Politicizing Art in the Age of Information and Communications Technologies

Patlabor 2 (1993, Kidô keisatsu Patoreibaa 2 the Movie) starts with a battle scene in which a platoon of hostile resistance fighters engages fire against UN mechas using RPG’s. The army fighters destroy the industrialized weapons leaving peacekeeper Kiichi Gotoh bare to witness the rain falling on the Angkor Wat in Cambodia. A crucial shot in the anime film is the close up of Gotoh as he gets out of the industrialized weapon to look at the natural jungles of Cambodia still littered with mines placed by the Khmer Rouge. In the background the jungle sits still while he takes off his helmet only to keep his eyes shut to take in what has happened. As he opens them the lector is able to see a swollen eye along with cuts and profuse bleeding revealing the state of shock that his body is in. The view of the camera then switches focus bringing to the foreground the vast jungle through the eyes of Gotoh as he scans the area during ceasefire. In this reversal between foreground and background the view of the camera takes on a free-floating consciousness embodied in the gaze of the Bayon statue that towers above him. Holding his wounded arm Gotoh looks over his shoulder and gets startled at discovering the immense temples of the Khmer empire. This state of shock that Gotoh is in together with the presence of sacred objects in their natural state produces an aesthetic experience in him that becomes hyper accelerated by its contrast to the overwhelming experience of war. It is in this moment that Gotoh is able to experience the Sublime in a war torn region, a peace outside the realm of war that is not defined by the absence of war but, rather, reveals the limits of war and peace as understood by the United Nations.

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.

Mamoru Oshii’s Alternate Possibilities: Sky Crawlers and Patlabor 2

In Sky Crawlers, action and movement is restricted and regulated by corporate control. Yuichi is a fighter pilot for a corporate compound. His labor is a representation of the movement of corporate capital because he moves in flight patterns over the outskirts of towns dominated by corporate control. His movement is prevented from going beyond the area designated by his employer. The limited space Yuichi has to move in makes his agency and ability to move always dependent on the closed decisions of the corporation. As a result of this environment, the narrative portrays characters such as Yuichi and Ksunagi as incapable of conceptualizing their actions, movement, or ideas outside of their identification as the subjects of the corporation. Its almost as if their substance boils down to a corporate credo reading: “Created by and for the interests of the corporation”. In this way, even their labor is un-liberating because there is no possibility for realizing their agency in the closed logic of the film. What this means for their labor is that it is reduced into pure simulacrum and spectacle. Their capability of possessing an agency of resistance is limited by the constraints of the film.

Oshii lets time unfolds differently in Patlabor 2 like a linear narrative; actions are seen as either responses or reactions to previous historical events. The film is introduced with Tsuge, an officer of the Japanese Defense Forces, surviving a failed U.N. mission. Tsuge fails to receive an order in time from his superiors. He is in shock when his team dies as a result of this perceived failure. This sets in motion so called “terrorist” actions from the perspective of the State, but what serve as his active response to what has become in his point of view an ineffective global policing system. The film then refocuses to 2003, four years after the failed mission in Cambodia to Japan. Tsuge forms a “rebel” group that bombs a bridge, hacks defense networks, and sets a full-scale attack against Tokyo. His actions pinpoint weaknesses within Japan’s security structure .In addition, they incite State fear or even paranoia at the prospect of unrest or possible civil war. Tsuge’s actions expose the weaknesses of Japanese police, defense, and international relations. His actions compete against the state’s message that wishes to maintain a sense of peace and control. The film progresses by following two police officers Nagumo and Gotoh, who are sent to capture Tsuge with the aid of an intelligence officer named Arkanawa, using unilateral power to capture Tsuge and end the threat of “terrorism”. In the Patlabor 2, a general says Japan “does not exist in a vacuum”. His quote ties together different understandings of agency and movement within a local, national, and global context. At the global level, this represents Japan’s relationship to other “post war” nation states. At this level, action and movement are influenced by external powers such as the U.S., exposes’ Japan’s dependence on foreign nations. However, in a local context this dependence plays out in various ways, through Tsuge’s actions and the state’s response to his action. Tsuge’s actions are seen at the global level as “terrorism”. Yet, Tsuge sees his action as a way to disrupt local patterns of movement that state and global powers govern.

