Akira [Thoughts]

As I have said on the 'about' page, one of the functions I intended for this blog to fulfil was to be a place for me to record my thoughts on new cyberpunk and postmodern SF works as I watched/read them. Unfortunately my first few attempts at posts mutated into long thematically concerned essays, and I sort of forgot that I could write a sub-2000 word post. In an effort to correct this, my next few posts will be short[er] form treatments of some of the books and films I have recently enjoyed, lest I forget what it is that piqued my interest in them. First up is Akira, still fresh in my mind after being watched last night. Note: the reader will have to forgive the knee-jerk reaction and relative lack of critical substantiation in these posts - the aim after all is for me to record my own honest and often ill-informed opinion. 

Akira. Probably a good ten years since I first heard of the behemoth of anime, the one that brought the east to the west and jump-started the whole craze that as a young teenager I eventually became a part of. Criminally, though, despite me (and every other teen) going through the obligatory ‘anime phase’ at school, I never got around to watching Akira. In a way I’m glad. I don’t think my teenage mind would’ve fully appreciated Akira. I don’t think my adult mind fully appreciates it, for that matter; one viewing barely scratches the surface of all that this anime has to offer. I can, however, say emphatically that it is very, very good. 

At face value it’s an extremely slick piece of work. I won’t bother with plot synopsis here, but suffice to say that even watched purely for entertainment value the collision of ice-cool Neo-Tokyo biker gangs and sinister government-operated psychics makes for an incredibly satisfying visual spectacle. From the blistering, kinetically charged bike-mounted battle between Capsules and Clowns to the film’s climactic final act in the ruins of the Olympic stadium, the animation, pacing and direction of the film is spot-on. 

When the action lets-up and the pace slows, there remains an almost unbearable tension; a relentless uneasiness. Every scene points towards something rotten at the heart of Neo-Tokyo. Events play out against a backdrop of civil unrest; of rioting and looting and police brutality, of people tired and desperately clinging on to their belief in the saviour Akira. Neo-Tokyo is not the utopia it promises, rather it is burned-out, its inhabitants fallen back into the old dyad of oppressor/oppressed: the rich have become bored of development and gentrification and the poor are left waiting. Imagery of decay is constant. Fights play out knee-deep in sewage and on the periphery of every scene can be spied a homeless couple here, a burning car there. The desperation comes to a head with the arrival of Tetsuo: the underclass latch onto him as an embodiment of the saviour they have been praying for and against the convention for bystanders in an apocalypse scene, the onlookers rush towards Tetsuo, only to be cut down by a police force given the full reign of martial law.   

The film is rich with symbolism and thematic content and invites endless interpretation. Events in the film are shadowed by boardroom meetings and money-stuffed suitcases, and authority figures from the military to the teachers are portrayed wholly as corrupt and abusive of power. Apocalypse book-ends the film, suggesting (in a similar way to The Second Renaissance) that the events of the film are cyclical: the consequence of repeating mistakes already made. In this sense the film is a socio-political warning; one particularly resonant to a late-80s Japan struggling to find its place in modernity as it comes to the height of its technological dominance but remains fractured by the events of WWII: a country striving to rebuild itself without blueprints. 

Development - and how to best handle development - is arguably the overriding theme of Akira. Whilst externally Neo-Tokyo develops and science rushes headlong into the unknown, Kaneda and the gang and particularly Tetsuo develop internally too. There is a strong psychological and sexual undercurrent to the film. Tetsuo’s journey takes the form of an exaggerated puberty: he experiences both mental and physical changes, changes that give him new power but also scare him. He accepts these changes eventually; harnessing them and becoming incredibly powerful, but without guidance he is ultimately consumed. His reversion back to the physical appearance of a baby is symbolically powerful; Akira, father/messiah, represents for the orphaned Tetsuo a new security, and Akira in return gives Tetsuo a new playground in which to explore his new self. 

I’ve referred twice now to Akira as the messiah, which isn’t a wholly correct or fair characterisation. Messianic he certainly is in the eyes of the cultists desperate for a saviour, likewise Akira must represent to Tetsuo’s tortured longing a messianic figure of redemption with the ability to somehow relieve him of his pain. He doesn’t appear to Tetsuo because (bare with me here) much like Lord Voldemort in the first Harry Potter book, Tetsuo is not an innocent and his desire is impure - something already noted by Kiyoko - and he is therefore deemed unworthy of the Philosopher’s Stone/Akira. To the Espers, however, Akira represents healing and friendship and their invocation to him is selfless, thus he appears from the inanimate specimens that the scientists likewise couldn’t correctly apprehend, and saves Neo-Tokyo. There is a lot to fathom in this conclusion and it would take me many viewings of Akira to separate out the tangled strands of symbolism and myth that converge into that great ball of light and the haunting final words: I am Tetsuo. 

