The Politics of Transgression in Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses

Amy Goh #260354243
EAST 467: Politics, Experiments, and Theory: Japanese Cinema of the 1960s
Professor Yuriko Furuhata
20th February 2010

The Politics of Transgression in Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses

In Funeral Parade of Roses1, Toshio Matsumoto, in his conflating of the politics of the individual identity with the politics of institutionalised structures such as governments, challenges the idea that the two are disparate elements incompatible with each other. In the tragedy of Eddie, Matsumoto proposes an almost apocalyptic, nihilistic look of the world, revealing the individual’s tragedy at being, inevitably, caught up within structures of his creation whether they are of a personal or political nature. However, Matsumoto accomplishes this beyond the diegetic level of the fictive plot to the level of the spectator’s experience of a film with the use of transgressive2 filmic techniques that break free from formalist film making. Thus, he transforms the relationship between spectator and film in which, typically, the viewer identifies with the central subject, but does not transform this investment of emotive energy into action3 in his own experiential reality 4.

This essay will focus on the cinematographic level on which Funeral Parade of Roses accomplishes this flouting of conventional norms through the distortion of the spectator’s experience. By the complicating of the viewer’s identification with the subject through the distortion of continuity and the blurring of reality and fiction, Matsumoto disrupts the viewer’s expectations of the organic unity of the filmic narrative, challenging the viewer with a form of film viewing in which the viewer is an active subject having to participate and interact with the filmic material beyond the emotive level. The viewer is forced to, having exited the encapsulated bubble of the cinematic theatre, question all forms of illusion, whether they are on the ideology of the self, institutionalised politics or in the politics of cinema implicit in the cinematic apparatus and the process of filmmaking.

Central to the process of filmmaking is the creation of a fictional reality- namely, the formation of the universe the film encompasses. This is done through the editing process of cutting and piecing together shots into a film sequence in which the actors, sound, music, colours, lighting and frames are synthesised into a coherent whole that tell a story through a plot that has a beginning, middle and end. Through the manipulation of these disparate elements, an organism emerges that carries the illusion of wholeness. In the conventional film viewing experience, the spectator is presented a coherent narrative created through this intrinsically disruptive process of cutting, slicing and selecting. Thus, in the creation of the film, the heterogenous nature of filmmaking is effaced by the illusion of seamlessness. The integrity of the organic whole is vital

1 Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no sôretsu, Matsumoto Toshio, 1969, 105 mins)
2 I am using the term ‘transgressive’ to refer to all forms of action which break away from established norms.
3 ‘Action’, here, can refer to the personal, psychological transformative action, and is not exclusive to the political activism of oppositional politics.
4 I use the term ‘experiential reality’ to refer to all forms of experience taking place in the real, immediate world. In other words, I am referring to the realm of experience outside the doors of the projection theatre.

in creating continuity, ensuring the viewer is able to follow the actions, motions and drama of the protagonist. Thus, it is vital for the process of identification and the production of sympathy. As Lyotard states, “all movement which would escape identification, recognition, and the mnemic fixation” (Lyotard 355)5 are erased in favour of the director’s vision.
Likewise, in the inscription of movement present in cinematography, the director inevitably sacrifices diversity for unity by removing unsatisfactory shots that do not correspond to the reality the film attempts to project. This includes overexposed shots, or shots with too much glare. Unrelated footage that does not contribute to the continuity of the filmic narrative has, likewise, to be cut. The process of the cinematography is itself an exercise in selective elimination involving the inevitable sacrifice of the complexity of reality for the formation of filmic reality. Thus, “the only genuine movement with which the cinema is written is that of value [emphasis added]” (Lyotard 350); that is, movements only have value in relation to other objects in the movie. Moreover, the physical act of directing puts the director in a position of absolute control wherein he is ‘god’ of the universe of his creation. Through the dictating and ordering of actions in the filmmaking process, the director suppresses the individuality of his actors, the film crew and, in some instances, the human complexity of the characters in order to make a film. Directing, hence, involves a domineering structure of totalising control in which issues of power play a central role.

In Funeral Parade of Roses, Matsumoto subverts this system of totalising control by the revealing of the directing process. In reminding the viewer that film is a product of an individual’s subjective reality- in other words, a creation-, the viewer is forced to re-orientate his relationship to the film. The focus, thus, shifts from the narrative imminent to the film itself as an entity in connection to other physical realities. In a particular long shot towards the middle of the film, the director is shown hovering over an Eddie who is putting on his clothes having just finished shooting a love scene with his co-actor for the movie he is acting in. The director calls out ‘cut!’; his shout pierces the previous carnival-esque music that played in the close-up sequence of the love scene, pulling the viewer away from the intimacy of the previous shot into a more distanced panorama. The director proceeds to dictate the next stage in the directing process in which an interview sequence will be filmed. The focus of the shot, here, is on the overexposed bed in which Eddie is putting on his clothes. The director is central to the shot, and the cameras, lighting equipment and crew are situated about him; prominent, too, is a lamp which shines directly upon his darkly-clad figure. In this shot, the viewer’s attention is drawn directly from the central protagonist of the story- Eddie- to the director, who is shown surrounded by the filmic reality he is creating.

In this instance, an amount of unease is created in the viewer as the film narrative is physically put in the background, and the director and his crew put into the foreground. In the centrality of the director’s position, the viewer is reminded that the director is like a God-like figure in his ability to create and dictate an encompassing world, and in turn, that the process of film watching involves the active believing and engaging in this projected, subjective reality. The lamp situated above the director’s head, in resembling a sun, draws an allusion to the centrality of the director in his world in a geocentric system wherein planetary bodies- the film audience, in this case- revolve around the director’s will. The distancing of the actors and the re-emergence of the ‘invisible’ process of filmmaking (the ‘backstage’ where the ‘strings are pulled’), in this case, disrupts the viewer’s idea of the integrity of all creation. The film world is shown as being the creation of a single human being according to values that he accords, and the viewer is forced to re-orientate himself in situation with the diegesis in light of this revelation. Thus, in the focussing on the director as central subject, the viewer is shown that the process of film making is innately political, involving a ‘director’ in the act of ‘directing’ the actions of others. In other words, it is an inherently political process involving plays of power and control. As the actors and crew are expected to follow certain protocols of behavior for the production of the film, the audience, too, is expected to identify with the subject matter in accordance to the director’s will. In being alerted to the system that envelops the directing process, the viewer is shown the inextricability of cinema and politics. Just as the citizen’s individuality, thus, is sacrificed for the perpetuation of society’s economic forces in the capitalist system, so film- through the totalitarian process of directing- sacrifices the diverse personalities of its actors for the creation of a filmic reality. The insertion of shots in which the director re-emerges with the cinematic apparatus, thus, threatens the integrity of creation and the notion that film is an objective reality free from systems of totalising control, forcing the watcher to rethink his relational position to the filmic matter and all systems of invisible policing that may lay hidden in his experiential reality.

The projection screen and projector, likewise, are imbued with systems of value encoded by the director’s vision. It creates temporality through the flashing of a series of still images into a geometrical curve of movement by which continuity and consequently, “meaning and consciousness” (Baudry 291) arises. The creating of the filmic ‘consciousness’ is vital in the creation of a passage of time in which the narrative can play out. However, the projection process hides the invisible ‘unconsciousness’ of the film strip6. Like the disparate, seemingly senseless images in dreams, it is made out of discrete units of static images with minute differences. It is through this ‘slicing’ of moments in time in the sacrifice of these minute differences (which were in turn carefully chosen by the director to conform to an overarching narrative) that static images are given meaning and are able to rise to the conscious ‘daylight’ realm of the cinema to create continuity and meaning, allowing for potentials of identification with a homogenous subject embedded in a narrative.

In Funeral Parade of Roses, the viewer’s relationship to the subject is complicated by the sudden, inexplicable emergence of the filmic strip from the ‘unconscious’ realm behind the projection screen. Inevitably, he is drawn from the congruity of the narrative into discontinuity, and a shift in identification, likewise, takes place.

