00 Departure
☞ Initiation
02 Crossing back the Threshold
—————— a (Goodbye Shyness)
03 Rebuild of Evangelion
Media
The year was 2002 when Adam told me of Neon Genesis Evangelion. I was 13, in seventh grade. Television and film were at the brink between traditional centralized media and the kind of asynchronous more or less decentralized streaming affair that we live in today. The technology to make the latter work was there, sort of, but not the economic model that could make the ones in power want to make it. I'm ignoring here non-internet based technologies: our television provider had a service called ‘Home Cinema’ whereby one could phone a number to order with an automatic answering machine a film from a small changing selection to be shown on a dedicated channel at a preset time. I would record the film on a VHS and likely never watch it again. And then there were rental stores. I didn't know what their rates were, but I saw them as a luxurious excess that I would not make a bidding to my parents for, and there weren't any stores around anyway. The first time I stepped into one alone, that is not accompanying one of my so called northern friends, was in high-school when a deal by our cellphone provider allowed one to rent free of charge 2 DVDs a week, and together with my parents' two phones I'd go to the shop around the corner of my school and take six movies with me back home. I watched a lot of movies back then.
Even had rentals crossed my mind, it would have been obvious to me that I would not find Neon Genesis Evangelion anywhere in Israel. There was only one recourse: so called piracy. KaZaA, an Estonian invention, was a peer-to-peer file sharing Windows program. Users could search content from within the program —music, videos, pictures, games— and download it from other users' computers instead of from a server. Incidentally, one of its developers, Jaan Tallinn, would co-create a couple of years later Skype whose calling functionality relied on the same peer-to-peer technology as KaZaA, reducing the marginal cost of thitherto expensive international phone calls virtually down to zero.
Neon Genesis Evangelion was, indeed, available on KaZaA. I remember a moment: I was walking the hall at school, thinking about the episodes being downloaded at home, excited and hopeful to find them ready upon my return. I'm struck by the timeliness of the whole affair. Just as would happen to me in the army, when the new availability of technology —namely, of internet on my cellphone— changed the course of my life, so it was here. That the change of technology nowadays is ever more faster is a cliché, still it is amusing to see how it had played in one's life in retrospect. Some centuries to say nothing of millennia ago it mattered little, to put it very grossly, whether you shifted an event or even one's life in time, a year in this or that direction. Great technological changes of binary significance did occur —an antibiotic is discovered, a train station is inaugurated, a factory is built, the printing press becomes available, a canal is dug— it was just that the probability of its timing coinciding with another personal event which it could influence drastically was rather low.
Retard internet development by a couple of years, and Cowboy Bebop would not have led me to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion. That I saw the former had nothing to do with the development of the internet. That I was pointed to Evangelion did, as it came from an online contact, but though ICQ was revolutionary, the unfolding of events was not contingent on its existence. The people of anime.co.il, for example, chatted on an IRC server (where I incidentally first heard of Firefox), a technology a few months older than myself, and could have served adnd.co.il people had ICQ not been there. And ICQ's birth in 1996 was essentially independent of what allowed me to download Neon Genesis Evangelion. Had I wanted to do so just a year or two earlier, I would not have been able to (it's possible then that for the same reason Adam would not have been able to watch it himself, nor recommend it to me, but it comes to the same thing). In 2001 a law was amended, increasing competition among Internet providers in Israel; optical fibers were laid between the country's large cities and between Israel, Cyprus and Italy. In 2002 we had at home DSL internet, i.e. non dial-up internet, so that my computer could be online without occupying the phone-line and thus with neither paying phone tariff nor be in danger of an incoming call dropping the connection. Without it, there would be no way I'd have let KaZaA run while I was at school. Downloading speeds were such that it took days to download an episode even with constant connection. And, further, KaZaA had only been released in 2001.
I did not first get KaZaA for Evangelion. I had already downloaded the DBZ episodes with it. You might wonder why I didn't get Cowboy Bebop directly, instead seeking other people to guide me in the fascinating world I found myself in. The answer is stupidly trivial. I literally had no idea what I had just watched that faithful evening. I'm not sure I even got the name. It was obviously a series, but at the time I had but a vague notion of series, they were to me not linear works with beginning and an end, but a circular phenomenon, like a river one dipped into whenever turning on the TV.
