This essay was a prizewinning entry in both the Eve Festival and After Festival of Rags Drum 2020, organized by Lab on Roof.
Preface
This essay takes as its subject Sunrise’s robot anime The Big O, broadcast from 1999 to 2003. By analyzing the genre traditions of Japanese robot anime and tokusatsu monster films, and by drawing on the Judeo-Christian idea of the Messiah, it seeks to construct a relatively radical approach to interpretation. The end of the twentieth century was the end of a Christian century: imperceptibly, in a cultural sense, everyone had become a Christian. This reading does not attempt a reductive textual analysis, nor does it seek merely to make the classics annotate the interpreter. Interpretation here runs in both directions: theory interprets the text, but the text also interprets theory. Through that movement, I hope to open a space for more complex and varied readings—and even misreadings.
I. The Body of Steel and the Disciplined Body
When Mitsuteru Yokoyama first drew the meeting between Tetsujin 28-go and Shotaro Kaneda, he may not have imagined just how popular the image of the giant robot would become, or that in the decades to follow it would grow into such a vast and enduring creative genre. If we trace the giant robots of that genre through time, however, we can observe a change in how they are represented. The most obvious development is that the giant robots doing battle have become increasingly “disobedient.” Evangelion Unit-01 goes berserk; the Unicorn Gundam absorbs its pilot. The good old days of simply climbing into a robot and defeating monsters or enemies seem to be gone.
The giant robot is, without question, another body for the human being. Tetsujin 28-go, for example, was developed as a substitute for its creator’s son Shotaro; Gundam Barbatos becomes the limbs of the paralyzed Mikazuki Augus. While watching anime, we can readily see how direction emphasizes the identity between robot and pilot. A classic shot shows the operator in the cockpit grimacing in pain at the very moment the robot is struck. The machine’s body is also the body inside its cockpit. Performances of “disobedience” appear to dissolve this identity. Yet in reality, are our bodies ever completely identical with our consciousness? The notion of a body fully controlled by consciousness is, of course, a modern construction grounded in the idea of the subject since the Enlightenment. Bodies fall ill and suffer injury; they undergo all manner of unforeseen experiences; they act against the subject’s will. This is all the more evident for adolescents, whose bodies become increasingly unknown and uncontrollable as they grow. They wake after a wet dream or begin menstruating—little wonder so many robot anime make protagonists of this age. The body has complex dimensions that language cannot easily delineate. As Foucault writes, “The soul is the prison of the body.”
Continuing from this question of corporeality, we can also observe changes in how robots are operated. Shotaro Kaneda controls Tetsujin 28-go with a remote. Koji Kabuto controls Mazinger Z from a craft docked in its head. The cockpits of most mobile suits in 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam are located in the chest or abdomen. This progression can also be read as a shift in attitudes toward technology: the steel body begins as a mere object, wholly other to the subject and manipulated from without by remote control; it then becomes a body belonging to the subject and held firmly under the subject’s command, with the operator sitting in what common sense regards as the body’s “command center”; finally, it becomes a body in which the subject is wholly immersed.
What can a body do? Body and subject are at once identical and internally divided. The body is capable of a sensory thought, a nonsubjective quality: it is “the alterity within the subject that must be excluded when the subject is formed.” Put more simply, to imagine the self as an identical and continuous subject, one must exclude whatever cannot be contained within that image. Here lies a paradox. A robot can be imagined as an other, but it can also be treated as an extension of the body. Deep in the cockpit, the protagonist must therefore eventually confront the other that has always been repressed within. The brutality Shinji Ikari encounters in Evangelion Unit-01 is also his own repressed brutality.
There is a second paradox. On the one hand, the giant robot is a body whose function has been determined in advance—as a weapon, a tool of production, or a machine with some other clearly defined purpose. On the other, it creates a path of resistance to such predetermination, a line of flight from the power of the subject. Flight therefore occurs twice over: first as flight from prescribed use, as when the Turn A Gundam is used to dry laundry; and then as flight from the pilot-subject’s will. At the end of Martian Successor Nadesico: The Motion Picture – Prince of Darkness, what runs down the Black Sarena’s face is surely not machine oil but tears. The story lies hidden in the tension of this contradiction.
The Big-type robots in The Big O belong to this tradition as well. Across the series, they are “silent protagonists”: they can act without pilots and choose their operators according to their own will. Yet they also need those operators, and remain locked in a constant psychological struggle with them. A pilot who relaxes his guard risks being swallowed. It is therefore suggestive that the series repeatedly identifies the power of Roger’s robot, Big O, as “the power of God.” Every time Roger pilots Big O, the same inscription appears: “Cast in the name of God, ye not guilty.”