In Sky crawlers, time is less linear than a narrative and leaves you hanging in a vacuum of hyperreality: there is no general sequencing of events or plot progression. All growth or development occurs in the confines of a closed space. As a result, time acts according to corporate control. Characters such as Yuichi and Ksunagi define life as “meaningful” or “productive”. They self identify in corporate terms because they are “kildren” or pseudo humans bred by the corporation as adolescents, designed to live for brief periods. As a result they perceive time as either irrelevant or unimportant. It’s as if their lives amount to continuous labor cycles. Their proximity and awareness to time acts to heighten their feelings of alienation and dislocation. These feelings are the foundation of their desire to end their own lives, which amounts to breaking the ultimate rule of trying to defeat the “undefeatable” ace pilot. The Kildren’s continuous identity follows the same capitalist logic of destructive regeneration, each accumulating the crisis of their ahistorical existence.

Oshii’s lens into Sky crawlers functions to intensify the continuous time structure by slow pacing, repetition, and sparse dialogue. The sparcitity of verbal interaction indicates the lack of meaningful or significant social interactions. The lens follows kildren, like Yuichi at his unceremonious welcoming into the corporate compound .At the welcoming, he is received with an attitude of disinterest. Yuichi flies into the compound and to be briefly introduced to his mechanic, General Officer Kusanagi, and several other pilots. The film begins by grounding what he will be doing for the remaining cycle of is life. When he lands not a single onlooker appears seems interested in his arrival, instead he receives an apathetic reception that the viewer has no way to contextualize. He must find his own way while later Officer Ksunagi, herself a kildren, later, welcomes him tiredly into her dark office space that appears to contrast the natural sunlight which streams through a window. Yuichi questions Ksunagi about the status of the pilot he is replacing and asks whether she is a Kildren. At this point Ksuangi’s expression suddenly changes and she refuses to answer Yuichi’s questions. His cold dismissal suggests a nihilistic interpretation of his arrival, where the closed-ness of daily life on the compound is repeated in every social situation and exchange. Each day the pilots fly airplanes cut from contact for the most part with the “outside” world except for limited opportunities explained later. The film asks the viewer to accept the strange world of Sky crawlers as it is, closed off and without an understanding of history.

The kildren’s own understanding of their historical connection to reality can be interpreted by what Jameson refers to as a postmodern “psychological status” in his essay Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Because the Kildren have no clear recollection of the past and are unable to attach any significance to their present moment of being or their creation or description is similar to Jameson’s schizophrenic who “suffers a breakdown of the signifying chain” (6). The fact that the dialogues between characters do not divulge details or have personal histories to tell signifies their forced to interpret their own histories for themselves. Kildren depend on material markers such as matches, repetitive movement as proof of their own “historical residues.”[1]

History is a record or memory of previous experiences When a Kildren dies, they are reborn with only vague recollections of their previous life. Literally “killing children”, their continuous life for the corporation is without the aid of historical memory. Kildren feel confused and disoriented by their surroundings. Kildren only have limited evidence of their previous lives. The film creates a sense of déjà-vu by concentrating on small details and moments of memory; the return to the same dinner, fold of a newspaper, a match thrown on the ground. These material objects function as memory devices in their repetitive and minute details offering clues without direct answers. Focusing on these moments also the viewer to interpret what objects such as a cigarette, meat pie, newspaper, or a match means to the kildren enforcing the idea that their understanding consists of by routine, control, and repetitive order (ref to images 1,2,3 below). The repetition of actions coincides with the military conflicts occurring continually in the film without a sense of purpose, reason, or an end. Only a female pilot Mitsuya summons the nerve to tell Yuichi that he is a reincarnation of Jinroh, brought back to life because of a unique “skill set”. Mitsuya is also the first person to tell Yuichi that he is indeed the reincarnation of Jinroh and that the other kildren were only “pretending” they did not know. The lifeline of a Kildren is set only to determine the needs of the corporation, replacing his sense of self for a “unique skill set”.


