A killer from the Moon.1
When friends at Lab on Roof suggested publishing some of my old tokusatsu essays on the site, I was genuinely astonished.2 For one thing, I don’t think my abilities are anywhere near good enough; for another, these old pieces seemed too thin individually and rather scattered when put together. Still, I have combined and revised “The Beetle from the Real Universe and the Disciplined Boy,” “The Temptation of the Mirror,” and “A New Mirror Image and the Father’s Call.” I ask your indulgence.
Screen titles: “The Rhinoceros Beetle Is a Space Invader!”; “Mirrorman”; “Mystery! The Mirror in Which the Devil Lives.”3
Actually, I can’t agree with what Gouzi said about tokusatsu in the voice chat on July 1. My understanding of Eiji Tsuburaya is that he was a tech geek with “no ideology.” In other words, I think his principal contribution was that his pursuit of the image gave us tokusatsu—an art whose emergence was by no means inevitable. As for shaping its intellectual content, all we can really say is that the Tsuburaya family has always tended toward an antiwar position and ideological neutrality. Nothing more. Of course we can criticize many of the things said in the tokusatsu productions of Tsuburaya and “Auntie Toei.” For instance, protecting the order of “everyday life” is an unchanging motif of tokusatsu—which is precisely one important reason so many of its episodes make such good texts for analysis. But rejecting tokusatsu because its earliest works were national-policy films is, I think, a matter of personal aesthetic preference, not an appropriate critical stance.
I. The Rhinoceros Beetle of Truth and the Kind Child — 真実のカブト虫と優しい子
I remember first renting Ultraman DVDs in second grade—or was it fourth? A television drama about Genghis Khan was airing at the time. While watching the conqueror of the steppes, I also began renting Ultraman Leo. The first disc started with this very episode, number 25, so it left a particularly strong impression. Well, I never much liked those fairy-tale episodes in the middle of Leo. They had neither the punishing training and horror of the early episodes—the Ultra Jeep, the black-lily ghost woman—nor the misery and vendettas of the later ones (the whole fucking team gets eaten). Looking back now, though, I find something else in them.
Of all the children in Ultraman, the only one I can remember is Tōru Umeda. In Japanese terms, he is a yasashii child—a kind child. Well, probably.
Subtitles: “Why are you doing this?”
Tōru is the one in yellow. He and his friends are throwing water bombs filled with ink into the fish tank. Looks like the familiar scene of little brats tormenting animals, doesn’t it? But didn’t I just say that young Tōru was a kind child? This brings us to a particular definition of kindness. Following Gouzi’s discussion, yasashii in Japanese means, to some extent:
Being considerate toward others and sensitive to their feelings (showing consideration for, or looking after, others) = (a minimum requirement for maintaining contact with society: anyone who fails to show such consideration or care does not measure up as a social being).
So who here is not quite so yasashii? Exactly: the protagonist I want to discuss, Jirō, leaning over the fish tank and shouting at his friends, “Why are you doing this?” He fails to consider his companions’ desire to have fun and acts in a way inappropriate to his position. But, as Gouzi has argued, yasashii is not a character trait but an institution. A person who is not yasashii, who would violate common sense, does not exist. We can even find traces of this institutional indoctrination in Leo’s theme song:
Subtitles: “No one should forget the courage in their heart.”
Subtitles: “Nor should they forget that warm, kind heart.”
This leaves the ideology called yasashii with a problem. If no one is not yasashii, why has someone done something here that cannot be called yasashii? What we see next, then, is that Jirō has encountered something that unsettles him:
Subtitles: “I dreamed that lots of poisonous rubbish fell from the sky.”
Subtitles: “But it came true.”
Subtitles: “My green turtle died.”
Subtitles: “I’ll die too.”
So what has happened? Jirō has seen—dreamed—something no one else can see, and he thinks he is going to die. He believes Earth (Japan) is unsafe. He has realized that there is no real guarantee of his survival, so he wants to go to another planet. In psychoanalytic terms, this is an encounter with a symptom.
How could poisonous rubbish fall from the sky? That sort of thing doesn’t happen. It defies common sense.