This discussion of technology makes me think of Speak like a Child, Cowboy Bebop's 18th and one of my favourite episodes which, like My Funny Valentine that put everything in motion for me, centered around Faye's character. The bounty hunter crew of the Bebop spaceship receives a package addressed to Faye. She, thinking it was a harbinger of her creditors, flees. Spike opens it and finds a video cassette. There's a bit of an inversion of My Funny Valentine. In that earlier episode, Faye wakes up from a half-century long post-accident cryogenic coma into the near future that is the series' settings. In a way she was like a stand in for the viewer, for me, waking up into an unfamiliar world, mistaking simple household items for things they looked like in her time. In the later episode the cassette is familiar to the viewer (at least to contemporary ones) but a complete enigma to Spike, who starts pulling out the tape cat-like through the transom. After he and Jet have found out what it is, they journey to the ocean-flooded, asteroid-stricken cradle of humanity, Earth, to seek a video player in the ruins, Greek temple like, of an electric appliances shop, located by their whiz kid crew member, Ed. Indiana Johnssing through the derelict caverns of 20th century architecture, they return to their ship with a television and a VHS player, only to find out that their cassette doesn't fit in — it's a Betamax. Eventually they manage to play it and find out that it's a time capsule footage that Faye has recorded for her future self. Expressing that she is rooting for her. Rather touching, really.
Issues with playing video are not exclusive to analog formats. Though everything is dandy nowadays, at the time it held true for digital video formats as well. Having Neon Genesis Evangelion's videos and a video player program was not enough, I had to install various codec packs to enable the player to decode the files. Despite the over the internet distribution, the encoding of the videos, which compressed their size, had a relationship with portable storage media. Movies were encoded to be just below 700 MB, in rare cases a multiple thereof, while single episodes approximated integer fractions: it was the standard size of blank CDs, where the downloadage was expected to end up on once one ran out of computer storage. It was before external hard-drives, to say nothing of cloud storage.
A private experience
I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion by myself. At some point I did seat Kosta through the first episode where some of that which makes the series special is already present, but perhaps it is not quite piquant enough to grip everybody. I might have ran out of credit with him, having made him a victim of my excitement over DBZ-Linkin Park AMVs, which I had thought were the awesomest thing. An AMV or Anime Music Video is a fan made clip of edited anime footage to the soundtrack of a song. The Nutcracker ballet for the turn of the millennium adolescent. Starting in the army half a decade later Crawling would play in my head with distorted lyrics as I made believe to be dramatically going Super Saiyan to tolerate the imminent shock of cold showers.
An American anime columnist, John Oppliger, speculated in 2003 that the reason AMVs were popular among Westerners whereas it was an unfamiliar form to the Japanese had to do with a distance the former had towards the source material, due to a language barrier, making anime's visual aspect more important to them. I think his presumption was generally wrong, and, moreover, that the phenomenon had to do with a much more trivial factor: distribution. Anime and manga was rife in Japan. One merely needed to turn on the television or go to the store to get it. And if one wanted to channel the creative impulses of an obsession over a particular work, they turned to make doujinshi —as Oppliger noted— manga fan fiction, an established medium in their society. Outside Japan this was not the case, so that if one wanted to watch a particular anime he had to turn to piracy, i.e. a KaZaA like service.
Before going on with my argument I'd like to express a doubt I had about that last point. In the US and some European countries anime distribution, that is, of series that had not been directed at young children, had been going on since the last few decades of the 20th century. In other words, there too one could get anime just as the Japanese did, through official outlets. Nonetheless I'd claim that even among them —to say nothing of the rest of the world— there were plenty whose demand was not met by supply rendered by official distributors. In May 2006 —perhaps not coincidentally, during the death throes of KaZaA, brought about by legal action— was founded the American website Crunchyroll, which was used to upload and stream anime. Pirated anime. Much of the content there was fan-subbed —like all the anime I myself downloaded on KaZaA— suggesting that the titles were not at all officially distributed in English speaking countries. Crunchyroll was slightly younger than 2004 Vimeo and 2005 YouTube (but not Niconico, a Japanese equivalent), but these latter took up a different niche of original content; as far as streaming of television and movies goes, Crunchyroll was the very first, preceding all the Netflixes out there. Supposedly, then, the demand had been already there —fansubbed titles were available and two years later Crunchyroll got a venture capital investment of $4 million— and before they appeared on the web their viewers would have had to use other means to get their anime.
I'd claim, then, that KaZaA (and the like), by being the primary medium of one's input of anime, became also a medium of output, serving to channel the creative impulses of obsessed fans. They created AMVs and distributed them through KaZaA. They didn't make doujinshi since the society around them didn't read manga, and the Japanese didn't make AMVs since they had neither the anime on their computers to edit, nor utilized that channel through which they could distribute them to others. This means that peer-to-peer sharing of media, a wicked tool that hurt art and artists, as distributors —who understandably wanted to be the sole beneficiaries of the works of others— would like you to believe, had been a creative force, giving rise to a new genre. Noteworthy mentions are Kevin Caldwell's Neon Genesis Evangelion x Rammstein's Engel and Eric/ Otaku Vengeance's Pokémon x Mindless Self Indulgence's Bitches.
