Man’s insecurity stems from the advance of science. Never once has science, which never ceases to move forward, allowed us to pause. From walking to ricksha, from ricksha to carriage, from carriage to train, from train to automobile, from there on to the dirigible, further on to the airplane, and further on and on – no matter how far we may go, it won’t let us take a breath.
– Natsume Sõseki, The Wayfarer
This picture – [of a transformer] – man mounted on machine, a joystick gripped in each hand, was and is the epitome of Japan’s technological dream.
– Ron Tanner, ‘Mr. Atomic, Mr. Mercury, and Chime Trooper: Japan’s Answer to the American Dream’
Fusion with the technological … is tantamount to stepping into a suit of armor.
– Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros
The bodies discusses in the previous chapters have all been strongly linked with notions of identity, from the frighteningly unstable to the rigidly fixed. The fixed masculine body types displayed in pornography suggest a negative response to the transgressive potential that the female and adolescent body is shown to be capable of. This yearning for a contained or armoured body is not limited to pornography, however. The world of hard science fiction anime known as mecha revolves around a quest to contain the body, this time quite literally in the form of some kind of technological fusion. As with the phallic demon in pornography, this kind of ‘containment’ can also be read as ‘empowerment’, perhaps even more obviously than the demons, since the viewer sees the frail human body literally becoming stronger as it fuses with its technological armour.1 Usually huge, with rippling metallic ‘muscles’ and armed with a variety of weapons to the extent that it almost parodies the male ideal,2 the mecha body clearly plays to a wish-fulfilling fantasy of power, authority, and technological competence.
However, this kind of empowerment can be a double-edged sword. Although the most conventional mecha, along with certain Western science fiction films such as Terminator, seem to privilege the robotic or cyborg body, many other anime present the technologically armoured body with profound ambivalence. Not only do these anime partake in the contradictory ‘double vision’3 that science fiction scholar J. P. Telotte ascribes to many Western science fiction films (the simultaneous celebration of technology through its privileged presence in the narrative and an excoriation of its destructive and dehumanising potential), but many works in the mecha genre actually enact this double vision on a more profound and darker level through insistently presenting the fusion of human and technology as one of ambiguous value. This often negative view of technology may surprise audiences who tend to think of the Japanese as masters of technological wizardry. However, it is a view long held by many thoughtful Japanese, such as the writer Natsume Sõseki quoted above, or more recent writers such as Abe Kõbõ, who vividly describe the human cost of technology in their novels.4
The mecha genre of anime carries on this tradition. Perhaps the most ubiquitous of all anime genres, mecha’s vision of what Alessandro Gomarasca terms the ‘technologised body’ is one that has only increased in im-portance since 1963, when Japanese television premiered Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu). This was not only the first Japanese animated television series, but the first of a long line of anime involving robots with human souls. In that same year the first ‘giant robot’ series aired, Iron Man # 28 (Tetsujin 28 go) based on the comic by Yokoyama Misuteru. Iron Man # 28 already displayed characteristics important to the genre, the most significant being that, unlike Astro Boy, the robot was controlled by a separate human being. As the genre developed, human and robot often combined, with the human inside guiding the powerful robotic body.
While the imagery in mecha anime is strongly technological and is often specifically focused on the machinery of the armoured body, the narratives themselves often focus to a surprising extent on the human inside the machinery. It is this contrast between the vulnerable, emotionally complex and often youthful human being inside the ominously faceless body armour or power suit5 and the awesome power he/she wields vicariously that makes for the most important tension in many mecha dramas.
The three anime we will examine in this section, the two OVA series Bubblegum Crisis and its sequel Bubblegum Crash (Baburugamu kuraishisu and Baburugamu kurashu, 1987–91), Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shinseiki Ebuangerion, 1997), and the video Guyver: Out of Control (Kyshoku soko gaiba, 1986), all explore this ambiguous process of body-technofusion with varying degrees of skepticism toward the empowering nature of body armor. Although the three differ considerably from each other in tone and style and from other, more optimistic mecha works such as Gundam or Orguss, they all contain certain tropes common to the mecha genre that make their darker tone particularly interesting.
