Haibane Renmei 10: Kuramori -- Haibane of Abandoned Factory -- Rakka's Job

Like a lot of anime series, Haibane Renmei takes a turn around the midpoint of its run, and (as with most other series that make this turn) it's towards a more dramatic and heavily serialized type of story.  This isn't always successful -- for example, Trigun was much better as a goofy episodic adventure series -- but when it's done well it not only makes the stories more consequential but disrupts the underpinnings of the lighter fare earlier on.  (Martian Successor Nadesico is a prime example of this although, as I'm discovering on my second watch-through it still has plenty of comedy episodes after the midway point.)  For Haibane Renmei, I especially welcomed this change, because the first half of the series is pretty soporific.

This change is instigated by the departure of Kuu, which brings into relief the strange metaphysical nature of the Haibane, and in turn provokes an existential crisis from Rakka.  In typical fantasy fashion, the rites of the Haibane are only exaggerated and literalized versions of human mortality -- we are here but for a short time, and then we have to leave, and it's impossible to know what happens next, if anything does.  Rakka has always seemed somewhat childlike, and her depression is akin to that first brush with mortality and the blind fear it brings.

Haibane Renmei is about supernatural beings that closely resemble angels, but only now does it touch on the subject matter of religion.  In addition to the question of mrotality, in the last few episodes we've learned that Haibane can be "sin-bound", unable to reach salvation because of an inborn curse.  How this actually works is a bit confusing -- in this episode the Communicator suggests that Reki can still fly over the wall despite being sin-bound -- but it's an obvious echo of the Christian notion of original sin.

Although by this point the story is basicall continuous, this episode still uses the series's signature tripartite structure.  The first part is an extended flashback to Reki's past.  We already know the broad strokes of her backstory -- that she was born sin-bound and went through a turbulent adolescence -- and this flashback doesn't really give us any new information.  What it does is shift our perspective.

Reki's process of hatching and being slowly brought up as a Haibane is parelelled darkly in Reki's story.  Whereas Rakka awakens surrounded by people, Reki hatches alone and covered in blood.


We then see Reki going through all of the stages Rakka did over the first seven episodes of the series -- meeting the other Haibane, being tested by the Communicator, and eventually witnessing someone leaving her -- but there's a darker inflection to each of these.  Whereas Rakka's process was marked by agreeable conformism and slice-of-life hijinx, Reki's is full of conflict[1].  This is most because she's easily identified as sin-bound, and thus stigmatized, but the meaning of the shift in perspective is more general than this.  It's a simple recognition that the cheerful narratives of growth that characterize most childhoods are not universal.  This is, I think, one of the more useful gestures fiction can make: sometimes, it's like they say, but sometimes it's like this instead.

It also highlights the darker side of the small world of Haibane Renmei, which has been subtly present the whole time.  Through no fault of her own, Reki is an outcast.  The mystical dictatorship and its unquestioned edicts make life easy and conflict-free for Rakka, but for Reki it sinks her life into incomprehensible suffering.  Even the two characters' names highlight their duality.  Despite being friends that care deeply for one another, they're also foils for each other.

The second part returns us to the present day[2], and is the most like what comes before.  Structurally, it acts as a bridge between one plot point (Rakka's sickness) and the next (her new duty as cleaner).  Thematically, it flows naturally out of the first part of the triptych.  Whereas the Reki we see there is a helpless victim, this Reki is not afraid to violently argue with the Communicator against the system and what she sees as injustice.  At the same time as this establishes continuity between the past and present (Reki's past leads her to act against a similar situation), it also establishes a potential discontinuity: if Reki has anything to say about it, the past won't be repeated, and Rakka will be saved.

Rakka is saved, in a manner of speaking.  Her fever clears up, but it's not clear what's responsible for this.  Given the way that Reki was talking about the wall-induced fever as a fatal affliction, this is an unlikely event, but the episode leaves it up in the air whether it was Reki's actions or blind luck that healed Rakka.  Or perhaps Reki's diagnosis was not as definitive as we thought it was.

For the most part what the middle stanza accomplishes is to flesh out the supporting characters.  The one who benefits most is Nemu, who up until now has been a benevolent matriarch-type, but is revealed to be... well, still a benevolent matriarch, but one who was at one point a bratty kid, and one whose benevolence leads to problems such as her own inability to communicate her feelings or, on a level that's more literal in-text and more metaphorical out of it, fly over the wall.  A couple of the Abandoned Factory Haibane show up, and they turn out not to be as tough as they look, although the rough-girl-shows-sensitive-side scene is one that's very familiar, especially to anime fans.  None of these characters are revealed to be much different than how we thought of them, but they do seem more real now.

The final third deals with Rakka's new job, ostensibly handed down as a punishment for her disobedience.  She is assigned to clean the inner walls of the temple, which is demeaning but also moves her closer to the central mysteries of the series.  There's been occasional emphasis on the Haibane's need for a job, with the idea of work as a neccessary way to define their identity, and this would seem to finally supply Rakka with such a job.

Interestingly, the outfit Rakka wears for this job heavily resembles that of the Communicator.  This would seem to foreshadow Rakka herself becoming a communicator or part of the system that's vaguely referred to as "the Renmei"[3].  I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this development -- it seems a little too neat -- but it does certainly give new important to the series's title.

In short, the end is coming into sight, and now that we're beginning to see the larger shape of the series we can see not just the future -- what it would take to complete this shape -- but how the past episodes fit into things as well.  This is perhaps not the best format for a serialized medium, as it leaves earlier installments incomplete and contextless, but Haibane Renmei manages it better than most "puzzle shows" by putting the emphasis on character motivations rather than mythology.  More than anything else, this is the episode where the central characters took a definite step into reality.

