Ecology, Nomadic Thought and Cinematic Expression

Molussca Eolis Larva

"The apparatus of capture also appropriates the war machine, the instruments of polarization, and the anticipation-prevention mechanisms. This is to say, conversely, that anticipation-prevention mechanisms have a high power of transference: they are at work not only in primitive societies, but move into the towns that ward off the State-form, into the States that ward off capitalism, into capitalism itself, insofar as it wards off and repels its own limits. And they are not satisfied to switch to other powers but form new focal points of resistance and contagion, as we have seen in the case of "band" phenomena, which have their own towns, their own brand of internationalism, etc. Similarly, war machines have a power of metamorphosis, which of course allows them to be captured by States, but also to resist that capture and rise up again in other forms, with other "objects" besides war (revolution?). Each power is a force of deterritorialization that can go along with the others or go against them (even primitive societies have their vectors of deterritorialization). Each process can switch over to other powers, but also surbordinate other processes to its own power."
-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p482-3

Encouraged by this philosophical text I have recently encountered and initially quoted I have chosen to weave together several articles and subject matters both from pop culture and and academic background (though for myself those two areas are entwined and indebted to one another). The subject matter circulates around Western "monster" movies such as Godzilla and Jurassic Park, and Studio Ghibli movies (Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind, and Princess Mononoke), and the relationship of social and cultural expression between East and West. This involves a reading of ecological aspects of Marxist thought, scientific criticism underlying movie productions, especially within Studio Ghibli and such movies as Akira or Godzilla, which are undergoing/have undergone their strange translations into Western culture). It also involves looking at the sexual and social commentaries inherent in Japanese animation, the manner in which Japanese cinema is an artistic response to an overwhelming state apparatus and expression of concern for cultural values and social contentment. So, initially I will take a look at the Marxist expression of ecology, and then will take a step towards the artistic counterparts; the nomadic and releasing forms of expression that began to permeate at first monstrously in Godzilla, then with strange apocalyptic vision in Akira, and with a certain sublime essence and transcendent vision in the creations and escapes of Studio Ghibli.

Fractal at later iteration taken from Jurassic Park.

 It is important to recognize that at the initial departure of capitalism into its industrial complex, the writers and thinkers of that time were fundamentally aware of the first iteration of an increasingly strained system. That is, to be able to see a development in its first stages before extra complexities are added. A chemist, Justus von Leibeg in Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (1862), wrote that the Great Britain:

"..deprives all countries of the conditions of their fertility. It has raked up the battlefields of Leipsic, Waterloo and the Crimea; it has consumed the bones of many generations accumulated in the catacombs of Sicily; and now annually destroys the food for a future generation of three millions and a half of people. Like a vampire it hangs on the breast of Europe, and even the world, sucking its lifeblood without any real necessity or permanent gain for itself."

Speaking of nutrients and circulation in the soil, though at an apparently more primitive stage in ecological terms, Leibeg grasps and expresses the initial iteration of the effects of State on environment, of a simple process of transacting minerals and nutrients from other areas and all-too-intensively farming on those areas. Though this is marked simply as a statement, it of course does not gather enough complexity of depth. The apparently simplicity of technological utopians such as Proudhon is a posterior statement; the vision of the future, though complex and wary of grand vision, does not ascertain the importance of a utopian vision, or the initial simplicity of the ecological problem, which is more or less local and depending on the health of populations and the uneven treatment of tentative aspects within the soil and tentative areas which were not looked at in monopolies and trade.

Intensive agriculture and a dislocation of local wisdom from rural areas in Britain led to an industrial production of fertility for the soil, and- combined with North America- the demand for unnatural fertility expanded in every-increasing dependence and a shifting of the balance of fertile earth. Marx' response was very sympathetic and in forming his thesis on the necessity of a socialist society, he described a "metabolic rift" that existed between humanity and earth, which was only solvable through a decentralization of control and a diffusion of responsibility and, speaking in ecological terms, feedback loops. In my own thinking, and probably that of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the state or agricultural apparatus acted as a captor, with the earth running fugitive deeper underground. The only means of preserving a state apparatus and industrial mechanism was by artificially deepening its narrow lines of development, which were methods of taxation, developing monopolies (textiles and shipping) and creating state or centralized solutions with increasingly unsustainable technological innovations. But, in the words of Marx, capitalism "creates the material conditions for a new and higher synthesis, a union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the forms that have developed during the period of their antagonistic isolation." This particular statement sounds a little like Hegel, in terms of its plea for an abstract synthesis under a  seemingly centralized apparatus, which seems a little inflexible.

A visual representation of Darwin's evolutionary development, which might not necessarily have the synthesis that may appear with later mathematical expressions.

John Bellamy Foster, who I am referencing for wider diffusion of his ideas of this particular area of Marxism, remarks that ecology is deeply imbedded with Marx and Engels' original thought, and explains their materialism as having certain affinities with Epicurus (341–270 B.C.E), that atomist materialist thinker who "held that the elementary constituents of nature are undifferentiated matter, in the form of discrete, solid and indivisible particles (“atoms”) below the threshold of perception, plus empty space." (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The artificiality of evolutionary theory from a theological perspective, based in a certain human archaeology and genealogy rather than the general was replaced with a more Darwinian immanence, and Marx and Engels' philosophy and political science was inherently smooth, without territories and reducible to the smallest interdependent forms: 

"For Epicureans there was no scale of nature, no sharp, unbridgeable gaps between human beings and other animals. Knowledge of Epicurus provides a way of understanding Marx's deep materialism in the area of natural philosophy. His study of ancient and early modern materialism brought Marx inside the struggle over the scientific understanding of the natural world in ways that influenced all of his thought and was deeply ecological in its significance, since it focused on evolution and emergence, and made nature not god the starting point."
- John Bellamy Foster

The confluent epicurean paths of Darwin, Marx and Engels were strengthened with the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) yet it seems relevant to catch Engels as he derives from the newly material nature of mankind and the emphasis on man as toolmaker, and highlight when he begins to emphasize the role of labor in mankind's evolution; the fixation on tools, on dexterity and physical specialization is akin to the ideas of Adam Smith who wrote The Wealth of Nations (1776). Their mutual fixation upon labor and specialization give the state a means of controlling development if it itself maintains the capacity of manufacture or tool making. Engels' fixation on the evolutionary development of man is not one of affects, otherwise he would discredit the notion of "labor" itself and present an understanding of its state fabrication and the event of mercantilism as being in itself responsible for  the understanding of humanity as a workforce or an object of potentials that could be released through work or the diffusion of work. 