(Figure 1)


(Figure 2)


(Figure 3)

This lack of historical connection may also explain internal conflicts and provide a reason for their inability to form individual or collective political consciousness. Ace pilot Mitsuya suffers from this type of ahistorical crisis and cries “Why? When? And how in the world did I end up like this?” She further explains that her lack of historical understanding makes her feel as if she is “floating further and further away from reality”, rooted in intense malaise for everyday life. Jameson refers to a similar type of stress and refers to it as “wanning of affect” where a loss or lack of connection to historical purpose forces them to interpret their lives differently. Like Yuichi, Mitsuya tries to establish some frame of reference by asking the pilots, “How many flight hours have you logged? or “How many years have you been working as a pilot?”. Mitsuya is also validates Yuichi’s own feelings of confusion and disorientation when she asks “ How do you reconcile the memories with your life if it is just an endless repetition of the present? “. Although Mitsuya is the only character to express these feeling of uneasiness, there is an implication that Ksuanagi’s desire commit suicide stems from a similar “wanning of affect” her chain of signifiers is unreliable she feels “no past and no future”.

Kusanagi describes the kildren as part of a game that involves “fighting a never ending war”. By referring to “war” as a “game” Ksuanagi is also saying that their violent actions are for the interests of capital. Kusanagi understands the conditions she and her co-pilots work in and does not see an alternative to their state of detached violence. She interprets “”fighting” as a critical element of human society” but she herself is not a human or historical being. Her explanation is vague and does not justify violence. Kusanagi’s own intense feelings of hopelessness drive her towards an existential and psychological crisis. She considers suicide and assisted suicide as the only means to escape her condition, exhibiting self-destructive tendencies in her desire to kill Yuichi and herself. Part of her anxiety also comes from dealing with her agelessness and responsibility of being a mother. Because she does not physically age she doubts her own capabilities and the ethics of raising a daughter. This crisis solidifies her status as an ahistorical subject, where neither nor her body nor labor has any significant impact. Kusanagi’s daughter also functions as a trace of her material existence, a living piece of herself reminding her of her nonhuman condition.

Yuichi and his fellow pilots have peripheral connections to the outside world with limited media access, exposure to tourists, and brief encounters with other women living on the outskirts of town. Even though these exchanges and encounters happen they only operate as with brief distractions emphasizing their mundane lives. These contacts also provide kildren with clues about their previous lost self. A woman Yuichi meets through fellow pilot Tokino, tells him “The fact that you’ve come means Jinroh’s dead, isn’t it?”. Even though Yuichi does not exactly know whom she is talking about, she is suggesting that she had sex with kildren before. Their conversation also proves that different kildren have underlying levels of emotion. She also tells him that she has asked Jinroh “Where do you keeping leaving your heart?” and that he did not respond. This is because many kildren have difficulty interpreting their own lives as meaningful to maintain stable feelings of attachment. She explains she was worried about him because him because he often looked like “he was at an impasse”. This information illustrates the point that although Kildren can have sexual experiences they still feel trapped by their work. They cannot find their selves without their work. The woman thinks maybe he left his heart “in the sky” emphasizing how after sexual encounters, she could not emotionally connect with a kildren.

When tourists come to visit the compound and “support” the corporation, the Kildren express desires to “kick their faces in,” showing a general indifference towards their presence. Their visit is clearly propaganda with Yuichi putting fake smile and cheerful demeanor. These moments emphasize pure spectacle of the corporate structure . It is not until a plane crash interrupts their visit that the Kildren stop putting on a show. Kusanagi loses restraint and yells at the tourists, she yells with hypocritical pity for a pilot they did not even know, further exposing the absurdity of funded violence.

The “world” or “reality” of Kildren may be interpreted as a “real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1). What is “real” for the kildren is that they essentially have no origin and use referential signs to simulate their own “reality”. The Kildren use these “signs” as substitutions of substitutions or simulacra as the means to understand their life as machines at war. Although Ksunagi reasons that their simulation of war is for some human historical purpose that brings war to “life” the way textbooks cannot, the news treats their battles like a spectacle. Yet the humans in the world of the Sky crawlers, such as man who works at the dinner the pilots visit, does not look interested in the television reports of the battles visible in his restaurant. Oshii’s camera shows a scene where he steps out of his dinner to sit by an anonymous man. The lens focuses on his blank and bored expression, perhaps suggesting that his own life is as boring and monotonous as the kildren. Yuichi perceives killing Teacher, the undefeatable flying ace, as a possible way to break the structure and he sacrifices himself trying to do so. The major change in the film does not come until the very end, after the viewer is left abandoned staring out into the sky, the lens returns again into Kusanagi’s office, where a she warmly tells a new pilot (assuming it is Yuichi brought back to life) “ I have been waiting for you”. The end of Sky crawlers ends the same way it beings and its cyclic structure is unattached to time unlike in Oshii’s earlier film Patlabor 2. Patlabor 2 provides a more realistic presentation of time and deals with similar issues of war, resistance, and struggle in a broader historical context.

