Part Two: Images of the Madwoman in Anime

III. Images of the Madwoman in Anime

The cultural history of Japanese women offers abundant material for understanding female characters in Japanese animation. It also reaffirms that an inquiry into the madwoman does not focus only on women in pathological states; rather, it concerns bodies that take female form, disrupt order, escape discipline, and cannot be reasoned with. The former, pathological understanding is itself a product of knowledge and power’s governance of the latter, closely bound to modern medical discourse.¹ Clearly, the many “madwomen” in Japanese animation are understood primarily through everyday experiences shared within a social culture, not through rigorous scientific discourse. Moe attributes such as darkening (heihua) and yandere describe a character’s mental derangement without requiring medical substantiation within the plot. “Madness” here is entirely a matter of feeling and of the subject’s experience of an encounter, bound up with the complex ways audiences and works act upon one another and with cultural conventions. Examining feeling—or perception—in its relationship to bodily experience is therefore an important part of analyzing the madwoman in anime. This is particularly evident in her “eyes” and her “smile.”

1. Eyes without Highlights

The “madwoman” is first associated with dark tones. Before Jane Eyre first hears Bertha, the text devotes considerable space to the surroundings Jane encounters while exploring the house: cold, gloomy corridors, strange portraits, a narrow passage, a small window, two rows of shut black doors.…² These descriptions prompt readers to imagine the house’s unsettling atmosphere. “Small window,” “narrow,” and “cold and gloomy” suggest insufficient light and surrounding darkness. Darkness refers not only to low levels of visible light but also to a wealth of cultural meanings: the dark side of things and of human nature, or the evil power in Christian and Zoroastrian dualisms. Dark surroundings often conceal unknown threats and inspire fear. Jung likewise uses the alchemical term nigredo, or blackening, for the subject’s dark side concealed deep in the unconscious.³ Originally referring to putrefaction and decomposition in alchemy, Jung introduced the term into psychoanalysis, describing it as the soul’s dark night when the individual confronts the shadow. It describes both a chaotic unity in which consciousness is indistinguishable from the unconscious during psychic genesis and an abyss of despair that the subject necessarily encounters in individuation.⁴ This description closely resembles the meaning of the popular moe-culture term “darkening.”⁵ From either perspective, “dark” symbolizes a condition of primitive, chaotic impulses and struggle.

To establish and present the terrible threat embodied by the madwoman, animation first “darkens” the image, especially emphasizing the loss of control over the female figure’s body by casting it in shadow. A particularly representative effect is “eyes without highlights,” sometimes accompanied by a ferocious face with enlarged whites and shrunken eyeballs and pupils. This device has important symbolic meaning. It connects the image of a woman’s psychic collapse to the sociocultural question of perceptual apparatuses acting on the body.

Darkness is both a condition of insufficient light and, at a psychic and cultural level, a color that produces unease and fear. “Eyes without highlights” visually unite these two routes of expression. Such eyes in a female character generally suggest two things in succession. First, she has suffered an unimaginable psychic blow: the severing of a vital relationship, the destruction of a belief, or extreme humiliation such as rape or other violence. In episode 19 of The Rose of Versailles, Charlotte, the younger daughter of the Countess de Polignac, is forced into marriage with a duke and cannot be with Oscar, whom she loves. She falls into just such a state of psychic collapse: standing in wind and rain, hair flying, the highlights disappearing from her eyes, pupils shrinking and whites expanding, she flails her limbs and laughs aloud.… Second, after this violent psychic shock, the character cannot control herself, as though hypnotized. The 1996 bishōjo game, or galgame, Gakuen Triangle, for instance, uses eyes without highlights to indicate that a character “does not respond to stimuli from the outside world.”⁶ In episode 1 of Fate/Zero, the young Sakura Matou lies motionless in the “training room,” eyes vacant, after days of torment by crest worms. In episode 12 of the television series School Days, a shattered Sekai Saionji repeatedly drives a knife into the fallen Makoto Itō. They are either unmoved or repeat an action mechanically. No others remain in their eyes—not even themselves. The states described in these last three examples truly reveal the subject’s internal division. “Not responding to stimuli from the outside world” means losing attention, a complete dispersal of consciousness. At the most immediate level, what we first see is usually a Cartesian subject, manifesting the dualistic division of mind and body. Consciousness can neither feel bodily stimuli nor control the ravaged flesh. Abandoning attention to bodily reality is the subject’s effort to stave off collapse. At the end of the second film of Fate/stay night [Heaven’s Feel]—hereafter HF—adapted from the famous bishōjo game, Shinji Matou attempts to force Sakura Matou into sex. Initially, Sakura’s eyes without highlights and her passive endurance indicate the following process: through an effort of will, she actively relinquishes control of her body, telling herself to endure. Bearing humiliation presupposes the mind’s superiority to the body. Self-consciousness becomes the vehicle for maintaining the subject’s coherence, making it possible to preserve the purity of consciousness—as though this could prove that we experience our own existence through coherent perception.

