ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
Hayao Miyazaki’s most internationally acclaimed work is undoubtedly Spirited Away (2001). Yet anyone with even a slightly deeper familiarity with his body of work will recognize that this film, which won him both the Golden Bear and an Oscar, cannot represent his entire stylistic range. From the science fiction of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky to the fantasy of Princess Mononoke and Kiki’s Delivery Service; from My Neighbor Totoro, a fairy tale even warmer than Spirited Away, to The Wind Rises, a biography wholly grounded in reality, the animated features Miyazaki has directed span anything but a narrow spectrum of subjects and styles. Critics generally describe him as a poet of nature and humanity who has never lost his childlike spirit. But this appraisal unquestionably overlooks one work that audiences and film critics alike often forget: Porco Rosso. A serious yet surreal portrayal of the burdened life of a middle-aged man, Porco Rosso cannot even find a place along the axes just sketched—science fiction–fantasy, fairy tale–reality. It thus becomes an absolute “element in excess” within Miyazaki’s directorial career, its presence continually reminding us that there must be another perspective from which to organize and understand his work.
What we must do first is set Porco Rosso against every other Miyazaki film—even The Wind Rises—and then locate the precise position of the opposite pole. If Porco Rosso’s central concern is the alienated, drab, dejected life of a middle-aged man—traumatized by war (we can easily see that this alludes to the actual First World War), he tries to shake off every tie and live freely in seclusion, to the point of keeping even the woman he loves most at arm’s length and rejecting the advances of a younger girl—then the film at the opposite pole, most brimming with youthful vitality and childhood fantasy, is undoubtedly the likewise internationally acclaimed My Neighbor Totoro. Taken at face value (I know what you may be thinking, but we will come to that later), Totoro positively overflows with “standard” Miyazaki optimism: the practical difficulties of life are effortlessly overcome with the aid of a magical power, Totoro, that belongs exclusively to the innocence of children. On one side are adult anguish and perversity; on the other, the exuberant innocence of childhood. Yet merely laying out this opposition is far from enough. We cannot take the opposition between adults and children for granted; we must press further and ask what ultimately grounds the distinction.
To understand this opposition, we need to reconsider Porco Rosso, and the source of the anguish in its protagonist Porco’s life. In a sense, even allowing for Miyazaki’s eclectic prettification, Porco’s circumstances are not all that bad. As an ace pilot of the last war, he can still fly his fighter through the blue skies above the Adriatic. He maintains an indefinable, ambiguous liaison with Gina, the widow of a close friend, and through a series of coincidences has captured the heart of the young Fio as well. His anguish can thus be said to arise on a “psychological” level, to come from “within.” At one point in the film, Gina tells Porco’s rival, an American pilot, that she will marry Porco immediately provided he comes to see her in the daytime. Porco is hardly unaware of her feelings for him; yet he only visits her occasionally, at night, and when they meet he invariably talks about the friends who died in the war—including, of course, Gina’s former husband.
It is in details like these that we find the key to deciphering Porco Rosso’s incongruous “adult style”: for adults, social life is precisely “sexualized”1—that is, castrated, obstructed by the superego. It is therefore no accident that Porco keeps talking to Gina about his dead friend. The symbolic debt left by his friend’s death in battle, like Hamlet’s murdered father, becomes a haunting superego specter, prohibiting Porco from taking his relationship with Gina any further, filling him with guilt, and drawing him into a distorted Oedipal scenario. Yet, as the film plays it out, the superego barrier between the two lovers also seems to lend their relationship a distinctive romance “for adults.” Consider Gina’s words again. If Porco’s indecision can be understood through the wounds the war has left him, why does Gina, for her part, make “come and see me in the daytime” a condition of their union? Is she not also participating in this Oedipal game, carefully keeping their relationship in a state of ambiguity? This relationship of mutual testing and meticulously preserved barriers is precisely what constitutes the “courtly love” Lacan discusses. The example of “courtly love” most familiar to contemporary readers, however, comes to us through Cervantes’s ironic figure of Don Quixote. His deluded would-be knight attempts to reproduce the “courtly love” of chivalric romances, imagining a peasant girl from a neighboring village as a noble, virtuous lady, and himself overcoming obstacle after obstacle to arrive at her feet. Yet, in a sense, does Don Quixote’s ludicrous parody of “courtly love” not grasp exactly the heart of this form of relationship? So long as the proper distance is maintained, so long as she is regarded as a distant, inaccessible object, can even a peasant girl not be transmuted into a noble lady through the sublimation of desire?