Eventually Kosta, I don't remember how it came about, became a fan of Cowboy Bebop, enough to later call his dog after the series' Welsh Corgi Ein, but he did not accompany me on my Neon Genesis Evangelion venture. He was the only one whom I showed an episode.
As for other friends, Ron was not the person for it. First, like Kosta, he wasn't much attracted to animation. Second, while he appreciated a good story, his attitude to those that were conveyed through computer games was antipodal to my own. While he never minded those cascades of text on the screen, I sat with my brother's electronic English-Hebrew dictionary and tried to make sense of it all. I happen to remember the moment when I learned the word aloof, appearing in a monologue of Archangel Tyrael in act IV of Diablo II (now verifying with online transcripts I find that it's not there. So much for strong memories!). I could perceive my English improving while Ron's stayed behind. Watching a Japanese series with English subtitles would not have worked.
Ofek would have been a good candidate, but by then our friendship was weakening. I think he was drifting towards the clique who had picked up electric guitars and metal music as their hobbyhorse. Rather a coincidence than cause and effect, around this time a new person came in to complete my set of best friends to three, Hillel, who had just transferred into the parallel class from another school. I can imagine him retrospectively to have been able to appreciate Neon Genesis Evangelion. Nonetheless he was also a man of strong opinions and likely would have rejected it outright without consideration. Regardless, a logistic problem stood in the way. Neon Genesis Evangelion was on my computer — Ron, whom I was comfortable hosting, visited rather infrequently, while Ofek and Hillel virtually never came over. I couldn't show it to them even had I wanted to.
And so, Neon Genesis Evangelion was a private experience. And it has mostly remained so, though I'd bump into the series, as it were, in the future, namely in the writing of
, who dedicated two pages about it. This was not quite an independent crossing. In the anime.co.il forum, which, as an aside, though Israeli was English speaking —it might have been a technical issue, it being easier to set up an English rather than a Hebrew PHP forum, though I felt there was of the elitist in it, a wish to stave off hoi polloi— I befriended a couple of persons, whom I would also end up meeting. One of them repeatedly directly me to posts in Overcoming Bias,1 from which I got to LessWrong, where Gwern was present. It also happens that it was through Gwern's published recommendations that I found myself on Substack, and here we are. That first Cowboy Bebop episode took me far. I wonder what would have been had I missed it.Starting to watch the series, I must have known immediately that I came upon that which I had been seeking. Past the theme song, Neon Genesis Evangelion began with a caption setting the scene in the near future, 2015 —followed by UN tanks in stand-by— and therefore on earth, as opposed to a cartoon world. Incidentally, this caption would be removed from the retelling of the story in the tetralogy of movies released between 2007-2021. The series had electric poles and wires, trams, traffic lights, classrooms and classes, fridges, toilets — the most mundane which was all the more fascinating since it was represented through a medium that I had only seen representing the otherworldly or the naively fantastical, whether it was Pokémon or Disney's Aladdin.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is, first of all, a 1995 Japanese animated series running 26 episodes of 24 minutes. I say “first of all” because it's more than that series. I don't mean that it was so great that it transcended its mere form, but that there was more of the story than those 26 episodes. Neon Genesis Evangelion is a mythos, perhaps the fate of any fictional account in which enough people are invested for long enough for it to be told and retold, even if, in Neon Genesis Evangelion's case, unlike Greek myth or the stories of the Marvel Universe, it was retold mostly by the same one person, its author, the writer and director Hideaki Anno.2
Jumping a little ahead I'll add that beyond this formal definition of a story retold, Neon Genesis Evangelion would assume a mythological position in my adolescent life, foundational of a world view, of an identity, perhaps not unlike the power that biblical stories had on those that decided to leave everything behind and set out to fight in the crusades over the Holy Land, or the romances that similarly spun Don Quixote's head and sent him after adventure.
In 1997, a couple of years after the series, two movies, Birth & Rebirth and The End of Evangelion (which I'm now delighted to learn that was ranked in 2014 by Wes Anderson as his third most favourite animated movie), were released, retelling the story. Since both the series and the movies had already existed when I first encountered this mythos in 2002, I saw the latter not as a definite version, but merely as an alternative — with a drastically different ending.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is an anime of the shonen genre, directed at teenage boys and beloved by grown men, of the same narrative niche as the Spidermans and Supermans in the West, telling stories about mostly men of extraordinary physical abilities in their violent strife against destructive forces threatening their society. It is further of the mecha genre, in which said strife is conducted piloting gigantic humanoid robots.
