by Allan Fish
(Japan 1997 90m) DVD1/2
Found on the shores of the silver devastation
p Mituhisha Ishikawa, Tsuguhiko Kadokawa d Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki w Hideaki Anno, Shinji Haguchi, Kazuya Tsurumaki m Shiro Sagisu
VOICES BY (Japanese version) :- Megumi Ogata (Shinji Ikari), Yuko Miyamura (Asuka Langley Sohryu), Kotono Mitsuishi (Misato Katsuragi), Megumi Hayashibara (Rei Ayanami/Pen-Pen), Fumihiko Tachiki (Gendo Ikari)
Suffice it to say that when Hideaki Anno’s original ending to his magnum opus Neon Genesis Evangelion was released, it received a mixed reception. The final two episodes were the key to the business, for by the time it came to animating them the budget had run out, there were other problems behind the scenes, and what we really had was not so much an ending but a diptych of dream states. Two episodes with essences of Nietzsche and which could be said to have swallowed themselves with the same ravenous appetite with which Eva 01 ate one of the 17 angels let loose on the earth.
Immediately, there was talk of the real ending, and in fact I could easily have lumped this alternate ending in with the series as one entry, for they were in some ways meant to be. What we get instead of the mind business of the original ending is a real fight to the death against the effectively Biblical apocalypse. An ending to stop a new beginning or, as may be more accurate and appropriate, another new beginning to stop a worse one in which mankind was wiped out.
It’s impossible to talk about the plot without losing the unconverted. Gone is the typically annoying upbeat anime theme tune, along with the various karaoke renditions of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, but the use of classical music remains, and if Beethoven’s 9th has gone there’s Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’. When JS Bach wrote it I’m sure he didn’t have a battle to the death between mechas in a form of ultimate smack-down in mind, but it’s a piece that fills one with a sense of if not despair, then futility, of trying in the face of the odds (remember the use in the library in Se7en?), which makes it bizarrely poignant.
The main character remains Shinji, and he’s just as dorky as ever, while Anno gets in a nudge in the ribs of the fan-service fanatics when he has Shinji masturbate when faced with Asuka’s bare breasts lying in a coma. It’s depraved, but he’s a boy in the depths of despair and, let us not forget a horny teenager. Yet it’s unnecessary, we already know that Shinji loves Asuka and she loves him, or loves to hate him, so Anno gets it out of the way in the first five minutes much like Hitch with his cameos. And while she is pretty much in the background here, it’s Asuka who somehow stays in the mind, again appropriate for one who so craved but rarely felt centre stage. On the surface she loves herself, greeting the others for the first time in the series on an aircraft carrier in a billowing dress and allowing the wind to cause it to rise and give the others a peep, purely to put them in their place like a boot on the neck. She’s like a Germanic combination of Hermione Granger and Tracy Flick, and if that sounds scary, add in a level of what turns out to be extreme self-loathing bordering on schizophrenia – after a horrific mind rape towards the end of the series where she yells out “don’t come inside me” in a way where the double entendre is doubly and sickeningly frightening – and you end up with a girl you want to give a good spanking to but also find someone who doesn’t abandon or reject her. Putting aside the moments of adolescent puppy love, what matters is that these are two people who belong in each other’s lives, one way or another. And it’s those emotions that are the tie that binds us for Anno; better to live and love than never to have loved at all. When the characters are in despair, note how they assume the foetus position, as perfect Freudian summation of the notion of returning to the primordial state. As for the child of the Silver Devastation, that was Gallifrey’s Master, but it could just as easily be Shinji and Asuka, together but not together, facing their future across a crimson sea. She says “how disgusting”, but one feels her thinking “he couldn’t even hold me.”
Can’t believe no one’s commented on this yet. In a way, I like this even more than your NGE review – because it’s not just that you have a way of boiling down a movie to get the essence: you get the human essence. This can be a difficult movie to take and to take in, but you got right to the heart of what makes it tick. Bravo.
Yeah, I didn’t want to leave the first comment here because it’d be a little much, knowing my track record with the series, but EoE is definitely a hard nut to crack, at least as challenging as any great piece of live-action experimental cinema. One of the things I love about Anno and this series in particular is how he was able to start with something completely mainstream (giant mech action), do it so well, and then slowly but surely peel back all the layers and wind up with something straight out of the avant-garde. It’s as though he started with Star Wars and worked his way back to THX 1138 instead of the other way around, and all within the same series (to use a Western franchise-metaphor).
I like that too, and it’s something a really connect with. Grounding us in something familiar than, bit by bit, “peeling back the layers” as you say. In fact, it’s sort of how I see cinema history (well at least a portion of it, say from the 30s to the 70s) – something on my mind now as I put the finishing touches on that clip show; it’s amazing to see, bit by bit, directors experiment and push themselves and the medium in new directions.
Actually, come to think of it, this is even more true of rock history – sometimes I like to make a playlist that stretches from say ’63 to ’70 and just listen as little by little the music morphs, pushing boundaries, turning into something new and unfamliar with every track.
It seems somewhat rare, rarer than one would think, for people to do this within a single work however. I’m trying to think of other examples – and for the moment all I can think of are documentary films which do this just by surveying a time of change in history. But films which push, push, push themselves… maybe Persona to a certain extent though it certainly starts kind of weird already. Really for the most part, as you suggest with your Lucas example, it’s something you see unfolding over the course of filmmakers’ careers rather than in a single film (Bergman & Godard, particularly in his first phase, are two directors I can think of who fit this course; Fellini too in a way though as well as getting more visually spectacular, his films tend to get sillier as well).