A symptom, then, means encountering something that does not exist in reality. One then recognizes the ontological unreliability of so-called reality and the untrustworthiness of the big Other, comes loose from the big Other—and things go wrong. But hasn’t so-called reality always lacked any real existence? The very reason we can fall asleep peacefully tonight is that we are certain we will open our eyes tomorrow. This is utterly groundless misrecognition! Perhaps the probability of not waking up tomorrow is very small, but it is certainly not zero. The things we believe can keep us safe are, at bottom, illusory. An American girl believed her parents would always protect her. Then a fellow member of her church assaulted her, and her parents forced her to marry the perpetrator immediately to cover up the church’s scandal.
Here, however, we see Jirō’s fear driving him to seek a new master:
Subtitles: “Will you take me to a beautiful planet?”
Our Ultraman Leo’s response is interesting too:
Subtitles: “In my travels through space…”
Subtitles: “…I’ve always thought there was no planet more beautiful than Earth.”
What kind of thinking is this? If I enter a system (one that gives me the certainty I need), I will always be safe. The difference between them is that Jirō does not think Earth (Japan) is such a system, whereas Gen Otori—the sort of foreigner Japanese people want—thinks Japan is the best of all. (Gen is essentially the ideal foreigner in Japanese eyes, or rather a foreigner constructed by Japanese people, which reveals other interesting aspects of this order.) As Gouzi puts it:
This worship of institutions (ideology) can appear in a sentence like “How wonderful to have been born in Japan.” It can equally appear in “How unfortunate to have been born in Japan.” The point is not what people think but what they do (ideology is a practice). Most Japanese people who complain about Japan will complain only in ways Japan permits. Criticism of the institution is contained within the institution. The apparent possibility of attacking it—this illusion—makes it more secure.
But the fact is: no, there is no beautiful (clean) planet. Not Japan, and not Planet CLEAN in Jirō’s dream either. (I’m inclined to think the alien from CLEAN in the episode is only part of the dream.) The reality we need to face is that nothing can ensure that the place we live will always remain suitable for human survival. And, according to the plot, Planet CLEAN is about to suffer a “dark forest” (?) strike from Earth.4
Subtitles: “Captain, the Earth Defense Committee’s Development Department will, at six tomorrow morning, use Planet CLEAN…”
Subtitles: “…to test the new CS137 rocket bomb.”
Subtitles: “Look, this is…”
What can the dream accomplish? I think this is precisely an attempt by the unconscious to dissolve the symptom. “How unfortunate to have been born in Japan.” If only I were on Planet CLEAN. In the fantasy of lamenting one’s lot and longing for somewhere else, the symptom has, in fact, already been resolved—if the symptom is nothing more than a boy’s dream. But we should remember that a symptom is a “ghostly message” from the invisible Real. And the existence this message points to can break through to a place where reality can no longer ignore it. An insect like this, for instance:
Subtitles: “This is the space insect Satan Beetle.” Fansub note: “Satan is the fallen angel who opposes Jehovah in the Bible, a symbol of evil; ‘比特尔’ is a phonetic rendering of the English ‘beetle’ (甲虫).”
That’s right: a beetle flies down from the sky and starts spewing poisonous substances. This is a monster that does not speak. It emerges solely to disrupt an everyday life in which nothing appears to be wrong. The monster’s appearance has two meanings, as discussed in “Discourse Politics and Monster Politics”:
For Žižek, what Lacan calls the Real is a “monster”: the Real is the negative point of reference of the symbolic order (human “civilization”), its traumatic kernel. Every “monster” within the symbolic order that refuses symbolization is an intrusion of the Real. What is crucial here is that “monsters” are opened up by human “civilization’s” own processes of symbolization and historicization. A monster is not a monster in advance. It becomes one by exceeding the coordinates and boundaries of the symbolic order, refusing incorporation into discourse, refusing any kind of “story.” Thus human civilization has monsters; the animal kingdom does not.5
Here, too, the monster’s appearance has two meanings. For those of us outside the show, the monster is an image: the intrusion of an existence belonging to the Real. It is, essentially, the traumatic kernel of the order called reality—or the very fact that this order is not real. Its appearance means that our misrecognition of safety and order is fundamentally illusory. The other meaning is more straightforward: ah, poisonous rubbish can’t fall from the sky, can it? Then what is the monster spitting out? Was the symptom Jirō encountered just his own delusion? No—that was what was real.
