No. 6 8: The Reason...

It's hard to imagine, but at one time the dystopia was an unusual, maybe even revolutionary storyline. The key to the dystopia was not just that things are bad, but that this badness is hidden behind an ideological construct that proclaims that this society is completely normal or, in fact, a utopia. When Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell were writing the novels that everyone reads in high school (well, maybe not Zamyatin) their writing was an act of insurrection against the ideologies of their time, ideologies that, as is their wont, present themselves as a normal or even ideal part of society -- totalitarian socialism, nationalism [1], consumerism, patriarchy (A Handmaid's Tale), etc.

Of course, now we all read these books in high school, and they are used not to undercut ideology but to support it, teaching us that Communism Is Bad and that we need to Watch Out For Big Government. The modern image of dystopia is not Brave New World but Brazil, in which the horror is any threat to capitalistic freedom. Moreover, the dystopia has become a stock set for genre projects, projects like No. 6.

The eponymous city of No. 6 is pretty much your bargain-bin dystopia. It's first established as a rigidly structured paradise -- a civilization much like our own, but without any apparent social problems or vices. However, as we quickly discover, it has a barely hidden totalitarian side -- secret police, constant monitoring by the government, and people who are too disagreeable being "disappeared". However, there is no apparent ideological basis for No. 6, no Big Brother or Fordism. It is a value-free dystopia, the trope hollowed out of its revolutionary nature and used in a way that is neutral if not conservative. There is only the contemporary societal bargain -- you can have a pretty good life so long as you don't mind the government doing terrible things constantly. But, as "The Reason..." makes clear, No. 6 is not so much a construct of any political ideology but rather modernity and Western technology. (I'm cribbing from Moe Sucks quite liberally here.)

As I've mentioned before, the clash between nature and modernity is a conflict that appears again and again in anime. The obvious reference here is Hayao Miyazaki's work, but it pops up in the strangest places. This is far from exclusively a Japanese concern, but its popularity in anime can certainly be attributed to the fact that this is a nation that was forcefully shaped into a modern liberal democracy by the hands of a foreign power, all in living memory. The circumstances are similar in No. 6 -- as we learn in this episode, the utopian cities were a deliberate, carefully constructed creation, when contrasted with the natural growth of both the forest people Rat comes from and the chatoic slums outside No. 6. These cities are also identified with Western culture both through costume and setting design but also through cultural reference -- Safu studies the work of Picasso and Shakespeare, but no comparable Eastern artists.

The introduction of the forest people adds a mystical, fantasy element to the thus far resolutely sci-fi series and underscores this dichotomy. Nature is accorded a semi-mystical power, associated with Rat's song that can be heard in other peoples' minds from far away. This suggests a kind of Jungian collective unconciousness, with Rat's song being a cross-cultural image that hints at a more natural and pure self. In No. 6 culture itself is associated with nature and primitivism -- in No. 6 we see no over-the-top propaganda videos, no mindless entertainment TV, no media or culture period -- just cold science and bland comfort. No. 6 even prohibits the neutered official culture that other cities permit -- a few episodes ago we saw Safu having to give up her art books on returning to the city. On the other hand, nature has so strong a command of art and culture that it is able to communicate it across all logical boundaries.

All of this forms a hastily-added environmental angle to No. 6. I guess you could say this has been foreshadowed by previous instances of Safu being able to here Rat's song, but other than that there's been no lead-up to this reveal in terms of either plot or themes. If anything the previously episodes mainly contrasted the orderly, planned city of No. 6 with the lively chaos of the slums. But the series seems to have lost interest in this and is instead grabbing at another way to villainize No. 6, this time through the familiar trope of industrial tree-clearing, this time executed by stormtroopers with flamethrowers, just in case we didn't get the message.

This episode positions itself as the "big reveal", an episode type that is designed to pay off all the mysteries that the audience has been struggling with all seasons. The title, "The Reason..." (the Japanese literally translates to "The reason for that is...") suggests an answering of questions and a making sense of everything that has come before it. But this isn't really a show that's built itself on mysteries. Safu hearing Rat's song was something weird, but wasn't exactly essential to the series. We didn't know about how No. 6 came to be, but it also wasn't really important -- we could easily assume something like the vague history that's revealed in this episode, and these revelations don't really explain anything previous. The main revelation, then, is Rat's backstory -- but was that something we really needed to know? More importantly, does something as genre-breaking as Rat being the last surviving forest folk truly help expand his character?

I talked about this in one of my Penguindrum posts -- the idea of character development through backstory, and how it's an ideological construction and often a very shallow one. Here we see backstory used ostensibly to explain the world in logical terms, but really to explain it in ideological/moral ones -- No. 6 bad, mystical forest folk good.

This episode also includes moral ambiguity as a constructed storytelling device. The elder describes Sion as "neither good nor evil", which is strange considering how there haven't really been any shades of grey in his character. If modernity is demonized in No. 6, however, so is resistance to that modernity, or maybe just resistance in general. In this episode Sion's mom Karan meets up with the leader of an underground resistance, and he's portrayed as a creeper who exploits the memory of his dead child to hit on Karan. Karan tells him that "This isn't the way for us to make up what's been lost". Finally, Old Man Exposition lays on us the old saw used to attack any kind of resistance anywhere, a putrid piece of garbled Neitzsche.

Moral ambiguity is of course a major part of our world and any decent portrayal of it. But it's also a trope, one that is frequently used to uphold the status quo. Having the proverbial shades of grey is considered aesthetically good for both genuine reasons and ideological ones. There's ultimately nothing more pleasing to the powers that be than plugging your ears, shouting "both sides are too extreme" and going about your daily business. This is, of course, nonsense: those who resist oppression, even violently, are not the same as those who enforce it. But No. 6 is not really interested in exploring actual moral dilemnas, just in having the appearance of ambiguity -- its complexity is an informed attribute, and shows not complex thought but the absence of it.

The difference between No. 6 and the dystopian fiction of old extends not just to the villains but to the heroes. Here the dystopia is fallible and escapable -- a whole city's worth of people are able to escape it, after all. Our heroes are not the meek anti-heroes of Orwell or Huxley, but a more standard type, the plucky resistance fighters. Late in this episode we see most of the significant characters gather together to make plans to overthrow No. 6. It's a disparate group of oddballs, ranging from Sion the naif to Rikiga the high-society pimp.

If a dystopia can be destroyed by a band of outcasts taking out one building -- as this scene leads us to believe -- then it's not really the kind of hopeless society we need to avoid, but just another type of action movie villain. Orwell deliberately pointed this out through the fake resistance in 1984. (It's probably unfair to keep comparing No. 6 to 1984, but this is the tradition it follows in, and it's not usually good when a sixty-year-old book looks like a deconstruction of your story.) The original point of the dystopia, or at least one of them, was that while we were obsessed with individual stories societal villains were what we should really be worried about -- all-encompassing social systems that couldn't be overcome by a few heroes.

What No. 6 really shows, then, is the increasing banality of dystopia. The dystopian society has become another archetypal setting and villain, one that can be dusted off without much thought and used to fill up a spot in the summer anime schedule. No. 6 attaches all sorts of issues to its story before it gets bored of them -- homosexuality, civil rights, now environmentalism -- but at its core it's not really about any of them. It's just about heroes versus villains, and that's a disappointment.

Next Week: Poorly animated fountains of blood.

[1] 1984 is taught as a condemnation of communism, but I think it's really more of an attack on wartime nationalism and paternalism.