Esoteric pop culture.
Saturday October 20, 2001
Like most oxymoronic things, I love it. We’re halfway through Evangelion (a DVD every week or so, along with food and free-ranging bitch sessions), which is fine; silly, sexist, uncomfortable in its mix of high school angst and apocalyptic dread, but weird and geeky (in the right sorts of ways) and committed to spinning fastballs out of left field (and I think I just irreparably mixed a metaphor there; what do I know from baseball), so it’s engaging. Japanese culture, atomic bomb psychic fallout, the usual giant robot/suit of armor stuff, bizarro Christian apocrypha. A fun jambalaya.
Our friends—what, you want pseudonyms? The magician and the accountant, does that work? No, but—our friends had borrowed our first four tapes of Utena, the ones that are available in English sans piracy, so there was the inevitable discussion about amazing structure and astonishing storytelling and how implacably cool Touga is and the bastards, the utter fucking bastards who have the gall to hang the whole fucking story right in front of your eyes in the very first episode—in the opening fucking credits—and it still doesn’t matter; you still don’t see it coming (even if you’re told to watch out for it); it still blindsides you somehow even when you see it all a second time—
You have to stop for a minute and imagine, okay, a story that is told within the confines of a commercially structured twenty-some-odd minutes an episode stricture, yet manages, over the course of thirty-nine episodes (nineteen and a half hours, or thereabouts) to tell a single, coherent story, maintaining a startling consistency in tone, manner and execution from start to finish (over the course of about four years’ production time, I think; I don’t know a damn thing about how television seasons work on Japanese TV); that is aimed at adolescents, nominally, yet manages a bleak and realistic yet highly romantic and stylized picture of adolescence, and burgeoning sexuality, alternative and otherwise, genderfucked and polymorphously perverse and dangerous and thrilling and dark and unbearably exalted without pulling any punches or sugarcoating any pills; that turns the limitations of repetitive and static animation due to budget constraints into sophisticated storytelling and rituals that build, with each iteration, into apotheoses rich and strange; that trusts its audience with tremendous leaps of faith and delivers every time; that somehow through some alchemy blends high school angst and fairy tales and comic-opera costuming and surreal slapstick into—into—
I already used jambalaya, didn’t I? —And anyway, that’s inappropriate; when all is said and done, Utena is like some clear, sharp, cold liquor—there’s a long and involved ritual you need to go through to get at it (contacting fans, locating fan subs, finagling deals—there are some good fan subs out there—then sitting down and watching the whole thing—), but when you pour and lift your glass and knock it back there’s one single flavor that’s left, though it’s hard to remember, and impossible to describe—
Yes. It’s just a Japanese cartoon; the music is at times an acquired taste, and Chuu-Chuu was most unfortunate. And most Japanese cartoons suck, like most of everything else. (Remember Sturgeon’s Law, and know that it is kept wholly.) But the good ones, man, the good ones—this one—are amazing.