This brings us to another dimension of the series: its Judeo-Christian messianic narrative.
II. The Monster’s Crime and Punishment, or Divine Violence
The heroine, R. Dorothy Wayneright, is also shaped by an established narrative tradition. Like the heroines of Castle in the Sky and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, she is a girl who carries the destructive technology of an earlier age and opens onto the abyss of the Other. The story also hints that she may be a “child of God” who brings salvation to the world. In Episode 11, the elderly butler Norman remarks that Dorothy’s birthday falls on Christmas Day. She thus embodies the double aspect of technology.
From here we can develop a deliberately violent reading. Dorothy, Roger, and Big O form a trinity. The “guilty” in “ye not guilty” refers to original sin, and the only guiltless person on earth could be Christ, the bearer of salvation. Further connections emerge in the middle and latter portions of the story. In Episodes 16 and 17, believers festoon the streets and repeatedly summon a destructive force capable of bringing about the end of the world. The scene is unmistakably apocalyptic: amid celebration, the faithful call for the advent of a final day that will wash everything away. Unfortunately, in keeping with the conventions of an episodic series, the giant monster that answers their call is eventually defeated by Roger’s robot.
The monsters that appear on screen are nearly irresistible violence, embodiments of natural disaster that bring the end of days. Yet a natural disaster is not always merely natural. To imagine one as such can be a way of dividing responsibility. Typhoons are indeed unpredictable, but their devastation is inseparable from the damage human activity has done to the global environment over the years. The same is true of monster films. A monster as destructive force can be a magnification of the consequences of a character’s actions. Could the original Godzilla have been born without the trauma of the atomic bomb? In this sense, monster films are—and can only be—films about “human beings.” We can push the point further. Because the monster is the externalization of human action and has been separated from the subject who acts, it is imagined as an utterly alien other; in doing so, it obscures the real object of concern.
The figure of the monster also suggests that a crisis can be resolved. We know perfectly well that natural disasters are elusive: no one can “kill” a typhoon or earthquake. A monster, however, is alive and can become an object of governance. Put radically, even fighting monsters can be ideological. The monster’s defeat signifies the characters’ imaginary resolution of their crisis, and all returns once more to the calm of everyday life—even though we know that the situation remains unsettled, the story is still filled with contradictions, and countless questions remain unanswered.
Returning to the anime, we can now reconstruct the protagonist’s battle against the monster in each episode as follows: Roger is the Messiah. Big O is his true body. By striking down the embodiment of humanity’s sin, the Messiah absolves the people of that sin. But the discussion does not end there. We must also notice the monster’s divinity—Godzilla, for instance, is a sea god in the fishermen’s lore. The worship of immense, irrational violence seems to have been engraved in the deepest strata of human memory. As in every story in which hero and enemy share the same origin, the protagonist who commands “the power of God” and battles monsters meets his own reverse, the dark supplement to his own image. If the Messiah signifies the mastery of reason and a balance reached with the alterity within, the monster breaks free from the leash of reason. It is the ghost of the body in its purest form, a passion that destroys everything.
This recalls Žižek’s discussion of Walter Benjamin’s divine violence: divine violence is the final irrational eruption of those trapped in a structure. Think of the bureaucratic runaround almost everyone has encountered: “You have to follow the procedure.” When everything appears perfectly ordered, discontent also loses the language in which to express itself. What form can its expression then take? Divine violence refuses meaning and every deep interpretation. Like a natural disaster, it appears solely as a pure negation of the existing order. The monster that has no purpose and acts only to destroy can be read as an attempt to give that divine violence symbolic form. This too is apocalyptic violence. Each time the protagonist defeats a monster, he also postpones the apocalypse. This neatly recalls the Jewish conception of the Messiah: the Messiah is always late, always about to come and yet never arriving. The time after his arrival is the eternal time of redemption. The time before it is a time in which past and future converge in the vanishing instant of the present. As people await the Messiah, their waiting becomes an endless motion of self-deferral and self-fulfillment.
III. Messianic Time
“My name is Roger Smith. I perform a much-needed job here in this city of amnesia. . . .”
Through this voice-over, we learn that an unexplained catastrophe took place forty years ago and robbed everyone in the world of their memories. Even without memory, however, the world can continue to function so long as people know how to operate its machinery. The survivors built Paradigm City among the ruins and returned to ordinary life. Yet the memories that should have been forgotten sometimes return like ghosts and stir up all manner of disturbances. When a disturbance spirals out of control, Roger boards Big O and becomes a deus ex machina who “solves” the problem—that is, he violently demolishes monsters, meteors, robots, and the like.