Yet the deeper significance of these eyes lies not simply in a division between subject and consciousness, but in an unceasing, contradictory movement encompassing consciousness’s self-dissolution and the reterritorialization of that dissolution. The coherence of self-consciousness is precisely a false, constructed consciousness—a fantasy—produced by modernity’s governance of perception. As Jonathan Crary suggests, historical research into vision has shown that the possibility of thinking presence through perception has disappeared definitively in history. Attention becomes a simulation of that presence, yet also a substitute embodying its impossibility.⁷ The notion of a coherent subject is shaken as never before. Attention becomes a problem for modernity’s governance of subjects: first an object to be governed, but also a site where perception escapes and governance fails. The separation of girls’ bodies from their Soul Gems in Puella Magi Madoka Magica exaggerates the Cartesian subject. Mind–body dualism utterly destroys a body schema founded on their wholeness. When Sayaka Miki realizes that her body is merely an empty shell that stops functioning once separated from her Soul Gem, fear of the possible dissolution of consciousness destroys embodied cognition and casts doubt on the subject’s position. Sayaka faces not only a crisis of disappointed love but also the profound self-doubt of the modern subject. “Eyes without highlights” mean not only that perception withdraws its attention from the body and turns elsewhere, but also that this elsewhere can no longer be grasped. States resembling hypnosis and sleepwalking push a contradiction of attention to the extreme. The process of hypnosis shows that the subject enters a trance and completely loses autonomous control only when attention is intensely mobilized and concentrated on a narrow object. Once hypnotized, the subject is controlled by another yet, paradoxically, also presents a crisis beyond rational control. A typical example is murder under hypnosis: with consciousness dispersed, the murderer is not considered to possess autonomous reason and therefore cannot “normally” become an object of legal punishment. Like efforts to govern the mad, efforts to govern the hypnotized—those whose attention has completely dissolved—generate new discourses of power, technologies of governance, and corresponding cultures of fear. As Crary describes it, hypnosis was regarded as a practice leading to automatic processes—lower, more instinctual processes, always associated with animality—rather than a rational process eliciting the patient’s conscious participation and willpower.⁸ Rather than animality, what it elicits is precisely (female) corporeality. To be hypnotized means that the state, society, and patriarchal consciousness have failed to manage the body; it means surrendering one’s fate to the automatic operation of bodily sensation. The hypnotized person becomes like the wandering body, the madwoman who escapes control, posing a grave threat both to social administration and to the subject’s pursuit of coherent consciousness.

