Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies
Part VI: Shoujo Kakumei Utena: Self-Discovery
by Travis Hedge Coke
“Bye bye bye bye! goodbye to whom? Bye bye bye bye! goodbye to me!”
– Internal Clock, Municipal Orrery, JA Seazer
“It seems there are rumors – I’m not really sure – that the line of dialogue, “You are worthy of love,” was something I said to Anno-san.”
– Ikuhara Kunihiko, in All About Nagisa Kaworu: A Child of Evangelion
Sometimes we work hard at the shadows we throw.
The members of Be-Papas understand that human lives, adolescent or otherwise, are complicated and complex. They understand that there is gravity in this, but that there is, also, humor. Early in the release of the television version of Utena, Enokido Yoji and Ikuhara Kunihiko did an interview where they described Saionji and Anthy in ways that prepared an audience, at the time, for a certain kind of understanding of them, which – masterfully – becomes something very different in retrospect, with the entire story taken into account.
Saionji, who spends all his time as a teenager trying to be a classic man in the best traditionalist buy-into-the-hype way he can find. Enokido calls him, “the easiest to understand,” of the cast, and Ikuhara says he is, “a great guy.” He is. He is a terrible person, he is a traumatized child, he is a meany, a deceiver, a pouter, an egotist, a friend, a stoic, a rock. Saionji is classic man, in a Japanese context. He puts all his effort into being a man. Living as a man.
He is not a good person. He is great at being a man.
Self
Discovery
is a
Process
Enokido almost lets a significant reveal slip when he says, “[Anthy] doesn’t feel that young,” except we have no reason to interpret that the way it is truest. Ikuhara baits the hook with, “[She] seems to know the true reality of it all.”
Seems is important, though of course, translations are imprecise. And, our minds, our interpretations go for less elliptical, less fantastical or complex options. I am not even suggesting Be-Papas members meant these as subtly as I read them, only that they meant them subtly. And, that if we doubt our read, at any point, too intently, we justify the doubt, we move along the lines of the doubt, and we lose the thread of likelihood and practical understanding.
This is Wakaba (left) and her b?o?y?f?r?i?e?n?d? ?b?e?s?t?i?e? ?g?i?r?l?f?r?i?e?n?d? person she knows, Utena (right). That’s the simple part of their relationship.
Shoujo Kakumei Utena is difficult for me to elucidate on definitively, even the faux-definite of essays – because, I can change my mind about an essay or I can focus on details which are less likely to get me sued, or I can emphasize a tone – and I am, admittedly, freed up when I am in the context or other voices on a level field or who are privileged to talk over me. In some cases, it is preferable to be talked over or to be the quiet voice in the back of the room, even in the back of the audience. Hecklers tend to sit a the front of the audience, it always seems, and that is something very different – I hope – than my concerns.
I have a respect for the Utena audience, and a social bond, and it is a work which, I think, has fewer fans who are just in it for the pew pew and the flash and the blam blam. It is hard to find a committed Utena fan who is not ready to dig deep or believes there is noting to dig to.
In one episode of the television series, a fellow student of Tenjou Utena’s opines that, “She looks cool in her uniform, but she looks perfect in a dress!” Utena is wearing a dress, just then, a formal party dress unlike anything she would normally have on, but more than this, we learn within minutes – though painfully long minutes sharing with us social anxiety, shame, panic, disconnection – that beneath the dress which helps her look perfect, Utena wears her complete student uniform!
Concurrent to all this, we are aware, if we have seen more than this one episode, that no one else wears a uniform such as Utena’s. Her uniform is a uniform in a sense, yes, but not a uniform in the sense that it is uniform to a subsection of the student body. It is modeled on an earlier, outdated form of boys school uniform, though, still, there, unlike – in its details and ornateness and cut – any that would be seen on actual boys in actual schools, even in the days when boys school uniforms looked more like the short pant costume which Utena wears every day to school.
And, when the designer dress gifted to Himemiya Anthy – for whom Utena is wearing a dress and attending a party – turns out to be a sabotaged gag dress which dissolves in water, Utena is able to not only clothe Anthy, but to provide her an even more elegant, fun, and freeing costume by instantaneously crafting a party gown from a handy tablecloth, so that the two of them can dance together, impressing the crowd which moments before had been gawking cruelly – or at least so it seems – at the denuded Anthy.
It is difficult, in this scene, to be sure of crowd reactions, because we see them embellished through Anthy’s perspective, and Anthy – who we will learn is an immensely powerful witch – has, regardless of power and perhaps because of experience – exceptionally intense social anxiety and a phobia of crowds. Faces blur for her, bodies unite into a haunting array instead of simply being people engaged in their own business.
One of the amazing, and difficult to hold truck with, aspects of Utena, is that people can be many things at once, they do not contradict themselves in what they are, but what they are cannot be easily summed into easy descriptions without leaving much out.
Utena is good at basketball & bad at math! At the same time!
