I could have plucked the stars, but suddenly saw it was only a dream
And what then fell from the sky, burned to nothing by starlight,
Was the star called the sun
Preface: While adapting this article into a visual presentation, I revised the wording for speech. Along the way, I took on board some comments from passing readers and discovered errors in my wording that could have serious consequences. I dislike the article-editing function and once went so far as to boast that I would not even fix a typo. Hence this newly published V2.
Revue Starlight is a story about the stage. In sociology, the stage—or, more precisely, a whole vocabulary including frontstage, backstage, teams, and performance—has been used to analyze and describe interactions between people. This was Mr. Goffman’s work. We cannot add anything to his system; we only hope to use it for a shallow analysis of an anime. Applying a theory that brings theatrical terminology into sociology—dramaturgical theory—to an anime whose very flesh and bones are performance and the stage should make for an unexpectedly distinctive experience.
As you watch, be sure to distinguish the different meanings of theatrical terms such as performance, audience, and staging. Quite apart from the Stage Girls and the giraffe as audiences within the story, and the performances the Stage Girls give, the anime itself is a visual work: there are actors inside the screen, viewers outside it, and the anime’s own staging. Dramaturgical theory then introduces a third set of terms identical in wording. You can imagine the considerable obstacles to understanding this creates.
Please put on some music: Rib’s cover of “Dramaturgy.” Naturally, the song will not provide any substantial help in understanding dramaturgical theory. This is a personal indulgence. Rib and Revue Starlight helped me through a low period, and my feelings for them are not something anything else could replace.
演じてみるの あなたの気を惹きたいから 『Fly Me to the Star』
I’ll do my best to play the part, just to catch your eye. —“Fly Me to the Star”1
I. On Dramaturgical Theory
Goffman was one of the representative figures of symbolic interactionism. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he drew analogies between theatrical terminology and everyday behavior, bringing that terminology into sociological research. In his account, ordinary human dealings, life, and interaction are all like theatrical performances. Everyone performs either independently or as a member of a “team.” In a given situation—a particular setting, on one stage or another—people perform according to their own needs or generally accepted norms. With the “role” as their basis, they interact through “performance” and “impression management.” In this way, theatrical terminology enters sociology.
For literary criticism, or the anime criticism we are undertaking today, concepts such as “role-playing” and “impression management” can help us analyze certain characters. An anime’s plot development and construction of conflict can be understood as manifestations of impression management in particular situations. Here I will try, to the best of my ability, to offer a reading of Revue Starlight using a small part of dramaturgical theory.
II. The Conflict Between Ideal and Actual Roles: Hikari Kagura
According to Goffman’s theory, life is a stage and everyone an actor. Conflict and interaction between people constitute the process of “performance,” creating meaningful episodes in the drama of life. Judging performance by conventional morality and treating it as “hypocrisy” does nothing to help us understand this important theory. Although such criticism persists, I hope everyone listening can set it aside. This article has no intention of equating performance with hypocrisy and using that equation to condemn any character.
“Role-playing” means that, in a particular situation of interaction, an individual always tries to bring their performance as close as possible to a role they wish to present to the audience—that is, to other people. What the audience sees is only the enactment of the role, not the role itself. Whether or not individuals realize they are performing, they establish an idealized role as their point of reference. The formation of this ideal role depends on their wider environment and personal experience.
Hikari Kagura’s aspiration is to become a “Top Star (together with Karen).” As she pursues it and her circumstances change, her actual role goes through several reversals, and her ideal role changes repeatedly. The intense conflict between her ideal role and the role she is actually performing is the inner force driving her actions.
We can thank the work for giving Hikari an overarching goal: each of her ideal roles lies on a necessary path toward it. As noted above, for most of the time she is shown to us, her ideal role and the role she is performing do not match. In London, as a student at the Royal Academy of Theatre and Acting, her ideal role is that of a “diligent, high-achieving student.” She hopes this will make her abilities worthy of the honor of “Top Star.” The fact that she can only play the second lead makes her impose ever stricter standards on herself—until she encounters the mysterious auditions, a more efficient means of reaching her goal, and gladly takes part. Her ideal role quickly becomes “the winner of the auditions.” This role governs her behavior for a long time afterward, including, of course, her fight through the auditions. Her subsequent defeat puts her actual role even further from her ideal role. Yet she is given a second chance and retains her status as a “contestant.” She cannot adjust this ideal role; instead, it becomes even more firmly entrenched. She holds her performance to the standards expected of an “audition winner,” distancing herself from others—even Karen.