In a particular shot towards the end of the narrative, the viewer’s point of view is shifted from a close-up of Eddie’s bloodied face facing the mirror to that of the filmic strip containing a series of images that make up the shot. Prior to this shot, the oedipal tragedy had reached its climatic moment, as Eddie confronts his own image in the mirror and, unable to handle his revealed self in the light of his crime, pierces his eyes. The shot is a close-up shot of Eddie’s face in the mirror.

6 I borrow Baudry’s metaphor, in which he likens the film strip to the unconsciousness of the film.

Like Eddie, the viewer is put in Eddie’s position facing the mirror which shines disturbingly with a prophetic light. Thus, a confusion of identity occurs in which the viewer, enveloped in the tragedy of Eddie’s fate, forgets his own reality. The shot, thus, creates sympathy in which the viewer, seeing the graphic image of Eddie’s pierced eyes in the light of the mirror, feels a sense of horror, pathos and repulsion. On a diegetic level, Eddie’s act of piercing one’s eyes can, here, be interpreted as a desire to ‘pierce’ the mask of the persona in a final effort to assert control. Eddie realises that he is ultimately subject to the inevitability of Fate- the principle that orders the world- and in a final act to assert some form of personal control against all systems of oppression, pierces his eyes. The viewer, typically, has reached a point in the narrative in which- in the process of sympathy- he feels the force of Fate delivered to Eddie as though a blow to himself. However, this forcefulness of emotion does not go beyond the fictionality of the plot and relies on the viewer’s ability to believe that film is essentially fiction.

However, by pulling the viewer away from the encompassing plot to the micro-level of the filmic strip, the director complicates the spectator’s relationship to the protagonist and his tragedy by drawing him to the filmic apparatus itself and film’s status as fiction reliant on the viewer to invest belief in its manufactured reality. A fracturing of sympathy occurs between subject and viewer, thus, as the focus is turned from the film’s presentation of reality to the individual’s personal reality. The differentiation of the film strip, hence, is not only paralleled by the breaking of Eddie’s self on the diegetic level but the breaking of the ‘consciousness’ of the film viewing experience in which the ‘unconscious’ cycles of thought buried in the process of sympathy is unearthed. The effect created, thus, is disconcerting, as the viewer’s sympathy is shifted from that of Eddie’s revelation in the light of the conscious revealing of previously buried knowledge (his ‘sin’ of having slept with his father) to the individual’s personal unconscious, forcing the viewer to interact with the issue of ‘revealed truth’ beyond the emotive level. The viewer is prompted, thus, to seek out the various kinds of hidden, buried knowledge that may lie beyond the fabric of his reality in order to ‘mend’ this fracturing of distance between Eddie and himself. The emergence of the previously invisible ‘unconscious’ of the cinematic apparatus, thus, creates the potential for the re-identification of the self, transgressing the politics of identification inherent in the conventional film viewing experience. The instability of the actual cinematic apparatus in producing congruity is revealed to be concurrent with the instability of the fluidity that all ideologies of the self project. The break in identification, thus, serves to create a more involved film viewing experience, in which the watcher is forced to evaluate the ideas the director presented through Eddie’s tragic sexuality. As Eddie’s sexuality is innately flimsy and unclassifiable into discrete categories, the viewer forced to question all ideas inherent in the structuring of individual sexuality. The revealing of the filmic text, thus, ultimately allows for the viewer to relate to the material beyond the diegetic level to the personal level.
Central to Baudry’s apparatus theory, too, is the power intrinsic in the machinery of the camera. The camera, according to Baudry, sets up a specified ‘subject’7 which is the “active center and

7 ”The principal point in perspective should be placed at eye level: this point is called fixed or subject” (L. Brion Guerry, Jean Pellerin Viator (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1962)

origin of meaning” (Baudry 286)8, inevitably affecting the way the viewer relates and identifies with the subject. This funnelling of vision on the subject enforces a specified ideology of value that is complicit with the ideology the film originates from, namely the director’s vision and the system of production he works under. The use of lens of different focal lengths changes the perspective of an image, manipulating the way objects are seen. By controlling the areas of reality in which the viewer sees, the viewer is inevitably caught up in the ideology associated with that particular position. The camera, thus, forms a bridge between the raw material of reality and the finished film product- it projects a reality of the second order that is imbued by the values of the director. However, the ‘monocular vision’9 of the camera is problematic as it erases the multiplicity of viewpoints and perspectives that is inherent in experiential reality. This simplifies the process of identification that occurs in the watching of film, allowing the viewer to relate on a visceral level to the universe the film encompasses by closing distances between viewer and subject, ensuring the sympathies of the viewer are pre-determined by the ideology of the director.

In addition, cinema relies on the setting apart of filmic from experiential reality. The viewer accepts the reality as an objective reality and thus, spills “libidinal forces, at the expense of the whole (of reality)” (Lyotard 350). The film product, thus, is “the paradoxical product of the disorder of the drives... a composite of decompositions” (Lyotard 351). In order for identification to take place, the viewer has to invest time, energy, and emotion into active engagement with the central protagonist and story.

Funeral Parade of Roses challenges the power intrinsic to the camera’s singular eye in the manipulation of camera angles and lens. This, in turn, complicates conventional ideas about perspective, point of view and the nature of sympathy. In the shot after Eddie has pierced his eyes, the camera shifts to the point of view of Eddie and the viewer is led down a dark tunnel in which a few, lone solitary figures are illuminated, presumably the bewildered stares of spectators played by actors. The spectators shy away from the blinding, overexposed light the eye of the camera shines in expressions of horror but are unable to escape this oppressive light. This accentuated perspective of the world created by a wide angle lens in a point of view shot continues as the viewer is led through a dark passage from Eddie’s secluded room into the overexposed realm of the world exterior to the apartment. The door connecting both realms, here, is shown as a single, overexposed patch of light. When Eddie exits the building, the camera abruptly cuts away to a long shot in which the viewer sees Eddie tumbling out of the building, knife in hand. The camera proceeds to revolve around Eddie’s face in a critical fashion as though examining him, and the viewer sees the bewildered faces of a crowd of spectators in the background. A final dizzying movement proceeds as the camera swerves away from a close-up of Eddie’s face, before zooming in on Eddie’s knife and ending at an abrupt tilt.
In this particular sequence, Matsumoto deliberately inverts the power play intrinsic in the device of the camera by privileging the documentary angle over fictive reality. The viewer is

9 I refer to Pleynet’s term “monocular vision” used by Baudry in reference to the perspective of the camera, in which Baudry attributes the single eye of the lens to the singular point of view it carries.

initially drawn into the pathos of Eddie’s tragedy by the use of a wide angle lens that creates a single point of view from the perspective of Eddie. A confusion of identity results, as the viewer ‘becomes’ Eddie, tumbling through dark, groping corridors (symbolic of the darkness of the psyche, the ‘hidden consciousness’) with pierced eyes. However, the sharp cutaway from a screen dominantly black with a single spotlighted center to an overexposed shot wherein Eddie is shown at a distance creates a fracturing of sympathy. Distance is created between the spectator and protagonist in which the camera shifts from taking on the position of a dominating device asserting control and creating subjective reality to a position in which the camera acts as a documentarian device showing different positional relations. The camera turns from a surveillance device, thus, to a critical eye. As a result, the innate absurdity of Eddie’s situation emerges. The viewer’s focus changes from that of intimate sympathy to that in which he analyses the filmic image from a distance, allowing for a space in which the viewer interacts with Eddie’s tragedy beyond the emotive level.

