Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Unstable, Imperfect, and Irrational
Rebuild of Evangelion
by Travis Hedge Coke
President of Gainax, Tomohiro Maki, was arrested December 5, 2019, on charges of sexual indecency and coercion.
In 1999, then-president of Gainax, Takeshi Sawamura, was arrested for tax fraud.
Why are these things, and Wizard, a geek culture and promotions magazine from the States, the first things to come to mind as the final movie in the quartet called Rebuild of Evangelion?
Ever a presentation of generational traumas, generational frictions, and generational commonalities and dissimilarities, Neon Genesis Evangelion has been as much a fictional world and narrative as it has been a construct for the promotion of discussion and meditation. Borne out of real life and personal trauma, a production experiment the likes of which were never seen before and will likely never be seen again, the making and releasing of the original Evangelion television series is as riveting and dramatic as the show, itself, or its sequel films, shorts, side stories, strip poker video games, pinball machines, pencil toppers, unofficial comics, official comics, and this quadrilogy of theatrically-released motion pictures the final of which made its United States debut on Amazon Prime in about an hour as I started to write this.
Set primarily in 2015, Evangelion debuted as a television program in 1995, appearing commercially in English two years later. Rebuild of Evangelion, a retelling and repurposing of the original program as four theatrically-released motion pictures, began release in 2007, meaning the future-setting of the main narrative was only a few years off but that events had diverged dramatically from our world in their past. The world-wrecking events that expedited global warming and geological, social, and economic upheaval reflecting those of our world, were now alternate history deviations and not things that could occur in a few years. We are further, and farther removed from our familiar Evangelion, our nostalgic past, and our nostalgic present.
Evangelion has always been about adults fucking up, and uniquely, at the time of the original release, because it was set slightly in the future, the adults were actually slightly younger, by birthdate, than the prime audience for the program, and the older adults were functionally, and by dates of birth, the generation of the authors of the program, the actors in the program, and dedicated hardcore audience primed for the program.
Evangelion was never about “what our kids will be like,” or the world they will live in. It was always about us. And, our parents, who are us.
And, it was always about adults having a priori fucked up.
Early on, our protagonist and we are told that the Evas, giant humanoid constructs which can be piloted in battle, hold inordinate power, and we take that largely to mean punching and explosions, because we ignore, we fail to take stock of what is implied when an Eva regenerates a damaged arm and the armor around the arm. One of the first moments in the first episode of the television series, repeated in the first of the Rebuild movies, is a ghostly appearance by what appears to be a character we will meet formally later. This apparition goes unexplained except by supposition. It is a prompt, a spectacle, not a causal narrative beat.
Rebuild will give us motifs of seeds in the fourth film, motifs of flywheels in the second, of tension and stress in the second. Circles, halos and balls and swirls appear in all four. The final film threads so many visualizations into a conveyor belt of mechanized spine.
What happens or why in Evangelion, is not what is of most importance, narrative and causality do not guide the program or the experience. Spectacle is not a distraction, but the point. The opening film of Rebuild – Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone – remakes beat for beast, shot for shot – in a different aspect ratio, the early episodes of the original television show, with crisper visuals, smoother animation, and many of the same vocal cast (in multiple languages) delivering the same dialogue, playing the same roles, but with age, maturation, simultaneous homage to themselves, variation on the themes they set down.
The point of a moment to moment remake is not to be the same or to capture the same lighting in the same bottle as before. Sticking so close, mimicking the angles, the mise en scene, the pacing and acting makes 1.0 weird. Scenes appear the same, but are in new order. Dialogue is subtly altered. Scenes play longer or move quicker than they did in the original presentation. Nostalgia is culled and cut down like gathered wheat hit by a sharp scythe. 1.0 is less rebirth or reboot than a reaping.
When Shinji Ikari, our primary point of view, a fourteen year old impressed into military service by his father, wakes in a hospital, having been brutalized, physically and psychologically, his first response is to say, “I don’t recognize this ceiling.”
And, that is us. We are traumatized. Brutalized. Even, when we do not know we are.
Evangelion is about personal and generational post traumatic stress. Cultural and psychic damage.
1996, I read an article in Wizard which pitched Evangelion as being like The X-Files, government agents investigated weird happenings but there is giant robots. In the end, bizarrely, it turns out there is only one giant robot in Evangelion, because what we saw as giant robots were not. This is only the beginning of my – and others’ – misinterpretation and confusion about Neon Genesis Evangelion.
