As a critique international human rights work carried out by international organizations such as the UN whose stated aims are to spread and gain support in international law, the anime film shows the ways in which the suffering of individuals and groups is intensified by the perpetual warfare required to implement and maintain a certain image of justice. He was one of the early directors that experimented with the upcoming technology of 3D computer graphics. Blending 2D cell-shaded animation and computer graphics his experimental use mixes cel film, a transparent sheet of celluloid or similar material that is drawn on and used in the production of anime films, and 3D computer graphics of his time to draw out the political implications in the technologies of reproducibility of the time. Using the existing technologies of reproducibility of the 90’s and submitting to the conventions of his time (the aesthetic dimension of the present: film animation as a medium, anime as a genre) the director Mamoru Oshii limns the overwhelming complications associated with forcing a particular idea of international human rights on other people. With the presence of the UN in countries such as Thailand and Cambodia, the attempt at establishing human rights becomes uncertain and confused as different groups and organizations pursue their own agenda that does not fit the political schema of the UN and its supporters. The task at hand then for human beings in the position to assist in “stanching the flow of human blood, diminishing cries of human pain, unbending the crouch of human fear…” as Wendy Brown puts it, is not as clear cut and simple as it may seem (Human Rights p. 452). Human rights are supposed to improve living conditions for human beings in extreme situations around the world. However, the crisis that stems from international human rights efforts is that it is not enough nor will it ever be. In supporting lives in underdeveloped countries what were really doing is letting them live longer to struggle; we keep the problem alive at the expense of human lives in order to keep our capitalist life style. Brown’s piece “‘The Most we can Hope for…’: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism deals with the some of the same issues present in Oshii’s anime film as well. She writes in regards to human rights,
“human rights are vague and unforeseeable; their content is infinitely malleable; they are more symbolic than substantive; they cannot be grounded in any ontological truth or philosophical principle; in their primordial individualism; they conflict with cultural integrity and are a form of liberal imperialism; they are a guise in which the globalization of capital drapes itself; they entail secular idolatry of the human and are thus as much a religious creed as any other” (p.451).
In other words, human rights cannot be reduced to one maxim, to a categorical imperative in which one would do one thing and one thing only in all circumstances: every situation has its own historical and ontological properties as opposed to Kant who argued that one should act according to the maxim that can be willed universal by everyone in a similar situation, which will always be in accordance to the State Law. Similarly, organizations that attempt to universalize a particular notion of human rights in other countries take for granted what it is that allows for the pursuit of such a goal. The pursuit of an ethical peace is not found in reducing human rights to an ultimate principle but, rather, by producing a breed of human rights activism that does not negate other possible ways of dealing with the crisis at hand.
In the film, the process of restricting human suffering that the UN undertakes perpetuates the very thing it seeks to prohibit: the use of violence will secure the State a sovereign space within which the people who’s rights are protected are able to inhabit, but this space is always something that has to be policed at the expense of other humans whose rights cannot be recognized or grieved as lives. Rather than questioning the system and finding other ways of being politically involved, peacekeepers resort to war in order to keep peace, the terms of war having to strip the intelligibility of some bodies in order to justify the rights of some by necessarily excluding others: the war apparatus remains working within the same system of capital or symbolic surplus rather than trying other ways of handling the crisis, which may require the negotiation of the very terms of liberal rights discourse that is particular to the state. The presence of UN peacekeepers in a country that does not recognize international law only aggravates the situation in creating more human suffering that could have been avoided had they not been there. According to Brown, “…human rights activism is valuable not because it is founded on some transcendent truth, advances some ultimate principle… but rather simply because it is effective in limiting political violence and reducing misery” (452-453). For this reason, the Kantian categorical imperative cannot be used as a justification for the existence of rights discourse, but only the need of considering each crisis in its historical specificity, without generalizations or abstractions into universal laws that often impede the political will towards action. Oshii clearly depicts the exacerbation of the problem and the contradictions of keeping peace through war when we see the objects that symbolize peace being destroyed by the resistant military wing. The function of peacekeepers being sent to patrol foreign countries is to maintain stability and improve the lives of the people. However, the peacekeepers ignite and create more conflicts, more blood flow as in the case with Gotoh and more chaos as a result of conflicts between international law and the various organized militias groups in the area. Additionally, rather than approaching it other ways that can lessen and even end unnecessary human pain, the UN works within the closed system of perpetual violence and it is this working within the dichotomy of war and peace that the UN forces its discourse onto autonomous regions that creates more situations in which dangerous conflicts can break out. As a result, the effects intended by the various activist groups only reproduce the system that creates the conditions for war. Instead of questioning the root problem (liberal imperialism) political organizations keep the system alive in a perpetual state of peace through war.