The difficulty inherent in genetics within evolutionary theory (this has already been touched upon in this journal in "The Selfish Gene"), or deep ecology and the sort of cultural problems inferred by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (that near-impossible return to idyllic post-primitivism in Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1754)) is that they do not resort to an understand of affects (or an evolution of affects) and are also not cautious of knowledge-construction or the politics inherent in the system of language they are using. Both Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze respond critically to ideological thought as maintaining an unconscious fascism which derives from perspectives which attempt to render broad theories within a rigid framework. This is unfortunately the case for Marx and Engels and even Adam Smith, though their separate understandings of ecology and affects would be deeply beneficial to one another, if they could deny the fixed term "labor".  

 

It is then beneficial to resort to my understanding as a student of History for the outcome of these important ecological theses. Once the Marxist theories were in decline and had departed from the fever of the 1848 "revolution" that was dispersed throughout Europe and a new technocratic understanding had evolved through the writings of Engels, it appears that the question of intensive agriculture subsided. Especially within a newly-formed German nation state roughly guided by the statesmanship of Bismarck, the agricultural question was evaded. Subsidies allowed the German state to preserve its class of agricultural production and the technological development of steel and coal manufacture began to raise the levels of competition between Great Britain and continental Europe. State-fostered control created source of tension that were not domestic, did not concern agriculture of ecological concerns, and the German question would escalate whilst ecology permeated the socialist/ Marxist tradition in the writings of German socialist Karl Kautsy, and appeared with greater resolve in the writings of Vladimir Lenin in  the Russian political tradition. Whilst ecological matters were pushed to the backwaters, industrial change causes ever-expanding friction between industrial nations which were too politically-motivated to allow either one the opportunity to expand economic horizons. The strain was put on more rural areas such as Russia in which the ecological sciences expanded considerably and in contrast to the technocracies of Western Europe.  It is significant that Russia retained it ecological presence more so that that of Western Europe because of initiatives to conserve it in the first instance.

The problem, however, within the Marxist tradition of Russia was that human culture was not a priority, much to the frustration of Alexander Bogdanov, doctor and theorist, and once partners with Vladimir Lenin, whose primary concern was the education and cultural focus of his generation. His cybernetics and affinity with systems-thinking predated the work of contemporary physicist and philosopher Fritjof Capra and other theorists concerned with loose, inter-dependent webs of social activity and knowledge. His concern connected with the ecology of Marx, but yet viewed humanity's essence as distinctly cultural. Perhaps, even, the reason that the state exists is because it facilitates culture and safe connection, and Bogdanov was deeply interested in the fundamental naturalness of human culture and activity. Rather than regarding the state apparatus, the capitalist system or the seemingly concrete machine of production  as opposed to nature, he saw that it was inherently part of nature, and the technocratic spirit so apparently inorganic and opposed to living systems was an extension of human culture, which would serve to make points intersect and fundamentally change the environment and resources with which humanity could deal with. This before the ascendance of the reality itself; the social reality which Bogdanov hoped to ameliorate through education and diffusion of skills and knowledge. The reality was that the political atmosphere was volatile and Lenin able to manipulate its reduced bureaucratic nature, declining the slow adjustments required to make the environment amenable to a soft transition. The reality also was that intensive agriculture in the West created a great deal of friction in Russia and the slow cultivation of an ecology of mind and nature were not state priorities; the volcanic nature of specialization and production hid the core ideas in emergence from social Marxism.

All the while in Japan, 1868, the  market economy emerged and the same tendencies of industrial expansion and the social and cultural damage inherent in those processes emerged. It is not necessary to evoke an entire history there, but I will begin the next stage of this discussion which rotates around ecology and modern thought and culture. David Dreamer writes in Deleuze and Film about an interpretation of Ishiro Honda's Godzilla (1954) which was a Japanese movie responding to the obvious anxieties around Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the destructive events that ended the second world war with the European "allies". It is a monster movie responding to the unknown destructive possibilities of nuclear radiation and obviously evokes a cultural anxiety about the destructive potential of science and experimentation on a molecular level,  that unknown field which reveals the hidden and volatile properties of matter itself. The fear of ancient creatures from the Cambrian period which in this case contains destruction but in the case of the Studio Ghibli production Ponyo (2008) it is clear that the Cambrian period is like a rebirth and a departure from the fear of things atomic, that fear of nothingness that resonates between atoms in Epicurus. The power of geological matter itself and what it contains, what dark potentials lie beneath the surface, is reversed in the latter. Things that are ancient are new and in a strange confluent rhythm, but in Godzilla the picture is different and seems opposed to everything that seems to hold culture in place:

Fear of the ancient...

We are living in a period of reflection and examination of the cultural importance of cinema and artistic expressions in a new light, that post-colonial, linguistic, psychoanalytic set of eyes that begins to look at the forces acting in amongst the mechanism itself. The expression of subject matter if of course an entertainment but it is only entertaining perhaps because it make the unreal and morbidly dreaded seem like a narrative which runs on a screen. If meaning has not been intended from the offset, as Dreamer outlines, it must be created, according to Deleuze. The formation of meaning from an image which has been re-imparted with meaning; the text or cinematography itself changes with every new rendition, and becomes not a contained meaning or entertainment but a source of thought and fundamental insight. Godzilla and history, or the universal; if a certain malleability of the film can be acquired or invented then it makes the interpretation and creation of meaning from other artistic or expressive texts possible. David Dreamer has the possibility of rendering meaning out of an entertainment and of diffusing wider insights and creative avenues in what is otherwise a film whose subject matter is catastrophe, fear, a feeling of being overwhelmed by things beyond the audience's control.

