“The long, painful war has finally ended, and peaceful days have come. But war has left deep scars here in this space colony, too. We have lost not only our school buildings but many people—parents, brothers and sisters, and friends. This peace was bought with the sacrifices of many people. I hope you will never forget that.”
To a gentle, lilting melody, war gradually recedes—yet this is when Al, the story’s protagonist, breaks into tears. Why is he crying? Has peace really come? Here in pocket-sized Side 6, at peace’s rear window, we look through the boy’s eyes, urgently hoping to find a viewpoint more real than real, to uncover the reality of war.
Two Forms of Corpse Exclusion
In the first episode of this original video animation (OVA), “How Many Miles to the Battlefield?” / 戦場までは何マイル？, we pass through a scene of peace: people throng the streets, traffic flows in orderly fashion, and Al and his friends make their way across a crosswalk pretending to have a gunfight. This sequence appears again in episode six, “War in the Pocket” / ポケットの中の戦争. This time, however, it comes only shortly after the Kämpfer attack in episode four, “Over the River and Through the Woods” / 河を渡って木立を抜けて.
As the montage recurs, the exclusion of corpses signified by the two sequences also changes.
Article 897 of Japan’s Civil Code shows that Japanese law expressly stipulates that a corpse is a thing. Most scholars in China agree with this view. Liang Huixing writes: “The body of a person after death is called their remains, and it too belongs to the category of things.” Wang Liming writes: “A person’s body after death also belongs to the category of things.” Zhang Liang writes: “After a person dies, their status as a legal subject ceases to exist. The human body left behind—the flesh—thus returns to being a natural thing. As a natural thing, it is an objectively existing thing, separated from life and no longer possessing the status of a legal subject.”
—Quoted from Wang Xiaoping, “Reflections on Civil-Law Issues Concerning Corpses”1
The Macro Level
A civilized world excludes corpses through funerals, public commemorations, mourning, and similar practices, thereby maintaining civilization and morality. Side 6, the neutral territory where Al lives, remains tranquil right up to 0080, the year in which Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket (hereafter 0080) takes place, at the end of the One Year War in the UC (Universal Century) Gundam setting.2 Zeon and the Federation fight in their world; we, outside their world, are safe. Corpses are thus excluded, left out in space. This is what the peaceful scene in episode one signifies.
This exclusion of corpses is synchronic: it preserves the order of peace by separating neutral territory from the warring sides, separating peace from war. Yet this exclusion is also fragile, because corpses—and war—still inhabit the same time as Side 6. The exclusion is, in fact, purely spatial. In other words, once war penetrates the space colony, the peaceful order can easily be thrown into crisis. And that is exactly what happens: Side 6 secretly colludes with the Federation; its research base is used as an armaments factory for the Federation’s development of the NT-1. When the Kämpfer, piloted by a Zeon special operative, attacks, peace is shattered.
By episode five, “Say It Ain’t So, Bernie!” / 嘘だといってよ, and the final episode, however, we find that peace has returned. The peaceful scene in episode five serves as a “lead-in” to a montage of Al and Bernie planning the repairs to the Zaku II Kai. Yet it also departs from the seemingly identical scene in episode one: it signifies peace after war, a superb example of repetition with a changed meaning. The exclusion of corpses now taking place is diachronic. Rather than excluding corpses from the outside world, it abandons corpses in the past. It is precisely through this shift from the synchronic to the diachronic that Side 6 becomes one with the universe: having excluded the outside world, it must now do what that world does—exclude the corpses produced within itself.
The Micro Level
War worship and weapons worship are widespread in our world. They may arise from a doctrine or an ideology, or from extreme patriotism and nationalism distorted by a government for its own convenience. But the “war worship” in 0080 is not so narrowly conceived. It grows out of the children’s perspective.
Consider these moments in episode one: children crowd around a school desk, animatedly discussing the military strength of Zeon and the Federation—though their argument is utterly absurd to viewers who know UC history. Back home, Al switches on the screen to play a war game; after his mother lectures him, he destroys the very city the game’s rules require him to protect. This latter scene points us toward the connection between children’s “war worship” and their rebellious phase.
The rebellious phase marks a child’s psychological birth. From this point onward, children gradually reclaim control, drawing a boundary between self and other, and eventually develop independent personalities. The worship of fighting that grows out of this is therefore easy to understand: “destroying the object” is a perfect way to assert subjectivity.