Of course, the order of reality will try to tame the monster with language. Take what Lord Seven—Dan Moroboshi, Ultraseven, playing the disciplinarian in Leo—says to Jirō:
Subtitles: “That’s right. The poisonous rubbish that frightened Jirō came from this creature.”
Wait. What was everyone saying before?
Subtitles: “But for now, it’s nothing to worry about.”
In other words, the authorities initially refused to accept Jirō’s concern. Then the monster appeared. So, well, here is the cause of the symptom you encountered—as though everything were under control.
Subtitles: “At last it became clear that the one releasing the poisonous rubbish…”
Subtitles: “…was Satan Beetle, controlled by an alien from CLEAN.”
Where did this alien from CLEAN suddenly come from? You knew there was a civilization there—one capable of attacking Earth—and you were still going to drop bombs on it? This is a shoddy lie (though probably due mainly to the screenwriter’s careless work), but it reveals an attempt to incorporate the monster into a system of discourse. The monster must not be a natural disaster; it must be a machine acting according to the logic of the symbolic order. Whether the account is credible or not, once they have made it add up, the shock that the monster’s very existence delivers to the system counts as dealt with. And then? Then we should physically annihilate the monster to prove that the system can reliably keep us safe. (Even when Ultraman does the killing, they can still insist it was the system that did it.)
One problem remains: the boy who encountered the symptom. How do we bring him back into the system and make him believe it is reliable? In fact, this disciplining has already begun in the dream.
Subtitles: “But your heart is even weaker than your body.”
Unease about what the symptom reveals is called weakness of heart. This is, of course, utterly groundless. Recognizing a problem and declaring one’s fear is cowardice; pretending there is no problem counts as courage. But isn’t this precisely Japan’s perversion on display? Worship ideology, believe it is all-powerful—so that, as long as you follow it, nothing you do need frighten you, and you need take no responsibility for it. Daring to act in this way becomes courage and responsibility, while questioning it becomes cowardice and irresponsibility. And at the end of the episode:
Subtitles: “It won’t fall.”
Subtitles: “It’s not just my body that’s weak. My heart is too.”
There is no problem at all. Jirō’s earlier failure to be yasashii was caused by his own weakness. The others are yasashii too, so they should make allowances for him. He will do everything he can to grow stronger and stop causing trouble for other people, so he is still fundamentally yasashii. In the end, then, there is still no one who is not yasashii.
Mm. The symptom is now resolved. The boy has affirmed the discourse of the symbolic order; in exchange, the symbolic order has promised to keep him safe. The boy has been thoroughly tamed. His symptom has been repressed. Of course, it will not really disappear. As we said, the monster is reality’s traumatic kernel. It cannot be destroyed, and it will keep showing you that the safety promised by the system is unreliable.
Like this:
The symbolic order appears indestructible, so vast that nothing lies outside it. Yet inexplicable monsters keep breaking through, leaving wound after wound. The seemingly reasonable sutures are, in fact, absurd and violent. A crisis of its totality is inevitable too.
II. The Devil’s Name Is Mother — 悪魔の名前は母親
Episode 37 of Ultraman Leo makes an interesting short text. In fact, the title alone is quite a draw.
Look! A mirror!
Mirrors make us think of Lacan’s specular identification, of course—though the Tsuburaya work I would choose to discuss it would be the first episode of Mirrorman, not this one. Still, the title does indicate the terrain on which the story unfolds: the intersection of the Imaginary and the Symbolic.
Once again, the story opens with Ultraman playing with the children. This time the problem is not Tōru, the usual source of trouble, but Kaoru, who has always been relatively well-behaved. The crucial thing is that she meets this person:
What is the problem with this person? We find out later.
Tōru and Kaoru lost their mother when they were little and later witnessed their father’s murder. Having an Ultraman big brother looking after them cannot compensate for that trauma. Besides, Kaoru never had the chance, while she was alive, to learn that Gen was Ultraman. Here, she suddenly meets an alien who seems to be her mother. And this alien?
Subtitles: “You look so much like her—like my daughter who died.”
