This article was a prize-winning entry in the Pre-Festival + Post-Festival events of the Roof Research Society’s Scavenging Strategy: Rags Drum 2020.
Introduction
This essay takes as its object Sunrise’s mecha anime The Big O, broadcast between 1999 and 2003. Through an examination of the genre traditions of Japanese mecha anime and tokusatsu monster films, and by drawing on the Judeo-Christian conception of the Messiah, it aims to construct a more radical approach to interpretation. The twentieth century’s fin de siècle was Christ’s fin de siècle; imperceptibly, everyone had become a cultural Christian. The interpretation proposed here is neither a reductive textual analysis nor a theoretical exposition in which “the Six Classics annotate me.” (Translator’s note: An allusion to the Song Confucian Lu Jiuyuan’s dictum “the Six Classics are my footnotes”—here aimed at criticism that treats a text as nothing more than an annotation to a pre-given theory.) It is, instead, an interpretation that works in both directions: theory interprets the text, while the text also interprets theory. The hope is to open a space for more complex, more diverse readings—and even misreadings.
1. Flesh of Steel and Disciplined Flesh
When Mitsuteru Yokoyama first drew the encounter between Tetsujin 28 and Shotaro Kaneda, he might not have imagined that the giant robot would become so popular, growing over the following decades into a vast and enduring genre. If we follow the genre’s trajectory through time, we can discern a change in the way its giant robots are depicted: quite unmistakably, these fighting giants are becoming increasingly “disobedient.” Unit-01 can go berserk; the Unicorn Gundam can absorb its pilot. The “good old days” of simply getting into a robot and smashing monsters or wiping out enemies seem to be gone for good.
A giant robot is unquestionably another body for the human subject. Think of Tetsujin 28, which its creator treated as a substitute for his son Shotaro, or Barbatos, which becomes the limbs of the paralyzed Mikazuki. Watching the animation, we can readily see how its staging emphasizes the identity of robot and pilot (one classic shot shows the robot taking a hit while the operator in the cockpit simultaneously grimaces in pain): the mechanical body is also the body inside the cockpit. These displays of “disobedience” seem to dissolve that identity. But in reality, is our flesh entirely identical with consciousness? A body that consciousness can control in its entirety is, of course, a modern construction founded on the conception of the subject since the Enlightenment. Bodies fall ill and sustain injuries, undergo all sorts of unforeseen experiences, and act against the subject’s will (this is all the more evident in adolescent boys and girls: as they grow, their bodies become increasingly unfamiliar and uncontrollable; they wake up to a wet dream or a period—no wonder so many mecha anime make their protagonists this age). They have complex dimensions that discourse can scarcely delineate. As Foucault put it, “the soul is the prison of the body.”
Continuing with the question of corporeality, we can observe another change in anime: the way robots are operated. Shotaro Kaneda controls Tetsujin 28 by remote control; Koji Kabuto operates Mazinger Z through the fighter craft in its head; most of the machines that appear in Gundam 0079 have their cockpits in the chest or abdomen. This, too, seems readable as a change in attitudes toward technology: the steel body passes from mere object (outside the subject, an utterly other being operated by remote control), to a body belonging to the subject and firmly under its command (the operator sits in the head, conventionally regarded as the body’s “command center”), and finally to a body with the subject entirely inside it.
What can a body do? The body and the subject are one, yet internally divided. The body can possess a sensuous mode of thought, a non-subjectivated quality; it is “the otherness within the subject that must be excluded for the subject to come into being.” (Translator’s note: The source of this quoted phrase could not be identified.) To put it more simply, imagining the self as a continuous, self-identical subject necessarily requires excluding whatever cannot be encompassed in that conception. The paradox is that the robot can be imagined as an other and can also be regarded as an extension of the body. So, deep in the cockpit, the protagonist will eventually have to confront the other within that has been repressed all along (the brutality Shinji Ikari confronts in Unit-01 is, in fact, his own repressed brutality).
Another paradox is that giant robots are, on the one hand, bodies with specifications laid down in advance (as killing weapons, tools of production, machines with clearly defined uses…); on the other, they also create a way of resisting those specifications, an escape from the subject’s power. Thus the escape is twofold: an escape from their designated use (the Turn A Gundam is used to dry laundry), and an escape from the pilot’s subjective will (at the end of the Martian Successor Nadesico film, what runs down Black Sarena’s face is, I believe, not machine oil but tears). Stories hide in the tension of these contradictions.
The Big-series robots in The Big O also belong to this tradition. Throughout the show, they are “silent protagonists”: they can move without pilots and choose their operators of their own accord. Yet they also need those operators, with whom they remain in a constant battle of wills; any lapse leaves the pilot at risk of being devoured. Intriguingly, the series repeatedly emphasizes that Big O, the robot piloted by the protagonist Roger, possesses “the power of God.” And in every episode, as Roger pilots Big O, one line invariably appears: “Cast in the name of God, ye not guilty.” (Translator’s note: The slogan appears in this English form in the anime itself. Its grammar is deliberately archaic—“ye” is the old second-person plural, with the verb elided—so it reads roughly as “this was cast in the name of God; you [who wield it] are not guilty.”)