As children grow into adolescents, their worship of fighting becomes worship of war. Before either army arrives, they long for war; when conflict takes place before their eyes, they are enthralled by it. By then, however, war has been disguised in terms they can understand: an ideology, a confrontation between good and evil. This is politics invading the child from the outside world—which can also be understood as the Symbolic. As Clausewitz puts it in On War: “War is politics with bloodshed.”3
At this point, war “yet to arrive” and war “arriving”—Side 6’s synchronic condition and its ongoing transition from the synchronic to the diachronic, as discussed at the macro level—are fundamentally indistinguishable at the micro level: children always exclude corpses. All along, they gaze at war from peace’s rear window.
But Al is unlucky—he falls out of the rear window.
From Gazing to the Impossibility of the Gaze
Interestingly, from episode one through episode four, the series gives no casualty figures. Only after the Kämpfer attack in episode four do we first hear a colony official describe the losses.
In the course of this, Al goes from being an onlooker at the rear window to leaning his head out to peer at war, reaching out a hand in search of it, and then being forcibly dragged outside by war itself. By episode six, “War in the Pocket” / ポケットの中の戦争, when he witnesses Bernie sacrifice his life, he has fully understood war’s absurdity. His coming-of-age rite takes place precisely through “touching corpses.” Until then, he has been like his friends, “looking at corpses from afar.”
The children’s “looking from afar” can be connected to the “gaze,” though not to Žižek’s “gaze from the object.” Here, the gaze is closer to the word’s ordinary meaning: a subject outside war gazes at war, projecting their desires onto scenes of warfare from a place of safety. There is no need here to trace whether the desire to destroy or attack is secondary, as self psychology understands it, or primary, as in Freud’s aggressive drive. What really deserves our attention is the change in the mechanism of desire when the worship of fighting becomes “war worship.”
In fighting, acts of destruction or aggression do not turn others into corpses; war, however, produces corpses. The desire for “destruction” now comes under the influence of an “external force”: the source of our longing for war shifts from ourselves to corpses. Yes—what fun is there in toys bombarding other toys? We have long had an inkling that a hail of bullets leaves restless souls, that corpses lie beneath the ruins. It is precisely because we know, deep down, about this cruelty and excitement that we seek it out.
It is easy to see, then, that the condition for “war worship” is looking from afar. We keep an appropriate distance from war—call it “this side of the screen,” or “inside peace’s rear window”—and gaze at war producing corpses beyond the window. At this point, fans’ affection for Gundam anime and GUNPLA (the weapons appearing in the Gundam anime series)4 coincides with the children’s worship of war. To watch so-called “real-robot anime” is to watch war.
An extreme case also arises here. Among student study groups and war correspondents, there are often people with simple motives who strive to get as close to war as possible, reaching a distance that is “extremely close, yet not present.” This further reveals the essence of “war worship”: “war worship” is a form of corpse exclusion. Exclusion does not mean that we are unaware of corpses. It is precisely because we know about corpses that we deliberately separate the others facing death from the living subject: “them” from “us.” Civilians under fire now come infinitely close to Agamben’s homo sacer, wavering between persons and things as “corpses still alive.” And we can be either the ones who save them or the ones who destroy them. For the latter, gazing at war is the desire to produce corpses. In episode two, “Reflections in a Brown Eye” / 茶色の瞳に映るもの, Bernie shouts at the dockworkers moving corpses: “Be more careful with them! They’re not rag dolls!” “We” are treating “them” as dolls.
Once someone truly “touches corpses,” as Al does, the intoxicating drug of war worship loses its power. People can then only remain at peace’s rear window and go on pretending to sleep. In episode five, Al passes an arcade and sees a giant robot on a game screen destroying a city where people live. A flashback follows: people in the street witness the flash of an explosion; at school, classmates and teachers are vaporized by the shock wave…
It inevitably brings to mind John Badham’s 1983 American film:
David, a high-school student who loves computer games, often connects his personal computer to larger computers elsewhere to play pranks. One day, he stumbles into a military computer at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, dedicated to warfare against the Soviet Union, and takes the opportunity to play “Global Thermonuclear War.” But this sets off a chain of events that nearly destroys the entire world.
