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Review: The Song at the End of the World: Personal Apocalypse in Rintarô's "Metropolis" Author(s): WILLIAM L. BENZON Review by: WILLIAM L. BENZON Source: Mechademia, Vol. 1, Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga (2006), pp. 171-173Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41510887Accessed: 12-09-2015 03:44 UTC

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The Song at the End of the World: Personal Apocalypse in

Rintarô's Metropolis

WILLIAM L. BENZON

Rintarô (director). 2001. Metropolis . Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures. ISBN 0-7678-81 80-X.

The penultimate sequence of Rintarô's Metropo- lis (2001) is astonishing. We see a finger press down on a key, followed by flashing light, and then hear Ray Charles singing "I Can't Stop Lov- ing You," a bittersweet ballad about lost love. As the music unfolds, we see the horrendous destruction of a huge building complex. The juxtaposition of music and image is exquisitely jarring. What is going on here?

Sound-track music is rarely so inconsequen- tial that one may dismiss it as mere ornament. In this scene, the music bears as much of the dramatic burden as the action, imagery, and di- alogue. Several narrative, thematic, and expres- sive features can be isolated that are associated with this complex.

Metropolis is set in a large, sprawling city that seems generally Western. As the film opens, we are celebrating the completion of the Ziggurat, an elaborate skyscraper. While ultimately bib- lical, the reference links Rintarô's film to Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis (various art deco images make the same link). It is this Ziggurat that comes tumbling down at the film's end. Si- multaneously, we see Ken'ichi's last attempts to save Tima, a young gynoid (female robot) who is at the story's center. Ken'ichi fails, and yet the overall effect is not so much of loss as of re- lief. Although the final scene depicts rubble and ruin, and despite Ken'ichi's grief for Tima, the ending is optimistic and is rendered in bright, saturated colors.

Charles's ballad laments the end of a roman- tic relationship between a man and a woman. No such relationship exists in the film, whose major characters are male except for the visibly female Tima. Tima and Ken'ichi quickly develop a close relationship, but it is hard to say just what kind of relationship exists between a young human boy and a newly animated gynoid. It surely is not erotic. Yet, within the apocalyptic scene it- self, that relationship is the most obvious focus for the song's grief. So we have personal grief amid large-scale destruction.

That destruction is itself given a very per- sonal context. Duke Red, an ambitious indus- trialist, commissioned Tima to replace his deceased daughter, and he simultaneously cre- ated the Ziggurat as his instrument for world domination. Actually, the Ziggurat was built to be Tima's throne, which she could use as her instrument. Thus Red's wille zur macht seems to be the twisted expression of a father's undy- ing grief for his dead daughter, and that grief brings him, also, within the affective penumbra of Charles's song.

The song was triggered when Rock - an or- phan taken in by Duke Red - was attempting to reach him just after Red finally called out to Rock in need. Rock thought of Red as his father, although Red repeatedly and explicitly denies it. Rock jealously attempts to destroy Tima, which is central to the causal nexus that brings down the Ziggurat. Coupling Red's motivation for cre- ating Tima and the Ziggurat with Rock's motiva- tion for destroying Tima, we seem to be facing a film that asks us to believe that a large-scale historical event - revolution and destruction in a major city - is but a family affair writ large.

Thus the determining dynamics of large- scale historical events have been rendered, in part, by assimilating them to the personal

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motives of a small group of people. The exter- nal social realities of class warfare and robot rebellions are made personal in the actions and feelings of Ken'ichi, Tima, Rock, and Duke Red. And that makes Metropolis art, not political sci- ence and not sociology.

We find a similar assimilation in Stanley Ku- brick's Dr. Strangelove (1964). Early in the film, a renegade U.S. Air Force general defies orders and commands his bomber group to proceed to targets in the (then) Soviet Union and re- lease their nuclear payloads. When Washington learns of this, officials begin a desperate dance that succeeds in recalling all but one bomber. The pilot of that bomber - Maj. T. J. "King" Kong - rides a bomb to the ground, waving his cowboy hat and yelling as though he were rid- ing a rodeo bull. That one bomb is sufficient to trigger a doomsday device the Soviets created to destroy the world should an atomic blast ever occur on Soviet soil. The final sequence consists of images of nuclear explosions while the soundtrack plays a nostalgic ballad, "We'll Meet Again." Alas, no one is likely to meet any- one else, ever again.

This use of music is a signal similarity be- tween Dr. Strangelove and Metropolis. These rather different films share other characteristics that, taken together, suggest an overall logic behind this striking juxtaposition of song and action.