The visual device of “eyes without highlights” depicts the loss of self in darkened or yandere women. In a narrowed application of Crary’s argument, it expresses a logic of estrangement from order. The dissolution of attention sacrifices not only the subject’s consciousness but also the efficacy of the moral norms acting upon her. Reflection on the causes of darkening consequently seems beside the point. Although female characters’ darkening is often closely bound to patriarchal fixations—being unloved by men, losing chastity—as well as physical violence, what matters is that these darkened characters produce an antipatriarchal consciousness and a castrating power, also making themselves their own continual opponents. Letting go of attention to—that is, control over—the body and willingly sinking into degradation constitute this endless process of opposition and compromise, a strategy of sexual perversion that mocks the order of paternal law. Sayaka Miki, for instance, madly tortures and kills witches, heedless of damage to her own body. Yet this “letting go” produces attention to letting go itself. The oscillation is directly visible between the dissolution of attention signaled by absent highlights and the text’s control as it recaptures attention. The ending of HF’s second film again concentrates this process. Between Sakura’s preparing to endure Shinji’s humiliation and her resistance to him, the actual movement of attention becomes complicated. Her consciousness concentrates on the attempt to stop concentrating. She tells herself, “Don’t think about it. It’ll be over soon,” yet cannot disperse her attention and must instead focus on the horror of being sexually assaulted. This is precisely a manifestation of patriarchal consciousness redirecting attention. The repeated injunction “Don’t think about it” produces attention—or, in Freudian terms, represses an unconscious conflict: she is actually deeply concerned with Shirou’s ownership of her body. This patriarchal discourse immediately manifests itself in Sakura’s first resistance to Shinji. That bodily resistance also rehearses her full descent into darkness, the second dissolution of attention. The perceptual disintegration brought by darkening overcomes bodily restraint. When Shinji resorts to violence, Sakura despairs at the realization that ultimately she cannot resist him, and kills him almost without conscious awareness. The animation undoubtedly gives visual form to this relationship between the body and technologies of governance. What the Dark Grail conceals is Angra Mainyu’s consciousness, not Sakura’s. Yet their relationship unexpectedly reproduces that between consciousness and the unconscious, between perception’s false presence and its suspension.

But Sakura’s suspension of perception reaches its end here. Abandonment to the body does not end only when Shirou Emiya saves her at the conclusion; it has already stopped when she identifies with “All the World’s Evil.” Unlike someone dreaming and wholly unaware of their bodily condition, Sakura reconstructs a center of consciousness through identification with evil. Reason returns to her consciousness once again. Her fixation on protecting the man she loves survives, allowing her to advise Rin Tohsaka to take Shirou away from Fuyuki City as quickly as possible. What confronts us is not a person whose consciousness drifts in hysterical paralysis, but a sexual pervert who takes pleasure in destroying society’s “good”: she knows clearly, and accepts, the possibility of becoming evil. One obvious implication is that the relationship between eyes without highlights and the dissolution of consciousness they once signaled has broken down. Those eyes no longer mean dispersed attention. They are merely a visual effect presenting the dark side and nothing more. Once the subject identifies with darkening and congeals it into a stable personality disorder—yandere—she reenters self-restraint and control, accompanied by patriarchal consciousness’s renewed management of the body. At the end of the game’s HF route, Shirou projects a weapon that severs Sakura’s connection with the Shadow, Angra Mainyu, ending her darkening. The poor, healed soul, associated with Sakura’s essentially good nature, is celebrated; the filthy “body,” clothed in shadow and hollowed out by crest worms, is treated as a stain for the story to deal with. The plot further suggests that the Cartesian mind–body dualistic subject has not been absent. It was already built into the definition of darkening as pathology. Once a darkened character identifies with the villain’s position, the ambiguous elements that escape the main narrative are fully mobilized to serve the story and its visual center: the shadowed face, the strange costume. This reflects not only patriarchal fantasy’s symbolic resolution of a stain, but also a purposeful gaze at the other and resistance to attention’s dispersal.

“Eyes without highlights” mean perceptual disintegration, indicating that the madwoman has fallen into a realm wholly beyond consciousness and reason, where the body wanders aimlessly. They also produce unease in the viewer, an unease tied to the body’s uncontrollability and the impossibility of rational communication. At the same time, this drawing convention signals a change in the overall logic of patriarchal discourse’s governance of the body. These eyes do not necessarily signify a total loss of attention; they may be only the visual aestheticization of a character who has identified with her dark side. Beyond the eyes, this visual process of decentering and recentering also appears in the madwoman’s smile.

