Interests: studies of anime, comics, and game cultures / gender / space / intellectual history. An observer on the margins, overflowing with empathy.
If we read a film from a radical perspective, we ask whether it functions as an “ontology of unfinished reality”: whether, by repeatedly staging fantasies until they contradict one another, it exposes the big Other’s seductive presence.1 A film that accomplishes this may be able to confront the hard core of materialism. At the same time, in our efforts to traverse fantasy, we must not lose ourselves in endless self-congratulation over seeing through lousy fantasies—in short, endorse works that struggle to establish even a basic fantasy and turn to “conferring sublimity on lousy films.” For a lousy film establishes precisely an appropriate aesthetic distance between itself and its viewers. Its ineffectiveness only confirms reality’s “complacency”; its very incompetence encourages viewers to put their fantasies into it. This makes critical scrutiny all the more necessary.
Weathering with You may be a prime example of this failure. It cannot establish a sufficiently engrossing virtual space, yet it constructs hazy political imagery that lets people defend its ethical value with fragments of fantasy. A vivid illustration of “nothing is more reactionary than meek acquiescence.” The crucial criticism of this work is not that it treats two opposed values—“remaining faithful to the subject’s desire” or “becoming the big Other’s jinchūriki”2—vaguely and simplistically. Nor is it that the film funnels questions of social ethics into spectacles of weather, diminishing sociopolitical mediation in the process (there is nothing new about leveling this criticism at Makoto Shinkai). Rather, it fails to depict a theme with greater critical potential: wasteland punk becoming everyday life. It tries to engage mediation, then shrinks back. Fragmentary “fantasies” patch the breaches opened by this “hesitation,” sending us off to look for “centrist politics” in a lousy film.
First, the prejudiced caricature of Tokyo and the stupidity of the police together reveal the film’s botched attempt to approach social mediation. Newly arrived in Tokyo, the protagonist sleeps on the streets and is beaten; he inadvertently comes into possession of a gun and gets entangled in the work of the state’s coercive agencies; the heroine, whose mother died prematurely, has to lie about her age to work and survive… These contrived episodes point straight to the conflict between individual and society, attempting to give some rationale to the protagonist’s bizarre actions later in the film as he tries to resolve the “individual–society” conflict. Yet this is precisely where Shinkai fails to explain how the circumstances in which the “gun” appears relate to the conflict in which the protagonist becomes embroiled. There is a complete vacuum where the contraband’s web of social connections should be. Nor does he give Tokyo a living face. In its place we get “urban oppression” and a tutorial NPC (the older guy), recreating an utterly formulaic Japanese light comedy. To fill this gap in the story’s logic, Shinkai stages, almost fittingly, several of the protagonist’s “masochistic fantasies.” He draws on familiar signs of abuse—villains’ savage expressions, the protagonist’s rain-soaked body, fists, his red and swollen face…—to arouse enjoyment in viewers who identify with him, thereby concealing the story’s missing logic.
Like the water slowly heating around a frog, the rain is both catastrophe and its own deferral, leaving everyday life an awkward space in which to unfold. The shortcoming here is not merely that this reveals the filmmaker’s lack of political imagination, forcing him to rely on adolescent slice-of-life comedy to advance the plot. The film also draws on the Messiah’s arrival in advance, turning the history leading up to it into an endlessly droning stretch of “garbage time.” Yet this time’s tedium receives no answer from the posthumanist spirit so congenial to deconstruction. In other words, once we know of Tokyo’s eventual catastrophe and look back at the film’s opening, the connection is not hard to make: the metaphor of catastrophe is already there at the outset. It guides a response to the state of emergency—a decision about what stance to take toward the approaching apocalypse, expressed in the characters’ gazing, brooding, doubt, and refusal to acknowledge it. The alternative is to relinquish neurotic anxiety and adopt the position of the “end-of-history thesis”: an “end” that would bring things to an end is no longer possible, only everyday life without end. Weathering with You, however, does neither. It gives us people’s postmodern adaptation to “garbage time” after the Messiah, yet still has to present the inevitable decision again in the film’s middle and later sections. And it is precisely the vagueness of political mediation that makes the protagonist’s decision so suspect.
Another instance is the “politics of speed” between the protagonist and the police. Both sides remain trapped in an intolerable mutual misunderstanding: from the beginning of the chase to its end, there is not a single moment of effective communication. Here we see an utterly typical stress response. In the depths of the protagonist’s fantasy, where viewers struggle to identify with him, the police have shed their human guise to reveal a mechanical face. As the extremities of power, their sole duty is to capture. The earlier “masochism” routine inevitably raises the suspicion that it was staged to cover for this reaction: violence inflicted on the body is so closely tied to immediate sensory pain and a desire to escape that the political leverage and techniques of organization involved in violence become irrelevant, even repellent.
But doesn’t this Deleuze–Asada-style “politics of escape” lead to an “impasse of the drive”?3 To a display of authorial will so perverse it becomes painful to watch? The run along the railway jolts us out of the film; what we see is nothing but repetitive movement with little to recommend it. The bystanders’ objections seem to be clumsily executing the central computer’s (the author’s) algorithm, reinforcing an already utterly lousy political intention. It is here that our fantasy is retroactively declared a failure, and we almost inevitably go looking for “warmth” in the scattered everyday moments earlier in the film, trying to find something to praise. This, too, is undoubtedly a “clever” trick of fantasy.
The same deception is reflected in the controversy over the conflicts of values set up by an overbearing authorial will. Most dangerous of all is the attack on the protagonist’s values. For what this presents is an equivocal appearance of ethics, and it is also the effect on public discussion that Shinkai seeks to produce (debate over the Zeitgeist of Japan’s youth: their fragmentation into isolated islands and their depoliticization). Once we focus on the protagonist’s values, we have already tacitly stepped into the trap laid by ethical fantasy, retroactively finding some realist value in the film (likewise, the characters’ relative indifference to the “rain” can easily be misread as a kind of postmodern banality). The crucial point, however, is that Weathering with You utterly fails to construct its ethical agenda. The emotional bonds built through everyday life prove unequal to the grave questions of right and wrong bound up with the city’s survival. This breaks down specular identification with the protagonist—we have not entered a context for discussing values at all, but have put into the film a debate whose terms we take for granted.
Even if we can ignore this political trajectory, forget the film’s many implausibilities, and lose ourselves in the feelings between the two leads, even in the gaps within those feelings, this substitution of fantasies remains questionable. Is replacing the fantasy of social responsibility with heterosexual fantasy really so clever? To go further: does replacing “sekaikei” with “island universes,” in which everyone fears for their own safety, really bring salvation?4