In addition, this shot disrupts the illusion of fictional reality by introducing actual passers-by into the film, thus mixing documentary filmmaking with the construction of artificial realities. After Eddie commits his final, melodramatic act of piercing his eyes in a final denial of vision, he travels through a dark tunnel into the overexposed realm of reality. Metaphorically, the viewer is led with the careful guidance of the camera from the fictional, encapsulated world of Eddie’s apartment into the immediate reality of raw experience through a dark tunnel that serves as a bridge between fictive and experiential reality. The melodrama of Eddie’s tragedy manifested in the inherent theatricality of the image is presented in all its force to the viewer: Eddie carries a knife, dressed in a suit that looks increasingly like a clown’s outfit. His overdrawn make-up- the outward manifestation of his status in society as ‘homosexual’- looks increasingly like a disguise. Here, the viewer is reminded of the absurdity of filmic reality by the startled stares of passers-by, who the director states in the commentary were actual people. The critical eye of the camera revolving around Eddie’s face contributes to this critical view. In a subversion of roles, the camera abruptly takes on the viewer’s perspective. The viewer’s reaction, as a result, turns from that of pathos to that of intrigue and speculation with this shift in points of view, and the viewer is forced to re-orientate himself in relation to the absurdity of Eddie’s image. The juxtaposition of experiential reality with fictional reality, thus, serves as the ultimate epitome of the process of revealing that Matsumoto accomplishes in his film. The critical eye of the camera corresponds to the critical point of view the viewer is expected to take towards the filmic matter, calling for a more active viewing experience. In shifting the perspective from that of Eddie to that of the viewer, the viewer is pulled into the film, engaging with the reality the film projects beyond the diegetic level.


Finally, the film ends with a single, overexposed shot of Eddie’s knife. The camera tilts abruptly, so the knife appears to ‘pierce’ the desert of whiteness that envelops the screen. The focus is turned from the spectacle of Eddie’s tragedy to the instrument with which he had inflicted his wounds. The knife, here, is symbolic of the ultimate piercing of fictive reality. As Eddie blinds himself after the unveiling of the ‘mask’ covering the truth of his true identity as his father’s lover, the viewer is forced to decide what his reaction is in relation to the revealing of film as fiction and, henceforth, construct his own individual actions in light of the ‘truth’ of what reality connotes in his historical and political milieu. The film, thus, ends on an interrogative note, calling for the viewer to challenge all classifications of thought whether they are about the ideologies of institutional politics, identity or sympathy.

Funeral Parade of Roses, all in all, provides a challenging viewing experience to the viewer in its transformation of the viewer’s relationship to the subject. By breaking free from formalist filmmaking by disrupting continuity, organic unity and, finally, piercing the illusion of film as an objective reality, Toshio Matsumoto inverts the process of identification inwardly towards the viewer’s individual persona. The focus of the film, ultimately, ceases to be about the theatre in which Eddie’s tragedy plays out, but the larger stage of life. Metaphorically, Matsumoto creates a ‘bridge’ between fiction and experience wherein all appearances present in the structuring of thought are normatively unstable, thus rendering the viewer’s position in reality equally ambiguous.

Works Cited

Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no sôretsu, Matsumoto Toshio, 1969, 105 mins). DVD.

Baudry, Jean-Louis, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen. (New York: Columbia UP,
1986), 286-298. Print.

Guerry, L. Brion, Jean Pellerin Viator (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1962). Print.

Lyotard, Jean-François, “Acinema,” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen. (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 349-359. Print.

Matriarchy, Modernity and the Scientist in Shelley’s Frankenstein

Amy Goh #260354243
ENGL 405: Medicine and Mystery in Victorian Literature
Professor Stephanie King
11th February 2010

Matriarchy, Modernity and the Scientist in Shelley’s Frankenstein

In Shelley’s Frankenstein, she presents us with a dystopian ‘world without mothers’ where sexual reproduction is asexual and the masculine figure has to take both roles. Thus, she reveals the impossible predicament of the modern scientist: of having to balance the intrinsically male notion of progress in the gaining of scientific knowledge- the foundation myth of ‘modernity’- with the internal need for the female, ‘humanising’ touch as expressed through familial ties and Nature. In Frankenstein’s tragedy, she reveals that the need for the scientific education to be revolutionised from the institutions of the university to a communal setting where knowledge is shared, and the female influence interposed to balance the inherently patriarchal1 scientific pursuit of knowledge with its mechanical probing of Nature, the ultimate female principle2. Victor’s monster’s deformity, in this lens, can be seen as Shelley’s comment on science’s ability to deform nature by trying to contain it within structures.

Modernity’s promise of the dawn of an “age of rationality” that would put an “end to superstition and injustice” and that “rational religion based on science would replace priest craft, democracy

1 I use the term “patriarchal” in the generic sense as a category for various forms of intrinsically ‘male’ dominating structures such as language (confining ideas to linguistic units) i, politics (the governing of bodies) and science (the structuring of the natural world through rational logic). Conversely, ‘matriarchal’ systems are centered about community, and the gathering and binding of peoples.

i In referring to ‘language’ as a dominating structure, I am alluding to Lecan’s theory in his essay “Middle March” that postulates that a child is initiated into the logic of a universe re-enforced by patriarchal structures when he acquires the faculties of language.
2 In referring to Nature as the “ultimate female principle”, I am alluding to the traditional idea of Nature/the earth as an essentially female force created by, and balancing, the typically male creator.

would overthrow aristocratic tyrants, and in time vastly improved machines and medicines would bring a far better life to all” (10 Ellwood)3 articulates a newfound humanistic optimism that was prevalent during Shelley’s time. There was a widespread belief that, through the realisation of a new, rational science, an “elixir of life” would “banish disease from the human frame” (40), depicting a way of thinking that devalues the female forces of intuition, sensory perception and communal bonding. In this cultural context, Shelley’s novel ultimately serves as a parable- a modern counterpoint to the Prometheus myth- to the possible dangers of subtracting the ‘matriarchal’ realm of feeling completely from the ‘patriarchal’ structures of instrumental pathology present in science.

Victor’s education begins in a matriarchal realm, where he, in his romps through nature with his childhood companions Elizabeth and Clerval, displays a gladness “akin to rapture” in “learning the hidden laws of nature” (Shelley 36). Early on, he describes a “fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature” (37) and states he disdains “the structures of languages... the code of governments”, preferring the “inner spirit of nature and the soul of man” found in the “secrets of heaven and earth” (37). He displays “an ardent imagination and childish reasoning” (40), thinking that by penetrating Nature’s womb, he will discover secrets unforeseen that will give him a spiritual satisfaction. To the contrary, the works of modern philosophers such as Sir Isaac Newton left him “discontented and unsatisfied” (39) with their reductive theories. Elizabeth, Victor’s foremost female figure, is associated with the former realm. Early on, it is established that while she busied herself with “the sublime shapes of the mountains... (and) the silence of winter” (36), Victor delighted in “investigating the causes” (36)- the mechanics- behind it all. She balances Victor’s

3 Robert Ellwood, ‘Myth, Gnosis, and Modernity,’ from The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell (SUNY Press, 2004), 1-35.
4 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Frankenstein (Oxford Classics). 1818. Reprint. London: Oxford University Press, 1980. Print.

“violent” (37) scientific temperament with “the living spirit of love... sub(duing) (him) to a semblance of her own gentleness” (39). Here, Shelley portrays the scientific need to understand the workings of Nature in a positive light when balanced with the female influence. In a pre-modern matriarchal world where familial ties and Nature is privileged, science has a beneficial role, giving the scientist a transcendent satisfaction in his discoveries. The realm of feeling is thus connected to the ‘male’ desire of understanding, and it is in exploring the great wonder of Nature in the company of “familiar faces” (45) that Victor finds the utmost fulfilment.
However, it is the university and the “modern system of science” (39) it imposes that drags Victor away from this childish, innocent pursuit of knowledge characteristic of the domestic, matriarchal sphere into an institutionalised, structured education. This would mark the start of a solitary spiral from which the removal of the female figures in Victor’s life will only aggravate. Initially, he is initiated by a “man of great research in natural philosophy” (41) away from the kingdom of ‘subliminal’ science linked to vast, insurmountable Nature into rational, reductive science. Natural phenomenon like thunder is reduced to the mathematics of electricity and galvanism, as the scientist is given a privileged position over the ancients with their “would-be science” of “natural history” (41) in his ability to ‘rein’ nature by understanding its mechanics. Thus enamoured by the rationality of this professor’s explanations, Victor rejects natural history as a “deformed and abortive creation” (41). This, in turn, foreshadows the inevitable turning of the magical wonder that accompanies the contemplation of the mysteries of the cosmos present in the pre-modern ‘matriarchal’ mind into the modern rationality that came with the enlightened modern mind. This discovery of electricity, thus, serves as an impetus for a new kind of thinking for Victor that shifts him from the communal realm of female influence to the male-dominated realm of science.

