| The World Ends
With You I've finished watching Utena. The series, not the movie. I've already seen the movie and will shortly see it again now that I know what's going on. As happened with Evangelion, I felt I understood most of it and have a satisfactory grasp of what the creators were trying to get across, but a few precise details of what exactly was going on eluded me. I enjoyed it regardless. Toward the end I had to write some notes to get everything in order before I could allow myself to continue. I've polished them into an examination of the show. It's all about maturity. I saw the greater theme as "Regression is bad. You can neither live in the past nor live eternally in the present. Move on." That becomes more apparent as the series goes along. Take the duels from the very beginning to the end of the Black Rose arc, for example. Every duel Utena fought was against immaturity. The duels themselves were the most obvious clue: to win, she had to literally de-flower her opponent. With a pointy sword. Which she pulled out of her bride. Her foes were each deeper proof of the theme. All of them were trapped in the mentality of childhood. In one form or another, Utena's opponents were trying to either stay the same or "go deeper" back in their development to simpler, more comfortable places. Places where they took their power wholesale from someone else and walked a path prepared for them. The more duels Utena fought, the more the fighting became just a frame for her opponents' psychological struggles with growing up. Especially in the Black Rose arc, to fight Utena was to fight maturity. And no one could beat her. Parallel to that development was the deepening of Utena and Anthy's relationship. It was very chaste in the beginning, all friendship and bunk beds. Then as Utena started to literally fight immaturity, she and Anthy took another step and begin actively helping each other. Their beds were lowered to the same level and pushed together in such a way that they could face each other and connect, albeit via hand-holding. Even the ending theme and stock footage transformation sequence gained nudity and more intimate posing, metaphors for how Utena herself was maturing. And then Akio started plowing into the entire cast with his raging metaphor. If one's whole world is centered around childhood (or the convoluted dramas of School), then the end of that world is logically the end of childhood. For most of his arc, Akio took the still-immature duelists, put them in his car and drove them out of the Academy, which was essentially their whole world. He therefore drove them out of childhood -- while he sped down a darkened road bare-chested and crotch-first. "Do you like it? The throbbing of the engine?" Oh come on. Seriously. Akio uses the pseudonym End of the World because that is what he is: the end of the familiar, the end of paradise, the "Light of the World" waiting to blind those who step outside of the Platonic Cave that is the ignorance of childhood. The fact that his name is only a couple degrees of separation from Lucifer was a big hint. But even empowered by the outer-school reality that Akio thrust onto (and into) them, the duelists could not beat Utena, who was still very much in school. Why? The answer is that Utena was still advancing, but the duelists had deliberately turned around and come back from "the end of the world." Something still connected them to their immature state, their childhood, and they simply couldn't let go. To continue the Plato example, they used what they learned outside the Cave not to enlighten those still inside but to rejoin them at a slightly increased level of power. Which isn't power at all, really. "We're all trapped in our coffins." Anthy was the most extreme example of that inability to let go. While the others still had enough freedom of movement to ride with Akio (so to speak), Anthy was quite literally trapped, and of her own free will too. I'm still not sure about everything involving her captivity. It seemed that she attracted the "million swords of human anger" by whatever she did to her brother in that log cabin, but what exactly was it? It's as though she cursed him with a sort of duality, of being outside the world (Dios) yet still physically present enough to affect people inside it (Akio). And what was her motivation? Was it just love from the witch who her brother couldn't make into a princess, or something more sinister, like an immature desire to be with him forever? Whatever the why, I came away thinking Anthy willingly gave up her will and trapped herself with the sharpened steel hatred the world had for her. She locked herself in a state where she was dependent on, and singularly devoted to, other people. Not even childhood, but infancy. The chick who chose to stay in her egg. And then she was saved. A prince called maturity smashed her world's shell. For the bride and her prince, Apocalypse was indeed their absolute destiny. Their old childish world finally ended in a very personal revolution. And good riddance. |