”).

Oshii uses the main antagonist, Yukihito Tsuge, as one of his metaphorical portrayals of peace and war coinciding. The character of Yukihito Tsuge is a rogue ex-lieutenant colonel who went missing after his UN Labor platoon was attacked by armed guerrillas in the Southeast Asian forests (first scene of the film); he plotted the terrorist attacks that occurred during the film which caused the military chaos. Oshii uses Tsuge’s character as a vessel to portray this idea/theory that peace stems from war; Tsuge is the terrorist that wages internal war with his own country (Japan) in order to gain peace within him, and to create a political system that is beneficial to Japan.


(Figure 1)

Tsuge’s bitterness and desire for revenge drives him to create war; however when we analyze his character more we realize that Tsuge is not a villain in which he is naturally evil or that he hates Japan, but rather that he felt like he was done a disservice/he was betrayed by his own country, so in order to regain peace within himself for the death of his platoon he seeks revenge by attacking the soil of the authority that could have saved his men. The reason for Tsuge’s revenge can be explained in two parts; the first is the responsibility his character feels for the death of his platoon, Tsuge feels obligated to avenge the deaths of his platoon, because he felt that he should have given them the right to defend themselves against enemy attacks; the second is the unjust political rule that didn’t allow his men to protect themselves when they really needed to (result of the new constitution of Japan).

The experiences that Tsuge endured would confirm Oshii’s theory that any kind of peace just or unjust is a result of war, and that peace and war are the result of each other. Tsuge believes that the only way for Japan to understand that they need to change their constitution to better their nation is to experience the same thing he and his platoon experienced; this is the underlying reason why he wages war on his own country. Arakawa: “Tsuge's putting us in the same position he was in three years ago: no backup. No rules of engagement. That's how bitter he is.” Tsuge believed that in order for Japan to understand that it living in an unjust peace and a peace that could be threatened without defense, he literally showed them through terrorist attacks that they needed a way to defend themselves, they needed an organized army.


(Figure 2)

At this point in the movie Japan was defenseless, because they couldn’t engage in any form of war/combat with anyone outside of their own country; this is why Tsuge uses an American fighter plane to cause confusion and chaos amongst civil and military officials. Tsuge uses these terrorist attacks to show Japan that they are v[ul]nerable unless they install a form of defense; the reaction he gets is obviously portrayed in a negative way, because it is chaotic. However in the end the audience gets an idea of what Oshii uses Tsuge’s character for. Although Tsuge put Japan under high alert and chaos it was meant as more of a wake-up call to military and political officials; Tsuge uses an American fighter plane to show that Japans security is compromised by its alliance with the U.S. and is a direct result of Japan's security and safety being undermined by the U.S. Tsuge makes a point to civil and military officials that if they don’t want to see innocent lives lost then they need to change the no military engagement rule in the new form of rule. Tsuge uses this dramatic chaos to provide a political stance that would provide a better and safer Japan for the future. Oshii uses Tsuge as an antagonist, but he truly serves as an undercover protagonist, because the normal reaction of hatred towards a terrorist is not actively present, because he reveals Tsuge’s true desire. Tsuge: “Perhaps there is a part of me that wants to see a little more.” This was Tsuge’s answer to the pilot that asked him why he didn’t kill himself after all the chaos he caused. Oshii uses Tsuge’s answer to show the audience that Tsuge’s motives were to create a protected Japan, a Japan that lived off a just peace instead of an unjust war (Anderson 84).

Oshii uses Patlabor 2 into a debate amongst viewers through the topic of peace and war coinciding, and whether or not there is such a thing as a just peace. This topic can be turned into a debate, because viewers are shown both sides of the coin. On one hand it is hard not to be on the side of the UN, because there needs to be a form of global peacekeeping in order to prevent another world war from occurring; however you can’t help but sympathize with Tsuge and his goal to restore Japan to its former glory, because every country needs to have the right to defend itself, because without sovereignty over your own nation you depend on the judgment of other nations for the peace and lives of your people. The drama Oshii creates through this debate is clear in which the audience does not know exactly which side is right and which side is wrong, because although the initial response would be to side with the UN, however seeing Tsuge’s point of view makes you question whether or not the peacekeeping and restrictions the UN and US placed on Japan was legitimate or even in the benefit of the Japan as a nation.

Oshii uses a couple of scenes to reveal this debate, specifically the scene in the control room where the Japanese are confused on whether the not the American plane in pursuit is theirs or not. This scene shows that Japan was in a state of confusion, which resulted from the restrictions put on them by the U.S. They had no identity anymore and didn’t even know what planes belonged to them and what didn’t belonged to them; this shows the audience’s first hesitation on the legitimacy of Japanese defense (the exact thing Tsuge eventually tries to fix); this scene confirms the one side of the coin that supports Tsuge’s terrorist attacks in which Japan needs to break away from UN/US control in order to have a legitimate defense and maintain a just peace. A scene that Oshii uses to show the other side of the coin is the opening scene when Tsuge’s platoon comes under attack, this scene reveals the process in which the UN operates in which attacking back is the second option and waiting for reinforcements and confirmation that it is okay to attack should be the priority. The argument that Oshii provides with the drama of the two scenes is that, should global peace be considered just over an unjust war. The most pivotal scene that wraps the two together would have to be when Tsuge is arrested in the chopper and he reveals that he wants to see the changes Japan makes, because of all the chaos he caused, I believe Oshii solves this debate for us by showing his audience that peace is a result of war and not every peace is just and not every war is unjust. It can be argued over and over what Tsuge did was wrong, however if the end result turned out to help the nation of Japan, can anyone say that it was truly unjust?