In Patlabor 2, a general says Japan “does not exist in a vacuum”. His quote ties together different understandings of agency and movement within a local, national, and global context. At the global level, this represents Japan’s relationship to other “post war” nation states. At this level, action and movement are influenced by external powers such as the U.S., exposes’ Japan’s dependence on foreign nations. However, in a local context this dependence plays out in various ways, through Tsuge’s actions and the state’s response to his action. Tsuge’s actions are seen at the global level as “terrorism”. Yet, Tsuge sees his action as a way to disrupt local patterns of movement that state and global powers govern.

Throughout Patlabor 2 Oshii brings his lens into the public sphere of Tokyo to show the inconsistencies between the Japan Defense force’s panic and insecurity and the public’s apathetic responses to the “terrorist” attacks. Security forces and police respond to Tsuge’s “terrorist” attacks by ensuring “public safety” by increasing paramilitary presence and installing surveillance equipment throughout Tokyo to prevent more attacks. The lens shows Nagumo watching in shock as the bridge explodes; perhaps never imaging such an action was possible in her city. On the contrary, regular civilians seem undeterred taking pictures with tanks while children wave at military labors, giving the event the quality of a spectacle (images 4,5). Different factions of military and police forces are also seen prepare for a “worse case scenario” by deploying tanks, military machines, and hoarding provisions.


(Figure 4)


(Figure 5)

Oshii’s pauses his lens at a wall painted with the words “Lumiere et ombre” meaning “dark and light” in French like dark military figures standing in front of reflective corporate buildings (10,12) . These words suggest a distortion between “light” and “shadow” like the duality between “truth” and “untruth”, simulation and reality. These words in a public space allude to the influence corporate media and how it shapes public conceptions of the evolving cityscape. The media interjects into the public’s everyday life with giant television screens visible in public squares and by commuting stations and news reports audible across space (7). Oshii moves his lens to emphasize the omnipresence of the media and how it operates to naturalize military presence. The media also functions as an intermediary between the public and the state as the only source for the public to gather information. Oshii’s moves his lens through the city as a news report announces, “All provisions for martial law were dropped from the legal code. The general consensus has been…” while the “camera” shifts from the inside of taxicab, the streets, into passing traffic, and an armed helicopter flying over Tokyo (images 13, 14, 8,9,11). This screen illustrates how the state projects its authority across space and is represented as democratic, prepared, and rational.


(Figure 6)


(Figure 7)


(Figure 8)


(Figure 9)


(Figure 10)


(Figure 11)


(Figure 12)


(Figure 13)


(Figure 14)

The news report is also ironic, because the defense state is represented as a democratic and methodical structure where sound decisions are made based on a “consensus”. Yet the films shows that the state does not function democratically and that Gotoh and Nagumo are discharged for challenging its ineffective hierarchal structure. The viewer can also infer that the information the media provides is as important as what it omits. The film shows the Japanese state making decisions that includes conflating their own national interests with submission to US control. This affects Japanese citizens abilities when it comes to making public safety decisions against “terrorist” attacks. During these times of crises Gotoh and Nagumo argue for putting aside political relations in order to ensure “law and order”, but their demotion forces them to work autonomously. They form a vigilante group to capture Tsuge and take paramilitary actions against a perceived threat completely outside of public view. This proves that the media functions to legitimize a state structure as compliant with U.S. interests. The media provides the public with images of a bridge blowing up without any explanation or commentary, thereby ignoring and delegitimizing any discourse of the event.

The tensions between the local police, defense and intelligence forces erupt when different state factions start working with and against each other. They do so because they do not want the U.S. to intervene or undermine their power. Because Nagumo and Gotoh recognize these tensions as problematic they are also in a position to realize that these structural problems are not new. Initially, Tsuge’s actions are perceived as a war-like threat, but Arkawa assures Gotoh that a war has been going on for a while. Gotoh begins to interpret Tsuge’s actions as a response to the global violence of U.S.- Japanese relations.

