Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Ten: Chapter Sixteen: A Face on the Train
In context of Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, especially in the ‘Death’ section in which the first twenty-four episodes of the television series are remixed, we can think of the flow of images in terms of exploded projection. Please think of my drawing of an array of ovoid shapes as a schematic rendering of the exploded projection that was so nicely drawn in the Yamaha motorcycle wheel assembly diagram. In the center of my diagram is the flow of images, arrayed before us. But the remix of Evangelion makes it difficult for us to orientate ourselves, to figure out what is going on, and where it might be leading. Characters appear, and with them the possibility of orientating ourselves vis-à-vis the flow of images. In fact, the chapter titles are largely character names: Misato, Asuka, Rei, Yui, Ritsuko, Toji, Kaji, Kaworu. Each character can be thought of as a ‘line of sight’ that passes through the array of images, offering a potential orientation. Maybe if we stick with Asuka, we can make sense of things, organizing the world around her. But then Shinji appears, and we have another line of sight: maybe if we stick with Shinji, we can make sense of things, organizing the world around him. But then there is also the possibility of that the relation between Asuka and Shinji is the key to the series. And so we have another line of sight, which affords another frame of reference.
The game of Evangelion is give a sort of open structure or open system that allows for different lines of sight and therefore different frames of reference. I’ve used characters as a way to think about this open structure of exploded projection, but the characters are also open systems, and so they’d have to be rendered as little exploded projections as well. If you push their openness, you’d begin to see that their components or elements might in fact overlap with one another. As these various open systems expand and contract, intermesh and retreat, the result is a giant matrix. And we should recall that matrix etymologically refers to mother. Indeed it is the dispersed body of the mother that seems to constitute the internal limit for disintegration and reintegration, death and rebirth, of the entire anime world. All of the major characters seem somehow related to this maternal body, and in the ‘Rebirth’ section, it is when Asuka finally gets in touch with ‘mama’ that she begins to kick ass. But what does it means for the maternal body to underwrite death and rebirth of the expanding and contracting anime world?
