EVA CINEMATOGRAPHY - MISATO UNDER PRESSURE
Although she doesn’t easily speak her true feelings, I loved the manner by which Misato hid the loneliness and darkness deep within her heart. After the TV series ended, I listened to Cruel Angel’s Thesis again and was struck by the lyric “Although I cannot become a goddess, I will live on.” Surely this must be the voice of Misato’s heart. - Kotono Mitsuishi (x)
ILLOGICAL DEVICE/ILLEGIBLE COMMAND: a mix for katsuragi misato. stream.
concrete wall – dog in the snow // peach, plum, pear (joanna newsom cover) – femfemfem // sparks – the dø // she’s spoken for – you say party! // love in the dark – yacht // stalemate – io echo // bad believer – st. vincent // running behind – holychild // logic of colour – wye oak // sky is black – h1987
Misato and Shinji are extremely afraid of being hurt. They both are unsuitable–lacking the positive attitude for what people call heroes. But in any case, Misato and Shinji are the heroes of this stories. - Hideaki Anno
his scene is loaded. there’s a whole constellation of themes that are finally being realized here, as shinji and misato – the two protagonists of NGE – share one of their more subtly powerful exchanges before everything goes to proverbial shit. this is the last ‘real’ moment of the show; come episode 25 and the audience is catapulted right into the throes of instrumentality.
a lot of people don’t know why misato says what she says, and what it actually means - for her, for shinji, and for kaworu (and others!). here’s my attempt at teasing some of that out.
discussions of self-alienating love, suicidal idealization, becker, feuerbach, and various other revelations below.
I don’t see a lot of people talking about this scene. Maybe it’s the tendency to refer to Misato as The Mama Bear™ over the Eva kids, conveniently failing to mention that by Eva kids, we really mean Shinji Ikari. Asuka never gets Mama Bear treatment from Misato, and this scene is in many ways emblematic of the real dynamic between the two: which is marked by a whole lot of indifference, neglect, and a latent sense of casual disdain – mostly on Misato’s end. Granted, Misato never actually comes out and says “Asuka, I care about Shinji a lot more than I care about you,” but after watching this scene I don’t think she even needs to.
Here’s Asuka having a very thinly-veiled, very public, very loud breakdown in Misato’s own washroom, complete with a heated display of water-basin flinging. The most Misato does is, well, nothing, if you disregard the glaring – which is exactly the point. Misato’s recent share of shitty life experiences aside, it doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to figure that she would’ve made an effort to reach out to Shinji if he were in Asuka’s place, just as she did in Episode 23, propelled by little more than a hunch that Shinji would be troubled after Rei II’s death.
Once you peel away all the pleasant pretenses and platitudes behind a lot of their initial conversations, this scene makes a lot of sense. Asuka has always framed Misato as both a rival and an exemplary in all its counter-intuitive glory. For Misato, Shinji’s been the pilot whom she feels most comfortable flexing her quasi-maternal muscles, precisely because Shinji is a boy, and Misato thinks she knows exactly what he needs from her, by virtue of Misato being a woman. Asuka is the problem, the conundrum, the puzzle Misato never really bothers to work through, up until the very end.
We can even see shades of this dynamic play out in Evangelion 3.0 (which is more or less an answer to Episodes 22-24 in NGE), where it looks like Asuka has now graduated to overt dislike of Q!Misato and her modus operandi (fuck your Eva, the mission is your top priority… you get the point.)
As promised, I am going to try to answer anon’s message regarding my thoughts on the “adult trio” in NGE (meaning Misato, Ritsuko, and Kaji). I struggled with any kind of systematic analysis until I included Gendo in the equation, and I think it’s because his relationship with Ritsuko functions as a symbolic complement to Misato’s relationship with Kaji.
Thinking about it last night made me realize how much I should be delving into Lacan’s concept of desire, which I have only read about in summary thus far and still kind of makes my head spin. But, as usual, the consolidated existentialist-psychoanalytic framework that Ernest Becker develops from Otto Rank suffices just fine. At least for starters.
I could have typed that up to look nice but screw it, you get my scrappy handwriting/my oversimplified layout of Becker’s existential paradox as clumsily navigated by our characters.
Remember that according to Becker, the foundations of human behavior lie in the terror produced by this paradox, and the frantic attempts to ensure ultimate and transcendent meaning in the face of bodily death. If we use the paradox as a lens, it becomes obvious that both Misato and Ritsuko are grappling with this terror in complementary ways, and that the objects of desire upon which they enact their terror (Kaji and Gendo, respectively) are symbolically antipodal.
I think it’s pretty obvious why I feel Gendo symbolizes death denial, or a refusal to be confined to the limits of the human body. His entire M.O. basically involves becoming god, and defying death in order to reunite with Yui. Why Kaji is representative of death acceptance (or perhaps even resignation) is less immediately clear, especially since we know so little about him, but the concept coalesces more on examination. There is not a single character in the series who is more prepared to accept their inevitable fate. Kaji appears to have a good idea of both how and when he is going to die, and when he does, greets it with equanimity. Kaji’s humorous nature seems a hint at the inherent absurdity of the paradox, or the “cruel joke” that it is to be the “God who shits” (as Becker puts it). Yet his serious side, as evidenced by conversations with both Misato and Shinji, suggests a grace, wisdom, and self-awareness that is not shared by anyone else in NGE.
Misato runs from Kaji because he reminds her of her father, and coming to terms with this would mean accepting that she does not have the sole power to design her own symbolic meaning. It is the failure of the personal causa sui to achieve its primary childhood goal — the defiance of the imparted causa sui of the parent — and is thus a form of death confrontation: the death of the “self-generated self.” She seeks refuge in the body component of the paradox while stripping away the potential for her relationships to carry more profound symbolic weight. To confront her true desires, after all, would mean facing up to death anxiety. She must confine whatever meaning she seeks to areas that do not remind her of her own powerlessness. Probably helps to compensate by investing most of your worth into the identity of Skilled Military Captain.
Ritsuko, by contrast, cannot conceive of the body as a refuge (see also: her bafflement at Misato’s sexuality) and clearly desires a more meaningful relationship with Gendo than one confined to sex. Of course, Gendo is incapable of providing Ritsuko with any kind of emotional validation, and she plunges into suicidal despair. Unlike Misato, who copes with existential powerlessness with denial, Ritsuko attempts to transfer power — the power to designate ultimate meaning — into the wrong party: another human being who is as doomed to die as she is. Gendo may want to defy death, but he cannot; ironically, he pursues transcendence the same way she does, which is the misguided investment of ultimate power into a vessel that cannot hold it:
After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption — nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know that our creation has not been in vain. We turn to the love partner for the experience of the heroic, for perfect validation; we expect them to “make us good” through love. Needless to say, human partners can’t do this. The lover does not dispense cosmic heroism; he cannot give absolution in his own name. The reason is that as a finite being he too is doomed, and we read that doom in his own fallibilities, in his very deterioration. Redemption can only come from outside the individual, from beyond, from our conceptualization of the ultimate source of things, the perfection of creation.
(From The Denial of Death, p. 167.)
Neon Genesis Evangelion Gifset Series: ADULTHOOD
“When you are an adult… then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, "The children are the hope of the future.” And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. […] Adults are the death of hope.” [x]