Since the Power Rangers was the only other work I had watched that to any extent pertained to the mecha genre, for me Neon Genesis Evangelion was sui generis. Nonetheless, based on what I have gathered, I can say a thing about its relationship with the genre. In his essay Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films3 the author John G. Cawelti proposes four transformative variations that an established genre might go through: burlesque, nostalgia, demythologization and affirmation. Since of the source material from which he draws his examples, Westerners and hard-boiled detective films, I'm unfamiliar with most and remember very little of the rest, it might be that I'm missing a point; as it is, it seems to me that the last two are variations of each other and should really be a single item in his taxonomy, their difference lying on an orthogonal dimension. I felt all the more certain of this when I revisited the introductory sentence for each of these and found that while he described the first three in terms of how they employ tropes (“elements of conventional formula or style” and “traditional generic features of plot, character, setting and style” in his words), the last one was described in abstract terms (“This brings us to a fourth and final mode [...] which might be described as the affirmation of myth for its own sake. In films in this mode, a traditional genre and its myth are probed and shown to be unreal, but then the myth itself is at least partially affirmed as a reflection of authentic human aspirations and needs.”) As I see it, the transformations are three and as follows: burlesque, in which tropes are exaggerated or juxtaposed in a way that defies the viewer's sense of truth and therefore mocks them as false; adoption (nostalgia), in which tropes are imported from their original settings to the contemporary world, adapted to the present yet retaining their essence; reformation (demythologization), in which elements of the tropes are assumed but their context (effects and causes) is reconsidered under a stronger light of verisimilitude. Cawelti's fourth transformation, affirmation, is “a reflection of authentic human needs” added to his third transformation, demythologization, but it could also be added to burlesque4 or subtracted from nostalgia.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is primarily of the reformation variation.5 It stipulates that there are giant robots piloted by teenagers to fight, and asks what it entails and means. The Eva Units, as the robots are called, need electricity; they need an extensive ground control to monitor their launch and operation; they may suffer damage that needs repair, which requires a budget; their movement alone through the city causes collateral damage on the environment; their piloting might be stressful to the pilots. I managed to find only one video on YouTube of a launch sequence from the Gundam universe which predates Neon Genesis Evangelion, for comparison. One can see the influence, but mark the differences. In this scene from the 1991 Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, the pilot of the mobile suit drives himself off the hanger, on his own, while the crew and brass gawks at it through the aquarium window as if their only job is to admire, like it was a boy leaving off to school and not a robot packed with explosives going through an opening hatch out to the vacuum of outer space.
On the other hand, there's justification to the mecha. In Gundam the enemy is other humans, their vehicles and their own ‘gundam suits.’ It's hard to imagine humanity ever developing giant humanoid robot fighting-machines other than as a work of art; it's expensive, complicated and offers no advantage in warfare. Their only justification, needless to say, is external to the work: they look cool. Further, it is complicated enough to fly the virtually rigid body of an airliner, to say nothing of maneuvering a jet fighter, and the controls of the gundam seem inadequate for a flying robot with the degree of freedom that a humanoid form has. On the other hand, the existence of the Eva Units in Neon Genesis Evangelion are justified; the series begins with an attempt to use alternative weapons against their monstrous enemies, to no avail. That the Evas can do the job is reasoned, it's not just because they look cool. Their humanoid shape is justified and their pilotability is supported. To accomplish this, elements of science-fiction and fantasy are introduced, thereby not making the story any more realistic than Gundam, but these elements, beyond being a justification, relate directly and metaphorically to the series' overarching religious and human-centered themes.
The religious theme, perhaps unique among works of the mecha genre, consists of the utilization of Christian symbolism and narratives, and, as I would only recognize when watching the recent remake, of Jewish mystical theology and the Shinto creation myth. At least at the distance of twenty years I'd remember them as mere varnish, neither consequential nor meaningful: the assailing monsters were ‘angels,’ the mecha units were ‘Evas’ (short for Evangelion and an allusion to Eve), explosions were cross shaped, Adam and Lilith were mentioned, one location was called ‘Central Dogma,’ the Dead Sea Scrolls were alluded to &c, but it didn't seem to matter.
Neon Genesis Evangelion 1-24
This is a Japanese cartoon that is very difficult to describe and might not sound that great if I tried anyway. It is 24 episodes, and we watched them all in less than a week because you start to want to believe it’s real.
- Wes Anderson6
The series begins in medias res, with the coincidental arrival of two individuals to Tokyo III which shall thence forward be as assailed as The Samurai Pizza Cats' Little Tokyo. The one is Ikari Shinji, the main protagonist of the series, a lad that was just slightly older than I was at the time, 15 against my 13. He had been summoned by his estranged father and was now trying to get in touch with his rendezvous, captain Katsuragi Misato. The other is the Third Angel, a gigantic being, not angelic at all, that begins raising havoc and destroying the air force launched against it as late running Misato's car appears to pick Shinji up. Giving up on conventional weapons, the military employs an ‘N2 Mine’, which I suppose in post war Japan is to nuclear weapons what Chaplin's double crosses were to the Nazi hooked cross, a clear but indirect reference. Minus the radiative fallout. Misato takes heed and before the impact throws herself over Shinji inside the parked car to cover both from the blast.