Once Tsuge takes his actions against Japan, the nation as a whole is thrown into this political confusion between military and civil officials in which they have no idea whether or not the American aircraft was theirs or was this a terrorist attack from the U.S. Oshii shows chaos and panic in many ways, from the levels of civil power to the levels of military power; Oshii portrays Japan as a nation that was so consumed in their unjust peace that acknowledging an attack on their soil was unthinkable (think how the US felt after 9/11). The reactions from the characters of the film truly portray Tsuge’s actions as positive rather negative, but only after they understand Tsuge’s true motive for his terrorist attacks. Tsuge’s motives were to help Japan realize that they were living in an unjust peace and that in order for them to truly maintain a just peace they must come out of the shadow the U.S. and become a sovereign state again, with their own army and unique constitution. The audience can tell that Tsuge becomes an unordinary antagonist through Oshii’s artistic portrayal of certain scenes that Tsuge is a part of; one specific scene is when he is getting arrested and all the birds fly up in the air. This can be seen as a burden being lifted off of Tsuge in which the birds represent revenge and burden and when his task is finally done and the military and civil authority finally realize his motives the birds fly away as if his burden was gone and he is now at peace. Oshii uses this scene as a way to express his agreement Tsuge’s actions and that he acknowledges that his terrorist actions may have been wrong, but his ideology and belief that Japan needed to change the way they govern themselves is correct. Oshii uses the character of Shinobu Nagumo, a former colleague of Tsuge, to show that the characters in the film understand why he did it, but have to punish his actions because it was still wrong. The audience can see the sadness of Nagumo as she arrests Tsuge, because she knows he is right in the way he wants to better Japan, it was just the way he did it in gives her no choice as a police officer, but to put him under arrest.

The topic of an unjust peace and a just war is a topic brought up many times throughout this essay as well as seen many times throughout the film Patlabor 2; however what real evidence do we have to ensure us that Oshii’s theory is even a relevant theory? Philosopher Immanuel Kant believed in a similar theory to Oshii in which he believed that “a war is only won only by the side that is comprehensively stronger, and since victory and defeat depend solely on relative power, reason declares that war as a procedure for determining rights is absolutely condemned.” If the reason of war is already condemned before it has started then does it not make it right to wage war on a country you already know you can defeat? Kant questions the legitimacy of war and the reasoning behind it; Kant brings up a valid point throughout his writings in which he theorizes that if nations waged war against a nation they knew they could already defeat, then would it not be easier just to solve their disputes in a court of law, and was actual war really necessary? Kant and Oshii’s theory do not stray far from each other; in another part of Kant’s writing he answers his question on the legitimacy of waging war with the idea that war is necessary in order to maintain peace: “asserting that war, not only peace, is absolutely necessary, since war is linked with peace and the moral sanity of a people, he claims that perpetual peace would reduce all peoples perpetual silence”; this quote can confirm Oshii’s theory that they must exist together in order to exist at all. Kant believed that people naturally have different opinions and that war is used to express these opinions, and in order for just peace to truly occur we must go to war to make sure that the opinions of a people is heard and executed.

In Patlabor 2, we can see Kant’s philosophy relevant through the actions of Tsuge in which he felt that war was necessary in order to achieve peace; creating chaos in Japan was the underlying purpose to show that the Nation was vulnerable and that they needed to become their own sovereign nation. During post-world war II Japan was taken over by the U.S. in more ways then one, the U.S. set up military posts on Japanese soil, assimilated them to the U.S. culture, created a new constitution for them, and rebuilt and ran their country as if it was the United States. Tsuge’s actions against Japan can be seen as a people’s voice being heard through war. It is no secret that even though the U.S. was part of the reason of the destruction and reconstruction of Japan, that the way they did it was not exactly to the Japanese liking. Patlabor 2, compliments Kant’s theory really well; however there are aspects of the film that do not necessarily agree completely with his theory; Kant believed that war was necessary to keep peace amongst a people, because war acts as the voice of opinion for a people, however in Patlabor 2, Oshii shows that peace is obtained by being a sovereign nation, it is once again showed through Tsuge’s ideology that if Japan were to maintain some form of peace and be in war they must be sovereign in order to carry out their own ambitions instead of another nations (Hoffe 156, 192).

In conclusion, Oshii metaphorically theorizes that peace and war whether just or unjust must exist with each other, that in order for one to occur the other must as well. We see this theory being portrayed through the dialogue of Arakawa and Captain Gota and the character development of Tsuge; we also can confirm that Oshii’s theory is relevant because it is similar to that of philosopher Immanuel Kant. After researching the topic of peace and war, I can confidently conclude that the idea of peace can only exist as a result of war; I conclude this because we see through many modern day events such as 9/11 that peace comes as a result of war; when a nation is put under chaos and answers back with a resolution it maintains its peace once again. I understand and agree with Kant’s philosophy that war serves as a reality check amongst a people, because sometimes it takes war to show what peace really is, and whether or not a nation has obtained it. Oshii uses Tsuge’s actions of terrorism to portray Japan in a light that many didn’t really see, in which they were at peace, because they were no longer in war, however they lived in an unjust peace, because they were being controlled by the U.S. Oshii showed that sovereignty is an important part of obtaining a just peace in which he uses Tsuge to show that being controlled by another nation can result in a form of peace, but when you have no control of your own state, then this peace is irrelevant because when you are attacked and when you need to defend yourself, you have no say in it. Patlabor 2 provides viewers with an intellectual challenge of norms and average societal thinking, in which it challenges its viewers to think outside of the box, and to focus on whether or not violence (war) is the result of peace, and peace is the underlying creation of war; regardless if it is the type of war that is seen on TV between militaries, or the war with self revenge, every type of war is in the pursuit of some sort of peace, and every type of peace exists because of some action of war.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Mark. "Oshii Mamoru's Patlabor 2: Terror, Theatricality, and Exceptions That Prove the Rule." (2009): 75-109. Web. 2 June 2011.