In contrast to the abjected feminine worlds of the gothic and the occult, which privileged women’s bodies and their terrifying potential to engulf the male inside dark, organic spaces, the worlds of mecha might be seen as stereotypically masculine in their emphasis on hardedged, thrusting, outward-oriented power, privileging what scholar Claudia Springer calls ‘the violently masculinist figure’.6 The futuristic settings of mecha, inevitably high-tech and/or urban, with immense skyscrapers, laboratories, elevators, space stations and huge corporations permeated with robotic equipment, also evoke a hard-edged technological world, far removed from the traditional settings of gothic anime.
Also in contrast to the gothic and occult pornography, the narrative climaxes of mecha, while also fast-paced and often accompanied by throbbing music, are climaxes of combat rather than sex. Virtually any mecha narrative will build up to a lengthy climactic fight between huge and powerful machines engaged in combat involving crushing, dismemberment and explosions. These climaxes evoke not so much fear as what Springer calls ‘technoeroticism’, a euphoric state of power, excitement and violence often associated with war. Indeed, Klaus Theweleit’s discussion of the imagery and tropes employed by the German Freikorps (elite troops created in the aftermath of World War One), which resulted in an ideology in which each young man became a machine and this ‘machine’ was both ‘one of war and sexuality’,7 seems appropriate to the many intense confrontations in mecha.
From this point of view, it seems fitting to call the mecha a conservative genre, one that has links with such Western science fiction tech noir or even ‘technophobic’ films as Robocop, Terminator and Total Recall. These films, although more complex than some of their critics give them credit for, certainly seem to both privilege and problematise the robotic or cyborg body as a frightening form of the ‘technofascist celebration of invulnerability’, to use Andrew Ross’s evocative phrase.8 The cyborg or robotic body is therefore simultaneously appealing and threatening, offering power and excitement at the expense of humanity.
Of the three works to be examined, two of them, Guyver: Out of Control and Bubblegum Crash, certainly have conservative and specifically technophobic aspects to them at the same time as they glory in the mecha on mecha confrontations that make up a large part of each work. The two series also clearly display a nostalgia for what might be called ‘Japanesé family values’ and the premodern pastoral world. Evangelion is harder to pigeonhole, refusing to give any easy solutions to the horrific world it presents. Although Evangelion clearly has both nostalgic aspects (as in an early episode when Shinji, the protagonist, runs off into the country) and technophobic ones, they take place within an acknowledgment of both the fragmentation and the complexity of the real world that the other film and series resist. Even more than most mecha, the Evangelion series problematises human interaction with technology from the simplest to the most complex level.
The Armored Body: Guyver, Bubblegum Crash and Evangelion
By what means is a young boy made a soldier? … How does body armour attain its final form, what are its functions? How does the ‘whole’ man who wears it function – and above all – what is the nature of his ego? … This, I believe, is the ideal man of the conservative utopia: a man with machinelike periphery, whose interior has lost its meaning…
– Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies vol. 2
The quotation above, taken from Theweleit’s book on the early twentieth century German Freikorps, gives a sense of some of the conventional ways Western critics have looked at the technologically armoured body. In this view the armored body (be it robotic or cyborg) is spiritually empty, hypermas-culine, implicitly associated with fascism, and conceived of only in terms of its ability to wreak violence. Or as Springer says of the armored creations in Terminator and Robocop, ‘What these cyborgs do best is kill’.9
Springer and Theweleit are basing their conclusion on Western prototypes, but at first glance much of what they say seems to work well in relation to Japanese mecha. The mecha in all three works we are looking at are also excellent at killing. Indeed, many of mecha anime’s narrative structures are built around at least one but often several long fight scenes of mecha on mecha, scenes that are not simply violent in terms of mechanical brutality but bloodily anthropomorphic as well. The fusion of human pilot inside armored machine leads to bizarre combinations of mechanical/organic violence in which huge machines combat each other in fantastic displays of mechanical agility while at the same time hinting at the organic bodies inside them with graphic glimpses of dismembered limbs flying around and blood seeping through mechanical armour. The power and exaltation of the augmented body noted by Springer and Theweleit10 is clearly on display in mecha as well; indeed, it is the dominant trope around which mecha plots revolve.
The Japanese stories often reveal a much bleaker world view than such Western fantasies as Star Wars or even Terminator, in terms of how much an individual can actually accomplish. This is partly due to the greater emphasis on the interiority of the characters than would seem to be the case in most Western science fiction films. These characters are far more complicated than the action heroes privileged in conventional Western science fiction. Although many mecha series of course have relatively one-dimensional characters, the protagonists of the three works to be examined here show a notable amount of emotional complexity, from Sho’s lonely suffering as the Guyver to Priss’s attempt to change the world in Bubblegum Crash to the hypersensitivity of Evangelion’s antihero Shinji.