She just happens to have suffered the trauma of losing a child? Isn’t that too much of a coincidence? Has such a being really appeared? Let’s hold on to that suspicion. Next comes an imaginary scene:
Subtitles: “Mom!”
Subtitles: “Mom!”
A classic scene, isn’t it? Isn’t this precisely a metaphor for symbolic castration? We can also see that this scene occurs in Kaoru’s unconscious at this moment—the moment in the first image—because it does not fit into the continuity of the plot. Isn’t it the reawakening of the trauma of castration repressed in the unconscious? An Other acting on behalf of the Name-of-the-Father intervenes in the imaginary, dyadic harmony of mother and child, prohibits the child’s desire for the maternal Other—the mOther—and at the same time casts the mother into the pain of deprivation. But then again, can we take what is in Kaoru’s consciousness as real? Remember, Tōru is there with them too. Would a son fail to recognize his mother’s face? And later, where does the alien Mazaras reside?
She walks into the mirror—the Imaginary!
At this point, I think we can read it this way: this being flashes into view only from Kaoru’s Imaginary, so Tōru cannot recognize her here. Or rather, Tōru could have had such a cause of desire, but this is Kaoru’s symptom. So what is Mazaras? She is the shadow of objet petit a! She is the remainder castrated away by the symbolic order when Kaoru accepted the Name-of-the-Father, now meeting Kaoru again in the form of an imaginary object. Object a belongs to the Real, but we can occasionally glimpse its existence in the Imaginary. We encounter it again and again, and it causes our desire. Yet it is forbidden, it belongs to the Real, it cannot be touched. We encounter it but can never actually touch it. What, then, goes wrong with Kaoru? She actually touches it.
Subtitles: “It’s all right. Just come in like this.”
And so Kaoru is captured by the mother’s desire—not by an other occupying the position of object a, but by object a itself, which is to say, the mother’s desire. Object a is given directly to the subject. This creates a short circuit between subject and object a, and the subject is dissolved. As Yuban mentions in an essay on Evangelion:
…the mother’s desire expanding without limit or restraint, irresistible, extreme enjoyment (jouissance), the presymbolic trembling of life… Here the function of the father’s name is to resist the enigma of woman / the mother’s desire. By issuing an unconditional prohibition, the paternal name prevents the child from responding to the mother’s desire. In fact, that desire cannot be answered, because the maternal Other (mOther) likewise has no Other of her own. No “meta-desire” can guarantee the mother’s desire; the mother, too, is lacking. The trick by which the paternal name leads the subject away from the mother’s desire is to turn impossibility into prohibition: the subject moves from being unable to respond to the mother’s desire to being forbidden to respond to it.
Here, there is no process in which the Name-of-the-Father collapses. Kaoru is simply tempted by object a and then, for some reason, actually touches it. This ought to be a problem, but it also makes the solution easier: Kaoru need only remember the Name-of-the-Father. Following the earlier metaphor, Gen should be the one to deliver the “No-of-the-Father,” the Non-du-Père.6 But is Gen the father? No! He is merely a substitute who makes up for the lack created in Tōru and Kaoru by their father’s death. Gen’s call is therefore not the Non-du-Père. He cannot handle the mother’s desire, which appears here as a monster. Here he is a “humiliated father.”
Subtitles: “Gen, why do you always get in my way?”
This is also why Kaoru resists when Gen later grabs her and tries to take her away by force. How, then, is the Name-of-the-Father reconstituted?
Kaoru now begins to resist the mother’s desire:
Subtitles: “My real mom would love my brother just as much.”
The question is: does anything like an older brother exist within the mythically complete relationship between mother and child? Of course not! When Kaoru says that her mother would love her brother too, she recalls the Name-of-the-Father and resists the true cause of her desire. Instead, she expresses her desire as wanting that mother within reality, the one who has accepted the Name-of-the-Father. But is this mom her mom? No. This is only the symptom produced by the short circuit between her and object a. And so Ultraman Leo, acting as an agent of the Name-of-the-Father, can now deal with Mazaras and the monster, whom he could not deal with before.
Afterward, Kaoru visits her parents’ graves. The symptom has been temporarily removed. The fundamental lack, of course, has been there all along.
Meme text: “We’ll stop here for today. The analysis fee is fifty francs.”