We can therefore readily understand Porco’s rejection of Fio. Perhaps we can also explain why this callow little girl should attract the dashing American pilot Donald: precisely because Donald cannot have Fio, she is “sublimated” for him; precisely because Porco has already won her heart, she looks to him like nothing more than a dull, callow little girl. What makes Porco Rosso truly “adult” is that its plot is deeply “alienated” and “sexualized.” It knows the game of conversion between superego prohibition and desire inside out: for Fio to remain sexually attractive, Porco must reject her. (Likewise, we must also reverse the formulation: it is precisely because Porco rejects her that Fio falls hopelessly in love with him. Another interesting observation is that the opposition between Gina and Fio anticipates that between Rei Ayanami and Asuka in Neon Genesis Evangelion; the plot of Evangelion is thus also highly sexualized.) As a result, all the romantic relationships in Porco Rosso are a “sweet sorrow,” possible only on condition of their impossibility, perverse and profoundly “alienated.”
Now let us jump straight to the other pole, to a “pre-sexualized” work, My Neighbor Totoro, and see what we find there. Because their mother is ill, Satsuki and Mei move to the countryside with their father, where they encounter the spirit Totoro in the woods. Little Mei runs off alone into the mountains, intending to go into town to find her mother; with Totoro’s help, Satsuki finds Mei, and they see their mother. Compared with Porco Rosso, Totoro could hardly be simpler. We are promised that life’s difficulties will be resolved by the power of innocence that children alone possess. The key here lies not just in children’s innocence, but in its redemptive significance. The world of Totoro contains none of Porco Rosso’s Oedipal scenarios, nor does it need to set obstacles for itself: the spirits summoned by the innocent power of children resolve every difficulty. This children’s world contains no inherent flaw that cannot be repaired; it is therefore “pre-sexualized,” “pre-castrated.” Totoro revives the figure of Peter Pan within a more everyday setting: led by Peter Pan, children can escape the anguish of everyday life and enjoy an unending stream of pleasure. And Totoro’s greatest success lies precisely in connecting this pleasure, exclusive to children, with an everyday setting (and with a pastoral fantasy of closeness to nature). In psychoanalytic terms, Totoro, this non-substantial spirit, is the embodiment of objet petit a, placing miraculous satisfaction, in virtual form, within an everyday setting.
This allows us to understand not only the narrative content of Miyazaki’s films but also the form of their visual style. Even when they deal with realistic subjects drawn from everyday life, Miyazaki’s films are far from visually plain or unadorned. More precisely, his films tend toward a “cinema of spectacle”: not only because, as in his science-fiction films, they show us magnificent scenes that exceed everyday life, but because, through an almost fetishistic rendering of detail (is there anything surprising about Studio Ghibli’s collaboration with Yohei Taneda on Arrietty?), he seeks to guide viewers toward a “new sensibility of innocence,” allowing them to rediscover what is moving in the backdrop of everyday life and thus restore their identification with it.
Yet, continuing with our diagonal method, we need to locate the opposite pole along the axis of spectacle in animated cinema in order to clarify the distinctive cognitive effect of Miyazaki’s images. At this point, it is natural to look back at Mamoru Oshii’s animated films. In his three most stylized works—Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and Patlabor 2: The Movie—extended spectacular sequences appear almost detached from the unfolding plot. Their common ground with Miyazaki’s films is that the spectacle is fundamentally embedded in everyday life: the streets of New Port City, modeled on Hong Kong’s cramped streets; the Etorofu parade, a riot of demons in a hybrid “Chinese Gothic” style (Yohei Taneda again, of course!); Tokyo in winter, rapidly swallowing up the Self-Defense Forces deployed within it. Unlike Miyazaki’s, however, all the spectacular displays in Oshii’s works seek to call viewers’ identification with this everyday life into question. Who is the cyborg: the person with a prosthetic body, or the city that generates order beneath its chaotic surface? Who is the true Cartesian subject: the deified thing or the reified human? Are we living in peace or in war? “War? That started long ago!” Oshii’s use of spectacle, then, cannot be understood, as Miyazaki’s can, as the rediscovery, through some “superior” horizon of vision, of a pleasing supplement within everyday life. Rather, it must be understood in the strict sense as a renewed excavation of everyday life’s horrifying kernel of the Real—unbearable, yet ignored all the same. This excavation of the most alienated contradictions and fractures within everyday life, this cruel exposure of its ambiguous doubleness, means that Oshii’s works, too, must rightly be assigned to the “adult” Oedipal world.
