Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Twelve: Chapter Nineteen: Perversion
Motosuwa Hideki is constantly worrying that he looks like a pervert (hentai), that the world will see his behavior as dirty-minded (ecchi). And given his heavy breathing and panic attacks in front of a lingerie store, he should be worried. But in fact, strangely enough, no one sees his behavior as strange. None of the women are disturbed by his pornography collection. And no one seems to think it is odd for a man to have sex with a female computer. It is only Hideki who is embarrassed by his impulses — his incessant babbling, ogling, and fantasizing.
On the one hand, we can say that, by the logic of psychoanalytic theory, his behavior is normal. After all, he is organizing his desire around a series of woman-objects. On the other hand, his desire appears instable because he doesn’t seem able to settle on one object. And his desire isn’t directed toward the complete woman-object, but toward bits and pieces of her. There is something perverse at work here, not just in Hideki but also in Chobits.
One definition of perversion hinges on the idea that perversion entails inventing or imagining prohibitions in the actual absence of prohibitions. This is precisely what Hideki does. He imagines that the world has prohibitions against pornography and against sex with computers, when it doesn’t. But this game is how he gets away with being a total pervert. Everyone around him sees his activities as entirely normal, and so he can continue to push the envelope. Is this okay, too? What about this? Finally, he has made everyone into an accomplice, he has obtained their approval for his sexual impulses. How twisted is that!
What’s more, as it turns out, his landlady, Mrs Hibiya, is Chii’s ‘mother.’ She is secretly watching over the couple, steering Chii in the right direction. How twisted is that? As for Chii, she is one of a pair of twin girl computers made for Mrs Hibiya by her husband because Mrs Hibiya couldn’t have children. But the one sister couldn’t overcome her desire for the father and had to be destroyed. Apparently, the father fitted Chii with a reset button between her legs so no one would take advantage of her sexually, so she could find true love. Should we call this female castration? After all, the father is saying, no, you can’t have sex with me, and you shouldn’t have sex with men at all.
These elements of Chii’s back-story emerge as her romance with Hideki unfolds. Everyone turns into an accomplice to their romance, and everything is arranged to make the fantasy possible: boy falls in love with a girl computer with a reset button between her legs, and he can live happily ever after in soft porn heaven. But whose fantasy is this? And what’s in it for Chii?
With such questions we are reaching the limits of the psychoanalytic theory at that level of narrative and character-arc analysis, because we begin to become so caught up in the orientations that we are bringing to the animation rather than considering how animation technics generate orientations. This is where I part company with Saitô who finds it reassuring that readers, viewers, or interactors can successfully impose their gendered positionality onto the animation, manga, or video game. He assumes that we can successfully override the materiality of the anime-manga world, and in effect transcend it. While there is no doubt that we can to some extent determine how we interact with such materials, there are ways in which such materials orient, disorient, and reorient us. Without some account of such processes, we end up with an account of animation that is entirely indifferent to the material processes that unfold from it and are folded into it. And so in the next chapter we will return to technologies and techniques, that is, technics.