2. The Frightening Smile

A “frightening smile”—ningxiao (狞笑)—can also take the form of laughter. This device is everywhere in anime: Yuri’s uncontrolled, cathartic laughter on learning the cruel truth of the world in Angel Beats!; the slight grin of the darkened Sakura at the end of the second HF film; Kotonoha Katsura’s relieved yet chilling smile as she holds Makoto Itō’s severed head in School Days. Although the expression ranges from throwing back the head in uncontrollable laughter to a nearly silent grin, these frightening smiles generally share a strange tightening of the facial muscles, accompanied by appropriately rendered surroundings. They are not merely a dual visual and auditory expression. They are an integrated, unified perceptual experience imposed on the viewing subject, enabling the audience to recognize and absorb their emotional force.

In the definition “frightening smile,” “frightening” describes the emotional effect achieved, while “smile,” the word it qualifies, is rich in meaning. Smiling and laughter here constitute, first of all, a metaphysics and a hermeneutics. Often associated with underlying humor and irony, they are also the vocal and facial means through which humor and irony find expression. Deleuze treats humor and irony as two routes of escape from norms concealed behind laughter, each with a different starting point and different consequences. If irony takes the form of Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith,” transcending and renouncing worldly proprieties through an explicit faith in divine law, humor does the opposite: it identifies completely with worldly prescriptions and bears them, paradoxically exposing the law’s defects. The ironist places hope in a good superior to the law as a secondary principle, but this good must itself appear through the law’s violence. Whatever happens, a tyrant speaking for the law will be inopportunely produced, reestablishing an authority that determines order. Humor, by contrast, unconditionally bears the law’s governance: it is the absolute “evil” that continually establishes the law’s “good.” As Deleuze writes:

While the sadian hero subverts the law, the masochist should not by contrast be regarded as gladly submitting to it. The element of contempt in the submission of the masochist has often been emphasized: his apparent obedience conceals a criticism and a provocation. He simply attacks the law on another flank. What we call humor—in contradistinction to the upward movement of irony toward a transcendent higher principle—is a downward movement from the law to its consequences. We all know ways of twisting the law by excess of zeal. By scrupulously applying the law we are able to demonstrate its absurdity and provoke the very disorder that it is intended to prevent or to conjure.⁹

Deleuze introduces this distinction between irony and humor into his discussion of sadism and masochism. It allows us to extend the discussion to gender relations within the heterosexual matrix, making a subtle distinction between the madwoman’s frightening smile and the “masculine” frightening smile of an evil villain. The villain’s laughter mocks order while also asserting fidelity to personal conviction and the body. It seeks to transform the unequal relationship between the weak individual body and the violent national body, transgressing and trampling the law while shaping a law of its own. This “ironic” frightening smile faces outward and often takes the form of unrestrained laughter, audibly telling the big Other of law and order: it does not identify with them. Yet when darkened or yandere women smile to display their power and sadism, a masochistic dimension is present. After inhuman treatment, Sakura thinks not of revenge against the twisted Matou household but of possessive dependence on Shirou and jealousy toward other women. The darkened Kotonoha has no intention of displaying power; she merely wants to be with Makoto forever—in the sexually perverse sense of necrophilic love. The “humorous” frightening smile always turns inward through self-mockery. Striving to submit to the law, it demands in return that the law continue to control it completely, thereby revealing that the law’s operation is not yet complete. Looking in a mirror, Sakura suddenly gives a horrifying grin and speaks words detached from her own consciousness: “That’s right. I just have to keep Senpai [Shirou] from going out, don’t I?” Rather than restricting Shirou’s movements to protect him, she is making an impossible demand of him from a pathologically masochistic position: he must remain beside her forever and attend to her at every moment. This masochistic logic of trying to become the absolute object of desire is even more nakedly expressed in the lyrics of “I beg you,” the second HF film’s ending song.