They arrive safely to the underground HQ of Nerv, an organization headed by Shinji's father, Ikari Gendo. Shinji had been summoned to become the pilot of Eva 01, a giant purple humanoid warrior, and his service, given the sudden arrival of the Third Angel upon whom the N2 Mine left just a flesh wound, was required at once. The supposed image of Ikari Shinji in fandom, unkind but rather accurate, is of a whiny wuss. Called to action, Shinji questions his father's sudden summoning and his own capacity to pilot the Eva. And so the pilot of Unit 00, which was then out of commission, is brought to pilot Unit 01. Ayanami Rei, a girl his age, is trollied into the gangway heavily bandaged on a hospital bed. A blast from the Third Angel above ground shakes the hanger, toppling Rei, who has been just struggling to get on her feet, to the floor. Shinji catches her, getting besmirched by her blood. Realizing that that injured girl would have to do what he refused doing he declares, after internally repeating to himself the now iconic “I mustn't run away” mantra (which I would repeat to myself in future moments of self-pushing), that he would do it, pilot the Eva.
“AT Field” is a supernatural force that as far as tropes go is not unlike the life energy chi that fuels superheroes such as those of Dragon Ball Z which allows them to shoot power beams, fly and look awesome. And yet, the AT Field is an inversion of the trope, being channeled not to act upon the world but to stop the world from acting upon the self. It's a barrier that serves as a metaphor to the division/ separatedness of people from each other. AT Field is what makes the angels immune to conventional weapons, and what makes the Evas, who could also generate —and breach— it, to be able to fight them.
The next episodes follow a series of conflicts not unlike the dozen Herculean Labours, each of which with its own peculiarity, that by and large gave duration to the main drama and set the pieces of the story without providing dramatic turns. During the battle with the Fourth Angel, an eggplant colored shrimp like giant, two of Shinji's classmates, who, wanting to see the action above ground have sneaked out of shelter, get in danger; to keep them safe they are let into Shinji's pod where they witness his distress piloting the Eva; later one of them apologizes for having beaten him up for his sister who had gotten injured during the battle with the Third Angel. The Fifth Angel, a shape shifting polyhedron (who would come to my mind years later when I tried to imagine how an object in a four dimensional first-person shooter video game would look like) could only be defeated from afar, and is shot down by a gigantic sniper rifle powered by entirety of Japan's electricity. The Sixth Angel is a marine creature. The seventh demands the coordinated cooperation of two Evas to be destroyed. The eighth lurks within a hot volcano. The ninth is a kind of spider that continued the fifth's work towards breaching the earth down to the Nerv HQ, using acid where the former used a drill. The tenth hovers in outer space. The eleventh is a biological computer virus infiltrating Nerv's systems. The twelfth was an extradimensional being, appearing to be a black globe which turned out to be merely its shadow upon our world, while it's real body was what appeared to be the globe's shadow. The idea of the Dirac Sea is evoked, likely responsible for my later special interest in Dirac's work and in mathematical physics more generally, influencing the topic of my bachelor's final thesis. The thirteenth angel infects and takes control of an Eva, the US made Unit 03 piloted by the boy who beat Shinji early on in the series. The fourteenth managed to breach into the underground space of the HQ, is brought back to the surface where it almost destroys Unit 01 before the latter goes berserk, as it did against the Third Angel, this time continuing to cannibalize the angel, revealing that the Eva is no mere mechanicus but an armour covering an organic being. After all else had failed, the Spear of Longinus, which had been impaling Lilith, the Second Angel, in Nerv's basement, is retrieved and javelined at the Fifteenth Angel. The Sixteenth Angel makes contact with Rei's mind, conducting psychological warfare as other angels had done with other pilots, and is defeated when Rei self-destructs Unit 00. The Seventeenth Angel turns out to be Kaworu, the slightly older than Shinji boy who had been sent to replace the clinically depressed pilot of Unit 02.