In this context, what the characters have lost is less “memory” than “history.” This is especially clear from Roger’s perspective. He is only in his twenties, so at first glance the collective amnesia has little to do with him; lamenting it is simply a way of mourning a lost past. Paradigm City is a city that has lost its history, inhabited by people who have lost theirs. The characters have not merely lost their memories. At a deeper level, they have lost the very possibility through which memory is formed as memory.
We must note that “having lost history” is not the same as “having no history.” Loss implies that a history once existed and that it might be recovered. What history do people wish to recover? Clearly, it is not the metropolis’s broken walls or the pitiful relics of the old age amid the ruins—although these too are history, history in fragments. What they seek is the unspeakable “Thing” of the Real that the subject imagines has been taken away. It always remains latent, yet continually harasses the subject and keeps it from attaining wholeness. The lost memories never existed in the first place. Yet this belief in the existence of what does not exist is indispensable, and in turn constitutes the subject. The anime is radical because it points to the plasticity of that process. The past is not fixed and immutable; it can be reshaped through action, as the series itself says: “Imagination and memory are the same thing.”
We must therefore perform a reversal: history does not create the present; the present creates history. Consider Roger’s flashbacks. In the chronological time of the story, the past comes first and the character’s actions answer it. In narrative time, however, the character acts first, calling the latent past into being. This is not a linear relation of cause and effect unfolding with time. On the contrary, an event in our present awakens memory anew and retrospectively constructs a narrative. Without the event in the present, the past would never appear. What this invokes is simultaneity: past, present, and future appear together and determine one another. It is a conception of “messianic time,” opposed to the homogeneous, linear time of Enlightenment narrative.
But the Messiah does not come.
IV. Late, or . . . Right Now?
“The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.”
—Franz Kafka, “The Messiah”
Perhaps the name Big O already contains a clue to the plot: O has neither beginning nor end, only an infinite cycle back into itself. At the end of the story, the truth of Paradigm City is revealed: everything is a fiction. At intervals, the robot Big Venus awakens, destroys the world, and resets it. Beneath the remains of theatrical spotlights suspended above the city, the same play is staged again and again. Through negotiation, Roger succeeds in persuading Big Venus to end the world’s recurrence.
Like the conception of history discussed above, this too is a rebellion against the linear time that structures Enlightenment narrative. Cyclical narratives and narratives of waiting for the Messiah resemble each other in that both point back toward themselves. When Big Venus restarts the cycle, what we feel is the power of an absolute negativity attempting to destroy the existing world and begin again from nothing. This negation coincides precisely with divine violence.
The Messiah of the fin de siècle is a Messiah who is awaited. The Messiah never truly arrives. He maintains the integrity of the narrative of redemption by postponing his arrival again and again, realizing himself in the deferral of an endless wait. But the real question is this: why must he be “about to arrive”? Why can he not have “already arrived”?
We can develop a more radical line of thought, following Agamben’s discussion of messianic time. Every moment that exists can be a messianic moment. Through retrospective excavation, every present instant can constitute the Messiah’s arrival. Kafka writes that “he will come only on the day after his arrival.” Does this not correspond exactly to the series’ reflections on memory? The Messiah is not a promise of the future, but action grounded in this very moment. To go further: at the end of the story, does the Messiah who promises a future actually deliver redemption? Or, more simply, does the world truly become any better?
What we encounter here is not messianic redemption, but the universal failure of the messianic narrative: in the end, the Messiah changes nothing. The conclusion repeats the apocalyptic moment. Big Venus walks through the city, and everything in its path vanishes into nothingness. Roger’s response likewise repeats every earlier episodic narrative: by successfully negotiating, he once again defers the arrival of the true Messiah. On one hand, we can say this reflects the limits of its era. On the other, it can be called a failure of imagination. How are we to imagine a moment of transformation that is utterly different?
What we may truly need is not the strength to keep living in the face of the apocalypse, but the courage to affirm everything unconditionally even if the world born after everything has been reset is no better, even if it enters the same wretched cycle again. Merely escaping a destructive cycle and allowing the world to continue does not necessarily constitute redemption. Would it not be a more radical attitude toward redemption to affirm every rebirth, to affirm everything born anew after destruction, even when the new beginning only repeats the old mistakes?
The story continues. The specter of the Messiah still wanders, waiting for the moment when it will crouch and leap.