On the fifteenth of August 1945 the Emperor of Japan in a radio announcement said: "the enemy has recently used a most cruel explosive", and it is here that Japan's anxiety towards the nuclear, the deformed, the cruel and the unnatural and unpredictable evolves. Without the accompanying political or social statement it would be difficult to evoke a meaning inherent in Godzilla without being speculative. Might it be a collective nightmare in Japanese culture that has its beginnings in the sudden death by the violence of the splitting of an atom and extreme heat of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Followed by seven years of military occupation by the United States, the country had to experience the fallout of the nuclear attack in their collective history, making Japan very significant in its cultural connection to the importance of ecological concern, the significance of humility before nature, and its historical closeness of the effects of military-dominated fallout and widespread suffering at the hands of the extreme adverse effects of the industrial-military complex; the unfathomable depths of nature which could cause so much mutation and undo the strength of bridges, the networks of trains, all the things that are valued but do not seem to bridge between nature and humanity. State- industrial development seems to shatter human lives.

The catastrophic image of resolving war with atomic destruction.

  

Godzilla, the monstrous mythic form emerging from the Pacific after American hydrogen weapon testing and its unpredicted outcomes, destroys the city of Tokyo and the narrative resolves when he is killed by the protagonist Ogata whose opposition includes a paleontologist who wants to preserve the monster and another scientist whose ultimate fear is to kill the monster using an even more destructive weapon which deprives the atmosphere of oxygen. The weapon is eventually used, but this is the fear after all; a weapon even more silent and destructive that the nuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, etc.; a weapon that might vanquish life itself, whose only fallout would be emptiness. But Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park would respond to this with a pragmatics that could only be deemed as "cruelly realistic". Crichton himself takes the themes of his novels, including The Lost World to examine the human species in all of its context. The paleontologist and archaeologist are there to exercise humility, not restore the past. The are a means of understanding, in Crichton's understanding, and though it is too early to discuss Jurassic Park, it might be worthwhile to also note that Akira was one of the most significant representations of Japanese anxieties concerning the military-industrial complex; the rigid state apparatus acquires a concrete dystopian form in its relief, and it seems that Godzilla was in fact the birth of a very tentative and deeply-felt poetics within cinema which carried across Western cinema is a relatively deprived context.

In Dreamer's essay, Jerome Shapiro reflects upon ideas that permeate the tone of the film, significant of which is "urami", which "looks toward the continuation of a process and is born out of a spirit of resistance". Japan is said to be re-enacting a traumatic past and also taking a certain responsibility for it by incorporating Godzilla as a mythic creature of its own past. The film explores the grave consequences of nuclear proliferation and engages with the psycho-historical, the way in whichy cultures deal with trauma by re-enacting it, or containing it in an entertainment. However, the memory itself is not averted by the production. According to Henri Bergson the matter through which memory is evoked does not have a universal quality as it always reaches people in different ways; therefore the cinematic expression of trauma bridges and expand with different possibilities. So, we have the film with the meaning with which is was initially invested, and then there is the film with the interior responses, the creatives responses, the universal exchange between director and audience, where the audience or the person who responds to the film responds with a further iteration; one that marries such ideas as social trauma with ecological ideas, criticisms of state of technocratic apparatus and the centralization of responsibility; these ideas become part of the re-iteration and thus we have an analogical geneaology of artistic expression which gradually clarifies and diverges from the original hysteria or inarticulate expression. 

Looking towards thinkers such as Epicurus,  Justus von Leibeg, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, or Benedict de Spinoza; those genesis-points of variation and points of multiplicities are initial expressions of complexity made from simple observations become the initial iteration of a complex pattern. They can identify the complexities and the need for specialization and emphasis on variation in thinking but culturally they are unaware of the need for artistic expression to overwhelm the state, to wrest responsibility into creative and ecological areas. This genesis of ideas appears much later on in the cultural works of Alexander Bogdanov, the interest in simplicity and culture professed by Albert Einstein, the philosophers and historians of the 1960s whose change in relation to the importance of meaning-forming and cultural movements made history and philosophy far less of a fixed nature; rather a "smooth space" (the expression is borrowed from Gilles Deleuze) in which thought can occur in a far more fluid and webbed social space; a nomadic space where the points of creativity are not subsumed into the rigid state apparatus that creates its own factual information, allowing from cultural trends beneath to proliferate which tend towards something extremely negative or reductive.

The incomprehensible code implicit in the Matrix.

Consider the great collective fear of social redundancy at the behest of machine-organized enterprises and monopolized loops of trade. Consider The Matrix, Equilibrium,  or those entertainments that demonstrate a certain ironic trend within culture and detachment for the visceral. The Matrix borrows from Jean Baudrillard's Simula and Simulacrum though it vests it with a strange sense of fashion and fascination with the technological apparatus of the time. It would be difficult to make a creative interpretation of such films because they are so aligned with current realities of boredom within work or a growing indifference to the potential of technology or its profound effect upon the environment and the actual. At the same time films such as Jurassic Park which are strangely a little more down to earth have the same advertising-complex as each other. Whether it is lunchboxes or telephones, the modern cinema narrative strays from the historical sense of trauma of those in the past in terms of becoming part of the mechanism they are critical of; it represents the difficulty for the audience to discern meaning from films and instead it is the entertainment or the ironic indifference that crystallizes instead of a meaningful cultural collectivity. 