The differences in characterization and character placement in every version of the story, from the television series and the comic which serialized during the same time, to the theatrical movie, the multiple musicals, the art book of Chiho Saito illustrations, the epilogue comic released on the twentieth anniversary of the original works, all of these pieces reveal facets of the characters and world which are in collusion to something complex and true and unable to be expressed clearly by only one or another revelation. They may never be completely revealed, but what – who – ever is?
The U is so big in the mid-show bumper’s “Utena.” You can’t spell Utena without U. Don’t make me strain “anata” into “Utena.”
The more characters in Utena try to be what they believe they are expected to be, they feel a loss of what they are, but trying to be is also part of what they are.
Utena is the ultra-cool, heroic, dashing young woman other students sometimes see her as, she is – transitively – Wakaba’s price, but she is also what she fears for in Anthy, what she sympathizes with in Miki or Wakaba, and what she fears most in Touga, in Saionji, in Anthy. We are also our dynamics, our external socialization, as much as we are internal or unvoiced occupations.
Utena is not the work of a single author, and can be easily perceived as the collaboration or even the conflict of three or more auteurs. Be-Papas, the cooperative name under which the comic, television series, musicals, and film and so on have been created, privileged Chiho Saito, Kunihiko Ikuhara, and Enokido Yoji, but it is not limited to them. While fans and critics may choose to privilege one or another further, it is often a misjudgment to do so, reflecting little of their practice as group author and more our anticipations.
In privileging one or another as author, we are privileging ourselves.
When the Shadow Girls perform a skit about naming kittens, wherein one wants to name the kitten, Kitty, but the other says that is too common, so they opt for Unusual Kitty, and the other says this is lacking a nice style, so they modify it to, Nicer Style Unusual Kitten, it is possible for the audience to perceive this as a lack of style in one of the two, a lack of subtlety or prettiness, but what if that awkward presentation is the style, is the aesthetic? The debate is not over right or wrong, even necessarily better or worse, but a presentation of two aesthetic sensibilities and an earnestness, on the part of each participant, to reach a compromise and to achieve an agreeableness.
What are the Shadow Girls? Silhouettes that could be the shadows of paper puppets, seen in the movie, The Adolescence of Utena, as straw-stuffed effigies, they also participate in school broadcasts, airing a VHS tape which reveals Anthy and her brother’s crimes and complications, as well as a tape of of Shiori’s personal doodle attacking Anthy’s pet monkey.
A tape Shiori gave them. And, why did Shiori give them a cassette that metaphorically incriminates her?
Look at them! Being all adult and mid-teens!
Like Nanami, who at thirteen is both confused by the world and deeply traumatized, Shiori is attempting self-definition, and the avenues she has for self-definition are all self-harm, even if they both would never admit that aloud to other people. They self-sabotage to draw attention to themselves and to make themselves dangerous. Nanami because she does not know what she wants the relationship to her older brother to actually be, and Shiori because she does not know what she wants her relationship to Juri to be.
Their confusion is rooted in shame, compounded in abuse, and complicated by immaturity and the oubliette fishbowl of the prison-school which the mastermind(s) behind Ohtori have created. Ohtori is grooming.
If we’re all abusing each other, it balances out?
In 2001, during an online Q&A, Chiho Saito said that Utena is about, “changing your personality. That is, not about changing it because you lost fighting society, but by changing your personality, your world view changes.”
She also said, of the question, What is Utena about?, that Ikuhara would say that it is a difficult question to answer.
Sometimes, I think Utena is about being a difficult question.
The three primary members of Be-Papas who created Utena had many philosophical interests in common, and several aesthetic. Ohtori is a combination, maybe, of Saito’s experiences in school, working on school plays, focusing on being a manga author, and Ikuhara’s anxiety and frustration and pretending to be a spy; Enokido, at the same school, in the same year as Ikuhara, and as an adult, speaking of an evolving sense of schools as closed-systems or without break between school and outside.
Enokido refers to Ohtori as a closed system.
When the Shadow Girls tell us it is, “Time for us to go back to what is normal for us,” they take a flying saucer away.
A UFO.
On a fishing line!
One thing that Utena does learn about Anthy, when they switch bodies, is that Anthy’s eyeglasses do not enhance or affect her vision. She can see fine without.
Saito said, before she began working on Utena that she, “realized that if I don’t free myself, I can’t do what I hope to do in the future.”
We are all the shadow girls, performing stories.
Shadows with two-gun mojo.
In an interview conducted at Anime Expo 2000 – which, coincidentally, I was set to attend before depression and other issues sidelined me – Ikuhara said that Utena, “wears a male uniform–but it isn’t really a male uniform.” That, “She’s not bound by the same male/female conventions that previous characters may have been bound by.” And, that, “in modern manga, a person is all allowed to follow her own path.”