Moreover, returning once again to My Neighbor Totoro and repeatedly examining the shared genealogy of its plot and the Peter Pan story (which originated in a 1904 stage play), we discover, ironically, a “sexualized” source for this “desexualized” tale. Peter Pan, this joyful, lively, ageless and immortal figure, may be traced back to Pan, the pastoral god of Greek mythology, a figure no less joyful and lively—but whose liveliness is also erotic. Here we encounter “the return of the repressed” within Miyazaki’s untrammeled fantasies of childhood innocence. In a more Christianized context, does not “neither aging nor dying” stand precisely for the evil power of paganism? One point of rupture between Christianity and Greek paganism lies in Christianity’s having introduced, through the suffering of God himself, a respect for death, rather than for life after death, for the first time. The perfect, deathless body is always associated with nauseating horror; only within the imperfection of mortality can we recover peaceful rest. Although this cannot be linked directly to the works themselves, do Miyazaki’s words at Isao Takahata’s 2018 memorial—“We all lived as fully as we could in that era”—together with the memorial’s vibrant setting, not reveal Miyazaki’s own pagan stance of disavowing death and expecting life to continue innocently forever? There is, of course, no reason to oppose this stance in itself. The problem is that it can all too easily turn into its opposite. And this opposite has also appeared in audiences’ reception of My Neighbor Totoro: the subject we avoided earlier.
The opposite of this innocent childhood delight is, of course, the “dark reading” supposedly rooted in minute, hidden details of the film. According to this reading, the beautiful pastoral landscape is a metaphor for the world of the dead, and Satsuki and Mei are thought to have died without knowing it. Totoro never does find Mei; what appears at the end is only her lost soul (the evidence is that she casts no shadow in the final scenes) … We cannot simply dismiss this reading because it lacks support. Instead, we should carefully grasp what this absurd yet widely circulated interpretation conveys: the audience’s intense desire to reconstruct Totoro’s world by introducing a flaw into it. For these adult viewers, is not this innocent Peter Pan world, which grants pleasure unconditionally while also refusing peaceful death, all the more unbearable? Is not such an excessively direct proximity to pleasure nauseating to them? In order to maintain a proper distance from pleasure and satisfaction—to preserve the “courtly love” relationship between ourselves and pleasure—adults have to imagine Totoro’s dark side before they can accept it. Only if we see this dark side as the necessary consequence of innocent childhood delight do we have grounds to accuse Miyazaki of failing to provide an adequate process of mourning for Takahata’s death (the memorial at the Ghibli Museum was public; for all we know, mourning may already have taken place in a more private setting). He has not settled the symbolic debt left by the dead through a structuring within the Symbolic, but has instead tried to summon it anew on the imaginary plane.
This reaction against innocent childhood produces the persistent inner tension of those films lying midway along the child–adult spectrum of Miyazaki’s work. On the one hand, they have a powerful impulse to return to childhood innocence as a means of resisting alienation in the adult world; on the other, they carry a vague sense of urgency, the sense that “one has to grow up.” Kiki’s Delivery Service handles this internal textual tension well. Though the witch Kiki recovers her magic with her companions’ help, she can never again speak with her pet cat, Jiji. The characters’ conversations offer viewers a suggestive explanation: Kiki and Jiji could converse not because of magic, but because their hearts were in tune; now they simply have lives of their own. Castration is an event the subject must ultimately accept, since it is also a necessary condition of entering the ethical world—for Kiki, of being genuinely accepted into that organic community. Kiki’s Delivery Service thus depicts the passage from the pre-sexualized to the sexualized, and explicitly expresses the urgency of moving toward adulthood.
But Spirited Away, in direct contrast to Kiki’s Delivery Service, is better described as being about “how to keep us from growing up, in order to cure the alienation of the adult world.” If its reuse of the motif of “turning into a pig” is not in itself particularly startling, it is downright astonishing that audiences so often overlook its striking parallel with Porco Rosso. Yet the same motif is used in utterly different ways in the two films. In Porco Rosso, the pain of alienation that comes with “turning into a pig” also lends Porco a mature allure, adding “depth” to his character. In Spirited Away, by contrast, “turning into a pig” retains nothing but the negative: it befalls Chihiro’s parents as punishment for adults’ insatiable greed, and only with the help of Chihiro’s innocent childhood power can they escape the curse. The motif of childhood innocence’s redemptive power reappears after Totoro, creating an enormous contrast between Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service. In the latter, the establishment of a new community presupposes the irreversible dissolution of the old; in the former, we begin with an organic family on the verge of dissolution, move through the protagonist’s “mythic adventure cycle” (the hero leaves home, embarks on a journey, makes companions, faces dangers, grows, and returns home), and finally arrive back at our starting point with the family restored. Spirited Away turns this “mythic adventure cycle” on its head, making it a genuine cycle: its core is less “how to change through adventure” than “how to keep everything unchanged through adventure” (Make the family great again!).