—Quoted from the Baidu Baike entry “WarGames (1983 American Film Directed by John Badham)”
In WarGames, war’s paradoxical parallax is exposed through a clumsy weld. 0080 clearly handles it with far greater subtlety. The best evidence comes after Al passes the arcade and meets his friends at school. They pull out cartridge cases they cherish like treasures, only to see the indescribable expression on Al’s face (the character acting in the animation here is superb). They, too, begin to look guilty and embarrassed. Isn’t this ironclad proof that they are “pretending to sleep”?
Modern warfare uses signs to dissolve the reality of war, replacing bloody struggles with buttons. The “Gundam” that emerged under these conditions should have served as a “humanoid weapon” that called corpses back, restoring the battlefield to a place of mortal combat within visual range and restoring war’s reality. Yet ten years after Mobile Suit Gundam (0079) first aired, as GUNPLA became all the rage, this literary significance was gradually lost. 0080 therefore tries, at its beginning, to make the audience’s viewpoint coincide with the little boy’s, then brings the boy into traumatic contact with war at its climax. Through this approach, the series succeeds in wrenching viewers down from their vantage point, bringing them too close to war—and to Gundam anime—to sustain the gaze, and calling back the lost “humanoid weapon.” What it signifies is plain: the war worship of GUNPLA hobbyists rests precisely on the deliberate exclusion of corpses. The key to completing the coming-of-age rite is “touching corpses”—witnessing with one’s own eyes the process by which corpses are produced. As director Fumihiko Takayama puts it: “I want them [GUNPLA hobbyists] to know just what it is they like.” In making the gaze impossible for its audience at the time, 0080 succeeds perfectly.
War Is Not Politics with Bloodshed
In episode six, “War in the Pocket” / ポケットの中の戦争, Bernie, piloting the Zaku II Kai, and Chris, piloting the Gundam NT-1, carry on the war. Even though the threat has been lifted, even though there is no longer anything to protect, Bernie keeps fighting.
For Foucault, “What is politics? Isn’t it the interplay among these different arts of government, together with their different reference points and the disputes these arts of government provoke? To my mind, this is precisely where politics is born.”5 Indeed: the neutral territory’s vacillation; the Federation’s public political propaganda and its secret collusion with Side 6; Zeon’s abandonment of its special forces and its willingness to blow up an entire space colony to destroy a single Gundam. An immense, invisible hand coerces every faction into action. The symbolic order weaves a dense web, binding the special forces, the Federation soldiers, the Gundam pilot, and the Zaku pilot, who fall into the all-encompassing net of politics. The series devotes a great deal of time to portraying war’s political nature, as in the quotation we cited under “Two Forms of Corpse Exclusion—The Macro Level”: “War is politics with bloodshed.”
Yet the twin facts that the crisis has passed and that Bernie fights to the death tear open a breach. Bernie and Chris each act out of what they believe to be justice, only to produce the absurd outcome of two people who love each other trying to kill each other. And this happens even though the cause of the war has already been removed: “politics” has vanished, but war keeps running. The Gundam and the Zaku, charged with symbolic significance, fight to the death; yet because the two wartime sides they represent have disappeared, this battle ultimately becomes “nothing.” Here, the fight to the death ends war by calling it forth once more. Packaged as a battle between good and evil, war now not only contains nothing of substance: it is itself “nothing at all.”
The series now poses a new question to its viewers: why does a war with “nothing at all” inside it keep producing corpses? To consider this question, we must return to Chris’s and Bernie’s “justice.”
When Al says, “So running away really is cowardly,” Chris replies: “No, it isn’t. In the end, I fight for myself. I fight because I’m afraid of ending up alone. But that’s my way of living, and running away is that person’s way of living. No one can decide who’s right and who’s wrong. People die if they fight, but they die if they don’t fight, too. There’s no right choice, wherever you look. All you can do is what you can do.” When it comes to individual choice, then, Bernie and Chris both choose what they believe they can do. While war is underway, the subject can escape from politics.
A question naturally arises: has the soldier who escapes politics also escaped the symbolic order? Bernie’s sacrifice seems to answer in the negative. To save Side 6, Bernie gives his life to destroy the Gundam NT-1. In fact, however, the Federation has already intercepted the Zeon cruiser carrying the nuclear warheads, turning this farce into pointless bloodshed. Bernie is bound by his era. The symbolic order tells him that unless he defeats the Gundam, nuclear warheads will fall on Side 6. He seems not to have escaped its grasp.