It is also significant that even officer Gotoh attributes relative “peace” as a part of U.S. military occupation of Japan, even though he has not experienced the war preceding the occupation. Gotoh also sees any participation in global violence and capitalism as supporting the cycle of “civil war, armed conflict, and ethnic strife” and that “our economic prosperity is created by demand for those wars”. Gotoh acknowledges that Japan benefits and legitimizes it power by keeping violence out of view. If anything, Tsuge aims to challenge state power by bringing violence he is personally affected by into the public eye. Tsuge creates war like conditions to disrupt any “illusion” [s] of peace by shutting down the communications systems, bombing major bridges, and turning a fake gas attack into a spectacle. Tsuge’s blimps release a faux gas over Tokyo causing panic amongst the soldiers until they realize it is a hoax.

By staging the attack as a spectacle, the actions also take on a symbolic purpose. In contrast to “state violence” Tsuge does not intend to gain anything from his exploits other than disruption. Whether or not Tsuge intends his actions to inspire a more democratic or autonomous state is unclear. The news reports only provide the public with ambiguous or false information, such as citing the bombing as a “terrorist attack” without further explanation of who the terrorists are and why they bombed the bridge. Even when Tsuge’s clever actions give him an advantage over the state, he does not hold anyone hostage or make any kind of demands. Instead he lets the actions produce whatever potential effect on the people without concern over how it is represented. His actions are completely intentional and he does not struggle when Nagumo arrests him. Yet, when asked why he gives himself over to the state, he replies he wanted to see Tokyo’s future, implying a desire for change without indicating what that change may be.

To sum up the analysis of Patlabor 2, it is useful to reference the Gulf War as one of Mamoru Oshii’s influences for the film and particularly the work of Mark Anderson’s "Oshii Mamoru’s Patlabor 2: Terror, Theatricality, and Exceptions That Prove the Rule." In this article he analyzes Arkawa’s argument as “given the brutality that defines the international status quo, the defense of “peace” constitutes a particularly dangerous illusion” that works by “banishis[ing] war to the realm behind the [television] screen” (89). Anderson also references the U.S. state of exception in international relations with Japan, in which the 1951 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty granted the U.S. unilateral discretion in positioning U.S. military forces in Japan (89). Anderson provides interesting context of U.S. –Japan relations as an influence in Oshii’s work but I am not certain if I can agree with his argument that “ the film’s main characters nevertheless remain centrally concerned to reinstitute effective Japanese national boundaries and sovereignty” (91). Although the characters desire a more independent state, it’s not clear that arguing for a sovereign nation was the point the film was trying to make. Instead, Oshii could create these fictional characters and world to illustrate how “post-war” nation-states have benefitted from global capitalism, often imposed with violence, by intervening in foreign wars and justified by media misrepresentations.

Anderson also cites a history of internal state conflicts that includes Naomi Klein’s point that “postwar neo-liberalism is ultimately a political project grounded in destruction” (93) which is also useful for looking at Sky crawlers. The fictional world of Sky crawlers is an extreme where semiotic reductive subjectivity and disturbing ethics of war and capital is the central crisis. If Patlabor 2 did not raise questions over the ethics over “inclusion through exclusion” in international wars (89) than Sky crawlers offers an even more extreme representation of war as simulacrum. Not even the characters in the film provide a coherent argument as to why a simulated war is in the interest of corporate capital, but perhaps Oshii intends to extend Klein’s argument on neo-liberalism where the project of destruction becomes the goal. Destruction, or violence becomes the ultimate goal used to maintain a public idea of purpose and peace. Oshii seems to purposefully distort the idea of war as ultimately appropriated for the interests of control and capital. Any other interpretation in this film is propaganda as illustrated by the visiting tourists who believe the kildren are actually doing some kind of public service. Overall, Oshii creates fictional worlds to raise questions and dramatically emphasize contradictions in the ethics of violence as legitimized by state structures and media propaganda.


NOTES

1. “The exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary “theory” and in a whole new culture of the image or simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relation to public history and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose “schizophrenic” structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax….” (6)


WORKS CITED


Anderson, Mark P. D. "Oshii Mamoru's Patlabor 2: Terror, Theatricality, and Exceptions That Prove the Rule." Mechademia. 4.1 (2010): 75-109.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York City, N.Y., U.S.A: Semiotext(e), Inc, 1983.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.