Against this conservative tendency, we will set Makoto Shinkai’s animated feature Children Who Chase Lost Voices, a film that needs to be reappraised. The sharpest criticism leveled against it is undoubtedly that it is Shinkai’s botched imitation of Miyazaki. We have no intention of refuting that criticism. But one point needs to be made: in repeating Miyazaki, Shinkai introduces an element of difference wholly his own—the “impossibility of the sexual relationship” that runs through all his serious works. The protagonist Asuna’s notoriously embarrassing monologue, “Maybe I was just lonely,” directly apprehends the constitutive void at the subject’s core. Placed in a more fitting scene, it would necessarily offer an emancipatory force comparable to “traversing the fantasy.” (This also explains why it becomes so embarrassing as soon as it is placed in a scene that feels even slightly incongruous: the emancipatory power it holds is so overwhelming that an unprepared audience’s first response is to reject it.)
We must also make clear that, by rejecting the theme of bringing the dead back to life at its conclusion, Children Who Chase Lost Voices succeeds in upholding Christian ethics’ resistance to the evil magic of paganism. (Resistance to bringing back the dead is not exclusive to a Latin–Semitic cultural background: it can also be found in the Japanese myth in which Izanagi ventures deep into Yomi in search of Izanami, only to flee in terror. The mythic motif on which Children Who Chase Lost Voices directly draws is more likely to be the latter.) Death is accepted as a finite horizon that humanity cannot cross. And in fact, contrary to vulgar interpretations of Heidegger’s “being-toward-death,” according to Hegel this finite horizon of mortality is precisely the site where eternity can arise. Children Who Chase Lost Voices even goes beyond Shinkai’s own series of works about “pathological,” symptomatic love affairs. Only in Children Who Chase Lost Voices can the characters confront constitutive lack itself, rather than the self-limiting symptoms organized around it.
Returning to Spirited Away, what Miyazaki tries to avoid through its conservative cycle is precisely the constitutive lack we find in Shinkai’s films. Spirited Away condemns this lack as the distorted alienation of the adult world, something to be healed by childhood innocence. Once again, no one has the right to reject this beautiful wish in itself. The problem still lies in the consequences brought about by the wish to set childhood innocence against adult alienation. When those consequences erupted in full within the political sphere, they produced the central controversy over Miyazaki’s last film, The Wind Rises. It is not without reason that this historical biography begins with the childhood of its protagonist, Jiro Horikoshi: the film’s version of him is essentially a direct continuation of his childhood personality. Horikoshi’s boundless love of airplanes avoids “sexualized” hysteria and is wholly innocent. The Wind Rises can therefore be seen as Miyazaki’s attempt to redeem Japan’s modern history, riddled with wounds, by carrying childhood innocence into a wholly real historical setting. Yet it is precisely this attempt that led audiences to reject the film.
Once again, we need not locate the reason for this rejection in the narrative content, but in the formal presentation of the images. In the sequence where Horikoshi visits a naval aircraft carrier to watch planes taking off and landing, the narrative backdrop confronts viewers once more with the purest cinematic spectacle: naval warships, including Nagato-class battleships, appear before the camera one after another. The gravest problem is that, when Miyazaki imposes his customary innocent, fetishistic perspective on these objects, he unforgivably renders them “neutral” at the same time. This “neutralization” strips the objects of the complex sociocultural network in which they are enmeshed (war machines for realizing the Japanese Empire’s expansionist ambitions; both the cause and the product of the military clique’s grip on state finances), presenting them as a purely material spectacle of industry (Ah! Magnificent crystallizations of human intelligence and labor, miracles of large-scale industrial civilization!). Returning to the plot, does the portrayal of Horikoshi’s innocence as someone who “stays true to his original aspiration” not likewise “neutralize” his active participation in the Japanese Empire’s military-industrial machine? Even the film’s eclectic portrayal of the imperial government’s brutal persecution of progressives raises the suspicion that it “beautifies” these unacceptable crimes. (The person persecuted in the story is German, and deference to his status as a citizen of a “friendly nation” means that, at worst, he is merely expelled. Compared with the Japanese Communist Party members who were rounded up and imprisoned en masse in 1928 and 1935, some even meeting violent deaths, this is nothing short of VIP treatment.)