So Godzilla instills a historical dimension into Japanese cinema which continues for a significant period. It had dealt with fundamental concerns and anxieties and brought the relationship with technology and industrial relations into a human light. Considered pragmatically, the Japanese are closest to the feeling of devastating holocaust, that is, to be burnt beyond recognition, burnt in entire. It is in this country that both nature and technological advance demonstrate their wildest blows, upon human relationships, culture, upon its future. It is an inescapable part of the Japanese social past, and it was with the production of the animated "cyberpunk" movie Akira (1988) directed by Katsuhiro Otomo and taken from a 2182 page manga narrative that the story becomes interesting, with Western counterparts and reactions demonstrating the difference in histories, in contexts and cultural background. On a passing note the cultural and political relevance of this particular film has been overlooked as the film enters a translation into Western culture and emphasis must be placed on the extraordinary distance between the Akira of 1988 and the one soon to be repackaged and translated seemingly without discipline and care of the loss of cultural voice that might entail. One can imagine how one of the protagonists of Crichton's novel Jurassic Park might respond: entertainment without the humility of doing for oneself; standing on the shoulders of an entire technocracy, scientific era or sense of national trauma to create something entirely different and lacking in the human dimensions of its point of genesis.

The character of Kaneda is taken over by the machinery of his age as the voice of Akira takes him by force.

So, Akira: I will refer to Isolde Standish's essay in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader on the postmodernism of the film in order to express its cultural and political relevance here. An initial thought is that the word Akira in Japanese translates roughly as "bright", clear" or "intelligent". In a movie set in dystopian Tokyo in the future, the name of the invisible threat that has destroyed the city once before (note the parallels with Godzilla here) is Akira, a strange mutation which is able to absorb the industrial potential of the city and force it into a mutant shape, bending it towards the city's destruction. That's the essence of the film, and it is more or less directed, according to Standish, to a very particular kind of audience in Japan, the adolescent male who is privy to the illicit practices of taking narcotics, traveling at high speeds through the inner-city atmosphere, engaging in an environment that seems so complex, so attached to the industrial complex that humanity itself, or the presence of a recognizable heritage or relationship with values is rendered shadow-like and distant.

First of all, it is important to recognize the relationship with Western culture, with reference points for the adolescent audience: Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) deals with the relationship between humanity and technological progress as it demonstrates a state antipathy towards the "replicants" that are created artificially to enter an industrial relationship with human society. These replicants are implanted with human memories and their experience of reality is identical with those set out to destroy them for developing their own independence. The film of course develops similar ideas to those in Akira and the mystery inherent in technology, the strange sense of the natural in everything is evoked. Despite Blade Runner's apparent dystopia, the sense that the vision is inorganic or a departure from what is actual, or moral, it appears that vesting memories into these replicants is an identical process to procreation at an organic level. The distance between technology and nature is no longer so apparent as both humans and replicants feel similarly to one another. Of course, the Western counterpart would have been invaluable to the Japanese equivalent, a culture so close to technological development and the industrial nature of the state that a similar cinematic expression would be deeply felt on an adolescent level.

Anyway, an aside, and a little focus on the socio-historical aspect: Akira focuses on a distinct mutation in Japanese society, that of the bōsōzoku, or "violent running tribe" who were a subculture existing in Japan much influenced by rock and roll and the noise of resistance to a status quo of industry, commercial enterprise and apparently homogenous society existing in Japan. Participation in gangs had peaked at 42, 510 members in 1982 and a certain trend had appeared for those who had reached the age of 20 to enter the Yakuza and continue in the undercurrent of opposition to state-industry or corporations. It means that Akira is significant, culturally and in a generational way, and much akin to the counter-culture movements that developed in Berlin in the 1970s and 80s which had severe consequences but gave birth to some profound environmental or social values. A revival in the form of Wild Zero (1999) would demonstrate this aspect of subculture had declined and it is a strange reminiscence of the absurdities but also the appeal of such noise and resistance. The film itself shows the absurdities of gang-violence and looks with nostalgia at the rock and roll era, and the most warming of all sentiments in the movie comes when the protagonist (a wannabe rock'n' roll star) falls in love with a boy who gives off the appearance of being a woman the star, Guitar Wolf, who he wants to be like proclaims in a surge of indignation: "Love has no borders, nationalities, or genders!" A new page seems to have been reached.

But we yet have to identify the postmodernism implicit in Akira. The fact is, that following the second world war, Japanese society was divided. There emerged a subculture without the means to be expressive within a capitalist model and could not meet the demands set upon it by the market. The existence of dominant social norms, according to Standish, and also the assumption of a universal middle-class exerted such an alienating force upon those without the means, and also interest in competing for their advantage because delinquent, or rather opposed to the nature of traditional Japanese values. They began to form their own antagonistic culture in an interesting "tribal" manner, much to the incredulity of the media. By referring to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari again, it might be possible to interpret this movement of a particular subculture, who felt disenfranchised with the way that reality and the media image of reality did not enter into confluence with one another:

""The unhistorical is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate and with the destruction of which it must vanish... What deed would man be capacble of if he had not first entered into that vaporous region of the unhistorical?" Creations are like mutant abstract lines that have detached themselves from the task of representing a world, precisely because they assemble a new type of reality that history can only recontain or relocate in punctual systems."
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p326

It becomes apparent that the generational conflict is cultural rather than economic. It is not a question of economic disenfranchisement, but rather the apathy involved in existing in a society that uses its industrial complex as a mechanism to recover from its own history, its own collective trauma. The story departs from Godzilla into new territories, which have been established by the new generation, but are obviously counterparts of the overall development i.e. an acute awareness of the destructiveness of an industrial complex encourages the generational noise and violence of protest, gang membership and subcultures which are mutations and escapes from the original terrain, which has become, to the adolescents of that time, despicable (see the creativity and counter-culture emerging in the same era within Berlin, within the beat generation of the United States). The relationship that emerges is an unusual synthesis between human and machine; the oppositional power of technology becomes as essential force within society to escape, or at least imagine escape. If the reader is familiar with the concepts within James Cameron's The Terminator (1984) or the sequel in which the protagonist develops a strange symbiosis with the "artificial" terminator then they are familiar: concepts of time, history and culture and obliterated in these new genres which are distinctly generational. The symbiosis between man and machine expands with the assertion of virtual over the actual and suddenly these forms of art become a means of escape, of imagined resistance, only to develop into new forms, new iterations over time.

