Posmodernidad en Ecuador

The 1980s saw the rise of the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction with works such as William Gibson’s “Sprawl” series12 and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Simultaneously, the late 1970s and early 80s saw an increase in the quantity of texts that participate in a particular brand of post-apocalyptic narrative that William Fisher terms the “Terminal Genre,” a genre that he claims navigates a utopian path through a distinctly dystopian setting:

The clutter and cast-off cultural debris of “consumer society” provide not only the look and texture of these films, but all the raw material on which their narrative process works. This genre takes a reckless plunge into the junk pile of contemporary material life. That it can resurface with

something salvageable entitles it to a utopian claim, for it belongs to a tradition where the utopian impulse acts as a magnetic north pole guiding us through the ruins of the heuristic “dystopia” which is represented.13 Fisher cites a slew of films that featured this peculiar convergence of utopianism and dystopianism: Blade Runner, Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1981), and The Terminator (1984). As we shall see, this trend did not end with the 1980s, for each of the texts I explore in this chapter plays with the thin line between utopia and dystopia, and it is precisely the terminal aspect of these anime texts that marks them as the perfect tools for exploring psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis.

Against this cyberpunk and terminal backdrop, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira debuted and became one of the most famous anime films in the Western world. Like other cyberpunk works, Akira’s tale unfolds in a dystopian, noirish future, and it investigates the relationships between humans and machines, yet ultimately the film depicts the potential for human development and evolution when confined by an oppressive police state: “Akira opens up a space for the marginal and the different, suggesting in its ending

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a new form of identity.”14 Akira first appeared as a manga series that Otomo wrote and illustrated from 1982-1990. 15 The narrative of the manga differs radically from that of the anime film. For the purposes of this essay, I will be focusing solely on the film because its ending deals more explicitly with disembodiment.16 Both the manga and the anime of Akira are fascinating texts in many respects, but it is this hope for a new form of identity that makes the anime version of Akira such an important work in the

development of sci-fi’s ideas about consciousness and the potential for human evolution through an attainment of disembodiment. Akira deconstructs the relationship between desire and identity and between identity and the body by means of its depiction of an evolutionary stage beyond the confines of the bodily form. The film represents a distinct form of evolution from the other two texts we will discuss because evolution in the film comes from within the current human form: it is latent potential that becomes actualized through technological intervention.

Akira takes place in Neo-Tokyo, a version of the city that has been rebuilt from the ashes of the cataclysmic explosion that opens the film. Against this dystopian background, the film follows the lives of Kaneda, Tetsuo, and their biker gang friends during the return of Akira, a child with powerful psychic abilities whose uncontrollable powers caused the explosion that destroyed old Tokyo. Akira presents a world from which one might certainly seek transcendence, for, as Isolde Standish explains, “Neo- Tokyo is a ‘critical dystopia’ in that it projects images of the futuristic city which perpetuates the worst features of advanced corporate capitalism: urban decay,

commodification, and authoritarian policing.”17 At the film’s outset, Kaneda and Tetsuo live out their meager existences as biker punks who engage in street warfare with rival

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gangs, but an encounter with a child who has escaped from a covert government facility irrevocably alters their lives. During a street battle, the escaped child, Takashi, appears suddenly in front of Tetsuo’s bike and a giant explosion ensues. Because of this

encounter, Tetsuo soon begins developing intense psychic powers, and the film reveals that a secret government operation has been attempting to harness the innate psychic abilities of humankind. Initially, Tetsuo’s powers manifest themselves in the form of abilities such as telepathy, telekinesis, and flight, but soon, like Akira, his burgeoning powers grow to the point where he can no longer even control his bodily form. Eventually, Kei (the object of Kaneda’s affection) explains that Akira, Tetsuo, and the other psychic children represent an evolutionary leap to an existence beyond the body, an existence as pure energy:

Akira is absolute energy…Humans do all kinds of things during their lifetime, right? Discovering things, building things…Things like houses, motorcycles, bridges, cities, and rockets…All that knowledge and

energy…Where do you suppose it comes from? Humans were like monkeys once, right? And before that, like reptiles and fish. And before that, plankton and amoebas. Even creatures like those have incredible energy inside them…And even before that, maybe there were genes in the water and air. Even in space dust, too, I bet. If that’s true, what memories are hidden in it? The beginning of the universe, maybe. Or maybe even before that…Maybe everyone has those memories. What if there were some mistake and the progression went wrong, and something like an amoeba were give power like a human’s?18

Thus, Akira represents the exponential expansion of human powers that leads to the human form metamorphosing into a state of “absolute energy” with a consciousness, a state that Tetsuo experiences in the final moments of the film.

