i’ve mentioned this a little before too — while i’m rewatching this time around, i keep noting times where women and girls respond to moments of crisis and decide to assume responsibility. a few episodes in particular i just rewatched, 7 through 9, repeat this pattern pretty strongly.
there’s the corporate dinner to showcase the launch of jet alone, where we watch ritsuko press the company executive about the wide-reaching dangers of nuclear power, as well as assert her own knowledge and come up against public humiliation. later on, during the display of jet alone taking its first steps, we watch as the robot glitches. i’m gonna bring in my favorite analysis of glitch here: “a singular dysfunctional event that allows insight beyond the customary, omnipresent and alien computer aesthetics.” olga goriunova and alexei shulgin describe the glitch as an event — “a mess that is a moment“ — that users receive as unexpected, that may or may not come from a program error.
for jet alone, the program runs just as expected, exactly as told, but quickly its power begins to expand further that of the executive as well as any staffman there. though control of the program extends beyond the control of any personnel present, the robot runs exactly as it should be. like ritsuko reports after observing from the sidelines what we later learn is an orchestrated crisis unfold, “everything was done according to the plan.” and like a glitch does, the moment brings forth the structure of the systems from which it came. we view a montage of phone calls of men deferring responsibility, requiring approval — bureaucracy functioning at its finest as a procedural structure that splinters accountability and sanctions death.
we watch misato get fed up and take on the responsibility of shutting down the robot herself, and i read her stepping up as responding to the moral failure of the bureaucratic process by acting on what she describes as a moral imperative. she tells shinji, “i’ve got to give it my best shot, you know? my conscience won’t let me do otherwise.“
in asuka’s debut, we watch men assert dominance not through administrative processes, but through claiming sovereignty over the sea. when misato requests access to a power socket on deck, the captain states, “we’re in charge of anything on the sea. follow orders without question.“ even in a situation of almost certain death for both others and himself, the captain refuses to hand authority to misato and, by extension, nerv. misato says it best: “who gives a damn about your procedures?! this is an emergency!” here, asuka comes in and decides to take the opportunity to make her debut even grander, disregarding any potential pushback from the captain or even misato. here, we watch a girl decide to bypass any official authorities and clearance and maximize the moment as hers.
going back to the morning of the corporate showcase, we return to misato’s apartment to shinji washing dishes, then turn his head timidly and ask misato if she’s really gonna make his parent-teacher conference. she replies, “of course!” followed by, “don’t worry about that. it’s my responsibility.” he blinks back — “responsibility?”
in this moment, i took him as both receiving misato’s sense of responsibility as negating any care for him and, like many times in the series, grappling with where he fits in matrices of accountability to others, misogyny, and boyhood. it turns out, his training into manhood is running successfully too. in response to asuka voicing frustration about getting ordered to share her first battle in japan with shinji, shinji replies in what i heard as a pretty mellow and chipper tone: “that’s okay! that’s just procedures. you know!” in line with ongoing processes of inducting and training shinji into manhood throughout the series, the approaches he takes in interacting with others morphs to both contort and fit into forces of manhood that in turn shape him. though not (yet) the condescension and reverence for bureaucracy of the company executive, nor (yet) the blunt demands of the fleet captain, shinji, who always does as he’s ordered, attempts to placate a determined asuka, severing possibilities for her intervention by reminding her of and therefore upholding the limitations of their world. that’s just procedure (which is actually, really, misato’s, a person’s decision, as with any procedure and bureaucratic process)!
during this rewatch, i’ve noticed moments where i consider how women and girls respond to the violences of manhood, authority, and administrative forms of governance. i assume in evangelion and in the world around me a constant state of emergency in which accountability becomes dispersed, and women and girls bear the consequences. i take that note as a push to all together carry our responsibilities — to ourselves and each other.
The child, in NGE, is positioned towards the border of a kind of humanity, which allows its intimacy with its mecha, a quasi-human materialization of his or her mother’s soul. If we conjure the stereotypical figure attached to what Sylvia Winter has called “monohumanist Man,” we see quickly that he is a tall, muscular, European man, not unlike that depicted in Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Specifying this generality further, we envision his full control of language, bodily ability and a divide between self-and-other. Sexualized and slimmed out, as in many anime depicting the young teenage age group, NGE’s children are visually marked as other to this imagery, a point that is dramatized whenever we see one of the characters next to one of the humanoid robots. In dominant ideology, the child is positioned on the way towards this position, but not yet with full access to its promises.
