Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies
Part IV: Shoujo Kakumei Utena: Trust
by Travis Hedge Coke
“Missing truth and forever/Kissing love and true your heart”
– Truth, Shoko Fujibayashi & Riki Arai
The end credits song for Shoujo Kakumei Utena
Left to right: Tenjou Utena in Himemya Anthy’s body & Anthy in Utena’s body.
Revolutionary Girl Utena is a jewel which occludes; brilliantly set, beautifully cut, attractive at a distance and close-up, it clouds and distracts and obscures itself the more intently you look.
Over thirty television episodes, alone, illustrating the anxiety called, thou shalt out no one else before their time. When it is said that you have to take people at their word or judge them by their actions, it is meant by the first that this is polite and by the latter than your failure to properly divine the future or past from current actions you could witness is no one’s fault but your own. Shoujo Kakumei Utena, translated as la fillette révolutionnaire, as Girls Revolution Utena, and as Revolutionary Girl Utena, thrives and trembles in uncertainty. Brings us to uncertainty as a reminder it is where we live.
Tenjou Utena, fourteen years old, lives in a haunted house with a witch and the ape of god. Tenjou Utena, fourteen years old, lives in a long-disused dormitory with her roommate and the roommate’s many pets, one of whom is a monkey with a necktie. Tenjou Utena, fourteen years old, fidgets earnestly, stuck to a spider’s web, believing herself nearly an adult, trying to be the best adult, her adulthood impossible for us to arrive at.
Utena attends a bizarre private school, run by a naively elitist student government, in turn dominated by a manipulative and seductive acting chairman, Ohtori Akio, whose surname – not even a married, but the family name of his fiancee – is also the name of the school and its grounds. Ohtori is Utena’s living, waking world. Its absurdities, she has no option except to accept,
At fourteen, seventeen year olds can seem adult. Dominating gestures can seem like dominance. And, Utena is immature for fourteen. She is immature in ways allowed because other children, and adults, often mistake determination and quietness as maturity.
Utena has to trust her roommate, Anthy. She has to take Anthy’s monkey on faith. The threats of the school’s student council. The presence of absurdities like a boxing kangaroo and banalities like low marks and make up tests.
Shoujo Kakumei Utena is blunter and subtler about misaligned trust than nearly any franchise before or since. It is in the basic makeup of the scenario that nearly all principal characters are children or appear to be children (even Kanae, who is eighteen, is treated with relative immaturity and explicitly as a child), that all of the children are victims of abuse, and that all of the characters are not responsible for or guilty of their abuse. They may, in turn, abuse others, other individual people, animals, institutions, or sets of people.
The only characters who are not children are either likely to be phantom creations, memories of before-school-times, ghosts, witches, or demigods. Or, some admixture thereof. And, those characters are arrested in either an immature state, a childlike semblance, or a phantasmagoric youthfulness.
Adulthood, if it exists outside of play-acting or sexless rule-bound ghosts, is cognitively irreconcilable with where Utena and the other students or recent graduates find themselves. Wakaba, brokenhearted and betrayed, finding solace and new hope in a romantic comic, is not demonstrating any excessive immaturity, but playing out a prescribed systemic role in Ohtori Academy.
Utena is built around the positive influence of stories we receive in childhood and also in the chance they prove toxic or misleading. The same myths which help the title character cope with the deaths of her parents and her sense of fear and isolation strengthen her naiveté and an affected disaffection, both of which we see in an even more intense form in the older teens of the student council, in Touga and Saionji’s alternate forms of princely masculinity and in Juri’s put on adultness, manifesting in her dress, her complicated hairstyle, and her refusal to acknowledge relationship patterns and social dynamics in front of her face if those patterns and dynamics imply she was ignorant or eager.
Fans are still talking about “37 yr old divorcee energy,” but she’s sixteen.
The use of discordant musical stings and real world ambient sounds, disruptive symbolism – butterflies on straws in discarded lemonade glasses; rows of empty shoes; party balloons – and intrusive non-diegetic imagery such as censorious rotating rose animations and directing arrows and the Shadow Girl performances, all prevent the audience from fully immersing in even a temporary belief they are immersed in the fictive reality of Utena’s world. It remains artificial to us no matter how emotionally real. And, it can be very emotionally real.
The playfulness of Anthy does not belie her nature as an older, stronger, powerful entity, but highlights it in a way we, and the youth of Ohtori, are unready to face. The shadow girls who narrate morality plays and chorus each episodes’ themes are engaged in, seemingly, either nothing but play or nothing but the work of illustrating, of educating.
The Shadow Girls performing a skit.