Karen Aijo’s entry into the auditions forces Hikari to adjust her ideal role. The distance between her actual role as “Karen Aijo’s opponent”—or even simply as a “contestant”—and her aspiration to become a “Top Star (together with Karen)” makes her abandon the ideal role of “audition winner” altogether. Once her actual role does reach that of winner, she makes a sacrifice no “contestant” should ever make: she offers up her own brilliance to protect Karen. Of course, the tragedy that follows lies outside this reckoning.
An explanation is necessary here. The standards attached to an ideal role are not determined solely by the person who adopts it. They are determined by what society expects of someone in that particular position. Someone whose ideal role is “an outstanding athlete,” for example, should not willingly give away a gold medal. Returning to the anime, the role of “audition winner” calls for someone broadly like Judy—at any rate, it should not be someone like Nana Daiba or Hikari Kagura. By the same token, a contestant should not willingly surrender her brilliance. The giraffe’s reaction offers some confirmation of this. One further point: an ideal role is essentially a direction, not a destination. Ideal roles are excessively perfect, and most are difficult to attain; but even someone whose performance matches one flawlessly must still use it to govern future performances. The second stage production, Revue Starlight -The LIVE- #2 Transition, provides a good example. Karen and Hikari have both brought their actual roles into alignment with their ideal roles, but Karen temporarily stops holding herself to those standards, while Hikari does not.
Looking across these two years of Hikari’s life, the struggle between her aspiration and an actual role that moves ever further away from it, together with her repeated adjustments to her ideal role, constitutes the fundamental motive for her actions. To realize her aspiration, she can only press deeper, step by step, toward the abyss of tragedy. In the end, however, the story arranges a happy ending and grants her that highest aspiration.
III. Hikari Kagura’s Strategies of Impression Management
“Impression management” refers to the self-management and self-control performers exercise while playing a role, so as to establish that role successfully and leave the audience with a good impression. Once a person comes into contact with others, they must consider the impression they make on them. We need to be clear about these terms here: “role” and “audience” emphatically do not mean a character in the story and you and me outside the screen. They refer to a particular character’s role and the other people with whom that character interacts. Similarly, a “good impression” means “an impression consistent with the role,” not “a favorable impression.”
When Hikari first arrives at Seisho Music Academy, her ideal role is still that of “winner.” To play it well, she makes efficient use of impression-management strategies.
The first is idealization: she conceals behavior inconsistent with the many accepted standards and norms of the “contestant” role, hiding her past from Karen. The second is misrepresentation, whose purpose is to mislead others into forming a false impression. Her deliberate distance from the others creates the false impression that she is unsociable. This supports her third strategy: mystification. According to Goffman’s theory, the more familiar two people become, the more their reverence for one another dissolves, and the more readily they come to look down on each other. Through misrepresentation, Hikari keeps the other girls from approaching her; she also actively distances herself, so that she can complete the entire round of auditions without emotional interference.
Hikari and Nana have repeatedly faced off through impression management. “When individuals appear before others, they always define the situation on the basis of the information available to them. If observers are unacquainted with an individual, they judge how to act from that person’s conduct and appearance, drawing on their past experience of interacting with similar people.”2 Nana draws on her accumulated experience with her other classmates. Their first contest of impression management takes place in the elevator. Trying to conceal her identity as the “guardian of the loop,” Nana presents a gentle face. Against Hikari’s self-isolation, she loses decisively. Whether it is pudding or a muffin is beside the point.
Again and again, similar clashes arise as the situation is reconfigured, driving the plot forward. In an interaction, performers can struggle for control over the definition of the situation only on the basis of the limited information they possess. We, however, possess all the information about every performer—even their unspoken thoughts. Thus, faced with the tragedy of episode 10, we cannot step in and move things along, however desperate we feel. The script has Karen enter Hikari’s theater, read its drama, and discover what Hikari has kept hidden in her heart. Karen, a character within the story, comes to stand alongside us. Karen’s grief and Hikari’s torment can finally be connected. We, who know all the secrets, have at last reached the revelation. As “Butai Shōjo Kokoroe: Makuai” (“A Stage Girl’s Principles: Interlude”) plays, everything comes together in a happy ending for the whole theater.
IV. Frontstage and Backstage: The Stage Girls’ Hidden Worlds
“Frontstage” is the part of the stage where performance follows an established pattern, defining a particular situation for the audience. “Backstage” is the part kept out of the audience’s sight, with access restricted for audiences and outsiders. Only those in closer relationships are allowed to see what happens “backstage.” The distinction is not absolute. Compared with a classroom, a dorm room shared by two people is naturally backstage. Compared with being alone, however, it is also frontstage.