Similarly, the death of his mother and Elizabeth’s falling sick with scarlet fever before Victor’s departure for the university of Inglostadt can be seen as a foreshadowing of Victor’s subsequent downfall that begins when he embarks on the solitary route of the scientist in his embracing of the professor’s new form of ‘natural philosophy’ subtracted from the more innocent pursuit of ‘wonder’ in natural history. Nature, in contrast to science’s rationality, is here associated with the uncertain, larger realm of spiritual and instinctual knowledge. However, it is not in science’s inherent rationality that causes Victor to make his fatal mistake of trying to recreate the human structure, but in his distancing away from his family in the confines of his lab that resultantly, causes him to disassociate from his humanity and think that the secrets of Nature can be reduced to the “minuteness of parts” (53). As Victor narrates in retrospect later, the scientist “might dissect, anatomise, and give names; but her immortal lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery... (keeping) human beings from entering the citadel of nature” (40).

The process of Victor’s creation of the monster from the “intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins” (53) is especially significant. He digs the “unhallowed damps of the grave” and “torture(s)... living animal(s)” with an ironically “supernatural enthusiasm” (51) to “animate... lifeless clay” (54) in a parody of Prometheus. He desires to theorise the creation myth itself, mistakenly thinking that the root of life comes from the grave. He becomes an ‘anti-God’, pulling together disparate parts from the recesses of churchyards. His belief that one has to “first have recourse to death” through the study of cadavers in order to “examine the causes of life” (51) cites the absence of a superstitious fear in death as an unknown, ominous, indeed unknowable entity. His studious belief that “wonderful man” will have victory over death shows the delusions that may exist when the scientist thinks he can master Nature with his instruments of rationality. The scientist, at close proximity to his microscope, in conquering disease gains the false impression that the grandeurs present in the all-encompassing Nature can, likewise, be tamed. Herein stems the roots of Victor’s god delusion: as the ‘modern’ Prometheus, Victor mistakenly thinks he can recreate the “principle of life” (51) with reductive scientific thinking, thereby perfecting a superior race outside the realm of Nature. Thus, he discredits the reproductive capacities of the female and the power of Nature, thinking he can lay control on all life. In the “solitary chamber, at the top of the house” (55) divorced from humanity and the season’s cycles, Victor undergoes the delusion that the tumours the “incipient disease”(57) of science produces from the grave will be redeemed by the subsequent beauty of its results. However, the “beauty of (that) dream vanish(es)” (57) with the reality of science’s grotesque face when the “shrine-dedicated lamp” (38) of the female influence (herein associated with all-encompassing Nature and the more accessible forces of Elizabeth and the communal sphere) is completely removed as Victor becomes increasingly obsessed with the (re) creation of life.

Shelley seems to imply, however, that the communal, matriarchal realm cannot be so easily put away as Victor sets his ‘false prophets’- Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, formerly the “lords of (his) imagination” (41)- aside for the study of rational science. Victor, in desiring to recreate life, portrays the inevitable longing of the scientist for the lost matriarchal realm. Like Victor, he desires “continual food for discovery and wonder” (50). In other words, he wants knowledge to nourish him like a mother. Thus, Victor’s seeking of the “active principle of life” (51) can be seen as a search for the ultimate mother figure that he loses in his relentless pursuit of singular knowledge. It is the natural reaction of the modern scientist in having to “exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth” (54). Likewise, Victor’s main motivation is that “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs” (54). Here, it can be seen that, even in the modern scientist, there is a ‘womb anxiety’- an innate desire to ‘retreat’ and reconcile with the lost feminine force that can only be accessed through Nature, family and the communal realm. In Victor’s monster, Shelley likens the production of knowledge to the creation of an essentially vital entity. In desiring to recreate the biological force through the pursuit of knowledge, thus, Victor essentially desires to create a being that will provide him with sustenance. However, due to his education, he makes the fatal mistake of thinking that by mastering- in itself a patriarchal act- human life through the instrumental logic of science, he can regain contact with the lost female force. Victor “attempts to usurp (the)... biological female function... (refusing) to accept the limitations of his male identity”. In doing so, he “trespasses divine territory, (and)... challenges the divinely ordained, natural procreative role of the female” (Kiely 64)4. Thus, in the ‘world without mothers’ of modern science, the creation of knowledge can be seen as a result of needing to compensate for the loss of a vitalistic force. In Victor’s case, this becomes the catalyst for his destruction when he decides he does not need the female force and can reproduce life asexually. The Victorian scientist- in his devaluing of the powers of the female realm- becomes a comical figure in trying to uncover the secrets of life using essentially lifeless, mechanical instruments.

However, in attributing his fate to the “immutable laws” (42) of “Chance” and “the Angel of Destruction” (45), Victor subconsciously adheres to the secret feminine power of Nature- here, an inherently greater, ‘sublime’, unconquerable entity- in his belief of superstition. Superstition, here,

4 Robert Kiely. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, MA, 1972.

is associated with the realm of intuition, a female instinct; like old Gods become demons, intuition is debased in Victorian society into something inherently anachronistic. Thus, even though the Victorian scientist desired to obliterate disease from humankind in his vision of a utopian humanism, he was inevitably confined within certain limits. The scientist may have suffered delusions of being able to confine the natural world into the structures of scientific reasoning; however, new ‘natural’ science, due to its unnatural properties, becomes a perversion, just as the monster can be seen as Science’s deformed progeny. Thus, in privileging superstition and allocating the deformity of the monster to ‘Chance’, Shelley inverts the conventional Victorian conception of superstition as irrational, revealing the need to acknowledge the potency of such feminine forces in rational discourses such as science.

Victor’s romantic voyage with Clerval can, in this light, be interpreted as another search for the lost sublimity of Nature he experienced in childhood. He desires to re-enter the feminine womb of nature by beholding it like the poet, reconciling with the lost, repressed feminine forces he rejects in choosing the solitary life of the scientist over familial community. He seeks “the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature... astonishment” (Burke5), journeying through glaciers and vast mountains hoping to, in the “brawling waves” of “imperial nature” (96), find solace and indeed, they do provide him with momentary reprieve. As he states, contemplating nature “elevated (him) from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove (his) grief, they subdued and tranquillized it” (96). However, as he has already conquered the natural world within the structures of science with his discovery of the secret of the ultimate ‘principle of life’, Nature’s wonder no longer holds any solace for there is nothing within its limits that can cause him true astonishment. Thus, Victor’s

5 Edmund Burke. On the Sublime and Beautiful. Vol. XXIV, Part 2. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001. www.bartleby.com/24/2/.

reprieve is short-lived, and as early as the next morning this newfound tranquility “fled with sleep, and dark melancholy clouded every thought” (96). The lost authentic connection to ‘something greater’- the spiritual, motherly force- evades him.