The very idea of ‘body armour’, as opposed to the conventional robotic type of Western science fiction film, emphasises the body instead of the armour. In much Western science fiction film even if there is a human body inside the machine, as in Robocop, the emphasis is much more on the protagonist’s dehumanisation by the alienating powers of technology. Likewise, the robotic hero of the Terminator series, while gradually appearing to develop some human emotion in the second film, is still seen largely in terms of a robot with only flashes of humanity, almost the opposite of the mecha protagonists who are first and foremost humans in robotic armor.11 Contrary to Theweleit’s and Springer’s visions of the armoured body as lacking interiority, therefore, the protagonists in mecha anime often have a surprising amount of interiority.
The first text, the 1986 video Guyver: Out of Control is based on a popular manga series by Takaya Yoshiki that also spawned an OVA series, although the single video is far darker than the series. Both works have similar plots concerning a young boy named Sho who, through a chance discovery, fuses with something called ‘bio-booster armour’ to become a hideous cyborglike entity known as a ‘Guyver’. He must protect himself from equally hideous agents of the evil Chronos corporation known as ‘Zoanoids’ while attempting to protect/rescue his girlfriend and, in the OVA series, his father. While the Guyver OVA episodes are a relatively uncomplicated series of fights between good Guyver and evil Zoanoids in which good triumphs over evil, the film Guyver: Out of Control has a far less triumphal tone, displaying, in certain scenes at least, a fundamental fear of and repulsion from technology. It is also a notably conservative work. It harks back, especially in its women characters, to a peaceful, pretechnological world in which a mother’s welcoming breast explicitly contrasts with the dark and hard-edged technological nightmare into which the main character is plunged.
Guyver: Out of Control begins with a traditional pastoral scene: a rainy night in the mountains. Into this scene speeds an earthy truck driver who picks up a seedy looking man with a mysterious bag. When the truck driver attempts to question him about the bag the man only responds that it contains ‘spare parts’, at which point the truck driver, incensed, kicks him out of the truck, keeping the bag. Seconds later a demonic face (bearing striking similarities to the monster in the Hollywood Alien series) appears in the windshield and two arms burst in to kill the driver and take the bag.
In this early scene technology seems both powerful and negative. The truck blasts through the bucolic landscape as the monster’s hands blast through the windshield to pick up the ‘spare parts’. Even the humans associated with technology, the coarse truck driver and his seedy passenger, are singularly unimpressive. In contrast, the next scene opens to a world of peace and order where Fukamachi Sho and his girlfriend Mizuki are walking home from school. Clearly the 97-pound weakling type, Sho is almost knocked over by a male classmate on a bicycle. Soon after, however, he and Mizuki find a mysterious mechanical object that, in classic male science fiction fashion, Sho decides is a ‘great discovery’ while Mizuki just wants to leave it and go home. Too late.
Sho begins to transform into a grotesque monster while Mizuki screams helplessly. Soon a group of similarly revolting monsters try to abduct Mizuki but the now-transformed Sho kills them all (in various bloody scenes) and saves her. Although Sho then transforms back into human form, this is only temporary. Sho has unknowingly activated a Guyver, a top secret new kind of ‘bio-booster armour’ that organically attaches itself to the body’s musculature to give it tremendous strength and other powers such as the ability to fly.
Agents from the sinister Chronos Company try desperately to retrieve the Guyver. They kidnap Mizuki and follow Sho to his high school, where they murder all his friends. Now an outcast, Sho hides for a while but finally decides to change into Guyver form and rescue Mizuki. The rescue sequence involves an immensely destructive fight with a female Guyver named Valkyria, who is a former human like Sho but, unlike the innocent boy, an aggressively evil employee of the Chronos Company. Sho-as-Guyver destroys Valkyria and, in an impressive series of explosions and fires, the Chronos Company as well. Although he also rescues Mizuki, who recognises him despite his Guyver armour, he realises he can never return to normal life and sadly disappears (to return, of course, in a lengthy series).
Altogether bloodier, more violent, and containing much more nudity than an American superhero story, Guyver: Out of Control is still a recognisable version of the universal adolescent fantasy of a weakling’s transformation into a superhero. This is a very dark fantasy, however. The actual transformation sequences seem agonising rather than empowering. Even more negatively, Sho’s new powers only serve to bring about the death of his friends and isolate him from humanity permanently.