Yet just as the madwoman’s image is governed within “eyes without highlights,” a certain irony is already built into the “humorous” frightening smile of darkening and yandere. Or rather, the two are not as easily divided as verbal description suggests. Just as lost attention contains the possibility of reconcentration, the endless movement of masochistic desire contains its own opposite: the desire to bear without limit is itself linked to an unlimited demand to be given something to “bear.” Sakura’s darkening does not remain within the eternal movement of masochistic desire. On the contrary, when Angra Mainyu influences her to accept her “dark” side, she ultimately adopts a “masculine,” teleological attitude. The sadistic subject’s desire paradoxically appears within Sakura. She uses her power of revenge to kill Zouken Matou—the “father” of the law who initiated the abuse of her body—declaring the former master–slave relation invalid. Sakura as the one who endures without limit is born and disappears simultaneously in the process of darkening. The clue lies not only in the later revelation that All the World’s Evil manipulates her consciousness, but already in her last whispered words while Shinji violates her, before the Shadow possesses her: she wants someone like Shinji to die. Darkening’s frightening smile does not simply continue down the line of flight of enduring humiliation and mocking the law. It contains an outward-facing irony toward order, a “masculine” logic of aggression.

The distinction between humor and irony in this smile offers a route into its metaphysical meaning. It lets us consider how the frightening smile, as a “feminine” presence, relates to a “masculine” presence, and thus reflect more deeply on the gender culture behind it. For the viewing subject and the animated image, however, it is not only the hermeneutics of laughter that merits investigation. The cultural logic rooted in the audiovisual system matters equally. The frightening smile is first a visual effect, activating knowledge and cultural contexts inscribed in the spectator, and it too carries gendered elements.

Unlike a hermeneutic account of its meaning, the frightening smile’s visual impact preserves elements of the subject’s drives that cannot be interpreted or symbolized. Anime conveys the madwoman’s frightening smile not only through the rendering of the scene but by controlling the contrast between the smile and its surroundings, emphasizing “the mouth stretched open in a smile.” In sufficiently detailed drawing, the smile first appears as an unusual tightening of the facial muscles, often most intense at the corners of the mouth. Animators subtly adjust the drawing at these corners. In the logic of visual presentation, their displacement determines how far the entire mouth can open; contrasting light and shadow at the corners emphasize the muscles’ action, creating an illusion of relaxation or grotesque distortion. The opening between the lips—the mouth—is given a strange curve. What makes the smile “frightening” lies precisely in the unsettling movement of its supports: lips and oral cavity. At the end of the second HF film, when Sakura darkens and grins, the muscles at her mouth’s corners seem unusually compressed in the direction that would close the mouth, leaving layered shadows that, at first glance, make her mouth look very wide open. The same technique appears when Sakura devours Gilgamesh: the shot focuses on her mouth in close-up, showing her as though eating. The shot projects drive onto the act of “eating,” bringing Sakura’s horrifying devouring posture before the audience.