[1]Maybe it's just the drama-addict in me, but I can't help but feel like Reki's story would make for a more interesting series.

[2]To give you some idea of how much attention episode director Koji Yoshikawa pays to form, the flashback ends almost exactly one-third of the way through the episode's running time.  The next two parts are less tightly wound, and what I've identified as the third actually happens in the middle of the second.

[3]Of course, everyone else who cares has already seen the end of the series, so my speculation is uninteresting as well as useless.

The X-Files 1-20: Darkness Falls

Straight horror has never been a major genre on American television, and attempts to make it so have resulted in everything from certain episodes of The Twilight Zone to American Horror Story, but never a major hit.  But horror has been far more successful when hiding beneath the veneer of science-fiction or other genre stories.  Early episodes of Star Trek revolve less around science-fictional concepts and more on strange foreign monsters that exploit our vulnerabilities and anxieties.  The same is true of the first season of The X-Files, which certainly has the show's distinct conspiracy theory flavour, but as often goes in for conventional horror plots.

"Darkness Falls" is one of these episodes.  It follows the classic template of isolating a group of broadly-drawn characters in an isolated environment, a literal cabin in the woods, and surrounding them with mysterious monsters that pick them off one by one.  The monsters are ancient insects represented by green bugs that look for all the world like blips in the video, probably because they more or less are.

This scene is another obvious horror movie staple, where one of the victims struggles to start their car.  The bugs have a bit more of a scientific rationale than your average movie monster, but they're not exactly unprecedented -- horror movies exploiting our fear of insects go back a long way.  The formula more or less works, and if the resultant episode of television is never really good, it at least holds the attention effectively.

What makes "Darkness Falls" distinct is the amount it commits to the woods as a setting.  The plot revolves around a conflict between forest rangers and a group of ecoterrorists[1], and in addition to this there's a lot of ecology and quasi-ecology relating to the setting.  Nature is not merely an isolated neutral setting -- it is the enemy itself.  At night the investigators and company huddle around artificial light, using technology as a refuge against the dangerous forces of nature around them.  The woods seem complicit in the violence perpetrated by the insects, mostly in their imposing length (preventing an escape even with all day to travel.  Later on we learn that they emerged from an ancient tree that was recently logged, with a green ring highlighting their former home.

Technology, on the other hand, isn't really trustworthy either.  Automobiles in particular are a source of vulnerability -- the forest rangers' car is easily sabotaged by rice and other natural substances in the gas tank, and even the much-vaunted Jeep can't take Mulder and Scully out of the woods fast enough.  And of course there's the above-mentioned "car won't start" stock scene, featuring the death of the stock character who doesn't believe in these irrational monsters.  Repeatedly we see the insects entering through the wholes in cars -- the vents and fans and cracks.  These reflect the chinks in the invincible armour of technology.  In the end, where the government promises to exterminate the insects with gas, there's a distinct sense that this technology too will fail.

This is basically a microcosm for the larger dialectic between science and nature in The X-Files.  On the surface, scientific rationality (usually embodied by Scully) is proved wrong all the time in its refusal to accept folk wisdom and urban legend.  This is seen in this episode both by the failure of technology and the first casualty's dismissive attitude towards the threat.  But at the same time science is often the only means of combating the threat of the unknown -- the only reason that Mulder and Scully learn enough to survive is because science gives them a way to know the threat.

"Darkness Falls" tries to strike a similar balance in the political side of the episode, in the struggle between the hippie ecoterrorist and the burly park rangers.  The X-Files naturally has an anti-authority bent, which would lend it to sympathize with the rebel disrupting the system, but on the other hand its heroes are law enforcers, and in most plots end up trying to banish the strange from the normal workings of society.

Because of this tension (if I wanted to be fancy I could call it another dialectic) this episode can never fully come down on either side.  A large part of the plot pivots around Mulder trusting the outsider, but this sympathy doesn't extend so far as to agreeing with his goals.  On the one hand, the "monkeywrenchers"' ideas are reinforced by the plot, as it's illegal clear-cutting that frees the killer bugs in the first place.  But their actions are also what stops everyone from being able to escape, which is reinforced -- in the usual TV irony -- by the end of the episode, when the "terrorist"'s Jeep is laid flat by one of his own caltrops and he's caught by the insects, hoisted by his own petard.  The episode suggests that the monkeywrenchers' concerns are valid, but their means of resistance is wrong.  That's a common refrain in mainstream television, but it's unsatisfying here, and a useful contrast could be drawn between the more agressive tactics the show condemns and Mulder and Scully's ineffectual attempts to work within a system they know is corrupt if not downright evil.

"Darkness Falls" seems to be very deliberately modeled on a classic from earlier in the season, "Ice".  Both episodes involve Mulder and Scully trapped in an isolated natural environment with a group of guest stars and an insidiously small monster.  It's obvious that at this point the series is trying to revisit its successes and move towards more of them -- the following episode, "Tooms", does this more directly.  But "Darkness Falls" doesn't quite live up to "Ice".  It replaces paranoia-driven conflict with ideological bickering, and by moving out of an alienating science-fictional setting (the arctic research station) it seems far more dated today.  Even without the tacked-on element of environmental politics, it would be a less effective episode: the green bugs are just less intriguing and less scary than the bacteria of "Ice".