Unlike the female transformations we have discussed in the section on pornography, Sho’s metamorphosis is seen as painful and alienating. In many ways it echoes, on a more simplistic level, Tetsuo’s extraordinary metamorphosis scene in Akira. As in Akira, the transformation is intensely grotesque and the protagonists’ agony comes across vividly. Unlike Tetsuo, however, Sho manifests no signs of exulting in his new strengths. The transformation scene itself is much shorter and quickly cuts to the fight scene with the female Guyver to which Sho seems more resigned than excited.
Furthermore, in radical contrast to Tetsuo, Sho remains vulnerably human both in his concern for his girlfriend and his memory of his mother. There is even a poignant scene in which Sho recalls himself as a child running to his mother and being cradled at her breasts. The contrast between the little Sho and the revolting monster he has become is something that would be quite unimaginable in an American tech noir film such as The Terminator. The final scene when Mizuki recognises him through his Guyver armour is also significant. Rather than appreciate his muscles and strength, Mizuki sees and wants the ‘real’ Sho.
Women are thus seen in their most traditional form as oases of comfort (the mother whose breasts enfold Sho) and spirituality (Mizuki, who is capable of seeing the ‘real’ Sho through his armour). As is typical for this kind of conservative fantasy, untraditional women come across as threatening and evil. Although the Chronos corporation contains various greedy old men, it is significant that Sho’s final Guyver enemy, Valkyria, is a woman.
Even before she becomes a Guyver, Valkyria is consistently associated with technology. The viewer first encounters her in a weight room, where she is seen molding her voluptuous body with the use of various steely machines. This linkage of sexuality and machinery is even more pronounced in the scene where she metamorphoses into a Guyver. Unlike Sho, who retains his clothes during transformation, the Guyver’s tentacles are seen entwining around her nude body in a clearly phallic fashion. When her final transformation into Guyver form is completed, however, the only real difference between her shape and that of Sho are her pointed, armor-plated breasts.
Distinctly different from the fluid and engulfing female body of anime pornography, Valkyria’s Guyver form is a rejecting and resisting entity, confronting rather than inviting the male protagonist. In the high tech world of mecha, both male hero and female enemy confront each other in armored isolation with no hope even for the sexual union achieved by Taki and Makie in Wicked City. Interestingly, Sho does not actually kill the female Guyver, as he did with the male monsters early on. Instead, her ‘control meter’ is damaged and she falls apart, moaning horribly and ultimately dissolving into a pinkish puddle-like entity, a final form that of course has more feminine connotations.
It is only in that final fluid image that Valkyria seems to reassert a feminine presence, but her dissolving body is horrifying rather than welcoming. In both forms, therefore, Valkyria’s body is seen as essentially hideous. Sho is briefly able to turn for relief to the recumbent form of Mizuki, who is clad in her traditional school uniform. But this relief is attained only through the violent subjugation of the technologically empowered female Guyver and can only provide a transient respite from a violent and frightening world. In the long run the body offers neither comfort (since his union with Mizuki is temporary) nor protection (since Sho’s own armored body is simply a means of torment).
As Springer says of the (often misogynistic) violence endemic in American cyborg films, ‘Violent, forceful cyborg imagery participates in contemporary discourses that cling to nineteenth-century notions about technology, sexual difference and gender roles in order to resist the transformations brought about by the new postmodern social order.’12 Whether Guyver’s notions about technology are strictly ‘nineteenth-century’ is perhaps questionable, but clearly its values are traditional ones and the film resists any notion of a technologically wrought utopia. In its relentlessly bleak vision, Guyver: Out of Control seems very far from Ron Tanner’s description of Japan’s postwar culture as having ‘been built on the unflagging belief in the benefit of all things high tech’.13
A somewhat more complex vision of technology – and of women in technology in particular – may be found in the popular 1980s series Bubblegum Crisis and its sequel Bubblegum Crash. Set in a high-tech near future where machines known as ‘boomers’ do most of the work for humanity, the series features a group of attractive young women who occasionally leave their normal working lives to become the ‘Knight Sabers’ a technologically-armoured paramilitary group who help out when the (also armoured) police are unable to cope with various forms of high-tech banditry inevitably wrought by perpetrators in equally heavy mecha armour (or else the armoured machines themselves). Although the series contains many scenes of mecha mayhem, the emphasis is not entirely on action. The series contains a certain amount of psychological depth in its characters as well as some satirical flourishes that amusingly skewer the materialist society of contemporary Japan. In fact, Bubblegum Crisis/Crash seems to suggest that the women are more fulfilled inside their battle armour than when they return to ‘normal’ materialistic life.
