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| THE POST-NUCLEAR VISION | |
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THE POST-NUCLEAR VISION Following the dropping of the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the postmodern vision of what the apocalypse looks like developed a very specific outlet in anime. With films such as Akira, the idea of nuclear power being focused in an individual who had the potential to destroy the world was cemented. The anime series I have chosen to discuss as it incorporates this theme is Neon Genesis Evangelion directed by Anno Hidodeki and from the animated film company called Gainax. This series consists of twenty-six episodes and two movies. The reason I have chosen to make it my focal point for this section, and not Akira, is because while Akira has produced scads of literature, Evangelion has not yet achieved that level of scrutiny. The wonderful thing about Evangelion is its very dense richness that makes it applicable to almost any theory that one cares to address to it. The idea that it produces a visual realization of the world in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse is only one way of reading the series. The anime is evocative of so much more than that and at the same time resists even the attempt to compartmentalize it into something that can be understood. In my examination of it I hope to show how this show can be viewed as the creation of a man who wanted to showcase the psychology of an individual in reaction to the destructive power that man contains within himself. |
| The Japanese as a people did not react to the nuclear bombings as an outrage, but rather as a tragedy. Later on they realized the discrepancy between their view of the bombings and the Occupation's view, and altered their own view only slightly. "The initial response. . .is one which the West has never understood. The bomb, like the war, like death itself, was something over which no one had any control; something which could not be helped; what we mean by an "act of God." The Japanese, in moments of stress if not habitually, regard life as the period of complete insecurity that it is; and the truth of this observation is graphically illustrated in a land yearly ravaged by typhoons, a country where the very earth quakes daily. The bomb, at first, was thought of as just another catastrophe in a land already overwhelmed with them." (Richie, 21) |
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With the multiple outlooks on the event, the attempts at working out how it should be dealt with through the medium of film could be varied and confusing. In the beginning, obviously, the bombings were presented merely as Ritchie puts it as an "act of God." However as time went on and the Western view of the bombings as atrocity came to be integrated into the Japanese ideology, the exposition of nuclear visions also evolved. However, Richie claims the Japanese take on the bombings never reached the stage of considering them an "atrocity," instead "the Japanese substituted an elegiac regard which has remained as the single constant element in the changing interpretations of the Hiroshima symbol," (22). In applying the idea of film as an elegy to Evangelion the comparisons are obvious to one who has watched the whole production. In the final episodes and in the movies, the extinction of the entire human race is discussed in terms of loss and what would be missing in such a state. The main character Shinji Ikari, is a boy in possession of the power to destroy or save the world and by the process of a long and thorough examination of his psyche he discovers how much he needs people. The series is almost an elegy for the population of Earth on its own. It displays the best in each of us along with the worst while offering a commemorative look back at what we have been. Most importantly though, Evangelion displays what people mean to each other. If there was a theme in this movie that had predominance over all the others this would be it. In a soul-searching look at the "self," Shinji makes the discovery that there is a reflection of one's own self in the minds of everyone one has come into contact with. All of these selves together inform the existence of one's own self, and without these mirrors to check ourselves against we would cease to exist as our lives would become empty and without shape or form. |
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As the century that saw the atom bombings came to an end and Evangelion was released in Japan, comparisons between it and Akira (a film made much closer to the year of the bombings) were numerous in initial reviews. Both anime conceptions presented a world in the stages of a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which further denigration of the human race was imminent through the actions of teenagers. Someone once wrote of Akira in the following words: "The narrative is also schizophrenic. There are a bewildering number of characters, incidents, spatial and temporal leaps, that make the narrative difficult to follow and render it well-nigh incomprehensible on a first viewing. In the absence of narrative coherence, the film grabs and grips the viewer by its visceral excitement, a constant bombardment and battering of the senses, a barrage of high intensity experiences. The film has incredible kinetic and graphic power; its stunning spectacles of violence and destruction rivet the viewer and seduce the conscientious objector that survives in most of us reared on humanist and pacifist values." (Freiberg, 95)