This opens another dimension of interpretation: the Judeo-Christian narrative of the Messiah.
2. The Monster’s Sin and Punishment, or Divine Violence
The characterization of Dorothy, the female lead, likewise bears the imprint of a narrative tradition. She is a familiar type, found in Castle in the Sky and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: the girl as an abyss of otherness, carrying the destructive technology of an earlier age. The story also hints that she might be the “Son of God” who will bring redemption to the world (in episode 11, the elderly butler mentions that Dorothy’s birthday falls on Christmas Day), revealing the two faces of technology.
From here we can pursue a very violent reading: Dorothy, Roger, and Big O form a Trinity; the “guilty” in “ye not guilty” is original sin, and the only person on earth without sin can be none other than Christ, the bringer of redemption. Further connections emerge midway through the story and toward its end: in episodes 16 and 17, believers deck the streets with lights and decorations, calling over and over for the advent of a destructive power that can bring on the end of the world. This is unmistakably apocalyptic: a festive summoning of the end that will wash everything away. Unfortunately, in keeping with the conventions of episodic storytelling, the giant monster that appears in answer to their calls is eventually defeated by the robot Roger pilots.
Monsters onscreen are a nearly irresistible force of violence, incarnations of world-ending natural disaster. But sometimes a natural disaster is not a natural disaster. Imagining it as one may simply be a way of carving up responsibility—yes, typhoons are capricious, but their devastation is also inseparable from the damage human activity has done to the planet’s environment over these years. The same is true of monster films: a monster’s appearance as a destructive force may be the disastrous consequences of the characters’ actions writ large—would the original Godzilla ever have come into being without the trauma of the atomic bomb? In this sense, monster films are—and can only be—films about “human beings.” We can push this one step further: the monster, as the externalization of the characters’ actions, is imagined as an utterly alien other because it has been separated from the acting subject, thereby obscuring the actual object to some degree.
On the other hand, the figure of the monster also suggests that the crisis can be resolved. We all know perfectly well that natural disasters are intangible: nobody can “kill” a typhoon or an earthquake. Monsters, however, are alive, and can become objects for power to govern. To put it radically, even fighting monsters can be ideological. The monster’s defeat means the (imaginary) resolution of the crisis facing the characters; everything returns to the tranquility of everyday life. (Even though we know perfectly well that the situation remains unresolved, that contradictions still fill the story, that countless questions remain unanswered…)
Back to the anime. In light of the foregoing, we can reconstruct the protagonist’s act of piloting a giant robot into battle against a monster in each self-contained episode as follows: Roger is the Messiah. Big O is his true flesh; by defeating these “incarnations of sin,” the Messiah absolves the world’s people of their sins. But the discussion does not end there. We should attend to the divine aura of monsters (Godzilla, for example, is a sea god to the fishermen who speak of him). Worship of vast, irrational violence seems to have been inscribed all along in humanity’s deepest memory. Just as in all those stories where “hero and enemy share a common origin,” the protagonist who wields “the power of God” against monsters encounters here his own opposite, a dark supplement to his own image: if the Messiah signifies mastery of reason and a balance reached with the otherness inside the body, then the monster is a breaking free of reason’s bonds, the specter of the body through and through, a passion that annihilates everything. This is akin to Žižek’s account of Benjamin’s divine violence: divine violence is the final irrational eruption of those trapped within a structure (think of the bureaucratic buck-passing almost everyone encounters: “You have to follow procedure.” When everything appears perfectly orderly, discontent also loses the language with which to express itself—what, then, is the only way it can find expression?). It rejects meaning, rejects all deeper interpretation, and, like a natural disaster, appears solely as the pure negation of the existing order. Utterly purposeless monsters whose every act is aimed solely at destruction can be seen as attempts to give symbolic form to this divine violence. This, naturally, is also an apocalyptic violence; in repeatedly defeating monsters, the protagonist repeatedly postpones the coming of the apocalypse. This brings to mind the Jewish conception of the Messiah: the Messiah is always late, always about to come, yet still not here. The time after his arrival is the eternal time of redemption; the time before his arrival is one in which past and future converge in the fleeting present. In waiting for the Messiah to come, waiting becomes an endless movement of self-deferral and self-realization.