The first scene that takes place in Cambodia abruptly cuts from a close up of the Bayon head to the 0.98 Labor Operating System training simulation set in Japan for the new Shinohara Heavy Industry Corporation Patrol Labor. Oshii takes us on an excursion from one extreme to the other; from the aesthetic experience that Gotoh has in the still shot of the Bayon face to the transition to Japan’s technologically driven society at the height of its urban sprawl. This juxtaposition of the organic sublime to the inauthenticity of the modern aestheticizes the surreal world of Japan’s futuristic society at the same time that it draws out the aesthetic impression of the Angkor Wat. It brings to the fore the differences between the natural and laborious production in Cambodia to the automated, impersonal and highly technologized world of Japan’s industrial society, creating an ethereal experience characteristic of the modern in this juxtaposition of the late-modern and post-industrial urban scape to its obscene and sustaining underside: the result is precisely the Sublime of the Real trauma as the experience of a primordial jouissance through this play of life and death, peace and war. Indeed, this juxtaposition is quite brilliantly illustrated in the “cyborg” like character of the mecha, a natural and organic character extended in space and time, made more efficient through its technological appendeges which become inextricable from the function of the human in late-modernity:
(Figure 1)[1]
Oshii raises the doubt that improving technology is a solution to the problems found in the first scene. He questions whether we need to improve our technology in order to be able to fight and end conflicts through war more efficiently, since for him they seem to merely extend conflict into previously unfathomable spaces that are the result of technological proliferation itself. In the movie, the technological innovations that take place after the battle between UN mechas and the militia group are supposed to be a solution to the problem, the idea being more powerful weapons will instantiate a universal peace. However, Oshii seems to be proposing the opposite in critiquing the strategies that are undertaken by industrialized nations such as the U.S. who attempt to implement an idea of what peace “is”. Their use of industrialized weaponry to reify the idea of international human rights in other countries fails altogether once the cure to the problem becomes the very disease. If the production and expansion of discourse produces and proliferates the very means of resistance to that discursive assemblage, then Oshii’s critique can be read in a Foucauldian light since the new technologies that are meant to suppress the insurgency simply create new spaces and, thus, new means of resistance that are enabled through technological expansion itself. In starting the film off in Cambodia Oshii questions the U.S. role as an international police unit. The recent violent history of Cambodia dates back to the Vietnam War when the war spread into Cambodia. During the Vietnam War the U.S. bombed the Vietcong along with the parts of Cambodia, their pretext being that Cambodia was a hiding place used by the Vietnam’s People’s Army. The U.S. government viewed involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam and, as a result, Cambodia got pulled into the war. The war to fight communism ended with heavy U.S. casualties along with heavy civilian casualties from the bombardment of the Vietcong. After the U.S. pulled out of the war civilian casualties in Cambodia rose to the millions. The Khmer Rouge’s leader Pol Pot took advantage of the countries vulnerability and of the scared citizens after the war as he promised protection and refused Western influence. However, the outcome turned out different. Pol Pot’s plan was to erase the history of Cambodia by killing all the intellectuals, brain washing the youth and starting genocide that led to a death of an estimated 1.5 to 1.7 million.