Miyazaki’s habitual “aestheticizing” style can therefore no longer be regarded as politically neutral, because this “aestheticization of politics” is precisely a hallmark of proto-fascism. Here we must reiterate Lenin’s point: what does not oppose bourgeois rule supports it. There is no middle option; the so-called “middle option” is a cleverly disguised form of support for reactionary politics. Miyazaki’s innocent wish for “neutralization” is directly its own opposite—an unequivocal political orientation. This is also why another “deeply moving” Ghibli film, Grave of the Fireflies, fails to resonate readily with viewers in countries victimized by the war, and even draws their criticism. The analogous operation of “neutralization” in that film assumes that a narrative can be told from an innocent standpoint unconnected to any political orientation. As a result, the bloody Second World War in Ghibli’s films is scarcely distinguishable from a natural disaster descending out of the sky—like the Great Kanto Earthquake in The Wind Rises. Yet the political sphere offers us no such neutral position. In this field where “one divides into two,” victory for one side is defeat for the other.
Let us reiterate the central argument once more: the apparently “neutral,” eclectic attitude of “depoliticization” that pervades Ghibli’s films itself depends on a political decision to “bid farewell to politics.” More than that, this attitude signifies what may be the worst political orientation of all: a proto-fascist political irresponsibility that attempts to sever an innocent fetishism of industrial miracles from their social background. Small wonder that we experience the same discomfort in Triumph of the Will, the most outstanding and at the same time the most evil of Nazi propaganda films: it, too, displays an undisguised intention to “aestheticize” the Nazi Party’s swaggering political rallies in an “innocent,” “neutral” way. It is precisely because this political orientation inevitably seeps in that the childhood innocence Miyazaki seeks to celebrate reveals its own hypocritical, childish side.
Yet it remains premature to pursue the indictment of Miyazaki further and argue that he has slid directly and irretrievably from a shallow bourgeois-humanitarian position toward the temptation of proto-fascism. (The basic historical-materialist judgment of his position as bourgeois-humanitarian is entirely self-evident. We need only ask: when has Miyazaki’s depiction of labor ever moved beyond the limits of small producers in services and craft workshops to engage genuinely with the proletariat, estranged and at the same time united by the intricate division of labor in large-scale production? No wonder that, in The Wind Rises, even the Japanese Empire’s relatively mature aircraft-manufacturing industry looks little different from the small artisanal workshop in Porco Rosso. Is it not strange, too, to find such a workshop in Milan’s industrial district in the age of piston-engined monoplanes?)
The key is to return to the motif of “turning into a pig” in Porco Rosso, which to a certain extent symbolizes “adult alienation.” In Porco Rosso, the protagonist unexpectedly succeeds in resisting the temptation of proto-fascism through an estranged aloofness toward politics, rather than political ignorance. Is a declaration such as “I’d rather remain a pig than join the Fascist air force” not a natural extension of his perverse, “alienated” personality? Now that the effort to heal the pain of adult alienation through childhood innocence has turned into its opposite and ultimately failed, we must take more seriously the emancipatory potential concealed within “alienation” itself.
Is it not precisely because of the human subject’s alienation—more exactly, redoubled alienation, separation—because it can never fully merge with the natural and cultural-historical background that constitutes its organism and symbolic identity, that it can break the bonds of the “great chain of being,” detach itself from that background out of step with its time and appear abruptly as a genuine event, distance itself “against the current” from the forces propelling history, and construct its own political–ethical position? This peculiar capacity, which Lacan calls the “death drive,” does more than allow the subject to break through the impasse of ontological politics (where we can only indulge ourselves, like Heidegger, in being “thrown” into the “inner glory and greatness of this movement”—by which he then meant Nazism).2 More fundamentally, it is precisely because the death drive—or, in Hegel’s terms, the disintegrating power of the understanding—has pulled the subject out of an animal-like, inert, immediate fusion with nature that the entire ontological domain can be established. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger certainly did not fail to notice this tendency toward disintegration inscribed in the structure of human existence. But, like Miyazaki, he retreated from it too soon.
For Miyazaki, Porco Rosso seems to be the traumatic work that truly sets the tone for his entire oeuvre; all his other efforts amount to nothing more than opposing the trauma of “alienation” in Porco Rosso with a pre-sexualized posture of innocence. And it is precisely the failure of this effort that succeeds in showing us that this minimal Oedipal knot, this trauma that keeps us at a distance from proto-fascist temptation, is nothing other than the condition of our regaining freedom.
Editor’s Note: To borrow a remark Yuban made in discussion, Miyazaki’s genius and innocence are revealed precisely in the process of turning everyday life into spectacle—and this is also precisely where his danger lies. In this “rediscovery” of and identification with everyday life, the details we overlook are what matter.