Still, if it's a fairly middling X-Files episode, that just means it can tell us more about the series as a whole.  Throughout its first season, The X-Files was balanced precariously in the middle of sets of opposites -- between nature and science, authority and subversion, and (on a more formal level) between episodic and serial structures.  All of these come across in "Darkness Falls", despite its status as a stripped-down horror movie expressly for entertainment.  It's precisely through a median episode like this that we can see the distinct X-Files approach forming.

Next week: "The walls are absolute.  There is nothing I can do."

[1]Even the word "ecoterrorist" sounds embarrassingly 90s, and this episode's attempts to shoehorn an environmental politics debate into the usual formula is very awkward.  Still, it's nice to remember when the scariest terrorists were hippies who might mess with your car.

Eureka Seven AO 15: War Head

Note: While I'm generally working off the official Funimation subs, I'm going to be using the original episode title, as Funi in their infinite wisdom has seen fit to replace the trippy musical reference episode titles (already in English, nonetheless) with rather generic ones, and I just can't abide by that.

"War Head" is predominated by the revelation from Eureka in the last episode that the Secrets which have thus far been the monster-of-the-week villains of Eureka Seven AO are in fact the planet's natural defense system from the alien scub coral.  This has everyone in a tizzy in this episode, and debating whether or not the theory is true.  Eureka offers up no real evidence (although we'll have some quickly) but seeing as how there's no real other explanation for why the Secrets do what they do, it's a compelling idea.

Taking a step back, though, this revelation hardly seems to matter.  No matter what the Secrets' motives or purpose is, they still cause mass damage and chaos, and their "cleansing" mechanism is responsible for massive nuclear explosions.  There have been a couple signs that the scub coral is less than benign, such as mentions of its health effects on the surrounding area, but they seem like much less of an immediate threat than the entities that would seek to erase them.  But everyone in the episode is taken up with the idea that, quoting Eureka, "the Secrets are not your enemy".

Revealing halfway through that the enemy which the heroes have been heroically crushing up until now is not the real enemy but in fact a potential ally is a fairly common storytelling technique for mecha anime.  The first time I saw this (I think it was Gundam SEED... hey, don't judge) I was blown away, but at this point it irks me more than anything.  The ubiquity of this twist probably stems from Japan's postwar pacifism, and the previously-described tension between abiding by those values and delivering an exciting action series.  This tension is usually born out of the best motives, even if by this point it's become de riguer, but I'm not so sure about the ultimate implications of this twist in Eureka Seven AO.

The original Eureka Seven was essentially a story about accepting the alien, as embodied in the relationship between the human Renton and the Coralian Eureka.  The series suggested that the scub coral were a new form of life, and that accepting difference was not just a nice thing to do but the key to progressing as a species.  The villains were characters who viewed the scub coral as enemies because of their foreignness.  In AO, we have a battle between two aliens, the Secrets and the scub coral, with humans frantically trying to intervene.  We can see this in the difference in design between the two -- the colourful, fluid outgrowth of the scub against the dark angularity of the Secrets.  They are not just opposites but atomic opposites, matter and antimatter, such that when they meet everything explodes.



If, as Eureka suggests, the Secrets are not the enemies, then the question arises: who is?  (There could simply be no enemy, but it would leave the following 11 episodes a little devoid of conflict.)  The most likely suspect is the government, which always seems to be the real enemy (and rightfully so), and AO has already made a couple jabs in this direction.  But if we accept that the Secrets were acting benevolently, doesn't that make the scub -- the alien -- a legitimate danger?  Aren't the Secrets acting on the same rationale as Dewey and the rest of the original series' villains?  Is this a counterpoint or a betrayal?

"War Head" poses these questions directly through the captured Secret subjected to questioning by the Japanese government.  Japan is a kind of ambivalent power in Eureka Seven AO, simultaneously acting as the regional bully to the now-independent Okinawa and being bullied in turn by the United States and the international organs (i. e. Generation Blue) it controls.  It has its own rogue agenda, which Ao (standing in for the series at large) can't agree with, but isn't comfortable with violently opposing either.  In this case, they're the first to jump on the possibility offered up by Eureka's words, quickly producing evidence to support her [1].

There is, then, at this point a certain ambiguity to accepting the Secrets as allies.  The Secret that Japan holds is the most human one we've seen yet, and is even identified as "human type", allowing for a level of anthropomorphic identification that would have been impossible with the more geometric Secrets.  But its design still suggests something jagged and hostile, essentially mechanical instead of living -- which is an interesting contrast to the mecha, which are anthropomorphized machines and which we can identify with much more.

But for all the sympathy for the devil, at the end of the day there's still fighting to be done.  After a fairly talky episode there's another Secret attack, and the piedpiper team feels as though they have no choice but to fight it.  This is, however, a battle where we no longer know what the stakes are.  And this would seem to lead to the downfall of the conventional action narrative -- instead of coming up with a cunning plan to defeat the Secret, Ao is crushed and hospitalized, without putting up much of a fight.

As evidenced by my previous entry on it, I'm currently re-watching Martian Successor Nadesico, and in its second half it poses a question similar to the one being considered here.  It's easy to acknowledge a change in the situation, but how do you change the way you narrate the world around you?  In particular, how do you change from a combative, warlike narrative to something more constructive?  This is a question that the characters have to face as well as the viewers. I've mentioned before that this shift of enemies is a common mid-series plot twist, but what separates the wheat from the chaff is whether this is just a changing of the gaurd, with a new ultimate evil to prove oneself against, or something more thoughtful.