Bolton, Christopher, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, and Takayuki Tatsumi. "Patlabor 2 and the Phenomenology of Anime." Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007. Print.

Höffe, Otfried. Kant's Cosmopolitan Theory of Law and Peace. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

Market, Mark T. "Peace and War from Patlabor 2 « The Critical Thinker(tm)." Web. 1 May 2011. .

Patlabor 2. Dir. Mamoru Oshii. 1993. DVD.

The Metaphysics of Anomie in Mind Game

Mind Game, directed by Yuasa Masaaki, released in 2004, comments on the no-future dialogue of alienation and anomie present in a lot of science-fiction anime. Such anime features fraught relationships with a defamiliarized self, anxieties of future relationships to technology and society and the destruction of familiar assumptions about life, and society. Mind Game is a lighthearted comedy film which indicates alternatives to a future with no free options. It postulates a more radical sort of moral agency which resonates well with Sartre's existentialist humanist ethic of authenticity which, when applied by protagonists, allows them to transcend material conditions of society as well as materiality in itself. The ability of the characters in Mind Game to become free actors is contingent on the fictionality of their being. The gradual discovery by characters of this power over the course of the film indicates a negotiation between realist and fantastic formal pressures. As the real evaporates, the space and time characters inhabit becomes more free, enabling them as agents to achieve a more authentically free self. Mind Game attempts to destroy the real as such in order to reinscribe a humanist ethic. This goal is necessarily complicated by human subjective understanding of the “real” as precluding symbolization, but is ultimately rescued from this ontological trap by an application of the moralist aesthetic of anomal jouissance which reappropriates anomie as a positive force.

Mind Game as a film is necessarily convoluted, fitting with certain themes of universality and of the common humanity of each of dramatis personae. A detailed explication of the narrative would be prohibitively long; however, much of the plot can be reduced to the arc of three main characters. Additional thematic character detail for minor characters and antagonists is described in extended montage sequences which frame the beginning and end of the film and affect the plot only obliquely. The narrative revolves around three key protagonists whose past lives have created a situation of individualized anomie. Nishi, a 21 year old shop clerk and aspiring manga artist, becomes reunited with a childhood crush, Myon. She takes him to a yakitori restaurant owned by her father and operated by her sister, Yan. Nishi is introduced to Myon’s fiancée, and sinks into a dark introspective mood which is interrupted when two yakuza agents pursuing Myon enter the restaurant. Myon’s father has taken out a sizeable loan and, in addition, has stolen the girlfriend and world cup tickets of one of the gangsters, a soccer player named Atsu. He becomes enraged, beating Myon’s fiancée and threatening to rape her. Nishi, cowering, threatens Atsu who, in response, shoots him in the butt. Nishi dies, and his soul ascends to heaven where God mocks him for his wasted life and pathetic death, and then instructs him that his soul must now dissolve for eternity into nothingness. Nishi refuses, disobeys God, and returns to his physical body moments before death. This time, he disarms Atsu and shoots him. He steals the other Yakuza’s car, and escapes with Myon and Yan from the restaurant. They are pursued by Yakuza agents and escape by ramping off a closed bridge into the mouth of a giant whale. Inside the whale they meet Jiisan who has been trapped there for 30 years. He shows them how to make the best of a bad situation, and helps them to escape from the whale. Once free, everyone is magically transported back in time to the very beginning of the movie. Myon and Nishi are still reunited but this time Myon escapes her pursuers. While at first these characters are subjugated by values they cannot effectively control, (anomie,) they soon reinscribe those values on their own subjective terms. This synthesis alienates the viewer but ultimately describes an alternative valuating praxis.

Characters in many classic Anime films suffer from a disconnect from the values of contemporary society which appear unsustainable and alien to viewers. They often suffer from Alienation or Anomie, the symptoms of which occur as feelings of disempowerment and helplessness for characters. The origins of this alienation are described by Karl Marx in an essay on “Estranged Labor”. He describes Alienation as the process by which a laborer loses feelings of ownership of the products of his labor which, extrapolated over time, alienate him from his peers, his society, and his sense of self. He describes this process, succinctly, as occurring when “the object that labour produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer”. He describes this objectification of labor as resulting in “a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation [Entaussenmg]” (Marx 324). In terms which can apply outside the industrial framework of class struggle, Alienation can be seen to exist whenever a person loses connection to the norms of a society or culture. Especially in a globalized framework, it’s easy for workers to fail to understand international culture and politics in terms of an internalized referent. A society collaboratively creates the world in which it exists, but individuals within that society can lose sight of themselves within this communal framework. Thus one becomes alienated from the products of one’s labor not only in the industrialized sense but also with regards to the family, the state, and the rest of what can be called humanity. Contemporary Anime illustrates this anomie by telling stories of defamiliarized dystopias where structures of meaning, (the real,) break down in a fictionalized space, (the film,) which collapses under the weight of unsustainable norms (anomie). This symbolic killing of the real-by-proxy intends catharsis, a release from anomie.

