Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
Editor’s note: Our author’s Bilibili ID is Qianzai Gouzi (潜在狗子). “I want to torment the world.”
Unravel can mean to explain or clarify, but also to collapse or come apart. At the beginning, Kaneki sits alone on a throne in midair, expressionless, his head bowed in silence. In a clear, luminous world, he sits securely in his own place. Whether this world—even this place—belongs to him is very much in doubt. His expression reveals a reflective stance: he has become aware of something, though he does not yet know what it is. That is why the song opens with a question.
Kaneki himself is a bookish boy, and a love of literature can very easily lead to a kind of withdrawal into oneself. The protagonist of Flowers of Evil, an even more typical bookish boy, occupies a space like Kaneki’s in the first episode. He quotes Baudelaire: “I reign in the sky like an inscrutable sphinx.”1 Here he realizes that he is a riddle waiting for him to solve it. We could say that Kaneki faces the same riddle: he is not merely sitting there thinking about some riddle; at this very moment, he himself is a riddle. Who am I? Where am I? What am I going to do?
“Premonition” is perhaps the best word for the atmosphere of the first few images. Kaneki and the two female leads seem to sense something coming. Then a pure space shatters. This is also the beginning of a narrative: next, we see all the main characters appear paired with their own mirror images. What matters here is that none of them looks at their own image. This shows that we have moved beyond reflection. Looking at oneself as one would in a mirror would undoubtedly be a typical form of reflection—a “conversation with oneself.”
Equally important, the characters and their mirror images form asymmetrical pairs. A split has opened between each person and their image. With Touka and Kaneki’s best bro, it is the mirror image that looks at the person, not the person at the image. This is the “someone within me” from the opening lyrics. Žižek says that when we gaze at our mirror image, it does not return our gaze. Our eyes can see everything, but they cannot see the very fact that they are seeing. Yet the estrangement between person and mirror image, together with the image itself becoming a subject, turns this invisible blind spot into an object. This blind spot, in turn, corresponds to the world that is falling apart. As we can see, the mirror’s shattering forms the backdrop to this entire world. To use Benjamin’s terms, we have moved from the symmetrical world of the symbol into the asymmetrical world of allegory. In this world, the most perfect allegory is a corpse.
In the images that follow, Rize and Touka remain largely motionless, while their kagune (wings) appear in a profusion of brilliant colors. Here again is the opposition between “I” and “the thing within me that is not me.” No wonder the lyrics say “Don’t look at me”: what you see is part of me, but not a part I can control. The kagune are given a highly aestheticized visual treatment, yet this cannot conceal their bearers’ powerlessness before them. Rize and Touka both close their eyes.
Then Kaneki is suddenly thrown into the world. Only now do we see that the pure space at the beginning was not so pure after all: it was also a space of pain. Kaneki and the two female leads stand there motionless, powerless. In this world, Kaneki is thrown toward his own opposite, thrown toward his mask of pain. By now the two female leads have disappeared, leaving him alone. And the opening’s final image is Kaneki: no longer securely seated, he has stood up. His eyes have become cold and resolute. He says nothing, just stands there quietly, as though he could face whatever might come.