Shelley, however, does not completely debase science into the regions of the narcissistic imaginings of the modern mind in its desire to recreate itself. To the contrary, she gives Victor a chance to redeem himself. If Victor had nurtured the monster by relearning maternal instinct and undertaking creative responsibility, he could have been saved by his monster’s gratitude for his creator. However, Victor fails to realise the necessity of taking maternal responsibility over the creation of his progeny and abandons his monster, not even bothering to give it a name. Due to the lack of the female influence, he lacks sympathy for the monster, reducing the issue of paternal responsibility to the weight of his rights over the small “portion of happiness” (144) he would be able to bestow his monster. Instead of taking the sympathetic view as Prometheus did in his giving of fire to man, he “reduce(s) (the issue) to an opposition between self and other” (Gilligan 256), speaking in the language of debt and obligation rather than that of the maternal responsibility a creator should feel for his child. Pity is similar to sympathy which, as James Joyce states, “arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the sufferer”. Terror, in contrast, “is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause” (Joyce 239)7. Likewise, Victor’s failure at pity and embracing of terror is a failing to realise that “creation is always an associative or nurturing act: a creator recognises the inherent capabilities of his/her

6 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Reissue ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print.
7 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (The Modern Library; Random house, Inc.), p. 239.

progeny (whether that progeny takes the for of a child, an idea, or a monster) and moulds the fashions it it in the context most suitable for its development and success” (Hustis 855)8. In other words, in the inherently single-minded pursuit of science, the scientist often overlooks the creative responsibility he possesses in the act of creation, a lesson that can only be obtained when one understands one’s obligation to humanity and that human kind is inherently connected to each other.

However, Shelley does not paint a completely stark picture of modern science. Rather, she proposes that Victor needs to be 'humanised' by returning 'home' to the more matriarchal realm of familial values in which communication and the sharing of knowledge is a characteristic. Shelley criticises the English idea that a liberal arts education- a pre-requisite for the scientific profession in Oxford- is the solution to ‘soften’ science. After all, Clerval, who is shown throughout the novel as possessing a child-like enthusiasm for the natural world, is stated to have been “debarred from a liberal education” (44) . Rather, she stresses the need of humanly ties and the importance of the scientific community- the communal ‘matriarchal’ influence- in 'neutralising' scientific knowledge. All in all, Victor’s monster is not a disavowal of science, but a progressive look at how it can be transformed into something benefitting mankind with the right ‘tools’. Although Nature- in modernity- has been permanently deformed, the solution does not strictly lie in a romantic regression into the sublime (the Romantic poet’s solution), but in the embracing of such deformity by the sharing of knowledge in a scientific community that emphasises communication between research fields.

8 Harriet Hustis, “Responsible Creativity and the “Modernity” of Mary Shelley’s Prometheus”, SEL 43, 4 (Autumn 2003): 845-858

Works Cited

"Burke, Edmund. 1909. 14. On the Sublime and Beautiful. Vol. 24, Part 2. The Harvard Classics." Bartleby.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2010. .

Ellwood, Robert, ‘Myth, Gnosis, and Modernity,’ from The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell (SUNY Press, 2004), 1-35. Print.

Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Reissue ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print.

Hustis, Harriet, “Responsible Creativity and the “Modernity” of Mary Shelley’s Prometheus”, SEL 43, 4 (Autumn 2003): 845-858. Print.

Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (The Modern Library; Random house, Inc.), p. 239. Print.

Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, MA, 1972. Print. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein (Oxford Classics). 1818. Reprint. London: Oxford
University Press, 1980. Print.

Identity, Ethics and the production of Genre as seen in the character of Faye Valentine of Cowboy Bebop

Amy Goh #260354243
EAST 214: Japanese Animation and New Media
Professor Heather Mills, Professor Gye-won Kim
20th March 2010

Ethics, Identity, and the Production of Genre as seen in the Character of Faye Valentine of Cowboy Bebop

Cowboy Bebop, in its mixing of the Western, noir, and cyberpunk, presents itself as a revolutionary ‘super-generic’ work. However, it takes this a step further, addressing the essentially materialistic issues that occur with such a transformation through the temporal fluidity of its protagonists who are eternally straddling a lost past and a future essential to their survival. In other words, even though diversion from genre verisimilitude makes a production much more appealing and culturally relevant to its audience, this evolution is not an innocent dialectical transformation into an ideal as presented by Hegel’s dialectic1, but operates within a capitalist system of production and is based, thus, essentially on materialist relations of power, hierarchy and profit. Cowboy Bebop, in its hybridisation of genres, utilises the nostalgic attachment to the past apparent in the temporally unstable world of the Western, the dissatisfaction with the present in noir, and the technologically saturated futurity of cyberpunk where masculine structures dominate to address the issue of attachment inherent in the transition to a present imperative in the genre industry. This essay will address specifically the sacrifice generic hybridity makes in its obligation to a present essential to its survival through the character of Faye in Cowboy Bebop, as well as the issues at stake in the production of genre virtuosity.

1 Hegel posits that history is a dialectical process by which the process of change serves to advance civilisation to an ultimate “Ideal”. In this light, the deeply rooted problems of society are seen as transitory issues that will eventually be overcome by evolutionary dialectics.

Faye’s character is a paradoxical one: she confuses ideas of gender, desire, time and identity in her body and actions, transgressing and re-inventing conventional definitions of gendered identity and audience identification present in classical cinema. On one hand, she embodies femininity through her sexually suggestive clothing, yet her actions are crass and language loud. Faye’s temporality is also confused- she is transported from the past to the distinct future through suspended animation, leaving a gap of experiential time where she did not exist as a person. She constantly longs for a past lost which she is sure will reveal her identity to her, yet she is materially tied to the present for her own survival and in order to pay a material debt to the company that preserved her body. In this aspect, Faye embodies the very nature of genre and the sacrifice it makes in being part of institutionalised companies and the commercial production of meaning. In other words, she reflects genre as not merely an innocent form of social communication- a “cultural language whereby America understands itself” (Gledhill 68)2- as posited by Wright, but a product of “popular culture” that is, as a rule, governed by “market pressures to differentiate to a limited degree in order to cater to various sectors of consumers and to repeat commercially successful patterns, ingredients, and formulas” (Neale 177)3. Film is, ultimately, a commodity, and hence, the generic system that structures its place in the film industry obeys economic rather than aesthetic rules. As a result, psychoanalytical anxieties of lost origins re-emerge in this innately disruptive and opportunistic regime. In Cowboy Bebop, Faye’s narrative becomes the platform by which “conscious and unconscious, self and other, part and whole meet” (Williams 711)4 to address the primordial anxieties present in generic transformation when the film product is deducted from the realm of aesthetics and put in the system of market forces and economic relations.5

In conventional cinema, identification and spectatorship is orientated toward the masculine audience in the conception of a central, male subject; in such an axis, the female body becomes the “primary embodiments of pleasure, fear and pain” (Williams 704). Similarly, in the traditional Western movie, the female exists solely as the object of masculine, heterosexual desire for the male protagonist, ensuing female identification with the central hero. As a result, her body is inevitably saturated with sexuality. Her sensationalised body- the portrait of her body in the crux of “out-of-control ecstasy” (Williams 704)- becomes the spectacle by which the instruments of identification can take place in the audience towards the male protagonist. Naturally, this presents the problem of identification in female spectatorship as the female, in identifying with the male protagonist, inevitably undermines her own femininity.

Note: According to Williams, “Body genres” like pornography, horror and melodrama feature a sensationalised on-screen body that “produces” on the bodies of spectators an “almost involuntary mimicry of emotion or sensation of the body on screen”. Here, she attributes the power of such works lies in their ability to evoke fluids in the watcher. It is for this reason that "horror makes you scream, melodrama makes you cry, porn makes you “come”.