In Bubblegum Crash Episode 1 the Knight Sabers seem to be on the verge of breaking up. Priss, the most masculine one, appears poised to become a teen idol, while another colleague, Linna, has become a stockbroker and is euphorically making money. Only one of the characters seems disconsolate about the breakup of the group but is unable to circumvent her friends’ yuppie-esque obsession with material success. Fortunately, for the future well-being of the group, a band of terrorists calling for a new world order threaten the city, and the Knight Sabers somewhat reluctantly reconstitute themselves. However, once they don their heavily armoured (but at the same time curvaceously feminine) mobile suits, they swing enthusiastically into battle and easily defeat the terrorists. At the end of this episode the two characters who seemed ready to quit the group now see the error of their ways. No longer obsessed by their shallow consumerist lifestyles, they are willing to dedicate themselves more fully to their careers as Knight Sabers.
Although the episode contains hints of female empowerment, with the women winning out over their enemies, it also shows a strongly conservative subtext. While hardly a paean to militarism, the series still implicitly positions the technological, armoured world of the Knight Sabers and the police against the shallow yuppie lifestyles that two of the characters initially embraced. The communal, self-sacrificing spirit of the Knight Sabers, underlined by their ability to coordinate with and support each other once they get into attack formation, stands in obvious contrast to their giggling and back-biting while still in the throes of materialist consumer culture.
Bubblegum Crisis/Crash is far from being entirely protechnology, however. Machines without human guidance are consistently shown as ineffective and often dangerous. Or, as anime scholar Antonia Levi concludes in regards to the ‘boomer’ machines in the series, ‘they are forever going on the rampage, shooting up innocent civilians and destroying urban areas. They are the whole reason for the existence of the Knight Sabers and the A. D. Police. Pure mecha equals pure menace.’14
In Bubblegum Crisis Episode 3 both technology and modernity in general are shown as evil and destructive. In this episode Priss befriends a young boy whose working mother dreams of moving with her child to the country. The mother’s dream is thwarted by the plans of the evil Genom corporation, which is taking over and destroying her housing area. Priss, in human form, tries to take on Genom’s thugs but discovers, when she tries to hit one of them, that they are actually ‘boomer’ machines disguised as men, and the demolition continues. The mother is killed under a collapsing building and Priss again takes on Genom’s thugs in vengeful fury. This time, wearing her Knight Saber power suit and aided by the other Knight Sabers, she is triumphant. But the final tone of the episode is far from exultant. In the last scene the viewer sees a long shot of Priss delivering the now orphaned boy to what is clearly an institution of some sort while a moody rock song plays on the soundtrack.
The episode’s final message is an ambiguous one. Technology and the huge modern corporations are destructive of both the land-scape and the land. Yet the only way the Knight Sabers can successfully attack is to fuse with technology themselves. This is most obvious in the scene where Priss, in nonaugmented form, attempts to take on the boomer thugs from Genom but is too weak. Once in her power suit, however, she and her friends easily deal with them.
Yet the overall theme of this episode seems to be one of nostalgia for a simpler world in which Knight Sabers, like some latter day band of ronin, can combat modernity with weaponry that is as much spiritual as it is technological. In a voice-over, Priss recalls the young boy’s mother’s desire to go to the country, and this seems to fuel her anger even further.15 But unlike more simplistic mecha series, which might have ended with Priss and her friends’ celebration after having avenged the boy’s mother, the episode concludes on a deeply pessimistic note, one that emphasises the powerlessness of the orphan boy in the face of institution. In the final analysis the individual can only do so much.
Both Bubblegum Crisis/Crash and Guyver: Out of Control limn worlds in which outside forces overwhelm individual action, especially on the part of young people. The only way they can resist these forces is to augment their bodies through technological means. This theme is taken to its greatest extreme in the ground-breaking television series Neon Genesis Evangelion. An extraordinarily complex work, and one that has spawned a small cottage industry of criticism about it, the immensely popular Evangelion can be seen as a deconstruction of the entire mecha genre. Although it showcases brilliant combat scenes of mecha-on-mecha confrontations, these scenes take place within a bleak context of seriously dysfunctional family, work and sexual relationships that is permeated with a mystical and apocalyptic philosophy and interwoven with surreal graphic imagery.
