August 3, 2016 by wondersinthedark
Bob Clark
Hideaki Anno’s “Neon Genesis Evangelion” is one of the true masterpieces of anime and science fiction as a whole, so it’s little wonder it popped up on the Wonders in the Dark Sci Fi countdown. But what does it have to do with Tony Kushner’s landmark “Angels in America”? I talk about this and a number of other things with fellow Wonders contributor Joel Bocko on the latest CinemaVille
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"Juliano vividly evokes this apparent paradise on earth, even as he touchingly reminds us how fleeting it is and how hard a fall from grace can be" 
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Looking for a movie?
Click on names for archives
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Wonders in the Dark is a blog dedicated to the arts, especially film, theatre and music. An open forum is highly encouraged, as the site proctors are usually ready and able to engage with ongoing conversation.
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Great discussion going on here! Haven’t seen the film unfortunately.
Nice hearing Joel as part of this podcast equation! Very fine interplay and cinematically auspicious discussion strands. I am sorry to say that I haven’t watched this yet. Allan has high praise for it but doubts I will warm to it. š Well I’ll get around to it, and have this awesome and informed discussion, one where Bob seems to play a dintictly alpha role throughout!
From Joel’s I LOST IT AT THE MOVIES:
http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2015/12/neon-genesis-evangelion-complete.html
Iād never been totally clear on where to start with the Neon Genesis Evangelion universe, what with it spread out over manga, films and TV, so I surmised that the original TV show was the point to start especially within the idea that I felt the story would bring a clear enough scope and exposition that I didnāt need all the ancillary materials. What I liked was the completeness of it; the mix of a sweeping battle story with so many clear single character arcs. Itās impressive from a philosophical standpoint, and as a collage of Eastern and Western themes/concerns (itās like so much Japanese art of that eraāthink Haruki Murakamiāthat is a comfortable speaking in Japanese tradition as it is American low art).
I liked the discussion on the potentially offensive material; Bobās points on it being central to the plot so to remove it would be to make it slight more incomprehensible and Joelās comment on the more suggestive nature of it are both true. Iād sort of love to return to the series as a whole, as I completed it about three years ago at this point and watched it scattershot over about 8 months. A complete run through in, say, a month with no other visual distractions (other movies, TV, etc) would be beneficial as would just the refresh nature of it (in any film buffs world now is a constant cycle of TV binges that makes series more readily fade from memory).
Now, I donāt necessarily see it as overly comparable with Angels in America, but Iāve long known that to be a Bob favorite so I understand the impulse to connect loves where others wouldnāt. Itās interest in the post- and much as the pre- part of the apocalypse always had my mind returning to films like Glen and Randa (1971) and A Boy and His Dog (1975). Films imbued with a real emotional melodrama within an otherwise cold milieu of life after the end of times, only missing the more epic scope a series run time could afford. Glen and Randa features a cheap, pre-digital aesthetic where fakeness nearly perfectly articulates a nuclear soaked soil (for example; https://i.ytimg.com/vi/62v97gqRauM/maxresdefault.jpg or http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2UzKvh0AHDo/Ug-aEiBrQ3I/AAAAAAAAFks/oqSIIEM9HyU/s1600/glenranda03.JPG), another is the obscure, Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, a film thankfully made available viaās Eclipseās Shochiku Horror set, but since it came from that famous studio, I wouldnāt doubt that Anno was aware of its allure before.
I will sayā¦ itās crazy that Bob wants a film negative of an already existing anima TV show more than a complete cut of Greed. LOL. Canāt win āem all!
This is just a tremendous comment!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Angels– Well, the Kushner play and the Anno anime both deal with… uh… angels. They’re wildly different, but that’s what makes them so interesting. And sure, I could think of other angel-centric stories to mention here. But they don’t have anniversaries this year, so fuck them (that means you, Milton, ya loser).
And yeah. I like Episode 16 that much. I’d even have had a hard time choosing between a perfect master of that and the mostly-complete Metropolis from about ten years back. If Episode 16 included gratuitous fanservice nudity, I’d gladly set fire to the Library of Congress to get it out. I’m totally in sync here.
Yeah, I mean I’m fine with your connections; as I said the beauty of loving anything is the tangential connections fans make more firm. Like, for example, I always pair the Refused doc, Refused are Fucking Dead with Ray’s In A Lonely Place because they seem to be working within the same philosophical universe. That’s the connection you run with that I find more interesting and compelling than saying, ‘the both deal with angels’. We’d probably all laugh if you added Angels in the Outfield, Wings of Desire, and 1966’s Barbara Steele vehicle An Angel for Satan into the mix as these three pictures couldn’t be more different, but all have angels featuring heavy in the plot.
When I revisitāwhich I think is assured at this pointāI’ll remember that episode 16 is your favorite. I can’t pretend to act like I remember it vividly. In fact, your discussion on helped bring it back into my memory, which is again, a statement more on consumption in the subsequent years than anything about quality (which the series clearly has).
The Wenders film would be a curious one to tie into if I were so inclined. It would be more or less easy with Kushner’s play, the second part of which is named Perestroika and shares the concerns of what the world becomes as time marches forth and keeps changing things. The cold war trappings are inevitable, and though the HBO series cuts the Worlds Oldest Bolshevick portion it isn’t too much of a stretch. Wenders even did a part 2, and the first film has a great portion where he eleboates on the mechanics of angels themselves, evolving in man’s mythologies from the caves and onward. Very interesting.
Eva, though? No idea. It’d be easier to connect that to Until, probably (Wenders channeled his own apocalypticism outside of the angelic– religious metaphors were more a local than global symbol for him it would seem). Coincidentally there is a really neat episode of the Ghost in the Shell series Stand Alone Complex that is a great big love letter to Wings of Desire. No shared crew, but neat.
Episode 16– one thing that interests me about the series is the constant crisis nature of the narrative makes it so you can easily remember some episodes more than others as it goes on. Like Joel said, if yiu have to save the world every week over and over again, saving the world this time makes little difference if you botch it up next time. It becomes a narrative about pressure, stress and fatigue inherent in siege mentality. Which is to say, you could lift 16 or other individual episodes from the middle stretch and not affect the overall story too much. That doesn’t weaken the story for me, though, it only makes each of those individual episodes shine even more as rare gems.