Faye, however, subverts this with the autonomy of her narrative and the ferocity of her femininity. She possesses her own narrative independent from the men she surrounds herself with, propelling her story arc through her own actions. Likewise, even though Spike and Jet are her partners, this union is motivated by her own selfish interests- Faye, ultimately, is an opportunist, unafraid to manipulate situations to get her way. Also, Faye does not shy away from using her femininity as a tool to hunt her bounties, understanding the power of her femininity in rendering men speechless and, as such, wears revealing, sexually charged clothing. However, she does this while toting a gun, a blatantly phallic symbol charged with masculine power. In a way, her trademark is that of an alluring smile that glints like a knife’s edge- a laugh, supplemented by the brashness of a gunshot. In this way, Faye re-appropriates her femininity to manipulate men, privileging the power of the feminine in her ability to turn the tables and make the men of her choosing the spectacle by borrowing masculine strength through the form of the gun. Instead of the female body serving as the sensationalised object of viewer fixation, thus, the male body becomes the site of gendered excess by which extreme emotions of pain, fear and horror are inflicted. Thus, she manipulates the politics of power present in conventional genres of excess in her subversion of the spectacle of the female body as the primary site of excess by making her male victims bleed, convulse and crumble in the shower of her bullets. The sensationalised body, here, becomes that of the male, causing the audience to identify with the female protagonist rather than the male specimens on which violence is inflicted. Thus, Faye could be said to constitute a new kind of “femininity of men who hug and the new masculinity of women who leer” (Williams 710). Her militant femininity is progressive in its nature, reflecting a contemporary tendency to privilege the female over the male. In this aspect, she embodies the dialectic nature of genre and its ability to manipulate constantly culturally evolving concepts of gender identity and politics to its advantage in order to seem progressive and hence, attract an audience.

5 The realm of the economic can be posited as “patriarchal” in its structuring of emotive and economic energies and the realm of aesthetics “matriarchal” in its privileging of emotions and feeling. However, it is beyond the scope of this essay to address this issue in an in-depth way.

Likewise, Neale (168) states that genres “do not exist by themselves; they are named and placed within hierarchies or systems of genres, and each is defined by reference to the system and its members” (Neale 168), and that genre virtuosity is a product of the fact that “individual genres... themselves change, develop, and vary by borrowing from, and overlapping with, one another” (Neale 171) in order to “cater for a sector of the market” (Neale 177). The system genre operates under, thus, is a structured regime enforcing controlling operations in order for its own survival. It operates, thus, by the patriarchal control and structuring of power relations through market forces and audience interest, raising up the issue of ethics in the formation of its ideologies. Even though meanings and norms are repeatedly re-worked and revised to produce audience interest, it is done so for “economic imperatives”, and not “self-expression, creative autonomy and originality”. It is, thus, never “(free) from all constrictions and constraints” (Neale 177).

Likewise, the cynicism that saturates Faye’s outlook reflects the materialist values that propel the production of genre hybridity. Even though Faye relentlessly uses her femininity to reassert her gendered power as female, she does not do this out of a shared female solidarity with others of her sex, but rather for personal profit. She is essentially an opportunist, squeezing what she can for her own survival in a profession wherein economic security isn’t assured- bounty hunters, after all, are tied ironically in a subordinate position to the bounties they chase. She understands that as a lone female in a world governed by patriarchal systems (embodied on one level by the dominance of technology and the other on the absence of women), she must operate by cunning and the skills she possesses. In such a world, masculine structures of economic relations dominate; thus, feminine relations of emotions, ideas and feelings are neglected. Faye, however, navigates around this dystopian world presided by technology effortlessly in her ship Red Tail, catching up with her male peers and even standing her ground in aerial fights against Spike. Thus, she utilizes all she has for all her survival, recognizing the lifting of her mask of feminine strength will result in her downfall.

Faye’s femininity, thus, is divorced from the collective female body and its fight for gendered equality in the broader political context of social action, serving purely a tool she utilizes for her own survival in order to generate a living and pay her debt. Her interests are, ultimately, selfish and monetarily motivated and thus, removed from her contemporary ‘feminists’. As such, it lacks the empowering nature of feminism in its noble promise of effecting actual historical change. Here, her materialism can be said to reflect the impurity of the generic expressions of ideas. Even though conventional ideas about gender, identity and sexuality are constantly transformed and re-made in the production of a continuous strand of transgressive characters and subjects, this is done not for humanitarian reasons, but purely for the film’s survival in a harsh industry that relentlessly exploits the politics of desire and expectation. Film is, thus, dissimilar from canonized literature in the fact it is not a pure expression of the human heart’s conditions in its material obligations to its commercial market and its position in the generic ‘regime’ where the play of ideas serves as another commodity that can be bought and sold.

However, Faye’s embracing of masculine traits and manipulating of gendered re-appropriations to assure her own survival also results in a melancholy she carefully hides under a mask of ambivalent, cultivated cynicism. She longs for the purity for ‘free expression’ divorced from the present imperative. Her depiction ‘new feminism’, thus, is ultimately removed from her identity. In a way, it is merely a tool she uses for her ultimate goal- the search for a lost past which she is sure will return to her what she loses in sacrificing her own integrity for her survival.

The temporality of Faye’s body is, in this light, particularly interesting in the way it transitions directly from the past to the future through a process of suspended animation done in order to save her life after a space shuttle accident. In this sense, she embodies the fluid nature of time inherent in genre. Genre floats between different historicities and cultural milieus, borrowing and using what it finds useful to construct a new kind of virtuosity relevant and appealing to the culture it speaks to. Likewise, Faye is temporally fluid, embodying both an absent past and a future imperative. Her temporality can be seen, thus, as both ‘too early’ and ‘too late’ in light of William’s discourse in which the temporality of the subject in genre films is connected to the originary fantasy it evokes through its perversions. Even though Faye dances about space dodging bullets and possesses the settings she occupies, the fertility of her actions does not result in any successful bounties gained, thus becoming inherently farcical in their futile nature. This is partly attributed to the temporality of her body itself. In transitioning straight into the future, she constantly evokes a past forever compromised in genre’s obligation to the present. Neale addresses this, stating that the evolution of genre is not a “continuous ‘development,’ but rather in the sense of a ‘struggle’ and ’break’ with immediate predecessors through a contemporary recourse to something older” (Neale 173). Even though genre continues to “change, develop, and vary by borrowing from, and overlapping with, one another” (Neale 171), it does this by the disruption of each of the elements it borrows from. In other words, generic hybridisation is an intrinsically disruptive process that constantly ravages past historicities to propel its own survival in the market. By tearing apart heterogeneous elements in genre virtuosity, thus, genre destroys the integrity of the past it borrows from, rendering the homogenous organic ‘whole’ a wasteland of disparate parts. Thus, even though genre borrows from past historical conventions and present cultural trends, it does so at the stake of the past’s identity. Faye particularly reflects this in the way her progressive femininity is undermined by her psychological immaturity. Her melancholy, in this light, can be seen as a consequence of the brutality of identity disruption inherent in genre transformation. This is particularly apparent in a moment in the episode “Hard Luck Woman”6 where, having recalled a piece of a past while watching the water spurt out of her shower head, Faye walks out of the shower and bumps into Spike. Her mask of feminine power falls away, and she starts like a little girl, stuttering a “sorry… I… have to go” to a startled Spike. This moment is particularly revealing, as it is one of the few instances we see her without her sexually provocative attire in a fully exposed, emotionally vulnerable state. For a moment, we glimpse in Faye’s suddenly unveiled innocence what is truly at stake in genre’s relentless pursuit of an audience- namely, the loss of identity that inevitably results in a regression to a childlike state. Herein lies the innate tragedy of generic transformation- in its ‘evolution’, it inevitably raises primordial, psychological issues that deal with the self, the past and the integrity of identity. Thus, even though generic transformation is imperative- just as the preservation of Faye’s body is essential for her survival in the future-, it is innately problematic in its disruptive nature.