Mind Game attempts to refute this common theme in Anime of no-future dystopianism by repositioning the fictionalized chronotope and attempting instead of destroying a symbolized real, to explode the real itself on fictional terms. This is itself symptomatic of anomie, but lacks the thematic anxieties of loss otherwise present in the genre. Many anime films, especially those produced in the science fiction or fantasy genres, feature alien futuristic landscapes which, standing in for the defamiliarized real, are collapsed or destroyed by cataclysmic forces. The moment of destruction and collapse is cathartic, and death often seems an escape from something much worse. In Akira (1988), a futuristic, post-nuclear war “Neo-Tokyo” is destroyed by an alien, transhuman menace. The city is reclaimed by the sea, and a new world begins to take shape as the credits roll. In Rintaro’s Metropolis (2001), a metaphorical babel-type society is destroyed, (again,) and from the ashes a new model of subjectivity no longer constructed around the human arises. In each case, apocalypse is viewed as a positive force which elicits and foreshadows redemption, as the phoenix, only after the rain of fire. Here the alien future stands in for an eluded-to past which, hyperbolized and extrapolated to a dystopian extreme, ceases to seem real and leaves characters with no agency or positive escape save cataclysm. Mind Game recontextualizes this apocalypse, choosing as the object of destruction not an unfamiliar future but a present where the real-as-such explodes into the symbolic and imaginary. Again, a moment of catharsis occurs and an alternative to anomie is presented which collapses the possibility of a real from which one can become alienated.

One of the first shots in Mind Game is of a young woman, Myon, running towards a closing subway train door while in the foreground Nishi types a text message reading “Your life is the result of your own decisions”. This early indulgence elucidates a primary theme in


(Figure 1)

Mind Game: the responsibility of characters as agents to behave honestly. The moral progress of characters during the film shows them learning to internalize this message by following their dreams unashamedly and without fear. Thus Nishi, who at the beginning of the movie is a resentful, no-prospects youth who only dreams of becoming a manga artist by the end of the film captures the love of his long-time crush and sets out to follow his dream job and Jiisan, trapped in a whale and filled with regret and repressed sexuality, can effectively turn back time to start again with better priorities and a wiser perspective. Each character holds a similar dream but none acts positively on their ambitions, choosing instead to respond negatively to external stimuli. Their motivations and desires are constrained by passivity and regret. Nishi complains, near the beginning of the film with regards to his feelings towards Myon, “I never had the guts to make a move, always playing it safe. Always waiting for someone to help things develop!” (Masaaki 2004) Nishi is at first afraid to act positively and is afraid of the individual commitment personal agency would require. As a result, he resents his world and is ashamed of his place it it. Characters in Mind Game do not interact authentically and are not happy until they discover a release from the oppressive norms of an alienated society.

The value for this film from a moralist perspective can be equated with the existentialist humanist ideal of authenticity as posited by Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre claims in his lecture, “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1945) that, in the absence of a priori values, man is “nothing other than that which he makes himself”(Sartre 22). Each person is thus responsible for producing their own self. For Sartre, one must establish the self as a subject, subjectively, so as to avoid becoming self-identical, an object. He claims that those who willingly negate the self are in “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), a state he describes as an unconscious lie which one tells oneself without knowing it is told. “Bad Faith”, he claims in his text Being and Nothingness, arises when “the one to


(Figure 2)


(Figure 3)

whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived” (Sartre 89). Sartre claims that individuals, aware of the freedom of a synthetic world, become paralyzed by choice and, realizing the extreme responsibility of this authentic ethic, suffer from “anguish” with the weight of their own responsibility. This allows them to create systems of control which abridge agency.

Here a distinction must be made between “reality” and “the real”. The Real may deny signification, but reality, as a purely subjective phenomenon, is still defined by human perception. That which makes Sartre's ethic of authenticity so powerful, especially within the morality of Mind Game is the claim that, in the absence of a priori givens, the subject is defined exclusively as consciousness and that, even including a perception of the “real” as such, “the only level on which we can locate the refusal of the subject is that of the censor.” (Being, 93). The ethic is exclusively subjectivist, and therefore has more power in fictionalized space, when engaging with “reality”. In the universe of Mind Game, characters are more radically free than they at first are led to believe. Characters deceive themselves as to their own constraints as actors, not only on the social performative level, but physically as well. Characters discover that their assumptions about the possible aren't grounded in fact. A telling example comes in the opening montage where Jiisan, coming into his sexuality as a transgendered being, goes to church and sees images of hell which cause him to repress his natural impulses. When he meets Myon inside the whale, she helps him to actualize a more positive performance of gender and of sex than was previously possible. He starts to wear makeup, and allows himself to be aroused by Nishi's body. The film also allows the laws of physics to be called into question. In an early scene, a yakuza agent pursuing Nishi & Co. as they escape by car from the restaurant falls from a speeding vehicle to the ground. Instead of a moment of brief, permanent violence as the body, constrained by laws of inertia, is destroyed, the man runs alongside the car. On his face, a moment of confusion gives way to a smug smile. He has discovered that he can defy the laws of physics. The claim of the film is that such things were always possible, but were assumed not to be. The protagonists' desperate struggle as the film progresses reveals new kind of agency outside the limitations of realist space and time which allows them to, by staying true to themselves, follow their dreams.