The Stage Girls practice audience segregation flawlessly. Its purpose is to keep the audience of one stage from seeing the performance on the next—much as a young man who is all manners and easy smiles at home instantly turns into a complete clown around his friends. The characters’ segregation is more frightening still: they hide so many secrets in intensely private backstages. Frontstage, Mahiru Tsuyuzaki is Karen’s roommate and close friend. Backstage, she conceals the fact that she has made herself entirely dependent on this relationship and feels inferior. Nana’s gentle frontstage role provides cover for a backstage of despair, which she can reveal only when she and Junna are alone together.
Another point needs explaining: frontstage and backstage are not divided by a fixed spatial boundary. When an audience enters the backstage, it naturally becomes frontstage. Return to Nana and Hikari in the elevator. Before she is noticed, Hikari’s concern for Karen is written all over her face—something she can show only backstage. Once noticed, she immediately puts away that tenderness and raises her barriers. The place has not changed; add an outsider, and she is forced onstage.
Audience members are actors too, however, and understand what kind of acting a situation calls for. When they inadvertently enter someone else’s backstage, they will usually choose to withdraw or pretend not to notice, giving the other person a chance to recover. Having intruded on Mahiru’s backstage, Hikari tries to overlook what she has seen and talk away the awkwardness. For various reasons, though, everything she does makes matters worse. And really, we cannot expect Mahiru to maintain her frontstage role after the same person has barged into her backstage three times in a row.
V. Conflict Escalates: Failed Performance and “Role Breakdown”
Our Mahiru can no longer hold together the role she has struggled so hard to maintain frontstage. She reveals her backstage feelings to Hikari, who is still an outsider and an audience member. In Goffman’s system, this is a failure of performance—a situation everyone does their utmost to avoid, fearing its consequences. But “failed performance” will not do for our analysis today. The Stage Girls actively tear off their masks and reveal their hearts on the giraffe’s stage. A description so heavily weighted with reward and punishment does not suit this.
Let me adapt a term from anime, then. Here is something Mr. Goffman never did.
The key to this work’s construction of tension and conflict is role breakdown,3 a misalignment of frontstage and backstage. That is: when you can no longer keep your mask in place, you tear apart the masks designed for all these different purposes, show others what is in your heart, and pull someone who does not belong in your backstage into it.
In his discussion of social conflict, Simmel holds that burying tensions too deeply does nothing to help resolve them, and may lead to more extreme consequences. To draw a simple analogy: the characters in this work bury their inner conflicts, leave all their sorrow and pain in backstages that belong to them alone, and conceal everything behind perfect frontstage roles. Unless these conflicts are exposed and thoroughly intensified, “growing every day” is empty talk. Of course, the idea that an outbreak of conflict can benefit the development of the whole is also part of Simmel’s theory. I will not elaborate.
Take Mahiru. Jealousy, lack of confidence, and complete dependence on Karen are at the heart of the problem, but all of it is deeply buried. Hikari’s repeated intrusions into her backstage make it impossible for her to maintain her mask, bringing everything frontstage. At that point, Hikari is not someone Mahiru can let backstage. Remember, even Karen has never seen that weak, helpless Mahiru backstage. Removing the frontstage mask before an audience and expressing what is truly in her heart produces a series of conflicts. There is now something that can be resolved. Nor is this an isolated instance. Other conflicts are constructed in the same way: the frontstage becomes impossible to maintain, and feelings long hidden backstage are exposed in full. This happens with Nana in episode 9, with Junna’s criticism of her classmates in the classroom in episode 2, and with Futaba Isurugi pouring out her heart in episode 6. It is all the more evident when Claudine Saijo stops concealing her admiration in episode 10.
Please understand that calling these “masks” is neither an insult nor an accusation. The time, energy, and money I put into Revue Starlight are all given sincerely. Yet in Goffman’s system, they are still a performance that establishes my role as a “Revue Starlight fan,” a “hardcore Starlight scholar,” or something of the sort. Such performance is called “sincere.” Only someone who genuinely believes in the role they play can go this far. A knowingly false performance, by contrast, is “cynical.” This is not relevant to the present discussion, so I will leave it there.
The characters’ masks are torn apart as a result of carefully designed situations. More interestingly, although the virtual frontstage that envelops each of them begins to collapse in the everyday world, their problems are truly resolved—the two parties enter each other’s backstage and talk—in the revue arena, on the frontstage of a literal stage. And yet the characters define this literal stage as a backstage space. What they perform here, under cover of an actual theatrical performance, is everything they have hidden backstage and dare not express in their everyday performances.
VI. Conclusion: “Capsule Man”—Our Sorrow
Only when performing on a carefully designed “stage” do the characters reveal the backstages that ordinarily belong to them alone. Put another way, only under cover of an actual “performance” do they stop the habitual, compulsory performances of everyday life and show what is real to that intimate someone they have always treated as an audience member—and, of course, to those watching from outside, whom we ordinarily call the “audience.”