The battle against the Secret does not go as planned.  Ao does his usual heroics, but instead of saving the day he's crushed and hospitalized.  The scene is shot effectively enough that, even though it's episode 15 of 26 and his name's in the title, I momentarily thought Ao might actually be dead.  Later, we learn that this kind of one-on-one combat is becoming outdated.  Generation Bleu has gathered the Quartz in their satellite and is clearly preparing for a massive winner-take-all battle.  The closest paralell would be the shift from the "heroic" wars of the 19th centuries to the industrial-scale carnage of World War I.  The old narratives, it appears, will not do us any good.

Still, despite both the work in the first half of the episodes to make the Secrets more ambiguous and my general misgivings about the series, when Nirvash is flying through the sky and that triumphant music starts playing, it's hard not to feel drawn into the battle.  Action scenes are propaganda at their finest, transfiguring violence into spiritual uplift.  And that's ultimately what makes transitions like this so difficult.  How can we create new narratives when the old narratives still seem like so much fun?

Next week: "That's a lot of flannel to be choking down, even for Bigfoot."

[1]I don't usually comment on things like this, but the speed with which the translation device was built and its perfect functionality stretches plausibility even for a very soft SF show like this one.

The Good Wife 2-22: Getting Off

So here's a question: why does American TV only feel comfortable addressing unconventional sex on procedural crime shows?  On most shows, no matter how sexed up, it's unlikely for the protagonists to do it in anything but missionary position, but it's such a frequent plot element on your CSIs and Law and Orders that they spawned a spinoff entirely dedicated to it (Law and Order SVU, which is actually still on, although everyone seems to have forgotten about it.)  Maybe it's just that such elements are introduced only by lowest-common-denominator shows looking for more ways to be lurid, having already exploited the element of violence as best as they can.  Maybe it's that in our cultural mind sex and violence are two sides of the same coin, or that we can only deal with sexual deviancy [1] when it's coupled with criminal deviancy.

The Good Wife doesn't entirely fit into the profile established above -- its lead characters have moments of sexual misbehaviour, and are at one point glimpsed engaged in cunnilingus [2].  And because it's a legal drama its protagonists are just as often engaged in defending sexual deviants than trying to put them away.  But for all its prestige-drama leanings, it still employs sensationalism frequently to add gravitas to its plotlines, and sensationalized sexual strangeness is among its arsenal.  The Good Wife at least makes an effort towards allowing its deviant characters self-explanation, but it still nonetheless associates this deviancy with unsavoriness if not outright evil.  Look at how Peter's nadir was not just sleeping with a prostitute but asking to suck her toes.  Or the entire Colin Sweeney character.  Or this episode, "Getting Off".

This episode does boast one of the better integrations between the episodic "case of the week" storyline and the ongoing serialized plot, although it's not exactly a subtle parallel.  Lockhart/Gardner is tasked with defending Stephanie Engler. a woman who runs a thinly veiled Ashley Madison and has an open marriage, while Alicia and her family deal with the fallout from her learning of Peter's earlier affair with Kalinda.  A prep session between Alicia and Stephanie quickly becomes obviously Alicia taking out her frustrations about her adulterous husband.

There's a big gap between having an open relationship and adultery in secret, and I don't think "Getting Off" entirely conflates them, but it does view them as associated phenomena.  What lurks like a spectre here is the idea, articulated by Laura Kipnis among others, that adultery and its ubiquity are a sign not of the weaknesses within individual relationships but in the mainstream relationship model itself.  Stephanie mostly gets to best Alicia in logical argument, her theories being undone by emotional response later, but even she can't quite muster up this kind of societal critique.  Still, she does raise the question of whether the sin -- Peter's adultery -- that lies at the centre of The Good Wife's ongoing storyline should really have been that big a deal.

The contrast between logic and emotion is a key structuring mechanism in the episodic plot.  This is most obvious in the cold open: Will has a cool demeanor, refers to the dispute as a matter of contract law, and generally adopts a hyper-logical libertarian dispute.  His opposition, recurring antagonist Nancy Kroeser, adopts her usual scandalized act and puts focus on the sexual component of the case, obviously appealing to the prurient emotions of the jury.  She's made out to be a villain for doing so, but it's more or less the strategy The Good Wife is using in this very episode.

As a matter of contract law -- whether or not Stephanie should be held responsible for the murder of a man at a date arranged via her website -- The Good Wife has little interest in the story, and the ethical ambiguity remains unresolved.  Instead the story transforms into a more black-and-white murder case, with Lockhart/Gardner having to defend Stephanie from charge of doing the killing herself[3].  This would seem to lend a lot of credence to my earlier musings about television needing its sex and violence to be intimately intertwined.

But even when Stephanie's business becomes well and truly irrelevant to the proceedings, it's still a central element of the episode, with it being the one central idea "Getting Off" wants to mull over.  Its continual presence is justified by the fact that Kroeser will use it to inflame the jury, but once again the jury and the audience of the show are both being served by the same device.  Visually, the scandalous images of the murder victim engaging in kinky sex are constantly framed and partially-blocked by the audience, calling attention to their spectatorship.  The trial is revealed as a spectacle by the frame of the larger episode, but even with that frame the audience can enjoy the spectacle nonetheless -- perhaps enjoy it more because it is no longer a guilty pleasure.

In the end, the vaunted open marriage is revealed as a lie, as it turns out that Stephanie's husband murdered the victim out of jealousy.  When she hears this, Stephanie embraces him -- turns out that deep down she wanted homicidal devotion after all.  I suspect the idea was to make her appear normal underneath the deviant facade, but it turns out that normalcy involves an equation of violence with love and a myopic if not sociopathic focus on personal relationship issues over another human life.  Stephanie's claims to an alternate and positive sexuality are rebutted and made the focus for her own humiliation.