This visual effect forms a psychoanalytic cultural metaphor, putting the spectator in contact with an unsettling drive-object. Kristeva’s theory of abjection offers an account of the cultural metaphor concealed in the frightening smile’s visual sign. In this theory, the establishment of progress and order is inseparable from the exclusion of the primitive and the chaotic; the primitive is incorporated into the overall social order precisely in the form of what has been excluded. Woman’s simultaneous association with “life” and “death” figures the meeting of opposites, the most fundamental primitive chaos violating the infinite boundaries constructed by the symbolic order.¹⁰ When the paternal metaphor—a dominant patriarchal consciousness—enters the construction of the subject a priori, the subject encounters the primordial loss, or exclusion, of feminine presence and accepts the desire and the lack within desire imposed by civilized society. The abjected “female” part signifying the primitive is carefully managed as the other that endlessly fills and continues to constitute the subject’s object of desire and essential lack. Once the relationship between other and subject is transgressed or blurred, the subject fears the collapse of meaning. These others are precisely what “disturbs identity, system, order.… The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”¹¹ This abstract gendering is closely connected with society’s concrete cultural attitudes toward things. Kristeva accordingly identifies three forms of the abject: food, waste, and sexual difference.¹² Food relates to the subject’s eating, but also figures the oral sexual drive and embodies vitality. Because people must eat to remain alive, food seems always to entice. Yet once food appears in its “excessive” form—as food’s “death,” in mold, decay, excrement—the boundary between food and waste blurs, and it becomes disgusting, abject matter. Excessive eating, or bulimia, is “the regression of the oral impulse to a primitive impulse to devour the object,” an expression of the death drive beyond the needs of life.¹³ Visual culture is acutely sensitive to the lips, which function as a temporary drive-object in this transformation of food. Lipstick and cosmetic surgery beautify this erogenous zone, while also becoming technologies for governing primitive, ugly lips. A mouth wearing lipstick becomes a mouth for display rather than eating, temporarily severing its connection with the primitive, uncontrollable oral drive. Fear arises when the primitive–civilized taxonomy imposed on the lips goes awry. In the urban legend of the slit-mouthed woman, lips cut by a scalpel as far as the ears not only disrupt technologies for governing the lips. They also suggest the threatening, primitive capacities she may retain, embodying the maternal superego’s devouring force. Here woman as “other” reestablishes the abject subject by externalizing an internal death drive associated with the primitive as a form of paranoid conquest.¹⁴

The frightening smile here is “the lips running riot.” The unnatural tightening of the muscles dissolves the clear boundary between “happiness” and a range of negative feelings. It invalidates the meaning of smiling, drawing it into an elusive, ambiguous circuit of meaning. More importantly, by suspending the smile’s meaning, it brings the primitive power of the lips into view. This power is connected with binge eating after emotional collapse, with the death drive that stuffs the subject to death. When we regretfully observe that the madwoman’s “humor” will also find expression as “irony,” only the sensory shock of the frightening smile itself seems to retain a relatively radical significance. In the representation of darkened and yandere women, it provides an analytical opening. Yet it remains inevitably confined by visual culture’s overall recuperation of the madwoman, especially in the aestheticization that distinguishes animation from film.

IV. The Madwoman and Visual Culture

Eyes without highlights and frightening smiles are prominent audiovisual features of character attributes such as darkening and yandere, providing basic approaches to the madwoman in anime. Yet the relationship between visual analysis and the deeper cultural logic behind these characters’ emergence remains unexplained. Just as HF has already established mechanisms for regulating attention, the appearance of a darkened character seems necessarily connected with a teleology hidden within the text. Is there, then, an internal relationship between the sensory effects on screen and modern culture’s governance of the subject’s perception? This question returns us to Crary’s concerns. Rather than simply investigating the mobilization and dispersal of attention in nineteenth-century modern painting, his fundamental concern is the antagonism behind viewer and viewed: capital’s dynamic logic attempts to impose a disciplinary regime of attention, while also revealing the subject’s inability to submit to its imperatives.¹⁵ An inquiry into madwomen therefore cannot remain confined to the modes of perception reflected by the character on screen. A cultural-studies approach must also discover how animation manages the audience’s “eyes” in producing that image. The emergence of animation opens a new field for the critique of false consciousness. This is inseparable from animation’s greater reliance on animetism than film’s.