But, back to the "classless" nature of Japanese society, and the reality of social alienation. Where did this alienation arise? The essay by Standish explains it well; sharing a market economy background like Western Europe there are similar stories, similar discontents, but not identical. The expression of social discontent is different in Germany, films with direct social criticisms that can be found in the work of Michael Haneke. There are similarities, but Japan is different; there is a distinct threshold which has been reached in Japan that is not like that of elsewhere. The current troubles with nuclear power let the shadow of a dark past emerge, and the response in Germany has been almost instantaneous; there is no doubt about it, that Japan is the locus of vital cultural and ecological statements that must be understood to make an escape from certain paradigms. So, Standish:  the kurai tani (the "dark valley") period of 1931-41 was a period of military-industrial control in Japan and its presence is prevalent in Akira in the image of the Colonel who has destructive capacities to resort to in the event of Akira emerging once more; that harbinger of an unknown fate, and a control that is beyond the Japanese people. The significance of Nagasaki and Hiroshima are also felt in the white implosive effect of the introduction and the film is of course a modern expression of a deep concern that envelopes the modern Japanese population.

Mutations during the last destruction of Tokyo emerge as clairvoyant types with powers of telekinesis and telecommunication, and they are contained my the military-industrial state. They are symbols of the deeply felt sense of being overwhelming by the nuclear, the mysterious, and we return somehow to Godzilla. This burden of experimenting with the unknown, tempting fate and resulting in monstrous beings who bring upon humanity an even greater self-consciousness and sense of fate. If a symbol becomes an entertainment it has failed in its every respect; Akira is a profound symbol of humility, that distant intelligence and clear-sightedness that has escaped the Japanese people and left them with a culture that is buried beneath technologies that has becomes cancerous and beyond control. Even the industrial-military complex suffers from an inability to adapt to the mutations it is presented with; one of the main protagonists and a member of the "violent running tribe", Tetsuo, is spoken to by the voice of Akira and develops power that is destructive and symbiotic with technology, so he manages to control and destroy his entire environment by means of telekinesis and beyond-human strength. The very same subculture that is antithetical to traditional Japanese values has been chosen an attaches itself to the very violence that once destroyed it, in a symbol of Japan that is deeply critical of its past and its contemporary illusions.

Standish again: the narrative resists equilibrium,  coherent beginning or an end that is resolved. The nature of the film concerns itself with movements, displacements, and disruptions which clearly show the limits of the characters that move within the narrative; excess of speed is an escape, as is the ability to withstand excessive amounts of narcotics. The tribal mechanism is established by aversion to slowing down and a constant passing between different members. Tetsuo breaks the connection by resisting the rigidity of the tribe and going out into the city by himself, where the brutal reality of the situation is revealed and the antipathy  towards women in this subculture is seen in the rape of his girlfriend. Akira's voice begins to emerge and it is a symbol of that aggressive undercurrent overwhelming the traditional order and opposing the concrete image of the state.

Akira is the dystopian vision of capitalism in its most anonymous form, in its most anonymous and destructive phase, the commercial takeover that makes Tokyo, in Standish's words, inseparable from other modern cities. Violence is implicit in the cityscape without need for explanation. Rebellion and forms of resistance and violence are conveyed in terrorist acts in police stations, attacks of rival tribes, etc. The lives of the characters are fragmentary and punctuated by neon-lighted bars and downtown narcotics experiences. There is only the utterly fragmented tribe whose best movement is freedom from any association, any rigidity. The characters correspond to Gilles Deleuze' theories on the nomad: the expression of the nomad is not voluntary, but necessary. The lines of freedom and expression are the only ones left and, in opposition to an extremely commercialized and industrial society with military complex, the idea of a tribal movement with no sense of security and also a decline in ethics is preferable; at least it is free movement. I do not think that this is what Deleuze meant, but  in terms of necessity Akira is illustrative. It sets the terms of generational means of escape, and in this particular dystopian expression, the walls of the state enclose more than they allow and so violence and speed are preferable to acceptance and the feeling of being encaged.

The characters within the film who display the strongest masculinity and resolve are also the ones who are overwhelmed by the mutation that takes over Tetsuo. The Colonel, who represent the dignity and virtue of masculine control and resolver is obviously overwhelmed by the physical threat of the return of Akira and Tetsuo's friend Kaneda does not understand the vulnerability of Tetsuo in anything other than a paternal context; he longs to protect Tetsuo but does not understand that that is not enough; that the masculinity he has and deems appropriate to protect his friend is precisely the nature which Testuo is trying to overcome, though in a cancerous, overwhelming display of need for total control and the presence of himself in everything. Unlike Standish, the film does not appear to me to defend the principles of "koha" or masculinity which are deemed valuable traditional social qualities but rather the film overwhelms these qualities into blinding white light. Tetsuo's fevered response to the indignity of his girlfriend being raped is in opposition to Kaneda's over-masculine presence, the allusion to control the Colonel has. In truth the film means to render the masculine into insignificance, where the borders between nature and manking are blurred and masculine resistance nothing as compared with the appearance of "intelligence" or vision. 