The moral claim of Mind Game is contingent on the existence of a fictionalized space. As characters in cartoons, the protagonists can bend time and space. This textuality is eluded to at the end of the movie, when the text message in the beginning of the film, “your life is the result of your own decisions” is replaced by another in an alternate timeline, “the story has never ended”. This message is explicitly stated before the end credits. As an animated film, Mind Game problematizes the concept of “reality” as such by postulating a chronotope where natural givens, such


(Figure 4)

as the way things look, feel, or sound, no longer exist. This concept resonates with a theory postulated by Susan Napier, one of the West's foremost Anime theorists, who claims, in a talk on the “problem of existence in Japanese animation” that animation as a medium creates “a constant state of mutability and flux, and that the division between the world of mutability, dreams, and the unconscious, and the hard-and-fast 'real'”. In an animated movie, the limitations of the text are those of the medium. Thus much that is possible depends on aesthetic choice and formal constraints.


(Figure 5)

The metatextuality of Mind Game allows its characters hitherto impossible degrees of radical freedom. That the limits of their physical beings is defined by their animators allies within the text the values of aesthetics and of metaphysics and the “real”. That the animators appear to let their creations play with the real in the film creates interesting implications for the aesthetic theory of jouissance. First popularized by Jacques Lacan and later expanded upon by, among others, Slavoz Zizek and Roland Barthes, jouissance is often described in sexual terms and is characterized as a moment of orgasm (often translated as “bliss”) which transgresses moral principles of appropriate pleasure but which excites a person to a point at which thought and identity seem to dissolve. Roland Barthes, in his late book "The Pleasure of the Text", describes the Lacanian jouissance as being a kind of sublime act of pleasure which destroys the conscious self. Barthes recontextualizes this moral discourse to illustrate an aesthetic argument. Jouissance is for him “the abrupt loss of sociality, and yet there follows no recurrence to the subject (subjectivity), the person, solitude: everything is lost, integrally.”(Barthes 39). Reading texts can give pleasure (jouir) but true bliss (jouissance) can only be described subjectively, as, within a neutral, unstructured space, the reader freely defines their own enjoyment. He attempts to describe the nature of bliss several times throughout the book, but always recoils: “"I can only circle such a subject - and therefore better to do it briefly and in solitude than collectively and interminably; better to renounce the passage from value, the basis of the assertion, to values, which are effects of culture" (34). Barthes describes this form of aesthetic enjoyment as being purely abstract and metaphysical; his aim is to escape the normative and the political aspects of writing and of reading as acts which he attempts to accomplish by positing this sort of normless, utterly individualistic form of pleasure. Within the free space of the text, any sort of interpretation is possible, readers can play freely with the ideas, situations, and characters of the text.

In a way, the characters in Mind Game are allowed the same degree of freedom as a reader of a text; constrained only by the deliberately flexible boundaries of the medium of animated film itself. Barthes claims that the end of jouissance as a textual praxis allows the reader to reapproach


(Figure 6)


(Figure 7)


their own subjectivity as an assumed reality which otherwise does not exist.“perhaps [after jouissance] the subject returns, not as illusion, but as fiction. A certain pleasure is derived from a way of imagining oneself as individual, of inventing a final, rarest fiction: the fictive identity.”(62) A central scene in Mind Game, both textually and for the narrative, shows the protagonists trapped in the whale at play. They are animated kaleidoscopically. Yan, accompanied by the Nishi, Myon, and Jiisan, performs an elaborate, heavily sexualized dance. In one part, she wears balloons, filled with water, across her


(Figure 8)

chest invoking disproportionate breasts. The balloons expand, filled with water from pumps and also with tiny baby dolls, until they burst in a way evocative of childbirth. Nishi and Jiisan strap meter-long bamboo rods to their crotches and swing around, the women dance on top in a parody of sex. Engaging the animated quality of the subject, Yan creates a collage where she throws her painted body onto a spinning canvas so that, when rotated, the moving image is of her running while her form moves as if rotoscoped. Their performance is ironic, an exercise of play in the glory of the repressed. The final scene, once the protagonists escape from the whale and after Jiisan's time-turning clock belt rewinds the past to give the team a “Second chance”, implies that in the future any number of things can occur. The tone is optimistic. For the protagonists to achieve this freedom, they must first acknowledge their own fictionality, in order to experience Jouissance. Their play reappropraites the body as a positive but anomal source of self which can escape negative or external definition. Here the aesthetic and the metaphysical become allied with the moral and that which is real can be defined to fit the conventions of a text in order to describe a humanist ethic which values individualist agency and collaborative gain. This “play” of the real and of the self within the real can be seen as an attempt to refute or provide alternatives to anomie as tragedy. Characters are differentiated and individualized, but are presented as persisting surrounded by individuals. Cooperation is privileged, as in the final scene of escape, as a means of reconstituting a community along more sustainable ethical lines. Pre-existing sources of meaning are destroyed or reappropriated away from models of the real outside the text. Characters are reunited with each other and with their own fictive selves such that the alienation established at the start of the film is by the end abolished.