The Canadian animation scholar Thomas Lamarre argues that, whereas cinematism uses movement into depth to make the world an experience of a purposive, continuous whole, animetism presents superimposed planar layers, revealing the world’s distinct, independent dimensions.¹⁶ Pure cinematism is a form of camera language inseparable from the modern subject’s mode of vision. Following Cartesian dioptrics (Figure 2), it allows the spectator to capture and rediscover the world within the frame accurately, while occupying the visual center.¹⁷ At the same time, it gives the spectator a point of identification for the gaze and a window through which to enter it. Under pure cinematism, the audience enters through the camera into the “politics of speed” produced by cinema’s rich world of depth. This politics gives viewers a sense of standing over and controlling the world, dissolving the distance between viewer and target.¹⁸ Whether “angel” or “madwoman,” the female figure ordinarily appears here only as the object of the camera’s voyeurism. Its operative logic is that “the determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly.”¹⁹ Typified madwomen—darkened, yandere, and so on—thus fall victim to the gaze. Equating subject with camera, and the subject’s desired object with the object of the camera’s gaze, expresses what apparatus theory calls the fiction-effect. This effect copies and reproduces mainstream social ideology, interpellating the spectator as its subject.²⁰ Yet this conclusion fails to recognize the split between spectator and camera, or between eye and gaze. In Crary’s theory of perception, this split appears when the audience detaches from a deliberately controlled visual center. Attention is the condition of its own dissolution: the audience’s potential to drift off is already built into the cinematistic shot’s mobilization and control of attention. In Žižek’s terms, meanwhile, the gaze comes from the object; the look is the big Other’s.²¹ When we follow the camera and encounter explicit sexual depiction or extreme female figures—abysses, monsters—we do not first satisfy our (male) voyeuristic and fetishistic desires. We first feel embarrassment or fear at the possibility of being seen by the big Other. The camera supplies a center from which we can distance ourselves, and we become alienated from it.

Conversely, once the camera ceases purposefully to confront fantasy and starts “talking about something else,” the viewing subject fully enjoys the superego’s obscene supplement. Consider the sexual encounter left unshown during the three-and-a-half-second cutaway in the live-action film Casablanca. What matters is not whether the man and woman did it during that interval, but that enjoyment of the encounter has already occurred within the spectator’s fantasy. The “absence” of direct sexual depiction shields the viewing subject from the big Other’s gaze. The paternal law imposed by the big Other expresses its efficacy through a brief relaxation of surveillance: precisely because you have ostensibly been relieved of guilt, you are tacitly permitted to enjoy to the full the obscenity of guilt itself.²²

Unlike cinematism, animetism is an art of compositing, a quality produced by combining independent planes through various techniques. Its greatest distinction is visual decentering. It dissolves the camera’s narrative center and disrupts the premodern visual model in which the modern subject starts from a “window” and acts upon a point of the gaze through relations of depth reflected in dioptrics. Equally important, animetism offers an aesthetics of “flatness and rupture,” not “volume and continuity.” Although animation can use closed compositing to create a coherent distance between foreground characters and background surroundings, reproducing cinematism, the character’s body often retains animetism in full: its parts still form a flat aesthetics of layers. In other words, the elements of an animated body maintain two-dimensional positional relations on a single plane. A live-action shot can reproduce the volume of a character’s nose or a pimple on the forehead; animation flattens these facial details. This allows viewers to shift the point of their gaze rapidly across the surfaces of individual layers, producing multiple frames of reference.²³ On one hand, an apparatus that decenters the subject wholly reverses the course of ideological interpellation through animation. With points of the gaze absent or proliferating, the spectator no longer directly finds the desired object. On the other, modes of attention management already disciplined by social culture and inscribed in the spectator’s subjectivity begin to operate accordingly. Faced with no center, the spectator allocates attention more actively and tensely. The desired object is not imposed but actively acquired in an unwitting, “base” fashion. Likewise, the absence of the camera means the dissolution of both the point of the gaze and the visual subject, and also the loss of the big Other’s gaze. Entering animation’s fantasy, the viewing subject can more readily put down the burden of guilt—an unburdening also often expressed in emphatic affirmations of the difference between “two-dimensional” fiction and “three-dimensional” reality. If cinematism offers a center of the gaze against which to rebel, a center that sends viewers drifting off like “students in class,” animetism offers, conversely, an absorbing “absence of center.” By not directing viewers, it lures them into animation’s fictional kingdom of fantasy. Here we encounter not only Stuart Hall’s account of textual negotiation as a critique of Althusserian overdetermination, but also an internal impasse of textual negotiation. When ideological fantasy is presented, audiences can conditionally accept some of it, reject it entirely, or completely misread the fantasy the text seeks to convey. Once fantasy’s directness is concealed, however, audiences actively participate in its construction.