Most episodes of The Good Wife end with a pyrhhic victory, and this applies doubly so here.  On the strictly literal level, the firm defends their client but only by implicating her husband.  On the more thematic level, the principle of monogamy is restored and the dangerous deviant sexuality is revealed as a form of denial -- but a new deviancy based on violence is created.  Stephanie's ideas would also seem to have some kind of traction despite the episode's conclusion, as they foreshadow the affair between Alicia and Will which begins in the next episode.

I don't really have the time this week to get into the more serialized bits of storytelling, but it's worth considering Kalinda's own recently-revealed deviancy, both in terms of her one-night stand with Peter and her bisexuality.  (The Good Wife makes a show of LGBT-tolerance, fitting with its generally moderate liberal ideology, but I think it's telling that Kalinda's cheating came out around the same time as her sexuality.)  In this episode the drama with Alicia is almost enough to send her to a new job with her occasional lesbian lover, a FBI agent investigating white-collar crimes, before she learns it would involve working with Peter.  In the end, this is a choice between two deviancies, and she chooses the workplace where she's known as an adulterer over the one where she's known as a lesbian.  It's a bit more complicated than that, but sometimes the broad strokes of a story are more telling than the disclamatory details.

But that choice can also be read as Kalinda choosing the female Florrick over the male.  The friendship between Alicia and Kalinda has been much more developed and more believable than whatever is between Kalinda and Peter.  I don't really read anything sexual in there (although if you want to, slash away) but as Eve Sedgewick has argued, homosociality can be every bit as subversive as homosexuality.  In the end, the more you fight it, the more deviance creeps in.

Next week: "We're unable to tell if it's a machine or a life form."

[1]"Deviancy" is an extremely loaded term, but I need a shorthand here for the constellation of kinks, fetishes, lifestyles and subcultures that makes up everything outside the narrowly proscribed horizons of "vanilla" sexuality.

[2] This isn't deviant sexuality in any way, shape or form, but I can still count on one hand the number of times I've seen it even suggested in television.

[3]I'm reminded of the story in one of the Phoenix Wright games where the titular character has to defend his client against a burglary charge and remarks on how weird it is that it's not a murder trial like every other case he's done.  Sure enough, the client is promptly charged with murder, which turns out to be the "real" trial.

Inside Men 3

Inside Men is a show about security.  That's true on a literal level, of course, as the titular saboteurs are all in some degree in the security industry, protecting the cash that flows through their counting-house, with Chris being a literal security gaurd.  But it also revolves around less physical ideas of security.

Chris and Marcus are both threatened by financial precarity, and this is what motivates them to turn to crime.  As much as Marcus may dream of lavish ends to put his stolen millions to, his primary motivation is to avoid the kind of finaical failure that his life has, it's been implied, been a steady stream of.  His goal is class mobility, the unfulfilled promise of capitalism.  Marcus has a goal that's even more enshrined in our culture, providing for his impending family.  The recession is never directly mentioned, but grey streets and empty businesses are a constant backdrop.

And it's not a coincidence that their target is a central institution of the global currency system, but one of those silent parts of the system that was responsible for the last crash.  As violent and partial as it is, the robbery they plan is a kind of resistance against capitalism and the money system that supports it.

Of course, this still evinces a basic belief in the power of money.  This is a version of Marx's commodity fetishism, at least as I understand it.  Obviously paper money only has value because a state structure exists to give it value, otherwise it's just paper with a kind of ugly drawing on it.  The same is true of gold or any other kind of commodity: it is only valuable insofar as it exists in an economic system that gives it value.  The protagonists of Inside Men don't really understand this.  Through their heist they remove the money in the counting house from the capitalist circulatory system, assuming that all of its value will transfer to them.  But the problem immediately arises: they can't even retrieve it, as they're being monitored by the police in the wake of the robbery.  Even if they could, they couldn't spend it (or at least not much of it) without alerting the authorities.  If they follow John's plan, they'll have to go about their normal lives for a long while without making significant changes so as not to draw attention.  In other words, the money loses its value, as they can't actually do anything with it.

This is itself a commentary on the economic system, whose arbitrariness -- massive cages of cash sitting in a warehouse while the streets are filled with empty storefronts -- Inside Men makes clear even to those without a grounding in economics.  This exact mental slippage, the conflation of money with what it represents, can be seen in the recent financial crash.  Not only were the people involved obsessed with massive sums of money that, after a point, couldn't have made any actual difference to their lives, but through financial devices like derivatives and bundling they repeated this process of abstraction several times order until eventually they were exchanging massive amounts of nothing.  The supposed security of money -- even the cold, hard cash that our trio of saboteurs steal -- is in itself an illusion.

What about the other forms of security they seek?  Racial priveledge, for those who have it, is an obvious kind of security, but it's also one that seems consistently under threat in Inside Men.  The incident which perhaps sets everything in motion is John discovering that Dita, a young East European immigrant, has palmed a 20-pound note and firing her.  The trio's criminal operation forces them to hire the oily Kalpesh and his crew of Indian immigrant thugs.  While someone like John seems to symbolize that criminality can come in any guise, it still exists primarily as a threat from afar, carried in on foreign bodies.  Our protagonists are descending not just into the world of crime, but a distinctly racialized world.

While there is a bit of subversion here, Inside Men still relies on typical ideas of the immigrant criminal.  In this episode John hires Riaz, one of Kalpesh's men, in order to let him scope the place out.  It's a scenario that goes out of its way to play into fears about immigrant workers.  The Indians are never much more than thugs, and while it's okay to have some flat characters in a four-episode miniseries, the choices about who to develop and who not to are important.  While John proves himself more than capable of violent depravity, it is explicitly a descent into a racialized depravity -- see Garland Grey's recent post about Breaking Bad for why this is problematic.