In its basic plot outlines, Evangelion is classic mecha. Set in the near future after a catastrophe called the ‘Second Impact’, the narrative follows the adventures of a young boy named Shinji who is summoned to NERV headquarters, a secret government organ-isation in the city of Tokyo III, by his mysterious and coldly distant scientist father. In Episode I Shinji learns why he has been summoned – to pilot an enormous robotic weapon known as an ‘Evangelion’ (EVA for short), which has been constructed to fight the ‘Shito’ (translated as ‘angel’ but actually meaning ‘apostle’), huge grotesque-looking creatures presumably from outer space that are stalking the planet. While adult scientists made the EVAs, only young adolescents (described with the English word ‘children’) can actually ‘synchronise’ with the EVAs well enough to pilot them. Although initially protesting his inability to pilot the EVA, Shinji finally complies, partly due to his glimpse of the only other EVA pilot available, a girl named Ayanami Rei. Rei has already been so exhausted by previous combat that she has to be wheeled into the control centre on a stretcher. Despite his reluctance, Shinji synchronizes very well with the giant EVA (‘49.9 percent synchronicity’, a scientist crows), and, after some early problems when it appears he will be defeated, ultimately triumphs over what the viewer later learns is only the first of a series of ‘angels’.
Recounted in this way, Evangelion would seem to adhere to all the most important mecha conventions, a near-future high-tech setting, a fast narrative pace, and above all a youthful hero who pilots his robotic machine to victory over an apparently evil and apparently mechanical enemy. The television series even has an inspiring pop theme song exhorting an unnamed youth to ‘become a legend’. However, the series actually turns these conventions inside out to produce a text that is as fascinating or perhaps puzzling as it is almost unrelentingly grim.
This subversive tone is established early in the first and second episodes. Perhaps the most obvious difference that helps set the tone is Shinji’s attitude toward his mecha. Unlike the Knight Sabers with their cheerful enthusiasm or even Sho, who grows more enthusiastic in his work once he realises he can rescue his girlfriend (and in the television series actually shows some real zeal for transforming into his ‘bio-booster armour’), Shinji looks on his augmented self with absolute loathing. His very first encounter with the EVA is instructive. Guided by his superior, Misato, he walks into the EVA holding pad to find it pitch black. When the lights are switched on he finds himself confronting an enormous robotic face, bigger than his entire body, a sight that makes him recoil in horror. Shinji’s continuing sense of unease is clearly telegraphed by his disturbed expression as he is loaded into his EVA and propelled out to the fight with the Angel. He seems agonisingly reluctant, a far cry from the willing body-metal fusion on the part of more conventional protagonists.
The actual encounter with the Angel, while certainly exciting, is much more grimly presented than the usual slam-bang extravaganzas of typical mecha-on-mecha confrontations.16 The soundtrack music is foreboding and the encounter itself is limned in a shadowy chiaroscuro, quite different from the brightly-coloured fight scenes of most mecha. Finally, the actual fight sequence ends up in a fascinatingly low-tech manner. Menaced by the seemingly victorious Angel, Shinji’s EVA, which has suffered enormous damage, manages to right itself at the last moment to produce, not a high-tech weapon, but a huge knifelike piece of metal. The scene becomes even more shadowy and the viewer sees the dark silhouette of Shinji’s EVA savagely attacking the Angel with the metal piece.
No doubt, part of this grim tone is due to the apocalyptic nature of the text. With the fate of the world riding on Shinji’s shoulders, it is hardly surprising that this is not a light-hearted fight scene. The apocalyptic aspects will be explored later but for the purpose of this essay, it is enlightening to look at what these dark early episodes say about body and identity.
It is possible to see this opening encounter in more mythic and/or psychoanalytical terms as the beginning of Shinji’s reluctant rite of passage into manhood, with the EVAs and the Angels as aspects of the Self and Other that Shinji needs to confront in order to form his own identity. Many critics have noted that the construction of the EVA has a feminine aspect, in that it encloses Shinji in a liquid-filled womblike space. It can be suggested that the machine has a masculine aspect as well, in that it is essentially an offensive weapon thrust out of NERV headquarters to take Shinji on his quest for selfhood.