The deft integration of animetism and cinematism manages the madwoman’s image. Some anime use extreme layer aesthetics to give concrete form to the body’s descent into uncontrollability, linking this to another restriction. In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the witches’ barriers and the reality outside them are sharply divided. Outside, closed compositing often simulates camera shots to depict the characters’ everyday lives; inside, extensive collage exemplifies layer aesthetics. Even where the animation simulates camera depth to reproduce the perspectival pleasure of action scenes and guide visual pleasure in displays of the magical girls’ power, collage remains characteristic of the dynamic relations among witches, familiars, and backgrounds. It conveys the extreme psychic chaos reflected by the witches. On one hand, within the barriers, magical girls tend to merge with their surroundings, most strikingly when character deformation dissolves the Cartesian body. The American animation style manifested here opposes the fetishistic elements of what Ōtsuka calls weaponry realism.²⁴ The fluid, deforming female body is not merely an unsettling cultural object escaping control; it is also a mechanism that disperses attention. Human faces become unfamiliar, and the key organs and parts that provide frames of reference move and blur. The uncertainty of the fetish object renders the fetishist’s projected gaze uncertain too. On the other hand, numerous symbolic signs and metaphors are embedded in the collaged layers. These place tremendous pressure on the spectator’s attention, threatening vision with disintegration amid a dazzling array of layered signs.

Yet these deformed female bodies are only temporary constructions, quickly returning to their more strictly structured forms once the conflict is resolved. The dialectic of attention also means that the layered imagery of the witches’ barriers becomes, as a whole, a center for attention’s mobilization and dispersal. Watching collage, the spectator seems to wander through a department store whose dazzling goods are arranged in tiers, constantly controlling attention so as to distribute it relatively evenly among every image element that enters view. Like the visitor’s contradictory abandon at a carnival or exhibition, immersion—or the dispersal of attention—in fleeting postmodern experience requires the subject constantly to keep control, observe a minimum of morality, and possess the ability to disperse attention at will.²⁵ Moreover, when spectators are wholly immersed in switching attention among the image’s elements, they have in effect entered a hypnotic, “daydreaming” state by concentrating all their attention on those elements. Under pure cinematism, the viewing subject’s attention oscillates between the screen itself and the flesh that identifies with it. Under pure animetism, it oscillates between one element of the screen and another. Between one fantasy and another. Although Puella Magi Madoka Magica still uses many cinematistic elements, its characteristic animetism suggests that female figures in animation—particularly its stylized, extreme “witches”—may have no intrinsic relation to the horror that threatens subject and order—or at least no relation on a visual level. The barriers emphasizing witches’ hatred, fixations, restless bodies, and despairing power are integrated into an apparatus of pure visual pleasure. By contrast, the Shadow in HF, produced by ufotable, a studio known for simulating cinematic camerawork, generates greater fear. Closed compositing simulates a shot placing the Shadow—Sakura—at the image’s center. Surrounding walls extend inward from the visual window along perspective lines, the light diminishing rapidly until it reaches a dark center. We direct our look toward the pitch-black end of an alley, but the alley returns the gaze. Here the spectator encounters a blank gaze connected with the character’s logic and the authorial consciousness behind it, falling into inexplicable panic and tension. Even so, animetism remains in Sakura’s image as a “madwoman.” In other words, the spectator undergoes a disciplinary process “from dispersal to concentration” in looking at her. Compared with the horror of directly presented drive-objects in live-action horror films, animation’s horror stands closer to the aestheticization of horror. Or, to go further, animation presents the fantasy of the madwoman more perversely than live-action film, moving toward a “hyperfantasmatic” quality.