In Lacan’s psychoanalysis, the child does not fully suffer the “human condition,” insofar as he has not fully fallen into language, nor fully coordinated his body in aggressive relation to the mirror’s image and the other. Positioned on the road to the human but not yet at its high peak, the child also stands near the border of a distinction between bios and zoe, the Greek terms for life Giorgio Agamben developed as the qualified life of the citizen on one hand, and the natural life and life processes categorized as outside of political on the other. Weaponized in service of political maneuvers, yet with no ability to advocate for themselves politically, children in NGE contrast Agamben’s figure of the homo sacer, or the man who can be killed by anyone but not sacrificed. In their paradoxically protected status, Shinji and Asuka cannot necessarily be killed by anyone, and are irreplaceable, but they are positioned as sacrificial in the broader political machinations of Gendo, NERV and Seele; Rei similarly cannot be killed by anyone, but her life is produced in the space of the show as reproducible and fungible, and thus not her life at all. As numerous moments in the show demonstrate, because of her life’s artificiality, she is also not ideally suited to operate the EVAs, in a sense because she shares too much in common with them, on the level of existence. This fact is additionally what produces the final failure of the adult-driven, world-ending project. In thinking about the shows discontinuous borrowing from Christian mythology, then, Asuka and Shinji are conceived of as chosen forms of life, not unlike agnus dei, Christ-like figures or Lambs of God. While Asuka’s body cannot fulfill this holy program due to a mental breakdown and subsequent battle defeat (though she is pierced with the Lance of Longinus, like Jesus…), Shinji’s body and the EVA he operates ultimately do come to the precipice of this sacrificial glorification, where he are elevated above the earth on a glowing crucifix. (The swift disjuncture between Asuka and Shinji’s storylines and mental states towards the end of the TV series ultimately comes down to gender, as yet another factor that determines the child’s proximity to or distance from capital-m Man).
In other words, NERV’s project requires human blood, but of a specific kind. The notion of the cyborg might also be said to need the same, since the hybridity on which it rests must first conceive as its constituent parts as fundamentally distinct prior to their glorified combination. This is intimated by the genesis of the Eva’s themselves, which are driven by “engines” containing the souls of the pilots mothers, extracted once their bodies disintegrate into the fluid called LCL. (As exemplified in the infamous scene where Unit-01, motored by Shinji’s mother’s soul, goes berserk, mothers are also depicted as short of the status of Man). While it’s hard to call NGE a critique of anything, it’s clear that its position on the possibility of a post-human or cyborg future is ambivalent at best. The result of the attempt, driven by adults, is continual death, precarity and, ultimately, desolation. The show seems to meditate on how children fare in actually any imagination of the future, and the ways in which they are violently instrumentalized to bring about such futurity.
whenever people pit one eva character against another, call one a villain to name another the victim, blame one to justify the other, cheer as their favored one lunges to strangle his supposed abuser (you know what i’m talking about), i have to wonder if they skipped through this entire scene:
REI: You never understood anything. SHINJI: I thought this was supposed to be a world without pain and uncertainty. REI: That’s because you thought everyone else felt the same as you do. SHINJI: You betrayed me! You betrayed my feelings! REI: You misunderstood from the very beginning. You just believed what you wanted to believe.
look, anno is often vague and ambiguous but not in this case. it’s all there written out for you.
see, shinji has lived in a closed world even before the instrumentality lets him turn that into a physical reality. his is a world where only his views and his feelings are valid, with others reduced to paper cutouts, not allowed to be as complex, as flawed, as unsure, as hurt as he is. only when forced by the dissolution of the barriers between souls does he see that others are just as real, and even then he rages against the revelation and tries to exonerate himself: “how can I ever understand you if you won’t say anything? you never talk to me, but you expect me to understand you! that’s impossible!”
to which rei replies: “did you even try, ikari?” so, are you trying?
eva isn’t the kind of show where you can conveniently place yourself in the protagonist’s shoes and have the moral of the story fed to you in predigested form. shinji is an unreliable narrator at best, and so are all the other characters. to varying degrees, they all failed to understand, they all believed only what they wanted to believe, and that’s precisely the point. in carl jung’s words: “people will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.” but face their own souls they must once instrumentality begins. suddenly, the person next to you is as real to you as you are to yourself, their suffering no longer something you can turn away from, and that’s frightening, isn’t it? because suddenly the villains become the victim, the victim becomes the villain. suddenly you’re confronted with the reality that your interpretation of your own experiences could be entirely wrong (cue shinji’s “i thought this was supposed to be a world without pain and uncertainty”)
so the next time you watch eva, question each character’s intention, especially your favorite ones, the ones you identify with. don’t let them get away with believing they’re right. don’t allow them the luxury of always saying the truth about themselves or others. don’t allow them, and yourself, the luxury of writing off the unpleasant parts. don’t deceive yourself. question everything. after all, to give you the second part of jung’s comment: “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
that, imo, is the greatest thing that eva has made me do.
he did! i think it’s important to note that the original anne of green gables is widely considered to be the most adapted story of all time, influencing creators from at least 20 countries since the novel’s release 109 years ago.