Like Metropolis , Dr. Strangelove assimilates large-scale historical events to the personal mo- tivations of a small core group. The film is set in the Cold War nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. But this apocalypse is not depicted as the result of ra- tionally war-gamed geopolitical considerations. Rather, it is the result of freakish circum- stances. The renegade general, Jack D. Ripper, is obsessed with the purity of his vital fluids and worries about fluorine in the water supply, not to mention ice cream and whatever else he can think of. These obsessions started when he in- terpreted postcoital tristesse as an instance of Soviet subversion. When Dr. Strangelove - for-

172 REVIEW & COMMENTARY

merly a Nazi - suggests that the country's elite hole up in underground bunkers, another gen- eral, Buck Turgidson, is intrigued at the possi- bility of having ten women for every man, a sex ratio deemed optimum for breeding purposes. The world is going up in mushroom clouds be- cause of the testosterone-driven incompetence of these powerful men.

So, we have three things lined up: (1) an apoc- alyptic scope, (2) presented in personal terms, (3) where the apocalypse itself is set to poignant music. To this we must add a fourth element: the obvious unreality of both films. Dr. Strangelove is a vicious satire and revels in exaggeration and caricature. Though grounded in real motives and attitudes, the film's main characters are all pre- sented as types, not as real people.

The unreality of Metropolis is subtler, resid- ing in its mélange of styles. The characters are rendered in a "cartoony" style closely based on that of Tezuka Osamu, whose manga inspired the film. In contrast, the buildings and city are depicted realistically. Within this primary juxtaposition is the additional contrast of the art deco style of much of the architecture and furnishings with the futuristic technological infrastructure of this world, most obviously its robotic technology. Finally, the sound track combines various musical styles, including rela- tively pure traditional jazz and segments con- ceived along the classical lines of much sound- track music. While the overall effect is quite coherent, it is not a coherence one can easily place either in the world of historical reality or in some future extrapolation from historical reality. Yet the obvious references to historical reality make it difficult to place the film in some "completely other" world.

A final aspect of this unreality is that both films seem "disengaged" - not a particularly good word, but I do not know a better one - from the death that accompanies their respective cat- aclysms. The only death we see during the Me- tropolis climax is Tima's; otherwise, we see only massive property destruction. Dr. Strangelove

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ends with elegiac images of mushroom clouds and bomb blasts. We can readily infer the hu- man implications of these events, but we do not see them directly. If you compare these films with explicitly realistic films such as Saving Pri- vate Ryan or Grave of the Fireflies , it is clear that conveying a sense of violence and death to the audience is not their focal concern. These films "converse" with the audience in terms of out-of- control personal-social dynamics.

And it is in relation to this "conversation" that we must think about how music functions at the climax of Metropolis. The music neither participates in nor advances the action. The characters and events are what they are inde- pendent of that music. But the music plays a significant role in how we participate in those events. Thus to understand how music works, we have to move away from thinking about the meaning of the events represented in the film and, instead, begin to think about how the film works on and through us.

We do not need to hear "I Can't Stop Loving You" in order to know that the action in Metrop- olis is driven by love and loss. That is easily in- ferred from the events themselves. But it is one thing to know something, and quite something else to feel it. The song allows us to experience love and loss, not only that of the characters in the film, but our own. It thus connects us with the deepest wellsprings of our psychic life.

What more could one ask of art?

The Influence of Manga on Japan

VERN BULLOUGH

Kinsella, Sharon. 2000. Adult Mango: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society.

Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2318-4.

Sharon Kinsella, who researches emergent Japa- nese culture and social trends at Cambridge Uni-

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versity, has basically written a history of adult manga. She traces its sources to the 1920s when classic American children's comics such as Felix the Cat and adult political cartoons were trans- lated into Japanese. Soon after, a number of Japanese independent associations of cartoon and comic strip artists began to produce works on their own. The writers and illustrators of some of the more political ones quickly ran afoul of the police, but a more cautious form of manga continued to grow despite censorship and media control during World War II that led to a decline in production. Many artists were thrown out of work but managed to survive by producing war- time propaganda for the military.

In postwar Japan, a reinvigorated manga appeared at very low cost, first as picture cards and then in book form. Since most Japanese could not afford the books, distributors rented them for small fees. During the 1950s, a teen- age artist, Tatsumi Yoshihiro, invented the term gekiga (dramatic picture) to describe the new genera of adult manga that explored new topics. As Japan's economy grew, manga rapidly expanded between 1956 and 1961 in the form of weekly magazines. Animated manga stories on television became a new form of public en- tertainment. Many manga publications were antiestablishment and leftist, a stance that ap- pealed to the working classes who were its larg- est audience but also led to considerable criti- cism from the establishment.

For the early manga, a single artist both drew and made up the story. As the number of new magazines increased, the creative and publication processes also changed. Editors developed a theme or story line and gave it to the artist to illustrate. This arrangement soon led to a sort of oligarchic control of manga, with five companies producing most of the material appearing in a variety of magazines. By 1994 the circulation of their twelve magazines was more than a million. However, the actual read- ership has been estimated at three times the official circulation because the magazines were

REVIEW & COMMENTARY 173

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