Given that for characters in Mind Game the free agency of the denouement is only available because as moral actors they have come to understand of themselves as fictional and have thus exploded the real as symbolic and as a outer limit to human agency, it remains to be seen whether the film can posit an effective moral alternative to symptoms of anomie and whether it is constructive for real human beings to imagine themselves as fictional. The agency, morality, and communality as a refutation of the aesthetics of anomie for protagonists of Mind Game is entirely contingent on their fictionality; the film attempts to combine the real as symbolic with the real as such by extending a metaphysical claim of textuality (“the story has never ended”) into the plane of the real outside the film proper. In doing so, however, Mind Game only serves to reinforce its own artificiality and to re-inscribe the permanent nature of the real.

We return to Lacan for our definition of the Real, as something which according to Zizek, “resists symbolization, dialecticization, persisting in its place, always returning to it”(181). By this taxonomy, the “brute, pre-symbolic reality”(the real) is contrasted with that which “structures our perception of reality” (the symbolic) and with that which has “no real existence but [is] a mere structural effect” and which can be called “the imaginary” (182). The Real, in Lacanian terms, however, is not only that which precludes symbolization but also that which is defined by it: “The real is simultaneously presupposed and posed by the symbolic” (191), Zizek notes, and therefore, is a “Sublime object” (192). By this logic, though Mind Game may explode the real as symbolic, its contingent status as text precludes engaging the real as sublime which is necessarily reinforced by its own symbolization. However, if we uphold the subjectivist ethic proposed by Sartre, the Real exists only insofar as human consciousness holds in faith that it is fact. Regardless, by acknowledging that the film is fictional, one extracts negatively a symbolic conception of the Real which is inescapable at least on symbolic terms.

Though the film may fail to refute the real as affecting actual human life, (here again the distinction appears – Nishi is fictional, you are not,) There still exists a claim to moral agency in the performance of the text as fictional. By collapsing taxonomizing boundaries between the moral and the aesthetic, we can experience the pleasure of the film as jouissance as being a positive moral act which can refute Anomie. Here, though the self may still exist and the constrictive boundaries of the real may still proscribe communal agency, we may experience value as “shifted to the sumptuous rank of the signifier” (Barthes 65) as being artificial and neutered by the pleasure of text. By combining the act of reading with the experience of the subjective jouissance, we can escape norms and reapproach culture and society in a genuine and authentic manner. Here Sartre can be shown to agree: “What art and morality have in common is creation and invention” (Existentialism, 46).


(Figure 9)


(Figure 10)

The narrative of the film is framed by two extended sequences of montage. The first uses sinister-sounding music and a washed-out color palette to provide backstory on each of the dramatis personae. It appears fractured and ugly. At the end of the film, after the conceptual shift, this montage is recapitulated. e music is changed, and the colors are restored. The narrative is now longer, more holistic. The narrative has in a way been mended, foreshadowing an open future which escapes the somewhat cliché tropes of the narrative but allows for a new kind of agency within text. The moment of catharsis arrives not as the story is concluded, but as it is revealed to continue outside the film. Temporality and spatiality have become fluid, and the only tangible limit on human agency is the self. From an experience of anguish in bad faith, the protagonists leave regret and shame behind, entering into a freer space defined by jouissance where the aesthetic, moral, and the real align in a fictionalized space which problematizes the “real” as such and postulates an escape from a no-future dystopian ethic. Taxonomizing boundaries dissolve and new kinds of being are in mind game synthesized, creating new possibilities and realities which resemble alienation but are embraced by the self of the protagonists, abandoning old ontologies to exist in a new world of their own creation.

Though Mind Game fails to resolve palpable real-world problems of alienation and anomie, it allows for a change of perspective where, though the Real still exists as a sublime object, a new understanding of the powers of subjectivity neuters the real as symbolized and allows the union of the moral and the aesthetic within an anomal, subjective space under a heuristic of self-indulgent jouissance. Given that the Real may still exist but that it is surrounded by symbolization, Mind Game contends that one can play freely with the norms of society, which are described as holding the same metaphysical weight as a piece of fiction. If Being is text and the self is alienated, the only recourse is subjectivity.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mind Game. Dir. Masaaki Yuasa. Studio 4.C, 2004. DVD.

Marx, Karl. Early Writings. London. u.a.: Penguin, 1992. Web. .

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller and Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Print.

Napier, Susan. "The Problem of Existence in Japanese Anime." Lecture. 24 Apr. 2003. Jstor. Web. 17 Apr. 2011. .

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism is a Humanism. Trans. Carol Macomber. Yale University, 2007. Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: a Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. Hazel Estella. Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1992. Print.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2008. Print.

The Sense of History amid Absence of Information about History

History makes a person who they are and in the absence of history, a person succumbs to alienation. In the movie Sky Crawlers by Mamoru Oshii, many of the characters, categorized as “kildren,” are not born into the world as individuals but as duplicates of a previous person. Each created character does not have a history or background to relate to and thus come into the air base an alien. They live repetitious lives, flying, killing, and then eventually dying.

They are provided basic fixed memories but in reality they have no hard evidence that they are individuals. Although every character has their own attributes and specific customs that are carried on even after death, without the knowledge of history, they are doomed to be lost within the animosity of their lack of information. Evidence of this can be seen with a character that was supposedly killed in an air battle but then is replaced with a similar character attributing the same habits as the previous character. This new person has similar features, habits, and style putting into question, “are we really individuals and to what extent?” It’s in this way that creates a need for the past to be felt by the characters, which intrigues us, the viewers, to want to understand what has happened.