How, then, to deal with Chris?  He's made every bit as sympathetic as the other two protagonists -- arguably more so, as he's the only one who really has a conscience.  Maybe as a British native, even a black one, Chris is not the outside threat that Kalpesh and Riaz are.  Or maybe his eventual decision in this episode to betray his co-conspirators to the police signifies that he is, in the end, still an outsider -- or, more precisely, one who is neither able to be entirely inside or outside.  I can't offer one interpretation here that explains everything -- Chris is the fly in the ointment, producing an endless array of complications.

What about the security of masculinity, of settling into a definite gender role that matches up with your biological sex and which gives you a power that's been established over millennia?  That's what John seeks in this episode.  What he relishes is the sheer masculinity of crime -- and not just any masculinity, but a physical and primordial "real man" type.  His attempts to start an affair with one of his co-workers pretty clearly stems from this rush, as does his playground-esque physical confrontation with Chris.


The contemporary world, Inside Men suggests, has little room for this ruggedness and its accompanying danger -- there isn't much of the fronteirsman less in the meek get-along middle manager that John starts out as.  Through crime, however, he returns to a more simple world, one without the tolerant ambiguity of human resources, and one that allows for this uncomplicated masculine persona.

(I'm not sure how accurate a social prognosis this is.  Masculinity is still glorified in our culture, especially its most violent and predatory manifestations.  Arguably antihero-driven shows like Inside Men feed into this obsession and the constant cultural demand for a more masculine society, usually expressed in laments about feminization by sidewalk-droppings such as Adam Carolla.  While these shows go to great extent to show the negative sides of their protagonists, their rejection of order in favour of action always seems to be supported by a troubling section of fans who will loudly support the masculine violence of John/Walter White/Don Draper/Vic Mackey/Tony Soprano/and so on and so forth.)

There have been a lot of comparisons between Inside Men and Breaking Bad (well, not a lot, as not a lot of people have seen the former.  But among those who have, there are comparisons).  And there's a definite connection, with the scene in this episode where Chris watches his mother choke to death instead of helping her seeming like a deliberate recreation of a similar scene from Breaking Bad's second-season finale.  A larger part of this is just a continuation of the antihero figure that's become so prevalent in "quality" dramas.

But there's an important difference between Walter and John.  Walter White certainly isn't doing everything for his family, as much as he will say that to anyone who will listen.  But he's doing it for a purpose, an ideology -- the code of masculine ideology that he's always subscribed to, albeit usually less ferverently.  Crime is a means to an end, just not the end he claims.  But for John, crime quickly becomes the end itself -- it's the act of subverting the rules that he lives for.  (This possibly helps justify the series' ending.)  He doesn't need the money, nor does he have any grand plans to spend it.  He just wants to become a criminal.

And this is, perhaps, what Inside Men finally suggests about security.  The very objects which seem to make us secure, seemingly stable and eternal things ranging from the financial system to gender, in fact create their own kind of danger.  Viewed from this angle, the eventual failure of the heist becomes clear.  The elements of stability that John relies on, from the carefully designed plan to the racial and class priveledge that he assumes will eliminate him as a suspect, can in themselves throw things into chaos.  It's a counter-intuitive message, but one that seems increasingly applicable to the times we live in.

Next week: "If you love someone, don't you set them free?"  "No."

UFC on Fuel TV 4: Munoz vs. Weidman

In addition to the usual low-wattage roster of a Fuel TV card, UFC on Fuel 4 suffers from occuring in the wake of the Anderson Silva/Chael Sonnen megafight, with most fans suffering from fight hangovers.  I watch these things pretty religiously, and I almost totally forgot about it.  In theory the point of these events is to build up new stars and give long-serving undercarders some TV time.  Outside of the main event none of these fighters are in sniffing distance of the top 10.  The question then emerges: is this event, wedged in the middle of a week bookended by more interesting ones, worth watching at all?  What are the merits to it as three hours (!) of television?

Some would simply suggest that it exists because the UFC wants to fully exploit its current popularity, expanding as fast as it can with no concern as to fan fatigue.  But this isn't really the case.  The UFC almost certainly runs these smaller shows at a loss: they're broadcast in the outlands of cable, usually fail to get a decent live crowd, and other than fighter salaries have all the same costs as a bigger-ticket event.  So it can't be greed.  The simplest explanation would be that the UFC has hundreds of fighters under their employ and a limited number of (healthy) stars, so sometimes you have to run a card without the stars just to generate enough fights for everyone.  That's closer to the truth, but it still suggests that the UFC is being run by its fighters instead of the other way around.  So it has to be that, somehow, these events contribute to the larger commercial and athletic (and those two are always in tandem, as with any other professional sport) project of the Ultimate Fighting Championships.

The nearest analogy would, I suppose, be one of those low-key episodes of a serial drama that exists to build characters and set up future events.  So it could be argued that while neither Mark Munoz nor Chris Weidman, much less the unranked talents that appeared on the undercard, are people you care about, in the future they may be fighting someone you care about, and possibly even become one of those people themselves.  Giving them the headlining spot is meant to introduce them to the promotion's "main stage", with the theory being that if the fans see these fighters in the main event, they'll start thinking of them as main eventers instead of undercarders.  (This applies mostly to Weidman, unknown before his recent upset of Demian Maia, as Munoz already headlined a not-as-small UK card last year).