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The very act expressing of these emotions, lust and the killing urge, releases the self from them for a time. Once you have exercised the need to fulfill your base desires then for a time you are content. This theme of end and beginning again is a repetitive cycle that Evangelion encompasses in its most basic form. The idea of an apocalypse is utter destruction, however by drawing upon Christian mythology, Evangelion displays a truly cyclical stream of events. God created the world and gave it to Adam and Eve. But then God destroyed the world and mankind saving only Noah and his family. Destruction then can be immense, but a few are always spared to begin again. In Evangelion, on August 15, 2000, (a date in August very close to the atom bombings of August 5th and 9th, 1945) an event called Second Impact occurred which was a repeat of the Impact that killed the dinosaurs (supposedly). The Second Impact melted all the glaciers in the Antarctic and caused a shift in the global weather patterns killing many and making many areas uninhabitable. The Third Impact is the one that concerns the entire series, because it is the one that some men are trying to plan and bring to fruition themselves. This Impact is one in which mankind will return to the state he existed in before the First Impact. Before the First Impact, man existed as one entity with one mind and no body. This was a pure form where no one was separate from anyone else and the "self," as the series defines it, did not exist. This then is the cycle that the film encapsulates, a death of mankind but at the same time a rebirth into his original substance.
"If the underside of the West's modernization narrative is romanticism (the obsessive, all-absorbing subjectivity and all-consuming presence from which the postmodern seeks to escape by positing an end/closure to consciousness), in Japan the underside of the imported modernization narrative is the myth of cyclical rebirth, of endless eternal desire and suffering. That this notion is tainted with pre-modernity by its Buddhist associations is secondary to the still vivid sense that Japanese modernity has been marked by a cycle of death and rebirth. Hence, the syndrome of Japan as Number One testifies not so much to a knockdown drag-out fight with the West as it does to the ability to stay, survive, be reborn: the ultimate symbol of that truth is the historical experience of the atomic bomb and the devastating destruction of Japan. For Japan then, unlike the West, postmodern means not the nuclear sublime but postnuclear, and the issue is not whether survival is possible, but how to survive in what has always been recognized as a precarious existence." (Wolfe, 229-230) |
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The two movies of Evangelion are appropriately titled Death and Rebirth. In a society rooted in the Buddhist conceptions of life as effervescent, the bombings seemed like just another "act of God," and from these pre-modern roots, the modernist view of the atomic age was as a death which destroyed a part in order for the process of rebuilding to begin. For Evangelion, the death occurred in the absorption of mankind by the Human Instrumentality Project which created the Third Impact, but the rebirth occurred in one individual's refusal to join this release of self. Shinji Ikari, through a long process of self-definition decided that he would rather live in the world than leave it and it was from his decision that a rebirth was possible. Of course the state of reality was a precarious one being based on one 14 year old boy's force of will, but it still provided a basis for a model of what the youth of Japan can effect through their own determination. Perhaps, Evangelion could be seen as a post-postmodern admonition to the next generation on how to conduct their lives in reaction to their parents. Or perhaps not. However, as I have hopefully shown at least in small part, Shinseiki Evangelion can be perceived as a Japanese postmodern view of the post nuclear world in which destruction is elegized and death is only the precursor to rebirth. |
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Broderick, Mick. "Introduction." Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. Ed. Mick Broderick. New York: Kegan Paul International, 1996. pp. 1-19. Freiberg, Freda. "Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime." Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. Ed. Mick Broderick. New York: Kegan Paul International, 1996. pp. 91-102. Richie, Donald. "Mono no aware: Hiroshima in Film" Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. Ed. Mick Broderick. New York: Kegan Paul International, 1996. pp. 20-37 Unknown. http://www.ex.org/2.7/09-exclusive_evangelion.html Wolfe, Alan. "Suicide and the Japanese Postmodern: A Postnarrative Paradigm." Postmodernism and Japan. Ed. Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian. Duke University Press, 1989. pp.215-33. |
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