In parallel to the matter with the angels, the characters are explored. Ayanami Rei, the pilot of Unit 00, who was really the several identical clone-like incarnations of a single person, which bore a relationship to Shinji's mother which I can't quite remember. She manifested a more extreme version of Shinji's social isolation, though hers was motivated by an apathy than anxiety. I'd think of her and her barren room many years later after I had taken on as a flatmate, out of a sympathetic gesture towards his self-description as having social-phobia in his email, him who thenceforward led a hermetic life in his squalid room, mostly heard rather than seen on his ventures out into the apartment. Ikari Shinji, the pilot of Unit 01, who suffered from social anxiety and doubted his self-worth. Soryu Asuka Langley, the pilot of Unit 02, whose brash outgoing and proud demeanour concealed distress over the childhood trauma of her mother's suicide. At some point she flirts, as I can see only retrospectively, with Shinji; I suppose at the time Shinji and I were equally blind.
Shyness
Watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, I realized that I was shy. I would later be amused by that insight, by having learned something of myself by watching a TV show, but it's not a particularly extraordinary turn. We are born into a chaos of impressions and it takes a while before self-consciousness is developed, that feature humanity prides itself with vis-à-vis animals: the awareness that one is part of the world, not merely affected by it —feeling pain by the harmful, quenching hunger by eating &c— but also affecting it. Consciousness enables perception, and the reflexive nature of self-perception makes it a special case, where the perceiving and the perceived are one. One becomes aware that perception is not merely a function of the environment, but of the self. One sees the dust on the windowpane, as Zen would put it. It is this insight, that the perceiving self is but a phenomenon of the world, that was required of Odysseus when he had himself tied to the mast to be able to hear the sweet sirens' song; he knew that ultimately he was but one of many men, not special and without an absolutely free will. But beside its reflexive nature, self-perception is merely perception; neither is binary, and both develop throughout life with our changing understanding.
“Know thyself,” as the inscription in Apollos' temple familiarly instructs, is not easy. While we turn to explore, investigate and test the world, expose ourselves to experiences, the self is scarcely taken as such an object of inquiry. It is taken as a given, and largely as a steady, unchanging phenomenon. No, not phenomenon. An agency. We are aware that we can learn new things, but we perceive skills and knowledge, as language suggests, as something that we have, not something that we are. It's an immaterial possession, but still a possession, essentially external. What is there to know of the self? We might give a bike a test ride, taste an exotic food, try a hobby. Do we ever try ourselves? When we go to a new event we are checking out the event, not ourselves. It's this outwardly attention that makes insight about the self the result of chance mirrors rather than a deliberate examination. And such a mirror was Neon Genesis Evangelion for me.
I cannot say at what point exactly, watching the series, this realization came to me. I don't think the word ‘shy’ is ever used there. Memorable concepts are Shinji's “phone that never rings,” and the idea of the Hedgehog's Dilemma, ultimately Schopenhauer's, between the warm but painful contact with others and the safe but cold distance from them.
In Neon Genesis Evangelion I also saw for the first time a depiction of depression, of the catatonic kind: lying in bed or in a bath, staring at the ceiling. It's hard for me to say now whether I had already experienced it or the like. No light bulb lit up in my brain as it happened with regards to my shyness. It's difficult to recall what one had not known, difficult to remember ignorance. An unknown absence is not noteworthy. We all have had our tragedies, aware of how ignorance had led us to bad choices in the past, but most ignorance is not tragic, or not obviously so. I would experience depression soon enough, suggesting it might have already been experienced, albeit without recognition, but much of the new arises in adolescence fast, so I can't say for certain.
Death & Rebirth and The End of Evangelion
There were two more episodes yet to the series, but I'd like to first turn to the movies, which I really watched afterwards. The movies Birth & Rebirth and End of Evangelion retold the story from the beginning —Ikari Shinji's arrival to Tokyo III— to the end. For years I had held on to notions developed by internet rumours, namely that the end of the original series was produced under circumstances of a budget running out, only recently learning it was not the case. I had never credited the idea that the movies were Anno's stretched middle finger towards fans disgruntled by the lacklustre conclusion of the series; I have not yet reassessed Gwern's view that the end of the series and the movies told the same story from different points of view —through introspection and extraspection, respectively— but be as it may, the two endings are different in their mood and in the concrete that they depicted. Whereas the end of the series is meditative, containing minimalist animation, the movies are over the top, telling a story of the greatest scale, epic in action and grandeur in significance. It's more graphic than the series, presenting for the first time interpersonal violence, as an armed force breaches and takes over Nerv. A gruesome battle takes