The final segment of Akira, of course, invokes the ubiquitous anime trope of monstrous bodily distortion, a trope present not only in mainstream anime series and films but in hentai—pornographic anime—as well, the most classic example of which is

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probably Urotsukidöji: The Legend of the Overfiend (1989), the first in a series of films. Hentai, such as Urotsukidöji, often present visions of monstrous phalluses and devouring vaginas along with various other bodily distortions. Annalee Newitz provides an

insightful summary of one of the most memorable and disturbing scenes in The Legend of the Overfiend series:

Nagumo, the Overfiend’s father, first experiences his supernatural powers when engaged in sexual intercourse. His penis becomes so large that it causes his partner’s body to explode; then it grows to the point where it bursts out of the roof of the building he is in and destroys the city in a flaming blast of sperm. Watching this animated image, it is clear that his penis becomes some kind of atomic bomb.19

Newitz continues to equate this “atomic bomb” of sperm with the United States atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.20 Nagumo’s sexual mutation serves as an excellent parallel to Testuo’s own bodily transformations in Akira because of the final manifestation of Tetsuo’s powers and Akira’s subsequent arrival and absorption of Tetsuo leads to second destruction of Neo-Tokyo through an explosion—like the one that opens both the manga and the anime—that is distinctly reminiscent of a nuclear explosion.

In the final segment of the film, Tetsuo’s physical form can no longer contain the growth of his power, so he must seek freedom through disembodiment. Because his mushrooming powers have transformed his body into a reservoir of energy, Tetsuo loses control of his physical form during the final showdown with Kaneda at the Olympic Stadium. Tetsuo must learn to completely divest himself of all physical boundaries, a process that he can only achieve with the aid of Akira. With the return of Akira, a

resurrection prompted by the three other psychic children (Masaru, Kiyoko, and Takashi), Tetsuo becomes absorbed into the universal sea of energy that Akira both represents and

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literally (dis)embodies. Tetsuo’s mutation begins simply enough: a laser beam destroys one of his arms, so he crafts a new metal one using his telekinetic abilities, thus turning himself into a rather simple cyborg, not much different from real “cyborgs” that have prosthetic limbs. But as Tetsuo gets closer to the sleeping Akira beneath the Olympic Stadium, his powers steadily overwhelm his ability to harness them: first, his mechanical arm begins to fuse with objects around him; then, his arm looses all normal human shape as it becomes a spraying mass of flesh and metal; and, finally, he loses all control of his bodily form and transforms into a gigantic, monstrous blob that devours everything in its path, including Kaori (Tetsuo’s girlfriend) and Kaneda, which again is similar to the penis of the Overfiend in Urotsukidöji that engulfs everyone it comes into contact with as it grows to more than priapic proportions. Tetsuo’s seemingly unstoppable

metamorphosis functions on the level of “body horror” as Susan Napier claims, yet Napier misreads the films ending when she posits that “the film’s climactic scene casts doubt on any positive interpretation of Tetsuo’s newfound identity.”21 Kelly Hurley develops the definition of “body horror” in her essay on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977); she defines body horror as

a hybrid genre that recombines the narrative and cinematic conventions of the science fiction, horror, and suspense film in order to stage a spectacle of the human body defamiliarized, rendered other. Body horror seeks to inspire revulsion—and in its own way pleasure—through representations of quasi-human figures whose effect/affect is produced by their abjection, their ambiguation, their impossible embodiment of multiple, incompatible forms.22

Hunter’s concept of “Body Horror” fits perfectly well with the images of the grotesquely deformed Tetsuo at the film’s end. Body horror uses such monstrous transformations to highlight how the body traps the subject within it and how power can exercise itself upon

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the subject because of their physical existence—it demonstrates how power inscribes itself upon the subject’s body in a manner akin to the machine in Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (1919).23

In Akira, Otomo uses body horror to symbolize the insatiable nature of Tetsuo’s desire, for Tetsuo’s metamorphosis is driven by more than his encounter with Takashi on the freeway; his monstrous transformation occurs because of his rampant desire. From the start of the film, Otomo stresses Tetsuo’s desire to liberate himself from his

dependence upon others. Of course, Tetsuo’s desire can never be satisfied if all desire is predicated on a “lack of being,” which depends upon the dialectical relation between self/other and subject/object. Therefore, even when Tetsuo receives incredible powers, he persists in his insatiable quest for power. “Desire,” as Lacan states, “is desire of the Other…it is always desire in the second degree, desire of desire.”24 For Tetsuo, Akira is this Other (the grand Autre, not the objet petit a), the (dis)embodiment of pure energy and the master signifier that provides meaning to the strange phenomena that Tetsuo has experienced since his powers first began to manifest themselves. Throughout the film, Tetsuo craves knowledge of Akira, but this desire remains unsatisfied as long as he clings to his individual bodily form because it remains tied to the dichotomies of subject/object and self/other. In order to satisfy his ever-growing desire for power, Tetsuo must shed his physical form to gain direct knowledge of this Other known as Akira.