The film is concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, but for another reason: the humility inherent in accepting intelligence over any sort of social or military-industrial resistance enfeebles the technological, state, tribal apparatus and draws attention towards the more efficacious values such as tenderness and continuity; capture dissolves into white light. Akira exposes both forces of resistance and state/ corporate apparatus in modern culture as besides the point; Akira emerges from almost nowhere as a force not of destruction but regeneration. The force of stalling all the masculine efforts of the military, the tribal etc. in an effort to surpass what society denies; that is, a relationship with environment and an access to a smooth and non-striated space, in the words of Deleuze. The point in invoking these aspects of the film is that it points towards the thresholds of science and industry and the importance of moral values expressed through slowed down relationships, that are not being surpassed by the loudness of rock and roll music or tribal motorcycle gangs but rather are those mysterious an unexplainable aspects of our relationships both with humanity and earth, that strange undifferentiated connection between technology and nature, and the overwhelming presence of the atomic when it is explored, when its inner surfaces are explained. Akira is fundamentally about the absurdities of both cause and reaction, both industrialism and its discontents. And it dissolves into white atomic heat.

The violence of ancient nature meets the apparent order and control of modern society in Jurassic Park.

"Biotechnology and genetic engineering are very powerful. The film suggests that [science's] control of nature is elusive. And just as war is too important to leave to the generals, science is too important to leave to scientists. Everyone needs to be attentive."
-Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park)

In the West the impact of technology is not so violent, except perhaps in Germany in its history of the Cinematographic image. There are directors who cut through the fixed lines of their territories such as Jean Luc Goddard and Michael Haneke, but the criticisms of humanity's relationship with environment seem to emerge in the strangest places. For instance, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) or James Cameron's The Terminator (1984). But these films are not concerned with the ecological aspect, more the terror of vaporization or a disappearance of meaning within human life. In truth, Akira seemed to be more concerned with trauma and generational conflict than it was coming to terms with nature, in any sort of non-abstract way. The divergence between invention and what is natural is implicit in both Scott and Cameron's work, but the problems of scientific discipline and the divergence from a familiar nature are strangely evoked within Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) based on the science fiction work by Michael Crichton. Crichton's work remains different to the cinema experience in that it is a work of creative science fiction writers with encounters with the artificial pharmaceutical industry, genetic industries, and the divergence from a pragmatics within human science; an understanding and respect for the limitations of an environment that is used as a resource. In surfaces that Spielberg's film has become a potent image of potential values in a social context and bridges Crichton's scientific criticisms into the cinema image with a profound impact, though it may not be recognizable.

Dr. Ray Bohlin explains that "Biotechnology, science, evolution, feminism, and new age philosophy all found a spokesman in Jurassic Park" and this is a message which I early on  identified with, but the message is so buried beneath the overall rhetoric of the "monster movie", the great entertainment and the commercial aspect of cinema. Cinema as dominated by the corporate apparatus, the message of commercialism and the controls of a society that first fixates upon the spectacle and then later reflects upon the meaning. It is a typical response: within science fiction, and especially the work of American novelist Neal Stephenson (author of Anathem and Snow Crash which are indictments against the existence of highly exclusive classes in society which are dangerous because they exclude on the basis on class, or expertise).

But within Jurassic Park, as with much of Spielberg's cinema, there are meaningful dialogues taking place, especially within the juxtaposition of paleontology with a genetically created Jurassic age which renders the field of paleontology extinct. The point is that fields of expertise can be made extinct, and that they should only be valuable for the insights and guidance they can offer children and positive relationships (this shown as the field-paleontologist averts talking with a child who is fascinated with his work in the car that is about to tour Jurassic Park). The paleobotanist within the film is described as "tenacious" and obviously depicted as a source of deep understanding of the consequences of creating an artificial space, and evolutionary theory is depicted through the statements made by the mathematician Ian Malcolm in responding to the inherent flux of nature (it is he who looks at simple-to-complex iterations and comments on the fundamental principle not or order but of life in the universe). Philosophy is intrinsic to Circhton's novel but also permeates the film by Spielberg; the film evokes a humility towards nature and provides a pivotal critique of linear order within science which is most certainly applicable to the unsustainable monopolies of the pharmaceutical industry and also experiments within genetics which are characterized by Monsanto industries.

"Life finds a way."

I discovered the film Jurassic Park earlier that the novel by Michael Crichton and was of course given an artistic expression that was understandable but incommunicable. It was not until later that I encountered the novel, which I read alongside Chris Maser's Sustainable Community Development, which placed value upon the cultural and social aspect of human communities rather than the deep ecological insights that permeated Marxism in its early stages. That evolution might not be genetic but indeed cultural and termed by affects and relationships was an idea that found confluence between the two pieces of writing; humanity was defined as a species that had developed because of relationships, not simply with land and physical connection but because of its ability for communication and shared insight and understanding. Jonathon Porritt in Seeing Green communicates this cultural aspect and also the realistic political terms with which this dialogue takes place. Of course, in between all of this is an immense pharmaceutical/ genetic/ scientific apparatus that is overwhelming to respond to but no less real; Jurassic Park in a way suggests this distance between the actual and the virtual which seems as insurmountable as the ages of time that science claims to have surpassed and controlled.

Morality within scientific discourse; it is an essential aspect, and is eroded with every privatised enterprise in genetics and pharmaceuticals which has such a clear impact upon the natural home and ecologies of those it claims to serve. Computer technology has such a strong grasp of our societies, yet they are treated with a certain distance and disdain in Jurassic Park, all to the detriment to the characters involved. It is much like entrusting the spaces and movements to which we are all part to a specialized science, and designating control and responsibility on their part. It is as if the time it takes for humility to make itself known it gradually eliminated and the necessity of a departure; it takes closeness to the event for the knowledge to be purposeful, and that is absolutely the point. The paleontologists, mathematicians and children are at such a profound distance from the realities they describe but are forced to encounter them in their most relevant form. The film itself resolves not because of an adult computer scientist but because of the enthusiasm and positive nature of a child who is able to restore the artificial harmony that sustains the park. Archaeological knowledge is made useful because of the accompanying morality; it is true that Jurassic Park is a novel about ethics, about social qualities, rather than about the complexities of science. Axioms and rhythms are important, efficacious truths.