place between Asuka's Unit 02 and the units of a production model series which eventually defeat and cannibalize it. And an apocalypse, mentioned along the series as an event to be prevented, takes place. The unprecedented violence, the guts spilling and the ending of the world was not the only provocation of the End of Evangelion. At an infamous scene we find Shinji sitting vigil by Asuka's comatose bed. His anger at her absence is directed at her; a shove turns her body into a supine position, revealing her breasts. He locks the door, masturbates, admonishes himself. It is depicted solely through Shinji's moaning, not unlike that of pain, then his point of view at the glistening white on his palm. I didn't understand what I was seeing. There's more to be said about this scene in light of Evangelion's themes, but instead I'll shock you as Anno might have shocked his viewers. That I didn't understand what I saw had to do with my age, 13, as well as, I'd now suppose, the then age in the historical sense. I was already a few years into self-aware masturbation. Tis a distinction from the early almost automatic activity I had engaged in under the sheets on the brink between waking and Lalaland. Awareness entered when an other's consciousness came near. I was playing with myself absentmindedly as my mom was tucking me into bed. She gave me a shrewd look; I don't know what she might have thought was going on, but as she pulled off the blanket after a still moment I pulled out my hand. No comment was made. End of Evangelion was likely also after I had had a talk with an older boy whom I infrequently saw, who asked me whether I was “doing in the hand” yet, as one slang term fittingly puts it. It was also a few years into engagement with porn —the frustratingly slow loading of image galleries— and therefore likely into the co-engagement of porn and masturbation, though the association of the two, I'd claim, is not as obvious as it might seem. Regardless, I don't think I made a connection between Shinji's moaning and the tantalizing body of Asuka before him. The crucial point, however, is that even if, which is not certain, I had already been past the orgasmic developmental phase of mere dry pelvic contractions, my ejaculate at the time could only be as slight as the transparent morning dew on a blade of glass, unrecognized by the opaque snow-white mess clinging on Shinji's hand.
This was not the only mystery in the movie which I watched without completely understanding, perhaps understanding very little, which still did not diminish from the experience. The movie did inform me about the series, if not immediately then somehow gradually over the years to come. Along the episodes of the series there were conspiratorial men-in-a-dark-room meetings between Ikari Gendo —Shinji's father and the head of Nerv— and representatives of an organization called Seele, name dropping obscure terms and discussing the Human Instrumentality Project.7 It remains merely talked about in the series, was opaque to my unterstanding, but is depicted in the movies: humanity's casting off of their human forms & casting into a single orange sea of an undivided soup of life. The end of interpersonal conflict.
Neon Genesis Evangelion 25-26
Episode 24 has Nerv first discovering Kaworu to be an angel as he makes his way to Central Dogma. He expects to find Adam and to initiate the Instrumentality/ Complementation Project but instead it is paralyzed Lilith who is there. Discovering his error, Kaworu instructs Shinji, who has been chasing after him and in whose Unit's hand he is now grasped, to kill him, as it is only one of them who would keep on living; he himself is indifferent to that fate but sees Shinji as worthy of living. After a long hesitation, Shinji cracks Kaworu dead. The two following, last episodes of the series, veer from the their precedents. In a matter of speaking, nothing happens on the 25th and 26th episodes. Ikari Shinji —and other characters in turn— sits on a folding chair under the spotlight in a dark room, a bleak gym like theater studio, answering the questions posed by title cards and conversing with apparitions of close ones and of his own past selves. Discussed are fears, motivation, aspirations, the relationship between the self and others. A vision of a world where no Eva piloting exists, where the children are ‘normal children,’ preoccupied with school and each other, freed of their deep psychological disturbances, is shown, which Shinji finds alluring. Still he finds himself not worthy of love — a mean, weak coward. But to love somebody, Misato tells him, means loving them despite their weaknesses. As Shinji muses that he might learn to like himself, accepts that he is he and wants to be nobody else, that if he was another there wouldn't be him yet he wants himself to be, the room he is in starts to crack. When he declares his self-worth the room vanishes, revealing an open blue space with the series' cast surrounding him, clapping their hands, each congratulating him in turn. Shinji smiles and thanks them. The end.
This description suggests it might feel anticlimactic, but to me it was anything but. I had undergone the same transformation together with Shinji, and as Shinji emerged from his shell, so did I. No longer without self-worth, no longer shy, I was a new man. A new boy.
The Real World
That very evening was a Bar-Mitsva party of a classmate, a friend's friends' friend's friend. Not the religious ceremony whereby the laureate reads from the Tora in the synagogue and takes the responsibility for his future transgressions away from his father, but the social celebration thereof. I was looking forward with excitement, ready to experience my new transformed by affirmative attitude self.
