Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Twelve: Chapter Twenty: The Spiral Dance of Symptom and Specter
The opening sequence of Video Girl Ai thus sets up the basic framework of interactions. The binary scenario of boy (Yota) courting a girl (Moemi) is disrupted by the introduction of a third — Ai, a girl who is not one because she is in fact from a porn video. Will the appearance of Ai put an end the relationship between Yota and Moemi? Will Ai become his girlfriend instead? Or will Ai ultimately turn out to be a mediator who will bring Yota and Moemi together?
Because Ai comes to life from a soft porn video, the manga is also playing with a larger set of concerns about pornography: what is the ‘proper’ role of pornography in a young man’s life? Will it lead him astray or help him to find his way into a lasting relationship?
The opening sequence sets up a problem of perception, with panels that associate the male with the viewing position (subjective shot), and the female with the viewed (objective shots). So we might think that male-female interactions will play out at this level throughout the manga, with the boy gradually becoming a man and winning the girl by stabilizing his position as viewer. But, unlike Voyeur and Shutter Love, there isn’t an optical device to reinforce the perceptual of subjective and objective shots. Rather it is the VCR that mediates between male and female. And the VCR doesn’t seem to imply fixed perceptual positions as does the camera or the voyeuristic optical device.
Here’s the scene where Ai comes to life (read left to right).
In this sequence Yota initially appears to be perceptually situated in the subjective position, and yet, as soon as Ai begins to address him directly from the screen, it is clear that she will not be confined to an objective position. And her leap out of the screen shatters the perceptual logic of objective and subjective shots. While you might read this sequence as ejaculatory, the ejaculation doesn’t belong to anyone in particular. The logic or rhetoric of this scene defines neat perceptual positioning, and the VCR is not presented as a perceptual technology. The VCR feels like a technology of contact, and the scene brings into play a range of affective elements (action lines and sound effects imply a direction of movement but the movement seems to come from everywhere, as if striking the actors, viewers, and readers) while the perceptual logic becomes muted (there are small panels of them looking at one another).