In 1997, I made my brother, Aaron, buy the first VHS tapes available of the tv series. He loved the show possibly more than me, and I loved it more because he loved it. He passed in 2017 after spending a decade in-hospital after flesh-eating bacteria derailed his plans to just be Misato Katsuragi, Ikari’s guardian and boss.
In 1998, my grandmother asked me to buy a CD. She had no music collection to speak of, had not really listed to music much in a long while. She liked the Shiro Sagisu soundtrack of Evangelion and wondered if I knew how to get it.
In 1998, a friend who later came out as ace, watches a pirate copy of Death & Rebirth with me, the summary and alternate-angle retelling of the final episodes of the television show. When Ikari, traumatized, self-hating, confused, masturbates at the sight of a comatose friend and colleague, another teenager, my friend tells me all masturbation is selfish and rape in the same way. And, it involves fluids and heat.
1999, my grandfather goes with me to a local con of decent size and buys a single-serve coffeemaker decorated with Nerv logos from the show, a sleek white, black, and red design. Unlike cup-based single serve, you had to pack the coffee yourself, and empty, wash it out, to fill against and make the next. It made incredibly strong, rich coffee out of cheap grounds and it felt like the future.
In 1999 I cosplayed as both Ryoji Kaji and Asuka Langley Soryu for a fan-made weekly calendar. In one manipulated photo, I am looking up adoringly at myself, and I am looking down at the child I am with concern trying not to look concerned.
In 2000, I write a short story for an anthology of Native authors blurring science fiction and fantasy about Evangelion fandom, character imprinting (on Ritsuko Akagi, resident scientist), reincarnation, death, and gender confusion. I am paid that year, the anthology fails to happen, and I finally sell the story again in 2020.
2021, the anglophone dub Rei Ayanami, Amanda Winn Lee, tweets: “Overheard while my son was on VR: ‘You want to WHAT? Dude, that’s sick! Rei is my MOM.’” This scatterguns me through decades of Rei empathy and discomfort at the horny and often pedophilic Rei Ayanami sub-fandom. Evangelion, itself, told us early on that this fetishism of children, of the abused and the injured, of abused, injured children, is disgusting. The company which owns Evangelion also marketed dozens of questionable products objectifying and sexualizing those characters, but points for trying? Maybe.
2021, I make a personal decision that is ethically the best, morally the best, but hurts people I love and hope the best for. I tell myself is this being adult. Being fair. Doing right. And, that I will watch all four Rebuild of Evangelion movies to keep my mind of my decisions, my actions.
As Katsuragi says in the second movie, “Who the hell wants to relive the past.”
2009, Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance hits theaters with imagery of deaths, suicides, nature preserves, graveyards, collapsed ships and towering angels. Immediately unfamiliar, conflicting, instantly blurring lines of reliability, of simulation and fresh occurrence, 2.0 complicates the traditional understanding of Evangelion as a narrative of adults manipulating children, by opening with the potential for children to manipulate adults. A violent, a promising and a horrifying proposition.
Evangelion is a mix of religions, of political theories and practices, of cultures and nationalities, social strata, philosophy and psychology schools. A frequent criticism after the initial fires began to fade, was that the Christian elements, and maybe even the Shinto elements, the echoes of Aum Shinrikyo – a movement and religion responsible for a terrorist attack and which had interested and taken in several of the staff who made the original Neon Genesis Evangelion tv show – that these religious gestures and iconography were only wallpaper, only window dressing.
Walls have wallpaper for a variety of reasons and they are all valid. Wallpaper looks good. Wallpaper covers imperfections. Protects the walls. May help create an atmosphere. Wallpaper is not bad or worthless at being wallpaper.
So, too, religion. Spirituality.
Spiritual wallpaper is okeh as spiritual wallpaper. Religious window dressings are important as wind dressing. Stained glass windows are not unheard of in religion. Bangles, beads, icons and figurines are hung in temples, mounted to dashboards, decals on windshields and home windows because they serve purpose.
