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.
Kaworu’s ultimate betrayal is not that he is an angel so much as he eventually does force Shinji to finally reckon with his own existential terror. “Life and death are of equal value to me,” he says to Shinji, which is horrifying to him because it is an explicit statement invoking the concept of existential absurdity. “Dying of your own will. That is the one and only absolute freedom there is.”
Remember this essay I posted? After so many episodes existing as the anxious dreamer, I like to look at Episode 24 as Shinji finally staring into the abyss of Nothingness, becoming dizzy from the anxiety produced, and beginning to faint. In doing so, he grasps at finitude – of which death is the ultimate – and it is only in doing this, in his own individual recreation of The Fall, that he will finally be able to comprehend true infinity: the possibility that he can mean something in spite of his absurdity.
And what is the ultimate anxiety? That we are the gods who shit, vessels containing the inherent paradox of finite and infinite, trapped in decay yet capable of comprehending what it all means (or doesn’t):
Episode 25 begins with Shinji interrogating himself, consumed with the guilt he must finally process, head in his hands. Why did I kill? Why did I kill? Why did I kill?
Frustrated and ever looking to deny his own agency, he screams that he had no choice (did he?), that Kaworu was an ANGEL and thus the enemy, and so had to be eliminated.
Apologies for the crummy subtitles. But there it is, the paradox, in writing. Kaworu was an angel, but he was HUMAN AS WELL.
The remainder of the series, as well as EoE, are Shinji’s attempts at coming to terms with the terror of this incongruity as well as the possibilities granted by recognizing the power of his own subjective will.
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.
it’s not even the least bit surprising that NERV has data on the pilots apoptosis pattern, or literally the mechanism by which their cells are programmed to die
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
I’ve never seen a protagonist - male or female - so effortlessly hide their ugly, unrepentant ego behind a veneer of warm compassion. Misato hits children, she hits wounded friends, she hits herself. My favorite Misato scene is when she just barely restrains herself from striking Shinji across the face, and slaps herself in redirected aggression. That’s her prerogative: redirected, impotent aggression, against the Angels and against herself.
Misato’s a walking advertisement of her own desperation, which probably nets her more sympathy than she otherwise might deserve. Her violence aggrandizes her, but behind the display is total disempowerment. She tries to win back the control she lost during her childhood and it gets her nowhere. Her authority is skin deep.