The actual journey begins when Shinji enters the darkened room and, as the lights suddenly go on, sees the EVA for the first time. The scene of the small boy’s face next to the gigantic face of the EVA is a memorable one. It is as if Shinji were looking into a distorting mirror and is horrified by the self that he finds there. Shinji is unable to escape from this repellent aspect of himself, however. In the next scene we see him, looking very frail and vulnerable, being enclosed by the mammoth machine while a clear liquid rises around him that, the technicians assure him, will make it easier for him to breathe. As the liquid covers him the EVA begins to move out to the launching pad, and, after a few more technical procedures, Shinji and the EVA are ejected out of NERV headquarters to fight with the Angel.
With its image of a small human encapsulated within a large liquid cylinder, Shinji’s immersion (perhaps a more appropriate word than ‘fusion’) in the EVA strongly suggests a birth scene. To make the message even clearer, the technicians are shown unlocking the so-called umbilical bridge (the English words are used) as the EVA moves out into battle. Thus the EVA has both aspects of the maternal – Shinji is inside its protective capsule – and the self – Shinji is ‘synchronising’ with it, fusing with it to make it act under his volition. In fact, the critic Kõtani Mari points out the increasing feminisation of Shinji in later episodes, hinting at the affect that the EVA has on Shinji’s personality.
Kõtani views the basic structure of the series – the combat between EVA and Angels – as one in which the patriarchal family, NERV, fights with the abjected feminine Other, the Angels.17 Although I believe that this is an important and illuminating point, since NERV is indeed depicted in an explicitly patriarchal way and the angels have clear links with the abject, I would also suggest that, at least early in the series, the Angels could also be seen as father figures, whom Shinji must annihilate. Huge, brutishly grotesque, and coming down from above, they exhibit an authoritative presence. They are also explicitly associated with Shinji’s real father, a man who seems to have rejected his own son in order to work on the mysteries of EVA and the Angels and who appears to be the only person to know the real meaning of the Angels. In this light, the savagery of Shinji’s final response to the first Angel is highly suggestive. This is not simply one machine attacking another, but, as the surprisingly primitive knifelike weapon attests, a deeply primal and murderous confrontation. The phallic nature of the knife is also interesting, suggesting that Shinji is attempting to arrogate his father’s masculine power.
It is important to realise, however, that just as the EVA is both mother and self, it is also possible to see the Angel as both father and self. After all, the closest equivalent to the gigantic, powerful and grotesque Angel is the gigantic, powerful and grotesque EVA with which Shinji is fused. In this light, Shinji’s final victory over the Angel is reminiscent of George Lucas’s science fiction epic The Empire Strikes Back (1980), in particular the scene in which Luke Skywalker engages in a sword-wielding confrontation with Darth Vader, whom he is not aware is actually his father. In a scene of mythic and psychoanalytical resonance, Luke finally manages to cut off Vader’s ‘head’ (his helmet), only to discover that the head is actually his own.
In the case of most of the more conventional mecha, the triumphant resolution of a fight is a prelude to further victories that will explicitly or implicitly celebrate the growing competence of the youthful protagonist and his maturation into an adult form of identity. In Evangelion’s darker vision, however, such a celebratory coming-of-age fantasy is largely undermined. The sexual transgressiveness and ambiguity that mark both EVA and Angel are embodied in a more psychosocial way in the general dysfunctionality of the human protagonists. This is clear throughout the series as the focus turns at least as much to the bickerings, sexual angst, and family secrets of the three young mecha pilots and their mentors as to the mecha action. Also, as has been shown with Shinji, the characters’ attitude toward their high-tech body armour is often ambivalent at best. Rather than empowering them, their huge EVAs leave them wracked with pain and deeply vulnerable. Far from bringing victory, body armour in this series only leads to physical and emotional damage.
Indeed, the EVAs can be seen as outward manifestations of the characters’ own defenses, not only against the world but against each other. Instead of enabling them to feel protected and potentially more capable of human interaction, the EVAs only add to the characters’ alienation from each other. Thus, while Shinji and his roommate and fellow EVA pilot, the striking Asuka Langley, might be expected to develop a romantic attraction for each other, their sexual tension, although clearly evident in some episodes of mutual fumbling, is usually subsumed under Asuka’s intense competitiveness as to who gets to lead in combat with the Angels. As in Ranma 1/2 this theme of competition can be seen as having links with the heavy pressures that Japanese society places on its citizens, but unlike Ranma 1/2, the competition here is apocalyptic rather than festive. Shielded in their EVA armour, Asuka, Shinji and Rei are incapable of any meaningful interaction beyond competitiveness in combat and the occasional bleak foray into sexual experimentation.