If the angels are called messengers or apostles, these massive abstract geometric monsters, these inverse-depth impossibilities and floating icons serve the same narrative purposes. To inspire awe. To be other forms of humanity and to be distractions for the characters to fight while, after the fact, being revealed as echoes, as possibilities besides us or our characters. But, whether they are called angels or apostles or messengers means something. The words, all the words, carry weight and inspire speculation.
The purpose of Evangelion is to inspire speculation.
While the television series often hinged on the anxiety of acknowledging others, of being community and communal and not suicidally individualistic or chasing the ghosts of parental approval, Rebuild shows us community unforced, organic and omnipresent. As the world becomes even more populated and as the stakes become more dramatic, more atrocious, we see in Rebuild an unspoken emphasis on bodily closeness and the ripple effects through social groups, through neighborhoods, workplaces, cities and nations.
We see, not what we expect to, not what we want to, not what we are shown. We see in a fashion subject to all those influences and failing all of them. As Ikari’s father, Gendo sees his (deceased? disembodied? disappeared?) wife when he looks at her clone, Rei Ayanami, we see Gendo mis-seeing. When Shikinami moves in with Ikari and Kasagari and she reenacts Shinji Ikari’s panicked nude run out of the bath, we watch the reproduction and it is politically different, tonally different, while being almost beat for beat. We see what we think we understand.
Evangelion has often been unflinching, willing to hurt us to help us. The show and the Rebuild movies pick the absolute cruelest way to show us that the Eva units are not robots but giant, enslaved humans. One Eva, one person, tears another apart, cannibalizing, throwing limbs and organs to the ground. This is war. This is peace. This is the human element of all military endeavors. All military existence. The flesh and soul war machine. The flesh and soul of self-defense.
If the eroticization of teenagers in 2.0 does not discomfort you, that is on you. The makers of the movie walk a dangerous line and they do so teasingly, demonstrating for us the risk they take, the tightrope walk. Bodies are property. Bodies cannot be owned. Bodies can be objectified. Bodies cannot be withdrawn.
When we want bodies to unravel, to withdraw the most, we have a pilot who enjoys her revealing uniform, whose hair and body are subject to heat, to pressure, to water and wind, and she fights an angel who unfurls bodily and screeches at us with a face of bone.
The word “not” appears parenthetically in the titles of three of the four Rebuild movies. The titles express things we and they, themselves, can and cannot do. Not concurrently or simultaneously or sequentially. All of those and none of those. Stateless is a state.
The opening of Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo mimics the opening of the preceding film and that film’s ending, and yet it is antiseptic, visually confusing, conflicting, and the world has ended, so it’s weird. It is a good movie that lives up to its title within five minutes.
The titles of the Rebuild movies utilize obsolete katakana to spell “Evangelion.” Outdated does not mean gone. Disused does not mean without affect.
Shinji Ikari comes into 3.0 outdated, barely wanted, a resuscitated memory, a liability the world has outgrown and an egoistic young solipsistic male gaze the world as outpaced.
At the end of 2.o, Ikari broke the world he was so strong and determined as a representative of individual drive and manchild with a goal. As a quartet of community-affirming movies and a world desperately in need of communal effort, that has no place and it has only a bad look. It leaves a bad taste in the collective mouth.
The community of Rebuild is smaller, tighter, but it has moved from naming things after old religious icons and dead people who may never have lived, naming their ship, instead, “the god-killer,” the Wunder. They give Ikari a “deification shutdown collar,” to stop him from syncing with an Eva or further/yet again causing the end of the world. One time was enough.
“It’s shocking how simple it is, to tear the world apart.”
Nerv, the organization for which all these characters worked in the previous two films, the organization which enslaved the Evas and abused children into soldiers, is now in conflict with our heroes in their current organization, called Wille. Nerv was created by Seele as an arm of, and replacement for, Gehirn, and in 3.0, Nerv is combatted by Wille. Soul. Brain. Nerve. Will. And, will have deification shutdowns and god-killers.
Nerv has clones, child slaves, giant slaves, and train cars. Ikari’s father. Ruins. Moving walkways that no longer move. Rebar and concrete wreckage. More trains.
And, Kaworu. Increasing amounts of Kaworu, a mysterious young man who Shinji Ikari fell in love with, in the television series, and then was murdered by Ikari or chose to sacrifice himself to being murdered.
Evangelion has forever been about impact. Immediate impact. Delayed impact.