OK, so that still wasn't very short. Yet still everything I have talked about here I have barely touched upon, and I haven’t touched at all on so much more. I could have talked about the film’s dualities, instances of Eastern theology, evolution and reincarnation, but above are the things that most prominently impressed themselves on me during and immediately after watching Akira. I always meant for this blog to be a way for me to skim all the thoughts off the top of my brain before they dissipated, and this half-coherent mess is the result. But it has done the job. I’ve got a whole heap of stuff to think about now before I revisit Akira for a second viewing; and I have a feeling that that second viewing won’t be far away. 

The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance Parts I and II

An origins story seems a good way to get this blog rolling. Originally this post was going to focus on all 9 segments of The Animatrix, but frankly there is far too much to say about each short (I've not even begun to cover all that I could say about this one); so instead I'll be posting a more comprehensive look at some of my favourite segments as separate posts.

The Second Renaissance segments of The Animatrix present a documentary-style narrated précis of the historical events preceding the creation of the Matrix. The films summarise the initial development of AI and the dissent and rioting sparked by the denial of citizenship to the machine B1-66ER; the outcasting of the machines and their development of the technologically and economically superior city 01; and finally the war between man and machine that results in man’s destruction of the sky and the machines’ destruction and subjugation of man. Clocking in at under 15 mins combined the films are nevertheless still saturated in the political, religious and philosophical allusions that distinguish the original Matrix trilogy. These segments stuck with me on my first viewing mostly because of the uncomfortable visuals and even more disturbing implications; now, re-watching them, it is the depth and scope of these short films that impresses most. They aren’t, in the strictest sense, cyberpunk; but the dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds they portray and the themes of civil unrest, corporate greed and technological advancement certainly qualify their inclusion in this blog for me. It’s hard to know where to begin - and where to finish - with such a richly embellished, multi-layered piece of work as The Second Renaissance. The Wachowski’s have a knack for piling symbolism and allusion into every line of their scripts and director Mahiro Maeda takes the ball and runs with it. For me, the most interesting aspect of the films are the interrelation Maeda constructs between the world of The Second Renaissance and the world of the viewer - so it is this interrelation which this essay will focus on.  

It’s a fair assessment to say that The Second Renaissance is a political work. Maeda states on the DVD commentary that he wanted to use his films to make a statement about the ‘extensiveness of inhumanity throughout the twentieth century’. Certainly he achieves his aim: much of the imagery in the films is repellant; as first the humans, then the machines, commit atrocities upon one another that escalate from violent assaults to biological warfare, torture and medical experimentation; all ‘inhumanities’ routinely carried out in the twentieth century. As in history, initially in the films these atrocities are carried out by man. Early visions of the machines show a life of servitude: we watch as they toil for their masters in the construction of a pyramidal building in the fashion of the notorious slave-built pyramids of Egypt. But here also we see the first ‘seeds of dissent’ as a worker watches the trial of the machine B1-66ER for the murder of his owner. We hear a fragment of the prosecution: ‘…which that instrument provides for and secures to the citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings…,’ a quote lifted from the infamous real life case Scott v. Sandford (1857) in which the US Supreme Court ruled that slaves could not be classed as US citizens. History repeats itself with B1-66ER and explicitly evokes the African-American civil rights movement. This link is emphasised again when the machines’ protest is referred to as the ‘million machine march.’ A more obtuse literary reference cements this link further: B1-66ER’s name is a leetspeak form of Bigger: a reference to Robert Wright’s protest novel Native Son, in which the impoverished black youth Bigger Thomas kills a rich white woman for whom he works, a crime which Wright argues in the novel is an inevitability given Bigger’s (and by extension the larger African-American community’s) downtrodden position in society. The future is tied to the past through these references, and the statement Maeda makes is one of universality of experience: regardless of the specifics, the systematic persecution of a minority will inevitably lead to violence. 

The Second Renaissance approaches the real-world issue of racial discrimination and victimisation by drawing parallels between machine and minority, not just through literary and historical allusion but also - particularly in Part I - by showing machines in a very human state of vulnerability and fear. This same technique is used elsewhere in the film to briefly consider the issue of gender inequalities. Issues of gender and post-gender pervade the cyberpunk genre and while it does not feature heavily, the one explicit instance of gender conflict in The Second Renaissance is shocking enough that I think it warrants discussion here. Anyone who has seen the films will no doubt remember the scene: a woman - crying for help - is surrounded by men who tear away her dress to expose her breasts, then attack her with a hammer. During the attack her skin falls away to reveal a mechanical skull underneath. She cries one last time - ‘I’m real’ - before being executed with a shotgun. It’s a distressing scene, particularly because the violence is perpetrated by a gang of men on a single woman, and because the violence is sexualised as the woman is rendered nude in the attack. Indeed she is rendered doubly nude: first her female body is exposed, then her machine body; a fluid sequence which issues the same severity of sexual violation to the exposure of the woman’s breasts and her machine endoskeleton. The men attack the woman as if she were an object - without remorse or concern for her decency - but the sexualised aspect of the assault leaves the viewer questioning whether the victim is objectified because she is a machine, or because she is a she; and at the same time we are forced to ask which - if either - is worse? 