Dr. Ray Bohlin discusses the pantheistic style of Jurassic Park and the way that nature is as much conscious as the humans that make their discovery within it. Malcolm describes the "rape" of the natural world, in a way mirroring the sense in which Tetsuo in Akira  understands that the industrial-commercial nature of his world has disregarded his own presence and undermined his sensitive nature. This idea is developed in the recent production Chronicle (2012) which gives a more visceral aspect to the ideas that are explored in Akira. Just as in the researches of James Lovelock towards the nature and consciousness of a greater life outside of humanity, Jurassic Park addresses the issues of a humanity that regards itself as separate, inside a seperate vector of existence; that cogito that defines so realistically the state of modern Western science as a state of separateness, the toolmaker and the resource. Suddenly Engels reappears with his theories with relation to ecology but are at a distance from human culture, the diffusion of human understanding, and the sense of a lack of holism begins to be noticeable; Jurassic Park focuses upon the human aspect, the cultural and direct aspect which has so much relevance in its particular context. The affects of the human species are what allowed it its position; its humility and its ability to live in a confluent manner with nature, causing noticeable difficulties only after the imposition of the control mechanism of science or centralized authority without regard for the importance of the affect, the becoming-child, the becoming-animal, the becoming- nature. Jurassic Park's real focus is upon intelligence and intuition, which is a deeply social condition based upon holistic observations. It elaborates the worldview of Akira somewhat:

“You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

Skyscape in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1984).

 The inevitable question is: what does this all lead towards? This is a beginning. There are of course questions to be made regarding solutions, but unless we can describe the monsters that are feared, the monstrosities inherent in an apparatus that is beyond control, it is no doubt no use to make a beginning at all. Artistic expression is a means of finding new territories, or territories that are not territories but rather vast open spaces which are marked by multiple realities and possibilities; a veritable tapestry of molecules. I will turn to the politics of popular culture within Japan, and I would like to make it transparent that the environment in which we dwell is not fixed by state but rather the smooth space that makes new things possible, arrangements that are amenable to a positive change. Of course, even the smooth spaces can be territorialized and resistance next to impossible; these are dystopian images rendered in so many artistic representations: George Orwell's 1984, Aldhous Huxley's Brave New World, the dystopias of Blade Runner and The Matrix. But these are visual representations of a loss of control, a certain overwhelming force implied by our own cancerous creations. Ideas of surveillance, of a knowledge-manufacture that permeates the writings of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. This, though, is very familiar. It is still Godzilla, after all, but only managing to contain the viewer even more still. The anxieties of lack of meaning, of independence, of self-autonomy are still there, and this is yet the cogito, that sefish expression of solitude which leads to the seeming impossibilities in the first instance. The smooth space that is always there is implicitly regenerative, and it is a question of forming individual artistic expression, physical attachment, cultural relationships.

Sean Boden, in his essay Resistance to the Japanese State through Popular Culture,  claims that the mode of animation is a voice with which the public has been able to engage with significant issues that are a part of social and industrial change, of which Akira is one and the works of Studio Ghibli are another. He discusses a certain authoritarian aspect to Japanese democracy which can be found in the military-industrial nature of the society in Akira, Boden claims that the structure of the state has been rigid in post-war Japan, and censorship of manga a publicly-condoned measure, which is no doubt surprising given the earlier example of subcultures causing friction in society which in part inspired the production of Akira. The problems of patriarchal control in Japan and state-intervention are highlighted by censorship within manga publication, but also have a more physical aspect. Japan as construction state, with little regard for the social effect of its decisions; becoming-oligarchy, Japan has only recently developed a certain pragmatism and self-criticism which is an effect of its need for a narrow-minded recovery after the second world war. This situation is similar to modern Germany, and the ecological motivations are highly similar; considerations of the environmental impact of nuclear energy production have become high on each society's agenda, and the need for consideration for environmental and urban future.

Japanese anime is an integral part of Japanese culture, as much as manga, in reflecting upon the changing social awareness of the country itself, and has a symbolic value of conveying deeply felt social concerns.  According to Boden anime “is the ideal vehicle for expressing the
hopes and nightmares of our uneasy contemporary world” because of its flexibility and ability to convey symbolic meanings that live-action expressions cannot and, considering the widespread popularity of anime, it is a good indicator of popular concerns in the country. Of course, Akira is mentioned, but that has already been discussed in its context.


Destined for reconciliation in Princess Mononoke.

 Studio Ghibli's Grave of the Fireflies (1988) if a rendition of the fallout experienced following the second world war and is most certainly one of the more actual and non-symbolic expressions in the studio's collection. That the film approaches a subject so close to the identities and memories of the Japanese people confirms that the means of communicating in this way has become highly meaningful in Japan, and though the studio have made other narrative pieces of a similar nature such as the expansive Princess Mononoke (1997) or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) which both questioned humanity's relationship with nature and the environment, and the issue of patriarchal control or the enfeebling effect of the military upon moral choices. The studio began to reflect a Japenese culture with a cultural past and a mythic connection to animals and landscape, and within Princess Mononoke, the disappearing values of the past are consumed by the conflict of industry and violence. Yet, there is a distinct difference to the consuming devastation of the spirit of the forest when he is killed; rather there is this possibility of healing, of regeneration if humility and sacrifice were to be made before its parasitic behavior. The film no doubt laments the rolling landscapes of a historical Japan, yet it is imbued with mysterious mythic recognition that the past might be a source of reconciliation with a neglected nature. Director Hayao Miyazaki's previous films had been sketches for this symbol of hope for a mutual understanding, and his films have become symbols of unities, becomings-magical, becomings-spiritual which guide the country from looking towards industrial change from a resigned perspective.