Here we introduce a concept: “Capsule Man.” Proposed by the Japanese scholar Osamu Nakano,4 it describes a widespread psychological condition among modern people who have grown up in the age of mass communication. Their inner lives are likened to isolated, sealed, can-like containers. “Capsule Man” also longs to escape loneliness, to interact and communicate with others. But when one can touches another, only their walls can meet. These barriers are not innate, yet they are absolutely indestructible. Whether used for self-protection or raised in the name of protecting others, they make it utterly impossible for people to reach deep into one another’s hearts.
This tragedy belongs to our generation alone. It is also, in fact, the root of the Stage Girls’ tragedies, each of which is resolved. Take Nana alone: with these barriers that everyone possesses, where would she end up by graduation if there were no auditions? I cannot bear to imagine that possibility. People long to express themselves, yet are unwilling to expose their backstages. Mahiru watches over Karen silently, attaching herself to her and never revealing her true feelings. Then, as I said in my previous article, Karen, unable to fathom another person’s inner life, becomes a source of anguish to Mahiru, provoking a jealousy that had not existed before.
This tragedy belongs to our generation alone. Every generation puts on a play, but no generation’s backstage has ever been as intensely private as ours is now. These unprecedentedly sturdy barriers are the heart of the tragedy.
Then give them a “stage.” Give those Stage Girls a real “stage,” so that under cover of an actual “show” they can stop their day-in, day-out performances. Break those wretched cans. Let them press two hearts close together in a space called “frontstage” that is really a backstage for just the two of them.
How wonderful! Then give us a stage.
Give those who cannot escape the stage an actual “stage.” Let that actual “stage” become the only backstage where those poor souls forever wandering frontstage can catch their breath.
Give them an actual “stage,” lavish, beautiful, dazzling, thrilling. Everything on this “stage” is false; everything is “performance” meant to please others. The truths they dare not reveal, hidden in their own backstages, are laid bare without reserve on this utterly false “stage.” The Stage Girls say everything on the “stage” that they dare not say in their dorm rooms. “Take everything from me.” I have put it all “frontstage.” I have “shown” it all to you. See, this is the “performance” I prepared so carefully. This is what I would never dare reveal in the real world—the truth of a backstage that belongs to me alone…
Only in this illusory space can we express something real for a moment. Only by hiding behind alternate accounts, within our circles, and behind our avatars can we offer up everything we dare not say as conversation fodder for the goofballs online, and so find a moment’s relief, a little rest. Then we gear up for the fray again, return to the frontstage, and step onto the never-stopping stage of fate to replay the dreary play we know by heart. As for everyone else, you need not worry about them—they are just like you.
この小さな劇場から出らんない、気ずいたら最後逃げ出したい
僕ら全員演じていたんだ、エンドロールに向かってゆくんだ さあ、
皆必死に役を演じて、傍観者なんていないのさ
『ドラマツルギー』
We cannot get out of this little theater; coming to our senses, we only want to flee.
We play every part, heading toward the closing credits, never to return.
Come on, everyone, play your parts for dear life. There is no such thing as a bystander.
—“Dramaturgy”5
This is our generation’s tragedy.
And in the foreseeable future, the next generation will share this tragedy, and it will go on without end.
This is humanity’s tragedy.
References
- Wang Qingfeng. “Interpreting the Duality of Goffman’s Conception of the Self.” Innovation 13, no. 1 (2019): 34–41.
- Zhang Jiayi. “The Emergence of the New ‘Capsule Man’ in the Social Media Era.” Cradle of Journalists, no. 10 (2018): 95–96.
- Wu Desheng and Ouyang Mengqi. “An Analysis of the ‘Capsule Man’ Phenomenon in the Mobile Internet Era.” Northern Media Research, no. 3 (2018): 48–49.
- Chen Jie. “Contemporary Reflections on Goffman’s ‘Dramaturgical Theory’ and Its Practice.” Dramatic Literature, no. 8 (2017): 107–110.
- Meng Wei. “A Review of Goffman’s Theory of Dramaturgical Analysis.” Heilongjiang Historical Records, no. 5 (2008): 58–59.
- Huang Jiansheng. “Goffman’s Dramaturgical Theory and Behavioral Analysis.” Journal of Yunnan Normal University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), no. 4 (2001): 91–93.
- Liao Kekai. “Performance and Self-Presentation in Online Games: Observations and Analysis Based on Goffman’s Dramaturgical Theory.” Western Journal (Journalism and Communication), no. 5 (2016): 64–66.
- Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Chinese edition. Peking University Press, 2008.