“Isn’t it nice how quiet it is,” Anthy asks Utena, but it is Anthy who disrupts quiet most, though subtly, even, ironically, quietly. Anthy’s loneliness may motivate the story of Utena even more than Utena, herself. Quietness does not appeal to or prove healthy for any of the characters, but definitely neither Utena nor Anthy, who do not crave aloneness, because they feel alone, they feel rejected or to be soon rejected. Aloneness and the silence that is not silence, the silence of hospital waiting rooms, of high towers, of distant activity, that silence is killing them.
Shadow Girls’ sketch with realistic fish silhouettes.
Utena’s shifts in visual styles, in pacing and artistic affectations, from the art nouveau windows to storybook illustrations, even the rose-framed greeting imagery, as if scrapbooking a person or placing them on a postcard or collectible photo print, enhance both the irreality and the essential underneath reality or the realness of implication.
Is it really deep, or is it art nouveau?
When the television show does a body swap episode, rather than learning truths about one another and coming out with a greater awareness of the person they switched with, characters are either left in a nebulous state, like Saionji and Chu-Chu, or, as with Anthy and Utena, perhaps only feeling more concretely and empathy for what is their perceived truth, their perceived life.
A traditional body swap narrative, such as Freaky Friday, is modeled on traditional bildungsroman motifs, the route to adulthood from childhood, the concrete realities of adult life and child life, or they are based in gender, sexuality, race or class in the way of The Prince and the Pauper or Lois Lane becoming Black in appearance for a single comic. The parties will find a new body, a new lifestyle, that those around them respond in a different fashion, responsibilities are had by all people, and learn something about a demographic as much as an individual.
In Utena, the title character does not, in Anthy’s body, understand what Anthy is really about, what her life is truly like, nor does she understand that Anthy is very likely responsible for the body swap and for all the oddities and magics of their world. She does not appreciate that colorist and xenophobia may play a part in the bullying of Anthy or that Anthy may not be as helpless or naive as she appears. She does not explore Anthy’s life, as much as she experiences a reification of her frustration with what she perceives to be Anthy’s life.
Utena’s empathy is real even if what she is empathetic about is a misinterpretation.
That Utena’s understanding is a misunderstanding is made clearer in successive episodes, including the episode where Kanae, engaged to Anthy’s older brother, is abused by bother the brother, though we do not know that yet, and Anthy, who is cast sharply as more knowing, more manipulative. Wherein Anthy is shown as irrevocable cruel.
Even disregarding the multiple tellings of the same story creating alternate perspectives, alternate routes, Utena is more maze than journey. Interpersonal dynamics are always fraught with tension and the potential for betrayal, perspectives are always subject to potential reversals and revisions.
In episode eighteen of the tv series, Mitsuri’s Impatience, the ten year old Mitsuri, who, early in the series, tried to be a boyfriend and older brother to a thirteen year-old, continues to dote on the older girl, while being told to stand aside while she has “adult talk,” and is chided by an eleven year-old friend who is low-key hitting on him while advising him not to pursue the older girl or let himself be abused by her or his own ideas.
When children parent children. Under giant flowers.
Mitsuri dotes on the older girl, bringing her meals, studying romantic movies in the hopes of learning, remaining steadfast despite rain, disinterest, or mockery.
Much as Mitsuri sees himself as older brother to an older girl, he tells the eleven year old she is hardly more mature than him.
“One year is one year more mature,” she says.
In the same episode, Utena confesses to Anthy’s brother, Akio, who will be revealed as, in essence, the Devil, that she is unsure if she is an adult or a child. Though only fourteen, Akio appears to treat Utena as an adult and to take her seriously. A repeated sexual abuser, manipulator, and – again – the Devil, Akio is only too ready to let a child walk into a trap thinking it is a place of honor.
When Mitsuri tries to kiss the eleven year old, after she tells him he has to practice adult things, adult romance, she slaps him and leaves. He is confused, eating part of a chocolate bar before throwing the rest into the trash, and the older girl, thirteen, is incensed. She suspects. She is envious even though she knows that, as he is ten, she should not be.
Children, in Utena, cannot trust their own impulses or the lessons of those around them, cast into a world of abuses and abusers and the abused who abuse in turn.
During the long arc which that episode takes place in, The Black Rose Saga, ever episode a character, generally a secondary character, will choose to descend in something like a confessional, an elevator, a waiting room, a photo booth, a private place which is not private, and they will be selected for a coffin, memories will be warped as they replay, and they will fight a duel, and they will lose, the coffin will be disposed of, and they will return to their life neither changed nor unchanged.