The indicator “a friend's friends' friend's friend” strikes me as I write it. The designation is to an extent arbitrary —at the peak popularity, perhaps indeed characterizing it, the lad played in our D&D group— though it does reflect the chain of close-ties. Even if the chain could be shortened by one link, it seems awfully long for a class of 40 pupils, even more so for the relevant cohort of male pupils, comprising a little less than half the total. In my mind he was one of the ‘popular kids,’ but this great social distance of ours makes me wonder for the first time if he was not, indeed, very shy himself. He was best friend with another kid who commanded respect: tall and good looking, his last name meant ‘splendour,’ his grandfather had been the commander of the Israeli Air Force, his father had been a military pilot and perhaps a civil one too, and he himself was serious and intelligent without being arrogant or unkind. So I remember him, anyhow. We were seated together for a season at a back corner desk, sharing a gag about me calling things “primitive.” I'd hesitate to designate him as shy as well, but he was relatively quiet and I'd think that the attention he received was brought upon him rather than actively sought. He was not the Bar-Mitsva's laureate's only friend, but there was a strong association between the latter and the former, more than there was, so to speak, between the former and the latter. The laureate was close to the splendour, but, as it were, did not emanate it himself. He clang to it like a satellite around a sun, allocated it by chance than by exploration or exploitation; the two of them lived in close proximity. Had the laureate not been shy, my theory goes, he would have had other close friends and our social distance was shorter. Anyhow, this is speculation done in long retrospection, based on flimsy evidence, but the mere possibility is illuminating as it reveals to my current self that which I had or could have been blind to as a child. Nonetheless, though it didn't point out anyone in particular, I do remember a moment of disillusionment during my teens, when I realized that that mass of kids, which had seemed to me to be unanimous in their mutual affinity, was actually comprised of individuals with differential and shifting attitudes towards each other, of friendships but also of enmities and indifferences.
The Bar-Mitsva party took place in the back lawn of his house. I remember a volley-ball net and grassy slopes. Beside kids loitering around with appropriate drinks, I recall from that evening only the moment of my disappointment, of further disillusionment. A game was played by both girls and boys of the class. I remember chairs arranged in two rows facing each other, or perhaps a circle, around a stage of the moment, where kids chosen or volunteering had to enact or do something in its spotlight. I wanted to participate but realized there and then that despite all my wishful thinking, that spotlight was inaccessible to me. I lacked the courage to step into the attention of others.
I'll be ignoring all tellings of the story that did not appear on the screen: games, manga, novels.
I couldn't find the year it was first published. It appears on the Film Genre Reader IV, whose third edition was published in 2012. The edition notice page cites 1986 as the year of the first edition, but since this is the anthology series's debut year, and since at least the third edition contains essays about 90's trends, I'm left in the shadows.
An example of this is Gainax's six episode masterpiece series FLCL, directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki who would also co-direct the new cinematic version of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
FLCL is also a fine example of the process of genreization, the emergence of genre. Genres can refer to formal distinctions within a medium, for example between poetry and prose within texts, sort of formal distinctions as between the short story and the essay. They can also refer to distinctions in content or style, as between a thriller, comedy or horror story. A work becomes generic in the negative sense, formulaic, not when it merely shares similarities to previous works such that it could easily be identified as pertaining to a specific sub-genre, but when it adopts elements from such works and employs them without justification. FLCL is wacky and rather surreal to the point of being incomprehensible to a large extent until a second or even further watch. That it became beloved and is enjoyable on first watch owns to the fact that it is consistent within its own premised rules and that it tells a heartfelt story about growing up, identity, imagination, longing and aspiration. I have not watched its two sequels —created by a different studio and personnel— but from the reaction towards them I imagine that here was genreization at work. Whoever responsible for these must have felt that what made FLCL great was that it was crazy and ‘random.’ Before starting writing this here footnote I had been lost for examples of unjustified employment of elements of formulaic works, but just reading part of the synopsis for the first episode of the sequel I am handed one. In the first episode of FLCL Haruko runs Naota over with her Vespa before smashing a guitar against his head. In the first episode of FLCL Progressive (the first sequel) a woman runs over a character with a vintage car. In FLCL Haruko hit Naota with the guitar on purpose, but she ran him over by accident. Essentially the running over —as opposed to the guitar blow— was incidental to the story, and it could have done without it. But that element of a traffic accident was adopted as if it was principal. It's like older image generating AIs when they produced text or 19th century Western depictions of Chinese writing: if you squint your eyes it looks like words, but if you don't you see it's not it.
This also happens —whether due to pressure from the conservative production companies or lack of creativity, I don't know— when it is the same creators who make a sequel in the image of the original work. Imitative of another piece of fiction instead of of the world. Echo of an echo.
The new cinematic release also combines the burlesque on its mecha elements but mainly on the fan-service eye-candy of the female figure.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230809091639/https://goop.com/travel/culture/some-favorite-directors-favorite-films/
The Japanese term is hokan (補完 ) which as I understand means “complementation” rather than “instrumentality,” a term borrowed from an unrelated American sci-fi novel.
My apologies if this is a dumb question -- are anime series broadcast in Israel generally dubbed into English or Hebrew? Do American cartoons have the original English dialogue or are they dubbed?