3. Messianic Time
“My name is Roger Smith. I perform a much-needed job here in the City of Amnesia…”
From the monologue, we learn that forty years earlier a catastrophe of unknown origin struck the world and erased everyone’s memories. Even without memory, as long as people knew how to use machines, the world could keep running as usual. The survivors built Paradigm City among the ruins and returned to ordinary life. But memories that ought to have been forgotten sometimes return like ghosts, setting off all manner of disturbances. When a disturbance spirals out of control, our protagonist Roger climbs into Big O and becomes a “deus ex machina” to solve the problem (that is, violently smashing up monsters, meteors, and robots of every kind).
In this context, what the characters have lost is less “memory” than “history.” This is especially so from Roger’s perspective (he is only twenty-something, so at first glance the amnesia seems to have little to do with him): lamenting the loss of memory is simply mourning a lost past. Paradigm City is a city that has lost its history. Those who live in it are people who have lost their history. Everyone who appears in the story has lost not only memory but, at a deeper level, the very possibility of memory being constituted as memory.
What must be noted here is that “having lost history” is not the same as “having no history.” Loss suggests that there once was a history, and also carries the possibility of recovering it. What history do people want to recover? Clearly not the ruined walls of the metropolis, not those pathetic relics of an earlier age lying among the ruins (though they, too, are history—a fragmented history). It is the unspeakable “Thing of the Real” of which the subject imagines itself to have been deprived. It remains perpetually latent, yet continually intrudes upon the subject, preventing it from becoming whole. The lost memories never existed in the first place; yet this “not existing, but being believed to exist” is indispensable, and in turn shapes the subject. What is radical about the anime is that it points to this plasticity. The past is not a fixed, unchanging existence; it can be reshaped through action (as a line in the series puts it, “Imagination and memory are the same thing”).
The reversal required here is this: it is not history that creates the present, but the present that creates history. Take Roger’s “flashback sequences.” In the chronology of the story, the past comes first, and the characters’ actions respond to it. In the order of the narration, however, the characters’ actions come first, and the latent past is summoned into view. This is not a linear causal relation that unfolds with time. Quite the contrary: through what happens, we in the present reawaken memories and retroactively construct a narrative. Without what happens now, the past would not be shown. What is called for here is a synchrony: past, present, and future appear together and determine one another. This is “messianic time,” distinct from the homogeneous, linear conception of time in the Enlightenment narrative.
But the Messiah did not come.
4. 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 Coming of the Messiah”
Perhaps the name Big O already hints at the plot: O has neither beginning nor end, only an endless circling back upon itself. At the end of the story, the truth about Paradigm City is revealed: it is all fiction. At intervals, the robot Big Venus awakens, destroys the world, and reboots it. Beneath the remnants of stage spotlights in the sky above the city, a play is staged again and again. Roger negotiates, successfully persuading Big Venus and ending the world’s cycle of recurrence.
Like the conception of history discussed above, this is also a major revolt against the linear conception of time that constitutes the Enlightenment narrative. Narratives of recurrence and narratives of waiting for the Messiah resemble one another in that both point back to themselves. When Big Venus sets the cycle in motion once more, what we sense is a force of total negation, seeking to destroy everything in the present world and start again from scratch—a negation that coincides precisely with divine violence.
The fin-de-siècle Messiah is a Messiah of waiting. The Messiah does not really come; by postponing his own arrival countless times, he keeps the narrative of redemption intact, realizing himself in the endless deferral of waiting. But the real question is: why “about to arrive,” and why can it not be “already arrived”?
We can pursue an altogether more radical line of thought (as in Agamben’s account of messianic time): every existing moment can be a messianic moment; every instant of the present can, through excavation and retroactive reconstruction, constitute the Messiah’s arrival. As Kafka says, “he will come only on the day after his arrival”—does this not accord precisely with the series’ explorations of memory? The Messiah is not a promise of the future but action grounded in the present. We can push further: at the end of the story, did the Messiah who promises a future actually bring redemption? Or, to put it more simply: has the world really become any better?
What we encounter here is not the Messiah’s redemption but the universal failure of the messianic narrative: the Messiah ultimately changed nothing. The ending repeats the apocalyptic moment: Big Venus walks through the city, and wherever it goes, everything turns to nothing. Roger’s response, too, repeats every earlier episodic narrative: by successfully negotiating, he once again defers the coming of the true Messiah. On the one hand, this can be attributed to the limits of the era; on the other, it can of course also be called an incapacity of the imagination: how are we to imagine an altogether different moment of transformation? Perhaps what we truly need is not the resilience to go on living even in the face of the end, but the courage to affirm everything unconditionally even when the world reborn after everything has been reset to zero is no better, and we step again into the same wretched cycle. Escaping the destructive cycle and allowing the world to continue does not necessarily amount to redemption. To affirm every rebirth without limit, to affirm all that finds new life after destruction, and not to shrink from this even if the new beginning after destruction merely repeats the same disastrous course—is this not a more radical stance toward redemption?
The story goes on. The specter of the Messiah still wanders, waiting for the moment to crouch and spring.