Likewise, Faye’s journey back to her homeland reveals the innate ruthlessness of generic production and the primordial anxieties it consequently raises. In this instance, Faye, having remembered a piece of her lost past, ventures back to Earth but, rather than uncovering a kernel of her lost identity, finds the land laid waste and devoid of inhabitants. She is greeted by an old classmate, who starts at Faye’s youthful appearance. She mistakes Faye for a ghost, who ironically replies that she is a ghost, before running away. Here, we see the vampiric nature of genre production and the way it leaves all it borrows from to a process of decay having sucked up what it needs for its own transformation. In the wake of its catapult into the future, thus, it ravages the past, leaving wastelands and deserts in its relentless re-working of past trends for its own survival. As Faye ‘evolves’ in order to survive by claiming a militant femininity, she leaves behind her old comrades and friends, herself becoming a ‘ghost’. Hers is not a successful transition from a past to a future (reflected on a psychological level in the transition from childhood to adulthood), but a violent start up to the present. Thus, she inevitably leaves behind a lost self- a ‘ghost’- in forsaking her childhood for a future that demands her attention. The authenticity of Faye’s identity in the ‘now’, thus, gets called into question, as the audience can no longer be sure of which of her traits is manufactured and which is real. In a sense, Faye ‘fades’ like a ghost, possessing more of a phantom-like existence as her past catches up with her.

Faye’s confusion of temporality, hence, reflects the fatalistic conditions present in hybridisation, revealing genre’s ability to float freely through space and time results always in a confusion of identity and a certain ‘lack’ or gap. This gap lies between “an irrecoverable real event that took place somewhere in the past and a totally imaginary event that never took place” (Williams 712) that is always present in the destruction of temporal and spatial boundaries. This ‘lack’ haunts genre’s transformation like a ghost, saturating the actions and outlooks of all those involved in its creation. Williams defines this as the “insoluble problem of the discrepancy between an irrecoverable original experience (a real event) presumed to have actually taken place… and the uncertainty of its hallucinatory revival” (Williams 712). Just as Faye is constantly seeking for a lost past she believes will reveal her true self, genre will always leaves behind a vacancy- a lacunae- imbued with loss in its evolution. There is always, thus, a nostalgia inextricable from genre tied intimately to its materialism and its need to produce meaningful content in order to be relevant to the present for its own survival. In the formation of “the bourgeois subject (Williams 713)”- that of Faye, in this case- the anxiety of the origin myth is invoked, raising up issues of identity inextricable from the discourse of generic hybridisation.

Genre is always governed by a set of rules and obligations to present industrial, commercial and institutional conditions. The production of new, progressive generic categories guarantees a maintenance of audience interest by re-inventing the subject in order to ensure viewership identification. Unlike canonised literature, thus, the production of generic categories is not a product of a ‘freedom of expression’, but the result of materialist conditions present in the film and anime industry. Faye reflects this by re-working the politics of identification, switching the seat of spectator identification from that of the male to that of the female. Moreover, in her portrayal of a new militant feminism, she projects a progressive idea of femininity, thus remaining culturally relevant to a society in which “the patriarchal unified subject” has collapsed, together with “the dialectics of Spirit, (and) the hermeneutics of meaning” (Wolmark 5)7, ensuing Cowboy Bebop’s continual appeal.

However, the overall ironic nature of all of Faye’s endeavours and the cynicism that soaks her outlook reflects a new self-consciousness that has risen in our post-modern era wherein the look is inverted and the signifier brought to the forefront over the signified. In this light, Cowboy Bebop can be said to be reflective of a new post-modern generic category of self-critical, ironic, ‘avant-garde’ works that has arisen due to the audience’s increasing awareness of culture as a form of artifice and hence, genre’s need to re-invent itself with the creation of another category of desire. Cowboy Bebop reflects this trend, taking an ironical, self-critical stance on genre hybridisation, acknowledging its own need to tear apart past trends to remain culturally appealing, yet constantly reflecting back on the process that makes its cult status possible. In it’s transgressive nature, thus, Cowboy Bebop is able to provide a revealing portrait of the post-industrial world to an audience rendered increasingly disillusioned with the reaping of desire in the commercial market. However, ironically, it is also in it’s transgressive nature that Cowboy Bebop is able to survive in the competitive anime market.

Works Cited

Cowboy Bebop Remix: Anime Legends. Dir. Sunrise Studios. Perf. Animation. Bandai Entertainment, 2008. DVD.

Gledhill, Christine. “The Western” in The Cinema Book. Print.

Neale, Steve. “Questions of Genre.” Print.

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Print.

Jenny Wolmark. “Introduction and Overview.” Print.

Tradition, Modernity, and the Archetype in Mushishi

EAST 214: Japanese Animation and New Media
Professor Heather Mills, Professor Gyewon Kim
15th February 2010

Tradition, Modernity, and the Archetype in Mushishi

In Mushishi, the audience is presented a solution to the modern loss of identity that occurred with the “Death of God” phenomenon through the archetypical figure of Genko who mediates between the world of tradition and modernity, as well as the dualities of light and darkness and sight and blindness. In addition, we are warned to the dangers of a “Freudian” regressing into the pre-modern consciousness1 in the imagining of the past as that of a rural, idyllic and unified utopia.

In the episode “Light of the Eyelid” 2, we are introduced to an alternative pre-modern world of rural villages as seen through the modern, cynical eye of Genko. Although this mythic world is shown to be a magical, marvelous universe populated by spiritual entities called mushi, they are “dangerous because they threaten the fabric of security” (Campbell 8)3 of the modern consciousness, causing and spreading diseases. Genko, acting as part folk healer, modern doctor, psychotherapist and collector of the weird, represents the progressive individual who seeks to overcome the pre-modern consciousness through a process of successful integration of selected archaic values- a symbolic psychological ‘healing’- into the kernels of the modern identity. His role, thus, is the modern equivalent “of the Wise Old Man of the myths”, “the modern master of the mythological realm, the knower of all the secret ways and words of potency” (Campbell 9), who is vital in enabling humankind to mediate between difficult, conflicting binaries.4

1 Joseph Campbell refers to this idea in his chapter “Myth and Dream” of “The Monomyth”, stating that, “the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid. We remain fixated to the un-exorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood”. Likewise, the re-emergence of the pre-modern consciousness can be the result of the unsuccessful integration of that realm from the ‘childhood’ of man into the ‘adulthood’ of modernity.

In the anime, mushi are described as “beings in touch with the essence of life, far more basic and pure than normal living beings”. They are ephemeral, unable to be perceived by the naked human eye. Only those with the power of supernatural sight- the mushi master or individuals with special sight- are able to see and interact with the mushi. In quintessence, mushi are entities that live beyond the physical level of consciousness; they can be likened to the essential matter of subconscious materialised in an outward form. They are creatures of both fear and awe analogous to the folk spirit, the foundation from which superstition and folk belief stem from. They project the idea that there is a level to human perception and understanding that cannot be comprehended by the modern Enlightenment-influenced mindset. This is the anarchic world of superstition, tradition and the rural village. In this world, yokai and spiritual deities live among humans, in forests and in objects. Here, God is a living entity existing in Nature. It is, thus, in direct conflict with the modern world and naturally an attractive counterpoint to the atomised modern neurosis of Jung’s “mass man” whose “rootedness and depersonalisation amid the masses of the modern industrial city seemed like a dark parody of tribal collectivity” (Ellwood 28)5.

4 I refer to the Levi-Strauss’ theory stated in “The Structural Study of Myth” that myth serves as a structure that enables society to mediate between conflicting dualities that may pose a problem when presented at face value.

However, as anachronistic creatures, the mushi only arise to cause diseases in the modern world. They are the “vapours, odd beings, terrors… in dream, broad daylight, or insanity” (Campbell 8) that the unconscious manifests when the modern mind represses the traditional in his seeking of progress. In this particular episode, Sui gets afflicted with an eye disease caused by the yami mushi that thrive in darkness and is thus unable to go into the light, living all of her existence in the storage shed of Biki’s house. She is rendered, thus, immobile and unable to participate in daily life. Later, it is learnt that the reason for this is because when she opens her second eyelid- here, reminiscent of the ‘3rd eye’ of Indian mysticism-, she is lured by a strange river of light that enraptures her to the point in which she is not only unable, but unwilling, to close her second eyelid. Crossing the river, at any instance, would have proved fatal, furthering her from any chance of recovery. Her diagnosis by Genko is that she “spends too much time in the darkness”. Modern medicine cannot cure her, and only Genko can; ironically, he uses the apparatus of the modern doctor such as syringes, glass eyes and externally administrated medicine in the form of a tamed mushi, indicating a need to negotiate past and present realities through one’s resourcefulness rather than romantic affiliations. Furthermore, Sui’s disease can be seen as an example of how the traditional past can be damaging to the present, serving to add- rather than subtract- from the modern ‘sickness’. As a hero-healer figure, thus, Genko “retreat(s) from the world scene of secondary effects to those casual zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside” (Campbell 17), to the dark river of the subconscious in order to eradicate the now demonic ‘anti-matter’ psyche debris, manifested in the yami mushi.