Let us note that in Rebuild, bodies – people – without sexual difference, gender or gender politics, are in appearance, traditional representations of a female body.
Rebuild leans into the potency of impact, the relevance of all parts. These would be fascinating movies with the audio only, the visuals only, but it all comes together importantly, significantly. Shinji Ikari’s cell looks less like a cell and more like a red sea with a small bed on it. Oceans change from red to blue. Flowers cut bright into dark earth and dark pavement. The black and white keys of piano.
“Playing piano is a conversation, just in scales,” says Kaworu.
Audio and visual, image and movement, conversations in scales.
Ikari plays piano with a partner. Plays shogi with an opponent. These are not conflicts, even if Ikari feels threatened. These are conversations. They are experience.
I used to feel so afraid for Dr Ritsuko Akagai becoming her mother. Little did I ever imagine I would even live to see 2021 and to see Akagi become mother to those who remain.
3.0 stops Evangelion from pretending to be a story of a protagonist reaching for goals and earnestly shows us brutal weirdness, the strangeness of new and old, and a protagonist surviving. Shinji Ikari is surviving Evangelion. Shinji Ikari is a person experiencing. And, he is our experience.
3.0, its tone and revelations, make the world too big for Ikari. Too big, really, for us. He cannot change the past or deal with the present and neither can we. Not their past and present. Not ours.
Each of these movies, in their final home media versions, are retitled from 1.0, 2.0, to 1.1.1, 2.2.2, 3.3.3. The fourth, however, is 3.0+1.0, for now. Maybe for always.
Shinji Ikari, like us, cannot tell who is a true friend and who is manipulating him, what is earnest sharing and what is prodding. Whether the shame is internal or put upon him.
David Franzoni (Gladiator; King Arthur) has often spoken of a dream project, developing The Apocalypse of Saint John, the Book of Revelation, as a literal portrayal in cinema. What an amazing, terrifying, awe-inspiring thing that could be. And, sitting here, Rebuild beat him to it, and beat it. The visualization of each of the world, each time expanding what the world is, is glorious, a full presentation, a plethora, a glut of astonishing visualizations and awful displays.
3.0 forego the biceps and pistons of the earlier movies for flywheels, strings, piano keys, piano strings, tendrils and glass walls. So many glass walls making everything visible and everything out of reach. The sky changes moment to moment. Gravity is defied in perpetuity. Love and sacrifice are always on the other side of the glass walls.
Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time summarizes the first three films in an almost-oppressive squareish ratio center screen, before mirroring scenes from those films and the television series with its first new content, most specifically, the original arrival of Asuka Saoryu at sea.
Eight minutes in, someone is complaining there is not enough time, someone else is saying this is why they hate young men, and there is screaming, things flying, flashing, things bleeding, the sky is fire, the ground is dust clouds, the air is full of bodies and machines, the sky is blue, the land is crimson, the mechanical sounds and digital whirrs and beeps will not stop.
3.o+1.0 is paced and purposeful overload. True to form, the remnants of Nerv are still naming things for Christian sources, invoking now the Vatican in the name of Nerv’s successor. Everything is big and weird and messy but it is still giant figures fighting giant figures.
The beginnings of 3.o+1.0 are recapitulation of 1.0 and its predecessor programs. The same motifs of retractable buildings, giant armored figures, military barking over comms. 3.o+1.0 is 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and also the original television program, the original theatrical movies, even the eventually surrendered Death, not to be reproduced in new media any more.
Shell-shocked, Shinji Ikari is outside time in any meaningful way. Outside Earth. Despite everything radical, the facades of day to day normality feel secure and true. Working. Even our now chorus protagonist, including the Rei Ayanami clone and Shinji Ikari are bemused by this semblance of our world, run down but normative. Clone-Ayanami sees her first house cat, which intrigues her. Shinji sits distant, quiet, possibly not even observing. The gender roles of these normative folk seem so traditional, but are clearly regressive. That they are encountering old friends, is all so regressive.
Two students from their old school cannot process this Ayanami as a clone, calling her, “a lookalike.”
A place people say things like, “I’d love to have you as my daughter in law.”
And, yet, in their normativity, in what feels so desperate, they encourage clone Ayanami to be herself, to make her own decisions, even as she protests that she is not Ayanami. To act as herself.
The normativity has a border and that is where Asuka Shikinami is living. A station of sorts. Gravity is as volatile there as in 3.0.
