recurring visual imagery: crossed arms + sidelong glance
evangelion: 2.22 you can (not) advance, dir. hideaki anno (2009)
evangelion: 3.33 you can (not) redo, dir. hideaki anno (2012)
this christmas, have a badly rendered video of misato katsuragi belting the chorus to “jingle bells” in her awful, yet strangely endearing singing voice
from the latest official eva spinoff: ritsuko surreptitiously sliding gendo and fuyutsuki the tab as the rest of NERV staff quietly leave the bar scans fantastically like a jerry gag from an episode of parks and rec
Remember this jarring cut? This is such a bizarre, unnatural perspective to emphasize what looks on its face so painfully benign: Ritsuko leaving a bar. I always wondered if the ice was supposed to resemble floating icebergs; it was only until someone else confessed to having the same thought that I realized that this frame may hope to emphasize more than Ritsuko’s absence. Ritsuko is leaving Misato alone with Kaji, a man who reminds Misato of her father. Their resemblance invokes the terrifying source of trauma Misato must constantly revisit throughout the series. The source of which traces its roots to Antarctica.
I always dismissed this cut as accidental, and unfortunate. Now, I’m not so sure.
So has nobody noticed that Misato’s ringtone in the Rebuild is the roar of King Ghidorah?
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.
Some insight into the guns used in Evangelion and the obscene amount of detail that goes into them.
Gendo carries a CZ-75 pistol. As its name implies, this is an old gun, designed in 1975 under a secret patent. Currently, this the most popular handgun in the Czech Republic, where it was first designed.
Misato carries a Heckler & Koch USP, a personal handgun distinguished from the standard issue Glock 17s all NERV personnel carry. The H&K is a German gun, implying that she’d obtained it during her military stay in Germany.
Ritsuko carries an R-92 revolver, an obscure conceal carry originally intended for Soviet security in the 1990s. It’s not widely distributed, and has been put into disuse after the advent of the Udar revolver, so it’s uncertain as to how Ritsuko acquired such a rare gun in the first place.
In the show, Kaji’s gun is never actually revealed even though he is shown adjusting it in Episode 15. In Rebuild, Kaji pulls out a Heckler & Koch USP at an unknown assailant. Because Eva is so painstakingly detail-oriented and because of Kaji’s uncharacteristic show of fury, this leads many Japanese fans to speculate that this H&K is actually Misato’s gun that Kaji is using temporarily for whatever reason.
animation errors in evangelion. there are probably more, but these are the ones that stuck out to me.
in the first scene, the dss choker around shinji’s neck disappears for a split frame before mark .09 cannonades the wunder’s interrogation room.
in the second scene, misato greets shinji wearing gold dangle earrings before they are replaced by her standard white pearls upon entering nerv hq.
attentive viewers might have noticed this, but ritsuko and kaji’s congratulations! do not feature cloud backgrounds, setting them at odds with the rest of the cast.
end of evangelion begins with a nameless NERV officer standing guard, wearing a beret that resembles misato katsuragi’s - since no other character has worn this hat it’s safe to say the semblance isn’t mere coincidence. a JSSDF soldier stabs the officer in the back just minutes before misato is shot in the back by another member of the JSSDF. the man collapses in his own pool of blood. so does mudstone. both the man and other beret-wearing officers are then blown to shreds in a manner evocative of misato’s horrific and untimely death.
belladonna of sadness, dir. eiichi yamamoto (1973)
neon genesis evangelion, dir. hideaki anno (1995)
these are all gonna be half-baked, illegible, and probably already better said by someone else thoughts on boyhood
i’m revisiting an old response to a question i wrote about girl bodies/boy traumas as i rewatch eva and i’m thinking particularly about the circumstances of the scenes in which shinji was subject to witness rei’s pain. to thread into that thought, in this rewatch i’m noticing so many more instances i didn’t care to give attention to before about shinji’s contortion into the budding violences of boyhood. in that particular scene, gendo orchestrates a puppet show of shame and coercion with shinji as the subject and rei as the object, and that dynamic has been analyzed to death already, in eva specifically and gender theories more widely.
there seems to me to be still such a tragedy in that, though. eva, over and over, makes critical distinctions between boyhood/girlhood and manhood/womanhood. we’re made to witness shinji programmed into enacting the incursions of boyhood in the name of man — as we’re made to accept how asuka and rei are rendered the recipients of both his boy pleasure and his boy pain (there’s a sharp splinter too with this, asuka becoming shinji’s object of masturbation and rei his object of pain, but they’re tangled in with each other). there are particular moments where he engages with some kind of reflexivity and attempts to refuse to become sustained by these violences while he’s already composed by them. i’m thinking about the way he looks at a bandaged rei upon their first meeting when he holds her and finds his hands covered in her blood, and he looks down at his palms with horror. “this could be you” (boy)/”this is already you” (boy on track to manhood). what misato said: “the robot’s as rude as the man who built it!”
there’s shit that gets passed down spanning trauma to power to love, and often a messy conglomeration of all three and more, and aside from the comfort that delineating an easy ‘perpetrator’ and ‘perpetrated’ might offer, misato might remind us that responsibility must be taken regardless. whatever shit falls on us, whoever put it there, must be acknowledged and carried — not responsibility for responsibility’s sake, not to get our individual selves to an unquestioned somewhere better, but for accountability to those we love (and those we don’t). when misato and ritsuko witness how the violences of hypermodern manhood function, misato observes they occur not through cold blood but through bureaucracy and administration, the “evasion of responsibility” (or the funnier translation: “hot potato situation”), which also aligns with how the neoliberal state has been analyzed to function.
what has become so compelling about eva to me is how it simultaneously amplifies the grotesque pain of rigid and familiar relationship architectures (parent-child, husband-wife, mentor-mentee) while refusing to adjudicate and punish and banish and repress. everybody goes to hell, everybody goes to heaven. we’re made to learn the angels aren’t (only) enemies but kin. but there is also the theme of cyclic reproduction from/of trauma, not even only in an honestly tired freudian way, also in a transformative way. if there aren’t thoughtful, compassionate, sustained efforts to transform relationships and how we connect with each other (negotiating the hedgehog’s dilemma), we’re doomed to continue replicating harm even if we blow the fucking world up and start what we might think to be anew (rebuild). i think some of the most crucial moments in eva are those that can signal to us that we do have the capacity to cultivate those connections and flourish with each other, with all the pain and difficulty that will entail (congratulations!).
as i’m anticipating the end, i actually wonder what could’ve happened if yui via unit-01 hadn’t actually bit gendo’s head off