“…I was going to go straight to the police and turn myself in. [But] how can I put it? Doing that… I kept feeling like I’d be running away. If I didn’t fight here, it felt like I wouldn’t be myself anymore. It’s not that I hate the Federation, or that I want revenge for the captain and the others. I can’t explain it very well. [I want] to fight it—to fight the Gundam. Maybe it’s because I’m a soldier. I don’t really know why myself.” The tape he leaves Al not only overturns the preceding conclusion but also reveals the substance of Chris’s words: individual choices in war reveal a weakening of the symbolic order and a strengthening of subjectivity. What he and Chris choose is not only what soldiers swept along by the current of their times can do—a soldier exists solely to fight, making turning oneself in to the police a second option—but also what they themselves believe they should do. The self’s choices, ordinarily obscured, now blaze with greater intensity and brilliance.
Thus, today, we encounter many so-called pure villains: war maniacs bent on destruction alone, whose creators motivate them with “the sense of being alive through fighting.” The reason is the same: subjective experience on the battlefield summons the subject back, demonstrating the presence of “I.” In this sense, Bernie’s choice and Lieutenant Colonel Killing’s mad determination to use nuclear warheads, by any means necessary, paradoxically share the same essence. We have therefore found one of the truths behind war’s persistence: if those in high positions give free rein to their already unbridled subjectivity on the battlefield, there is no chance that the war machine will stop easily.
Toward the end of episode six, Al’s cry, his voice hoarse from shouting—“Bernie, you don’t have to fight anymore!”—echoes Bernie’s monologue. Together, in “War in the Pocket” / ポケットの中の戦争, they reflect war’s absurdity: even if Bernie knew at this moment that the colony had escaped the shadow of nuclear weapons, the fighting could no longer stop. The monster born of politics has now broken away from politics, lost in the seductive return of the subject. Here, the series says: war is war.
Epilogue: The Masterpiece Comes Down to Earth; the Gaze Remains
“Al, don’t cry. There’ll be another war soon. This time it’ll be even, even crazier—a really big, fun [war]!”
“And then we can pick up live rounds, not just empty cases. Maybe we’ll even find army guns!”
Those of us familiar with UC history know, of course, that war will ravage the Universal Century again in the years to come. The two children’s conversation sounds like a prophecy. But for now, on this pocket-sized patch of land, the war is over.
The “beetle’s shell in the box” and the mystics tell us that subjective experience and empirical inquiry are inherently separate. We can never truly communicate our own experience to other people.
—Quoted from Hank Green’s Crash Course Philosophy6
Thus, although Al has been “fortunate” enough to come down from the rear window of the gaze, everyone within the scene of peace can no longer comprehend war: corpses have been diachronically excluded from peace. Yet we on this side of the screen are equally unable to comprehend war. This is even structurally determined.
Of the UC Gundam works with an “8” in their titles, 0080 explores the antiwar theme most deeply. It hopes to pull viewers down from their position of gazing, yet fails precisely amid a chorus of praise: viewers drawn by its reputation, eager to comprehend war, turn their gaze upon Al, the boy whose viewpoint was supposed to coincide with theirs. They want to see Al traumatized, to see him “get what he deserves.” This gives rise to “a gaze upon the gaze.” The work’s failure also marks the failure of the viewing subject. Immersed in the mirror’s reflection, we pin our hope of recovering something missing on a so-called “antiwar masterpiece” that reveals the larger picture through a small story, hoping thereby to understand the reality of war.
But from Al’s perspective as a character, he has indeed learned what war is by living through it and witnessing corpses. From our perspective as viewers, we have not lived through war. The absence of experience is an impassable barrier: “People do not share one another’s joys and sorrows.”7 Thus, as mere spectators, we never will—and never can—know war.
As the overhead shot rises and draws away, 0080 comes to a close. In this peaceful, cheerful atmosphere, the boys’ conversation reaches across the millennium into our twenty-first-century present, creating an exquisitely pointed irony both within the story and beyond it. Once this work ends, we will go looking for more films about war, maintaining the posture of the gaze, trying through reading, again and again, to find an essence.
We are always standing at peace’s rear window.