Talent? Nope!
One possible psychoanalytic reading of Makoto Shinkai’s new film, Weathering With You, takes the protagonist’s final decision as an ethical choice: at the crucial moment, he chooses his own desire. As we see, he is willing to sacrifice everything to save Hina (in this sense, isn’t his choice a challenge to the big Other?—it aims at a radical suspension of the given social order). But perhaps we should take the opposite approach here and return to Kierkegaard’s crucial insight into the ethical: what if the ethical itself were a temptation? The protagonist makes a sacrifice for Hina, but what stance should he take toward his own sacrifice?
We now need to follow in Kierkegaard’s footsteps and examine the triad of tragic hero—knight of infinite resignation—knight of faith. The tragic hero sacrifices himself for the Thing; the knight of infinite resignation goes further and affirms this sacrifice—the sacrificial gesture here passes from being-for-another to being-for-self. Finally, the knight of faith renounces the sacrificial gesture itself: to borrow Žižek’s formulation, he sacrifices this sacrifice. This is a typically Hegelian triad, in which the ethical is sublated into faith through the mediation of infinite resignation.
It is not difficult to situate the film’s events within this triad: isn’t the protagonist’s choice precisely a sacrifice for the Thing? Doesn’t he reaffirm this sacrifice at the end of the film? Yet the third moment of the dialectical process is missing here—the protagonist is unwilling to sacrifice his own sacrifice; he needs to derive enjoyment (jouissance) from it.
It is in precisely this sense that the romance between the two protagonists of Weathering With You perfectly bears out the notorious statement “Woman is a symptom of man.” In Hina, Hodaka’s self-reflection is doubled: only when he adopts her perspective can he see his sacrifice as “meaningful” and “affirm his own sacrifice” (no wonder the first half of the film repeatedly stresses the price Hina pays for becoming a sunshine girl). Isn’t this precisely the function of the phallus? The phallus rescues the subject from the “bad infinity” of drive, making desire possible for him.
Lyric: “Why does everything we are given only slip through our hands?”
For Hodaka, Hina’s existence allows him to evade the impasse of his own sacrifice, yet this is precisely the impasse that a truly ethical subject, in the psychoanalytic sense, must confront. Faced with the choice between “saving Hina or saving Tokyo,” a truly ethical stance should correspond to the nonexistent third option: losing both Hina and Tokyo. We can imagine an ending like this: Hodaka ultimately chooses not to bring Hina back to the ground. When he opens his eyes again in the pouring rain, he finds that the police have arrested him. Not only that: he has even lost his memories of Hina. All that remains is the ring—that “skull,” the truly ineradicable inert remainder, objet petit a…
Lyric fragment: “Why, in our finite lives, make us…”
Let us return to the dialectical triad. The missing third moment is precisely the most crucial moment of the dialectical process, the “negation of negation”—its absence makes the entire film an attempt at obscene transgression. Doesn’t the same hold for the protagonist’s defiance of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (a defiance that can be taken as a metaphor for resistance to law and order)? It is easy to think here of medieval carnival rituals: on one day each year, the women of the city take to the streets and are allowed to exercise rights normally reserved for male citizens. Although the existing social order is suspended for that day, everything returns to normal immediately after the carnival… Just as the film shows us, the rain in Tokyo ultimately does not stop, and the protagonist’s life returns to its everyday routine.
Finally, we come to the film’s ending. One obvious fact is that the ending of Weathering With You differs radically from those of Shinkai’s early works. Here, Shinkai’s fidelity to impossible love (the Thing must be prohibited; only then are phenomena possible) gives way to an affirmation of the possibilities concealed behind it. Isn’t the opposition between these two positions precisely the opposition between Kant and Spinoza? Yet we must note that this ethics of affirmation is precisely the kind of ideology most prevalent in contemporary capitalist society. Think of Nike’s famous slogan, “Just Do It”—if we could make Weathering With You speak to its audience, perhaps it too would say: “Just love. Like Hodaka, hold fast to your love, whatever the cost…” (Following this Spinozist–Deleuzian line of thought, we could take the reading even further, treating submerged Tokyo, for instance, as a form of deterritorialization, a smooth plane without depth…).
We can now return to the recurring theme of Shinkai and the post-Oedipal phase. Weathering With You presents us with a third option beyond drive (5 Centimeters per Second) and prohibition (The Place Promised in Our Early Days): it replaces the father’s prohibitive injunction with the superego’s injunction to enjoy. Unfortunately, psychoanalysis cannot respond very effectively to this substitution. We must admit that we live in a century of perversion—a century of absolute affirmation that is also a century of absolute negation. Faced with this challenge, perhaps what we should do now is precisely to complete the missing third moment, the crucial “negation of negation”—that is, before undertaking a genuinely radical act, first conceive an entirely new field through renewed negative reflection—one that will be unfamiliar to us all.