Pom Poko (1994) is direct and opposes the construction-model of Japanese city development that was earlier described. It is representative of grass-roots developments, those models that establish rudimentary but creative ecological feedback loops. This is going back several pages, back to Epicurus and the latent potential to atomic depths, those earlier details about the value of culture within ecological and social perspective. The value of Studio Ghibli is not precisely political, but cultural. There is a depth of feeling that is deprived by the machinic environment of Tokyo, the speed of every-day life, and it is through the hand-drawn cinematography of this studio that images without time and with a great depth of communication, regardless of how abstract; this is perhaps the connection that was missing to evoke purpose in what otherwise seems to be great vulnerability and segregation from the more overwhelming commercial-industrial purposes. As Sean Boden describes, the value of representing a certain resistance to the construction industry threatening quiet domestic life is of great measure for Japanese children and the future of their culture, and certainly expresses the concerns of Japanese cinema in the mainstream, which is deeply concerned with the decreasing ability to slow down what is happening.

It would be useful to talk about the legacies of Akira such as Ghost in the Shell (1995), or Metropolis (2001), or even the complex narratives found in manga or running series, but that is a broad subject with its own micropolitics, and inner dimensions. There are layers within Japanese culture that are very difficult to penetrate unless there is a close affinity and understanding of the types of problem the culture faces, which are distinctly industrial- capitalist but have other social anxieties running alongside them. Were Soren Kierkegaard or Franz Kafka to spend a night in Tokyo they would have written books of a much different nature. All our culture has is their dated outlines and sketches of bureaucratic encagement or the anxiety running through their own cultures, which has grown larger in its postmodern climate. But this postmodern self, this ironic presence which entertains the virtual more than it does the actual, this age that serializes The Matrix and continuously expands the virtual in the Final Fantasy franchise, this striated self that takes part in a strangely universal solipsism and lament for heroism, to create one's own art by reading the modern script into the postmodern.

Inverting values until the social self has been so ruptured that a theory of genetics seems probably, the fabrication of virtual landscape tenable. If we can engineer thoughts and principles, create an entire industrial apparatus by folding a reaction into entertainment, into an identity that is consumed and derivative of once-territorializing acts. Consider the advent of the postmodern novel, that of Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) or Joseph Heller (Catch-22), who are deeply critical of the industrial apparatus, the apparatus that creates the self, enforces striated spaces in which a self can be folded back into the state, into the manufacturing apparatus. Because this is, after all the issue; creativity is in decline because of the ascent of the industrial state, the technocratic state, the state of high taxation and surveillance. Akira's message was about identical to the message of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, or Blade Runner; we are involving ourselves ina a state apparatus which has become like a snake biting its own tail, heading towards the atomization of the self, that is striated and cloned from previous selves which are in the process of perfection. In Japan this is all too evident, and it is there to which we might turn from this introspection which is not so close in the West, where the new generation is on-line and their parents only ever feared the possible nuclear devastation of the Cold War because of the testing in the Pacific, but most likely the devastation visualized in photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.


Hayao Miyazaki's vision of destruction is equally a vision of unity and love, and everything having unknown individual energy and capacity to adapt and shine with a certain brightness and clarity.


"The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it - I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless.”
- Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibl

The atomized world, that world that is gradually appearing as a world of affects but of a far more complex nature than we had imagined before; this is the new world of vast connection that children in this day's age grow, and it is the message of director Hayao Miyazaki amongt others that seems to offer the sense of humility and faith in the artistic potential of the smallest living things, and it is his faithful translation of Ponyo (2008) into a timeless narrative about the mysterious nature of life and the ancient that has brought Japan through its cinematic history to something mythic and musical, beyond that monstrous Godzilla that stepped out of the Pacific ocean to torment the Japanese people with its representation of ancient fears from the Cambrian age. Instead, Ponyo takes two children, one the daughter of the ocean and guardian of the sea who has transformed from a goldfish using all the latent power of the ocean since the Cambrian age and the other the child of a woman who lives on a mountain by the sea. The film itself is simple, from a simple folk tale about the relationship of children with the sea, with nature. That there are social or generational conflicts seems besides the point in Ponyo; the children here are the children of humanity and the brimming possibilities of nature. They are somehow brought back together in a beautiful slowing down of time, in the appearance of the Cambrian age in the eyes of a child not afflicted by the hardships of city life, and also not condemned to its hyper-reality, its distance from the actual and the value of creating, expressing from oneself. The film is for and about children, and the entire audience, after all, are children.

The spirit of the forest has receded into mythic Japanese past and Miyazaki has created symbols for a new materialism in Howl's Moving Castle and against the virtual satisfactions of industrial socities in Spirited Away (it is a symbolic look at the excesses of capitalism and prostition; it is exceptional talent that spiritualizes the apparently loathsome). His artistic relandscaping of Japan, has become actual insofar as he has voiced the concerns and feelings of a people. The next step is reducing the state, finding confluence with nature. This writing is of itself, a sketch. But ways of moving beyond are found in art and culture, not in the existence of a great industrial apparatus. Remember, without resistance there would be no culture, but resistant may be music, may be art; it depends on the conditions. It might be true that everyone seeks only that sense of timelessness and fluid smooth landscape here, but it cannot be obtained by discpline; rather pragmatism, rather becoming-children after we have accepted death and the great mystery inherent in life.

References:

"Deleuze and Film" - David Martin-Jones and William Brown

"Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader" - Sean Redmond

"Marx's Ecology in Historical Perspective"- John Bellamy Foster

"Resistance to the Japanese State through Popular Culture"- Sean Boden

"Epicurus (Stanford Encylcopedia of Philosophy) "

"A Thousand Plateaus"- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

"The Worldview of Jurassic Park"- Dr. Ray Bohlin