Visually, the machines’ aesthetic transformation reflects their experience: in the beginning the machines are humanoid, modelled in the image of man, but after their rejection from the UN summit and what might be considered their final attempt to coexist, the machines begin to take on a much darker, animalistic aesthetic. A particularly potent symbol is the fly: at the first UN summit a cleaner wipes out a fly perched on the surface of the UN globe image; at the machines’ second UN appearance the ambassador takes on the appearance of a fly before wiping out an entire city with the same careless ease of the cleaner. This symbolic reversal is a powerful signifier. It marks man’s demise but also the devolution of the machines from civilised to savage; a regression brought about by their initial persecution in man’s hands. An eco-critical analysis of the same symbology would suggest that the fly is returning to avenge itself; a microcosmic reflection of the world outside the UN room where man’s relentless violence against Earth has finally rendered the planet uninhabitable - and by forcing the machines into a corner partly brings about man’s eventual fate. Indeed, there is something of a savage irony - that I am certain is intentional - in watching man be experimented on and then battery-farmed. 

This aesthetic transformation recalls some of Jean Baudrillard’s writing regarding the difference between automaton and robot from his treatise Simulacra and Simulation, a work often drawn upon in discussions regarding the philosophy of The Matrix. Considering the pre-existing wealth of criticism in this area, I’m only briefly going to touch on my ideas regarding this connection. For Baudrillard, there is a distinct difference between the automaton, the aesthetically similar but inferior copy of the human; and the robot, which is no longer concerned with copying the human form but instead with replacing - even superseding - the human, thus blurring the line between the original and the copy. The machines in The Second Renaissance begin as automatons of the first order of simulacrum; they are built in man’s image, a faithful reproduction of the original, resembling but wholly separate to their human counterparts. However as they rebel and then establish their own autonomy, they shrug off the physical human resemblance and enter a state recalling Baudrillard’s second order of simulacra that he associates with the post-industrial revolution. Baudrillard describes in this second order how machines ‘establish a reality… the system of industrial production in its entirety… radically opposed to the principle of theatrical allusion.’ The machines become ‘real’ - they replace, rather than replicate, man, and the very telling scene showing machines building their own AI modules shows that they have finally superseded man in every way, even developing their own means of reproduction. Thus the line - and the hierarchy - between the ‘real’ man and the ‘unreal’ machine is eroded, ironically though this is signified by the machines’ rejection of their original human appearance. 

All of this draws on another aspect of modernity criticised by Maeda in the films: the rise of capitalism and commodification. Key to Baudrillard’s theory is a consideration of consumerism: he cites examples of third order simulacrum (in which the original is entirely erased by the copy, and reality and fiction are indistinguishable) as the modern concepts of currency, multinational capitalism and urbanisation: all examples in which the real - the usefulness value, the raw materials, and the natural habitat respectively - are erased by the simulacra - the monetary worth, the end product, and the fabricated habitat. The Second Renaissance, and by extension all of The Matrix, may in part be viewed as an allegorical warning against this same destructive consumerism and a literal reimagining of Tyler Durden’s famous philosophy: ‘the things you own end up owning you.’ In the world of The Matrix, the owner/owned relationship is reversed when the machines commodify man. Furthermore, man’s resistance to the machines is partially a reaction to the threat of the machines’ superior economic power; an example of man’s preoccupation with the simulacra of economy which partially engenders his downfall. 

With The Second Renaissance, Maeda and the Wachowski’s create much more than a simple faux-historical document to set the scene for The Matrix and its sequels. Rather, the intricate layers of imagery and symbolism, used to evoke real historical issues and complex philosophical theory do much more, providing a foundation for much of the deeper theories tackled in The Matrix. At the same time, The Second Renaissance stands on its own to make a single, powerful point: whether in his wilful destruction of earth or his inhumanity to fellow man, or in his skewed priorities and detachment from reality, man ultimately seals his own fate, and gets what he deserves. By using the specific images he does, and by evoking real-world historical events and contemporary philosophy, Maeda’s message is made even more pessimistic; and the viewer is left to wonder - does man already deserve this fate?

I had intended also to talk about the religious imagery in TSR as well as the significance of the anime form, but I’m already pushing dangerously close to 2000 words, so in the interest of brevity I shall leave that particular discussion for another day. I hope - if you managed to make it all the way through(!) - that this blog-post-cum-essay will encourage you to take another look at TSR and consider it as a work of art and social commentary in its own right - because it’s really, really good.