Incorporating a country that has shown a history of violence and oppression is significant in contextualizing modern international efforts for human rights since the anime film was released in 1993 soon after the Gulf War, which has become characteristic of late-modern conflicts. The Iran-Iraq War began when Iraq launched an invasion of Iran on September 20 1980. Iraq’s air forces attacked Iranian airfields with the intent to destroy the Iranian Air Force base. Saddam Hussein’s reason for invading was a supposed assassination attempt to kill the Foreign Minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz. The war ended once the UN negotiated ceasefire but this only lasted a few years until the Gulf War began as a result of border conflicts between Iran and Iraq. Both Cambodian history and Middle Eastern history have had border disputes. In the case of the Gulf War the U.S. led the war and called all other nations to join the front against Saddam Hussein and his regime. Cambodia’s history is full of border disputes that date back to the 1400-century. In incorporating Cambodia and its history, Oshii questions U.S. involvement in the Gulf War and their absence in not only Cambodia, but other countries where there is there genocide going on. He questions their role as global police and draws out the contradictions in their global agenda and its effectiveness. Places like Cambodia, Africa and other underdeveloped nations that have had it worse have yet to be aided by the U.S. How can some lives like the lives of Iraqi citizens be recognized as grievable[2] and how can others not be considered lives at all like the Khmer people that have been suffering for centuries as a result of the agenda of other countries. In Frames of War Judith Butler distinguishes between lives that are considered grievable and lives that are not recognized as lives. She writes, “Normative schemes are interrupted by one another, they emerge and fade depending on broader operations of power, and very often come up against spectral versions of what it is they claim to know: thus, there are subjects, and there are “lives” that are not quite recognizable as subjects, and there are “lives” that are not quit – or indeed, are never – recognized as lives (p. 7). In the anime film, the normative schemes set up by the U.S. global policy do not recognize certain lives as grievable as opposed to lives that are in our interest to save. A big question regarding U.S. involvement in the Gulf War and the more recent Iraq war focuses on and asks about the oil that the liberal imperialist society of the U.S. benefits from. Oshii engages in that widespread critique of U.S. intentions which asks whether or not the U.S. political agenda is based on its own self-interest. Given the history of underdeveloped countries such as Africa and other struggling nations like Cambodia, it seems as if the U.S. picks and chooses which lives are worth a life and uses it to normalize and justify human rights efforts.
By the end of the anime movie the technological innovations clearly function to complicate and blur the problems caused by technology and its limitations. As Captain Gotoh finds himself entangled in the political crisis as Yukihito Tsuge, an angry war veteran of the Japanese Self-Defense Force leads a military terrorist group into a violent assault against Tokyo and blows up the Yokohama Bay Bridge. Pat labor 2 draws police commanders Kiichi Gotoh into the chase after Tsuge. But the investigation into the crisis is protected by secrets both personal and political. Oshii uses the technologies of mechanical reproduction particular to his time to politicize art and creates new modes of political life in the age of information and electronic technologies. In the piece "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility" Walter Benjamin is writing at a time when film begins to emerge as a pervasive and accessible medium and technology particular to its time. He argues that man, while limited to the means of technological reproduction of a time, is also capable of rearticulating the uses of those technologies and finding a new means of previously unforeseen modes of political life. In doing so, Benjamin notes that while the aesthetic technologies of time are limiting, they also enable a timeless and constant revolutionizing that cannot be confined to those technologies, effectively equating art to politics. Oshii meets the revolutionary demands that Benjamin seems to be calling for in using computer graphics and cel film animation to depict through art and film the political implications of the world in which the film is imbedded. In this Oshii creates new modes of being involved with politics that were not possible before the invention of the technologies of reproducibility that he uses.
NOTES
1. The new Shinohara Industry Patrol Labor in the anime film is a result of an upgrade from the Hiishii Industries AL97B Hannibal, which is the mecha that Kiichi is in when he gets shot. It is supposed to improve the efficiency and efficacy of international human rights efforts.
2. Professor Judith Butler in Frames of War: The Politics of Ungrievable Life explores the way that recent US-led wars have enforced a distinction between those lives that are recognized as grievable, and those that are not.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media." Selected Writings. Vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2008. 250-83. Print. 1938-1940.
2. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: verso, 2009. Print.
3. Brown, Wendy. "Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism." The South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 251-63. Print.
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