On the other side, secretly supporting the symbolic order, the shadow of the remainder that castration deprived us of—although we never had it—continually tempts us in the Imaginary. If we really break down the separation between imagination and reality, or try to approach the mother’s desire at the Oedipal stage, then, without question, the subject will be devoured.
III. The Father’s Call and the Son’s Name — 親父の呼ぶと息子の名前
When discussing episode 37 of Ultraman Leo, I mentioned the first episode of Mirrorman. Today I’ll knock out a little piece about it. I said earlier that it seemed to be a story about specular identification, but now it looks like another story about the Name-of-the-Father. Shōwa tokusatsu seems awfully fond of fathers who are plainly dead but keep popping up to run their mouths, with no end of smart-ass remarks.7
Even by Shōwa tokusatsu standards, Mirrorman has a fairly unusual premise. Where does this giant hero get his powers? From his dad—his dad’s a 2D character.8
Subtitles: “…came from a two-dimensional world.”
The protagonist, Kyōtarō Kagami, is a reporter. While investigating a town destroyed by a tornado, he receives a mysterious warning from a mirror and turns the tables on the invisible being attacking him, killing it.
Subtitles: “Was it the mirror?”
After showing his photographs to SGM, the organization founded by Professor Mitarai—the man who raised him (his father-in-law)—he returns home. There, the professor tells him about his origins and asks him to become a hero.
Subtitles: “Kyōtarō, I need your strength. No, not just me…”
And how does our protagonist respond?
Subtitles: “No, no! I’m not Mirrorman!”
Let’s leave aside the lead actor’s overacting and the abrupt plotting. To us, is being a superhero really a bad thing? Or is being an ordinary human something one needs to cling to quite so fiercely? I wouldn’t venture a rash conclusion, but I think this has something to do with a widespread Japanese cultural reluctance to be someone exceptional. To quote Gouzi:
“Being disqualified from being human” reveals precisely the impossibility of “not being human.” The real horror is not that you cannot be human, but that you must be human.
So why the insistence on being an ordinary human? As Gouzi points out when discussing what is distinctive about makeup in Japan, its purpose here is not beauty or the expression of individuality but being like everyone else. (You have to wear makeup to become a recognized adult member of society.) In other words, people are bound by an injunction: you must be an ordinary, normal person whom the system can accommodate. And a superhero is not.
Is there another side to this? Yes. When Professor Mitarai says, “I need your strength,” isn’t this a paternal Other calling upon the subject? I say you are special, so you must sacrifice yourself and fight for everyone, for the town. Kyōtarō’s first response to this sudden interpellation is sheer bewilderment. I’m just a reporter—how the hell am I suddenly Mirrorman? All I was supposed to do was lead a comfortable petty-bourgeois life as a writer, fulfill an ordinary employee’s duties, live at my teacher’s house, and play tennis with my fiancée. Suddenly I’m supposed to protect the world as a hero with no room for human feeling. And now you tell me my dad died doing exactly this, and you want me to take over? (Though, by the logic of Japanese reality, inheriting one’s father’s profession, unfulfilled aspirations, and even name is an unquestionable duty.) Am I really the person you say I am? Why?
For psychoanalysis, “the subject emerges where ideology fails”; the subject is far from being an outcome of interpellation… “Not only does the subject never fully recognize itself in the interpellative call: its resistance to interpellation […] is the subject.”9
This disavowal is not merely the fetishistic disavowal, by someone living within the order of “everyday life,” of the crisis confronting that order itself. It is also a moment in which a subject recognizes himself through resistance to the big Other’s interpellation. This is a contradictory judgment. How can someone be perverse and resist the big Other in the same act? But we know that the big Other does not exist. Its will is imagined through retroactive construction. The big Other Kyōtarō worships and the one he resists are, in fact, different. Although everything is fundamentally about preserving everyday life, this inconsistency will always be made to look as though there had been no conflict.