In modern manga, but not in life. In life, though, we also say, this is abnormal life, or unreal life, or make excuses. We make excuses for our own lives, the living others do, when it does not fit a narrative in circumstances we pretend are not narrative-bound.
I come off weird, emotional, distractible in here. Me!
My mom has an amazing memoir and I do not recognize myself in it, though I recognize events. Sometimes, when relatives tell stories about me, I cannot see myself in them. Why would I? Our nature, when stories are told of us, where we are used to illustrate a point, either resonate so much we feel too visible or they feel alien.
I appear in friend’s anecdotes, in the memoirs of an ex, in another’s confessional erotic poetry, I am an illustrative point in a lecture a professor gives every year. Each time, I want to interject to the world, no, I was there, t’was not so, I t’was not so! I want to get shakespearean about it, even though I know, kind of, probably, it also was so.
Sometimes I tell a story and I am sure those people in those stories do not always recognize themselves. I tell it anyway. No fault of the teller. Not a fault in the story. All story, even exceptional and enlightening story, revelatory, is bound by limitation. Great story might be shaped in limitation. You do not tell it regardless, you tell it anyway.
A lot of times, when we tell anecdotes, like Shiori with the videotape, we tell on ourselves.
And, like Homer Simpson says of Rashomon, “That’s not how I remember it!”
Everyone is the shadow girls.
You and who?
Utena, like life, has to be looked at and felt from outside and inside.
My social media was recently fairly full of “Tell us about a childhood scar,” and I am not sure what the original purpose was. The offer struck chords with many people.
I talked about being stabbed in the face in sixth grade. It is a funny/not-funny story. It is a tiny scar from a little pocket knife. Fight on the bus.
I also made an aside about thinking about talking about scars from surgeries. I am intersex, and over my youth I had surgeries relating to that. Like the surgeries I had on my ears or having my nose treated for damage, they had an effect on me, they are memories I will not lose. Unlike having tubes put in my ears, though, I learned early and specifically that those surgeries were not talked about in social situations. And, if it came up, you definitely did not talk about the underlying causes, what necessitated procedures.
So, at my age, as an adult, I made a gesture. I did not want other people to feel alone, and I know people have, that people do. And, I made a vague gesture, because I take the path of least resistance.
Like all Shadow Girls, sometimes we have a fish head.
Nanami’s uncertainty about incestuous feelings towards her brother – living in a fishbowl of sexual grooming, sexual abuse, and a deliberate social conflicting of the adult responsibility of children and sex as approval – and Shiori or Juri experiencing anxiety and shame at homosexual feelings between two close in age teenagers, are not comparable in the sense that homosexuality were akin to incest in any way, but the shame and confusion in both these cases is systemic and societal. What Nanami is experiencing may have underlying basic, healthy psychological components, but she has been abused by the system in which she lives, to the point that she is unable to understand that or which elements are healthy and which are not. The instances in which Nanami thinks wearing a cowbell makes her stylish and special, in which she worries over an egg in parody of of pregnant teens, in which she becomes a literal cow and is carried off to slaughter while Dona Dona – with its irrevocable metaphysical and Holocaust overtones – plays as the mournful soundtrack – illustrate and reiterate that Nanami is a young child forced into an unhealthy and engineered semblance of maturity, and that Nanami understands she is akin to a calf to the slaughter and does not know why.
Nanami, like Shiori, like Utena and Touga, assume their suffering and their path towards the slaughterhouse must be, at least in part, their own fault. They seek reasons they must be in this position, and they try to take responsibility for those perceived reasons. That there are master manipulators, that manipulation can occur, that it can be so thorough that a person falls completely under the lies, that is less acceptable and more crushing than self-condemnation.
Two abuse victims trying to pretend like it’s the halcyon days of youth.
In Adolescence, Touga is clearly prostituted as a child, but there is little reason to not understand the tv version of Utena in the same way, or, especially given the coda sequel, After the Revolution, that the comics/manga version of Touga is not similarly being sexually abused. In After, it clear that Touga’s ability to process life as a healthy, socially-cognizant adult, as well as Saionji’s ability to do the same, has been destroyed, fragmented and blurred by abuse in adolescence and pre-adolescence.
When Nanami cannot healthily process her desire for her brother’s approval, presence, love, adoration, friendship and privilege, it is, in part, because Touga cannot healthily process or express these things. Touga frequently positions himself as sexually available, as sexually unavoidable, because he is trying to take responsibility for what he perceives in himself and his situation.
When Utena, in the tv series, begins to visit more with her roommate girlfriend/not-girlfriend’s brother, Akio, she also begins to manipulate and push friends. She takes on Akio-like gestures and demeanor as she forces sexual confrontation onto other children, without being aware that it is malicious or that what she is enjoying in it, at least in part, is the malice of it.
When you try to dress like the hero, but the hero you chose is a devil with a necktie.
Adolescents, especially, pick up bad habits for naive reasons. But, adults, too, and it can be part of the lie of maturity, in a social and stratifying sense, that adults do not.