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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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).
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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.