The above partially-incoherent paragraph goes to showcase how important image and status is in the fight game.  Building a name that people remember (which usually involves building a persona) is frequently more difficult than making it into the top 10 or even winning a championship.  Take Chris Weidman, who has an impressive victory in the main event.  He's stopped a dangerous opponent, and the stoppage is even a memorable one, albeit mainly due to the referee's delay in stepping in when Munoz was clearly out of it.

But where does this leave him?  What separates him from Jake Ellenberg, or Johny Hendricks, or Michael McDonald, or any of the other surging crew-cut white guys?  Of course, this is a bit of an unfair question.  Not everyone has an uniquely marketable persona -- indeed, it would be impossible for each of the 200 or some odd fighters to all be interesting characters.  In fact, it's usually only after you win a championship that the marketing gurus start to work, as when they transformed Frankie Edgar into a mostly-unknown crew-cut white guy to a lightweight Rocky, helped along by Edgar's gutsy performances.  Even then, Edgar never really became a major draw, and who knows what'll happen with new lightweight champion Benson Henderson.

The UFC can't come up with characters wholesale, and similarly its athletes shouldn't be pressured to become media characters instead of focusing on their fighting (although those that do, like Chael Sonnen and Ronda Rousey, are usually rewarded for it).  So in that respect it lacks in the character department when both something like pro wrestling and team sports, where a team can maintain the image it's gradually developed for decades instead of constantly having to invent new ones for the latest rising star.  This is not so much a failure of effort as a failure of format, and it may explain why fight sports have never trumped the big four in America or sports like soccer or rugby internationally, but to me it's part of their appeal -- they present each competitor as an individual instead of appealing to tribalistic emotions.

But what the UFC lacks in characters it makes up for in spectacle.  This is the part that's made it most popular among young males, and which also draws all the criticism.  Supporters have long argued[1] that it's equally or less dangerous than established sports like boxing or football.  But of course, the difference is that in mixed martial arts the violence is overt, personal, and bodily -- there is no way to avoid it.  This kind of violence has undeniable biopolitical significance.  The representative of violent spectacle on this card would have to be the battle between James Te Huna and Joey Beltran.

(Most MMA screenshots are going to involve the referee standing awkwardly around on the fringes of some sort of action.  Although it's not as awkward as when the referee should be doing something, like the previous one.)

The Te Huna/Beltran fight isn't really a competitive exchange of skill -- despite some flurries from Beltran, it's mainly a beatdown.  And it's one that never reaches its conclusion, a testament to Joey Beltran's chin.  (The ability to take a punch is, as per usual, read as a sign of grit and authenticity.)  The two mens' striking is not very technical.  But the fight is aesthetically pleasing in its own way: its brutality, its sloppiness makes the stakes of combat seem so much more real than a fast-paced submission battle.  It looks like two guys fighting outside a bar, and that transmutes the situation into something we can understand and empathize with.  It seems as though either guy might go down at any time, restoring destructive value to the punches that usually just accumulate as statistics.  I don't want to be hyperbolic here, but a fight like this makes us believe that the UFC is real again -- hence why the announcers talked it up so much.

The rest of the matches were fairly obscure affairs, but they did their job of showcasing up-and-coming stars as well as a couple resurgent veterans like Rafael dos Anjos and Aaron Simpson.  The UFC is generally known for its competitive matches, and that continues here, although sometimes things fall through and you end up with an one-sided fight like Aaron Simpson vs. Kenny Robisnon.  But in general what you have is the next step in each of these fighters' individual careers, whether it be a step up in competition or a shift to a new weight class or an adversity to be either fought through or succumbed to.  Each fight has two narratives, one for the winner and one for the loser, but it's the winner's narrative that is generally highlighted, with the loser condemned to obscurity.  Such are the perils of competition.

In the end, the ultimate significance of this event is as of yet unknown.  If its prospects -- Chris Weidman, Francois Carmont, James Te Huna, etc. -- go on to major success and stardom, then it will have been an essential part of the UFC mega-narartive, a tapestry woven from hundreds if not thousands of individual stories.  If not, it will just be a strange detour that only the hardcores will have noticed.

Next week: "This crime hasn't happened yet."

[1]This argument is probably correct, but since it's such a young sport we haven't really seen the long-term implications of being a professional mixed martial arts fighter.

Haibane Renmei 3: Temple -- The Communicator -- Pancakes

There aren't very many shows that can be described as "supernatural slice-of-life", but Haibane Renmei thus far is among them.  Its first three episodes are dedicated to laying out the life of the angel-like Haibane in the quaint locale of Old Home.  These episodes (and possibly the rest of the series, for all I know) are consumed with the quotidian and the almost banal.  It's world-building, but of a different sort than we usually see.  We still know basically nothing about what the Haibane are, or the world around them, or the mysterious and fairly ominous figures that run their nice little city.  But we know how they pay for things, how they raise their children, and what each of their hobbies are.

It's useful to contrast this with something like Game of Thrones.  In that series we get broad exposition about far-flung corners of the world and significant moments in history -- we have a much better picture of the world at large.  But zoom in and things start getting fuzzy.  After two seasons of Game of Thrones I still have no idea how the average person in that world lives, or at least not as much of an idea as I do of the ordinary lives of the Haibane after three episodes [1].  Haibane Renmei's focus points to a more sociological idea of fantasy, which imagines societies in the ways favoured by leftist historians that denounce the "great man" figure and focus on broader social trends and common experience.