By becoming disembodied, Tetsuo finally achieves his desire for the Other by becoming one with Akira and potentially with the cosmos itself. But what Tetsuo must experience before he can shed his bodily form represents a torturously physical

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drive theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Freud defines a drive (Trieb) as “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces.”25 He divides the drives into two major types: the ego or death drives (Thanatos) and the sexual or life drives (Eros), “the former [of which] exercises pressure towards death, the latter [of which] towards a prolongation of life.”26 Néstor Braunstein explains that “the drive does not reach its object in order to obtain satisfaction; rather the drive traces the object’s contour, and on the arch of the way back it accomplishes its task […] Jouissance is indeed the satisfaction of a drive—the death drive.” 27 Braunstein further defines

jouissance as “the dimension discovered by the analytic experience that confronts desire as its opposite pole. If desire is fundamentally lack, lack in being, jouissance is a

positivity, it is a ‘something’ lived by a body when pleasure stops being pleasure. It is a plus, a sensation that is beyond pleasure.”28 In the case of Tetsuo, we can see the

operation of both desire and drive, of the manque à être and jouissance. By moving from the depths of lack to a state of awful “positivity,” Tetsuo becomes completely enmeshed in the grip of the death drive, which compels him towards a separation from his body, a separation that simultaneously equals the death of his physical form as well as

representing the birth pangs of his newly emerging identity that will exist beyond the realm of unfillable lacks and uncontrollable positivities. But, for psychoanalysis, this would mean that Tetsuo has moved from the normal human realm of the neurotic into the space of the schizophrenic who reinscribes meaning upon existence in a manner that forecloses lack,29 and, consequently, represents a deterioration of his psychic state. Yet for schizoanalysis this is not necessarily the case.

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According to schizoanalysis, Tetsuo lacks not because human identity is predicated upon lack, but because society has inscribed Tetsuo’s desire in the form of lack. Tetsuo’s social milieu is a marginalized one: he is a biker on the fringe of society who has no money, no education, and no prospects in life. Within this subculture, a form of morality has developed that privileges strength, violence, and other stereotypical displays of masculinity. Because of his status as a “weakling” who must be defended by Kaneda, Tetsuo remains incapable of living up to the moral system of the biker culture. Hence, Tetsuo’s desire manifests itself as the desire for strength, for the ability to exhibit power over Kaneda and other strong-willed individuals. For psychoanalysis, his thirst for power proves unquenchable because he begins to hunger not merely for power but for the Other represented by Akira, the master signifier that sears his brain with psychic

transmissions during various segments of the film. For schizoanalysis, then, his desire will prove insatiable as long as he remains tied to the socio-cultural system of morality that produced his desire. By way of his disembodiment, Tetsuo achieves an escape from hierarchies and moralistic systems by becoming a literal body without organs, a plane of immanence in which he can exist in absolute freedom, but first he must face his drives head-on and overcome the socially imposed morality that has inscribed lack in his being.

As Tetsuo’s all-devouring and continually expanding body is swallowed by Akira’s return as pure energy, Kaneda and the audience are offered a stream-of-

consciousness glimpse into the nature of Tetsuo’s desires and drives, all of which stem from his disempowerment at an early age and his never-ceasing quest to recapture a sense of clout. Suffering from bullying as a young child, Tetsuo clung to Kaneda not just as a friend but also as a bodyguard, a relationship that persisted into their adult life. Akira

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frees Tetsuo from his body and helps him attain a state of oneness and self-empowerment as he becomes a part of the infinite flow of energy that binds all things together. As Tetsuo transforms into pure energy, a scientist watches the energy patterns generated by the metamorphosis and the return of Akira. The scientist exclaims, “Is this the birth of a new universe?!” And the answer to his question is a profound “no” because what he witnesses is not a new universe being born but rather the rebirth of Tetsuo, through Akira’s power, into a state of pure energy, a state that allows him to become one with the universe; thus, it is not a birth but an entrance into the oneness of the universal flow of energy (35). The viewer becomes even more aware of this in the final scene of the anime when the last bit of Tetsuo falls into Kaneda’s hands as a pinpoint of light that promptly disperses throughout his body in a subtle blaze of light. When Kei and Yamagata (one of Kaneda’s biker pals) find Kaneda after the disappearance of Tetsuo, Yamagata asks, “What happened to Tetsuo? Is he dead?,” to which Kaneda answers, “I’m not so sure. But he’s probably…” (36). Kaneda’s words are cut off as he is blinded by the beams of sunlight piercing through the clouds and slowly moving across the newly destroyed Neo- Tokyo like a grid of celestial searchlights. The roving shafts of sunlight, which

seemingly manifest themselves in answer to Kaneda and Yamagata, provide testimony to the fact that Akira, the three children, and Tetsuo have now become omnipresent through their disembodiment and dispersal into the endless field of energy.

Despite his bodily dissipation, the final shot of the anime evinces the fact that Tetsuo still maintains some sense of his original identity, albeit a state of identity no longer predicated upon lack or painful positivity. The audience sees only a sort of celestial “eye,” to use Susan Napier’s term,30 which quickly metamorphoses into a tunnel

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of light representing the endless flow of energy that Tetsuo now perceives. As the viewer sees the eye, Tetsuo makes his statement of identity—the final words of the film—“I am…Tetsuo” (36). The disembodied eye then blurs into indistinctness with the tunnel of light, thus representing that Tetsuo’s form of perception has altered as the Blakean “doors of perception” have opened in his mind allowing him to witness what in the world of