The crack is there nonetheless. And who occupies the big Other’s position, explaining everything? Professor Mitarai. He is an academic authority in the real world, presumed to know everything. He has defined Kyōtarō Kagami both as a reporter and as Mirrorman. But he is not really omniscient: he is only a lacking subject. He therefore cannot answer Kyōtarō’s question: why is he Mirrorman–Kyōtarō Kagami rather than the reporter Kyōtarō Kagami? Nor can he explain why, while raising Kyōtarō, he told him to be an ordinary person, only to issue him, at this moment, an identity that contradicts the first. As Kyōtarō tries to cling to the earlier signifier and resist the newly issued one, he loses his anchoring in the signifying chain. Neither signifier now signifies him. At this point, the mythical scene recurs: Kyōtarō needs to rebuild his identification. And so we see this:
He can pass through mirrors!
If Kyōtarō can pass through mirrors because of his ancestry, why has he only discovered it now? Or rather, he simply didn’t know that he knew he could pass through mirrors. Otherwise, how could he know that two-dimensional people can do this the moment he hears about them? What am I getting at? Kyōtarō’s hand passing through the mirror produces a new mirror image, different from the image with which he had previously identified. Does the mirror stage, then, occur only at the subject’s first alienation?
We call specular identification the subject’s first alienation. Yet this inaugural event does not occur at a fixed moment; it is happening all the time, because the mirror image with which the subject identifies is always changing. Each identification subsequently passes itself off as having always been there. Isn’t a person’s appearance changing all the time? Why can people always recognize themselves in the mirror? Were all these selves already present in the initial specular identification? There is, however, something distinctive about the initial mirror stage: the person has not yet entered the symbolic order. Of course, symbolic castration is also an ongoing process. But when discussing specular identification alone, we leave signifiers out of account. We assume that there was once an imaginary identification untouched by signifiers—which is, of course, only an effect retroactively produced by the signifying chain. Here, the signifying chain first makes it possible, and only then can Kyōtarō, as a conscious subject, see a new mirror image. Will he gladly identify with it, like the subject we describe in the mirror stage? No, he will not. Perhaps the new images continually taking shape can be accepted directly. But this one has changed abruptly and drastically. As I said, the big Other has suddenly issued him an entirely new signifier, and this has instead unanchored him from both signifiers. When he sees the new mirror image, all the mirror images of imaginary identification shatter. Our protagonist falls into the world of mirrors—a world of chaos.
What pulls him out of this chaos? His father’s call.
Subtitles: “No. From today, you are Mirrorman.”
Subtitles: “Live on as Mirrorman.”
Subtitles: “No! I’m not Mirrorman! I’m not Mirrorman!”
Whether or not he accepts this discourse, whether or not he constructs this identification in an instant, he has once again returned to the symbolic order. By now, however, Kyōtarō’s disavowal has acquired another meaning: resistance to the Name-of-the-Father. This father’s name, Mirrorman, is new to Kyōtarō. It is not the Name-of-the-Father he originally accepted. That was his teacher, Professor Mitarai (his father-in-law), and the explanation this Name-of-the-Father gave for the maternal Other’s absence was an accidental death during scientific research. But now a new Name-of-the-Father appears and tries to overwrite the old one. What this name reveals is that his mother left him to undertake secret work, placing him in the care of her own teacher because his father had already been killed (though he can still run his mouth at his son). The mother’s presence matters. Although she never actually appears, she is always present through her absence. What form does this presence take?
The Invaders’ repeated incursions point to the existence of the absent mother. This destructive monster is the reason she left her son at her teacher’s home; it also brings the son face to face with the maternal Other’s lack. The mother is not whole. She cannot avoid being absent, because she cannot resist these enemies. Once the father dies, the mother can no longer protect the son. What now prompts Kyōtarō to accept the Name-of-the-Father is not the terrifying desire of the mother but the still more traumatic revelation of her lack. Confronted with the horror of the mother’s lack, what should he choose? There can be only one answer.
Meme text: “I swear loyalty to you.”
No, this one:
Subtitles: “Transform into Mirrorman.”
In resisting the mother’s inadequacy, we accept the protection of the Name-of-the-Father and accept our own name. There is something fated about this, but, as I said in the first essay, it is neither secure nor real. Human beings are therefore destined to be caught in ontological anguish, to encounter symptoms of negativity. Yet there is no doubt that neither the affirmation of the Name-of-the-Father nor the affirmation of the negation of the mother’s desire is something to pursue. The dimension of emancipation lies in the negation of negation.
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Editor’s note: Must catch up on Shōwa tokusatsu history sometime.