Genko also plays the archetypical6 role of the ambivalent modern hero for the audience, serving as the mediator between the traditional and the modern. Genko’s mission is to move through villages ‘healing’ people from various diseases and afflictions inflicted by the mushi. Often, the motif of disappearance, blindness and getting lost reoccurs in the symptoms of the disease, indicating a connection to the danger of losing one’s identity to the past. Genko, in solving these cases, restores the identity, re-establishing a present, stable reality.

Moreover, Genko is a liminal figure, straddling the modern and pre-modern world. He moves through rural villages dressed in modern clothing, betraying his modern outlook with his blatant cynicism. He is divorced from the social conditions of rural Japan, not having to subscribe to their customs and traditions. Genko’s cynicism can be interpreted not so much as an intolerance in embracing the traditional world, but as stemming from an understanding of how this pre-modern world is a fragment of the past and thus, must be ‘put away’. Like Sui, he had crossed the river and lost his eye. Sight, in the Mushishi universe, is a recurrent, important motif. It represents the ability to see things as they actually are on the spiritual level (ability to see the mushi) and on a physical level (maturity, wisdom). Genko can be said to possess both forms of sight in his ability to see mushi, yet acknowledge the reality of the real world. However, he has a ‘second eyelid’ and is able to see the river of light made out of mushi. The sacrifice of sight, in Genko’s case, gives the audience some comfort that even Genko- purveyor of modernity- succumbed to the romantic tendency of desiring to ‘cross the river’ into a deeper darkness. As a heroic figure, he becomes the “scapegoat for (the modern mind’s) fear and… guilt” (Leeming 267), descending into the ‘underworld’ of the lake and emerging alive and “transfigured... (to)… teach the lesson” (Campbell 20) of its dangers. The darkness of the world beneath the second eyelid, thus, is the darkness of Aladdin’s cave. It is the consequence of leaving the present for a stagnant past that ensnares, rather than liberates. Thus, in the portrayal of Genko, the audience is reminded that everyone has the tendency to want to ‘regress’ to the world of romanticism that Gnosticism projects in its promises of salvation; however, one has to ‘move on’, ‘reject the river’ in order for one’s psychological health.

The river made out of yami mushi, in this episode, represents the attractive light of the past- it is the internal light of the folk that resonates from the river that holds the Gnostic promise that the past will provide salvation. It is made out of a different element of earthly light- the mushi- which Genko states is harmful and represents escapism into the primordial realm of the traditional past. In the anime, Biki states “It was so pretty I felt myself being pulled towards it. I wanted to stare at it forever”. Likewise, the light of the past is alluring, beautiful but dangerous, and when Biki spends too long with Sui in the darkness, he contracts her disease and gets dragged into the darkness. Thus, the anime acknowledges the past is awe-inspiring, beautiful, and romantic to the modern eye, but in this allure there is a danger that is potentially fatal. If one mediates too long upon it, one suffers potential irreversible damage- Sui, in the anime, suffers the loss of her eyeballs as they get eaten up by the darkness. Likewise, when Sui embraces the light, she is bathed in light and is initiated to the beauty of the real, present world- that of trees, flowers and the sun. She enters “through the sun door (into) the (continuous) circulation of energy” (Campbell 42) of the earthly realm and is able to heal. It is stated, too, that she probably will never get lured into the strange light again now she has successfully exorcised it. She goes through katharsis “a purification… from sin and death” (Campbell 26).

However, there is a parallel to this dangerous light in the light of the daytime realm- that of the sun, which represents the promise of the future. The mushi are drawn naturally to light, wanting to come out into the consciousness of the psyche to disrupt the modern reality of progress: they are naturally antagonistic. When they emerge, though, they dissolve, wither, disappear, charred by the sun. They- like the mushi in Sui’s eye transforms into a dragon/serpent entity- transform from invisible, inscrutable entities to yokai. Like forgotten gods, they ‘metamorphose’ into monsters when neglected. This is reflective of the modern consciousness’ predicament: one fights a desire to cling onto a primordial world where universal values were held in great esteem, but has to deal with the realities of a disassociated, atomized existence. In our present world, the universe does not simply ‘disappear’, but lurks at the edge of the modern consciousness. Mushi are, here, like memories that need to be buried properly and given the appropriate funeral rites so one can move on psychologically. The mushi, however, only have power when one chooses to reside in the darkness, rejecting the present reality. When exposed to light, they disappear like the yami mushi disintegrates when Genko calls them out into the light. As the anime postulates toward the end, “it (was) perhaps for the better to those living for before that time. It is said that many had lost their eyesight from staring too much at the river of light”. In other words, it is a life/death imperative that one stays in the present light of the sun, and does not regress into the past, mythic world by “crossing the river”.

Finally, the fact that Sui is given a glass eye with a mushi injected into it by Genko seems evident of the necessity to restore a remnant of this old world in the modern framework. The pre-modern can be ‘tamed’ to Sui the modern. This seems to be Mushishi’s ultimate solution: one salvages what is useful to the present reality, and healing and (partial) wholeness is restored. However, as the modern man has lost an essential thing, he is forever lacking something. As Sui’s eye is constructed by the mechanics of science, our eyes are coloured by the rational, progressive outlook. We no longer possess ‘true sight’, having glass eyes. However, preserving a remnant of the mushi in our eyes helps us mediate between both ways of seeing, and live a spiritually healthier life. Ultimately, Mushishi teaches us that the solution to the modern problem of the loss of the spiritual consciousness is not a regression to “the primordial and eternal world” (Ellwood 7) of “small, self-contained idyllic villages” (Ellwood 5) envisioned by nineteenth century visionaries, but in confronting the past through a successful integration, and then moving on to the present life imperative.

In our modern era, there is a tendency to romanticize the past “as a repository for disappearing traditions” (Foster 139)8. However, in Mushishi, we are alerted to the dangers of such a mindset by the figures of mushi. Genko, in this case, brings to us a post-modern ‘elixir’9 as a counterpoint to Modern Gnosticism in the artful balancing the past and present. The present- in the end- is imperative and the past serves only as a curiosity we have to put into the museum of the past wherein they become relics to be admired by the modern eye just as Genko, inevitably, can’t help but collect artefacts of the mushi for seemingly ambivalent reasons. Having rightfully integrated memory into its rightful place, we are able to relish a more practical sanity in reality’s light, whatever historical milieu we happen to find ourselves in.

9 I refer to the stage of the hero’s life stated in Joseph Campbell’s theory of “The Monomyth” in which the hero returns, transfigured, with an ‘elixir’ to transform his society

Works Cited

Mushi-shi: The Complete Series. Dir. Hiroshi Nagahama. Perf. Yûto Nakano, Travis Willingham, Kenny Green, Randy Tallman, Mika Doi. Funimation, 2007. DVD.

Campbell, Joseph. “Prologue: The Monomyth”. Print.

David Adam Leeming. “Introduction: The Meaning of the Myth” . Print.

Doty, William A. “Definitions and Classifications”. Print.

Foster, Michael Dylan. Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai. University of California Press, 2008. Print.

Thury, Eva and Devinney, Margaret. “The Structural Study of Myth: Claude Lévi-Strauss”. Print.