While on the subject of history and how there is a need for the past, within the movie there is a similar negligence of historic information as Oshii only provides many instances of hints and clues that paint the big picture. Throughout the movie very limited information is provided to us about the main story. We, as the viewers, are required to infer the story behind the scene. It’s almost as if we are put in the position of the kildren and are made to experience all that a kildren would experience. There is no point within the movie that explains exactly what has happened previously, but only moments in which the characters’ experience to allow us to have our own assumptions of what had happened. Usually nothing is perfectly stated out in the open about what had happened, and in the times that something is stated, we do not know if it is the real truth or just the information from a third party. Without the experience provided by the character’s own history, it is not possible to be sure if the information given is supposed to be actual truth or a diluted truth. Since the main characters in the movie have no history, they have a need of history which causes the viewers to be intrigued into what had happened in their past.

In the beginning of the film, there is a scene where Yuichi, the main flier pilot who had just entered the base has a number of questions about past events and why things are the way they are. “Who was the previous owner of the plane? Where did he go? Why was he transferred out? Did he die? When taking over a plane, surely it’s normal to have contact with the previous pilot? Are you a kildren?” Yuichi has a need to know what had previously happened on the base, and we as the viewers, are intrigued by how this story is being told. We are put into the position of Yuichi, being weary of asking the wrong questions and getting in trouble, but still having the desire to know more. Another scene which shows a need for the past is when Kusanagi, presumed the most knowledgeable and experienced of the kildren, seems depressed and lost. It is as seen when she recollects old memories, which have no assurance of reality, but causes her to reminisce. The scene in which I am referring to is when she goes into Yuichi’s room and has a remorseful look on her face as she smells Yuichi’s scent on his bed and remembers a different time. In the viewer’s eyes, we are unable to understand anything, but are able to see the residue of history left behind and experienced by Kusanagi.


(Figure 1)

Kusanagi’s sufferage is further shown when she goes into the town to have fun. Kusanagi and Yuichi eats dinner together and we find that she’s a had a bit too much to drink and can’t really walk straight. Yuichi helps Kusanagi walk and she points a gun to his head asking “Do you want me to kill you? Or would you grant me death? Otherwise we’ll be like this forever.” In this line, it seems as though she’s being tortured by the burden of knowledge which is making her suffer, but what exactly this suffering is, is unknown to Yuichi and the viewers. Progressing a bit further into the movie, Mitsuya is with Yuichi in his room and she talk of how things are. She then proceeds to break down from her lack of history. She cries and confesses to Yuichi that she has “no sense of solidity at all” and that everything she knows could be lie. She asks out loud, “How do you all stay in control of your feelings? How exactly do you connect your endlessly repeating life with your memories of the past?” She goes on to theorize that they’ve “probably become forgetful, hazy feelings, as if you’re watching a dream, protecting your mind.” She knows of no reliable past and has no evidence that she was born or grew up.


(Figure 2)

With this lack of history she then goes on to threaten Kusanagi holding her at gun point in hopes of ending the tormented loop. It’s in this scene that I feel as though it shows how far a person is willing to go if they are driven by the need to know their history and backed into a corner of uncertainty. Oshii creates these kildren, without a sense of history, causing characters to react through destructive and self-destructive actions. This includes smoking, homicide, and unquestioningly going into war.

A need for the past to be felt by the characters is created, which intrigues us, the viewers, to want to understand what has happened. None of the kildren are born with the knowledge of their past lives. All they have is the information given by the people around them which gives them a compilation of their own history, but nothing which can be compared to their own experience. Though through this way, they are able to create a first time experience, building on the character’s own primary past experiences. With the absence of information, one only has the sense of history, which will present those without a history a presence of alienation. Now, knowing the characters are without a solid history, I believe that their only option is to create history in the present. It is only in this way that they are able to have a history, which is to be able to make it in the moment. They must use all the information provided as they live now, in their current life, to create real memories in order for it to become their history. This seems like the only truth that they are able to live by.

“Sky Crawlers neglects to have a lot of definitive information about the history. The director, Oshii, has a lot of inferences into what might have happened in the past, but nothing can be directly known that it had happened. Instead we are given some information in order to make our own assumptions. As the movie starts out we are shown a fierce sky battle with names such as “Teacher” thrown out to us. We are unaware of who these people are, why they are fighting, and who are the good guys and bad guys. We are neglected a lot of information, which eventually we find the answers to our questions. When Yuichi first comes in contact with Kusanagi, he asks her a lot of questions, which to our dismay, do not receive any answers. It is then seen throughout the movie that these questions are slowly answered by inferences from different sources. We again are able to see the absence of information to the characters and viewers. A big neglect of information is the “kildren” characters. Throughout the movie, they are mentioned multiple times, but Oshii wanted the viewers to figure it out with many hints and doesn’t allow us to have more information until the end into what they really are, although we still don’t have an exact description of what they are. What we have is more of an idea of what the kildren are, rather than knowledge of exactly what they are. The movie lacks a lot of information, which forces the viewers to think and come up with our own answers to the questions while giving us pieces of information along the way.