Sadly, we can’t coexist…even though we are fundamentally the same creatures.
According to one of the video games (the one that, according to Anno, they used to cover backstory and other stuff that didn’t fit into even the infodump ending movies), this part of what Kaji dug up isn’t true.
Just more SEELE lies (what they fed to the rank and file involved in setting off Second Impact?) so they could get away with their instrumentality plan, and Kaworu and Rei would have known that & remembered their agreement that the planet would be handed over to Lilith and her children if it weren’t for the fact S2 engines damage memory (deliberately).
Meaning that after Yui flew away from the devastated Earth in an Eva, as a god, playing with her new power is going to mindwipe her. Poetic justice FTW.
Still, some lingering sense that he’d agreed that the Lilim had the right to Earth, even though this was supposed to be his planet, might have been another reason Kaworu refused to wipe us out and take it for himself (besides the fact that it’s obvious to any decent person that the genocide of billions to make way for another race, superior or not, is NOT OKAY).
Say that someone tells you that you’re Case Zero of a zombie virus. You might not want to eat brains now, but before it’s going to destroy your brains and personality and what’s left will go out and bite people and it’s going to be even worse than World War Z: Third Impact = all humans die instantly.
Either way, you’re dead. The only question is whether or not you want to die as yourself, and save the world in the process, or be replaced by a shambling killer, a mockery of what you used to be.
some things to keep in mind about nge’s very own the man, the myth, the legend, spending time on volume 7, stage 43 of the manga ‘verse. super rough, but i’m enjoying thinking about him more, even if just in sketches. i mean, come on, just look at him, that sweet baby k:
Part 1: “Let Me Appeal To Your Intellect”
this post is meant to suggest that manga vol. 7, no. 43 tells us all we need to know about what ryoji thinks about himself and his relationships, and therefore his own motivations; he explains this quite literally to shinji in the chapter, and it’s an incredibly useful backstory (courtesy of sadamoto) for this reason, but let’s backtrack to figure out why all the things he doesn’t say matter even more
the 1967 version, specifically! for those who don’t know, king ghidorah is godzilla’s arch nemesis - a three headed, lightning wielding dragon who was, interestingly enough, not featured in anno’s own shin godzilla.
Kotani Mari has related this act of cannibalism on Shinji-EVA’s part to the explosion of the radically feminine, that is, to what Alice Jardine calls ‘gynesis’. Kotani describes the scene this way:
The moment electric technology becomes unavailable (his power supply cords have been cut), Shinji strongly hopes for a miracle. Thus, with the ultimate aim to defeat the enemy, Shinji very naturally but miraculously comes to feminize himself. This sequence unveils Shinji’s epiphany. The more strongly he desires a miraculous breakthrough, the more deconstructive his own sexuality becomes. Hence the abrupt explosion of fearful femininity out of Shinji’s own male subjectivity.
Despite the hyper-masculine outlines of the EVA suit and the fact that the pilot of 01 is a boy, over the course of the series in scenes such as this one the Shinji-EVA cyborg amalgam is is decisively gendered feminine: the uncontrollable, insufficiently bounded body/subjectivity that enlightened, rational modernity has sought to repress. And yet, it is in precisely these same scenes that the Shinji-EVA cyborg through some kind of hysterical crisis to overcome the limits of technology; the power cord and backup battery; to defeat the attacking angel.
This narrative, therefore, employs both the male terror of being radically feminized through the excessive intimacy implied by the interpenetration and inter-corporation of the cyborg subject and the paradoxical hope that the one power that can finally oppose the various forces of evil is precisely the eruption of the abject femininity, permeability/penetrability; that is repressed in techno-patriarchal society. That powerful eruption can only occur, however, when the interconnection of the various cyborg elements is at its maximum. In the nineteenth episode Shinji’s synchronization rate with the suit is an inconceivable 400%, indicating that, despite the terror it provokes, the only hope for humankind is to move toward increased intimacy; permeability/penetrability; with the mechanical other.
Many thanks to milenashakujo for linking me to this. If you enjoy Donna Haraway, cyborgia, psychoanalysis, and Japanese science fiction, you will love this read.
this is actually so wild to me because of the violence against women used in all three of these movies, with the body of the mother as the vessel for pain and suffering
+ aronofsky’s plagiarism is well established. he’s a hack who purchased the rights to satoshi kon’s perfect blue to steal wholesale scenes for black swan and requiem of a dream without fear of suit. knowing him it’s likely he turned to eoe for inspiration, and knowing anno he likely borrowed from karel thole likewise