The alienation of the characters, especially that of Shinji, is spectacularly apparent in the puzzling and genuinely subversive final episode, a grand finale in which, bizarrely for a work in the mecha genre, not a single mecha is shown. Episode 26 comes after a dizzying series of revelations concerning both family and institutional secrets interwoven in a highly technological framework in which, among many other things, the true function of NERV and the real identity of the first EVA pilot, Ayanami Rei (she is actually a clone of Shinji’s dead mother), are revealed. In contrast to the technological revelations of the previous episodes, however, the final episode is fascinating and to many viewers disappointing in its virtual lack of any high-tech special effects or apocalyptic imagery.
Instead, the final episode is an almost classically psychoanalytic exploration of the personal identities of Shinji and his friends/colleagues at NERV, who, the viewer has by now discovered, are all deeply psychologically damaged. The surreal framework in which the exploration takes place is a series of questions flashed across the screen that Shinji and the others then try to answer, as if they were prisoners being interrogated. The question that occurs most often is ‘What do you fear?’, and Shinji’s answers have nothing to do with high-tech weaponry or Earth-threatening Angels and everything to do with his deeply dysfunctional family life and profoundly introverted personality.
In answer to ‘What do you fear?’ Shinji first responds, ‘I fear the hatred of my father’ and adds ‘My father abandoned me. He hates me.’ As the question continues to be pressed, however, Shinji expands his circle of fear to reveal that his deepest fear is ‘not being wanted [by anyone]’. This leads him to confess, in answer to another question, that he pilots the EVA because his ‘life is pointless otherwise’, and, ‘Without the EVA, I had no value.’ The others apparently have similar revelations concerning their own sense of worthlessness and their need for the EVA to give their lives meaning.
As the episode continues however, Shinji learns that all of this is taking place in his own mind and, as the outside voice repeatedly tells him, this is a vision of the world that he has come to through his own decisions. Continually being asked the question ‘What am I?’ Shinji finally sees himself as utterly alone in a blank white world, a lonely cartoon figure floating in a perimeterless space.
Having come to the ultimate in identity deconstruction, Shinji then has a surreal vision of an alternate anime universe, a self-reflexive version of an animated high-school sex comedy that proves to him that there are many possible directions his anime life could go in. With this knowledge he appears ready to begin rebuilding his life and states ‘I see I can exist without being an EVA pilot’. The series ends with Shinji thanking his father and saying goodbye to his mother.
Looking at this final episode unironically, Shinji’s story is in a sense a coming-of-age drama as much as that of Luke Skywalker or the protagonists of more conventional mecha. Indeed, critic Endo Toru sees the final episode as an explicitly sexual coming of age in which Shinji, through the interrogation of the personas of his fellow female combatants in his mind (his anima, perhaps), ultimately is able to separate from his dead mother and move on to a more adult sexuality.18 At one point in the episode, for example, he is told in Lacanian fashion that ‘the first person you see is your mother’ and at the end of the episode, he says goodbye to his mother. Even if Shinji’s ‘maturation’ is perceived in a straightforward manner (and, given the dark tone of the series this would be rather problematic), it still seems to be highly ambiguous. Indeed, in the film The End of Evangelion, Shinji’s sexual coming of age is shown in the bleakest of terms as the opening sequence reveals him masturbating miserably over the wounded body of Asuka. In contrast to Luke’s learning to use the ‘Force’ in the Star Wars series, it seems clear in both film and these final episodes that mastery of the EVAs leads only to alienation and despair.
The very ubiquitousness and popularity of the mecha genre makes Evangelion in general and this final episode in particular peculiarly jarring. Through Shinji’s self-questioning, the viewer is insistently reminded of the fundamental worthlessness of the power derived from the mechanical armor, thus undermining the whole basis of the mecha genre. The final scenes in which the unarmored Shinji floats gently in a world without directions, boundaries, or human contact are in striking contrast to the scenes of armored bodies in combat that ended many of the previous episodes. In the solipsistic world of Evangelion, mecha are finally unimportant except as a means to know the self. Even the human body is less important than the mind that creates its own reality.