Of course, the main difference is that whereas leftist historians are extremely critical of these aspects of society, Old Home and the village around it are thus far pretty idyllic settings.  There's work to do, but it's all pretty pleasant work, like baking and teaching.  (It's also work that's traditionally gendered feminine, although I'm not sure about the larger significance of this.)  Everybody is friendly and the worst conflict is a little mischief or childish misbehaviour, as at the end of the episode when we find out that Hikari has been using the halo mold in her baking.  The art style supports this mood, being full of thin lines and soft colours, creating a pleasant, nonthreatening, and sometimes soporific effect.

As newly hatched, Haibane Renmei's protagonist Rakka needs the world explained to her, which makes her a convenient proxy for the audience.  It's an age-old device, but it works well here.  But even for an audience surrogate Rakka seems strangely passive, constantly out of it and a little inept.  At first this makes her seem like just another hapless moe heroine, I would argue that this actually stems from the divide between her physical body and mind and her lack of experience.  We're used to thinking of the mind as developing naturally with experience, to the extent that we often fail to distinguish between the growth of the two, but Rakka presents the question of whether we can imagine a set of developed mental faculties without any set of memory or experience, newly pushed into the world.  This isn't a purely academic question either, as it raises a lot of the issues surrounding the fluid memory we know in the real world.  Rakka's strange combination of passivity, childlike curiosity, and frustration could just as easily belong to an amnesiac or an Alzheimer's sufferer.

All of the series's episode titles are triptychs, but they don't represent a rigid seperation between acts as they would in, say, a traditoinal Saturday-morning cartoon.  Instead they suggest a gentle flow from one story to another.  "Temple -- The Communicator -- Pancakes" (the title, not the episode itself) brings together three different things: the vaguely religious connotations of the series, the mysterious and faintly ominous Communicators which suggest a deeper mythology, and the genial adventures in child-raising that Rakka undertakes in this episode.  These conjure up disparate moods and disparate objectives, but in the actual episode they all appear to be of one cloth, belonging to the series's natural rhythm.  It's a magic trick that Haibane Renmei isn't afraid to brag about.

Let's start with the first part.  Japan has a complicated relationship with Christianity, greeting it with the same mixture of distrust, fascination, and incomprehension as it does most of Western culture.  Anime offers a good window into this.  There are fairly few portrayals of actual Christian religious practice -- the recent Kids on the Slope is all that comes to mind.  Instead, Christian mythology is taken and taken apart into material for fantasy.  Whereas American Christian fantasy mostly takes the whole mythos part and parcel, usually adding in its own interpretations (even something as irreverent as Dogma basically maintains the whole schema), anime has no compunctions about abandoning most of it and grasping the parts it likes into a completely new framework.  This can be seen in the jumble of Christian symbols within Evangelion[2] or Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne.  To be fair, the mostly secular Japanese culture largely treats Shinto and other Eastern religions the same way.  Some have accused shows like Evangelion of not really understanding the symbols they use, but this suggests a certain reverence for the symbols' original meanings that is disrupted by their repurposing within a genre narrative.

And so we have the angels in Haibane Renmei, who have wings and halos and live in a church but have no apparent link to the role of the angels in Christian mythology.  Is the town they find themselves in Heaven?  That would explain the generally warm atmosphere and lack of conflict, but if so it also suggests that Heaven is a very restrictive place and one that can promise contentment but not happiness.  The haibane still go to work, raise children, and have minor spats with each other -- it's just a bit more pleasant than the world we live in.  Given our experience of our fellow humans this seems to be the only version of a broad afterlife I can imagine.  So maybe the Christian mythology in Haibane Renmei is more closely tied back to its origin than it first appears.

This brings us to Rakka's interaction with the titular Communicator, one of the stranged mask men that seem to govern the haibane.  His title is somewhat ironic -- he is the Communicator because no one else is allowed to speak in his presence, only replying with a movement of the wings to signal "yes" or "no".  At the same time he hides his face, preventing anyone from reading his expression and discerning identity or information he doesn't want to divulge.  In the realm of silence, he does appear to be a mighty communicator, but it is only because of the norms that subdue all creation.  A neat metaphor for the state, the church, and really any other institution.


Of course, thus far the Communicators are presented as fairly benevolent rulers -- they accept Rakka as one of their own without much in the way of trial.  But Rakka was already a haibane.  Through this process of confirmation, the Communicator subtly transmutes an article of fact into an article of government approval, creating an appearance of generosity and acceptance while really simply tugging her identity into its realm of control.  (One could make an analogy between this and gay rights if one was really determined.)  This fits in with the general politics of the town.  They leave charmed lives, at the expense of their own autonomy and freedom -- none of them can leave, and their lives are rigidly expressed in official books.  This trade-off isn't as dystopian as one might think -- after all, we make a less dramatic but similar deal everytime we pay taxes.  But there's still something eerie to the Communicators and their obscurity, and I hope that Haibane Renmei isn't naive enough to make this setting utopian all the way through.

Finally we come to the pancakes, which make up a surprising amount of this episode.  The plotline consists of Rakka trying to convince the Young Feathers to eat rice, despite her own personal distaste for it, and then bribing everyone with pancakes to do it.  The main take-away from this is that Rakka is still in many ways a child, unaccustomed to the world around her.  But I'm not sure it raises above the cute-girl-does-cute-things genre that's become so common recently.  The main issue is the apparent lack of conflict or stakes.  Even in an utopian society there's friction between people and personal weakness.  The absence of any such thing in Gile is as eerie as anything else.

Next week: "You do not want this guy on top of you hitting you in the head."

[1] If this blog ever becomes popular enough to spawn a drinking game, trashing Game of Thrones as an aside will definitely warrant a shot.

[2]Same thing for a gratuitous Evangelion reference.