A main distinct characteristic of the movie which I had noticed is the background music, or should I say the lack of background music. In the movie, background music seems to play sporadically throughout the movie. Although it isn’t unusual to have music play in the background of a movie, I had noticed that it only played in certain instances and only plays for a short duration. In this way, I took a bit of time and looked at the scenes and believe that the background music is a reflectance of their emotions. This idea comes from the relation of the kildren’s lack of history and the movie’s lack of background music. It’s through this that I believe that these two are related.

Though as they live, the background music represents their memories being created into history. Within the movie, the background music can be seen to represent a moment in which emotions have been elevated to a level of history not due to its absence but its familiar feel. The soundtrack of the movie is an important substance for the movie as a whole, “Film sound-taken as a single complex unit rather than three or more separate components-cannot be under stood without analyzing relationships among sound track components.”(Cooper) This shows that the soundtrack, upon multiple levels, contain a mass amount of information which supports the overall film. Due to the quality and timing of the soundtrack significance, quantity of the soundtrack isn’t needed, which is why we are presented with so many moments of absence of background music. As their way of life revolves around a non-history, all they are able to depend on is the emotion at the moment and their instances of living creating history in the moment. These instances are moments of heightened emotions, which can be reflected to the background music. In summary, the kildren are first presented with a lack of history and information, thus they having nothing to build on. Assuming that the background music is a reflectance of their history, this is why there is no background music for a lot of the film. The kildren first have a heightened moment of almost-memory, and then after, this moment is amplified for the viewers by the background music as they react to live in the current moment. In these moments where they are living in the moment, they are actually creating their own history for their current self.

In the first scene of the whole movie, right after the plane fight, we are able to hear the slowly intricate background music by Kenji Kawai. It sounds as though there is a complexity, which we later find within the twist of kildren within the story. This is what we are presented as we step into the world of skycrawlers. In the scene when Yuichi is gone and Kusanagi goes to his room, she seems to feel lonely or sad by the absence of Jinroh, Yuichi’s former self. As this scene begins with her outside the door, we suddenly hear the of the background music. This is a big difference from the usual silence that we hear through the movie, which signifies that this is an important and most likely an emotional moment. In a later scene, right after we learn of Teacher and how he is a man, we see that Kusanagi is going pilot a plane. This is the first instance and only instance in which she is piloting a plane. Within the beginning of this scene, the background music begins slowly and then increases in volume and tones. To me, it feels as though history is being created for Kusanagi. It’s almost as though the music is portraying her inner ambition to create change and as the music plays, it reveals her actions, motives,


(Figure 3)

and emotions at this time. Within the movie, it is seen that music plays only in moments that seem critically emotional or might be of importance.

There are many moments in which there are also imitations of background music and sounds which lead to having a history, but not in the sense of emotions deferred into history. Following the previous concept of background music’s connection to history, there are many other moments within the movie which causes memory training through repetition in the background music or sounds in general to be remembered in history. What I am referring to is the direct sounds created by the characters, and not the unseen background music that is experienced being incorporated into history. If we think about it, history isn’t just emotions but is also a series of memories. In many scenes within the movie, there are sounds that either try to imitate the background music of history or try to create their own sounds of history. In substitution of the lack of background soundtrack, the movie seems to have a lot of diegetic sounds. “Gorbman’s pithy definitions of diegesis as the ‘narratively implied spatiotemporal world of the action and characters’ and diegetic music as that issues from a source within the narrative.”(Winters) From this, it is possible to see that the diegetic sounds within the movie is a rich source of information. The way the sounds try to condition us is through repetition, creating for the viewers a sense of history through these other sounds. One such force of background music repetition would be the low rumbling of the planes. The low rumbling of the planes seems to create its own background music within the movie. It’s as if within the reality of the movie, Oshii is trying to have the characters create their own history, which wouldn’t be too crazy of an idea since the kildren had been associated to flying since we are first introduced to them. The low humming of the planes might be the movie’s attempt for the kildren to have their own sense of history and allows the viewers to see the process too. Another instance of the movie trying to create their own essence of background music and history is the scene when they are in the car driving to the brothel house.


(Figure 4)

The radio playing in the background tries to create its own atmosphere of background music, trying to set the mood. The radio’s music is trying to create a sense of history for the characters riding in the car. Aside from the music coming from the radio, there are also some other sounds coming from equipment or something else, but since in the movie they make a noise, they are an important attribute to the story. “The sound makes one think about the object because the object is recognized through the sound; but only rarely might the object…itself evoke the sound.”(Argyropoulos) This sound which causes us to be conditioned would be the opening of bottles, flickering of matches, or sparks from a wielder. These are the digetic sounds that I was referring to.


(Figure 5)

There are many other objects that can make sounds in the background, but it is only the important ones that make a sound and is recognized by the characters which are built into their present history.

Without history it is hard for a person to know who they are which would create for them a sense of alienation. It is within the movie “Sky Crawlers” that the character kildren are born and reborn without definite history. It is within this lack of history that the kildren feel as though they need to find their history. The movie is very vague in information distributed and tries to have us figure what is going in the movie. Within the background music, one is able to tell the emotions in the instance elevating to a level of history. Aside from the background music, there are also other sounds that attribute to the characters sense of history. In this movie the characters are alienated due to the absence of information about their history.


WORKS CITED

Argyropoulos, Erica. Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema(Review). Notes. Vol. 64. (June 2008)

Cooper, David. Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (Review). Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. Vol. 3.1 (Spring 2009)

Winters, Ben. "The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space." Music and Letters Vol 91. (May 2010)