Shikinami is distressed, there at the border, that her nudity does not fluster or disturb Ikari at all. They have their children’s bodies while everyone else has aged, except the youngish clone Ayanami they now call, Miss Lookalike. We do not know why Shikinami cannot age. We have only a slight idea of why Ikari does not. It is impossible, as we are, with them, in the movie, to know what it means, except that, naturally, we as an audience will never let these characters age.
We will permit them to die, to fight, to be resurrected. We cannot let them age (out).
As we become aware of our control as audience, bodies turn less eroticized, less emphasized. They are presences. Until everyone is back in Eva action, and then the old objectification returns unabated. Bizarre and unabated. Bizarrely unabated.
Why will they not age? Because they will not live in the world. In their time. It is refusal to eat the food, to breathe the air, to act in society.
No difference between fragile and strong in 3.o+1.0.
All the pilot children, ageless and un-aging, refusing life, are engineered and maintained as they are. As we keep them. As their society and their progenitors keep them.
Mari, the new girl, the character who does not seem to belong, who has no analogue in the earlier tellings of this story, continues to be obtrusive, out of step, too knowing and too unknown.
“There’s nothing wrong with repetition,” the former class representative tells the clone Ayanami, who still seeks a name for herself, a life for herself. The nameless girl wants to grow, to become, to belong and to stay. She reads children’s books and farms and laughs and makes friends and watches babies and mama cats, and then she collapses because this is not what she is permitted to do.
Toji, the town doctor, confesses to Ikari that he is not really a doctor, he is only playing the part of doctor, being doctor because the town could use one.
Ikari can barely mature enough to try fishing, to try to provide something other than playing commanded soldier.
Community is what they are pushing forward, what they are sustaining. It is of individuals, but it is the community that is paramount and given privilege. Rather than generational conflicts, we see generation cooperation, even with misunderstanding, with misapprehension, the subtleties of the original television series and the earlier movies are flipped to become the dominant narrative. The under-truths of Evangelion appear as central narratives and sacred understoods.
The more the bizarreness of traditional Evangelion encroach in the normative village, the more we feel the cruelty of these bizarre and metaphysical disruptions. These wounds, these stigmata and traumas. An hour into the final film of the quartet, we are sure this is a quartet and not a quadrilogy, and the world breaks again, this time, not with brightly colored skies and flashing battles and bleeding mountains and seas, but the quick, staccato death of one girl who wanted to finish harvesting what she helped to plant and sow.
Mari, the new girl, the character who does not seem to belong, who has no analogue in the earlier tellings of this story, continues to be obtrusive, out of step, too knowing and too unknown. Is she us? Is this how we would look from within the story?
Would we, also, reach for their hands even if we knew they were fiction?
The further we go, the more artificial she seems, and not coincidentally, the animation grows more and more fakey. Careful detail, careful naturalism are disregarded for planes and sheafs as the dialogue turns more and more to one-liners and jock talk. Everything that seems fresh dissipates into repetition, mimicry, and the implication that all is planned and sequenced, paced out.
“This changes nothing,” says Misato Katsuragi, doing exactly as she would otherwise.
No one can really disrupt their own patterns. People are true to themselves.
The textureless, smooth 3D animation enhances the irreality. The mimicked inflections and revised mise en scene engender an alienating familiarity. Inappropriate, uncanny valley filmmaking make everything absurd, cosmic, and uncomfortably intimate as Ikari worries that his motions and his father’s are too similar, that they are too similar. The different animation techniques and stylistic quirks of the Evangelion television program and all earlier movies are resurrected vibrantly, cruelly, energetically, but with greater subtlety and eloquence.
German is throw about with abandon, but Wille and Wunder hold a lot of potency.
Religious iconography abounds, but it resonates even stronger as rainbows appear reasonable and real nails are in real hands.
There is a reason that, in the end, occurs the witnessing of Evangelion Imaginary, an imaginal and real Eva. Why Katsuragi wants to do the impossible and make an impossible thing. Why Ikari and Ikari, son and father, have an impossible conversation in an impossible place, outside possible time and possible causality.
The rebuild, in Rebuild, is literal and intentional. It is a plan, a hope, a prayer. For just over eight hours, Rebuild of Evangelion helps us to think about that and gives us someone to talk to.