Ok, you know what? It doesn’t fit the bill exactly (some would say not at all) but I think Lawrence of Arabia is a film which takes this sort of odyssey approach. It starts as a conventional, almost confined biopic with the somewhat stiff scenes in England. Then it gets more exotic with the Cairo sequences, but it still ordered around dialogue and exposition. Then Lawrence goes to the desert, and the film becomes more visual and almost abstract at times, but settles into a somewhat conventional “epic spectacle” sensibility with the sequences at Faisal’s camp. Only when Lawrence voyages into the desert to launch a surprise attack on the Turks does the film fully let loose and become the spectacle-as-psychodrama in which it realizes its full greatness. Though of course I think that slow-boil buildup is an essential part of the greatness as well.
And another one: Psycho (yeah, I know you’re not fond). You can almost see the sixties being born in that film – and the scenes you really don’t like with the boring sister and boyfriend are in a way the lingering reminders of an older sort of mise en scene, slowly being choked off by the moody zeitgeist of Norman.
I guess any film which depicts the descent into madness, from a subjective rather than objective viewpoint (though, really, the subjective kind of is the objective as far as this is concenrned so maybe “internal” vs. “external” would be a better dichotemy) has to follow the Evangelion pattern.
Yes, and in a sense you’re finding the mainstream box that this series can fit into, by calling it a “descent into madness from a subjective POV”. Two other shows that definitely follow this form are The Prisoner and Twin Peaks, though each has its own share of caveats (in the case of the McGoohan series, though it had a nice straightforward spy-in-a-pleasant-dystopia premise, it started its descent right from the next episode, depending upon how you ordered it; in the case of the Lynch series, Cooper’s odyssey into the Red Room was just how he decided to end the season– one wonders how much stranger it would’ve gotten had season 3 been greenlit). We can accept all of these avant-garde breaks from traditional storytelling as long as there’s an explicit break from reality of some kind, which is a little disappointing from that point of view, but at least provides a decent way in to the psychodrama, as you put it.
Now, can we find this elsewhere in modern mainstream sci-fi or fantasy? It certainly isn’t there in stuff like Lost or The Matrix, although the potential might’ve been there at some point– they’re so busy putting together their own intricately assembled alternate realities that it’s almost impossible for them to make the next leap and take one step further into real madness. Come to think of it, there’s precious little of it even in what we might call the majority of the simulated-reality subgenre of sci-fi. There’s some dream logic in Cronenberg, but it’s usually explicitly underlined in some way. It’s miles away with Inception, where they all but give you an instruction manual to understand their idea of shared dreaming. If you get into the trippy wonderland of Avatar it might be there, but really Cameron’s clinging to mainstream conventions tighter than Kate Winslet was to that door at the end of Titanic. I’d like to say there’s a wee bit of it in Revenge of the Sith, but for all the weirdness in those movies there’s still far more classic cinematic vocabulary being kept in place (but you use Lawrence of Arabia of all things for an example, so who knows, I could pull something out of my hat for that one).
I can see it thematically in Sith, and to a certain weak extent stylistically inasmuch as the style echoes the themes, but only in the same way I would see it in Godfather. With Lawrence I think there’s an interesting shift in the storytelling/filmmaking strategies throughout though of course not to the extent or in the same way as Evangelion at all (and it does not go avant-garde).
Can’t believe I forgot to mention Twin Peaks. Actually, watching NGE and EoE, Peaks was on my mind the whole time – it’s uncanny how the arcs of the shows seem to have echoed one another at least from what I’ve gathered so far, that both had tremendous fan bases, declined as the company pulled the rug out from under them, and eventually ended off in left field, and followed up with a movie that must have upset many with its darkness and stylistic weirdness. Of course NGE has a much cleaner narrative arc and doesn’t nearly descend into the horrible terrible badness of second half of Season 2 of Twin Peaks. Not exactly analogous when all’s said and done but (and again, this is just what I’ve gathered mostly from you & Allan’s pieces) some interesting similarities.
The “descent into madness” can be a double-edged sword, because yes on the one hand it “explains” everything too neatly and yet really it depends how one plays it off. After all, even if one doesn’t explicitly call it a “descent into madness” isn’t it always just that (madness being understood as whatever is not rationality, sanity – even deeper spirituality could be construed as madness in a sense)? And even if one DOES ground the craziness in that explanation, it need not change its effectiveness, because the very crux of madness is that it transcends labels like “madness” (though to a certain extent, unless the viewer is mad, “knowing” that what we’re seeing is representing madness may already ground us too much in sanity to appreciate the crazy without knowing it’s crazy). So again it’s all in how it’s handled. I think Evangelion does it pretty well.
Aha, I have it – the film that I was thinking of in the back of my head but couldn’t place when discussing this sort of stylistic arc into irrationality/descent into madness: Out 1.
One thing that SW as a whole has going for it over “The Godfather” (good call on the connection, though– it may be obvious, but each time I watch ROTS again, it strikes me more and more as a feature-length baptism montage) is the way in which sci-fi/fantasy allows you to indulge in a great deal of expressionist cinematography and visual design as a part of world-building, something that’s often taken for granted, and something that Anno and his team does like gangbusters throughout NGE. Anno obviously goes a lot further than Lucas or any other fantasist filmmaker typically dares, but that’s an allowance that anime (and animation in general) has. Because of how it includes the supernatural over time, Twin Peaks falls into this category too, and can go a lot further (as far as network standards let it) with the more mature, realism-grounded subject matter. It’s easier to see the madness contextualize the experimental when the real-world is there as an anchor, of sorts.
Also, I need to do another “40 characters” list with Asuka and Scratch from The Devil and Daniel Webster on it, among others. She’s maddening, but she is pretty unforgettable.